By: Lucid Pellucid
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Author's Introduction (Audio)
Dear Un-Pellucid Reader,
Far, far away, in a land few Sounds have ever seen, stands the palace of Agám Kaffú. Not a palace of marble and silks, you understand. Nothing like those over-gilded palaces of the Sound realm. No, in the Land of the Echoes the palace glitters like a frozen snowflake in the early light of morning. And it looks like one too.
The walls are carved from gleaming ice that never melts, and the floors look like silent ponds you can walk on. Yes, you’ll find curtains and tapestries to rival the finest woven art of the Taj Mahal or Buckingham Palace, but here they look like waterfalls sown together, foaming and splashing but never, never flowing away.
It’s so many decades since my father took me to see it, that magnificent palace on Iceberg Mountain. Or is it centuries? Even the chandeliers resembled frozen bubbles, I remember. And the pillars looked like towering mounds of snowflakes. But if you were to see it, un-pellucid reader that you are, you wouldn’t notice the waterfall curtains or the ice cube walls. No, for you the things that would stagger belief would be alive. Trees, people, dogs… Because, you see, in the Echo realm, every living thing is see-through.
Not entirely see-through, you understand. Not invisible… well, not everyone… not all the time. But I’m getting ahead of myself. You’ll have to find it out in the proper way, turning page after page in this strange story of a Sound, a boy, who was hunted by those terrifying demons of darkness known as the Fate Sealers and their oracle masters, the Fortune Tellers.
But did it really all happen, you might wonder? Certainly, in the Echo realm.
But is the Echo realm real?
Ah! That is the fortune-changing question you’ll have to answer for yourself.
Yours Obscurely,
Lucid Pellucid
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Chapter One: The Mysterious Reappearance (Audio)
William Cleary sat in the dark listening to the howling wind. It was an old, familiar sound that reminded him of his nightmares, where creatures he could not see were shrieking through the holes in his bedroom walls. The creatures were a dream, but the holes and room were real and so the nightmares felt real. Will used to try and plug them, the holes. But the old cabin he and his parents lived in was falling apart with age, and he had long since given up.
Only one precious object was beautiful in Will’s ugly room and he now held it, cool between his hands. It was a crystal ball that glowed faintly like a strange basketball made of shimmering glass. There were numbers inside, falling through a bright mist, the big ones like snowflakes, the small ones, like rain in slow-motion. At the moment the number Eight was the biggest, and it hovered beside the smaller forty-one, with a tiny two raining down on the right, then three, four, five… It was eight forty-one in the morning according to the crystal ball clock, the start of a new day. But the falling numbers that disappeared in the fog made it seem as if time was raining itself out of existence.
The crystal ball clock was the first thing William Cleary remembered from childhood. That and the nightmares.
The pale light of the shimmering crystal ball blinded Will to everything else in his cold, dark bedroom. But he could still see, a little past him, almost hovering in the blackness, the face of his white wolf with her dark-rimmed yellow eyes that seemed to see into his soul.
“’Cause I had the nightmare again,” said Will, as if the wolf had asked a question. “Not going back to sleep to have it again. Anyway, almost time. Look.”
Will held the crystal ball out to the wolf, and in her yellow eyes two crystal ball reflections appeared with silent, falling numbers.
Then, in a moment, there was something else.
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Inside the crystal ball a miniature boy appeared, looking tall and lanky, with long gangly legs and glasses. The falling seconds bounced off his curly brown hair, and the large hour and minutes hovered over him like a cloud. But the boy inside the crystal ball never noticed.
“He’s here,” said Will to the wolf. And in a flash Will was dashing downstairs, the floorboards groaning under him, the front door whining as he tore it open to find the boy from the crystal ball clock standing on the doorstep, looking real and full-sized and very pleased with himself.
“You found it?” gasped Will.
“In the museum library,” said the boy, grinning at his miniature self in the crystal ball clock Will was hugging to his side. “It’s all about—”
“Wait, Ben!” Will glanced back nervously. “Let’s talk outside.”
They sat on a cold stone bench on the edge of a rickety porch. The white wolf nuzzled a greeting at Ben, who didn’t seem surprised to be greeted by a wild animal. Then the wolf started pacing the porch, her yellow eyes peering at the dark snowy garden, where leafless trees were swaying in the wind like dancing skeletons.
It was terribly cold outside, and both boys shivered. The morning was still black and ominous, as if the winter wind had blown the sunrise off the ledge of the horizon. Only the crystal ball clock cast its pale white light between Will and Ben, as Ben reached in his coat and pulled out a slab of white marble.
“But you said it was a book?” Will frowned.
“It is.”
“But it looks—”
“Like a gravestone, I know. Lots of gravestones, actually,” said Ben.
With trembling hands, Ben turned the strange book over to reveal the title—Disappeared Without a Trace?—printed where the names of the dead were usually carved in cemeteries.
Will barely noticed the wolf jerking her head back as Ben read the title aloud.
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Suddenly a dark hiding place ripped open in Will’s mind, a place where he tucked away his most painful thoughts of his twin sister, Emmy—the sister he couldn’t remember because she disappeared ten years ago when they were only two. Emmy was the reason Will’s parents had let their home fall apart. She was the reason they had almost gone mad with sorrow. And now she was the reason why he and Ben had to sit outside, shivering in the cold, just to keep their conversation secret. For any talk of Emmy always ended in insane rescue plans and false hope.
“You found the proof?” Will gasped. “Emmy’s dead.”
“No, Will. You don’t understand.” Ben shook his head. “The opposite is true. You’re in the book. You disappeared just like Emmy. But you came back. And if you came back, you know what that means?”
But Will had expected to hear something quite different. An end to the mystery, not more infuriating false hope.
“Don’t you start, Ben!” Will snarled. “My Mom’s out there on the pond—looking for Emmy! She’s been doing that for ten years! My Dad hasn’t stopped looking for clues, either. The last thing they need is you telling them I know the secret to bringing Emmy back.”
“But if it’s true?”
“Ben, Emmy drowned! Unless she’s a mermaid, she’s not coming back.”
“So why didn’t they find her body?”
“Because—“
But that was the fatal question no one could answer.
For a moment Will listened to his old home creaking and groaning in the wind, until he could face the disappointment of another impossible idea. For Ben had to be wrong.
“Don’t you think my parents would have told me if I disappeared like Emmy?” said Will quietly.
“Perhaps we should have,” answered a quiet voice from the wild, snowy garden. And an old man with a young face ambled tiredly up the broken porch steps into the pale light of the crystal ball clock.
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“Dad!” Will jumped back, startled. “Thought you were in the library.”
Mr. Cleary bent to shake Ben’s hand in greeting, and in the light of the crystal ball clock he looked more like Will’s older brother than his father—with blond, tousled hair that looked like straw and a small, thin body that resembled a scarecrow dressed in old clothes. Even Mr. Cleary’s eyes were a lot like Will’s; large, melancholy brown eyes that spoke of a sad heart.
“Came across this idea in Lucid Pellucid’s manuscript,” Mr. Cleary said sadly, puffing on a large pipe. “Secret passage in the pond… False scent, I’m afraid. But this?” Mr. Cleary frowned at the strange gravestone book resting in Ben’s lap. “New clues to Emmy?”
“Yes,” said Ben eagerly.
“No,” said Will flatly. He could feel himself getting angry. Not a make-your-blood-boil sort of angry, but a hopeless, helpless, falling-into-a-dark-hole anger that leaves you feeling cold and bitter.
“What now?” said Will sharply. “Think I disappeared like Emmy? Think I can remember how to bring her back?” Suddenly Will felt as if all these years his parents had been blaming him for something he couldn’t even remember.
“That’s just it,” said Mr. Cleary softly, while Ben fidgeted with embarrassment, and the wolf seemed to raise her eyebrows at Will in disapproval. “We knew you’d think that. So we never told you, Mom and I. But how could you possibly remember anything, Will? You were barely two. It happened on Christmas, you see. On you birthdays. You and Emmy disappeared together. Well… we think you were together. We’ll never know for sure.”
“Because you can’t remember, right?” Ben jumped in suddenly, rifling through the gravestone book. “Every page here’s about someone who disappeared. Hundreds of people, but especially kids. And no one remembers how they disappeared. Not one witness.”
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“What does the book say about me?” asked Will grudgingly, dreading something terrible, a horrible reason why his sister died, but he had managed to return alive.
“Finally!” said Ben, and he dropped the strange, heavy book in Will’s lap.
But as Will started reading the page Ben had bookmarked, he realized that his disappearance was clouded in as much mystery as his sister’s. And yet, the story of Will’s return was no mystery at all.
“My pets brought me back?” mumbled Will in disbelief, looking up from the story of his return through the frozen pond behind his home.
“Yes, a week after you disappeared,” said Mr. Cleary, his face shrouded in pipe smoke. “We were there, Mom and I, saw everything. How strange… So hard to believe. One minute the pond was frozen, the next the center was melting. And then you popped out, riding a wolf… with a falcon circling over you. You kept calling out the animals’ names: ‘Deá, Damian… Deá, Damian…’ in your cute toddler’s voice. That’s how we knew what to call them.
“Mom never let the hole in the pond freeze over since then. Kept it defrosted with buckets until I had the water heater installed. One day Emmy will follow you home, and we will be ready, Will. We will be ready.”
Mr. Cleary sighed and whispered to himself, “Ah, Emmy…. alone, alone, all, all alone.”
In the same moment, the shadow of a bird circling in the bleak black sky fell over Mr. Cleary’s features, making him look almost faceless. Soon the dark, speckled bird came to a landing on the wolf’s white back, and the two animals stared long at each other as if exchanging wordless greetings.
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In the back of Will’s mind he could hear his father and Ben still talking, but he had stopped listening. He was watching the falcon and the wolf, wondering what other secrets his pets could reveal if they could talk. Or if he could read their minds the way they sometimes seemed to read his. Then, his thoughts still mingling hope with curiosity, Will bent over the gravestone book again and read the rest of his story.
William Cleary was naked at the time of his reappearance, but his body was covered in a strange glowing plant. No such plant is known to grow anywhere on earth. Despite extensive laboratory testing, it remains unknown why the plant glows at times but not at others. One unsubstantiated theory postulates that a chemical reaction results when the plant comes in contact with a yet unidentified type of gas.
“Dad?” Will looked up. “Was I covered in a plant? A glowing plant, when I came out of the pond?”
Smoke billowed from Mr. Cleary’s face, swirling in the wind.
“Why, yes…” Mr. Cleary nodded. “A beautiful shade of luminous green. Stopped glowing after a day or two, then started again from time to time. Last month, in fact. Glowed for me and Deá when I went to water the plant… down in the cellar. Would you like to see it?”
Will caught sight of Ben nodding so hard his head seemed about to pop off. And breathlessly, Will nodded too. He had no idea his home even had a cellar, and he wondered what else he might find there.
Mr. Cleary led the way into the cobwebbed, windswept house, past mountains of moldy books in the living room and stacks of filthy pots in the kitchen. Will’s crystal ball clock lit their way behind a moth-eaten curtain at the back of the dank laundry room, then down a dark, dusty stairway that creaked ominously. At the bottom, Mr. Cleary pulled on a dangling, filthy cord and an overhead light came on with a click.
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Will gazed in wonder at the musty, windowless cellar. All the walls were lined with iron shelves from floor to ceiling, and every shelf was crammed with chests and boxes, piles of paper and shapeless bundles that gave no hint of what they hid inside. It was all covered in a thick layer of frosted dust and cobwebs, like a crypt that had been closed for centuries. But even down here, Will could hear his old home creaking and moaning in the winter wind blowing outside.
“You kept the plant in the dark?” wondered Ben.
“It likes the dark,” said Mr. Cleary, wiping cobwebs off a manuscript he found on a bottom shelf by the stairs. “Warts and Witchcraft in the Middle Ages.” Mr. Cleary sighed with fond remembrance. “I was twelve when I wrote it. Emmy’s age, and yours, of course, Will. Well, we didn’t come here for that.”
Patting his son’s shoulder affectionately, Mr. Cleary reached behind an old wicker chest labeled Our Memory Box and withdrew a jar of leaves floating in water. “Not glowing, I’m afraid,” he said, securing a lid over the jar.
But at that moment veins of luminescent green began to spread all through the stringy plant, up its stalks and down its leaves, which started to drift to and fro as if an invisible teaspoon were swirling the water. Soon the whole jar was glowing like a lantern between Mr. Cleary’s fingers, casting an eerie light on the wolf’s white fur as she pushed past Will, the dark, speckled falcon still perched on her back.
Spellbound, no one spoke—until the distant honk of a car shattered the silence.
Inside the crystal ball clock Will was still hugging to his side, the miniature hologram of Ben had disappeared. But now a tiny purple minivan emerged in its place, with a shadowy figure waving hello behind the steering wheel. The hour and minute numbers of the clock hung above the car, and the seconds bounced off the roof and vanished in the mist at the bottom of the crystal ball.
“My Mom,” said Ben, already rushing off. “Promised I wouldn’t make her wait….”
“Take it!” Mr. Cleary nodded at his son.
Will stuffed the glowing jar in his coat pocket and followed Ben to the front door of his creaking home, the wolf and falcon at his heels.
“Bring the gravestone book to school tomorrow,” shouted Ben, rushing to the real-life purple minivan parked before the house, its headlights slashing the early morning darkness. “And the plant!”
With a farewell honk the car sped away, and Will was left alone, wind gusting in his face, shaking snow showers from the treetops overhead.
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Inside the crystal ball clock a tiny boy with strawy hair had replaced the fading car. It was Will, and in the smaller version of his face Will could see all the confusion he was feeling. Glowing leaves and reappearance acts, he thought desperately. What next? Talking pets? And suddenly Will heard a strange girl’s voice answering, as if someone was hearing his thoughts.
“Yes, you’re quite right. It’s time we had a good long chat, Will.”
Will snapped his head back. There was no one there! No one except Deá, the wolf, curled on the porch bench, watching him with her dark-rimmed yellow eyes.
“Yes! So let’s get on with it!” agreed a young man’s voice.
Will looked around, baffled. Only Damian, the falcon, was there, perched on the rail, fluttering his speckled wings.
“Who’s there?” cried Will.
“Don’t be an idiot!” the young man’s replied.
Will swiveled—and caught the falcon rolling his eyes at him.
“We have a lot to tell you,” said the bird impatiently, while the wolf jumped off the porch bench and gestured with her paw.
“Maybe you should sit down first,” she said kindly, and Will could have sworn that his white wolf was smiling at him.
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Chapter Two: The See-Through People (Audio)
At long last, the sunrise was unfurling in the sky with skeletal fingers of faded gray and pink. It was a cold, bleak December morning in Alaska, a place so far north on planet earth that if there were such things as popsicle people, they could live there quite comfortably. Will shivered from the cold, but mostly from amazement, and watched the wolf and falcon watching him. For ten years they had been perfectly normal pets… well, except for being wild animals that seemed to read his thoughts… But the wolf and falcon never plunged into a sudden conversation, not even to wish Will happy birthday when his parents had been too busy looking for Emmy.
“You— can— talk—?” Will blurted out finally, but it sounded more like coughs than words.
“I know it’s a bit of a shock,” said the wolf, nodding kindly, “but there’s a perfectly logical explanation.”
Will sunk on the broken porch steps, too stupefied to speak. The crystal ball clock slid from his hand and rolled to the bottom of the porch, and inside it Will’s miniature hologram swiveled a few times then sat down too.
“Less and less promising,” muttered the falcon, shaking his head.
Then, to the sound of Mr. Cleary humming a sad tune somewhere behind the open front door, the majestic bird spread his speckled dark wings and flew away.
“We’d better talk in the privacy of the forest,” suggested the wolf. “Leave the clock here. It won’t work out there. But bring two shovels… and don’t forget the Waterweed.” Pointing her paw at the glowing jar peeking from Will’s pocket, the wolf promised to explain everything soon. Then she galloped off down the gloomy, snowy path leading to the frozen pond. And
Will followed, stopping only to pick up the shovels from a rusty garden shed. As he rounded the pond he waved to the thin white figure tugging a black hose across the ice. ‘Emmy…’ Will thought desperately, ‘always Emmy…’ And he stopped hoping that his mother might notice him for a change and wave back. Up ahead, the wolf leapt into the snowy forest behind the pond and Will rushed after her.
“Where are you?” Will cried into the silence of the tree trunks, which echoed his voice back at him.
Suddenly Will saw his pets.
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The wolf and the falcon were lying in the snow not far from Will. They looked dead without any reason to be dead. There was no blood, no weapon, only the fresh snow that was starting to bury the two as the wind shook the treetops. Without realizing it, Will dropped the shovels and dashed forward, the pit of his stomach turning to stone.
“No!” Will cried, falling in the snow beside his pets.
He started shaking them, first the wolf, then the falcon. “You can’t be dead. Deá, Damian. Wake up. It’s not funny. Wake up! Wake up!”
“We’re not dead.” Will suddenly heard Damian’s voice—but the sound came from above.
Will looked up.
A boy of about sixteen was standing not far from Will. The boy’s skin, proud face and curly hair were as dark as coffee. His eyes were darker still, and they glittered with intelligence. He wore shimmering black clothes, and everything about him was see-through, so that Will could see a snowy tree showing right through the boy’s face. It felt like looking through a brown-glassed window.
“Who are you?” marveled Will.
“I’m Damian,” answered the boy, in Damian’s voice. “And this is Deá.”
The see-through boy stepped aside, and a beautiful girl of about fifteen emerged from behind the same tree. Her skin was as white as the snow at her feet, and her shimmering clothes were as white as her skin. Her long hair and large gray eyes were both so pale that for a moment Will thought she was made entirely of mist—like the mist inside his crystal ball clock—especially since the girl, like the boy, was see-through.
The two strange beings exchanged radiant smiles, as if they hadn’t seen each other in years and were trying to make up for lost time. Then the pale girl turned to Will.
“The Waterweed… in your pocket,” she said, in Dea’s voice. “It stopped glowing after I left you. Did you notice?”
Will shook his head, as if in a daze.
“Well, it did,” said the girl. “But now it’s glowing again. Look.” She waited for Will to numbly pull out the jar of luminous leaves from his coat pocket. “Told you. Glowing. We’re still Deá and Damian, Will—but now you’re seeing us in our true forms.”
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As if the girl had slapped his face, Will’s sense of reality came back to him.
“My pets.” Will shot to his feet. “What d’you do to them? Bring them back. Bring my wolf and falcon back to life.”
“We can’t,” said the girl sadly, daylight glittering on her beautiful white face like sunshine on a lake. “They’re dead, Will. They’ve been dead for ten years.”
“That’s a lie!” Will dug his fingernails into his fists. “They were talking to me just a few minutes ago!”
The dark boy chuckled. “Animals can’t talk,” he said dryly.
“Mine could!”
“Yes… Because they weren’t animals at all. Look—” the boy lost his smile “—I know it’s a shock for you, Will. And I wish we had time to discuss this comfortably over milk and cookies—”
“—Oh, how stupid of me!” Will rolled his eyes furiously. “Obviously, my pets just turned into Snow White and the black dwarf. No mystery here.”
The dark boy’s eyes flashed. He was far from a dwarf, but the insult made him stand up even taller. He took a deep breath, as if to keep his anger in check, and tossed back his shimmering black cape. The cloth looked like tar trapped in an hourglass, flowing slowly down from his shoulders to his feet.
“The ceiling in your bedroom leaks,” said the boy. “You keep a bucket on the floor.”
Will gasped. “You’ve been to my room—?”
“—Yesterday,” the boy ignored the interruption, “I stuffed a sock in the new hole under your window. To stop the wind.”
“How—?”
The girl giggled, her long hair fluttering as she moved, her dress shimmering like melted diamonds. “Haven’t you ever wondered why your wolf was a vegetarian—?”
“—Or why your falcon went with you everywhere, even to school?” The boy kicked snow off his black boots impatiently. “Did you think I enjoyed sitting on the hood of the school bus like an overgrown ornament? Or on the windowsill of your classrooms… watching over you… with all those stupid pigeons cooing at me? Still don’t believe us? All right, ask me something only Damian could know.”
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Will felt dazed. How could these see-through strangers know so much about him? Who were they? What were they?
“All right…” Will muttered, glancing down at his dead pets. “All right…” He fought back the sadness that confused him. And then Will’s gaze fell on the falcon’s wing, where an old scar showed white between the dark, speckled feathers. And that gave Will an idea.
“When did Damian meet our school nurse?” Will asked casually.
The dark boy chuckled. “Very sneaky, Will. You know very well I never met Nurse Bell… or Tinker Bell as the students like to call her because she’s so short. The day I cut my wing when the school bus hit a lamppost, you snuck me into the school infirmary when no one was there. Ben kept watch outside. And you covered me in bandages until I looked like a bird in a straitjacket. Thank you for that, by the way.”
Will blinked, astonished. He and Ben had never told anyone about this.
“Now, ask me something,” said the pale girl, almost singing the words.
Will looked at his motionless wolf, wishing he could bend down and wake her with a hug. Instead, he forced himself to think of another trick question.
“What did Deá bring up to my room on my last birthday?”
The girl’s large gray eyes grew hazy as she searched her memory. At last she smiled.
“Not on your birthday. Last spring. When you were sick, and your Dad was away on a book tour. I brought you a sandwich. And you were amazed because you thought—”
“—That my Mom made me something to eat for the first time ever.” Will nodded eagerly. “I forgot all about it, Deá. I thought—” Will shut his mouth abruptly.
“You called me Deá! You believe us! You believe us at last!” The girl clapped her misty hands soundlessly.
Will swallowed hard. Impossible, he thought. And yet he knew that this was the truth, no matter how strange.
* * *
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“It’s about time,” sighed Damian, and he walked away, his lucent cape drifting behind him like a dark, black fog. He stopped to pick up the two shovels Will had dropped in the snow.
“We have to bury our animal selves,” said Damian quietly, and he started digging beneath the shadow of a stately cedar.
A deep silence fell over the three of them, and the sound of the wind grew loud above the trees. Will couldn’t believe it was happening. He couldn’t believe that he would never see his wolf and falcon alive again. But he felt stupid, because they weren’t really dead.
To stop the tears stinging his eyes, Will picked up the second shovel and cleared away a circle of frost a few feet from Damian. Deá came to stand between them, and suddenly Will noticed crystal drops falling at Deá’s feet, like beautifully polished hail.
Will looked up, a little shyly because the see-through girl was so beautiful, and he saw that Deá was crying frozen teardrops.
“What kind of people are you?” asked Will, starting to dig the second grave to keep himself from staring at the girl.
Damian’s shovel struck the frozen ground with a clang. “First, promise you’ll never repeat what we tell you,” he said sharply
“Promise? Why?” asked Will suspiciously.
Damian’s glance darted anxiously to Deá. “A small matter of risking our lives.”
Will’s shovel froze in midair. “Your lives…” He still felt protective towards Deá and Damian, even if they weren’t his pets anymore. “All right, I promise. I won’t even tell Ben.”
“Good,” snapped Damian. “Unless you want your best friend to die because of you.”
“Die? Because of me? What d’you mean?”
But Damian shook his dark head infuriatingly. “No more questions. Dig. Shut up. Then I’ll explain.”
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“You can’t just say something like that and tell me to shut up,” Will snapped back.
“I can if you want to get anything more out of me.”
“Damian!” Deá stomped her shimmering white boot, though she made no sound, nor raised any snow drift.
Damian started digging furiously, his shovel banging against the frozen ground. Will expected Deá to take over explaining everything, which would have been a relief, but the girl seemed happy just to watch Damian and see what he would do next.
“Deá and I come from another realm,” the dark boy said finally.
“From outer space?” Will nodded. Finally things were starting to make sense.
But Damian raised a haughty eyebrow. “I said from another realm, not another planet! Just dig and listen.” He waited for Will to obey.
“Beneath the North Pole…” the boy resumed, “…and areas down to the 50Ëš North latitude. Underground, I mean… there are other lands. Places a lot like here. There’s light, for example. Trees, mountains, lakes.” Damian kept digging, and his breath was coming in gasps “There are animals too. And people. Cities, villages… Deá and I come from one of these lands. We… everyone who lives there… we’re called …ekos.”
Will wasn’t sure he heard right. “You’re Geckos?” he asked, not trying to be funny. It was just that Deá and Damian had lived in a wolf and falcon for so long, and he had no idea what else they could do.
Damian smiled wryly, his coffee eyes glinting with amusement. “Not Geckos, you idiot. Echoes! As in a sound and an echo.”
Will smiled in embarrassment, and it didn’t help to hear Deá giggling beside him.
“Have you ever looked in a mirror and wondered if your reflection was actually another person?” the girl asked.
Will took a moment to consider his answer, and he kept digging, ignoring a stinging blister forming in his palm. “You mean alive?” he asked finally.
“Poor Will.” Deá giggled again. “This is all going to sound really strange.”
“Stranger than you two living in my pets?” Will muttered, more to himself than anyone.
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“’Fraid so,” said Deá, without giggling this time. “Like nothing you’ve ever heard before. Though maybe you’ve seen it… some of it… in your nightmares…?”
But Will had never seen the creatures shrieking in his nightmares. He always seemed to wake up a second before the walls of his room cracked open in the dream.
“They’re real… those things in my nightmares?” he stammered.
“Oh! They’re real,” said Damian. And he wasn’t smiling anymore.
“They’re Echoes,” said Deá. “Like us.”
“But what are you?” asked Will.
“Think of the beginning of an Echo as a bubble of air,” said Deá, “or gas, actually.”
“Gas?” Without thinking, Will crunched his nose like a kid making a silly joke.
“Oh! How hilarious,” snapped Damian, driving his shovel harder at the ground.
“There’s more to life on earth than you realize, Will,” Deá went on explaining. “Every time something in your world comes to life, gas is released into the air. It happens at the same time. Two forms of life come into existence together. A Sound and an Echo. And the Echo is made of gas. But it’s not ordinary gas. This gas is alive. It’s a living being. And it looks like a reflection.”
“Of what?” asked Will, finally starting to begin to understand.
“Of whatever released the living gas into the air. If the gas came to life when a flower began to grow, then the gas-being will look exactly like the flower. And it will grow like the flower, open up its petals, bloom… just like the flower. If the gas came to life when a tree sprouted, then the gas-being will be a tree. And if the gas came to life when a human was born…”
“Then the gas being will be a human,” said Will, hardly noticing the pile of snow the wind had just dropped on his head. “And you and Damian are reflections? Gas-beings, I mean.”
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“Echoes.” Deá nodded. “And we come from the realm of the Echoes. The place where all reflections live.”
“So this is the Sound realm?” said Will, not really digging anymore. “I mean, that’s what you call us… me?” And suddenly a thought blazed through Will’s mind, the way a flashlight beam can suddenly light up a doorway. “Hold on!” he added. “That means I have an Echo. A reflection of me. A gas-being that looks just like—”
But before Will could ask if his nightmares had something to do with his reflection… and if Emmy’s disappearance was also connected to it… Before Will could ask any of it, he suddenly noticed a deep, dark grave gaping in the snow where Damian had been digging.
The dark boy was gone. As Will turned around to look for him, he spotted Damian standing with his back to him and Deá, the Echo’s shimmering black cape billowing like a storm. A moment later Damian turned, and Will saw that he was carrying the body of the white wolf with the speckled falcon resting on her chest.
As Damian drew near, Will saw a muscle pulsing in the Echo’s dark, see-through cheek, as if he was clenching his jaw. Will looked away, feeling intimidated by this brooding boy that was probably just a few years older than him, but who looked so much like a warrior.
It was Deá who moved toward Damian first, reaching her see-through misty hand to comb away a cluster of fur from the wolf’s tail. She gave it to Will, who was suddenly feeling the tears pricking his eyes again. He looked at the ground to keep Damian from seeing him crying, and suddenly Will saw the Echo’s dark hand extending a dark speckled feather to him without a sound.
Then the funeral just happened, without any of them telling the other what to do. They lowered the pets into the deep grave Damian had dug, and Will realized that Damian was just trying to keep him busy before, making Will dig a second grave to stop him asking questions. It was clear the wolf and falcon belonged together in a single grave.
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Looking down into the grave, Will thought of his crystal ball clock and the falling numbers that rained inside it and disappeared as if Time was dying. He tucked away the fur and feather without taking his eyes off the grave, where his childhood pets where lying at the bottom, as if this was all some nightmare Will was trapped in. Except that it wasn’t a nightmare. It was worse. It was real.
And then a swirling feeling of drowning came over Will, as if the grave was some deep, dark pond calling him to plunge inside. And Will wanted to, because up here where he stood in the cold light of day Will felt as if his heart would break and rain down like the disappearing numbers in the crystal ball clock. Just as the days and years of Will’s life had rained down, every new day washing away the hope that Emmy would ever return. She couldn’t return, Will knew that. No more than Deá and Damian could. His pets, not the Echoes… Will meant his pets… But his pets had been the Echoes….
Will shook his head. A haze of tears was blinding him. He started pacing the frozen forest floor that crackled under his feet as if threatening to collapse. He tried to think of more questions to ask the strangers who used to be his favorite beings in the whole world. He looked at the Echoes and thought, ‘Deá and Damian aren’t dead’. ‘Only their bodies are different’. And then, like a lightning bolt flashing through a dark night, a question shot through Will’s sadness and confusion.
“How long did you live inside my wolf and falcon?” Will asked breathlessly.
Damian was already shoveling earth back into the open grave. He looked up, smiling mirthlessly with his see-through, coffee lips, like some strange coca cola ice sculpture.
“Ten years,” he said, with that ironic curve of his lips to one side. “And before you start showing off your brilliant mathematical deductions, let me explain something. I wasn’t six years old when I entered the falcon, and Deá wasn’t five. We were the same age we are today. An Echo living in a Sound doesn’t age.”
“Doesn’t age? You mean… you live forever?”
Damian shook his head. “An Echo living inside a Sound weakens gradually and eventually will die. You can actually see how weak Deá and I are… just look at the transparency of our skin. Normally, we shouldn’t be more see-through than our clothes. Now, help me finish! There’s a lot more you need to hear, Will, and we’re running out of time.”
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Chapter Three: The Secrets of the Crystillery
Damian led the way deeper into the forest, away from Will’s mother who could still be seen through the snowy trees, standing in the middle of the frozen pond, putting on a black diving suit that glistened in the morning sun.
“Don’t forget this,” Deá said to Will, and she slipped the glowing jar of Waterweed into his coat pocket and turned to follow Damian. “Coming?” she glanced back at Will.
Will memorized the spot where his pets were buried and walked away, feeling for the ball of fur and feather in his pocket.
“Is this where you got your clothes?” Will asked, seeing Damian picking up a shimmering black bag behind the tree he and Deá had first appeared by.
“Yes,” said Deá.
“Where d’it come from?”
“Your Echo left it for us.”
“My Echo—?” Will was stunned. His Echo had been there? When? Why? Will’s mind no longer groped for questions; they were flying at him like darts.
“Not here!” snapped Damian, before Will could ask any of them.
Gradually the forest grew thick and dark. The trees, which had looked like snowy triangles before, were so crowded here that very little snow made it past their thick, green branches. Many shadows fell on the brown, frozen ground. There were no bird sounds or wind. No sounds at all. The forest looked eerie and evil, like a place where bad things could happen if you didn’t watch out.
At last Damian stopped and signaled for them to sit beneath a heavy veil of icy branches. Then, without a sound, the Echo opened his shimmering bag and pulled out a glittering object.
For a second Will thought he was looking at a huge sapphire about as big as Damian’s palm. But then Will realized that the top of the strange blue stone was round and perfectly smooth, like a polished dome. And it was see-through, so Will could look inside and see blue waves ebbing and flowing like a miniature sea.
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Suddenly three glittering things burst through the waves, and at first Will thought they were tiny fish. But the glittering things were star-shaped, and in a moment Will realized that they were gems. The first was red like a ruby, the next blue like a sapphire, and the last yellow like a yellowish sort of diamond. Twinkling on the waves, the stones looked like magical fireflies.
“This is a Crystillery,” said Damian, and he started rocking the blue dome between his dark, see-through palms. The blue waves grew stormier and stormier and soon they were frothing. And maybe that’s why it seemed to Will that the starry stones were twinkling brighter and brighter.
“We’re going to use the Crystillery to look back at the day you and Emmy disappeared,” said Damian.
“How?” gasped Will, enchanted by a string of silver bubbles that suddenly floated up between the twinkling stones.
“The Crystillery can read memories,” said Deá, her pale gray eyes twinkling too.
“And thoughts,” added Damian darkly. “Reach inside your back pocket, Will.”
“My pocket? Why—?”
But suddenly Will remembered something brushing against him in the cellar that morning when he, Ben and his Dad were looking at the glowing green Waterweed.
“Right pocket,” added Damian, though he really didn’t need to.
Already Will was pulling out the photograph of a beautiful woman seated cross-legged on a green lawn, blowing soap bubbles. Will didn’t have to ask how the photograph got there. The falcon must have slipped it in Will’s pocket as the bird perched on the wolf’s white back.
“On the ground,” said Damian, and Will set the photograph down and had barely snatched his hand away before the Echo lowered the Crystillery over the smiling woman’s face.
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Instantly the waves inside the blue dome parted, and a terrible whirlpool sucked them away. The red, blue and yellow stones clashed together and sparked like fire, then they too disappeared. And in their place rose the woman from the photograph, only now she looked alive and real, as if the Crystillery was some tiny television screen.
The woman floated up to the top of the dome, and the green grass and her pink dress looked more and more real as the blue dome slowly turned as clear as glass, then clearer still, until it looked like it wasn’t there at all.
No bigger than a thumb, the woman seemed as if she was standing with her feet in her world and her head in Will’s, and when she laughed and blew bubbles Will waited to see the bubbles drifting up at him. But they never did, though the woman’s voice rose up like a splash of summer in the dreary, dark forest where her mouth kept blowing air into the soap bubble wand. And there were other voices rising behind her, the giggles of little children and a hiccuppy sort of laugh Will recognized at once.
“My Dad…”
“Yes,” said Deá softly.
“Who is she?” wondered Will, suddenly thinking that he recognized the woman, now that her eyes started sparkling like diamonds with rainclouds trapped inside them. Which was strange, because Will never knew anyone with eyes like that.
“This photograph was taken on Christmas morning… ten years ago,” said Deá, her words sounding like steps taken cautiously over thin ice.
“The day Emmy and I disappeared?” asked Will, frowning.
“Yes… You see, Will.” Deá sighed. “That’s what your mother used to look like… back then.”
It took these words a long time to begin making sense to Will, and when they did Will felt as if his world was turning upside down.
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“That’s… my Mom?” Will shook his head, staring at the beautiful, happy woman. He had never seen his mother laughing. He had never seen her in a pink dress or in a garden. Only on the pond or on the way back from it, with her hair dripping and her skinny body trapped in a black diving suit.
“But she looks like a completely different person,” said Will, shaking his head.
“She was—”
A shriek rose from the Crystillery and silenced them.
The miniature woman was suddenly screaming, eye’s wide with horror, staring at something behind Will.
Will twisted back in a panic, but there was nothing there except trees and shadows.
“It’s in her world, not ours,” said Damian, and Will twisted back to face the screaming woman that was supposed to be his mother.
“Inside! Take the kids inside!” Will heard his father’s voice shouting from the blue dome, only Will couldn’t see him there. “Lock the—”
But suddenly the voices stopped as if someone had turned off a radio. In a second, the woman turned see-through and faded away. The dome turned blue again, and the water inside it returned with the red, blue and yellow stars floating over the waves like twinkling fish.
“Turn it back on!” yelled Will breathlessly.
“We’re not expert Crystillery readers,” said Deá, shaking her head. “We don’t know how to see anymore.”
“There’s another way,” said Damian.
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“What way?” Do it!” Will couldn’t stop shaking.
“You know what happened next.” Damian stared at Will, as if his coffee eyes were trying to read something in Will’s face. “You were there. You were one of the kids we heard laughing.”
“Me?”
“Ten years ago. The day you and Emmy disappeared.”
“I was two years old! I can’t remember.” But as Will said this, he suddenly felt nauseous and terrified, as if something terrible was starting to happen.
“You’re remembering something!” cried Deá. And from the corner of his eye, Will saw her turning and crying, “Quick, Damian!”
A split second later Will felt the chilly bottom of the Crystillery slamming into his forehead, and the forest around him disappeared.
Will could feel the cool crystal of the dome softening against his head like a clammy mouth. Then it started to suck him. Images, memories, feelings flashed through Will’s head like insane streaks of light. They had voices, and they shouted and laughed and talked at him in a mad jumble of a thousand days mixed together. Will tried to raise an arm to knock the squeezing pain away, but he couldn’t remember how to move a muscle.
“Enough! Damian, stop!” Will heard a girl yelling far, far away. Then the squeezing disappeared, and the storm in Will’s head vanished. He heard the girl asking if he was all right. He opened his eyes and saw the world in fuzzy doubles. Two Damians were saying, “Don’t worry, you won’t stay cross-eyed forever.”
Will shook his head to stop the buzzing in his ears and heard himself asking, “Did it work?”
“Yes,” said two Deás—but they were merging into one already.
Once again Damian rocked the Crystillery, stirring the blue waves into a storm of silver bubbles, and soon the surface of the dome turned invisible, and a circle of dark fog rose up to stand where the laughing woman had been.
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Will heard his mother screaming again, but he couldn’t see her in the Crystillery as before. “Take the kids inside! Lock the door!” Will heard his father shouting in the blue dome. And suddenly the circle of dark fog turned, and Will realized that he was looking at two see-through creatures.
They looked like dark smoke, but they were men, men whose faces were masks of terror. Their eyes were dark, bottomless holes with no pupil or any sign of life. Their toothless mouths gaped as if screaming, silent screams. They were thinner than any human Will had ever seen, with chests that looked like extra-long ribcages, and arms that reached down to their feet, as if the horrifying men had been starved and stretched on torture racks for years. As Will thought this, he realized that the gray skin of the creatures sagged off their skeletal shapes like dirty gray robes, and those were the only clothes they were wearing.
Will heard his mother’s scream again and children wailing. The dark skeletal men laughed at this, in high pitched screeches, and their sagging lips swung from side to side like grotesque pendulums. One of them reached beneath his sagging skin and brought out a luminous horn, like that of a ram only made from ice. Wrapping its swinging lips around the narrow end, the creature filled its lungs until the thin chest looked like a balloon in the middle of the endlessly long body. Then the creature blew into the horn and a shower of icy needles fired out of the other end.
“Watch out!” shouted Will, flinching back.
But nothing had happened in his world. The nightmare was happening in the Crystillery-world alone. For there Will suddenly saw the woman in the pink dress again, and she was running away with two toddlers wailing in her arms.
The shower of ice hit her head from behind and she fell forward on the green lawn, her pink dress specked with blood. A sagging gray arm swept before her to grab the toddlers hurled into the air. In seconds the icy shards coated the woman’s head until it looked like a bowling ball of prickly ice. And where the ball rested Will saw a second ball of ice on the green lawn, this one attached to the shoulders of a man.
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Will didn’t realize that he was shaking until something terribly cold hugged him tightly. It was Deá, shaking a little too.
“I’m so sorry, Will,” she whispered in his ear, her cold breath feeling like a freezer. “I’m so, so sorry.”
Will saw Deá wiping frozen tears, as Damian wiped the Crystillery with his shimmering cape and slipped it back inside the black bag. The visions in the blue dome were gone… the visions that were memories from Will’s childhood, from the day he saw what happened to Emmy.
“What were those… things?” Will gasped. He didn’t add that the shrieks of the creatures were the same shrieks he had always heard in his nightmares, when creatures he could not see would scream through the holes in his bedroom walls.
Damian’s face was rigid and full of pain. “They’re called Fate Sealers.”
“Fake what?” stammered Will.
“Fate. Sealers. They are… or, more precisely, they once were… Echoes. Now they are tortured creatures that live only to inflict pain and misery. Ask me one day what turns an Echo into a Fate Sealer… but not today. Not today.”
Will wasn’t sure if Damian was being impatient again or showing the first sign of compassion. “What did they do to my parents?” Will forced himself to ask.
“They froze their brains,” said Damian, speaking softly. “That’s how Fate Sealers attack.”
“But my parents didn’t die.”
“Brain Freeze doesn’t kill. It just wipes off chunks of memory.”
“So that’s why they couldn’t remember anything…” Will thought not only of his parents but of all the witnesses Ben had read about in the gravestone book. So many kids disappearing, and no one remembering how it happened. “Is it painful?” Will asked. “The Brain Freeze?”
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“I’m told it is,” said Damian, the muscle in his dark see-through cheek pulsing tensely.
No one spoke for a while, not even Damian to stop Will asking questions and tell him that they’re running out of time. In the distance something hummed over the dark forest. It was the water heater by Will’s house, the one his dad had installed to keep the center of the pond melted in winter. Will thought about his mother and the woman in the Crystillery, and how they were supposed to be the same person. Then for the first time in his life, Will didn’t feel sad that his mother never noticed him. He felt sorry for her instead.
“There’s a reason,” Damian spoke again, “why Deá and I revealed ourselves to you today. After keeping our identities secret for ten years. We were sent here to guard you from the Fate Sealers.”
“Guard me?” asked Will. “Who sent you?”
“For the last ten years,” Damian went on, ignoring the question, “Deá watched over you by night, staying awake in the corner of your bedroom. I guarded you by day, going with you everywhere you went.”
“Why? Why are Fate Sealers after me?”
Deá laid her hand on Will’s knee; it felt like ice. “Just listen, Will. Damian will tell you everything we know.”
“In less than three weeks,” Damian continued, “you’ll turn thirteen. That changes everything. We can’t protect you here anymore. It’s time you came with us down into the Echo realm.”
“What?!” Will jumped to his feet and scratched his face on a branch. “Are you insane?” he asked, not noticing. “D’you know what’ll happen to my parents if I disappeared too?”
Damian rose also and held his hand out to Deá. A tree trunk showed through his dark body, making the Echo look scaly.
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“We know where Emmy is,” said Damian. “She’s alive, and we want—”
“—No, no, no!” Will shook his head in frustration. “The Fate Sealers took Emmy. The Crystillery showed us. She’s dead. How many times do I have to tell everybody. Emmy drowned.”
“Then why are you alive?” asked Deá. “Your Dad told you… you disappeared too. But you came back. Why?”
“That’s different… I—”
“—Do you or don’t you want to know what happened?” said Damian, in a whisper that cut into Will like a knife.
“You were never this annoying as a bird,” muttered Will.
Deá giggled.
“You were never this inquisitive when I was a bird,” said Damian. He raised a dark eyebrow and curved his lips in that wry smile Will was starting to recognize.
Will smiled back. “I want to know,” he admitted.
“Good,” said Damian, but not smugly. “A party of the King’s loyal servants caught up with the Fate Sealer who kidnapped you. You were saved. It was decided that Deá and I should take you home and stay with you, to guard you.”
“And Emmy?” asked Will
“The Fate Sealer who kidnapped her got away. The search for Emily Cleary continued for years. In the end, she was found when she was already seven years old… far too old by Echo law to return to the Sound realm.”
Will hardly dared to breathe. “Where was she found?” he muttered.
“In…” Damian’s coffee eyes narrowed and his lips tightened. He seemed to be fighting himself to keep talking. “In Shadowpain,” he said at last. “The dungeons of the Fate Sealers. She’s the only human to survive captivity in the hands of those monsters for so many years.”
Will felt sick. He kicked the frozen ground with his foot to stop himself screaming that this can’t be happening. Emmy can’t be a live, not after living with creatures like that for…
“Years?” Will asked, still shaking his head in disbelief.
“Yes,” said Damian.
A frozen teardrop fell out of Deá’s eye.
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“Where is she now?” asked Will. He couldn’t believe he was having this conversation. Emmy was alive! His parents were right after all!
But Damian’s words were drowned by a scream. It came soaring over the thick, dark trees, piercing the cold air, echoing from far away. It was the same cry Will was used to hearing on stormy nights when his mother would mistake the wail of the wind for the cry of a little girl and rush out into the rain in search of Emmy.
In a flash Will was on his feet. He darted away, past tree trunks and falling shards of ice, retracing his steps back to the forest’s edge. A dark shape flashed past him; Damian moving at a speed no Sound could match. Branches slapped Will’s frozen cheeks, blinding him for seconds at a time. As the forest grew less thick, whiter and whiter trees seemed to dash forward to meet Will, light streaming through their snowy branches, everything streaking between them in a confusing smear.
And then, suddenly, Will slammed into a wall of ice where no wall existed, only a see-through mist. And out of this mist rose a terrible face, its eyes hollow, its sagging, swinging lips curled around the wide edge of a luminous horn.
A Fate Sealer!
Will’s mind spun in a whirl of terror. In a moment, icy needles were shooting into his eyes, his cheeks, his mouth… And through the never-ending pain Will thought he saw Deá’s see-through body bending over him like an umbrella trying to stop the rain—but then she melted away and everything went black.
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Chapter Four: The Most Precious Coin in the Land
It was night outside when Will woke up, shivering badly. To his amazement there was no ceiling over his head or a bed under him. No! He was staring up at the constellation Cassiopeia, his initial W written in starlight. And under him stretched the hard, frozen pond he knew so well. The pond with the hole melted at the center.
Suddenly Will heard a whisper, very near him.
“How can we… just leave him? What if he can’t… remember… anything?”
Will tried to move. But his body was too frozen, and in his head pain exploded like fireworks of ice.
“It’s not working anymore, Deá,” answered a firm voice. “You’re losing a lot of blood. I’ll try another bandage. But if I don’t get you real help….”
The speaker broke off. But after a moment, Will heard him again.
“The Brain Freeze didn’t last long enough. Will’s memory isn’t erased, I’m sure of it. Not permanently anyway. He lost consciousness twelve hours ago. Soon he’ll wake up. Then we’ll see.”
Will tried to move again, and now the pain in his head felt like rain, not ice. So he dared to turn his head a little more.
And then Will saw a boy, dark as the night, crouching quite near him. At the boy’s feet lay a girl that looked as pale as the crescent moon shining over her. How strange that both the boy and the girl looked as if they were made from colored water that was a little see-through.
“Woo are yoo?” Will hooted, realizing that his tongue felt disgustingly fuzzy and numb.
The dark boy turned and very slowly asked, “You don’t remember me?”
“Nwo,” answered Will thickly, though he wondered why the see-through stranger seemed so perplexingly familiar.
“Roll your tongue in your mouth. It will help,” said the boy. He pulled out a small blue dome from his pocket and rose to his feet. “Remember this?” he asked, holding the dome over Will’s face, until Will spotted three star-shaped stones inside, glowing faintly like fireflies.
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Will shook his head, then flinched from the pain.
The strange, see-through boy promised Will he would soon feel better. Then he dashed sideways in a blur of speed that made him disappear into the night for a moment then reappear by a large block of ice.
“Can you see her?” asked the Boy.
Will turned his head a little more. But what he saw seemed impossible. Inside the ice he thought he saw a human being.
Suddenly the dark boy raised his arm and slammed the blue dome into the block of ice on the top right side. Cracks appeared as the ice there shattered, and the boy cleared the broken shards away, until what seemed impossible to Will a moment ago became terribly real.
Inside the block of ice, Will saw a face with eyes shut tight, and a screaming mouth that made no sound.
“Mom!” Will recognized the face in horror.
In a flash, memories shot into Will’s mind like scenes from a horror movie. A scream of terror— A rain of icy needles— A sagging face with dark black holes for eyes—
“A Fate Sealer!” Will screamed.
“Do you remember me now?” asked the see-through boy.
“Yes, Damian,” said Will.
And with the whirlpool of memories flooding Will’s mind came a terrible longing to see his pets again. The falcon had always gone with him everywhere, and at night the wolf had always been there. But now Will would never see them again. And missing his pets felt as if someone was drilling a hole in his heart.
“Come, I’ll help you up,” said Damian. And he grabbed Will’s wrists with his cold, Echo hands and pulled Will to his feet. “Give it a few seconds. Your head will stop spinning, I promise.”
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With everything a blur, Will looked around, wishing at least that his crystal ball clock were here with him. It always cheered him up after a nightmare.
“What time is it?” he asked, shaking Damian’s icy hands off.
“About four A.M. It’s Monday morning. Sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine. Monday morning? How long was I—?” But suddenly Will gasped as his roving glance fell on Deá.
The beautiful Echo girl he remembered from the forest was lying motionless on the frozen pond. Her eyes were closed, her face and hands looked almost invisible, and her body was so thin and frail that she might have been a puddle of moon drops, if the moon could trickle down to earth.
“She’s dying,” muttered Damian helplessly.
Will noticed white liquid oozing from Deá’s bandaged neck. Echo blood, he realized. “How?”
“Fate Sealer… He slashed her throat.”
“She bent over me.” Will remembered. “She protected me.”
“I’m taking her to the Echo realm,” said Damian, lifting Deá so gently in his arms that she seemed to float up like a cloud. “I have to, Will. She wouldn’t approve, leaving now after guarding you for ten years, I know she wouldn’t. But I can’t let her die.”
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For the first time Will saw fear in the proud Echo’s face. “I’ll be okay,” Will said, because he felt he should say that. But he knew it wasn’t true.
“You won’t,” said Damian, as if he could read Will’s mind. “Not if you stay here.”
Damian gestured for Will to follow him, as the Echo walked away with Deá lying limply in his arms, her see-through head resting on Damian’s shoulder. To Will it seemed that an invisible hand was erasing Deá’s beautiful face out of existence and that soon she would disappear.
“By now they know in Shadowpain,” said Damian. “They always know.” As if looking for something, the Echo scanned the distant dark shore. “Fate Sealer messenger crows are everywhere. You’ve been lucky, Will. The attack on you failed yesterday. But the Fate Sealers will make sure it doesn’t fail again. You have four… maybe five hours before more Fate Sealers get here.”
“I can’t leave my Mom like that,” said Will, glancing back at the frozen figure lying on the ice, screaming a silent scream.
“Use hot water to defrost her,” said Damian.
The Echo stopped by the melted hole in the pond, where a long green hose left forgotten on the ice was pouring steaming water into the hole, keeping it from freezing over.
“But melt your mother slowly,” added Damian. “You have to go slow, you understand? If you rush, your Mother could break… like glass. But if you’re careful, she’ll wake up without remembering anything . Not even the pain. Your father might, though. His brain was only partially frozen, like yours. I left him in the house.”
Drops of Deá’s pale blood trickled through Damian’s dark fingers and fell into the hole at the Echo’s feet, where dark water rippled.
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“Can’t let her die…” Damian muttered to himself, looking down at Deá.
“I’ll be fine,” said Will, trying to sound convincing. “After my parents wake up, we’ll leave together.”
“No!” said Damian, and suddenly his voice was sharp. “They’ll find you. Fate Sealers never give up. Never!”
Looking torn, Damian shook his head, stared at Will and shook his head again. But finally the Echo seemed to make up his mind what to do.
“Take my Crystillery,” he said, turning his back to Will. “That’s right, lift my cape. It’s in my back pocket. Found it?”
Damian’s dark shimmering clothes felt like warm Jell-O between Will’s fingers. “Yes,” said Will, pulling the cold blue dome out.
“Do you remember the chest in the cellar, back home?” asked Damian. “The one the Waterweed was hidden behind?”
Will nodded. “Our Memory Box.”
“That’s right. There’s a coin hidden in the lining of the box. D’you understand?”
“Memory Box. Coin. Got it!” Will held the Crystillery tightly with both hands. “And this is for?”
“I don’t have time to explain,” said Damian. “You’ll have to read the coin’s memory with the Crystillery. Just copy what you saw me doing in the forest.”
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Will nodded and so did Damian, as if fighting to convince himself that Will will be okay.
“You won’t be alone,” added Damian, as if answering his own troubled thoughts. “He’ll help you, I’m sure he will. Just take the coin to school—”
“School?” asked Will, amazed. “My school?”
Will glanced back at his mother, wondering how soon he and his Dad could get her away from here. How could he possibly go to school now?
But Damian just kept on talking, as if he didn’t hear Will at all. He told Will the name of the person he should see at school, the only person who could help him now. And Will might have heard the name despite talking at the same time, if only Deá had not suddenly groaned.
After that it was too late to ask Damian to repeat the name again, because the Echoes splashed into the pond and disappeared.
* * *
Will was alone. The night seemed suddenly darker. And in every shadow, every whisper of the wind, Will imagined a Fate Sealer swooping down on him like a giant bird of prey. It was like being trapped in one of Will’s nightmares, except that now he couldn’t wake up.
Lifting the hot water hose, Will started defrosting his mother. Just a trickle at a time or she would break like glass… A human being breaking like an ice sculpture…. Will worked in slow-motion like a gardener watering the most delicate plant in the world. And every time the cold wind bit into the back of his neck, Will jumped, terrified. But he never dropped the hose. He never stopped watering his mother back to life.
Hours later, or was it years? Mr. Cleary came running across the moonlit frozen pond. He remembered nothing, and Will just let his father believe that his mother had fallen into the hole in the icy pond without wearing her diving suit.
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“I’ll stay behind in case Emmy comes back,” said Will, as he and his father laid Mrs. Cleary on the backseat of their beat up old station wagon. Then Will’s father sped away to the hospital, and Will raced for the safety of his ramshackle home.
At the bottom of the porch stairs, it waited for Will, his glowing crystal ball clock. Only yesterday Will had left the clock there to go chasing his wolf into the forest. So much had changed in a day! Now peering into the clock’s mist, Will saw a miniature hologram of himself, just as yesterday he had seen Ben’s hologram inside.
Holding the crystal ball clock before him, Will walked up to the front door of his home. There, too, a crystal ball waited for him. Only this crystal ball was a doorknocker that looked like a giant pearl hanging in the middle of the weathered front door. With every step Will took, the pearly knocker glowed brighter—while inside the glowing crystal ball clock held between Will’s hands, the head of Will’s tiny hologram grew bigger and bigger as if a lens was zooming in on him.
Will sighed with relief. This meant that the camera inside the doorknocker was working fine. Any living being nearing his home would be filmed by the doorknocker and converted into a hologram inside the clock. So long as Will kept the crystal ball clock before him, he would see any approaching Fate Sealers. He would have a few seconds’ warning. Though what good that would do, he wasn’t sure.
Holding the glowing clock with both hands, Will lit his way through his cobwebbed home down into the musty cellar. When Will found the chest labeled Our Memory Box, he remembered the jar of Waterweed that had been hidden behind the chest yesterday but was now tucked in his coat pocket. Waterweed only glowed when Echoes were near, so Will pulled the jar out quickly to see if the leaves were luminous. But the plant drifting in the water looked like dull, ordinary seaweed. Will was safe, for now. And his parents were far away and safe too. It was time to look for Damian’s coin.
Will sat on the dusty cellar floor with the Memory chest before him, the clock on his right and the sleeping Waterweed on his left. Then he pulled the lid of the chest back—and forgot all about Damian’s coin.
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Will felt as if a time machine was sucking him into the past.
The chest was brimming with photographs. Ordinary photographs that stay still and never speak. But Will had Damian’s Crystillery, and when he swirled it the way Damian had in the forest, everything in the photographs came to life. Faces smiled at Will across the years. He watched his happy parents celebrating birthday parties and opening presents, hanging holiday decorations and playing in the park on those normal sunny days that used to be—before Emmy disappeared. Before Will’s home started crumbling. Before his parents went mad with grief.
Laughing with the photographs felt more real than life had ever felt, and Will forgot where he was or what he was supposed to do. Until his fingers struck something knobby under the lining at the bottom of the chest. In Will’s hand the Crystillery suddenly turned black like a giant drop of tar. Then, like sounds rising from a radio, Will heard muffled voices coming from the Crystillery.
“You say Will doesn’t even know this crumbling hovel of a house has a cellar?” asked an old voice.
“I made sure he doesn’t,” answered someone younger.
“You sure you can’t keep the coin?” asked a third voice, a girl’s.
“’Fraid not,” answered the first voice. “What if I’m murdered? The likelihood increases daily.”
Suddenly the world inside the Crystillery changed.
Darkness and light mingled in a jostling mess and the voices stopped. The Crystillery looked like a tiny swamp in Will’s hand, brewing with slow, lazy waves. Until, in a flash, the swamp turned into a face.
It was an old face that stared at Will through the Crystillery as if seeing him. And Will stared back in amazement, recognizing the man but just not understanding. What was he doing in the Crystillery? He was just a teacher from Will’s school. His new chemistry teacher. The terror-of-the-lab sort of teacher. Mr. Drinkwater to his face but Frankenstein behind his back. What was he—?
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“Your Majesty,” said Drinkwater, his wrinkled face hovering in Will’s hand as if talking directly to him. “Not a palace maybe, but safe. Even Fate Sealers won’t find you here.”
“I agree,” said the younger voice, and now Will recognized the sound immediately. It was Damian.
In a moment Deá spoke too. Will saw her as his old chemistry teacher drew back. Only Deá wasn’t in her Echo form but Still looking like a wolf.
“I hope we’re doing the right thing,” she said softly, looking directly at Will through the Crystillery, with her white, pointy ears actually peeking out of the blue dome.
“No one else will know,” said Damian reassuringly. And, in a moment, Will saw him fluttering in his falcon form and landing on the wolf’s white back.
Standing behind them, Drinkwater didn’t even blink to hear a wolf and falcon speaking. He raised a beautiful golden dagger in the air, then the world inside the Crystillery became a haze of colors and everything turned black and disappeared.
Feeling trapped in a dream, Will clawed at the lining of the chest until the tear he could see in it ripped open. A blob of dry, chewed-up purple bubble gum rolled out, followed by a coin that looked like water trapped in a circle of polished blue ice.
* * *
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An hour later Will rushed into his school, casting a final glance at the dark parking lot where a yellow bus was driving away. Still no Fate Sealers, thought Will with a sigh of relief. Even so, the ride to school had felt like a bad dream. Everyone on the bus had quizzed Will about his falcon’s disappearance, and his best friend, Ben, sulked the whole time because Will didn’t want to talk. Which, of course, was the opposite from the truth. Will was dying to talk. But how could he? His secrets were too dangerous. If Will revealed them to his best friend, Fate Sealers might try to kill Ben to get at the Royal Shekel.
“Where are you going?” Ben asked for the fifth time, following Will into the school. But Will slipped away down the side corridor leading to the Chemistry lab, still giving Ben the silent treatment.
Will found his chemistry teacher, Mr. Drinkwater, standing in the doorway of the laboratory. He was looking wrinkled and ill-tempered as usual, dressed in the same shabby purple outfit he never seemed to wash: a faded fuchsia shirt with a zippered pocket, a sagging plum-colored cardigan, it too with a zippered pocket, and a pair of violet pants with faded knees. Drinkwater’s round-rimmed glasses wobbled on his nose where masking tape patched them together. And a bubble of purple gum erupted out of his mouth and exploded in a loud pop.
“Pests!” Drinkwater bellowed at the students banging locker doors in the corridor. “Curse your foul noises, you tone-deaf brutes!” Then Drinkwater noticed Will, and his scowl deepened.
“What a vision you make this morning, Mr. Cleary.” Drinkwater chuckled. “A new fashion statement?”
In the dark school bus windows Will had caught a glimpse of his reflection. The Brain Freeze had given his complexion the color of vomit, and his strawy hair looked electrified. He didn’t care, not about that. He stopped beside Drinkwater and said flatly, “A Fate Sealer tried to kill me.”
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In a flash, Drinkwater’s scowl disappeared.
“In here,” he barked, and shunted Will through the laboratory door, past shiny metal tables, test tubes and microscopes. Students stopped doing their homework to stare as Will was propelled forward like a science experiment about to explode at any minute.
“In here!” Drinkwater swung open an office door at the back of the lab, and in a moment it slammed shut behind them.
“Ouch!” Will hit his head on a rusty birdcage hung at the entrance. It was strange that the dove sleeping inside didn’t wake.
Beyond the cage, shelves lined the narrow room Will and Drinkwater had entered. They were crowded with creepy, slimy things that floated in glass jars, and a few floating eyes even seemed to follow Will as Drinkwater still pushed him forward.
“Well, sit boy. Sit!”
Drinkwater finally stopped at the end of the room and pushed Will into a creaking chair. Then he sighed his way into the seat opposite and leaned his elbow tiredly on a lopsided desk, where precariously high piles of paper were defying gravity.
“So what makes you think I can defend you against Fate Sealers?” asked Drinkwater, reaching for a teapot behind the tallest mound of papers, which was marked with the sign, Exams, F, at the top.
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Will cleared his throat, feeling scared but not by Frankenstein. After the Fate Sealers, a mad science teacher was unimpressive.
“Damian wanted me to talk to someone at school,” said Will, as Drinkwater stretched a steaming teacup to him. “No, thank you. Not thirsty. I think Damian meant you, Mr. Drinkwater,” Will rushed on. “I saw you with my wolf and falcon. I think you were hiding this.” And Will took out the coin he found in the Memory Box.
It was a strange coin, very small but rather thick, and more beautiful than any coin Will had ever seen. Clearly Echo-made, it was slightly see-through and seemed carved out of polished blue ice. Except that it couldn’t really be ice, since it was warm to the touch. The engravings on the coin felt perfectly solid under Will’s fingers, and yet they looked like flowing water. One side was covered by strange curly letters, the other with the bust of a boy—a boy with a sparkling crown on his head and a face that looked a lot like Will’s.
“Is this my Echo?” asked Will—but before the words were out of his mouth, Drinkwater snatched the coin out of his hand.
“What in Fortune’s name?!” the old teacher bellowed, his eyes flashing insanely behind his taped glasses. “Are you a suicidal maniac? What do you think you’re doing? Have some arsenic with your tea and be done.” And again Drinkwater shoved the teacup at Will, who didn’t dare refuse this time.
But just then, the old wrinkled teacher deflated as if someone had stuck a pin in him.
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Will cleared his throat, feeling scared but not by
“Damian, you say?” he asked, blinking in confusion. “Damian sent you to me? Ah…” Drinkwater nodded his head sadly. “Then Deá was hurt very badly, right? You don’t have to answer, I know it. There can be no other explanation. Damian would never leave you otherwise.”
Drinkwater sighed but smiled at Will at the same time, and his face wrinkled in a thousand places. Suddenly he looked like a perfectly nice old man with bad taste in clothes. Nothing about Drinkwater seemed mad or even weird. He just looked tired, terribly tired.
“Well, drink your tea. Go on, it’s not poisoned,” said Drinkwater, and he dropped six lumps of sugar in Will’s steaming cup and offered him a teaspoon. “Stir it well, your body needs the sugar.”
Indeed, Will suddenly felt famished, and despite the arsenic comment before he took a sip from the sweet amber liquid, and the scent of the tea made his stomach growl.
“And eat,” said Drinkwater, unveiling a box of crystal ball cookies in seven different colors. “Didn’t bring you here to listen to your stomach.”
For a second Will wondered if Frankenstein had concocted the cookies in his lab. But looking at the old man, Will couldn’t remember him as Frankenstein, the science teacher from hell. It was as if that other person was just an act, and now Will was talking to the real Drinkwater.
“Why did you get so upset about the coin, Mr. Drinkwater?” Will asked, biting into an orange crystal ball that spilled delicious peach filling into his mouth.
Looking thoughtful, Drinkwater leaned back in his creaking chair and blew a purple bubble with his gum. After it exploded softly, he asked, “You saw me hiding the coin, how?"
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Will cleared his throat, feeling scared but not by
“Damian gave me his Crystillery.”
“Gave you his Crystillery…?” Once more Drinkwater sighed, as if he was seeing a sad story unfolding in his mind. “No choice, I suppose. Blurry Memory, was it?”
“What?”
“Me? Did I look fuzzy? Things all smeared? You know, blurry Memory when you read the coin with the Crystillery.”
“Oh, yes. Kind of.” Will bit into his third crystal ball cookie, a blue one this time, feeling so hungry it was hard to be polite and eat slowly.
“Thought so. Memory Crossing!”
Drinkwater fished a purple velvet bag from the zippered pocket of his frayed purple cardigan and asked, “Kept the coin on the floor, by any chance?”
“It was in the Memory Box,” said Will, crumbs flying out of his mouth.
“Chest and coin, you see,” explained Drinkwater, tossing away his purple bubble gum into a garbage bin by his chair. “Memory Crossing. Now, watch carefully, Mr. Cleary. And keep eating. Surely you can look and chew at the same time.” Drinkwater smiled kindly, and Will smiled back and watched.
Withdrawing a Crystillery from the purple velvet bag, Drinkwater swirled the blue dome gently in his wrinkled hand until the water in the Crystillery became wavy. Then three glittering stones suddenly floated up and crashed together, shooting red, blue and yellow fireworks into the air above the blue dome.
“Wow,” Will gasped.
“Wait till you see the rest,” said Drinkwater, winking at Will.
Drinkwater rested the ice-blue coin on his faded purple pants and lowered the Crystillery over it.
And suddenly the glittering, starry stones arranged themselves in a line. Then, like a finger drawing in the sand, the stones began to draw a crown on the waves rolling inside the Crystillery. The crown was no bigger than a walnut but it looked real, made of gold with sparkling jewels.
“Takes years of training to master a Crystillery,” said Drinkwater, lovingly rolling the blue dome in his palm. “It’s a hobby of mine. As for you, young Mr. Clearly, when you know so little about Crystillery Reading, all you can expect to see is the most recent, complex Memory.
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Will cleared his throat, feeling scared but not by
“What do you mean?” asked Will between cookies, staring at the line of stones drawing something new on the waves of the Crystillery, a long pointy object that soon turned into a metal sword no bigger than a toothpick.
“What do I mean by recent and complex?” said Drinkwater. “Well, if you tried to read the coin now, what would you see? Remember: recent and complex.”
Will shrugged uncertainly. “You put the coin on your leg, that’s the last thing that happened to it.”
“That would be a recent Memory, yes,” said Drinkwater encouragingly, like a patient teacher. “But not a complex Memory. The Crystillery will look for a Memory with several variables: sounds, colors, motion.”
“Maybe the Memory of me taking the coin on the bus?”
“Yes, that’s a possibility. But, of course, you’ll be limited by perspective.”
“You mean, ‘cause the coin was in my pocket?” asked Will. “I wouldn’t be able to see anything? Only hear?”
“Very good.” Drinkwater smiled, looking impressed. And Will felt a surge of pride.
“Luckily, I am skilled at both Target Acquisition and Perspective Control,” said Drinkwater, winking at Will again. “We’ll be seeing the Memory I want you to see. The way I want you to see it.”
Will bent closer, watching a gold dagger replace the metal sword as the finger of starry stones kept drawing on the waves. “You mean the real Memory of the coin?” Will asked eagerly.
“The important Memory, yes. Ready?”
All at once, the glittering stones crashed again and the sword disappeared. The waves in the Crystillery turned into a terrible whirlpool, and the ruby, sapphire and yellow diamond went round and round in circles until they were sucked under the water. And then the Crystillery seemed to turn into a window in the wall of someone’s mansion.
Will found himself looking at a candlelit white chamber that was so small it could fit inside the blue dome resting on Drinkwater’s palm. There was a man in the room, a see-through man lying in a bed that looked like a fluffy snow ball with tiny snowflake pillows and a puddle for a blanket.
“No, don’t!” Drinkwater warned, as Will reached his hand in fascination to the hologram bed. “You’ll mix your Memories with the coin’s.”
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“But is it real?” asked Will
“The room?”
“No, I know the room isn’t. I mean, the bed. What’s it made of?”
“Echo fabrics. Wonderful things… Feel warm to Sound hands. Cool to Echoes. Shhhh… Watch and listen.”
Two see-through men entered the miniature chamber that seemed to float on Drinkwater’s hand. As they walked, their robes flowed down their bodies like shimmering water. They looked as if they were only half inside the Crystillery, with their heads sticking out into Drinkwater’s office. They came to kneel on either side of the snowy bed, and Will noticed that both were armed, the first with a dagger, the second with an iron sword. The men’s backs were turned to Will and Drinkwater, but as each spoke he bowed his head to the man in the bed, and so Will could tell who was talking.
“Can Your Majesty speak?” asked the Echo with the gold dagger, a little too loudly.
“And hear, as well,” answered the old Echo in the bed, his voice as faint as a sigh.
“Alas!” said the Echo with the iron sword. “Death shows no mercy. Better to have seen you die in battle, My Liege, than by this slow suffering.”
“But if suffer, suffer in comfort.”
The ill King lying in the bed chuckled dryly, and his face turned even more see-through against his snowflake pillow.
“But enough with insincerities!” he snarled in a moment. “You have not come to visit a dying man. You wish to learn which of you shall be King hereafter.”
Wheezing painfully, the old King turned his see-through head to look up at the Echo with the gold dagger.
“Stephen, our brother,” he spoke faintly, though majestically, in the manner reserved for royalty, using we when he really meant I. “Should we anoint you King in our place, the royal coffers will glitter from floor to ceiling. But the people of this land shall die of hunger!”
The waterfall blanket rippled as the old King slammed his fist down, as if passing sentence on the Echo kneeling beside him.
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