by C. A. Gray
“Well, wait a second,” said Lily, and Cole and Peter looked at her expectantly. “The point of this book isn’t the Shadow Lord. He was only mentioned in passing, and only in order to explain why Morgan didn’t try to use the Stone on her own body. So it seems that the point is the fact that she used it on the castle, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” said Peter slowly. “Most of the castle disappeared, though, so I don’t see how –”
“It disappeared from our world,” Lily cut him off, gaining momentum, “but Morgan said that matter can be neither created nor destroyed, remember?”
“Isaac Newton said that, actually,” said Peter dryly.
Lily ignored him. “So that means the castle couldn’t have been destroyed. It had to go somewhere. If the body of the Shadow Lord was translated from earth to the world of the penumbra, then it stands to reason that the same thing happened to Avalon, doesn’t it?”
Now Peter looked impressed. “That’s logical,” he admitted.
“Peter,” said Lily, really excited now. “What if the castle still exists, but in their world – a sort of halfway house? It used to be on earth, so it has some connections to earth, just like the Shadow Lord does…. Meaning that humans can still exist there, even if they can’t cross all the way over into the world of the penumbra?”
“Like a Shadow Fortress?” Cole said, catching the idea.
“Yes, exactly like a Shadow Fortress!” said Lily. “A place where a human could be held captive by the penumbra –”
“And would never be found unless someone already knew where the fortress was,” Peter finished, thunderstruck. “Like Carlion.”
Lily nodded. “Isdemus said that Carlion can only be found by those who already know where it is –”
“Or by those who wish to find it,” said Cole.
“That’s only because the nimbi guide him straight to it,” Lily added.
Finally, Peter voiced what they were all thinking. “That’s where my dad must be,” he said. “He’s being held captive in the castle of Avalon.”
***
Brock blinked, trying to orient himself. He had not moved, nor had he gone through a porthole… and yet the scenery had changed. Myriad penumbra still surrounded him on the banks of a lake, smooth and silver as glass, with a single, impossibly thin footbridge suspended over the water from the bank to the castle beyond. Both the footbridge and the castle seemed suspended by nothing, in mid-air, like a wisp of smoke. The first thing he noticed was that, unlike the penumbra he had seen on the bus or in the park, he could not see through the castle to the other side.
The cluster of the penumbra surrounding Brock moved into a single file formation so that they could cross the footbridge. It looked like a ribbon, slick, flimsy, and almost as narrow. He half expected it to collapse under their weight. Involuntarily Brock looked over the edges of the bridge. The water was unnaturally still – as still as death was the phrase that kept repeating in his mind, until the words lost all meaning. He could see clear to the bottom, but there was nothing there: only black sand with the occasional flecks of silver and gray. He supposed he wasn’t surprised that nothing could live in this water. It was the opposite of the moat surrounding Carlion, which was alive with colorful aquatic life of every kind. Here, there was no movement in, and no movement out. Stagnation was the very essence of death.
As they approached the castle at the other end of the bridge, Brock could see its proportions were equally as absurd as the bridge: the turrets, spires, and flying buttresses looked stylized and cartoonishly thin, with lines that seemed to curve in on themselves. Even Brock could tell that those turrets should have crumbled under their own weight. The existence of the castle seemed to be an architectural impossibility.
Suddenly it occurred to him that he could hear the footsteps of the penumbra. Brock looked at the feet of the flame-haired siren walking in front of him and saw them fall, firmly contacting the bridge. Then he instinctively looked down at his own feet, and nearly lost his balance.
He could see the stones of the bridge through his feet.
Is there even air here? Can I breathe? he thought, gasping involuntarily. His lungs dutifully expanded and contracted again as they resumed their previous position, but as if they were going through the motions; here, air did not seem to be a strict necessity.
“Where are we?” Brock said, swallowing the sound of his own stifled voice, mostly just to see whether he could still speak at all. His voice fell flat, like the sound of a muted drum.
“Avalon,” said the flame-haired siren. Her eyes gestured to the water, and she said, “It means Isle of Glass.” Her musical tone seemed to carry and echo.
“But… where are we?” Brock repeated, and swallowed. His mouth was so dry.
The siren tilted her head to one side. “At the moment, in terms of your world, we are approximately 52 latitude and -31 longitude. Directly over the Atlantic Ocean. That changes continuously, of course, since Avalon has no anchor from your world to ours.”
“We’re… over the ocean?” Brock stammered.
“The Fata Morgana spends the majority of its time over the ocean, naturally, since water makes up some seventy percent of the surface area of your world,” added the blond siren behind him.
“What’s the Fata Morgana?” Brock repeated, trying not to panic.
“That,” said the siren, pointing at the castle. “The phrase was coined by sailors, I believe?”
Brock shook his head mutely to indicate that he didn’t know.
“It means mirage,” said the first blond siren.
The flame-haired one continued, “They say fairy castles have been known to appear over the water in your world, luring unsuspecting sailors to their deaths in the belief that they will reach land if they sail just a little further.” She laughed, and tossed her hair, which now fell around her shoulders rather than floating, as it had before. “What they are seeing is real, of course, and not a mirage at all. Yet they could sail for all eternity and never reach it.”
Brock felt the chill creep deeper into his bones.
The mouth of the castle was a portcullis standing wide, like the gaping jaws of a leviathan. Once they passed, Brock’s mouth fell open involuntarily.
The castle had no foundation. It was comprised of three convoluted walls suspended over the eerily still water, where the wisp of a bridge burst into a flat labyrinth upon its surface, gossamer like the web of a spider. The inside of the castle seemed pitch black from the outside, but once they crossed the threshold there seemed to be a faint, otherworldly glow emanating from all around and nowhere at once. It was impossible to locate, but the illumination was just enough to reveal the fact that they were not inside at all.
The silence was so deafening that he could hear a ringing noise inside his own head. It was as if his brain was trying to interpret the utter stillness, like the sound had been muffled inside of a paper bag. Instead of the inside of a building, it looked as if the gossamer web floated on an ocean which not only stretched as far as the eye could see, but wrapped up and around them, as if they were enclosed in a sphere of water. Brock instinctively knew that to fall into that water would mean certain death. He doubted the surface would even make a single ripple as it engulfed his body within its depths.
“You’re right,” said the flame-haired siren.
“About what?” said Brock, though he had a funny feeling that she was responding to his thoughts. She had been so accustomed to generating them for the majority of his life.
“You don’t want to fall in there.”
“Why is that?” Brock asked, but he knew he didn’t want to hear the answer.
“Because that’s where he is.”
Suddenly a voice cut through the stillness like a knife, but was muffled in the bizarre, unearthly silence.
“Brock Jefferson?”
Almost as soon as it the voice had come, it fell, blunted in the muffled stillness. Brock’s stomach fell with it. He turned to s
ee the speaker.
It was Bruce Stewart.
Chapter 22
Polly Jefferson rolled off her left arm, which had gone numb from the full weight of her body for the previous several hours that she had been asleep. She tapped her fingers on her leg, feeling the pins and needles, and looked at the clock, which blinked 6:30 in lurid red LCD. Instinctively she craned her head towards the other side of the bed, but she knew already what she would find there. The sheets were rumpled but empty and cold, and her husband’s briefcase, which had been leaning against the dresser the night before, was gone. He had already left for London.
She sat up on the edge of the bed and stared at the closet doors, with the peculiar feeling of dread that she could not quite identify, as if something awful had happened and in another few seconds, she would remember what it was.
Oh, yes. Cole.
A wave of nausea passed over her; she gripped the edge of the bed and closed her eyes until it passed.
Cole was still in Carlion, and she did not even know where Carlion was, or how to get back to it. Henry had forbidden her even to speak of him. He could, presumably, come home anytime he wished, but she knew her son. He wouldn’t leave, not when he might be able to help Peter find his dad. With that thought, another wave of nausea passed over her and she fought the bile rising in her throat. Help Peter find his dad. What would that mean exactly? Where had Peter’s dad been taken, and by whom, and for what purpose? Perhaps Cole would help Peter gather information. Perhaps the three teens left in Carlion would stay in the castle while the Watchers launched a daring rescue mission. Perhaps.
But perhaps not.
She stood shakily to her feet, slipped them into a pair of slippers lined with lamb’s wool, and wrapped herself in the blue terry cloth robe that her husband hated and she therefore only wore when he wasn’t around to see it. She could not sit in her room and continue to think or she would go crazy. She had to do something.
She intended to go down to the kitchen for coffee and breakfast – the chef would not arrive for another half hour, but Polly knew how to work the French press and teapot – but her feet disobeyed her and instead she headed straight for Brock’s room. She needed to not be alone.
The door was open, which surprised her. Brock always slept with his door closed. She pushed it open, and saw that the bed was still made. She frowned. That was especially odd. Most of the time Brock didn’t even make his bed – he let the maid do that in the afternoon, after he had already left for school. Even if he had made it himself, he should have awakened only a few moments before. School started at 7:30 and it took Thomas only fifteen minutes to drive him to King’s…
There’s football practice this morning! Polly remembered with relief. Henry’s words to his son the night before came floating back to her: “If you get to bed soon, you can be up early enough to make football practice in the morning.”
She padded almost silently down the stairs, her relief turning back into the vague sense of dread she’d had when she first woke. Absently she filled the teapot with water and placed it on the stove, turning the knob. She pulled coffee from the freezer, and lost count of the number of scoops as she dumped them into the French press, having to pour the coffee back into the bag and measure again, three times. Then she dropped the measuring scoop altogether, forgotten, as she stepped towards the window in disbelief.
The dented BMW was still parked out front. That meant Brock and Thomas hadn’t left for school yet.
“Brock?” she called, perplexed, her voice rising with a twinge of fear. She looked out the window to the servants’ quarters. She could see Thomas’s wife up and about, and Thomas was out pulling weeds, his wraith-like penumbra hovering a few feet away from him. Polly started when she saw it. He waved at her through the window, oblivious.
Instinctively Polly abandoned the coffee and fairly ran upstairs, panic mounting with each pounding slipper. She didn’t quite know what she was afraid of, only that it was very, very bad. “Brock?” she squeaked, from room to room. “Brock!”
She burst back into his bedroom and found his football gear, cleats and pads, as well as his book bag lying untouched on his desk. Polly began to half-whimper, half-cry.
“BROCK!” she shrieked now, running downstairs and repeating the same process through the rooms on the ground floor.
On instinct, she ran to her purse, grabbed her phone, and without thinking, she pressed speed dial, ready to scream with impatience as the phone rang on the other end once. Twice. Three times.
“What is it?” said Henry’s cold voice finally on the other end.
“Brock is missing!” The words tumbled out of Polly’s mouth so quickly that they slurred together, coming out a jumbled mess.
“What?” said Henry. “What are you talking about?”
“He’s gone! I’ve just turned the house upside down, and his bed is made and –”
“He had football practice this morning –”
“AREN’T YOU LISTENING, HE’S GONE!” Polly screamed. “Thomas and the car are still here and – his – football – gear…” She had rendered herself incapable of logical speech, and dissolved into tears.
“Well, what is it that you think happened, since you obviously have a theory?” Henry snapped irritably over her sobs.
“You KNOW what happened. You heard what those Watchers said just like I did!” Polly wailed, and suddenly in that moment, with sickening clarity, she knew too. “He was abducted by the Shadow Lord because we brought him home, away from the protection of Carlion, just – like – Peter’s – father!”
There was silence on the other end of the line. Polly gasped, trying to regain control of her breath, waiting with a glimmer of hope that Henry was processing this, that he believed her, and that he would come home, to the rescue. His next words shattered that hope.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said contemptuously. He spoke through gritted teeth. “I thought I told you we were never to speak of that place again! I never want to hear another word about –”
Then Polly did something she had never, in twenty years of marriage, done before, nor had she ever believed herself to be capable of it. She hung up on her husband.
She knew she couldn’t call the police. They would not be able to help. But she needed help, and desperately.
Suddenly she remembered something Isdemus had said to Peter when they had overheard them in the adjacent room, talking with those other Watchers: it was something about how Isdemus could not locate a person who spoke his name instantaneously like the nimbi could. That must mean that the nimbi could locate the speaker when she said one of their names… whatever that meant.
During her time in Carlion, Polly had seen many of the nimbi, but she only remembered the name of one. It had been fluttering over her head when she and Henry had first entered the Great Hall, making sarcastic comments in the background. She had overheard Isdemus call it something, but she couldn’t quite remember what it was… it was something like…
“FIDO DINGUS!” she cried as loudly as she could.
Nothing. Maybe that wasn’t it.
“FIDUS DINGUS!”
Still nothing. This should work…
“FIDES DIGNUS!”
Suddenly there was a crack, and Polly fell backwards in surprise, although fortunately into a waiting kitchen chair. It scooted away from her as she fell, but still remained near enough to support her.
About three inches away from her face, the glowing form of the ugly middle-aged baby beat its tiny wings spastically. He frowned at her. “Something is wrong,” he said, observing her face.
“Brock!” she gasped, but halfway through the word, her voice died and she had to swallow before she could try again. “Has been taken!”
Fides Dignus’s eyebrows shot up so high that they were hidden by his coarse, curly fringe. “Taken?” he repeated, alarmed. “Taken by whom? How do you know?”
Polly repeated to the little creature everything she had seen that morning
and recounted to her husband, but also added that the night before, both she and her son had discovered that as a result of their time in Carlion, they both had become Seers. Midway through her story, she dissolved into tears again.
“They took him! The penumbra, they took him, just like they took Peter’s father because Brock was with Peter that night. I know it! I just know that’s what happened!”
“I see,” said Fides Dignus with a most disturbing frown that did not contradict her, though Polly felt some strange measure of relief that at least he took her seriously. “I will go and inform Isdemus right away.”
“Wait!” she cried. “You can’t just leave me here! I’ll go crazy, I have to help!”
Fides Dignus regarded her and said doubtfully, “It will be much faster if I tell him what has happened –”
“Just take me with you!” Polly demanded. “Do that cracking thing you do, but take me too!”
“I cannot take you too,” said Fides Dignus patiently, “because you belong to this dimension and I do not –”
“I DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR MATH, JUST DO IT!”
Even Fides Dignus was beginning to look flustered and very slightly frightened. “See,” he tried again, “you can only warp if there’s a space specialist present, or if there’s a pre-made portal, and the nearest portal to the castle is the Grandfather Tree at the edge of the Enchanted Forest –”
When Fides Dignus was still mid-sentence, Polly Jefferson understood what needed to be done. She leapt to her feet and ran towards the pegs that held her car keys, yanked them off and continued towards the door without stopping, still dressed in her slippers and bath robe.
“Come ON!” she shouted at Fides Dignus, who fluttered after at her insistence, not daring to disobey.
***
There was a vague whistling sound in the background, but it didn’t quite sound like an alarm clock. It took Ralph, Bruce’s research partner, several moments to register the fact that it was a tea kettle. He was momentarily confused (the tea kettle in his house was in the kitchen, which was downstairs from his bedroom) until he realized that he was still in his office at the university. He opened his eyes and blinked the sleep out of them, and could see clearly through his right eye, but the world was all a blur through the left. He sat up and adjusted his glasses on his nose. Apparently, he had fallen asleep with the yellowed pages of a book full of thermodynamic equations plastered to the side of his face, because it sat open below him, pooled with a little bit of drool.