Read an Excerpt

This Little Light of Mine

Balboa Press

I have just crossed my bedroom on tiptoes and jumped into bed. I was on tiptoes for two reasons.

1. If I step on the cracks in the floorboards, something terrible will happen. Something unknown and unseen to me, but something terrible nonetheless.

2. If I don't catapult myself quickly into bed, my feet will hover too long and too close to the dark space underneath. Who knows what could happen in that case? Many a toy or notebook or set of keys have gone missing under there, never to be seen again. Oblivion is a terrifying thought. I swear there's a black hole under that bed, and I, at twelve years old, am far too young and far too clever to get sucked in to it. I'll jump into my bed if it's all the same to you.

So, for reasons you now fully understand, I have just crossed my bedroom on tiptoes and jumped into bed.

I slide down into the coolness of the cotton sheets and pull the quilt up to my chin. This is one of my favourite times of the day. Especially on nights like this one, when the wind is howling through every crack and crevice in the house, whispering menacing secrets that you can never quite catch; when the night is so cold that if you stay out in it, even for a few minutes, your fingers become numb and stiff and feel detached from your body like ten long, thin aliens wriggling to free themselves. On nights like these there is nothing better than crawling into a warm, cosy bed, knowing it will stay that way until you next have to leave it.

I'm waiting for my dad. He's in the kitchen downstairs, helping Mum with the dishes. Mum washes, Dad dries. This is the way it's always been. He's coming up to say goodnight to me soon. He promised.

Here he is now. I can hear his footsteps on the stairs, heavy and slow, in perfect rhythm.

Thud, thud, thud, thud.

Here is his footstep now on the stair that starts to turn the corner. Four more carpeted stairs to the top, and then he'll be on the landing. Two large footsteps straight across the landing, and he'll be in my doorway. I know he's on the stair that turns the corner because it's the only one that speaks. Every time it's stepped on it groans and creaks in complaint with its deep, gruff voice (unless, like me, you have learned to step in the very corner where there's hardly any stair at all. He won't speak to you then because he won't even know you're there). I hear the stair grumbling at Dad. Four more foot falls.

Thud, thud, thud, thud.

He's at the top, on the landing. My eyes are squeezed tightly shut in anticipation. I'm trying to look like I'm asleep so that Dad has to pretend he can't wake me up. Then he'll have to go off to his own bed without saying goodnight, sad and lonely. And, finally, I'll have to scream at him excitedly, 'Come back! I'm really awake! Can't you tell? Don't you know by now?' That's just what we do. That's our dance.

So, I'm waiting. And waiting. And waiting. Where is he? I open my eyes and look towards the doorway, wondering what sort of trick he'll play on me this time. The light in my bedroom is off, but the light in the landing is a humming, luminous globe, casting shadows in my room. From where I'm lying I have to look over my toes to see the doorway. The view from over my toes is not the same tonight. This is definitely not what I was expecting.

The hallway light, shining brightly behind him, makes the man facing me from the doorway a perfect silhouette. I can't see his face, but I know for sure that this is not my dad. This is a man wearing a cowboy hat. He stands with his legs wide apart and his toes angled slightly towards the sides of the doorframe so that I can clearly see he is wearing boots with spiky spurs on the backs.

There is a cowboy in my doorway!

I look at him for a few seconds. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't move. His silhouette makes it impossible for me to see his face. Strangely, I'm not afraid. I sit up and yell towards the open doorway, past the cowboy. 'Mum, we ve got company ... again!

Mum and I are used to this sort of thing. It happens to us all the time. And because Dad has lived with us both for so long (for my whole life, and with Mum while I waited to be born before that), he is used to it, too, although he is yet to see his own Crossovers. Mum is so used to it, in fact, that when I yell down the staircase, it takes her two full minutes to even think about coming to my room. When she finally does start climbing the staircase, calmly and leisurely, I can hear her singing a Madonna song to herself on the way. My mum loves that woman. She says that even though Madonna has done some things in her life that she might be embarrassed about later, she's given girls of my generation permission to be empowered. I don't really listen much after that because I'm so mortified that someone I'm related to loves someone so old. Madonna is straight out of the 1980s! I wasn't even born.

Mum gets to my room, singing, 'Holiday! Celebrate!'

I screw up my face. 'Mum ... please.'

'I know, I know,' she says, rolling her eyes. 'You weren't even born.' She turns on my bedroom light and sits down at the end of my bed. 'So, who was it this time?'

I shake my head and tell her I'm not sure who he was, although I am certain to tell her he was dressed like a cowboy. I tell her how he had appeared, how I couldn't see his face, how he didn't say anything, and how he had simply turned around and walked back down the stairs after I called to her. Mum says she didn't catch a glimpse of him on her way up.

'Maybe he just wanted to say hello,' she explains. 'You're a beacon, Cub. They come to where the light shines best.'

Freeze-frame. I should probably explain two things here.

1. My name is not actually Cub. That's just what Mum and Dad call me sometimes. My real name is Stella, but when I was younger, I made my parents read me Goldilocks and the Three Bears over and over again because I loved that we were just like the three bears – Daddy Bear, Mummy Bear, and Baby Bear. And since a baby bear is called a cub ... well, you can see how the name sort of stuck.

2. Even though Mum says I'm a beacon, I am not an actual lighthouse. I don't perch, immobile, on the edge of cliffs and wear hats with flashing lights revolving at the top. I'm a different kind of beacon. I'm a beacon for Crossovers. I have been all my life. My mum is a beacon, too. We have a light that shines brightly around us and inside us, shooting up into the atmosphere. The Crossovers see it and somehow know that we won't mind if they drop in.

No one really knows where the Crossovers come from. They used to live on the earth just like you and me, but they left our world for lots of different reasons. I once saw a television show all about them, but the people on the show called them "ghosts". Whether they prefer to be called ghosts or Crossovers, a beacon can see them in their new world, the world they go to after they have passed away. Some of the Crossovers haven't lived in our world for a long while. Some of them never have because they've got other jobs to do. Mum calls these, "Whisperers of people", "Whisperers" for short, because they're always whispering into our ears and lighting our paths whether we can hear them or not. She says not to be confused if people call them "angels" or "guardian angels" instead of Whisperers; they're all the same thing. A beacon sees Whisperers, too.

Mum taught me everything I know, and Grandma Lotty taught her. They say that everyone in the world has Crossovers and Whisperers all around them, but some people can't open their eyes or minds wide enough to let them in. Mum and Grandma Lotty also say that everyone is born a beacon. But too often they turn their lights down when they start to grow up. They can only turn their lights down though, never off. Mum says that's not possible. What is possible is turning the light back up; that can always happen. People just have to make the choice to shine.

Dad has just come up to my room. My real dad this time, not the unexpected and mysterious cowboy dad. He sits on the opposite side of my bed from Mum and smiles at me with his head tilted onto his right shoulder. He always does that. That's how I love him the best.

'Another one, hey, Cub?' he asks, pulling the quilt up to my neck.

I nod, smiling back at him.

'Scared?' he adds, eyebrows raised.

'Nope,' I reply.

He always asks me that. He likes to be sure. Since he can't see them, he never knows if I should be terrified or not. Mum keeps telling him that the Crossovers will never terrify me because they'd never hurt me, and I'm too well protected by the Whisperers anyhow. But he still checks anyway. I guess that's just what dads do.

'You know the drill, don't you, Cub?' Mum asks, bending over me and kissing me on my forehead right between my eyes. 'If you don't like it, you tell it to leave.'

I suddenly feel sleepy, and Dad also gives me a kiss goodnight. They leave my bedroom, flicking the light off as they go. I roll onto my side and think about what Mum said: if I don't like it, tell it to leave. I smile to myself because it's so simple, and yet I know it's absolutely true. I am a beacon, but I'm also in charge of who I let come and go in my space. I am perfectly safe. Just as I drift off to sleep, I open one eye wide enough to see Astrid come across my room from the window where she likes to watch the stars. This is the first time I've seen her all day. I close my eye again and I feel her climb into bed and rest her head on the pillow next to my own. I smell bubblegum.

Astrid always smells like bubblegum.

Astrid wakes me later that night. She's whispering in my ear. 'Stella ... Stella, wake up. The others are here.'

I open my eyes wide. A full moon is striding dutifully through my window and lighting up the space on the other side. Even without the light on, I can see everything in my room. Astrid has made her way over to the doorway. She turns and looks at me to make sure I'm following and makes her way down the staircase. When I get to the grumpy corner step, I make sure I put my foot on his edge so I don't wake him up, along with his noisy voice. He sleeps on, not making a sound.

Astrid and I tiptoe through the sleeping house with its strange creaks and moans. I search the darkness for anyone I know, but all is still. The Crossovers must all be sleeping in their own houses tonight. We cross the kitchen and reach the back door. Astrid opens it quietly and we look out on to the garden. I hear singing. A woman's voice is singing a beautiful, enchanting lullaby. Directly in front of us are three concrete steps leading onto a small patio. To the far left of the patio are five more steps made of stone that take us down to the long, narrow garden. As my feet land on each of these steps, little circles of multi-coloured lights explode from the tips of my toes. They buzz around me from bottom to top, floating off into the air above me after settling momentarily on my eyelashes.

Ahead of me, Astrid is sitting on the grass with her legs crossed and her eyes closed. She is whispering quietly, repeating the same words over and over again.

'Mother, we come in offering. Mother, we come with our light. Mother, we come in offering. Mother, we come with our light.'

As her chanting becomes faster and faster, more perfectly round balls of light begin to emerge from the trees and bushes around us. Some are blue, some are green, and some are purple. I suddenly realise they are coming one colour at a time. All of the blues, then all of the greens, then all of the purples, until all the colours of the rainbow in various shades and hues have left the trees and shrubs and are moving towards Astrid.

The singing woman has silenced her refrain. Now there is a beat, a low, steady, resonating beat; a beat I can feel on the bottoms of my feet through the earth. This is a beat that matches my own heartbeat, a pulse.

Astrid is still chanting, and the colourful balls of light are all around us in the air. One of them comes very close to my face and the first thing I notice is the humming sound, a very fast, faint hum. Then I see the wings – delicately-veined gossamer wings that look like a dragonfly's, glinting in the moonlight and beating so fast that they sound like a hummingbird. I see legs arranged artfully like a ballerina in a lift, one leg hanging straight down, the other bent at the knee, toes pointing gracefully towards the ground. I see a body with a slight grass-green hue to its skin. I see arms hanging loosely in any direction the wind takes them, and I see a head. There is wild, red, curly hair, just like mine, and vibrant green eyes as well as a wide, enchanting smile.

'Stella,' she says, holding out her hand to me. 'It's been a while.'

In fact, it's been twenty-eight days. Twenty-eight days since the last full moon and the last meeting. I take her tiny, fragile hand and she leads me to where the others have all settled on the grass around Astrid who has saved a spot for me. This one is Belle. Not only is she my treasured friend and the guardian of Mum's basil bush, growing happily at the bottom of our garden, she is also an accomplished animal communicator. I discovered this as a stubborn and fiery six-year old, the age at which I developed an inexplicable preoccupation with snails. I would swipe them from the garden, quietly and deftly, and place them in an open-topped ice-cream container, which I would have prepared earlier in the day with a soft bed of grass for the snails to eat and rest on. Belle always let me keep them for a short while, but never for longer than a few minutes. I talked to them as if they were human babies and prodded gently at their tiny eyes, watching in fascination as the long tentacles retracted back into their heads. Then Belle would remind me that snails deserved freedom as much as the next living, breathing organism, and more importantly, they had pressing jobs they needed to get on with. I would inevitably argue the point. I proclaimed my love for the snails, justifying their capture with a detailed explanation of how decadent their ice-cream container home would be if I only had more time to perfect it. Belle would glide down into the container with the snails, put her ear to one of their spiralled brown shells, and listen to the words whispering from the snail's soul. She would respond to my desperate pleas to keep the creatures with their very own wishes. More often than not, they desired their freedom and the ability to go about their snail business. They were glad to have met me and grateful for the lush green grass, but preferred their own food and the company of their own kind, their own families. I was just too rough and just too curious. Particularly about their eyes, which they tended to request I didn't touch. Ever again. Belle was my kind, my family, so I listened to her translations and tipped the ice-cream container upside down, bidding my snail friends farewell (until the next day when I would swipe another group of unsuspecting snail friends and the routine would play out all over again).

Back in our garden tonight, Belle sits next to Astrid, and her green wings stop, stretch, and tuck themselves in to sit magnificently down the length of her spine. We all take up the chant in a whisper that becomes a wave, washing over our heads.

'Mother, we come in offering. Mother, we come with our light.'

The pulse becomes louder. The echo of it intensifies at the bottom of my feet and at the base of my spine where I'm sitting on the grass. It travels up through my body until I can feel it in my ears, in my eyes, in the crown at the top of my head. It bursts out like the ocean from the blowhole of a whale. When I open my eyes, I see more light - a glittering mixture of metallic purples, hot pinks and sky blues, cascading down like a waterfall around my body, flowing back to the ground.

The chanting stops suddenly. All voices fall silent at exactly the same moment, and in that moment, we all realise that the pulse rests, also.

Now, we wait.

This seems like a good place to pause. It's best to tell stories like this one in stages. It's a lot to take in all at once. Actually, now is a perfect time for me to properly introduce myself. You already know that my name is Stella, and if you've been paying attention, you'll know that I'm twelve years old. What you don't know yet is that I've never been to school. My mum has been my teacher at home since I was five years old.

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Excerpted from This Little Light of Mine by Claire Horne. Copyright © 2017 Claire Horne. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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