The Lighthouse between the Worlds
Page 5
If Griffin had been any less desperate, he’d never even have considered it. But he’d already tried every other option. He’d waited behind a bush by the electronic gate for hours, hoping someone would drive through so he could slip out and away. He’d gone for a walk on the grounds looking for a place to jump the fence, only the towering steel structure was too high. He’d thought if he could just get out, then maybe he could run all the way home, or at least to the coast highway. Once he got that far, he could always hitchhike the rest of the way. Or he could wait at one of the scenic viewpoints along the highway where the tourists always pull off to snap pictures. While they were busy reading the signs about sneaker waves or tide pools, he could slip in between crates on those cargo haulers hitched to the back of the RVs. But what if he picked the one rig that didn’t stop at the lighthouse and he ended up all the way down in California?
Out of ideas, Griffin trudged back into headquarters, aiming for a dim corner of the library where at least he could think through how to get the portal open once he finally got to the lighthouse, and where, in case anyone had noticed his absence, he could pretend he’d been stuck in a book all day. But the moment he entered the main corridor, Dr. Hibbert swept out of her office. “Went for a walk, did we?”
“Um. Yeah?” Griffin scuffed his Tevas against the concrete.
“Follow me,” she ordered, striding back into her office.
Griffin had never thought of glass as cold. To him it was alive. Every piece had a story to tell. But the thick panes that made up the four walls of Dr. Hibbert’s office were every bit as frosty as she was, without even a hint of the bending and flexing, of the fire that had birthed it.
Her aluminum desk was bare except for a box with a round speaker set into the top. Dr. Hibbert pushed the red button at the base. “Sykes,” she said, and then she lifted her finger, waiting.
A voice crackled through the speaker. “Yes, Dr. Hibbert?”
“Bring two plates into my office, and keep everyone away. I have an important guest.” She released the button for the second time and steepled her fingers on the desk, a practiced smile curving over her lips. “So, Griffin, how are you getting along so far?”
Griffin shrugged, glancing back at the door and wishing somebody—anybody—would give him a reason to get out of there. He did not want to sit and eat a friendly meal across from somebody planning to murder his dad. But he’d already skipped lunch, and his stomach was rumbling so loud he knew Dr. Hibbert could hear it.
Her smile didn’t crack, and she seemed prepared to wait an eternity for Griffin to remember his manners and answer her question. And she might have, too, if Sykes hadn’t pushed through the glass door, ducking his head and balancing a tray in his hands. With a flourish, he spread a cloth over the aluminum desk and set out brimming plates, silverware, and glasses full of iced tea that looked like it had steeped too long. Sykes backed out of the room (an awkward thing for someone so tall), and then he turned away from the glass wall, standing guard outside the door.
The fake smile reappeared as Dr. Hibbert dropped her napkin into her lap. She seemed to be exerting a great deal of effort to hide her irritation. “What fun—growing up at a lighthouse!” She speared the braised chicken thigh on her plate and drew her knife across the meat in a sawing motion.
Griffin gulped. “I guess so.”
“Those vicious winter storms, the beach all to yourself, and that charming little cottage—what an adventure you must have had!”
Griffin stuck a forkful of Tater Tots into his mouth so he wouldn’t have to answer right away. “Sure,” he finally offered.
“And did you go to school?”
“At home.”
Her eyes narrowed, just the tiniest bit at the corners. “I suppose your father taught you all about the lighthouse in the course of your studies?”
Griffin shifted in his chair. He stuffed a heaping mound of macaroni into his mouth and puffed his cheeks out extra big.
Dr. Hibbert flicked bits of arugula around her plate with the prongs of her fork. “Because if your father told you something—about what he was planning to do with the lens back there—I would hope you’d tell me.”
“I don’t know anything,” Griffin said around his mouthful of food.
Dr. Hibbert’s fork gave up flicking and started stabbing. “I thought your father told you everything?”
Griffin squirmed in his chair.
“Well,” she said. “If you should remember something, I know you’ll come tell me right away. We want to bring your father home, Griffin. And I’d hate to think you knew of a way for us to help him and kept it to yourself. . . .”
She didn’t say anything more for the rest of the meal, but she watched him from beneath hooded eyes. Griffin downed the food on his plate as quickly as he could and scurried out of there.
By the time he got back outside, the sun brushed the tips of the cedar trees, already on its way down for the evening. Griffin turned in a frantic circle on the gravel drive. He was out of time. Even if he managed to slip away, he’d never make it to the lighthouse on foot before sunset. And he had to beat the Keepers there.
He didn’t like it one bit, but Griffin’s only option was to somehow sneak onto the Keepers’ transport to the lighthouse. The helicopter was long gone, so they had to be driving back. He ducked behind an overly exuberant hydrangea bush beside the front door and waited.
Sure enough, shortly after six o’clock, a caravan of black sedans and a passenger van circled in the packed gravel driveway. The van was quickly loaded with duffel bags, then the drivers disappeared into headquarters. Griffin waited a couple of minutes, and then a few more just to be sure. He crept out onto the driveway and approached the back doors to the van. Inside, the duffel bags were piled up as high as the back seat.
He eyed the sturdy zippers. Maybe he could wiggle himself inside one of those. But what if the zipper stuck and he couldn’t get back out again? What if he couldn’t breathe in there?
Griffin scraped a fingernail against the thick canvas. He unzipped one of the long zippers and peered inside. The duffel bag wasn’t filled with clothes, or food, or even weapons, as he’d imagined. Instead, four stout aluminum canisters were wedged inside. Something was written on the label—Griffin glanced behind him, then swiveled the closest canister until the writing came into full view.
Silica.
He frowned. Why on earth were the Keepers taking silica through the portal? Were there glassmakers on the other side? Griffin zipped the duffel bag back up, snuck around to the passenger side, and eased the door open. In the way back, under the last row of bench seats, was a narrow space he could probably squeeze into. But how long would he be waiting? And what if he was wrong, and the van wasn’t headed to the lighthouse at all?
Just then, the front doors to headquarters groaned open. Griffin didn’t have another second to decide. He jumped into the van and pulled the door closed behind him. While footsteps crunched across the gravel drive, he scurried to the back row and wedged himself under the seat, scooting as far into the corner as he could get. The instant he pulled his knees up to his chest, the doors opened. The van wobbled and dipped under the weight of the bodies clambering inside and scooting across the bench seats to make room for more people to pile in.
“That’s all of us,” Fergus announced.
A pair of smelly feet in old leather sandals settled directly in front of Griffin’s face. The doors slammed, and the engine turned over. Griffin curled up as tight as he could while the van bumped and swerved. After ten minutes or so, the ride leveled out and the van picked up speed—they must have turned onto the coast highway.
Griffin closed his eyes, hugged his arms over his stomach, and tried to slow his racing mind. But it was no good. He kept picturing his dad tied up on some strange world, with no one there to help him. And really—even if Griffin somehow beat the Keepers up the lighthouse stairs, he still didn’t know how to open the portal. He had clues and hunches. B
ut what he needed was more answers. The last thing he wanted to do was lie there and wait.
There’s a spot just north of the lighthouse called Devil’s Churn. It used to be an underwater cave until wave after crashing wave, year after thousands of years, collapsed the roof overhead. Now it’s a narrow inlet you can spot from the highway above. The waves still roar in, and the pressure of all that water rushing through the skinny space is too much sometimes. The water explodes upward, hundreds of feet into the air, where it finds a release at last. Griffin felt exactly like one of those fitful waves, hemmed and penned in when all he wanted was to burst free.
After thirty long minutes, the van slowed, turning in a wide circle before rolling to a stop. “Everybody out,” Fergus said. “Hibbert’s already at the cottage.”
Griffin held his breath while the Keepers filed out of the van. The doors slammed and he waited, cringing, for someone to open the back, yank the luggage out, and spot his hiding place.
But the minutes dragged by, and the chatter faded. Griffin crawled from under the seat and peered out the window. The driveway was empty. He crept to the door and eased outside. His legs tingled as he dropped onto the asphalt. Griffin shook out his arms and banged on his thighs to wake them up.
He was home. Part of him wanted to go inside the little cottage, run straight up to his room, hide under the covers, and pretend like none of this was happening. But it wouldn’t feel a bit like home if his dad wasn’t there.
The sun wavered above the clouds that hunkered down on the horizon. From its point on the headland, the lighthouse beckoned, the lens winking as it pirouetted high in the tower. The quickest way over to the path was across the cottage lawn, but the Keepers would spot him for sure. Griffin didn’t have time to bushwhack behind the house, cutting his own trail through the forest—the sun would be setting soon.
He gritted his teeth and made a run for it. His sandals slipped on the wet grass, and Griffin struggled to stay on his feet. He’d almost made it to the path when the front door was thrown open and Dr. Hibbert rushed out onto the porch.
“Griffin!” she shouted. “What are you doing?”
He tucked his chin, sprinting with everything he had. Fergus and Sykes leaped down the porch steps and tore after him.
“Griffin! Let me explain!”
Griffin ran, his raincoat crackling as his elbows pumped at his sides. I’m coming, Dad. Griffin’s lungs wheezed and his legs burned. The sound of Fergus’s and Sykes’s heavy breathing and even heavier footfalls seemed as loud as a landslide after a hard rain. But Griffin knew this path like he knew the way between the mounds of books, discarded shoes, and dirty laundry in his room. He knew where the half-buried tree roots jutted out of the soil and where he could cut a hairpin turn in half by leaping up the bank between ferns. He broke through the trees, sprinted across the grass, and pushed through the workroom door, slamming it shut behind him and twisting the lock.
Fergus and Sykes banged against the door seconds later, first with their fists, then ramming their shoulders against the sodden wood. Griffin backed away. He stripped off his raincoat and dashed for the stairs. At the first landing, he wiggled out of his jeans, tying an extra knot in the sash to cinch the stola tight. At the next landing, he ripped off his hoodie, tossed it to the ground, and raced up to the watch room.
Far below, blows rained on the workroom door. Out at sea, the sun passed behind the clouds, and the sky faded to a dusty pink. Directly in front of Griffin’s eyes, the gears turned, rotating the lens in the lantern room above.
He panicked. Fergus and Sykes were going to bust through that door any second, and Griffin would still be standing there trying to figure out how to open the portal.
You know more than you think you do.
Griffin squeezed his eyes shut. Come on. Think!
His dad was always saying how they needed to be careful with the lighthouse, that everything—from the bricks to the windows to the gears and the lens—was old as dust. You had to watch where you stepped and be careful what you touched.
The huge brass gears turned, the familiar whine sounding as the heavy lens swiveled. When his dad had been sucked through the portal, those gears had been quiet and the lens eerily still. How was Griffin supposed to stop something that big—something that was built to constantly turn, no matter what? Again, his dad’s voice filled his head. We have to be gentle with the old gears. How many times had he said that? Something as simple as a doorstop would send the whole thing grinding to a halt.
Griffin felt a prickle at the back of his neck, and he turned to look over his shoulder. There, on the windowsill, perched an oddly shaped block of wood. A film of dust coated the sill around it—funny, Griffin had never wondered why it was always right there, in that spot. Every time he washed the watch room windows and wiped the sill clean, he’d picked it up and then set it back right where it belonged.
The prickles inched down his arms. Griffin picked up the block of wood and turned it over in his hands. He stepped toward the gears, and, as if he had done that very thing a thousand times before, he slid the wood into the space between spurs.
The gears stuck with a loud screech, and the lens quavered, halting mid-turn. Griffin ran up the last flight of stairs to the lantern room. He didn’t know if there was something else he was supposed to do to make the portal open. But in that place where Griffin and his father had worked side by side all those years, the need to be together again shoved all the doubts from his mind.
The sun broke through the clouds just as it touched the water. All around—the bricks in the tower, the wrought-iron spiral staircases, even the floor-to-ceiling window panes that looked out on the moody Pacific—everything began to shake. The glass in front of Griffin seemed to soften and throb. Ever so slowly it began to swirl. A hum traveled up through the floor, clattering his teeth together and rattling the length of his spine.
Griffin stepped toward the bull’s-eye. He lifted a trembling hand and stuck it into the center of the swirling glass. There was a sucking sound and a flash, and then all the light in the whole world blinked out.
AH, SO YOU DO WANT to hear about more of the seven worlds tethered to our own?
I thought you might. Close your eyes, then, and listen well.
This time, picture the biggest jungle you’ve ever seen, with overgrown bushes, trails of tickling moss, and Tarzan vines swinging from giant trees.
Does the jungle stretch above your head? And under your feet? And as far as you can see? That’s a start. See that house over there with the curving beams and sturdy pillars driving deep into the ground? That house is alive, you know. See how the leaves along the roofline all lie flat, overlapping like scales on the belly of a fish? Every building on the green world is alive.
You see, among the people of Vinea, certain branches of the family tree hum with magic. Everybody has a little of the green stuff in them. If you were to hold your forearm up against that of a kid from Vinea, you’d notice one difference. The blood that runs through her veins is green. Imagine!
A young greenwitch looks no different from the rest—her blood is pale as a pea shoot. But the more she practices, the more she comes into her strength, the brighter, and bolder the green becomes. You can spot the most powerful greenwitches from far away.
How?
Griffin, they glow.
Some of the greenwitches practiced healing. Others tended the plants that in turn tended them. Still more created things: living sculptures and buildings and bridges leaping over vast swaths of untouched greenery.
It’s not so far-fetched, not really. The greenwitches simply learned to listen to the call of the blood in their veins. They reached out to the beings who shared their world, and they asked for help. And the two developed a bond that goes so much deeper than symbiosis. Trust. That’s what they cultivated, human and plant.
The magic of the greenwitches is simple: Listen. Ask. And finally, trust.
10
A YELLOW SKY
But it wasn’t his lighthouse. He knew that just as he knew the sour smell of a minus tide or the feeling of his father’s hand resting warm and steady on his shoulder. The windows, the lens, the metal floor, and the domed roof—none of that had changed. The air was different, though. It tasted like the spark of metal after a lightning strike. The collar of Griffin’s shirt was damp from soaking up the leftover raindrops dripping out of his hair. But within seconds, all of the moisture had dried in the brittle air.
He turned toward the windows, pressing his hands against the warm panes and peering up at the sky. Where was the sun? He walked in a tight circle around the lens, taking in the panoramic view. The sky was as bright as it had been at home, but the light here was yellow and diffuse, as if it had no single source in the sky.
And there was one more big difference. Whatever this tower was used for in this new world, it wasn’t a lighthouse. Griffin double-checked behind him. The stairs leading down to the watch room were at his back, and the door to the gallery was on his left. He reached out a hand to steady himself. It should have been right there, in front of him.
The ocean was gone.
It felt like putting your shoes on the wrong feet or pulling your favorite sweater on inside out. Just wrong. The forest was missing too. As far as Griffin could see, the ground was a dull brown. Flat and desolate, without a tree or bush or clump of grass anywhere.
“Somni.” He tested the word on his lips. He knew this place. Not from a memory or an old photo. It lived in his mind with his mother’s stories.
A sudden stirring in the lens at his back startled Griffin out of his daze. The glass sagged at the center and began to swirl, the portal opening for a second time that evening. Was that the Keepers coming after him?