Arrivals

"There is nothing a mother will not do for her child. I only learned how completely I meant it the day it cost me the world I knew."

The knock came three times, sharp and deliberate, and every one of them went through me like a blow. I froze with the coffee halfway to my mouth. I'd barely slept — the news, the red jumper hanging on its hook, Sharon's blunt words sitting unanswered on my phone since the night before — and my nerves were already worn down to nothing, so that every sound in the house had become a threat. Three raps on my own front door during the daytime should not have frightened me the way they did.

Another round of them followed, harder, insisting.

My hand shook as I set the cup down, coffee slopping over the rim and spreading across the table, and I left it where it fell. I couldn't take my eyes off the door. Sharon, finally? The police — was this how they came, a knock in the middle of the day, here to ask me why a woman my exact height and colouring had been filmed running from a dead man's house? Or something worse than any of it.

"Mrs. Triffett?" A man's voice, firm, and one I didn't know. "My name is Luke Smith. I need to speak with you about your husband."

The name went through me colder than the knock had. Luke Smith. The name off the news not twelve hours before. The name Nial had underlined twice in his notebook. The man whose house I had broken into, whose dark room had held that thing. Every breath came short and tight. How in God's name had he found me?

"I saw your Facebook post," he went on, steady, pressing. "About Nial and your Dalmatian, Buffy. I know where they are."

The words landed and scattered everything I'd been holding together. Buffy. He'd said Buffy. No one who meant me harm would know to reach for the dog's name — or perhaps that was precisely the trap, but the wanting was already up in my throat, and I found myself moving towards the door, my palm flat against the cool of it.

"How do I know you're telling the truth?" My voice came out thin.

"Check your Facebook page," he said, calm, even. "I'm holding up my phone right now. You can open your own device and verify who I am."

My fingers fumbled the phone out of my pocket. I swiped it open and found the page, my heart going hard against my ribs, and there was my own post — Nial's face smiling up out of it, the plea I'd written beneath — and a new message, waiting in the requests, from a Luke Smith. Sent minutes ago.

It went through me like cold water. He was real, and he was here, on the other side of my door, and he was saying he knew where Nial had gone.

"Sammy?" It came out of me without thought, the mother in me reaching for him before the rest of me had caught up. "Darling, are you still reading?"

Silence.

Something cold opened up in my chest. "Sammy?" Louder now, the panic climbing into it. I left the door, left Luke Smith standing behind it, and went down the hall. He'd been in his room ten minutes ago, cross-legged in his picture books. Ten minutes.

"Sweetheart, answer Mummy!" My voice cracked and came back at me off the walls.

Nothing. No giggle, no rustle of a turning page, no thud of small feet.

I was almost running by the time I reached his door. It stood wide open. The light lay across an empty floor, his books spilled over the bed with their pages bent as though he'd got up in a hurry, and no Sammy anywhere in it.

"No, no, no..." I heard myself saying it over and over as I crossed the room and dropped to my knees to look under the bed. Nothing. The wardrobe next — I hauled the doors wide, half of me still hoping he'd be folded up in there grinning, ready to spring. Only his clothes, swinging on their hangers.

Behind the curtains. Nothing.

"SAMMY!" His name tore out of me and rang through the whole house.

"Your son is safe, Mrs Triffett."

Luke's voice, come from up the hall, level and awful in how calm it was. I spun into the doorway — and there he stood, the man I took to be Luke Smith, tall, heavy through the shoulders, a shaved head catching the light. But it wasn't the look of him that stopped me cold. It was that the front door was shut behind him. The door I'd left locked. The lock I'd checked twice.

"How did you…" The room seemed to draw in around me.

"He's with the babysitter," Luke said, as though it settled the matter.

"Babysitter?" The word broke coming out. I had never in my life hired a babysitter.

"A teenage girl," he said, and there was nothing in his voice, nothing at all. "She said she was from your school. Very concerned about him, she was. Said she needed to take him somewhere safe."

I already knew exactly who he meant, and everything else fell away with it — the how of him, the locked door, the terrible calm — because it was no mystery to me at all. Not a babysitter. Not some girl. A student from my own school who had decided my son belonged to her. Serena. Serena had Sammy. Serena, who had let herself into my house in the dark, who had stood dripping in my bathroom and called us a family, who had been the shadow over every one of that boy's broken nights — Serena had walked my son out of his own backyard.

"No…" It came up out of me from somewhere deep and animal. I had his shirt in my fists before I knew I'd moved, twisting the fabric, hauling him towards me. "Where are they?" My voice shook with all of it at once. "What has she done with my son?"

He didn't pull back, didn't so much as tense. If anything he looked almost sorry for me. "They're safe in Clivilius," he said, so calm the words barely seemed to mean a thing.

"Clivilius?" The word was nonsense in my mouth. "Stop talking in riddles! Where is my son?"

"I can show you," he said, dropping his voice. "But first, you need to understand—everything you think you know about reality is about to change."

Something in that broke the last of my composure. "You're working with her, aren't you?" The terror came up fresh and total. "Serena sent you!"

"No," he said, firm, shaking his head. "I found them in the backyard." Something moved across his face, close to sympathy. "I can take you to them, through the portal, but we have to move quickly."

I stared at him, dragging in one shallow breath after another. Hope and horror tore at each other in me. My mind scrabbled for something solid, something that made sense, and found none of it. A portal. Clivilius. Words out of a fever dream, and he said them like facts.

Maybe I'd finally broken. Maybe this was the place where a mind gave out under everything mine had carried — Nial gone, Serena, the thing in that dark room — and started building somewhere else to be. Maybe none of it was real.

His hand hovered near mine. "Please, Jenny. I can take you to him. But you have to trust me."

Trust. The word was almost funny. Trust had died the morning I woke to find Nial gone. What was left of it went when Serena let herself into my home. Whatever survived that had rotted away in the reeking dark of that dark room. And this was the man at the centre of all of it, standing in my hallway asking me to hand him the last thing I had.

"You're not leaving this doorway until you tell me exactly what's happening to my family," I said, and the steel in it surprised me.

His face gave a little, though the urgency in him never let up. "Your husband is in a different place. A place called Clivilius. Sammy and the babysitter are with him now."

I searched his face for the lie, desperate for it, because a lie I could fight. But there was none to find — only that same relentless urgency, and under it something worse, something that looked horribly like a man telling the truth about the impossible.

"If you're lying to me…" The threat came out jagged, unfinished.

"Every second we wait puts them further beyond reach," he said, almost gently. "Will you trust me enough to save your family?"

I got my phone up and unlocked it with a shaking hand. "I'm calling the police," I said — the reflex of it, the thing a person reaches for.

But even as I said it, the hollowness of it opened up under me. There was no one to call. The one detective who had ever listened to me was gone, vanished off the evening news. And to every other officer in this state I wasn't a frightened mother — I was one of two women they were hunting, the shorter one, the fair one, the red jumper on the hook by my door. If I dialled those three numbers I wasn't calling for help. I was handing myself in. There was no one out there in the whole world coming to save me, or my son. There was only me, and a wall, and this man.

"Jenny." His voice came firm and low, and somehow it stopped my hand where it was. "Look."

He held it up in his palm — a small, plain thing, sleek, no bigger than a USB stick, so ordinary it was almost an insult to everything happening in that hallway. He pressed his thumb to it.

Light burst out of it — a hard bright bloom that shot across the hall and struck the wall opposite, and where it hit, the wall stopped being a wall. The colour spread like something poured, bleeding out across the plaster in slow rings until the whole of it was a churn of colours, turning over and over on themselves, throwing soft moving light across the floor and the ceiling. There was a pressure to it, too — not a sound exactly, but a low charge I felt in my teeth and in the bones of my face.

The phone slid out of my fingers and cracked against the floorboards. My legs had stopped being sure of me.

"What..." I had nothing else. Every rational part of me was screaming that this could not be, and it churned on my hallway wall regardless, brighter than anything had any right to be.

"This is how Nial disappeared," Luke said quietly, watching it. "This is where Serena has taken Sammy. Through there"—he nodded at the churning light—"is Clivilius."

"This isn't real," I whispered, backing away until my shoulders hit the far wall. My breath was coming in tatters. "This can't be real."

He took a step towards me, dark against the glow of the thing. "Your son is waiting," he said, gentle and unrelenting both. "Your husband too. But we must hurry."

The words pulled at me harder than they should have. The world I knew was sliding away with every second, and through the fear one thing held clear: Sammy was on the other side of that light. Nial was. Whatever this was, however impossible, it was the only road left that led towards my boy.

The colours shivered, their edges wavering like heat off summer tarmac, and I took a step towards it before I knew I had.

Jenny. It wasn't a sound. It didn't come through my ears at all — it simply opened up inside my head, as clear as a thought that wasn't mine. He's the man with the rainbow colours.

It was nothing I could place — not a man's voice, not a woman's, not old, not young. It was just there, easy and complete, folded in among my own thoughts as though it had always had the right to be. Another step.

They're waiting, Jenny. Just beyond the colours. Sammy misses his mother.

"No," I said aloud, trying to drag myself back from the edge of it. The word came out thin against the pull of the light. "This isn't possible."

All things are possible in Clivilius, the voice said, gentle and certain, drawing me on. Come and see.

The colours ran deeper, their brilliance sinking into richer, darker shades, and I could have sworn the thing was reaching for me. Every instinct I had left was howling at me to turn and run, to snatch up the phone, to do anything but go nearer — and then I thought of Sammy's small hand shut around that dinosaur's tail, and it held me exactly where I stood. He was through there. Nial was through there.

They're waiting, the voice pressed, close and familiar now. Just a few steps more.

"How do I know this isn't a trap?" I could barely get it out. "How do I know Sammy's really... there?"

"You don't," Luke said, calm, steady. "But ask yourself this—what choice do you have?"

He was right, and that was the worst of it. He was right. There was nothing behind me any more — no husband, no Sharon, no police I could run to, no life left that wasn't already coming apart in my hands. There was only the chance, however mad, that my son was on the far side of that light. Against that, what was a wall? What was anything?

"We need to go. Now," Luke said, an edge coming into it. The colours seemed to quicken with him, pulsing faster.

Now, Jenny, the voice echoed, low and pressing. Before it's too late, and you lose your precious Sammy and Nial forever.

I took another step. The colours seemed to answer it, thin ribbons of light reaching towards me and falling away, and the air itself had begun to hum against my skin, sharp and electric, lifting the hair along my arms.

"Will it..." My throat closed on it. "Will it hurt?"

Something in his face eased, just for a second. "Like stepping through a waterfall," he said gently. "Close your eyes if you're afraid."

But I couldn't close my eyes. I couldn't look away from it, the awful swirling promise of it, salvation and ruin in the same breath. One more step brought me right to the edge of it, near enough that the light seemed to soak into my skin and set me glowing with it.

Choose, Jenny Triffett, the voice breathed, lilting, urgent. Choose now.

The weight of it bore down on me, and I let it. Because there was no choice, not really — there had been no choice from the moment he told me a teenage girl had walked off with my son. If Sammy was through there, then through there was where I was going, and it could have been fire and I would have walked into it. I drew one breath, looked at Luke once — his face set, waiting — and stepped into the light.

The world came apart around me all at once, swallowed in a roar of pure colour.

Then it stopped, all of it, as suddenly as it had taken me, and the voice came one last time.

Welcome to Clivilius, Jenny Triffett.

Ground came up solid beneath my feet. Warmth closed over my skin, the air dry and strange and smelling of nothing I knew, something mineral and old. I screwed my eyes half shut against the glare and looked. The sky went up and out further than any sky should, a blue so deep and clean it didn't look real. All around me low dunes of ochre sand rolled away to the horizon like a still ocean caught mid-swell, their crests smoking faintly in a breeze I could only just feel.

I turned slowly on the spot, the impossible beauty of it filling me with wonder and terror in one breath. Then I saw him.

Not twenty paces away, standing tall against all that emptiness, was Nial.