by Martyn Ford
“That one’s an old man,” Dee said, pointing. “An old ninja man.”
“I am afraid I cannot decipher such an image.” Phil frowned.
“The top bit is his hat,” she added. “The plane trail is his sword.”
“Do ninjas wear— Oh my jolly biscuits, I see it now.”
“How about this one?” Tim said, concentrating on some low wisps of vapor and sharing his imagination with them. He had practiced a lot over the last month or so. Slowly but surely a picture emerged.
“That is…It’s a monkey!” Phil yelled. “And he has a typewriter.”
“I wonder if anyone else is noticing these,” Dee said.
“Good point.”
Eisenstone had told Tim to keep his powers—if you could call them that—quiet, which seemed a reasonably sensible idea. The images above, thankfully, cleared by themselves, spreading and unraveling in the wind.
Purple dusk drew the nearby woodland shadows over them, but no one wanted to go home yet. The topic of what had happened at Fredric’s facility arrived, as it had done time and time again over the past weeks.
“When I thought you had died, I didn’t care about anything,” Dee said. “Literally nothing mattered. Not even drowning. It was as though the floor, the earth itself, had just become irrelevant.”
Tim smiled as she picked a long piece of grass from between them, twirling it in her fingers. For some reason he found himself noticing her eyelashes as she blinked.
“I’d wanted more,” she said. “More things. More toys. More clothes. More gadgets. More. But when I was sure you were gone, I just thought about all the things that matter, and all the things that don’t….I know what you mean.” Dee shuffled closer and rested her head on his shoulder as they watched the night arrive. “It’s just stuff,” she said, flinging the grass away.
Tim squinted at the clouds. He’d had enough of them for tonight. So he gently swiped his hand and the blackening sky began to clear, the early stars like glitter, almost flashing above them. The ceiling was truly gone. Now, looking up through the fire-white dots above, Tim could only wonder how far his imagination might take him.
Harriet Goffe was fast asleep when her cell phone lit up, buzzing on top of her bedside cabinet. BRRRH—BRRRH. BRRRH—BRRRH. She flinched awake, apologizing to her husband, who rolled his pillow over his head.
“Yeah, what is it?” she groaned, yawning, stepping into the hall.
“Harriet, Harriet, it’s…it’s Rick.”
Resting the phone on her shoulder, she wrestled her bathrobe on, tugging it up her arms. “Who?”
“Sorry, Rick, Rick Harris.” He sounded flustered. “I’m one of the junior lab technicians. I worked on twenty-two at the Diamond.”
“Oh, all right. How…” Another yawn, and she rubbed water from her eye. “How can I help you, Rick?”
“I was overseeing the…the filing of all the evidence from Crowfield House. The teleporter, we moved it when TRAD was shut down, but I carried on working on it. It…I was looking at the software it uses. Custom-made. It’s impressive. There was data on it. Lots and lots of data. The code, it was from chamber A, you understand, and it was going to chamber B. But there is a glitch. Or there was. In the system. So it didn’t work. It never worked.”
“Excuse me, Rick, what are you talking about? Can’t this wait until the morning?”
“No, not really. I…I fixed it. I just fixed the glitch. It was a simple line of programming. But the moment I did, chamber B…it…it came alive. Lit up like Christmas. The teleporter works, and something…something appeared inside.”
Harriet flicked on the lamp in her hall. “Something?”
“Well, no. Some…someone.” Rick cleared his throat. “A woman. She said…she said her name is Clarice.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Martyn Ford is a journalist from Hampshire, England. He likes pasta and enjoys pressing keys on his laptop until stories appear. His first book, It Happened to Me, is a collection of shocking true stories. The Imagination Box was his first story for young readers. The Imagination Box: Beyond Infinity continues the story. Visit Martyn at martyn-ford.com.
DISCOVER HOW IT ALL BEGAN….
What if anything you imagined could become real?
Meet Professor Eisenstone, scientist and inventor; Tim, an orphan with an especially keen imagination; Dee, the professor’s granddaughter; and Phil, an eloquent finger monkey with a dry sense of humor.
Introduce an Imagination Box that can create anything Tim can imagine, plus some bad guys…
and you’re in for a hilarious, action-filled adventure!
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