Chapter 42

The Door

The clear light of death is calling. A few steps forward, and we would all dissolve. I clamp down on Aliya’s hand, the only sensation there is. Impenetrable darkness is all around us. Even though the clear light is only a few paces away, it does nothing to illuminate where we are now. Is the light getting closer? We’re drifting. Not the direction we want to go. Where do I want to go? Thoughts are sluggish, down here, well below the level of conscious thought.

Deep sleep.

Death.

Lily!

Lily is waiting for me, somewhere parallel to where we are now.

Not forward into the light. Sideways.

I pull.

My own consciousness, and those with me. Shift through into my world and tug them along behind, into the depths of my sister’s mind.

Here, there is an edge to the blackness, where it fades into red. A little further away from the seductive light. The red expanse is creepy, an endless field of blood, but at least we can see again. I can take comfort in Aliya walking beside me, mulishly determined.

Ahead in the distance—there she is! I shout her name and run towards the tiny nutshell boat floating in crimson space. We hug so hard.

‘Who are those kids, Luca?’ she asks me. ‘Is any of this real?’

‘Um.’ Real is getting pretty hard to define.

‘Don’t worry, Luca,’ Aliya says to me, ‘she won’t remember any of this when she wakes up. We are far below dreaming, now.’

When she wakes up. Not if.

I introduce Lily. Caleb shuffles his feet and blushes. Geeze.

‘Aliya and Caleb have come to help take you home, Lily,’ I say. With the power of three dreamwalkers combined, we will have no problem. Especially when one of them is Caleb. Okay, so he kept accidentally killing people—but that proves how powerful he is, right?

‘Is everyone ready?’ I ask. I’ve still got an arm around Lily’s shoulders, and the other two reach out and place a hand on each of us, nodding to me.

‘Onwards and upwards,’ I say with a grin.

My grin changes into a grimace when we all push our way back towards the surface of Lily’s mind. It’s like swimming through treacle.

‘I thought it was just me,’ I say, stopping for breath.

‘It’s your whole world,’ Aliya says, frustrated. ‘I felt it before… There is so little to work with.’

Caleb looks up at us with sad eyes. ‘It’s not just that,’ he says. ‘I’m pulling you all back. I know I’m—I’m dying. I’ve gone too close to the light. And it’s touched Lily, too. I can feel it, like we’re matching colours or something. I’m sorry. You two can get out, but I have to go on through. And I think Lily does, too.’

‘But it’s not the same!’ I say. ‘Your body is…uninhabitable, now. But Lily’s might still be okay. There’s still time—the doctors are still working to save her. We can’t give up yet…not until we know for sure.’

‘I don’t want to give up,’ Aliya says, ‘but there’s no pathway. No life energy. You can feel the truth of that, can’t you?’

Lily lays her head on my shoulder. ‘It’s okay, Luca. I’m not so scared, now that you’re here with me.’

My whole body is shaking with the pain of letting go.

To have come so far, and for it all to be for nothing.

No, not nothing. In looking for a way to save Lily, I’ve found myself. And, I found a closeness with my sister that’s been missing for too long. That makes it even harder to lose her now. But also easier, because there’s nothing unhealed between us.

And it’s not the end. Aliya is confident that there’s something new on the other side of death. Lily will be alive—somewhere. Just not with me.

‘There might still be a way,’ says Aliya. ‘If there’s not enough life force in your world to wake Lily up, we’ll have to wake your whole world up first.’

Now I get what Lily means about it being too painful to hope. ‘What do you mean?’

Bathed in red light, Aliya’s face looks eerie, but I trust her. Trust her enough to put my sister’s life in her hands.

‘Everything’s interconnected,’ Aliya says. ‘The body, the mind, the environment we live in. They all contribute to sickness—or health. You’ve already helped with the inner causes; you’ve brought hope and acceptance and confidence. Now we need to work on the outer causes. Lily is reaching out for the world—we need the world to reach back.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘The sickness in your world, Apprentice—what did you call it?’

‘Pollution?’

‘Yes. Take me to your world.’ She holds out her hands.

‘Um, sure,’ I say, putting my hands in hers. She plans to cure pollution from inside my head? Well, Aliya has managed stranger things.

‘Caleb, will you stay here with Lily?’ I ask. ‘Keep her out of the light. Can you do that?’

‘I’ve been in this space between life and death for ages,’ he says with a wry smile that is way too old for him, ‘I can manage a bit longer.’

I give Lily one more quick smile. ‘I’ll be back soon.’

Then, Aliya and I are sliding sideways out of the dream. Caleb is right, it is easier now I’m not trying to bring Lily with me. It only feels like lifting a hundred-pound weight, instead of trying to shift a bulldozer. We both groan with the effort it takes to reach the forest of lampposts.

Still holding her hand, we sink into my lamppost and spiral back up. I reclaim my physical form, sitting on my bed with pins and needles in my left foot.

Before I open my eyes, I prod around in the back of my head, trying to feel the tickle of Aliya’s presence. But she’s not there. Something went wrong. I’ve lost my last chance to save Lily.

Opening my eyes, I jump like a rabbit and topple off my bed. Aliya is sitting in front of me, cross-legged on my duvet, her deep, soulful eyes taking in all the details of my room with interest. Impossible. Utterly out of place in this modern world. For some reason, what strikes me most at this moment is her smell: not unpleasant, but full of anomalies. Wood smoke and betony. I gape up at her from the floor.

‘From my point of view, this world is a dream,’ she says.

I suppose that’s an explanation. Ish. All the explanation I’m going to get, anyhow.

‘Come on, then,’ she says, jumping up, ‘let’s plant a tree.’

In a daze, I lead her downstairs. The kitchen clock reads 3:06pm, just over two hours into the operation. We still have time. I grab us each a coke on the way through the kitchen and hand one to Aliya. She watches how I open the can, copies me. Takes one sip and spits it into the sink.

‘I think I’ll stick with water,’ she says. Maybe I should keep up the sugar-free diet too—the coke does taste sickly sweet after months without it.

I run her a glass of water. She spits that out, too. Yeah, well, welcome to London. I pour her some fruit juice, which she swallows.

Then, I take a Bronze-Age shaman out into modern London.

I have done some pretty surreal stuff the last few months, but nothing beats sitting on a bus with Aliya. While I’m quietly freaking out beside her, she’s cool about everything, as if modern technology is all in a day’s work for her.

‘I feel like I must still be in a dream,’ I tell her. She gives me a look like, duh, of course you are.

‘Hey, nice costume, man,’ some twentyish hipster says to her. She gives him one of her intense stares until he slopes off.

We get off the bus at Parliament Hill and walk up towards Kenwood. It’s cold, with occasional bursts of sunlight stabbing through the churning clouds. I don’t know what Aliya thinks we’ll gain by planting a tree, but I know what spot feels right: a partly wooded slope bordered by a tiny stream, one of the wilder parts of the Heath.

‘Perfect,’ Aliya says. From the pouch on her belt, she pulls out a single acorn. ‘The elemental who gave this to me—to us, I suppose—told me to use it if I ever needed the strength of a tree.’

‘You’re going to bring elementals here?’ I ask incredulously. ‘I reckon we killed them all off, back during the Industrial Revolution or something.’

‘Then this is your second chance, Shaman,’ she tells me. ‘You have to look after them better this time.’

‘I will,’ I say. Sure, my shoulders can be broad enough to carry the future of the world. I’m proud of myself for only thinking that slightly sarcastically.

Aliya nods to me as she kneels on the damp grass. She reaches out her hand and burrows the acorn into the soil. The hard winter earth parts easily and closes over the precious seed.

Her voice takes on the cadence of ritual, where she is no longer just Aliya, but one cell in the vast body of life. ‘Spirit of the earth, as you draw strength from this earth, lend it also your strength. Renew this land and be the seed from which life springs.

‘I have drunk the bitter waters of the sea, and her voice is in my tears.’ Aliya squeezes a drop of moisture from the corner of her eye and presses it to the earth where she has just planted the seed. ‘All water is part of the sea; let the spirit of the ocean be present in every drop.

‘The air in my lungs is the breath of a different world,’ Aliya says, breathing out heavily, misting the air. ‘In it is the life which makes the air sing.’

Finally, this girl—who is a shaman, a dream, a forest, an ocean—puts both palms flat on the ground. ‘With the fire in my heart, I call to the fire beneath the ground, the fire that never goes out. Reawaken and bring back the inner fire of this world.’

Oh God, please don’t let us cause a volcanic eruption in the middle of London.

There are no tremors in the earth. There is a response, though. Life—glorious, vibrant life—answers Aliya’s call.

It comes up through my shoes. I’m fizzy with it: that vitality that before now was only part of my dreams. A shoot of green erupts out of the earth, impossibly fast, unfurling into a sapling with tiny emerald leaves, bursting with life in the drab winter park.

‘Oh,’ I say, gently stroking a leaf. ‘Hello.’

The young tree answers me with a ripple of calming energy. It’s not old enough to speak yet, but one day…One day, this tree and the other elementals that Aliya has brought here could have the power to reverse pollution, to regrow the forests, to clear the seas. But for now, they have just enough power to call my sister home.

I check my phone. Just after four. It’s getting dark.

We sit down on either side of the oak sapling. The damp immediately soaks through my jeans, but I won’t notice it when I’m in a trance.

I take one last look at Aliya against the backdrop of the city’s electric skyline—the greatest friend it is possible to have, even if she might only be myself—and then close my eyes.

It’s a long journey back down.

The light on top of Lily’s lamppost is flickering feebly. We race through into Lily’s weird symbolic brain. But she’s not here—she’s much further in. We first have to wrestle our way across that featureless white expanse.

Aliya shudders. ‘Juna has been trapped here for three months.’

‘Now, we know how to wake her up,’ I reassure her. ‘Between the two of us.’

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘when the danger has passed. When Caleb’s…gone.’

It feels like an eternity before we get back to where we left Lily in the sea of blood-red light. She’s not here.

‘We can’t be too late,’ I say.

Aliya points across the crimson emptiness, to where it shades into black at the horizon. We run forward—or maybe downward—it’s hard to tell with no ground beneath our feet.

Into the dark.

Lily and Caleb are backlit by the clear bright light shining out through an open door. It’s like the door in the roots of Caleb’s tree, but this one looks exactly like the door of Lily’s bedroom. That slice of normality is the eeriest thing I’ve ever seen.

‘I have to go through,’ Lily is saying as we reach them. But Caleb is hanging onto her arm, holding her back.

‘You can’t,’ I tell her. ‘We’ve fixed things so you can wake up again. You have to come back with me.’

I grab hold of her, filled with the new energy tying me to the elemental forces in my own world. But there is still an equally strong force pulling her back. The force on the other side of that door.

‘We have to close it,’ I tell Aliya.

She shakes her head. The compassion in her eyes is a painful truth. ‘It will only close when she goes through.’

No. Not when we’re so close.

‘Someone has to go through,’ Caleb says in his quiet voice.

‘It’s my door,’ says Lily.

Caleb smiles at her. ‘I’ll go through it for you,’ he says. ‘Let me make up for all the death.’

I was right after all: the cure for the plague would also be Lily’s saviour. But I never dreamt it would involve this kid’s sacrifice.

‘Thank you,’ is all I am able to say, although that can never be enough.

Aliya holds out her hand, and the boy takes it. He says, ‘Tell my mum I love her.’ He looks the least frightened I have ever seen him.

‘I will,’ Aliya promises.

‘What happens when I go through?’ he asks. His gaze is fixed on the light rising from the doorway like mist.

‘I have no idea,’ she says. ‘Would you like to find out?’

‘Yes.’ He gives Aliya a small, brave smile and lets go of her hand.