The Bell Between Worlds (9 page)

He thought about Espen and the beast fighting behind him. He tried to picture his new friend crushing the dog under piles of twisted steel and rubble, then turning and running after him to join him at the bell. But soon his mind became crowded with images of a bloody fight, of Espen and the beast locked together, tumbling across the compound, the beast’s vicious jaws closing about his neck, and then it was the beast that he saw leaping over the fence in one mighty bound and setting off into the forest, its snout lowered to find his scent, gaining on him, hunting him down.

He shook his head.

“Run!” he grunted through gritted teeth.

He pushed on through the thick undergrowth, thundering through fallen leaves, twigs and saplings, feeling the path ahead with grazed hands. He had been climbing for several minutes now and he told himself that he must be near the top of the hill. Sure enough, the ground soon started to level out and his way became a little easier. He did not slow down, but glanced about wildly, gasping, looking for some sign that he was near the bell.

And then he saw it.

It was not an object, nor was it a movement: it was an absence of something. There, directly ahead, the meagre moonlight pooled where there were no trees. It could have been a clearing, but when Sylas turned his head, he saw that it was not only the area in front of him: all of the forest as far as he could see simply stopped a few paces ahead.

He slowed to a walk and put his hands on his hips, drawing long, deep breaths.

Where the trees ended the ground was littered with broken foliage, branches, boughs. He could see the paleness of splinters and crushed pulp and the raggedness of broken limbs. He inhaled the sweet, wholesome scent of fresh wood. As he drew level with the very edge of the forest, he saw that these limbs were not just branches but entire trunks – whole trees that had been felled by some unimaginable force. But the path of this destruction was very narrow, for not far ahead he could now see another wall of trees where the forest began again.

Suddenly he realised what he was looking at. He turned his head and looked to his left to see a long, perfectly straight pathway of obliterated forest. He had no idea how far it went because it disappeared into the darkness. He looked to his right and the scene was exactly the same: a narrow path of broken wood disappearing into blackness. But where was the bell? Sylas stepped into the graveyard of timber and stared out into the blackness. He looked at the horizon in both directions and could see nothing, but then he lifted his eyes above the canopy of the trees.

There, some distance away and suspended high above the forest, was an immense bell.

It was tilted away from him and was entirely motionless, at one end of a giant swing. But there was nothing to carry its weight: no rope, no cord, no chain. It seemed to float in the night air. It was hard to guess its dimensions because there was nothing around it to compare it to, but to Sylas it looked about the size of a house. It was a pale colour, perhaps brass or gold, and it seemed to reflect light that was not there, as though it had been polished to such perfection that it was stealing all the light in the sky. There was some kind of design around its rim and he squinted and craned forward and felt a new stirring of excitement. He could just make out symbols, and soon he could discern the shapes clearly, carved with perfect precision into the metal.

Ravel Runes.

He felt a slight movement of air, a gentle motion that wasn’t even a breeze, blowing from the direction of the bell. It seemed to bring him to his senses, for as he blinked and looked again, he realised that it was moving – moving towards him. It was becoming larger and larger with every passing second, and the slight shifting of air was now a breeze, a mounting wind moving down the channel between the trees, ahead of the swinging bell. He gasped and stepped backwards, glancing towards the trees.

His gaze fell on two large pale eyes.

They peered out at him from the blackness of the forest, just paces away. There was a rustle of leaves and a shifting of shadows and then the cruel snout of the beast emerged into the clearing. It had wide gashes across its face and Sylas could just make out that it was carrying one of its paws off the ground as though injured. Nevertheless its huge frame looked more powerful and terrifying than ever. Its greasy fur flew up around it as the breeze became a wind that whistled between the broken limbs of the trees.

Sylas felt a chill in his bones, but, to his surprise, there was no panic. He turned his eyes from the hound to the bell, which was now crashing through the forest, gathering pace as it went, sending twigs, leaves and branches flying through the air in all directions. And suddenly, as the wind became deafening and swept the air from his lungs, he felt entirely calm.

He was only dimly aware of the hound crouching back on its haunches, preparing to pounce; he did not see the forest buckling under the raging power of the bell; he saw only the bell itself – its radiance, its perfect glistening surface; its vast mysterious message depicted in runes about its rim. As it glided towards him and the wind became a hurricane, its beauty filled his vision and stirred a new emotion in him, an emotion that was so unexpected, so out of place that at first he did not recognise it.

Joy. A pure, overwhelming, wonderful joy that filled his heart, grew like a sob in his chest and made him want to cry out.

And, as the wind ripped at his clothes, as the beast launched into the air, he reached out to touch the approaching bell.

Then he heard Mr Zhi’s voice in his head.

“You have nothing to fear.”

“It seems that Nature welcomes their very touch, bending to their
will not because it must, but because their will is its own.”

Her palm was warm on the back of his hand, and he could feel her fingers pressed between his. He looked down and saw their hands clasped together: her delicate white skin a sharp contrast to his own grubby wrist. He had always loved her hands. They were so fine and gentle that he sometimes felt he should not touch them. When they were at work, moving in confident sweeps across the paper as she drafted graphs, equations, diagrams, they had all the elegance of her creations, all the beauty of her brilliant mind.

He pulled his eyes away and looked ahead at the sunlight that danced brightly on rippling water and in that moment he was aware of a warmth that he had forgotten. He tried to look beyond the beautiful radiance, but the light dazzled him. He tried to shift his feet, but they seemed distant and numb. All he could see was the light, and all he could feel was her hand on his. He wanted more than this – he wanted to speak with her – so he turned to look into her face.

Sylas woke with a start. The warmth that had felt so real just moments before disappeared and in its place he felt the dull ache of a chill in his limbs. His arms were splayed wide and he pulled them across his chest to try to warm himself, but they only pressed his damp clothes to his skin, making him gasp. All that was left of sleep disappeared and his mind began to clear.

His first thoughts were of the beautiful bell, tearing through the forest towards him, sending branches flying in its path. Then he recalled falling backwards, unbalanced by the great wind that had risen before it. But he could not remember landing, or the bell reaching him, or anything since, except his dream. Something else filled his thoughts: a growing unease that gradually formed a picture in his mind – a picture of the beast. He could see it clearly: its glaring eyes, its jaws gaping wide, its filthy claws outstretched as it launched itself towards him.

He forced his eyes open and saw a blackness so complete that he would have thought them still closed were it not for the dim light at the very edges of his vision. Ignoring the stiffness in his neck, he turned his head and saw that, sure enough, there was a line of blue-grey light through which he could just make out the angular shapes of broken branches and twigs, some silhouetted, some dimly lit. He turned his head the other way and there too was the strange strip of light. As he craned to see more, his rucksack pressed into his back and he shifted to ease the discomfort, but a sharp pain ran across his shoulders, making him groan.

The groan echoed back.

His heart quickened and he held his breath. “Hello?” he said in a husky voice.

The word echoed back to him, then again, and again. The voice was his own, but the sound was cold, metallic and hollow. His mind flew back to the chase, the factory, the woods, the clearing – and the bell. Pushing himself up into a sitting position, he glanced around at the wide circle of light and for the first time he understood.

He was under the bell.

He seemed to be lying at the very centre of the bell’s massive black shadow. The light at its edge, which he had at first thought to be a thin strip, was in fact a gap of at least his own height between the bell and the ground. The darkness made him uneasy and, glancing about for signs of movement, he heaved himself to his feet among the broken branches, wincing as his weight fell on his sore knee.

He began to make his way towards the light, choosing the easiest path through the undergrowth. The sound of snapping twigs and crunching leaves echoed eerily around him, setting his nerves on edge. His eyes scoured the darkness for any sign of the beast, lingering on ragged silhouettes that looked all too much like angular shoulders or crouching haunches. But nothing stirred beneath the bell.

Sylas drew near the light and he paused, squinting into the gloom. Ahead of him he saw the pathway of mangled trees stretching off into the distance, bordered on both sides by the forest. It was as he remembered from the previous night, but there was one difference: it bore a strange, wintry cloak that was quite wrong on a July morning. Many of the trees had lost their leaves and were dusted with a white frost; a cold mist hung low over the ground and his breath formed clouds in the air, which drifted upwards to join the featureless grey sky. Everything was still and silent – there was no wind, no chime of the bell, not even the call of birds in the trees.

Sylas peered left and right, then stepped out from under the bell and into the light. A new edge to the chill made his teeth chatter, and he gathered the collar of his jacket round his neck as he picked his way through twigs and branches. He stopped next to the stump of a great old oak, which now sent spears of broken wood into the sky where its canopy had once been. He turned and leaned back against it, slowly raising his eyes.

There, just paces away and rising to a point high above the treetops, was the perfectly smooth polished surface of the bell.

It was an unusual shape for a bell, resembling a gigantic golden teardrop. It had a dark circular opening at its base, bordered by a fluted lip bearing the runes that he had seen the previous evening. Above, its great curving sides bowed outwards in gleaming arcs and soared to an astonishing height before tapering inwards at the top. Here the bell narrowed and narrowed until, at the highest reaches, it came to a bright ring of gleaming metal. Sylas found himself peering above to see what supported the great weight of the bell, but there was nothing. It was as if it was suspended in the air itself.

He looked back down at the band of vast Ravel Runes etched deeply into the shiny surface. He stared at them long and hard, moving his eyes from one to the next, hoping that in some way they might work together to form a message: something to explain what was happening. As he gazed at them, he had the strange sense that they were familiar, that he may even have seen this sequence before.

A pheasant suddenly crashed through a bush to his right, launched into the air and flew across the clearing, clucking with each beat of its wings. He glanced in the direction of the bush, which swayed from side to side.

He saw a movement behind it, in the shadows of the wood.

A human figure emerged from the darkness, stepping nimbly over some broken branches.

Sylas held his breath. At first he thought it was Espen and his heart rose, but he saw quickly that it was not a man’s frame, nor even a boy’s: it was far smaller and its lines were much more slender.

It was a girl. But her slight figure and her disobedient mass of red hair were the only signs that she was not a boy, for her movements were robust and masculine, her skin ruddy and tanned and she wore a coat that was almost comically oversized, made of a brown, crudely woven material. She took three steps into the clearing, throwing her shoulders back and her head high as if to defy her smallness, then she stopped and stared at Sylas, looking him up and down.

Her narrow face bore a bold expression, but the way she carried her elfin body betrayed her caution: her knees were bent as though poised to run and she held her grimy hands slightly out from her sides, ready to defend herself.

Her eyes fell on the bracelet around his wrist and suddenly her eyes met his. Sylas saw for the first time that beneath the streaks of mud on her cheeks she had a pleasant, even pretty face, with lively, smiling hazel eyes.