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The Return
‘Is that a light?’ he whispered.
Further down the creek, over the water, she saw a familiar sight: a beautiful, round blue glow hung in the air, and Lucy had no fear. It was hard to play and talk at the same time. She kept playing and the light expanded. She felt Jonathan’s trembling presence. It’s real, she thought. Utterly real.
‘Hold me, if you can,’ she said above her music.
‘What?’
‘My shoulders.’
He scrambled and stood behind her, and placed warm unsteady hands on her shoulders. The music expanded, the notes lengthened so that they played over one another. The air thickened, and the blue light cast giant shadows as it moved closer towards them. Lucy saw herself and her wheelchair as a massive dark caricature on the sand next to the creek. Jonathan’s shadow loomed next to hers — an oblique, strange giant. Her heart sang. Every atom of her body was one with the music, then the light engulfed them, and there was no more division between girl and instrument, between the light and her substance, between her and Jonathan. Weightless and windborne, Lucy closed her eyes, blinded by the light which drew her into itself, aware only of speed and sound as all sense of orientation dissolved. Time warped over her head, and she flowed along with it, losing track of it.
‘Jesus Effing Christ.’
She heard his words, and blinked.
She’d never imagined Jonathan capable of expletives, but life was full of surprises. When Lucy’s eyes finally adjusted, they burned with tears. Her heart expanded with unstoppable joy.
Jonathan lay on his back, bathed in pink light, on a familiar, soft, sea-edge, swearing softly to himself.
Low, dense vapours swept around them.
The wheelchair lay on its side, next to her cello. She was curled up in a foetal position, her hands clasped around her knees, holding the end of her bow. Slowly she unfolded herself and stretched. Bending her legs at the knees, she relished the stretch of her calves, the feelings of pins and needles in her toes. She stretched her legs out in front of her and sat up, crossing them.
‘Did you say something?’ she said. She wiped an errant tear from the corner of one eye. She leaned forward, held her own ankles and felt her hands on them.
‘Holy Shit,’ Jonathan said, and came up on his elbows.
‘Keep it up,’ Lucy said. ‘I like this new talent of yours. Didn’t know you had such a store of foul language.’ She looked into his face, which for the moment, resembled a desperate trout swimming upstream.
‘Christ, Lucy, look at you!’
She got up and stretched her arms over her head, holding her bow as she stood on her tiptoes, an inadvertent ballerina.
‘You’re … standing!’
She ran towards him through the mists and dense fog, trailing her fingers through the strange atmosphere, briefly looking behind her as small eddies swirled up into the mist and spiralled out behind her.
Lucy Wright, sixteen and a paraplegic after a recent car accident that took her mother’s life, lives in Queensland on a 10,000 acre farm with her father. When Lucy investigates strange lights over the creek at the bottom of the property, she discovers a mystery that links the lights to the science of cymatics and Scotland’s ancient Rosslyn Chapel.
But beyond the chapel is an even larger mystery. One that links the music the chapel contains to Norway’s mysterious Hessdalen lights, and beyond that to Saturn and to the stars. Lucy’s discoveries catapult her into a parallel universe connected to our own by means of resonance and sound, where a newly emerging world trembles on the edge of disaster. As realities divide, her mission in this new world is revealed and she finds herself part of a love story that will span the galaxy.
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Genre - Young Adult SF
Rating - PG
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