The Lost Girl (31 page)

Vigil shook me hard, making me focus. “Joey, I don’t know what to do. I cannot heal you; my powers don’t do
that. There is too much blood. What should I do?”

I blinked again and managed to croak one word before I slipped into dark oblivion: “Hospital …”

I jolted awake and found myself standing on a worn-out wooden platform. A thick mist surrounded me, making it impossible to see mere feet away. It floated eerily, bathing everything in a pale hue of gray.

After a few seconds’ disorientation I stopped to check my stomach, where the wound had been. All the horrid memories came rushing back to me – the stabbing pain, the blood on the floor – but I didn’t have any wounds now. Where was I? Was I dead?

I peered into the distance. It seemed there was a vague silhouette way ahead of me. Someone was out there, but the mist was too thick for me to see who it might be.

I headed over hesitantly, being careful not to step off the old platform. Each step I took made the mist dissolve a little more, making me increasingly confident. I seemed to be on a wooden pier, the sound of splashing a sign that there was water below.

When I reached the end of the pier I realized the shadowy silhouette was a ferryman, perched on top of a long, thin boat moored to the platform. He had his back to
me and a long sandy cloak covered his body completely.

I stopped as I took in his view: it was an infinite silvery ocean. The mist had cleared considerably now, allowing me to see for miles. The water glittered oddly whenever waves crashed over one other, and that’s when I realized that it was not, in fact, water, but sand. Silver, wavy, moving sand. The movement was beautiful, catching the glittery reflection from the big, white moon above us.

Was this a dream? Somehow I knew it wasn’t. Something deep inside of me knew this was as real as it could get.

The ferryman’s boat sank into the sand, wobbling a little just as it would have done had it been on water. I glanced to the ferryman, his long cloak billowing on the soft warm breeze. The air smelled of ancient parchments, of dust and sand. His hood covered his face and the bottom of his cloak merged into the sand.

Tiny specks of sand floated from the sea upwards into the dark sky. It was like the sand was so light that gravity could not hold it down, and it drifted towards the sky like tiny stars. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

The ferryman noticed my presence and turned slowly. A washed-out skull of dark wood, the same color as the boat, stared at me intensely from inside the hood. My eyes went as wide as they could get. It is not every day you see the empty eye sockets of a live wooden skull.

“S-Sky?” I risked. The long cloak and eerie skull were pretty good indicators that this could be Death in all its stereotypical glory. Was Sky portraying herself like this to me now?

The ferryman frowned slightly – if a skull could even do that – and bowed. “I am but the Ferryman. ‘Sky’ asked me to fetch you and bring you to her domain. She is waiting.
Come now, we must leave.” He waved a long, knotty, bony finger at me.

“Huh … right. But I’ve been to Sky’s ‘domain’ before … This doesn’t look like it. It does have a lot of sand, but no moon in the sky, and the sand doesn’t move, not floating about like here.”

The Ferryman stopped and rubbed his wooden chin. “That is her workplace, so to speak. This is her residence. Here you don’t have to worry about the scorching sun. Here you have to worry about the dust sea.” His voice was raspy and gritty. He waved his hand towards the sand that brushed against the boat.

As I stepped inside the boat, the subtlety of his threat reverberated in my head.
Here you have to worry about the dust sea.

“Shouldn’t I give you a coin or something?” I asked, remembering the old stories about Death’s Ferryman. No coin, no ride.

He nodded as he began to row us away from the pier. “Ordinarily, yes. But you are a guest this time.”

We drifted away quickly, swiftly gliding through silver waves of sand as if it were water. In the distance I could see dozens of other piers, which slowly disappeared one by one in the distance.

The boat rocked as the Ferryman continued rowing steadfastly forward. The action made his cloak float back, showing all that was inside. Instead of a skeleton made of wood I saw that the Ferryman was, in fact, part of the boat itself. His body fused with the boat below his waistline, his wooden bones and muscles protruding from the woodwork and his feet merged with the floorboards.

It was as if he had melted into the wood. It was creepy.
And the more I thought about it, the more creepy it got – because I was sitting in the boat … and the boat was kind of part of him. So I was kind of sitting on him as well! I shuffled uncomfortably and decided to look at the ocean rather than the Ferryman.

The silver sand never ceased floating to the sky. It moved slowly and lightly all the way up to the unknown dark void above our heads.

Then something started following the boat, something incredibly big, swimming alongside us beneath the sand. Soon others like this creature joined to accompany it. They, whatever “they” were, seemed to be escorting us towards Sky’s home, gliding alongside the boat.

One of them passed really close to me, its cracked, giant back surfacing above the sand only to quickly disappear again, burying itself in the dust sea. I made to reach my hand in its direction but the Ferryman warned me not to.

“Beware of the dust sea and what lies beneath it,” his dry, raspy voice said.

In other words,
Do not touch the alien creatures in the sand.

I nodded and pulled my hand quickly inside the boat, all the while observing the alien-looking whales swimming close by.

A big wave of sand – boy, is that as weird to say as I think it is? – splashed over us, rocking the boat, and I turned to see what was causing the commotion. A mile or so away a gigantic whale-creature surfaced. But not only that, it also started rising completely out of the sea, floating upwards in slow motion towards the sky, in the same way as the glittery sand.

It was falling. Into the sky. Or flying up. Whatever. This was getting way too weird for my brain to comprehend.

My mouth gaped widely as the giant continued its ascension until there was nothing left but a tiny dot in the distance, too far away for me to discern its form any more.

I was about to ask the Ferryman what the hell that was all about, but he had stopped rowing and was now looking fixedly at something ahead. I followed his gaze and then gasped in even greater astonishment.

In front of us there was a steep glass staircase leading up to a huge glass mansion. The entire structure was translucent and transparent, shimmering and glinting in the moonlight, almost fusing with the black sky. It was like something out of a wild fairy-tale dream. It was as outlandish and beautiful as the strange sea of silver sand, and the alien creatures that swam beneath it. It was as scary as it was breathtaking.

A small, narrow, wooden plank rolled out from underneath the boat and parked itself, resting on one of the glass steps: my way out.

“Milady,” the Ferryman called out to someone, bowing deeply and making the entire woodwork creak with the movement. “In accordance with your request, I bring your guest Joe Gray, Witch Sorcerer, Conjurer of the Underworld, Gray Hood Bearer and Fire Wielder.”

I turned and looked behind me to see who the hell he was talking about, because that was certainly not me.

Sky’s deep laugh caught my attention and made me turn in the direction of the glass staircase. “Thank you, Erwin!” she said, acknowledging the Ferryman, and then turned to look at me. “He can be so posh and formal sometimes, you
know?” She beamed widely and winked, walking in my direction.

I skipped quickly out of the boat and stopped at the bottom of the glass steps. Sky’s midnight hair covered her bare shoulders, and wristbands, necklaces and rings adorned her ankles, neck and fingers. She still wore the heavy make-up and black pants, tank-top and those black boots I had grown used to seeing on her at all times.

“Joey, I’ve been waiting for you,” she said, giving me a tight hug which, as usual, sent cold shivers down my spine as if a cold bucket of ice had just been thrown over my head. I cringed and clenched my teeth, bearing the coldness of her embrace. It was not her fault that she had this effect on people. And everybody deserved a good hug now and then. Even Death.

“Hmm, you were?” I mumbled when she stepped away.

“Of course. I told you I’d see you later. Now is later!” she said, with a wise smile on her lips.

“Am I dying?” I blurted out. This question had been nagging at me from the moment I’d jolted awake on the pier. I remembered what I had been through in the warehouse, the sheer panic, the terror, the pain, the fear of dying. But since I had been in this place, all of that seemed like a distant dream, as if this had been the real thing all long. I wasn’t afraid or scared; I wasn’t in pain. And nothing from before mattered any more.

And that was freaking me out big time because deep down inside I knew that it should
all
matter. I should be scared. I should be sad that my life was ending. Was I really dying?

“Yes, you are,” she answered me, still smiling. “But
you have been dying since the moment you were born, Joe Gray. I’m sure you knew that already.”

I blinked stupidly at her. That was not what I meant! God, I forgot that speaking with Sky was just as philosophically challenging as speaking to Vigil.

“Come inside! I’d like you to see something, and it’s almost time,” she exclaimed excitedly, grabbing my hand and pulling me along with her into her glass mansion.

Goosebumps rose up my arm from her touch as I let myself be dragged inside.

“The place wasn’t like this a few days ago, but I got the idea from you, from when you stomped your foot in the sand and turned it into glass. That was so clever of you! Heat and sand equals glass. So obvious! And since I have all this raw material available, I thought to myself, why not just do like Joey? So here it is! What do you think? Do you like it?” Sky asked, as she skipped quickly through the glass hallways.

As it turned out, the mansion really was made of glass, as in,
everything
was glass: the long floors, the high ceilings, the huge doors and the numerous chairs, tables, vases – even the flowers in the vases were sparkling like beautiful crystal.

“Y-yeah, it looks great! Really beautiful,” I said. Not very practical, or safe, or even comfortable, but I guess that was just from a human perspective. Death didn’t need to be safe
or
comfortable.

It was also a little bit of a death-trap, no pun intended – well, a little pun intended. But since the only source of light was the moon outside and its reflection in the sparkling floating sand, the house was the darkest glass at night-time. If you pictured it, you’d realize how hard
it would be to walk around without seriously injuring yourself. I was glad I had Sky to guide me safely through the vast rooms.

We reached a curling staircase and Sky pulled me up the steps after her.

“Thanks! I think so too,” she said happily as we emerged on the second floor and walked to what looked like a balcony. “I love to come up here to watch the view.”

I stopped by the balcony railings and gazed at the view with wide eyes. Although it seemed like we had walked up just a few stairs, when we stepped onto the balcony it felt like we were a dozen storeys up. Scarily high.

“H-how … how can it be this high?” I muttered in amazement, peering cautiously down below.

Sky shrugged as if this were a most normal thing. “Time and space runs differently here. Ten floors, two floors, it’s all the same, and yet not the same at all. It is what we make of it. And right now we want high, so high we must be.”

The view stretched as far as the eye could see. I watched the landscape, a never-ending ocean of silver sand, so beautiful and mesmerizing it was impossible to take your eyes off it. The glitter-sand still drifted upwards, in its everlasting reverse freefall, taking hundreds of giant alien creatures with it. It was a raging dream, unbelievably beautiful and frightening at the same time.

Sky turned to me, a soft smile dancing on her pale lips. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that, Joey. I’m sorry I had to watch you being tortured,” she said, a little more serious now. “But I couldn’t intervene; I’ve meddled too much. I’m sorry I couldn’t answer your pleas. I was there to collect Jarvis. A complete annihilation is very rare; the
ultimate death of a being doesn’t happen very often, so I had to be there. But I thought I could make it up to you now by bringing you here.

“I remembered how much you liked watching the rising sun, how you thought it was beautiful. So you should like watching this,” she said, gesturing to the horizon where the dark sky met the silver sea of sand.

An intense white line shone brightly on the horizon, casting a spellbinding glow of pink, orange and yellow rays over the inky black sky.

The sun was rising!

Soon the bright molten ball rose, spreading its colorful fingers over the sand, tinting it slowly with amazing hues of vivid yellow. The sand now sparkled vividly like fairy dust, endlessly shining. The entire ocean was now moving like liquid gold.

I didn’t think I would ever see anything more beautiful than this. I felt my eyes streaming with tears of joy. It was just too beautiful, too magical, too perfect. It left me completely frozen in utter wonderment.

Then all the silvery sand that was floating towards the sky slowly stopped, lingering gently in the air, as if it were holding its breath, and then started falling back to the sea of sand, its silver hue transformed into tiny specks of gold. And after that the soft yellow rain never stopped falling. The giant gentle creatures started descending back to the sea again. Everything that had been floating up was now falling softly down.

That’s when I realized something.

This world, this never-ending cycle of sand floating up and falling down … it was an hourglass. Sky’s home, Death’s domain, was an hourglass universe made of sand,
in infinite motion, moving up or down, night and day, silver and gold falling and floating. It was so simple in its beauty yet so complex at the same time. It was perfect. I was speechless.