The Second Forever, page 7
Later, when they had eaten, Foreclaw sat the two children down with a serious look on his face. ‘It is actually fortunate that you have come early,’ he began. ‘The way things are, every day we can save is good.’
‘Yes,’ said Festival. ‘I noticed how the water had risen since I left. It seems to be coming up faster and faster.’
‘I think it is,’ said Foreclaw. ‘But for all the floods in my world, and all the drought in yours, and all the pain and chaos they have brought, there is an even greater problem.’
‘How could there be?’ said Festival. ‘Millions of people are going to die, maybe even everyone! What could be worse than that?’
‘What happens after that,’ said the old man. ‘After they have passed away. Even now, as people die of old age or disease or from accidents, the disaster is too great to comprehend.’
‘What are you talking about?’ said Peter. ‘When you die, that’s it.’
‘No,’ said Foreclaw. ‘It isn’t.’
‘What, you mean heaven and hell and all that stuff?’ said Festival. ‘I don’t believe any of that.’
‘No, no, it’s not like those stories,’ said Foreclaw. ‘It’s much bigger than that. It’s not life after death. It’s life during life, from the instant you are conceived until the last seconds and the final act.’
The more Foreclaw tried to explain, the more confused the children became until the old man finally sat down, buried his head in his hands and said softly, ‘I will have to show you.’
‘Show us what?’ said Peter.
‘The Hourglasses.’
‘Hourglasses?’
‘It’s like a library, but where there would be books there are hourglasses,’ said Foreclaw. ‘Millions upon millions of them – one for every living being on earth, not just humans, but every creature that draws breath.
‘The two of you, me, your parents – absolutely everyone. Even Darkwood, though his hourglass has turned black, making the sand inside invisible, not that it moves anyway,’ Foreclaw continued. ‘There is an hourglass for every single living creature, not just humans, and when one of them dies, their hourglass . . . No, I have to take you, even though it is forbidden for anyone apart from the Warden to ever go there. It is so secret that it doesn’t even have a name, but these are desperate times when rules must take second place.’
‘What’s the point of it?’ said Festival. ‘I mean, what are these hourglasses for?’
‘They count the passing of time,’ said Foreclaw.
‘I’ve never heard of them,’ said Peter.
‘Nor have I,’ said Festival.
‘Almost no one has,’ said Foreclaw. ‘The Warden is the only person there. When he was appointed to the job, he had to read the book to become immortal so he could watch over everyone else as the centuries passed without his own time passing.’
Foreclaw explained that since Peter and Festival had destroyed the original book, the Warden, who was supposed to be there forever, had begun to age. He had been old to start with and was now close to death. ‘And when he dies, there will be no one to guard the Hourglasses and all life will slowly fade away.’
‘So why doesn’t Darkwood become the Warden?’ said Peter. ‘Then there would be no risk of him dying.’
‘True,’ said Foreclaw. ‘And in the beginning he would have, but as time has passed, or in his case, refused to pass, it has eaten away at him and now his heart has turned against him. Darkwood wants to destroy everything in the hope that it will destroy him too.’
This was all too far-fetched for Peter and Festival to believe. It sounded like yet another fantasy religion made up to explain life, more like an exotic gothic fairy-story than something real. And even if there were such a place as the Hourglasses, what would it matter if it all stopped? It would hardly mean everyone would suddenly drop dead. If you destroyed all the books that had been written about something, that wouldn’t destroy the thing itself. It wouldn’t make any difference.
‘I can see you don’t believe me,’ said Foreclaw. ‘But when I take you there and show you the devastation, you will have no doubts about re-creating the book.’
‘Can’t someone else just become the new Warden?’ said Festival.
Peter was about to tell Foreclaw that they had already re-written the book, but then he remembered his grandfather’s advice about being very careful who he trusted and said nothing. He noticed that Festival had said nothing either.
‘But this is only a tiny part of the problem. We need the river to flow again,’ said Foreclaw. ‘Come, we have talked enough. I must not put off taking you there, but it’s difficult. What we are about to do is so forbidden that I am afraid.’
‘Tell me something,’ said Festival. ‘If this place is so secret like you say it is, how come you know about it?’
‘I am a direct descendant of the Warden,’ said Foreclaw. ‘His last living relative. I am the safety net.’
‘So if this Warden person does die of old age, then you could take over?’ said Peter.
‘I could, but as I said, I am his last descendant, and I am old and ageing too,’ said Foreclaw.
‘That’s easy to fix,’ said Peter. ‘When we re-create the book, you can read it.’
‘True,’ said Foreclaw. ‘But live or die, you will see there is a far greater problem than the death of the Warden.’
‘What’s that?’ said Peter.
‘The drought. You will see.’ Foreclaw hesitated. He had said he would take the two of them to the Hourglasses, but now he stood by the door, his hand on the knob and a look of fear in his eyes.
‘What’s the matter?’ said Peter.
‘I, er . . . I, er,’ the old man muttered and fell silent.
The children waited and finally Foreclaw began to speak.
‘As I said, no living person is supposed to know that the Hourglasses even exist and I have broken that rule,’ he said. ‘Now I am actually talking about taking you there. It is all so wrong.’
‘You think you’ll get into trouble,’ said Peter.
‘Yes.’
‘Who from?’ said Festival. ‘If no one except you knows about any of this, who is there to get in trouble with?’
‘Why, that is true,’ said Foreclaw, brightening up. ‘I never thought of that. It’s just that from my earliest days when my father told me everything, he said over and over again that I could never tell anyone about it, not even my own mother. It was the one all-powerful unbreakable rule he burnt into my brain. But like you said, no one will ever know.’
‘Leave Syracuse here,’ he added. ‘She will wait for you.’
The cat, curled up by the fire, briefly opened an eye as they left and then went back to sleep.
Peter, Festival and Foreclaw walked out onto the top balcony and looked across the rising water. The last of the island had vanished beneath the waves; the dense clouds that hung over it had almost gone too, leaving a faint blur of white sitting on the water.
‘That is where we have to go,’ Festival said, pointing towards the mist.
Although the water had risen and driven people into the upper levels that had previously been too dangerous to visit, they had moved up in such large numbers that they had overwhelmed the dangers and the runaways and misfits who, in turn, had moved to a level above. Now they were all together on the one level below this one, unable to go any higher since the Gold Lady had followed Peter and Festival up here and sealed the single entrance so that it could never be opened again.
As they came out of Foreclaw’s door, they could see the crazy Gold Lady far around the gallery, poring over the spine of a crumbling book with her magnifying glass.
‘How do we get down?’ said Peter. ‘The old lady blasted the stairs with dynamite and the whole wall collapsed into the gap.’
‘We do not go down,’ said Foreclaw. ‘We go up.’
The children looked up. There was no up. The only thing above them was the vast dome of the roof. The sky that had shone so brightly the last time Peter had been there was now weak and grey, lost on the other side of the thick layer of dust that had collected on the glass. There were tracks in the dust where birds had died and slid down the surface.
The dust was still falling, and as each week passed the sky grew darker until one day Festival’s whole world would be in permanent night. Their world would not only be drowned, but every living plant would shrivel and die, too. And it didn’t bear thinking about what would happen then, when the desperate characters on the gallery below had total darkness to hide in.
They were so high above that Peter could reach up and touch the glass. ‘There is no up,’ he said. ‘We’re on the top level. Look, here is the roof.’
‘I would have thought by now,’ Foreclaw replied, ‘you would have learned that what you can see is not always everything there is.’
He took a key from his pocket and put it into his own front door. Peter assumed he was locking it, but then he realised that the keyhole was in the wrong place. Normally, the door handle was on the left side of the door with the keyhole below it. You turned the key. You turned the handle, pulled it towards you and the door opened. But this keyhole, which neither of the children had noticed before, was on the right of the door, and instead of pulling, Foreclaw pushed and it opened inwards.
‘See?’ he said.
But rather than being back inside Foreclaw’s apartment, they had entered a dark corridor. This was a place that had been deserted for years. It had outlived the spiders and cobwebs that come to abandoned places. The minute specks of dead skin and smaller insects had long been eaten and re-eaten and the spiders had starved away. It was the most uninviting place Peter had ever seen. Not terrifying, though it was as still and cold as death, but it felt as though he wasn’t wanted there and the air smelled very old, the same as the air behind the broken panel in the wall of the cat mummy’s room.
Foreclaw lit a candle and led the two children towards a set of stairs at the end of the corridor. As they walked along, the air was filled with sudden flashes as the candle flame caught the abandoned cobwebs in little bursts of stars and puffs of smoke. They climbed the stairs to another door, where Foreclaw stopped.
‘I am afraid,’ he said. ‘I have never been beyond this point before. I know we have to go, but I am not sure I can.’
‘How do you know the Warden is dying, then?’ said Festival. ‘Maybe he’s immortal, like Darkwood.’
‘He came to me three months ago,’ said Foreclaw. ‘He was so old and bent so low he could not lift his head to look at me. He was so weak I had to carry him back to this place. He asked me to take him into his room, but I was too scared to go. Before I opened the door, I closed my eyes and just pushed him through. I know it was wrong and he was so frail. He could be lying dead on the other side.’
‘There’s only one way to find out,’ said Peter, and he opened the door.
Nothing any of them had experienced in person or in a book or in a movie or even in their dreams had prepared them for what they saw.
Peter, Festival and Foreclaw stood open-mouthed and stared silently at the scene before them. They had walked onto a small balcony that overlooked the largest room they had ever seen or thought possible, so immense that ‘room’ was a totally inadequate word, and yet it was a room, not a vast cave, for the walls had been built by man.
Thousands of columns, stretching further than the eye could see, supported a vaulted roof, which was almost blurred by distance where millions upon millions of hourglasses hung down, each on a slender rope. Some were so small they were no larger than insects and others were larger than a man, but most of them, the ones Peter assumed belonged to humans, were the size of a human head. Light – it was impossible to tell where it was coming from – caught in the hourglasses and emerged as rainbows, each splitting into yet more rainbows as they passed through more hourglasses. It was spellbinding. The place was like a cathedral, but a cathedral that had been magnified a thousand times. Yet there were no hymns – just an endless scream of breaking glass that surrounded them.
Their eyes and ears were so full, there was no room for words and nor were there any words big enough to fit. Festival reached out and took Peter’s hand and it brought them both back as close to reality as it was possible to get.
‘They must have been giants,’ Peter finally said.
‘Who?’ said Festival.
‘The people who built this,’ Peter replied. ‘I mean, if every person in the world all worked at the same time, it would have taken hundreds of years to complete.’
‘It did,’ said Foreclaw, who had fallen to his knees and bowed his head.
Along the whole length of the cavern, hourglasses came free of their ropes to fall to the ground, shattering into thousands of pieces, throwing shards and sand everywhere. They fell singly and in groups, some slower than others, as if the life they represented was fighting to survive, but even the most reluctant came to the same end, filling the air with the sound of breaking glass. They came down in a constant and never-ending rain.
‘Lives ending,’ said Foreclaw. ‘Not just humans, but every species on earth. Though if you look up, you will see new hourglasses replace them as fresh lives begin.’
‘The whole earth?’ said Peter. ‘I mean, my world where I live, or just this world here inside the museum.’
‘All of it. And every living thing from an ant to a whale,’ said Foreclaw.
And all the time, far above them, the ceiling was covered in little flashes of light like tiny stars that sparkled for a split second then faded, leaving a new hourglass in its place. The procession was endless – the falling hourglasses, the new stars, never in equal numbers of course, but neither with more than a split second’s pause. Now and then two hourglasses would fall side by side as twins passed away, but then new stars would appear in twos or threes.
The floor was covered in shattered glass, half-buried in piles of sand. The debris was piling up on itself, and every new crash made little landslides of shards.
Here, there was no rain. The air was dry. This was the only place in Festival’s world where it never rained.
‘That is the problem,’ said Foreclaw. ‘Beneath all the broken hourglasses there is a river, the River Styx, that recycles life. It carries the dead away, or rather, it used to. That was the river you travelled alongside, out on the island. When it began to run the other way, it took the water from here and, as you can see, the dead are trapped, unable to leave.’
‘Where is the Warden?’ said Festival.
‘I imagine he is up here somewhere. If he were anywhere down there, amongst the dead, the falling glass would have cut him to ribbons,’ said Foreclaw.
The three walked down a spiral staircase, away from the balcony. The lower steps were now buried in glass, but halfway down, cut into the wall, was a door that led into a small room. This was where the Warden lived, though lived was perhaps a rather ambitious word to describe it.
‘You . . .’ the Warden began, ‘you have cut it fine.’
‘We are here now,’ said Foreclaw.
There was a loud noise as an hourglass crashed onto the stairs right outside the door. The Warden was dead.
‘Does that mean you’re the Warden now?’ said Peter.
‘Yes,’ said Foreclaw, ‘it does. I must stay here until I die, and it means you two will probably be the last living souls I will ever see.’
‘Well, you didn’t exactly have many visitors before, did you?’ said Festival.
‘No. That’s true, and I liked it that way,’ said Foreclaw sadly. ‘But it’s different now. Before, I could go out into the world whenever I wanted to and there was always the chance of unexpected visitors like you two. Now that’s all gone. No one can come here.’
‘We can,’ said Peter.
‘Yes, if you give us the key, we can come back and see you,’ said Festival.
‘But it’s forbidden,’ said Foreclaw. ‘I told you that. No one is supposed to know this place even exists.’
‘We know. And once again,’ said Peter, ‘who forbids it? If no one but the three of us know about this place, who is there to say we can’t return?’
‘So give us the key,’ said Festival.
‘No, I must not,’ said Foreclaw.
‘But we will have to come back here after we’ve re-created the book,’ Festival said, just in case Peter’s grandfather had been mistaken and Foreclaw was not entirely to be trusted, or maybe there were hidden ears listening. ‘So you can read it and remain safe here forever.’
‘Safe,’ said Foreclaw. ‘Oh yes, in the same way a bird locked in a tiny cage is safe. No cat can get it, but it can never fly again.’
‘Not only that,’ Peter added, ‘this will be the perfect place to hide the book.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Foreclaw, and handed him the key, as well as the other one that opened the door into his apartment.
Peter had been holding his breath and now let it out with a sigh of relief. He would have been prepared to take the key by force if he had to. ‘Why does there need to be a warden here?’ said Peter. ‘Once the river starts to run again, does it not just carry the broken hourglasses away?’
‘Most of the time,’ said Foreclaw. ‘Until there is a great disaster that kills everyone and everything all at once. Then many hourglasses will fall within a short time, forming a dam across the river. The Warden must clear away the dead so life can continue unbroken.’
‘Is there anything you would like us to get from your apartment?’ said Festival.
