Young Writers Society

Haveyouheardhaveyouheardhaveyouheard – that’s school right this second, that’s today’s question. Kids’re asking it in words, and in looks, and in the way that they toss their bags down and hunch over the tables to talk to each other. It’s 10:36am and everyone’s heard by now, but people’re still asking the question because it gives them a chance to talk about it again.

“First time in sixty years, my nan says!” that’s one of the Emilys. I can’t remember which, but it’s the fourth time she’s said that today.

Excitement sort of feels like the noise an old kettle makes, especially when it’s shared. The last time school was like this, it was because one of the chemistry teachers had been arrested – for dealing drugs, apparently, and kids kept getting detentions for making Breaking Bad references. It’s different today, though. Everyone’s excited – teachers, dinner ladies, the lot.

Gran said I should’ve had the day off. She said it’s not every day that a rift to another world opens up, and she’s right, but school never shuts for anything. You can sort of see it from the top of the science building, if you know where to look. One of the year eleven boys spotted it and started drumming up a trade, demanding 50p from everyone who wanted him to point it out to them. It’s just above the church, it turns out, right in the distance. There’s a patch of sky that’s blacked out, like ink soaked into pale linen. A fingernail slither of another world.

-

I’m a couple of streets from the church now, and I have been for the last thirty-three minutes. People are everywhere, and the air’s all shouting and mutters and sticky, summery heat. There’s local police in the distance – I can see their helmets, poking above the people-tide like rows of buoys. A barricade.

“Don’t waste your time, love,” that’s an old woman, a few feet from me, coming out of the chemist’s. “The first day’s mayhem. The bobbies won’t let anyone in.”

“I just wanted to take photos,” I say. I know they quarantine it for the first day or so, just in case the town on the other side’s turned into a warzone, or oozing radiation from a nuke.

“They all do, love,” she says. “You’re best off going early morning, soon as they say it’s safe.”

I shuffle a bit, but if I stay much longer I’ll miss Pointless, which’d be a shame because the jackpot’s at £12,250 and I want to see if anyone can get it. So I shin about a foot up the nearest lamppost, hold my camera as high as I can and click. Just to prove I was here.

-

They did get the jackpot on Pointless, but they picked golf for their final category so I couldn’t play along. I rang Jessie after tea because I wanted to tell her about the rift, but she’s bogged down with revision for uni exams so she wasn’t that interested. She said there was a similar rift in Kent about a year back, and these sort of badger creatures came through it and started chewing through everyone’s bin bags.

“They’re not even rare, Jace,” she said. “You’re acting like a spaceship’s landed in the back garden.”

I muttered something about spaceships being nowhere near as interesting and put the phone down. Jessie can be ever so boring sometimes.

“Chin up, Jacie,” Gran says, digging into the Quality Streets and chucking me a toffee penny. “Use that fancy camera of yours and get some nice photos. Make her jealous.”

I fiddle with the edge of my jumper. I like that idea.

-

Mum was mucking around with my camera last night taking photos of these glass pigs she wants to put on eBay, so it’s only got about 30% battery left, but I don’t have time to charge it up. It’s 4:29am already, about five hours since the West Yorkshire Police updated their Twitter to say that they’d ‘made contact with the Neaton locals’ and ‘confirmed the safety of the area’. Neaton’s the name of the town on the other side of the rift. According to Gran, it looks kind of like Worcester but the people have different accents. There’s a Wikipedia page for Neaton, but most of it’s complicated parallel world science stuff that I can’t make sense of, with hardly any good pictures.

Mum’d go mad if she knew I was going out this early to find the rift, but it’s what the old woman advised, and old women usually know best. I’ve made a sandwich out of granary bread and the rest of the seaweed from last night’s Chinese takeaway so it’s not like I’ll miss breakfast, and I’ve got hours until school starts. She can’t get angry, not really.

The sky’s a forget-me-not blue this morning, crossed with dashes of pink and a smeary orange along the horizon, like someone accidently dipped it in paint. Normally I’d photograph it, but normally my camera’s fully charged, so I have to make do with just looking.

It takes longer to reach the church than I remember. Lefts, rights, little alleys, a big blank Tesco not open for business yet, more lefts and rights, a bridge, an uphill climb, and then-

Oh.

To one side, the church, glossed pale by the light yawning above the horizon. To the other, a row of houses, still and asleep behind drawn curtains. Between them, a portal, torn from the ground up, ripped sixty feet into the sky.

And within it, a street, drenched in darkness and thick with snow from another world.

-

I had never expected it to look like this. I stand at the border between worlds for an unfathomable amount of time – how can I count the seconds when I’m staring up at two halves of sky, one robin’s egg and white smoke, the other black ink and tiny, scattered diamonds? My eyes start to water, swirling the halves together, and all I can think is that Jessie is mad, totally mad, to not be excited by this.

I wipe my eyes, scrabble for my camera, point it upwards and click. My hand wobbles as I do so, blurring the shot. It’s still the best photo I’ve ever taken.

-

Snow soaks into my shoes as I take my first step into Neaton. I think I remember Gran telling me that seasons were opposite here. She said that, when she was a girl, the rift opened in our winter and everyone who went through it had a tan for Christmas. Night and day must be opposite too, I suppose, seeing how dark it is. My watch says 5:14am, but there’s a fat, paper cut-out moon stuck in the sky, bright as anything.

I squint at the windows of the houses. Some are lit, so it can’t be the dead of night yet. I lean over the gate of the house nearest to me, peering as far as I can into the garden, and then-

And then this whopper of a cat comes wandering out of the shadows, sinking its huge paws into the snow and sniffing around the bushes. I’ve got a wobbly old tabby at home called Bayleaf, and I thought she was massive, but you could fit her into this cat about four times over. It’s humungous.

It turns to look at me, but its amber eyes don’t say yum yum, my next meal so much as they say I have absolutely no interest in what I’m looking at, which is what the eyes of most normal-sized cats say. Then it turns away and pads back into the shadows it came from, and I don’t realise I’m holding my breath until I let half a minute’s worth of it out at once.

But then my hands are scrabbling at the freezing gate latch and I’m stumbling through sheets of snow, towards the bottom of a garden that isn’t mine. My fingers are in my pocket, digging around for my camera, because I just saw a cat the size of a Great Dane and imagine Jessie’s face if I send her a picture of that.

I creep, then sink to my knees and crawl, and it’s like wading through a plunge pool but I grit my teeth and take it. Five feet away, four feet, three. Any closer and it’ll run. I fumble with the camera settings, trying to find the flash, and I’m just adjusting the zoom when-

Crack.

Firecrackers of pain, a face full of snow, then nothing.

-

“Here, ye pike. I den’t hi’ you that hard.”

Pain’s one thing, and cold’s another, but pain and cold together’s one screaming Molotov cocktail full of needles and glass. I’m trying to sit up, but absolutely everything is made of lead and I just can’t.

“Oiya,” that voice is closer now, and a bit softer. A hand grips the side of my head, roughly, but I don’t care because it’s so warm.

“What ye in my garden for, chunk?” the voice asks, and I try to answer, but my mouth’s full of melted snow and my teeth are stinging.

The voice sighs, the hand drops, and suddenly I’m being hauled to my feet and lugged through snow, up steps, into a building the colour of warmth.

-

“I’m sorry, I am, I just- I wanted to take photos, that’s all.”

The house looks like most houses, except the walls are wood and instead of a telly there’s a big fabric screen and projector. I’m trying not to look round too much in case he thinks I’m plotting to steal something.

“Photos? In me back ga’den?”

I don’t know his name yet, this boy who clubbed me over the head with a metal soup ladle. He’s older than me, I think. Stocky. Brown-skinned. Dry, liquorice-hued hair. He looks normal, really, or he would if he wasn’t wearing a crop top and baggy, patterned trousers. Fashion’s obviously different here.

“I know it’s silly, but I saw that, um, cat. That big cat. And I’ve never seen a cat that big, not in someone’s garden, so I sort of forgot myself and I tried to get a picture, because I wanted to send it to my sister and- I am really sorry.”

The boy shakes his head. “Ye daft’n. Should just’ve knocked on door, not snuck around the garden on hands an’ knees.” He plonks down on the sofa next to me. “Ye no’ first one to come from the rift, nor firs’ to admire Jasper. Den’t ye have bi’ cats where ye are?”

I blink, trying to untangle meaning from his words, and answer too late. “No. Well, yeah, we have big cats, but they don’t live at home with us. I’ve got a cat, but she’s sort of-” I hold my hands out, estimating her size. “Not like your, er – Jasper.”

He squints as I speak, like my accent is every bit as weird as his. Which it probably is, to him.

“Wha’s your name?” he asks.

“It’s, er, Jace. Jason.”

“Which one?”

“Jason. Or either. I mean, my friends call me Jace,” I say. “What’s yours?”

“Einya.”

There’s a silence a bit like the ones you get on the news, when the newsreader asks a foreign correspondent a question and there’s those few quiet seconds before they answer.

“I di’n’t hi’ you too hard, did I?” Einya asks, scratching his head.

“No, honestly, I’m okay.” That’s a lie. My cheek’s throbbing like a heart.

“Well, if it bruises black, ye come back here for supper, right? I’ll cook something. To say sorry.”

“Oh, that’s not-” I swallow. “Sure. I will. If it goes black.”

Einya slaps his thighs and gets to his feet, so I take this as my cue to leave. I’m at the door, buttoning my jacket to my throat, when he speaks.

“Do all ye lot from the other side of rift dress like gran’pas?”

-

Well, my cheek’s not black. Not exactly. More of a dark, plummy purple. Though I’m surprised my tongue hasn’t gone black with all the lies I’ve been telling Mum. She’d go mental if she knew someone had clubbed me about the face, and even more mental if she knew they’d done it ‘cause they caught me creeping around their garden. I can’t risk her banning me from Neaton, so I told her that I decked it in the snow instead.

I prod my face in the bathroom mirror. Is it bruised enough? It certainly hurts.

My brain wanders back to Einya, for about the hundredth time. I wonder if he’s as good at cooking as he is at whacking people with ladles.

Only one way to find out.

-

Neaton looks different in daylight. The sky’s watery and pale and not especially remarkable, and the houses are the same squat, red-brick things you get in my world. I’m not sure what time it is here, but my watch says 6:22pm and my stomach says time you filled me with food, wise guy.

I can’t remember which house it is. Maybe that one? Or the one next to it? Was the door black or red? Did it have a knocker? I mumble my way through some inaccurate version of eeny meeny miny moe and settle on the house right in front of me.

I count a full minute before the door opens, but it’s to the wrong person. A girl, maybe Jessie’s age, with a narrow nose and so many freckles that, if you played dot-to-dot with them, you’d scribble her entire face out.

“What lankin’ time ye call this?” she says, wiping ropy hair from her eyes. I can’t tell if she’s really angry or if it’s just her accent.

“Um, I might have the wrong house,” I say.

“All houses’re the wrong houses at this time, chunk,” she snaps. Her eyes scoot up and down. “Ye’re one o’ them Leeds kids, ahya? From the rift? ‘Course ye are.”

“I’m sorry, I’m just-” I take a step back. “I’m looking for Einya. Does he live here?”

The girl snorts. “I hope not, chunk. What are ye, his huna?”

“I don’t- I don’t know what that means.”

She lets out a bark of laughter. “Two doors down, little. Tell him from Alna to stop invitin’ rift kids into the hood at the brink o’ dawn.”

The door slams.

-

The Einya that opens the door two houses down has been dragged through a hedge by his ankles – that’s my first thought. Gummed eyes, corkscrew hair, a massive, stained shirt that practically drips off him. His legs are bare, but he doesn’t flinch at the cold. Maybe he’s too tired to feel it.

“Who,” he says, “are ye?”

My stomach drops a few inches.

“Jason. The one who you…” I point gingerly at my face. “I don’t know what time it is here, but it’s- well, it’s teatime back in my world, so I…”

He groans and rubs his face. Stares at me through his fingers. Then he reaches out and presses his thumb against my bruised cheek.

“Ow!”

“It’s no’ black.”

I bat his hand away. “It hurts.”

“Woe is ye. I’ve no’ gone shopping yet. Couldn’t make ye dinner even if it was right time o’ day.”

“You do the shopping?” My mum won’t even let me steer the trolley in Tesco.

His frown says yeah, obviously, but it’s not obvious at all. He looks younger than I remember. Maybe a year older than me, at the very most.

“Well, sorry for waking you,” I say. “I’ll leave you in peace.”

My stomach yawns and gurgles as I shuffle towards the gate, and I hope he can’t hear it. I can’t get the latch open quickly enough.

“Wait a sec,” he says. “If ye’re okay waiting around fo’ me to ge’ food, I den’t mind goin’ out.”

I turn. “Are the shops open yet?”

“Yeah, course. I’ll ge’ a bus into Charford. Won’t take long.”

“Can I come with you?” I ask, too quickly. I can feel heat creeping into my cheeks. “I-I’m trying to get photos of Neaton, see. Of everything. To show my sister.”

His lips twitch, but he’s kind enough not to laugh at me. He jerks his head, beckoning me inside, then flashes up the staircase in a few bounds. Muttered voices start to buzz above me. I fiddle with my jumper and wait.