by Stucky, Pam
contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
chapter one
chapter two
chapter three
chapter four
chapter five
chapter six
chapter seven
chapter eight
chapter nine
chapter ten
chapter eleven
chapter twelve
chapter thirteen
chapter fourteen
The Secret of the Dark Galaxy Stone
connect
acknowledgments
more by pam stucky
THE UNIVERSES INSIDE THE LIGHTHOUSE
Pam Stucky
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 Pam Stucky
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For information and permission requests, contact www.pamstucky.com.
Published in the United States by Wishing Rock Press.
Cover design by Pam Stucky
Cover artwork by Jim Tierney
ISBN: 1940800072 (print)
ISBN-13: 978-1-940800-07-3 (print)
eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-940800-08-0
eBook ISBN: 1940800080
www.wishingrockpress.com
For Dean and Paula
whose lives I hope are full of an abundance of spectacular adventures
chapter one
“There! Left of the moon. Over those tall trees. Did you see it?”
Emma Nelson readjusted the multitude of pillows cushioning her body from the hard, bumpy back of the truck’s cab. She and her twin brother, Charlie, had been sitting in the bed of the pickup for two hours already, having arrived at this prime sky-viewing spot just before sunset. Emma tracked her gaze along the direction of the dark shadow of Charlie’s arm as he pointed up into the night sky.
“I missed it again,” she replied, wrapping her plum-colored sleeping bag more tightly around her shoulders. Even on this early August evening, the night came with a bit of a chill. “What did it look like?”
“Like the sky was shifting,” said Charlie, lying back down on the air mattress beneath them. “Shimmery. Like looking at the sky through water after someone’s thrown a rock in the lake.”
“Missed it,” repeated Emma. She scooted to lie down again next to her brother, slipping into her sleeping bag.
“Maybe if you’d stop fidgeting,” said Charlie.
Emma didn’t reply. She couldn’t help it if she was fidgety. Her mind wasn’t on the sky.
The twins fell silent again, watching.
Two weeks earlier, their family had arrived back on Dogwinkle Island, a small island more or less near Seattle, for a summer vacation “away from it all”—or at least, that’s how their mom and dad had put it. Their parents had dragged them out to the island over Christmas break to scout out this island as a possible vacation spot. The teens had not been terribly excited about the idea at first, but then Emma had met a friendly local boy and her opinion had changed. After that she’d been eager to get back, but on their return she’d learned the young man, Ben, was away. Emma and Charlie had been amusing themselves as best they could on this remote island. A week-long “Dogwinkle Days” festival and parade had provided entertainment for a while, but with the event over, the twins were bored again. Ed Brooks, the man from whom their family had rented a vacation cabin, had suggested they try this camping spot, a broad and wide clearing in the deeply forested northern part of the island.
“We saw UFOs there once,” Ed had told them.
“Or maybe it was northern lights,” his new wife, Ruby, had added, the tone of her voice rich with the rolling of eyes.
Whether UFOs or northern lights, any diversion was welcome. So far, they hadn’t been disappointed. At least Charlie (the younger by half an hour) hadn’t. Emma seemed to blink at all the wrong times, look left when the action was right, look down the second the sky lit up.
Emma was a homebody, in all senses of the word. She liked home and all its comforts. She did not like bugs, or sleeping on the ground, or the idea of being mauled by bears or stray wild boars or whatever nefarious indigenous monsters the island might be hiding. On hearing this, in his great kindness, Ed Brooks had loaned the teens his truck with its extended cab and extended bed, normally used for deliveries from his whiskey distillery. He’d asked if they wanted an enclosed van. Emma had wanted to say yes, but had been too embarrassed to admit it.
“Drive it carefully,” Ed had admonished, patting the white truck lovingly on the side. “You have a license, right?”
Charlie had puffed up. “We’ve been driving for a year, thanks.”
Ed had laughed, handed over the keys.
Charlie shifted in the bed of the truck so he was facing Emma, even though they could barely see each other in the dark. “Did you hear Ben is back?”
Emma was glad for the cover of night, as she felt the blood rising to her face. Anyone else might not have heard the mocking smile in his tone, but she did. “He is?” she said, trying to be nonchalant, but it was pointless. Charlie knew her as well as she knew herself, and vice versa.
“He is indeed,” Charlie said, his amusement clear. He loved his sister, but he loved teasing her, too. “Ed told Dad that Ben and his brother were off in Iceland for a few weeks. That’s where they’ve been. They just got back today.”
“Hm,” said Emma, but her mind whirred. Iceland! She had not heard that part. An adventurer, then! Her attention wandered from the sky again as she imagined herself and Ben cuddling together in an igloo. Did they have igloos in Iceland? She was going to have to do some research. Looking like an ignorant idiot in front of Ben was not an option. Maybe they’d get married in Iceland. Everyone could fly—
“There!” Charlie cried out. “Did you see that one?”
Emma looked up, too late, again. “Missed it,” she sighed.
Charlie laughed lightly. “More moon, less mooning, Em.” His voice softened. “We’ll go find him tomorrow so you can just accidentally run into him. But pay attention to the sky tonight. We need to catch some UFOs!”
“Tomorrow,” she said, “after I shower. This sleeping bag is terrible. I’m cold but I’m also sweating. I feel so gross.” She punched Charlie in the arm. “Dork.”
Charlie punched her back lightly. “Dork.”
And then they focused on the stars.
Just in time, as a blazing white-yellow light appeared out of nowhere, streaked brightly across half the sky directly overhead, and disappeared as fast as it had appeared.
The forest went silent.
“What was that?” said Emma, exhaling. She realized she’d been holding her breath.
“An airplane?” said Charlie, skeptically.
“Could be,” said Emma, though she didn’t really believe it either. “But where did it come from? And where did it go?”
Neither of them had an answer.
Once she’d settled into the night and let go of thoughts about her own honeymoon with Ben, Emma, too, had seen a lot of action in the sky. Her luck continued the next day: when she and Charlie drove down to Wishing Rock to return Ed’s truck, Emma
was surprised and delighted, and perhaps a bit anxious, to find Ed sitting at a picnic table out front of the town building—visiting with Ben, the one heavenly body she most wanted to see. Wishing Rock was the small community at the southern tip of the island where Ed and Ben lived. In the unusual community, everyone in town lived in the same large, refurbished, L-shaped building. The town had been built a few decades earlier by Ed’s grandfather.
“Children!” called out Ed, waving at Emma and Charlie to come join them. “You brought back my truck in one piece, I hope?”
“Not a scratch!” said Charlie, shaking Ed’s hand as he returned the truck keys. “Better than you left it!”
Ed and Ben were sitting on opposite sides of the picnic table. Charlie slipped onto the bench next to Ed, leaving the seat next to Ben open for Emma. She was grateful for what she knew was conscious effort on her brother’s part, but felt a blush rise up from the back of her neck.
“Hi, Emma,” said Ben with a warm smile. “Hey, Charlie!” The young men reached across and fist-bumped each other.
Such ease of existence in the world, Emma thought. Being a teen boy seemed so much easier than being a teen girl. She smiled shyly back at the handsome young man. “Hey, Ben.” Smooth, she thought.
“Ben!” said Charlie. “Great to see you again!”
Ed reached across the table to give Emma’s hand a welcoming grasp. “Great camping spot, am I right? I gotta get up there again myself.” Ed looked at Ben. “I sent them up to that spot where your dad and I saw the UFOs that time.” He turned his attention back to Emma and Charlie. “One of these days someone is going to prove us right. I’m certain we saw something supernatural. No one believes us, but I feel it in my gut. So, what about you guys? Did you see anything unusual?”
Emma focused on Ed to calm herself. “Definitely,” she nodded. The strange activity from the night before, combined with nervous energy on seeing Ben, left her chattering. Normally she was quiet in groups, listening more than speaking, but she liked Ed, and she liked this island. She felt comfortable in this place in a way she never did at home or at school with her peers, whom she just couldn’t quite understand. She never fit in at home. But there was something about this place that made her feel like she belonged. “It’s like you said. The shimmery sky, mostly, is what we saw. A couple times—”
“—there was definitely something not normal,” Charlie, the more gregarious and outgoing of the two, finished her sentence eagerly. “Could have been planes, except they appeared and disappeared. Out of nowhere, into nowhere. Weird. Awesome.”
“Totally what we saw when we were out there,” said Ed. “Right, Ben?” He tipped his head toward the dark-haired young man. “Ben’s heard the stories a time or two.”
“Or fifty,” Ben said. “Yeah. Shimmers. Lights. That’s the way they tell it.” Ben’s smile at Emma indicated he wasn’t so sure his dad and Ed weren’t full of it.
His gaze was overpowering. Emma had to remind herself to breathe. “Have you ever seen it yourself, Ben?” she asked, quietly.
Charlie, both a pain in the behind to his sister and also her biggest fan, recognized her struggle. “Yeah, Ben, you should come along with us next time! Want to go? Maybe I’ll ask that girl I saw at the parade to come along.” He pulled out his phone and brought up his pictures. Much to his delight, he’d managed to get a picture of the attractive young stranger without being too obvious. “Do you know this girl? I don’t remember seeing her when we were in Wishing Rock in December.”
While Emma tried to will herself not to blush furiously at Charlie’s suggestion that Ben join them, Charlie passed the phone to Ben, who scrutinized the picture with enthusiasm. “No,” he said, raising his eyebrows, “I think I’d remember her.”
“She’s not local?” asked Charlie.
“Never seen her before,” said Ben. “But now I’m curious.”
Emma’s heart sank.
“Your mystery dream girl,” said Emma.
“She’s not from Wishing Rock, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen her at Moon Bay, either,” said Ed, referring to the second of the island’s three small towns. “Maybe she’s from Balky Point?”
“That’s the town with the lighthouse?” asked Emma.
“Our camping spot was near there, though, wasn’t it, Ed?” asked Charlie.
“Yes and yes,” said Ed. “You weren’t too far from it last night.”
Ben leaned toward Emma. “Some people say the lighthouse is haunted,” he said, a sparkle in his eye.
“Haunted!” she said, her nervousness suddenly disappearing. This was what she liked about Ben: even in her extreme discomfort at being around him in all his fabulousness, he made her comfortable, made her forget how anxious she was around him. Like Charlie, he was easygoing, comfortable in his own skin. Confident. Like her, though, he seemed to listen more than talk. She envied that balance.
Ed nodded. “Haunted. Strange things happen there sometimes, I’ve heard. Never seen it myself. Balky Point is a pretty small community, only about fifty people there, I think. Maybe they’re just trying to drive business up there, who knows.”
“Can we get into the lighthouse?” Charlie continued, eager for a new place to explore. The idea of a haunted lighthouse was compelling.
“As far as I know, it’s usually unlocked,” said Ed. “Worth a look, anyway. It’s a nice lighthouse, as lighthouses go, I suppose.”
Emma and Charlie exchanged a look: tomorrow, to the lighthouse.
Unable to contain their anticipation, Emma and Charlie biked from the cabin out to the lighthouse right after breakfast the next morning. The day was warm, the sun high in the sky: a perfect day to be outside. When they got to the lighthouse, Charlie was distracted by a long set of stairs next to the building leading down to the beach, the gentle waves sparkling in the sunshine. The lighthouse would wait a few more minutes. He jumped off his bike and ran down the steps before Emma could even get off her bike. She followed him, carefully picking her way down the weathered steps.
Charlie skipped rocks while Emma alternated between staring up at the red-and-white-striped lighthouse and scanning the rocky beach for any special stones that might catch her eye. Ed had told them how Wishing Rock got its name, and she was on the lookout to find a nice one for herself.
“My grandfather was originally going to call our town Inaboks—a town in a box—but luckily some people brought him to his senses before that happened. Instead, he named the town after wishing rocks. They’re all over our beaches. They’re the rocks with a white stripe, a white ring around them. Those are wishing rocks. Make a wish on one, and it’ll come true,” Ed had promised with a grand smile.
Emma had laughed. She liked Ed. “Exactly how long does it take for the wish to come true?” she asked.
“You know, Emma,” Ed had said, “time is a funny funny thing. Still, it never hurts to wish.”
Emma agreed. She had a very important wish she needed to make, and it involved a handsome dark-haired eighteen-year-old whose name began with B. It felt like Ben had expressed more interest in a picture of a girl on a phone than in real-life, right-there Emma, and who could blame him? The girl was beautiful. Regardless of whether wishes on wishing rocks worked, Emma could use all the help she could get.
Sensing her mood, Charlie called out to his sister as he lobbed stones into the water. “If he doesn’t like you, he’s stupid, you know.”
“I know,” she said. She knew. Still.
A bright white stone about three feet from her left toe caught her eye and interrupted her self-pity. “What is that?” she wondered out loud. Her class had studied rocks in fifth grade geology. She remembered igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic. She remembered obsidian, limestone, pumice, marble, slate, and shale. But this, she could not place. She didn’t remember any stones as bright and smooth and shining and white as this, glowing as though it had energy inside it, burning to get out.
“What is this?” she called out, louder, as sh
e bent to pick up the rock. She held it up high for Charlie to see. “I can’t remember what kind of rock this is.”
Charlie tossed his remaining handful of rocks into the surf and went to his sister’s side. Emma passed the smooth stone to him.
“I don’t remember, either,” he said, just as Emma had expected. Charlie was smart, but in school he was more interested in making people laugh than in studying geology. He handed the rock back to his sister and hopped across the beach back to the waves.
Emma pulled a bottle of water out of her backpack and took a drink as she watched Charlie, so carefree. How did he end up so easygoing, when her mind was always racing? But even as she thought it, she knew it wasn’t true. He was a much deeper thinker than people gave him credit for.
The August sun dazzled off the water. Emma squinted and blinked, thinking she saw trails of light following Charlie as he walked. She put the water bottle back in her pack, along with the white rock, then rubbed her eyes. The trails were gone. “Must remember to drink more water,” she said to herself.
A spider ran across the rocks at Emma’s feet, and she shuddered. They’d been down at the beach for a good while already, and she was eager to see the lighthouse. Besides which: bugs. “Charlie!” she called out again. When he turned, she pointed at the cliffs. “Let’s go back up.”
When they’d run down the stairs earlier they’d noticed there were a lot of steps, but going up made that fact crystal clear. “… One hundred seventy-seven, one hundred seventy-eight … good stars … One. Hundred. Seventy-nine. One hundred and seventy-nine steps, my dear sister,” said Charlie, panting and puffing. “What this cliff needs is a good elevator. Make note of that, please, to tell the committee.”
Since they were little, Charlie and Emma had always told each other to “make note of that, please, to tell the committee.” How it started, who the committee was, and what they had ever thought the committee would do about it, neither could remember. But telling each other to make note of that, please, to tell the committee was as familiar to them now as breathing, an automatic response, like saying “Gesundheit!” when the other sneezed.