Chapter 11

  Jimothy

  Jimothy stepped through the door, tripped, and flailed at the empty air. His hand at once found something to steady himself on. When he regained his footing and looked to see what he had caught himself on, he saw nothing. Yet his hand pressed against something. Jimothy braced himself with the cane, removed his hand, saw a reddish handprint suspended in the air before him.

  He adjusted his grip on his cane and leaned in for a closer look. It was his own handprint. He checked the Line and saw that the handprint was not real. Nor was the floor he stood on, or anything surrounding him. Strange. It looked real. It felt real. But he knew better than to trust himself with these things. Only he and Hazel were real here.

  He stood on a surface of colored glass at the top of some tall building. The lack of guardrails concerned him; though he wasn’t particularly afraid of heights in themselves, he was afraid of falling from them. Maybe that was the same thing. He wasn’t sure. But if he fell off the edge of this place, he would have several seconds to think about it before he hit the ground.

  The sky around him was blank–as white as a sheet of fresh canvas. No sun. A landscape composed of dull grays and whites met this sky in all directions. It looked like an unfinished sketch of a place, detailed but abandoned before coloration. It made him sad, somehow. Maybe God had started this place, but decided partway through that it wasn’t worth finishing.

  It also made him excited, in the way that blank canvas always made him excited. He couldn’t help but color in the blankness with his imagination, and he spent several minutes staring out in all directions painting the blank scene in his mind, grinning.

  Hazel barked behind him. The dog pranced toward Jimothy with something in his mouth. Jimothy reached out for it, but Hazel pulled away, crouched down playfully, and jogged back and forth. He had never learned that Jimothy couldn’t put up a challenge when it came to take-the-toy.

  Jimothy stopped trying to take it from Hazel. The dog dropped the thing almost as soon as Jimothy appeared to lose interest. Hazel then reached out with a paw and nudged it closer to Jimothy, which was new behavior for him. Character development.

  Jimothy stooped pterodactyl-like, and would have fallen even with the aid of his cane had Hazel not appeared as a brace against his left leg. Jimothy grabbed the thing and straightened. He held an off-white hexagon, split six ways with a little picture on each slice. Two of the pictures glowed faintly in green and gold. The thing had a leather cord attached to it, but Jimothy put it in his pocket rather than around his neck.

  Narrow stairs, without an exterior guard or rail of any kind, wound down along the outside of the building from the edge of the platform. Jimothy looked at them dubiously. A death trap.

  The maroon handprint still hovered in the air above the glass, right near the door he had stumbled out of. Jimothy looked at his own hand. He reached out with his index finger and traced a thick line like a handrail, following the curve of the stairs down and out of sight. He imagined it a shade of blue in his mind. The line hung in the air when he had finished. His eyes told him that it existed in front of him, but Jimothy had no idea whether he was actually seeing it or only still imagining it. He checked the Line. It, like everything else here, was unreal. Just a dream.

  This gave him confidence. He took hold of the blue handrail. It was cool, smooth, anchored firmly in the air. Hazel whined behind him.

  Jimothy turned to look at Hazel. “Photography,” he explained. Then he descended into the lighthouse.

  Below the stained-glass platform was a large glassy chamber. Jimothy knew well what lighthouses looked like on the outside, but he had no idea about the light fixture within. He thought it was maybe supposed to be some kind of giant flashlight. This was not what he found in the topmost room of the lighthouse. Instead, a big clear tube extended from the floor to the ceiling. It was empty. It rose to the stained-glass platform above, and would obviously light the glass up from below when illuminated. That would be cool. Jimothy imagined himself up there at night with all the colored light coming up from below. His own shadows would be all over himself. He imagined Elizabeth dancing on it. She would look cool dancing through a bunch of lights. He filed that away for a potential painting idea.

  And would it shoot up into the sky like a six-color searchlight? Yes, it would. And what about the black part of the circle? Had he ever seen black stained glass? Yes, of course he had. It didn’t draw attention to itself, but it still had to be there to make everything else work.

  All six of the walls here were windows, so crystal clear that they provided an easy panoramic view of the exterior. At night, out there in the darkness, white light would stream from the top of this lighthouse, circling, circling, and a column of colored light would shoot up to the stars. It would be visible for miles and miles. He approached one window and drew a forest-green smiley face on it. How long would this color last? He erased it and did not question how he had done so.

  It seemed like something was supposed to be in that glass chamber in the center of the room. Something bright. He would keep an eye out for something to put in there. In order to not forget, he wrote it on the palm of his left hand in bright blue. This color thing could be pretty handy, he thought.

  Minutes later, he would realize that he had accidentally thought of a pun. ‘ Handy ,’ because it had something to do with his hand. Isaac would like that one.

  Jimothy descended further into the lighthouse. A spiraling staircase wound along the inner wall to the bottom. It passed through five or six floors, most of them consisting of a single tall room. Sizeable gaps of empty space allowed Jimothy to see parts of the next few levels just by looking down as he descended the stairs. Walkways extended across empty space from the stairs to the floor of each level. Possibly it had been designed this way so that he could create a slide and just slide all the way down to the bottom. He swept his hand in an arc, visualizing a gently sloped pumpkin-orange slide with nice high walls so he wouldn’t fall. And there it was.

  He stood for a moment partway down the topmost flight of stairs, gripping his cane in one hand and the yellow handrail he had made in the other. He could not decide whether to trust the slide. Hazel, who had been gleefully teleporting at random all over the interior of the lighthouse, solved it for Jimothy by testing it out. He appeared at the top and then sat with sudden dignity as he began a smooth descent to the next floor. When the slide curved, Hazel looked back up at Jimothy as though to confirm that it was safe.

  Jimothy stepped in with care, and at once fell because he had forgotten to add texture to the slide, and it was, therefore, slippery. He slid all the way to the bottom, gaining confidence as he went that the slide would not vanish.

  One floor was empty. One contained a lot of couches and comfy chairs around a few tables. One (the topmost) housed a collection of painting supplies: canvas, easels, shelves and shelves of paints, brushes, blades, glazes. One of them toward the bottom had compartmentalized areas: a bedroom, a bathroom, a little doghouse for Hazel. Jimothy understood this to be his personal place. It looked nice and cozy.

  All the floors came with clear, thick windows which let in the colorless light from outside. The ground floor was the tallest area, probably thirty feet high, and noticeably wider than the uppermost floors. The stone here, like in the rest of the lighthouse, was dark gray, but like everywhere else, beams of light cut through the gloom from tall windows. Jimothy noticed at once that these beams of light came down at all different angles. Where was the light coming from? There was no sun outside.

  In the center of the ground floor lay a small hexagonal pool of water, level with the stone floor. A chunk of clear crystal floated in the center. This crystal was roughly the size of a plastic water bottle, with hard, flat edges. It pulsed with a faint light, glittering on the still water. Jimothy leaned way over and risked falling into the pool, but he could just barely not reach it. After some thought, he created a simple pincer out of two blades of colored light. Saffron. He grabbed the pincer out of the air and tried opening and closing it a few times. He reached out with the long pincers and after a few attempts, one of which knocked the crystal onto its side, picked it up. Faint ripples from this action creased the surface of the pool.

  He held it up to a beam of light that slanted through the gloom. The crystal refracted a scattering of rainbows that twitched with every minute movement. The abrupt beauty of it, a sudden rainbow brilliance in the gloomy chamber, transfixed Jimothy. But after a moment, he got the sense that something was amiss. He had always taken special notice of how light looked and worked. This crystal reflected more light than it should have.

  Even when he removed it into shadow, it reflected illumination from an unseen source, and faint rainbows still danced around him. It didn’t make sense, but that was fine with Jimothy. It was still beautiful.

  He took it with him as he explored the bottom floor of the lighthouse. The stone floor was barren and cold, the walls unadorned, and a single door opened outside. It had a thick wooden board laid across some bars for a lock. He tried lifting the board, but it was far too heavy. He puzzled over this for a while, then created a plane of cerulean light under the board and raised it up in his imagination. The board rose easily, but tipped toward him once it was free of its holdings. Jimothy cried out in surprise and stumbled back as the board fell.

  Hazel came out of nowhere and tackled the board in mid-air. They both disappeared. A heavy, hollow thud reverberated through the floor from behind him. He didn’t need to turn around to know that it came from the board falling.

  “Thanks, Hazel!” He tried to pet Hazel as the exuberant dog ran circles around him. He noticed now that Hazel did not have bad breath. Did angels need to eat? He hoped so. Otherwise it might be sad for them if there was good food around. He knew he would be sad in that situation. Did Callie have to eat? He should ask Elizabeth.

  He checked all of his pockets before remembering for probably the thirtieth time that his phone was most likely destroyed in a fire. It was only him and Hazel in this lighthouse, as far as he had seen. Up at the top he had seen nothing but wilderness outside. No other people, and certainly not his friends. Was he alone again? He hated being alone. It was scary being alone in a strange place.

  Hazel nuzzled him under the arm as if to remind him that he wasn’t all alone. Or maybe Hazel just wanted to be pet. That was more likely.

  Jimothy made a chair for himself out of white almost without thinking about it and sat down on it to consider. After some time, he decided that probably what he should do was wait for the others. He could go out and explore, and he intended to do that, but Elizabeth had also gone through a door, right? She must be around here somewhere. And if she was, then maybe Kate and Isaac and Eric and even Heidi were too. Jimothy knew that if Isaac and Eric and Kate and Elizabeth and even Heidi were around, then they would be sure to find him eventually, because they were his good friends and they would all want to make sure he was okay.

  But he did want to go outside and see what was out there. He stood up from the chair, and it disappeared. He turned to the heavy wooden door, put his hand to it, and then heard a small splash from behind him. Hazel growled at something in the direction of the pool.

  Jimothy felt a ripple of fear, but he looked at the pool anyway. The water, which had before been still as glass, quivered. It looked like something was shaking the water, but Jimothy felt no vibrations. Strange! He kept his distance.

  The pool, partly lit by narrowly slanted light from the tall windows, showed no signs of disturbance apart from the water. Ripples emanated from the edge and converged into a tiny maelstrom in the center where the crystal had been.

  Jimothy looked at Hazel for clues about how to react to this. Hazel, head lowered, fangs bared, glowered at the pool in suspicion.

  A wave splashed over the edge of the pool. The water spread strangely on the floor, making a pattern. After this, all was still. Jimothy looked at the wet shape on the floor. He walked all around it, but could not make sense of it. A picture? A complex word in an unknown language?

  The crystal in his hand pulsed softly with a warm light as he abandoned this inquiry and returned to the door. He decided to remember that shape, just in case. He made it appear in a cool aquamarine color on the floor nearby so it would still be there after the water dried.

  The heavy door swung open easily when he pushed it. Open, it looked like a square portal into a gray world. He put the crystal in his pocket, stepped through, and with the help of a temporary handrail, descended five broad steps one-by-one to a path of pale dirt. Hazel, who had zoomed out the door like a white rocket as soon as it was open, ran back and forth in the grasses ahead, teleporting at random.

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  Jimothy stood at the foot of the lighthouse, which rose like a monolith behind him, intensely dark against a pale, colorless sky. Flat plains stretched ahead, rising into hills in the far distance. The horizon where colorless sky met colorless land was hazy and indistinct.

  The path before him, flat and dusty and wide enough for several people to walk side-by-side, ran to his right and left. To the left, scatterings of pale trees scratched the blank sky maybe a mile off. Jimothy knew by remembering the view from the top of the lighthouse that hilly woodlands lay that way. Flat grasslands and empty sky extended to his right, punctuated by occasional rock formations like twisted little replicas of his own lighthouse, but blank and empty of color like everything else. He decided to go this way.

  He noticed, not far from the lighthouse, that he did not appear to have a shadow. Nor, upon inspection, did the lighthouse. He found no sun anywhere in the sky above, so he guessed that made sense, but he soon discovered that there was something unnerving about not having a shadow.

  The colorlessness of his surroundings oppressed him further every minute that he proceeded down the path. It looked so wrong. Forgotten. Sad. Empty. Unfinished. Lost. Even…dangerous? Yes, because it was clearly incomplete, and unfinished things were even worse than broken things. Michael had told Jimothy once that with people, things were never black and white. It was all shades of gray. Jimothy had said that was wrong; shades of gray weren’t different and beautiful enough. But one time Jimothy had seen a person who did look gray to him, always the same, always small and sad and quiet, and he’d told Michael and Michael had said that this person probably wasn’t having a good time. Not having a good time all the time? Jim had asked. Michael had explained what depression was, and Jim had lain in bed all night thinking about it, and the next week he painted a painting for the person even though he didn’t really know her. Then he had given it to Mike to take it to her, and it made Mike cry and he told Jim that the person had gone away, but he’d take the painting anyway, and this, as far as Jim knew, was the only painting Michael had not photographed. Jimothy remembered trying to imagine seeing the world in gray. It had been sad and empty. It made him think that his friends and the people who loved him were like colors painted on his life, and without them, alone, everything would be gray. Jimothy liked the fact that during the Banana Quest they had each picked a color and kept using it even afterward.

  But this place was the opposite of that. In this place, he didn’t have to imagine a colorless world. In this place, his friends were missing.

  He walked for a while. The trail became rough. It wound around some of the cool rock formations, which looked like crumbly sandstone, and it passed by simple wooden bridges over the occasional steep gully or crack that cut through the plains. At one point, he tripped and put up his arms to shield himself from the fall. His fall stopped, and he realized that once more he had caught himself from falling by creating something for his hands to steady himself on, without thinking about it. This time it was the outline of his arms in navy blue. Seeing the blue was a shock. Just like getting used to grayscale in an old black and white film like Buster Keaton, he had forgotten that colors existed here. He looked at his hands and saw the innate color there. He looked back at the blue imprint in the air and thought about it dissolving. It dissipated into nothing.

  With the tip of his cane, Jimothy tapped the ground and concentrated on imagining a swirl of color spiraling out on the dusty path. This happened in his eyes just as it did in his mind, and vibrant colors bloomed out on the path like drops of watercolor on a wet surface. The colors seemed luridly bright and vibrant against all the pale grayness, so he desaturated them to a chalky pastel. The colors remained even after he ceased concentrating. With the tip of his cane, he stirred the dust. All of it, even the dirt underneath, had changed colors.

  He continued more slowly after this, stopping now and then to colorize things: a rock here, a clump of grass there, an angular chain of color across the path. He discovered that he could remove color as well, resetting things to their original blandness. Complicated patterns and effects like smooth gradients required greater concentration. He did not have to actually touch something to change its color, but it was harder to do at a distance. He discovered that he had limits: when he passed under a natural stone arch that twisted over the road, he tried to make it all sky-blue but could only change a small part of it.

  He became absorbed in the activity of coloring things, and in the joy of discovering what he could do here in this dream. It made him forget the strange melancholy and loneliness of this place.

  It took him a while to notice the shadows. They built up around the edges of things, in corners and cracks. They seeped and creeped in odd clumps and in strange directions. When Jimothy did at last notice, he looked up in surprise at a changed landscape. It was partially in darkness, as though the unseen source of light was fading. What had been a flat gray scene had shifted into high contrast. Dark shadows skewed out at weird angles from the twisted rock formations, they pooled in the ravines and crevices like a liquid, and they crawled across the sky like drops of ink folding out into murky water.

  Jimothy spent some time examining the shadows. He could tell at once that they were incorrect. The angles were at-odds, and they moved and shifted with a life of their own. The longer he watched, the more the shadows unsettled him. Something about the way they moved. They twitched as though struggling with increasing strength as time passed, and they tended to writhe in his direction.

  He saw with surprise that he had come a fair distance from his lighthouse. If night was falling here, he wanted to get back there before it did. The thought of being caught out here among the shadows once they had gathered and increased made his heart pound a little faster. He saw the spots and scatterings of color he had left along the path he had traversed, like rainbow blood from a monster’s wound.

  He began retracing his steps. More and more he tried to look around him as he walked, which for him was a dangerous maneuver. But the shadows grew, and so did the sense of being watched.

  By the time he had made it a third of the way back, he thought he could safely say that night had fallen. Darkness had taken most of the sky over, and shadows shrouded everything below. It wasn’t so much that the light had faded; it was more as if an opposite force had steadily overwhelmed it.

  Here he discovered that besides creating color, he could also make light. This discovery pleased him so much that he stood for a minute enveloped in a pyrotechnic display of his own design. He could create light in any color, but settled at last on warm white light because it made him think of Hazel. He caused it to emanate from the top of his cane, kind-of like the Dark Man. Hazel, who had been keeping close to Jimothy and eyeing the darkness warily as it grew, seemed pleased with the light. Hazel was immune to the shadows. No matter where he went, Jimothy could see him clearly as if he was glowing in the dark. Jimothy was not immune. He had a shadow, and when he held the light in front of him, he thought he could feel his own shadow stirring behind. It gave him shivers. When he turned around as fast as he could, his shadow lingered for a moment before swinging reluctantly around to where it belonged.

  The sky became dark enough that he could no longer see the lighthouse except for a few faint specks from interior lights. He stopped to count them, and that was when he heard something rushing through the grass to his right. Hazel heard it as well and crouched, growling in that direction.

  Jimothy clutched at his cane and nearly fell over with fright. He gazed wide-eyed into the shadows where he had heard the sound, but the light from his cane extended only a few paces. He could do better than that, right?

  Jimothy concentrated, and then squinted as light surged from the tip of his cane, illuminating an area several times larger than before. He held the light aside so it would not blind him and looked out into the field. Small dark shapes fled from the light in quick bounds. A faint hissing, snarling sounded from beyond the light. One small creature stopped at the far edge of the illuminated area and turned to look at Jimothy. Its slanted eyes reflected the light. Instead of disappearing into the dark, it slowly crept along the border of Jimothy’s light like a shark circling its prey. It kept its horrible shining eyes fixed on Jimothy.

  Jimothy whimpered in fear. It had been a mistake to leave the lighthouse.

  Jimothy watched as another creeping figure joined the first, circling along the edge of the light, watching him. He bit his lip and concentrated to try to make the light reach them. The illumination from his cane narrowed into a flashlight-thin beam, blasting the two figures with intense brightness. They screeched and vanished. But this left everything else around Jimothy in darkness again, so he desperately centralized the light. He turned back to the path and there they were, several more crouching figures skittering away.

  Jimothy swallowed and wished with all his heart that Michael was here. Michael or Isaac or Eric or anyone. He didn’t want to be alone here in the dark with monsters. He closed his eyes and saw the Line. Not real. Nothing here was real. A dream. But it felt real. It all felt very real. And maybe it was the kind of dream that he could get hurt in. He stood still on the path, in the middle of a circle of light as though some spotlight shone down from the heavens. But his shadow stretched out away from the light, and Jimothy turned the cane back and forth, making his shadow dance so that those creatures out in the darkness could not use his own shadow as a path to reach him.

  He tried to think, to block out the shapes moving and shuffling at the edge of the light, creeping closer. What would…anyone else do? He thought the lighthouse was safe. He had to get to the lighthouse. But it was so far away! And he couldn’t even see it anymore, except for just a few barely visible pinpricks of light up in the darkness. If only it had some really bright light at the top, like a…like a lighthouse. Then he would be able to see it. Then it would be a beacon of safety in this terrible night.

  He remembered the crystal, its angularity awkward in his pocket. It buzzed with a strange warmth when he touched it, it scattered its radiance all over Jimothy when he drew it out. Horrible cries of pain and fear resounded around him as the monsters in the darkness scurried away to escape the sudden brilliance of the crystal. Jimothy held it up to the darkness where he knew the lighthouse stood, and imagined this crystal, or maybe a bunch of them, in that topmost room. “Oh,” he said. He resolved, if he lived through this night, to find more of these crystals and store them in the lighthouse.

  First, he had to get back. Step by step, the shining crystal held aloft, he made his way back down the path. He nearly fell several times. He did fall once. But although the shadows writhed and shapes scurried in the darkness, they did not approach the light of the crystal. When Jimothy made it shine, it shone as brightly as a small sun.

  Jimothy felt as though he had walked all night by the time he made it to the lighthouse. His legs shook, his arm trembled from the effort of raising the crystal overhead, and his mind was numb from being afraid and alone in the dark. One time, near the end, a large and bold creature of the shadows had leaped out at him like a huge gorilla, and Jimothy in a panic had imagined brilliant streaks of light scouring the thing from existence, which is what happened. This, in its own way, scared Jimothy more than the monsters themselves.

  Once inside the lighthouse, all things seemed well. The pool of water lay still. The interior of the lighthouse was dark, but with the crystal Jimothy could illuminate the entire room. He double-checked the pool, but saw nothing unusual. For a while, he stood in front of the pool and watched the reflections of himself and the crystal in the water.

  Here he discovered that he could channel different colors through the crystal. Whenever he did, the faint vibrations in the crystal changed. He randomly settled on a golden orange as he went to the stairs and began a slow ascent up to the floor of the lighthouse with his room on it.

  name?

  Step by step, up the stairs. He was tired. He should try not to go out at night again. Not alone.

  hello

  Hazel waited for him at the top of each flight of stairs. He looked pretty tuckered out as well. Jimothy made it up to the third floor, the one which had a bedroom and bathroom and kitchen and stuff in it. It had lights too. He turned them on, all the ones he could find. They made shadows, but normal shadows that stayed still, not like the ones outside.

  hear me

  Jimothy started to put the crystal back in his pocket, but hesitated. It might be nice to have it around. But on the other hand…

  ?

  On the other hand…what if someone else was out there in the darkness? What if someone else needed a lighthouse? It was his lighthouse; he was pretty sure. That made him responsible for it. Did that make it his fault if someone got hurt out there because they couldn’t see it?

  need to know

  He needed to know. Wait, what did he need to know? Um, probably, he needed to know whether there were any people out there. Or maybe, whether putting the crystal up at the top would do any good.

  if you can hear me

  Now if they could hear it…wait, hear a lighthouse? Who hears a lighthouse? Jimothy kind-of liked the idea of that, but it probably wouldn’t work as well as a normal lighthouse.

  Jimothy

  Jimothy. Yes, that was his name. What?

  He shook his head. He was really getting tired. But he couldn’t leave people out in the dark. He turned and headed back up the stairs. He could slide back down, after all. “Come on, Hazel,” he said. “A little more.” Hazel looked like he was intently listening to something only he could hear. He did that all the time.

  keep hold

  Jimothy made it to the top room and at once ran into trouble figuring out how to open the case. He searched all around, and at last tried simply touching the glass case with the crystal

  do not let go

  He thought maybe he shouldn’t let go, but it was too late. The glass case pulled the crystal through. Inside, it drifted to the center of the container and rotated there, pulsing with an inner light. Yes, he thought he understood what needed to be done. He also thought that, maybe, he should have kept holding on to the crystal. He didn’t know why he thought that.

  He wanted to remain awake in case other people came in from that horrible darkness, but he had to sleep now. He slid down to his floor, closed the door to his bedroom and collapsed onto his bed. He fell asleep hugging Hazel, who curled up next to him.