FREE from 12/2-12/6
Prologue
So this is how I’m going to die?
The
thought formed in Peter Stewart’s mind in essence if not in actual
words as the silver Land Rover hurtled through the air, upside down, and
headed straight for the windshield of the Jeffersons’ BMW.
Instinctively Peter turned to look out the window on the passenger side,
and he saw just a flash of a face standing on the side of the road,
with a jagged scar across the right cheek and a vivid expression of pure
terror.
Brock
sat in the front seat next to the driver. Lily Portman, the new girl,
and Cole, Brock’s younger brother, were in the back seat beside Peter.
He could not possibly have imagined a more unlikely group of people with
whom to die. In that split second, he thought of his dad’s face — his
sellotaped glasses and lopsided grin. He’d never see him again. Then –
Just at the moment when impact should have occurred, the entire scene vanished.
Peter
blinked, his heart still pounding, and looked around. All he knew for
sure was that he was in a very bright place: it was a meadow, peaceful
and quiet, with a pool in the middle. A rainbow radiated from the
surface of the pool, and he felt himself compelled irresistibly toward
it. As he approached, it grew larger.
Am I dead? he wondered. Is this heaven? But he didn’t see the others – he was alone here. Then he saw that the others were in the
rainbow- and they were still in the car. He recoiled: the rainbow
showed him horrific, brutal images of the accident. The crushed front
seat of the BMW obscured the driver completely beneath the wreckage. The
other four were very clearly dead. He fought the nausea threatening to
overtake him.
He
looked again and realized that the scene took on an eerie red hue, as
if viewed through a pair of tinted glasses. At first he thought that was
because of the blood, but the upholstery was red too, and the trees –
He
took a step back and saw the rest of the rainbow again. Cautiously, he
moved toward orange, and the accident again blossomed into view before
his eyes… but this time, the impact occurred slightly to the left of the
previous one. Peter bit his lip, concentrating hard, trying to
understand how reality could shift with each color, as if it were a
physics problem to solve. He looked at Cole. He was still dead, but he
bled from a wound in his cheekbone this time instead of just above his
eye, like in the red version.
Peter
stepped back again. Infinite variations existed in the rainbow between
red and orange, each showing the impact at a slightly different angle.
From his perspective on the bank of the pool, each ephemeral view of the
accident was like a thousand shimmering possible realities inside a
kaleidoscope. Peter searched through the colors of the rainbow
frantically, looking for one, just one, which might offer some hope…
He
found it buried somewhere between blue and violet. In that image, the
Land Rover sat on the side of the road. Lily gasped for breath and Brock
clutched the sides of his seat, but they were all otherwise all right.
It looked as if the accident had never happened. Without thinking,
without any idea what he was looking at, Peter somehow knew what he had
to do: he aimed at the precise place in the pool where that shade of
blue-violet emanated, and he dove in.
Instantly
he was back in the car, his arms outstretched. Sweat poured from his
brow, and he trembled from head to toe. The silver Land Rover hovered
over the BMW, suspended in mid-air.
“Well, set it down then!” Cole shrieked.
The statement jarred him. What did that mean?
That was the moment Peter realized he was
the one holding up the Land Rover. His lips started muttering something
without his permission, but he could not tell what they said; the words
were unfamiliar. As he spoke, the car reversed its trajectory and
landed on the side of the road, in exactly the same place it had
started.
Except for the hammering of their hearts, it was as if the whole thing had never happened.
But really, it had just begun.
INTANGIBLE
is a work of young adult fantasy fiction set in both modern-day
Norwich, England, and in the fictional city of Carlion, the counterpart
of Camelot. The novel interprets Arthurian legends and traditional
elements of fantasy through the lens of modern concepts of quantum
physics, explained in metaphor appropriate to a younger audience.