Above the Vaulted Sky - Page 25

All I can think, as I bring myself to my feet, is that I’m grateful the rain has stopped. 

I look up, then down and watch as the world focuses itself. The canopy of stars above my head is beyond beautiful. A vaulted sky high above me.

            I love those nights when you feel like you can see every single star in the universe. Just layer upon layer: big, small, and infinitely far away. I feel like I’m looking at a wall painted like a chalkboard. The stars are flecks of paint, spattered from an overloaded paintbrush.

            Is that how small we are? Is our sun, the ball of fire that gives us life, just a paint-spot on the canvas of the milky-way in the deserted gallery that is the universe?

            The light from the stars above, complementing the thin crescent moon illuminates the land around me. I can scarcely believe my eyes as I see I’ve moved.

            I’m in a field of haystacks. I feel a slight tingling in my fingers. I realise I feel the same when I walk through walls, when I sense the dead all around me, when I’m at one with the universe.

            The grass is long beneath my feet. Long enough to wet the hems of my trousers. As I begin to move, the heavy damp material rubs against my ankles.

            The field is large and looks like it goes on forever in the darkness.

            Why here of all places? I could have taken myself to New York, Rome,  to Barbados or a desert island with en eternity to live in comfort, but I come here, to a damp nowhere.

            It scares me that I have no control over my abilities. That I slip in and out of memories and apparent space whenever I please. I’m a floating mass of nothing caught of the breeze.

            And still I don’t know where Penny is. A quiet voice thinks she might have seen her parents and run, if she’d ever been there at all. If she’d ever made it out of the Edge.

            I shudder at the possibility. Surely she would have saved herself. Penny had been so close to her mum. If I still held that connection to my mother after I died and pulled myself out of the memories, then I’m certain Penny must have.

            I need a plan. I need to work out where I can go and how, and then I need to think where in the world she’s gone.

            Turning on the spot, my eyes find a beacon of light in the distance. Four pinpricks illuminating an area of darkness.