The Bell Between Worlds

by Ian Johnstone

  For a moment he looked up at the flock of multicoloured kites and felt warmed and consoled. These, at least, remained constant and true: their colours as bright – their designs as beautiful – as ever before.

  He laid the box of pigments on top of the papers and took his other prized possession from the old drawer. A large hardback book, on whose cloth cover was a simple, gold-foiled title:

  REVELATIONS: A BOOK OF SCIENCE

  He turned to the title page and read the inscription written in an elegant hand across the bottom corner:

  Learn all at you are, my dear Sylas, learn all at you are able to be, M

  He paused. There was something strangely familiar about those words, and not just because he had read them so many times. He thought back to Mr Zhi’s words in the Shop of Things, as he was unpacking the mirrors:

  “... you can see all that you are able to be.”

  He frowned and ruffled his untidy hair. A coincidence perhaps? But then he remembered the shopkeeper’s parting remark:

  “... all your mother would ask.”

  He stared blankly at the page. Could it be that all this was connected in some weird way? The arrival of the Shop of Things, his strange meeting with Mr Zhi, and then – straight afterwards – this discovery about his mother?

  Surely not – that was impossible. But then nothing really seemed impossible when he was with Mr Zhi...

  Sylas shook his head. His mother would laugh at him. She had been a woman of science and facts – that was why she had given him this book. That was what she had meant in her inscription: learn, read, find out about the world.

  He settled back on the mattress, tried to clear his mind of all this nonsense and turned through the dog-eared pages. This was unlike any boring science book he had come across at school. Its gloriously jumbled pages were filled to the brim with beautiful drawings and quirky explanations of all manner of animals, plants and things of the cosmos; of medicines, engines, machines, contraptions, theories and inventions. These pages told a story that was at once science and magic, a story that was almost as much an escape for him as his wonderful kites.

  He stopped at the first page of the chapter he loved most of all, the one about the wings of birds and the flight of aeroplanes. Soon he was lost in the fascinating, freeing world of the skies: in clouds and thermals; in the endless migrations of birds and the beautiful shapes of their wings; in inventions that reached into the void – kites, hot-air balloons, gliders, planes...

  And the more he read, the more the exhaustion of this strangest of days started to wash over him. His eyes became heavy and the print faded and blurred. Slowly the marvellous book of revelations slid from his chest and his eyes closed.

  Sylas slept, comforted by the weird lullaby of Gabblety Row: the endless growl of traffic making the windows rattle and the trapdoor leap on its hinges; the ancient walls sighing and grumbling into the cool night air. Even the occasional yellow beams from passing headlights served only to brighten the depths of his dreams, dreams that now filled his mind with a new image. It was an image that warmed him, drew him close, consoled him. It was a delicate, female face, a face that he knew.

  Then for a moment everything was silent. The sound of traffic stopped, the windowpanes rested in their frames, the floorboards ceased humming for the first time in decades. Even Sylas held his breath, the vapour from his lips hanging in the air.

  As the dust began to settle on the windowsill, it began.

  The room shuddered with a sound of such power that the dream was shattered in a moment. It tore through the walls, hammered on the ceiling, crashed through the floor. It shook the kites from their fittings, sent the Samarok skidding across the floorboards and threw the window wide open.

  It entered Sylas through his chest and pounded his lungs until his heart missed a beat.

  It was not a definable sound, but one so immense and terrifying that it swamped the ears and confused the mind. It was a moaning, aching howl that drowned everything and consumed all.

  He threw himself upright in bed and found himself gasping for breath. The very air seemed to have rushed from the room. He pushed the eiderdown back and at once felt a piercing chill. He looked around desperately for the source of the noise, hoping that in some way he might silence it, but he realised that it was everywhere, in everything, and there was nowhere to hide.

  7

  Flight

  “The thoughts that brought me here are forgotten. My dreams are

  lost to me. My one hope is that I might survive.”

  SYLAS HESITATED FOR A moment, unsure what to do, then flung himself back on to the mattress, drawing the pillow over his head. Even that resonated with the deep, low moan and the mattress shook beneath him.

  He thought the world was coming to an end: that some great earthquake had struck the town or some gigantic volcano was at this very moment pouring rivers of lava into the streets and pelting the town with a downpour of rock.

  “Stop! Please stop!” he shouted into the mattress, but he couldn’t even hear his own voice.

  For what seemed like a minute the noise continued relentlessly, tearing at his eardrums. But then it seemed to ease slightly. And then a little more. The wail was definitely fading now – becoming more bearable.

  As it eased, Sylas realised that it was not a horrifying sound, the sound of war cannons or buildings crashing down. Rather it was a solitary, immense, dolorous chime. Its voice was metallic and hollow and it rang rather than screamed. The more the noise faded and his ears recovered, the more it came to resemble the single dying note of an enormous bell.

  Sylas pushed his bedding away and sat upright again. As he tried to control his fear, he became sure that the noise was coming from outside, from the window. He stood up and edged slowly towards it, dragging his bare toes over the comforting, familiar roughness of the floorboards. The curtains were blowing wildly in the wind, flashing bright in the passing headlights, and he found himself wondering why the cars hadn’t stopped.

  As he reached the sill, the sound of the phantom bell once again reached a deafening pitch. He closed his eyes, fearing what he was about to see. Gripping the base of the window frame in his cold hands, he swallowed hard, then drew himself forward.

  Everything looked normal. The traffic still sent shafts of light into the sky and thick, acrid pollution into the air. The road bustled with cars: a jostling mass of white, red and blinking orange lights. Rain was falling, and Sylas could see it glistening on the black street below. But the chime of the bell pervaded the night – immense, unstoppable – drowning out any other noise.

  He searched for the source, looking past the road and the housing estate on the other side, out to the pinprick lights on the towering chimneys at the edge of the town. He looked through the fog of gases that they spewed into the sky.

  Finally his eyes rested on the dark hills in the distance.

  “Impossible,” he said to himself, “that’s miles away.”

  There seemed no way that a sound could pass so far across the hubbub of a town, with its clamorous factories and riotous roads, but Sylas was certain. He squinted towards the dark horizon and listened to the chime slowly fading away, transfixed by its mysterious power.

  Finally the noise of the road became audible and brought with it some sense of normality. His earlier thought came back to him – why had nothing stopped? Why was everything carrying on as normal? His eyes turned to the cars that flew past, the drivers apparently unaware of anything extraordinary; to the occasional person rushing along the street, huddling under an umbrella; to a tramp in dark, ragged clothes standing in a puddle. No one seemed to have heard the sound.

  It was as if the bell was ringing only for him.

  Suddenly the room shook and the curtains flew into the room. His ears felt as though they were being pierced with needles and a blast of rain hammered into his face. He wanted to scream, but the air had rushed from his lungs.

  It was happening again.


  Sylas threw his hands over his ears, but that had little effect – it was as though his very bones were vibrating with the sound of the bell. He shut his eyes and tried to focus his mind, but the aftershock hummed in his skull and shattered his thoughts.

  He slid down below the window and wrapped his arms round his head, rocking backwards and forwards. He wondered if he was going to die, or worse, if this was the end of all things.

  But slowly, too slowly, the noise began to subside. He had no idea how long it took, but finally the timbers beneath his feet ceased their shuddering and the wall at his back became still.

  Frightened as he was, Sylas pushed himself up and leaned out of the window to see if anything had changed. He looked along the length of the street, across to the houses and over them to the town, but again the world seemed unaware of the strange chime.

  And yet he had the inexplicable sense that something was out of place, as if he was looking at the world through a distorted windowpane.

  Then he saw it. His eyes were fixed on the sphere of orange light around one of the electric streetlamps. He could see thousands of tiny raindrops falling from the dark night sky, but there was something wrong. The rain was not falling straight down, but at a steep angle to the ground, as though being carried on a high wind.

  There was no wind.

  His eyes shifted from one streetlamp to the next all the way up the street and, sure enough, the rain was the same everywhere: it was being drawn towards the source of the sound. As he watched and the sound gradually waned, the rain returned to a normal, vertical path. As the noise died, its hold over the tiny drops weakened and fell to nothing.

  Then the chime struck again.

  He recoiled and covered his ears, but forced himself to stand at the window and watch. As the shock hit his room, the rain was driven back, away from the hills, sending another cold, painful blast into his face. He tried with all his might to keep his eyes open and after the impact of the chime he saw the rainfall gradually swing about, once again sweeping towards the source of the sound. The long note of the bell was drawing it in.

  Drawing it towards what?

  His thoughts came to him in fragments, but somehow he managed to piece them together: something magical was happening. His mind went to the dark corridors of the Shop of Things, the beautiful birds flying without strings, the strange shifting runes of the Samarok. He turned and peered across the room at the Samarok glistening on the trapdoor. Suddenly Mr Zhi’s words came rushing back to him.

  “The Samarok is yours, and its journey of discovery will be yours too. Only you will know when that journey has begun, and where it is taking you.”

  Surely he couldn’t have meant this? But then Sylas thought about the street outside – everyone else just carrying on as though they could not hear the bell...

  “Only you will know...” he murmured.

  Could it be that somehow the bell was calling to him, drawing him in, like the rain? But even as he started to believe that it might just be true, his thoughts returned to his mother – surely he should be looking for her, not following some bell? That was the only journey that mattered now.

  But Mr Zhi had made it sound as though this ‘journey’ had everything to do with her.

  “I’ll try to understand,” Sylas had said.

  “... that is all your mother would ask.”

  He looked around the room, at the papers strewn across the floorboards, at the kites scattered and broken. The empty shell of his sanctuary seemed even more lifeless than before, now riddled with questions and deceits. There was nothing here to keep him, nothing that made sense to him any more. All that lay ahead of him now was his search for his mother and the journey to understand the Samarok. Somehow these journeys were one and the same. And the bell was the beginning of it all.

  He picked up the Samarok and put Mr Zhi’s message between its pages, then snatched the rucksack from the shelf and slid the book inside it, followed by a bottle of water from his sink. He pulled on a sweater and his trainers and hesitated, looking back at the papers on the floor.

  He ran over and rummaged through the documents, picking out the Order of Committal. He checked for the name and address of the Winterfern Hospital, then slipped it into his bag. Seconds later he was clambering down the dark staircase towards the corridor.

  The chime had almost faded away. He could hear the rain lashing the outside of the building and the flutter of a moth against one of the wall lamps. The corridor seemed darker and more ominous than usual – a few of the bulbs had burned out at the other end, leaving it in blackness. But Sylas felt a surge of excitement as he took his first steps towards a destination he could only guess at.

  As he picked his way along the corridor, he looked warily at his uncle’s apartment door and then at the next one, the one leading directly into the office. He willed them to stay closed, and to his relief he was soon past them.

  He was about to breathe a sigh of relief when the bell sounded again. The din was almost unbearable, seeming to reverberate between the walls and ricochet along the length of the passageway. He held his ears, expecting his uncle and the other residents to burst out of their apartments in a blind panic, but the doors remained closed. He continued, reminding himself to step carefully over the loose floorboards – if no one else could hear the bell, they would surely be able to hear a clumsy step. He looked carefully from board to board, planning his way ahead. Finally, when he was nearing the staircase, he began to relax.

  He looked ahead into the passageway, into the darkness, and felt the blood drain from his face.

  A surge of adrenalin charged through his body. There, suspended in the darkness at the end of the corridor, were two pale yellow eyes. As Sylas watched, they blinked slowly, coldly, and moved towards him.

  The monstrous jaws of the wolfish hound emerged into the lamplight. For a moment the two faced each other. The beast stood with its head and shoulders in the flickering light, its long body disappearing into the blackness. Its head moved slowly up and down as it drew long, rasping breaths. The sound of the bell was fading once more and Sylas could hear the air hiss between its teeth and a growl as it exhaled. It blinked lazily and its tongue curled upwards to the fangs that protruded below its wrinkled snout. Its eyes were fixed on his in a way that left no doubt of its intent.

  Sylas was motionless: breathing deeply, trying to steady his nerves, his eyes avoiding the beast’s drooling jaws and lolling tongue. He glanced towards the first step of the staircase. It was about halfway between him and the beast. There was no way he would make it, and if he did, the hound would pounce on him from behind. When he looked back, it too was looking at the staircase and he had the unnerving feeling that it was willing him to try. He swallowed hard and drew in another long breath.

  As a chime crashed through Gabblety Row, Sylas whirled about and threw himself forward, charging back down the corridor. He could hear nothing but the bell, but he could sense that the beast was already in motion. He pictured its sinewy muscles tightening as it launched itself out of the darkness. He thundered down the corridor, his fists pumping the air. He passed the door to the office and then hurled his full weight against the main door to the apartment, turning the brass handle. To his relief the door opened and he staggered inside the kitchen, turning in time to see the dog’s massive head careering towards him, its eyes wide and its teeth bared in a hungry snarl.

  He leaned his body against the door and slammed it shut. The latch fell into place and he threw a bolt across.

  The beast hit with incredible force, bending the wooden panels and cracking the plaster around the frame. Somehow the door held. As Sylas stepped back, it struck again and he saw a crack of light appear between two timbers. A splinter of wood flew off and nicked his cheek. It would give way all too soon.

  He turned and ran through the doorway into the adjoining office, pulling it closed behind him just as he heard the beast smashing its way into the kitchen. Breathlessly he skirted the desk, p
raying that his uncle had left the door between the office and the corridor unlocked. He reached for the cold brass handle and turned it. The door held firm. He hurled himself against the wooden panels, but still it held fast. He heard a crash and turned to see the kitchen door bulge and splinter and the hound’s ghoulish head forcing its way through, its jaws biting at the shards of timber. In desperation he wrenched at the handle, rattling and twisting it from side to side. Suddenly he felt something smooth and cold brush against his fingers. He bent down and saw the old brass key still sitting in the keyhole. With a surge of relief he turned it and shouldered the door open, almost falling into the dim light of the corridor. He ran as fast as he could towards the main stairwell, hearing snarls, growls and crashes behind him.

  In seconds he was there.

  As he turned on to the first step, he looked behind. The massive figure of the hound smashed through the door in an explosion of plaster and splinters, hitting the opposite wall and falling to the floor. It lowered its head and glowered through reddened eyes, then threw its glistening snout high into the air and let out a bloodcurdling howl that almost drowned out the chime of the bell.

  Sylas launched himself off the top stair, taking them three at a time, forcing himself to keep his eyes ahead. He heard the clatter of the dog’s claws on the floor above as it gave chase. He reached the second floor and saw a crowd of residents gathered round the stairwell, peering up at him with frightened faces.

  “Run!” he cried. “Get inside!”

  Most scattered as he passed, but the more curious remained and as he continued his descent he heard their shrieks and shouts behind him. He thundered on to the sound of plaster shattering and wood snapping close behind. Finally he leapt off the bottom step and flung himself through the outside door.