The Lighthouse between the Worlds

by Melanie Crowder

  Dr. Hibbert considered the boy in front of her, dripping with rainwater that pooled on the concrete floor beneath his feet. It wasn’t an easy thing to look someone so clearly devastated square in the face. And Hypatia Hibbert wasn’t accustomed to dealing with children. Griffin was the first to ever enter the Keepers’ headquarters, and she didn’t have a clue what to do with him.

  “Won’t you sit?” she asked, indicating a row of high-backed chairs along the far wall.

  Griffin shook his head.

  “Would you like to take off your raincoat?”

  Griffin tugged the zipper up over his chin.

  Dr. Hibbert’s jaw ticked to the side. “I’m not the bad guy here.”

  Griffin still didn’t answer. He was having a difficult time keeping any of her words inside his head long enough for them to drop anchor. Her questions mostly drifted by like severed floats bobbing on the outgoing tide.

  Dr. Hibbert sighed, a long, drawn-out sort of sigh meant to make anyone within earshot aware of her exasperation. “Young man, we have a common enemy. You are not mine, and I am certainly not yours.”

  Griffin blinked, trying to focus on her words. “What do you mean? What enemy?”

  Dr. Hibbert clicked her tongue. “I’m not sure I should tell you that.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “If your parents wanted you to know that information, they would have told you themselves.”

  Griffin reeled as if she had slapped him across the face. He wasn’t ready to hear his dad talked about like that—like something from the past. He’d only just gotten used to thinking of his mother that way. So he slapped back, before the blow took the wind out of him. “If you know something about what happened to my dad and you’re not telling me—”

  Dr. Hibbert waved him off. “Your parents trusted me to lead the Keepers; I can’t think of a single reason why you should feel any differently.”

  Griffin rocked back on his heels. The Keepers? That was the phrase his dad had used. “Keepers of what?”

  “The Society of Lighthouse Keepers, of course.”

  Griffin crossed his arms over his chest. “Lighthouse keepers wash windows and polish lenses. We do that. Me and my dad. But this ‘headquarters’ is—what, five miles inland? You’re not anywhere close to the water. So what is it, exactly, that your society does?”

  Dr. Hibbert brushed a wayward hair out of her face, considering her words carefully. “We are a collection of scientists, commissioned by the Coast Guard to . . . protect the populace. Our particular expertise hasn’t been needed much in the past few years. The lighthouse has been quiet. As I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, it can be extremely dangerous.”

  There was truth in what she said. But it wasn’t the whole truth; Griffin was sure of that. Griffin eyed the woman who stood before him, rigid as a snag in a forest of downed trees. Her eyes were fixed in a permanent squint, and vertical lines carved into the skin above her lips (perhaps because she was a little too fond of pursing them).

  If you look closely when you’re working with glass, you can see imperfections, you can feel vulnerabilities. There might be a hairline crack or a bubble trapped inside.

  It’s not so easy with people.

  Griffin squinted, inspecting Dr. Hibbert like he would a piece of freshly annealed glass. “What do my parents have to do with any of this?”

  Dr. Hibbert turned to face the trees. “Katherine designed this room. Did you know that? And Philip installed the ceiling. We worked on it together, actually. I’m a botanist, you see. Each Keeper contributes what he or she can. And we have all sacrificed greatly. But our enemy is so much bigger than any one of us and our own private tragedies.

  “Anyway, your mother’s . . . trips . . . taught her certain things”—Dr. Hibbert gestured upward—“insights she shared with the rest of us.”

  The memory Griffin hadn’t quite been able to catch earlier snagged a second time. It was of his mother, telling one of her bedtime stories, and though he couldn’t remember the words, it warmed him, and it gave him courage.

  “You sent her on those trips. You’re the reason we lost her.”

  Dr. Hibbert almost hid any start the accusation had given her, but Griffin had been watching, waiting to catch her out in one of those almost truths. There—a stiffening of the fingers, knuckles pressing against the thin fabric of her pockets. You could almost say her hands clenched into fists.

  “How do you know about that?” Dr. Hibbert’s voice had gone cold and sharp.

  “My dad told me things.” Griffin tried to sound more confident than he felt. “He tells me everything.”

  Dr. Hibbert pursed her lips. One eyebrow quirked upward. “I wouldn’t be so sure.”

  The concrete walls sucked her words into their pores. Griffin tried to swallow, but something was getting in the way of the air headed for his lungs.

  She turned on her heel, her braid whipping over her shoulder. “I’ll send someone to show you to your room. You may as well get comfortable.” And with that, Hypatia Hibbert crossed to a tall wooden door set into the opposite wall and swept through it. In the seconds before the door slammed behind her, the sound of agitated conversations, clanking dishes, and hurried footfalls slipped into the quiet atrium.

  Griffin glanced around him—at the bare concrete walls and the high security fence outside the window—and began to wonder if he wasn’t exactly a guest in this place, but something much more like a prisoner.

  6

  PERFECTLY IRRATIONAL ANSWERS

  ALMOST AS SOON AS Dr. Hibbert left, a second woman emerged. She approached the base of the trees, where Griffin stood in the dirt, leaning against the solid trunks as if they were the only things keeping him upright. Like Dr. Hibbert, this woman also had deep wrinkles stretching across her forehead and braided hair colored by the shock of age. But that was where any resemblance between the two ended.

  This woman’s white braids curled under her ears, ending in feathery tufts that bobbed in an almost childlike way. “You’re Griffin. I’m Beatrix.” She seemed to know that he wouldn’t want to talk, so she kept on in her lilting voice that hopped between tones for no particular reason. “We’ve got a room ready for you. If we hit the kitchen on the way up, I’ll sneak us a handful of cookies.”

  Beatrix laid a gentle hand on Griffin’s shoulder, and she waited until he was ready to leave the hush of the atrium for the flurry at the rest of headquarters. But Griffin couldn’t bring himself to move. Beatrix seemed nice enough, but she worked for Dr. Hibbert. He couldn’t trust her.

  After Griffin’s mother died, trust hadn’t come easily. His father had seen this and tried with every action, every day, to say straight to his son’s trembling heart: I am here. I am here. I am here. But it didn’t matter in the end how steady Philip had been. He was gone now too.

  Griffin rested his hand on the pouch strapped around his stomach. What he needed was time alone, to think. So when Beatrix once again applied gentle pressure between his shoulder blades, he let that little push propel him forward.

  Griffin followed her through the thick wooden door and even thicker walls. Beyond, a wide corridor bisected the first floor. To the left was a kitchen with swinging doors, a narrow dining room, and a flight of floating stairs leading up to a second floor. To the right was a conference room and an enormous library filled with people whispering in flustered groups. Dr. Hibbert sat at an aluminum desk planted in the middle of a freestanding glass box at the center of it all. Her eyes darted from the paper in her hands to the people busy in the kitchen and hurrying between the library and the conference room and, finally, to where Griffin stood.

  He shuddered. The entire building had a stony, modern air, but Dr. Hibbert’s office in particular seemed to blow a chill across his cheeks. Beatrix reemerged from the kitchen and steered him up the stairs to a quiet hallway with no fewer than a dozen closed doors. She led him into a small, plain room. It contained exactly four pieces of furniture: a twin bed, a
cupboard for clothes, a chair by the door, and a wobbly bedside table.

  Beatrix set a tray of food on the chair (as promised, with a teetering pile of molasses cookies) and backed away. “Sleep well, child. I’m right next door if you need anything.” And she closed the door softly behind her.

  Griffin let out a long sigh. Missing his dad throbbed like a couple of cracked ribs. Even shallow breaths were sharp with pain. But he didn’t have time to curl up on the small bed in the corner and let grief crush him.

  Nothing that had happened that afternoon made sense. Griffin moved the chair in front of the door and sat, tipping the seat back in case anyone tried to push the door open. He unfastened the strap around his waist and pulled out his father’s journal and his mother’s artwork.

  Griffin began with the drawings. He sorted them into two piles: one that seemed random and a second that might have anything to do with the lighthouse or Dr. Hibbert and the Keepers. He tucked the first bunch back in the pouch and lifted the small stack that remained, careful not to crease the thin paper or smudge a single one of his mother’s lines. He examined the drawings, and sure enough, he noticed things he’d overlooked before.

  On an aerial sketch of the big Fresnel lens in the lighthouse, she had written portal access in tiny letters that nearly blended in with the grated-metal floor. Griffin’s gaze had slid over that sketch several times a day, but he’d never noticed that his mom had also inscribed a name above each of the carefully drawn bull’s-eyes. First Earth, then Caligo, Stella, Arida, and Glac—The rest of the word was lost as it followed the angled panels out of sight.

  Griffin frowned. Portal access? What did that even mean?

  He placed the paper on his lap and picked up the next one. It was a colored-pencil drawing of the lighthouse tower, only the small workroom attached to the base was missing. In its place was the cross section of what looked like a huge temple. All through the nave were narrow alcoves fit with breathing masks and webs of tubing. His mother’s careful script noted the dimensions of each niche in the wall and the path the tubes took to vent in the tower high above.

  Outside the temple was an amphitheater; beyond that, barracks and a narrow rectangular building labeled rectory. The rooms inside were all marked: priests’ bedrooms, offices, guard stations. At the heart of the building was an eight-sided space labeled chapel.

  Griffin frowned. Why would his mom draw the lighthouse tower on top of a temple? And why had she gone to such lengths to note all those details about a place that was just in her imagination?

  Beams of light radiated from the tower—at least he’d always thought that’s what those squiggly lines were supposed to be. And they were, but as Griffin peered closer, he realized they were also more of his mom’s careful handwriting.

  The traveler must center himself in front of the bull’s-eye, stall the gears, and focus all his want on that singular world. If the need is great enough, the glass will respond. But be wary of standing so close; another’s desire on the other side can draw the unsuspecting through.

  There was more, but Griffin would need a magnifying glass to read it—something about stolen dreamers and worlds taken in conquest.

  Wait—worlds? Griffin sat back in surprise. Not, like, traveling around the globe, but from one world to another? His mom couldn’t possibly mean that. Could she?

  All of a sudden, missing her rose up into his throat, as if everything he hadn’t been able to say to her over the past three years was lodged there, trying to find its way into words all at once. His mom would have meant traveling between worlds. That’s exactly the kind of impossible idea she would’ve whispered over his head while he drifted off to sleep.

  Griffin ran his fingers over her words. A portal? Hope squeezed his lungs, made his breaths come quick and hard. A portal isn’t a dead end. It leads somewhere, right? So where, then? And did that mean his dad was somewhere else? Not dead, just on the other side of a portal between worlds?

  Griffin had watched him get sucked through that lens. Through the portal, he corrected himself. One minute he was right there, and the next he was gone. Griffin squeezed his eyes shut. It was impossible. Wasn’t it?

  Griffin turned to the following page. It showed a pastel sketch of the exact clothes the Keepers had all worn—pajama-like things cropped at the knee and elbow, with a red sash around the waist. A swatch of pale blue fabric was stapled to the paper—it was breathable and soft, like well-worn linen. Something about it was different, though. Griffin rubbed the cloth between his fingers. He pulled it first one way and then the other. It stretched out and sprang back, but there weren’t any crisscrossing fibers like you’d find in a swatch of cotton or denim, or anything else on Earth for that matter.

  The last page was a watercolor of a cavern filled with trees, just like in the atrium. But the trees weren’t like any Griffin had ever seen before. They were as tall as redwoods with broad fanlike leaves you’d find in the tropics. Notes on soil, light, and cloud cultivation in the canopy filled the margins.

  Griffin set that page on top of the others. Reality and memory collided, blurring the edges of his vision and overlaying everything in sepia. He’d seen those trees before. Not in the drawings on his wall, not in the botanic gardens in Portland, but in his mind. His mother had been sitting on the edge of his bed, tucking the covers up under his chin and telling him a bedtime story.

  Wait. Had his mom been to those other worlds? Had she seen them with her own eyes, breathed in the dream clouds on Somni and traipsed through the jungle of Vinea? The tips of Griffin’s fingers began to tingle, and then his toes, like when you roll over in the middle of the night to find that your limbs are dead asleep. But you shake them, no matter how much it burns, until they wake up.

  Questions Griffin didn’t even know he’d been living with all those years sidled next to perfectly irrational answers. A portal to other worlds. Right there, in his lighthouse.

  If his mom had traveled to those other worlds, or even just one of them, maybe he could too. Maybe he could go find his dad and bring him back home. Griffin raked his fingers through his hair. The day before, he and his dad had ground a bevel into a round of glass just like the concentric circles in the lens, to catch the light, his dad had said. But what if it was more than that? What if his dad had been trying to teach him something about the portal without freaking him out? What if both of them were trying to tell Griffin something—through his lessons, through her stories and sketches—dropping clues for him to pick up later?

  It was all too much. The journal and all the papers slid to the floor as Griffin dropped his head into his hands. Tears pricked his eyes. His nose ran and his ears rang and his chest was one steady ache. Rain drummed into the roof overhead, and the four walls of the tiny room muffled the sounds within. There are some things no one else has any right to hear.

  Gradually, clanking dishes and a phone that nobody seemed to care to answer ringing on the floor below brought Griffin back to himself. He drew his sleeve across his nose and wiped his hands off on his jeans. He had work to do. It was too late for his mom, but he could still do something about his dad. He had to do something, and soon.

  Griffin plucked the journal off the floor and opened it. To anyone else, the notes that filled each page would have seemed like gibberish, but he recognized the shorthand immediately. He swiped at the edges of his eyes and flipped through the small book, front to back. All the bits and pieces tumbled together like bubbles of air in a cresting wave. The pictures may have been a puzzle, but he knew exactly what this was.

  No two pieces of glass are the same. Of course, factories these days can get it pretty close. But any number of variables alter the composition: thickness, coloring agents, or the ratio of silica and soda, lime and lead. Those differences subtly change the way the light moves through the pane, whether it is caught and redirected, channeled, or diffused. And that doesn’t even begin to take into account curved or etched glass, impurities, or plain-old mistakes.

&n
bsp; Every day, in the family glass studio, Philip would jot a recipe of sorts onto the chalkboard to specify the color and weight of the glass they’d be working with that day. The angle and precise measurements of the mold or carving—it would all be there, in the shorthand that had become like a second language between them.

  The journal was simple. There were eight sections with a bull’s-eye sketched at the beginning of each one and what were becoming familiar names written above: Earth, Caligo, Stella, Arida, Glacies, Maris, Somni, and Vinea. The following pages were filled with glassmakers’ notes. To the untrained eye, the drawings looked identical. But Griffin knew better. He could see irregularities in the concentric circles that made up each panel of glass and read them in the notes scrawled across the pages. Each bull’s-eye was different, the impurities and subtle variations a map charting the way to a particular world.

  Everything around Griffin ground to a stop. His breathing. His heartbeat. This was it. The portal wasn’t some mystery he’d never understand. It was glass.

  Griffin scrambled to pick up his mother’s drawings. He could do this. He could. He wrapped the drawings carefully around the journal once more and tucked them into the pouch at his waist. He stood and dragged the chair away from the door. He kicked his shoes off and climbed into bed. His dad was right. Griffin did know more than he’d realized. Maybe he even knew enough to bring his dad home.

  7

  MURDERERS

  UNLIKE THE FOGHORN or the tsunami siren, there are some noises you don’t even notice until they stop. Like when the electricity shorts, and suddenly the hum of the refrigerator and the low roar of the furnace quit. Or at the end of a ferry ride when the engine gears down and you can hear the waves slapping against the hull. Griffin had been so lost in thought he hadn’t noticed the hallway outside his door rumbling all evening with the steady patter of people hurrying back and forth. But then it all went quiet.