Page 1 of The Otherworld

Prologue

My father always told me that there are two worlds.

Our world, and the Otherworld.

Our world is simple. It is the island. It is the lighthouse. It is the endless waves of ocean stretching in every direction. It is the soft, thick blanket of clouds rolling across the sky, carrying rain and sometimes snow.

The Otherworld is out there.

Beyond the edge of the ocean.

I wouldn’t have known it existed had I not asked my father when I was eight years old.

“What is out there, Papa?”

With a smile, he answered, “More ocean. Thousands of miles of it. Waves and waves into infinity.”

“Infinity,” I whispered, reaching my hand out as far as I could.

We were standing at the railing around the top of the lighthouse. I spread my fingers and watched infinity fill the spaces between them.

“And what’s that, Papa? That land way out there?”

Papa’s face went pale and quiet, like the breathless calm before a storm. His sharp eyes looked past the fog to the distant shapes of islands like ours.

“That is a whole other world,” he said, placing a weathered hand on my shoulder. “It’s where most people live.”

“Why don’t we live there?”

“Because we have our own world, little Orca.” His gaze floated across the silver-crested waves as they danced closer to our shore. “The other world is full of danger and darkness.”

“Like thunderstorms?”

Papa nodded. “Like thunderstorms. But not the thunderstorms you’ve seen. These thunderstorms are inside people. They are people. They’re dangerous… mostly because you can’t see the storms coming. People can change from light to dark in a moment, without warning.”

I didn’t understand what he meant. But I thought about his words.

I thought about the other world.

The Otherworld.

Papa knew it well. He’d lived there for a long time before he came to the lighthouse. But I couldn’t remember ever seeing the Otherworld, and I longed to know more about it. Papa’s natural history books talked of rainforests sweet with nectar and fizzing with tropical birdsong. Deserts as wide and lonely as the open seas. Mountains so tall they were never without snow.

Earth wasn’t the problem, Papa said. It was the people who caused the problems.

The thunderstorm people.

But even thunderstorms have another side to them—a terrifying sort of beauty, when rods of white lightning split the sky into pieces and flash on the swells of the black ocean below. I used to sit by the window and watch such storms with Papa at my side. When the thunder roared and shook the sea around us, I would snuggle close to Papa, and he would tuck me into the side of his overcoat. He smelled of rain and salt and hard work. Our dog, Lucius, didn’t care for stormy nights. He would lie across Papa’s feet and whine until the thunder ceased.

Our island is small enough to circle in a day’s light on foot, a coastline of hard gray beaches and jagged black rocks slick with sea mist and vibrant green moss. If you walk straight across the island instead of around it, you come into a thick gathering of trees—stout junipers, sticky hemlocks, and paper birches—thousands of branches reaching up to the sky and blanketing the mossy forest floor in golden leaves come autumn.

But of all the sights and wonders our world has to offer, none is more familiar to me than the lighthouse. Her whitewashed tower stands proudly on the island’s northern tip, crowned by a glass-walled lantern room, sea mist worshipping at her feet as she sends light across the water to infinity.

At times, I have glimpsed lights from the Otherworld, too. Little pinpricks of light, as if some stars had fallen out of the night sky and landed in the water—twinkling for a moment on the horizon before the waves swallowed them up.

What is it like out there? Will I ever know?

When Papa spoke of the thunderstorm people in the Otherworld, he emphasized how much we don’t belong there. How much I don’t belong there.

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