The Second Forever by Colin Thompson Page B

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 upand touch the glass. ‘There is no up,’ he said. ‘We’re on the top level. Look, here is the roof.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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 ofthe 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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜How do you know the Warden is dying, then?’ said Festival. ‘Maybe he’s immortal, like Darkwood.’
    â€˜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.’

    â€˜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 uponmillions 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