The Book:
The house was the perfect green with petal pink trimming. Inside, the rooms were lolly colours. At night though, Darkness filled it with sinister shadows and it creaked with the wind and a little girl sat in her bead, clutching her soft toys. The Darkness was when Bad Magic happened.
Blonde hair swinging out behind her, Lucky Frine had not a care in the world. Until she remembered where she was heading – Home. Home to a mad mother, to a place where bones lay in the cellar and where bright coloured walls were just part of the whole evil façade.
Stars studded the sky like bright pieces of metal, preventing Dreams and Nightmares from escaping to other worlds. It was a cool summer night when everyone should either be sleeping or watching their night visions struggling for freedom. But Lucky Frine was alone. Alone except for her toys… and the Book. The Book’s cover was a deep blue-violet and it told Lucky stories. Stories that stretched past the clouds and starts, beyond the skies of the highest bird migration paths. But every night when Lucky was asleep, the Book would take a walk.
The Book always went to the same place and person – it would go to wherever Lucky’s mother was. He – it was decided many millennia that the Book was male – would sprout black wings and fly low to the ground and down the staircase. The Book came to comfort Lucky’s Mum’s – Louise – feverish mind. It was the Book’s job to give her answers to the strange questions that left her mouth. Louise flicked through the book’s creamy but old and freckled pages.
“My precious darling....” Her whisper was like a hot, desert wind and the Book shivered at her touch.
“Why are the visions visiting again?”
The Dark Magic is once again growing stronger.
“Is Lucky involved?” Louise’s voice was full of fear yet threaded with the wine of pride.
Of course she is. But the part she will play…
“Always unknown.” Louise closed the book and the peace she’d clung to and clutched to her only a few moments ago, fled, eluding her once again, hovering at the edges of her broken mind.
