Ian Johnstone - The Bell Between Worlds

“The thoughts that brought me here are forgotten. My dreams are lost to me. My one hope is that I might survive.”

SYLAS HESITATED FOR A moment, unsure what to do, then flung himself back on to the mattress, drawing the pillow over his head. Even that resonated with the deep, low moan and the mattress shook beneath him.

He thought the world was coming to an end: that some great earthquake had struck the town or some gigantic volcano was at this very moment pouring rivers of lava into the streets and pelting the town with a downpour of rock.

“Stop! Please stop!” he shouted into the mattress, but he couldn’t even hear his own voice.

For what seemed like a minute the noise continued relentlessly, tearing at his eardrums. But then it seemed to ease slightly. And then a little more. The wail was definitely fading now – becoming more bearable.

As it eased, Sylas realised that it was not a horrifying sound, the sound of war cannons or buildings crashing down. Rather it was a solitary, immense, dolorous chime. Its voice was metallic and hollow and it rang rather than screamed. The more the noise faded and his ears recovered, the more it came to resemble the single dying note of an enormous bell.

Sylas pushed his bedding away and sat upright again. As he tried to control his fear, he became sure that the noise was coming from outside, from the window. He stood up and edged slowly towards it, dragging his bare toes over the comforting, familiar roughness of the floorboards. The curtains were blowing wildly in the wind, flashing bright in the passing headlights, and he found himself wondering why the cars hadn’t stopped.

As he reached the sill, the sound of the phantom bell once again reached a deafening pitch. He closed his eyes, fearing what he was about to see. Gripping the base of the window frame in his cold hands, he swallowed hard, then drew himself forward.

Everything looked normal. The traffic still sent shafts of light into the sky and thick, acrid pollution into the air. The road bustled with cars: a jostling mass of white, red and blinking orange lights. Rain was falling, and Sylas could see it glistening on the black street below. But the chime of the bell pervaded the night – immense, unstoppable – drowning out any other noise.

He searched for the source, looking past the road and the housing estate on the other side, out to the pinprick lights on the towering chimneys at the edge of the town. He looked through the fog of gases that they spewed into the sky.

Finally his eyes rested on the dark hills in the distance.

“Impossible,” he said to himself, “that’s miles away.”

There seemed no way that a sound could pass so far across the hubbub of a town, with its clamorous factories and riotous roads, but Sylas was certain. He squinted towards the dark horizon and listened to the chime slowly fading away, transfixed by its mysterious power.

Finally the noise of the road became audible and brought with it some sense of normality. His earlier thought came back to him – why had nothing stopped? Why was everything carrying on as normal? His eyes turned to the cars that flew past, the drivers apparently unaware of anything extraordinary; to the occasional person rushing along the street, huddling under an umbrella; to a tramp in dark, ragged clothes standing in a puddle. No one seemed to have heard the sound.

It was as if the bell was ringing only for him.

Suddenly the room shook and the curtains flew into the room. His ears felt as though they were being pierced with needles and a blast of rain hammered into his face. He wanted to scream, but the air had rushed from his lungs.

It was happening again.

Sylas threw his hands over his ears, but that had little effect – it was as though his very bones were vibrating with the sound of the bell. He shut his eyes and tried to focus his mind, but the aftershock hummed in his skull and shattered his thoughts.

He slid down below the window and wrapped his arms round his head, rocking backwards and forwards. He wondered if he was going to die, or worse, if this was the end of all things.

But slowly, too slowly, the noise began to subside. He had no idea how long it took, but finally the timbers beneath his feet ceased their shuddering and the wall at his back became still.

Frightened as he was, Sylas pushed himself up and leaned out of the window to see if anything had changed. He looked along the length of the street, across to the houses and over them to the town, but again the world seemed unaware of the strange chime.

And yet he had the inexplicable sense that something was out of place, as if he was looking at the world through a distorted windowpane.

Then he saw it. His eyes were fixed on the sphere of orange light around one of the electric streetlamps. He could see thousands of tiny raindrops falling from the dark night sky, but there was something wrong. The rain was not falling straight down, but at a steep angle to the ground, as though being carried on a high wind.

There was no wind.

His eyes shifted from one streetlamp to the next all the way up the street and, sure enough, the rain was the same everywhere: it was being drawn towards the source of the sound. As he watched and the sound gradually waned, the rain returned to a normal, vertical path. As the noise died, its hold over the tiny drops weakened and fell to nothing.

Then the chime struck again.

He recoiled and covered his ears, but forced himself to stand at the window and watch. As the shock hit his room, the rain was driven back, away from the hills, sending another cold, painful blast into his face. He tried with all his might to keep his eyes open and after the impact of the chime he saw the rainfall gradually swing about, once again sweeping towards the source of the sound. The long note of the bell was drawing it in.

Drawing it towards what?

His thoughts came to him in fragments, but somehow he managed to piece them together: something magical was happening. His mind went to the dark corridors of the Shop of Things, the beautiful birds flying without strings, the strange shifting runes of the Samarok. He turned and peered across the room at the Samarok glistening on the trapdoor. Suddenly Mr Zhi’s words came rushing back to him.

“The Samarok is yours, and its journey of discovery will be yours too. Only you will know when that journey has begun, and where it is taking you.”

Surely he couldn’t have meant this? But then Sylas thought about the street outside – everyone else just carrying on as though they could not hear the bell...

“Only you will know...” he murmured.

Could it be that somehow the bell was calling to him, drawing him in, like the rain? But even as he started to believe that it might just be true, his thoughts returned to his mother – surely he should be looking for her, not following some bell? That was the only journey that mattered now.

But Mr Zhi had made it sound as though this ‘journey’ had everything to do with her.

“I’ll try to understand,” Sylas had said.

“... that is all your mother would ask.”

He looked around the room, at the papers strewn across the floorboards, at the kites scattered and broken. The empty shell of his sanctuary seemed even more lifeless than before, now riddled with questions and deceits. There was nothing here to keep him, nothing that made sense to him any more. All that lay ahead of him now was his search for his mother and the journey to understand the Samarok. Somehow these journeys were one and the same. And the bell was the beginning of it all.