Read The Fathomless Fire Online
Authors: Thomas Wharton
The Fathomless Fire
For Conor
Not so long ago, or very far away…
W
ILL
L
IGHTFOOT
, a boy from our world, ran away from his family and stumbled into the Perilous Realm, the world of Story. There he was stalked by terrifying spectres called fetches, but was rescued by Rowen, a girl from the city of Fable. Her grandfather, Nicholas Pendrake, a toymaker and master of lore, feared that Will was being hunted by Malabron, the Night King, who wished to destroy all stories but his own. At the library of Fable, Will accidentally awoke Shade, a talking wolf who became Will’s protector and loyal friend. Determined to find a way home before Malabron’s dread servant, the Angel, tracked him down, Will set out from Fable with Rowen, Pendrake, and Shade, as well as Finn Madoc, a young knight in training, and Moth, a mysterious archer whose companion was a raven named Morrigan. With his new friends, Will travelled far and faced many dangers before he finally found the way back to his own world. In the end, however, it was revealed that the Angel had been sent to capture not Will but Rowen, who discovered she had hidden powers of her own, and a destiny greater than she had ever imagined…
And so Will Lightfoot went home to his own world beyond the Realm, and you might think that was the end of the story, but it was really only the beginning.
– Tales from the Golden Goose
H
E WAS LEAVING TONIGHT
. He couldn’t wait any longer
Will stuffed the bottle of water into his pack with the apple and the energy bars. He looked around his tiny, low-ceilinged bedroom, wondering if there was anything else he should bring. It all depended, he thought, on how long he would be gone. And that was something he didn’t know.
From the floor below came a clatter of pots and pans. Dad was making dinner, and apparently destroying the kitchen in the process. The noise was surprisingly loud, as if Dad was in the same room with him. Will wasn’t used to the way sound carried in this new house, but then he wasn’t used to a lot about it yet. His family had moved in only a few weeks ago, after travelling across the country from the town that Will had lived in all his life. He hadn’t wanted to move in the first place, and when they’d first pulled up in front of this ramshackle little two-storey house, with its peeling paint and unmown lawn, his heart had sunk. But now, despite the unfamiliar smells and the cramped quarters, made worse by all their still-unpacked boxes, he had to admit there was something he liked about the place. It was at the edge of town, on a quiet, tree-shaded road lined with other houses of the same age and state of repair. There wasn’t much traffic. It was a place where you could come and go without many people around to notice.
Looking out of his window now he could see trees and a few scattered rooftops. The house, he thought, stood between two worlds, the city and the country. And that was it. The house was like him. Between worlds.
“What are you doing?”
Will jumped and turned to the door. His little sister Jess stood there, a doll tucked under one arm and a wide-eyed look of curiosity on her face.
“Nothing,” Will said quickly.
“Are you going somewhere?”
She was eyeing the pack he was still holding in his hand. Since they’d moved in Jess had been coming into his room without warning, as if the house was so new to her she was still figuring out the living arrangements. He shouldn’t have left his door open.
“For a hike, maybe,” Will said, tossing the pack onto his bed with what he hoped looked like a casual gesture. “Tomorrow, if it’s a nice day.”
He expected her to ask if she could come along. She was always tagging along behind him whenever he went anywhere. But to his surprise she only watched him silently, with an odd expression he couldn’t intrepret.
“Dad wants you downstairs,” she said as she turned suddenly and walked away, leaving Will with the uneasy feeling that his plans were not as secret as he had thought. But how could Jess know anything about them? She and Dad had no idea what had happened to him during the trip to their new home. They didn’t know he’d gone on a journey of his own, to a place far stranger than this unfamiliar house.
And now he was going back. He had no choice. Not after what had happened last night.
Last night, Will talked to a shadow…
It was a warm summer evening and he couldn’t sleep. The house made strange noises at night, soft little creaks and odd knockings. He lay awake in his bed for a long time, listening to these sounds and trying to guess what was making them. After a while he gave up on sleep, climbed out of bed and started unpacking some of the boxes in his room labelled
Will’s stuff
.
To his surprise he realized that one of the boxes wasn’t from the move. On the lid was his name, written in his mother’s neat, graceful hand. This was a box of his things that she had packed away long ago.
He opened the box and began to unpack it, and each thing he lifted out brought memories with it. His old stuffed animals. Plastic figures of superheroes and monsters. Crayon drawings of his from years ago. And at the bottom, books.
He lifted the books out one at a time and turned the pages, remembering. There were his favourite storybooks when he was very young.
The Wolf and the Three Little
Pigs. Jack and the Beanstalk. Little Red Riding Hood
. The bindings were loose and the pages tattered and torn. Some pages had his childish crayon scrawls on them. He hadn’t treated books very well back then.
His mother had read him these stories at bedtime. He had asked for them over and over. And when they both got tired of the storybooks, she told him stories that she made up herself. Most of her own stories were about a boy who
could run faster than a hare and leap higher than a deer, so the people called him Light-of-foot, or Lightfoot for short…
Will’s mother had died three years ago, not long after Will’s eleventh birthday, but he could still hear her voice, as clearly as if she was here beside him, telling him about Lightfoot’s adventures. At first Will believed the stories were true, and he was thrilled to have the same name as this boy hero of long ago, who was always outwitting monsters and menaces of every kind.
He was
not only fast on his feet, he was clever, too, and it was quick thinking that got him out of more than one tight spot, like the time he stood up to Captain Stormcloud and his Lightning Warriors…
It didn’t take Will long to realize his mother was making it all up as she went along. But he still loved to hear about Lightfoot and asked her for another of his adventures almost every night. He tried to recall how the story of Lightfoot and the one-eyed Captain Stormcloud had ended, but he couldn’t, and then he remembered why. His mother had never finished it. It was a long story with lots of surprising twists and turns: she had been telling it to him over many nights, and then she had fallen ill, and went to the hospital. There were no more stories after that. He never found out how Lightfoot defeated Stormcloud and his warriors.
He remembered how every time she finished one of her stories and was tucking him in, he would ask her for just one more. And she would tilt her head, and smile, and say…
A gust of wind swept in through the open window, sending Will’s drawings flying and knocking over the reading lamp on the table beside his bed. Before he could catch it, the lamp landed on the rug and the shade sprang off the bulb. Will lunged, rescuing the shade before it rolled under the bed. As he was about to put it back on the lamp, he heard a sound behind him. A very distinct and unmistakable cough. The kind of cough someone makes when they’re trying politely to get your attention.
He whirled around.
There was no one else in the room. The door was closed. All he saw was his own looming shadow, thrown by the bare bulb onto the far wall.
But there was another shadow, standing next to his.
Another person-shape, where there shouldn’t be one. Will turned his head slowly to the side, his heart pounding. There was no one beside him casting that other shadow.
“Hello,” said a voice.
Will raced for the door.
“Wait!” said the voice, although it was not quite a voice. More like the hollow echo of a voice. “Why do they always run away?” it muttered.
Much to his own surprise, Will didn’t flee out of the door and down the stairs. Instead he stopped, turned and faced the shadow. He wasn’t sure why, but it was at least partly the certainty, deep down, that this impossible thing had come from that other world he had visited, and was hoping to return to.
His dad’s voice boomed from the living room below: “What’s going on up there?”
“Sorry,” Will shouted. “Just dropped something.”
The shadow of someone who wasn’t there moved away from Will’s own shadow, towards the corner of the room. An old saggy armchair stood there, on which Will piled his clothes at the end of the day. The shadow-person raised a shadow-hand and gestured to the shadow of the chair.
“May I?” the voice asked. How a shadow could be speaking to him, Will didn’t know, but the voice sounded …
right
somehow. A shadow should sound like that, he thought, like the
edges
of a voice with everything in the middle taken away.
Will nodded his head slowly.
The shadow of someone settled into the shadow-chair with a long sigh.
“That’s better,” it said, patting the arms of the chair. “It wasn’t easy getting here, believe me. I’m a bit out of breath. The truth is I’ve never had to travel this far before to carry out my task.”
“Where are you from?” Will asked.
There was a moment of silence.
“You don’t really need me to answer that,” the shadow replied, with the slightest tinge of sarcasm.
“No, I guess not. What are …
who
are you?”
“That’s a better question. Unfortunately, the answer is that I’m not anybody. I’m a shadow.”
“A shadow of who?”
“Just a shadow. No
who
.”
“But every shadow has to be a shadow of
something
.”
“Perhaps, but that’s not important right now. I’ve got a task to perform, so I’d better get to it before my time is up. I’m here to bring you a message.”
“What message?”
The shadow seemed to lean forward in the shadow of the chair.
“A stone will speak,” it said slowly. “The sky will come to earth. And a friend will fall.”
