The Ninth Dimension - Chapter 1
Jamie
Jamie
Jamie Lock woke to the sound of a deep and low rumble as though a lion had mysteriously popped into the bedroom. Caught between a dream and reality, it took a few moments for him to realise what it was. He groaned under warm sheets, turned on his side and glanced at the big red digits of the clock on the bedside table.
02:58
It wasn’t like the dog to make a noise in the night; once he had curled up in his basket at lights-out Jamie never heard a peep out of him until he continually pawed at the door to be let out for a pee in the morning.
“Quiet, Sam. Go back to sleep.”
Beyond the bedroom door, the distinct sound of the living room door’s creaky hinges drifted up the stairs. His dad would often get up in the night when he couldn’t sleep and Sam never reacted to that. The dog growled again, his ears erect and alert. In the glow of a tiny light plugged into a socket, he hauled his sheepdog body out of his basket and sauntered to the door, tail down, sniffing the gap at the bottom.
“You can’t want to go out, Sam; it’s nearly three in the morning!” Jamie switched on his bedside light, swung his fourteen-year-old legs out of bed and got to his feet as another creak came from downstairs. He found it strange that Sam didn’t run out when he opened the door. The dog just stared at the landing, head cocked on one side, listening.
“What’s the matter, big fella?” he whispered, “don’t worry; it’ll just be Dad making a brew. Come on, let’s let you out.”
From the top of the stairs he couldn’t see any light spilling into the hall which he found a little odd. He couldn’t imagine his dad bungling around in the dark. He glanced at his parent’s closed bedroom door and listened to a cyclic snore from within. Only Dad snored.
A cool draft drifted up the stairs, it heightened his senses and, even though he was warm, it sent a tingling shiver through his core. Mum told him responses like that were caused by anxiety; by negative thoughts and fear of the unknown. She told him he was big enough to deal with any problem that came his way; and she was right of course. Being square jawed and rugged before his time and built like a bulldog (which his dad often called him), he knew he shouldn’t be bothered by anything really.
But, even though he had taken up contact sports including kick boxing and rugby union, he remained apprehensive about investigating peculiar occurrences on his own. It was at times like this when he wished he had a brother or a sister to bounce ideas off; to feel the security of someone else by his side; to bond with someone his own age and not his parents.
Mum had had three pregnancies. He would have had a younger brother and sister if not for the ‘complications’ as she called it. He never really found out what they were until he overheard a conversation between his dad and his friend Mr Oswald when he was seven. He had to look up miscarriage and hysterectomy on Dad’s computer.
The minute hand of the grandfather clock in the hall reached the top of the dial and the old monster of time thumped out three muffled dunks – definitely dunks, not dongs. Everyone liked it to sound that way, nice and quiet, especially during the night. That’s why it had one of Dad’s socks over the bell.
As the dunks ceased and silence descended upon the house, a cloud cleared and the moon cast a window-shaped square of light on newly carpeted stairs. Maybe the sounds he and Sam heard were just whispering breezes passing through an isolated creaky, old house.
His fingers intertwined like snakes in clasped and clammy hands. “Do you really want to go out, Sam? I hope this isn’t going to happen every night otherwise you’re not sleeping with me.”
Forcing the thought of burglars and hideous monsters from his mind, he tip-toed down the stairs but stopped halfway down. He inhaled sharply. The hair on the back of his neck stood to attention like an army, and an icy shiver felt like a glacier gouging its way along his spine.
A green glow increased in intensity from the gap around the living room door. The flutter of paper, the chinking of glass and an engine-like whine cut through the silence. And then, as seconds seemed like minutes, the strange light and sounds vanished leaving nothing but the clunk-clunk of the clock’s pendulum and the dull glow of the moon once again.
His mind raced back to when he was five and six years old when his dreams would cause him to bang on his parent’s door in the middle of the night. Mum and Dad were sympathetic at first, but as his dreams led to sleepwalking and more nightly disturbances, the sympathy soon turned to telling offs and cries of ‘get back to bed’ – usually from his mum. No wonder he was anxious.
He listened intensively while watching the pendulum gently swing from side to side, wondering if he had just woke up – the transition from dream to reality as unnoticeable as all those years ago. Sam eyed him questioningly with his head on one side. The dog didn’t look in any rush to get outside for a pee.
His heart beat like a rock band’s bass drum as he gingerly trod the last few steps down to the hall. He couldn’t go back to bed until he knew for certain he had been dreaming. He needed to prove he could overcome his fears. He would open the living door and there would be nothing out of the ordinary.
He could do this.
He ran a sweaty, nervous hand through locks of shoulder length brown hair and stared blankly at the door before slowly pushing it open. It groaned on dry hinges like the door of a haunted house. He reached through the gap and quickly flicked the light switch, half expecting a hand to grab his wrist.
The door half opened before jamming against scattered magazines on the carpeted floor. Pictures lay face down on the dresser and his mum’s precious collection of crystal glasses balanced precariously on the end of the cupboard shelf. Sam looked too, didn’t like what he saw, and returned to the bottom of the stairs.
Jamie ventured into a room that was so charged with electricity his hair quivered. Perhaps the patio door had blown open and a sudden gust of wind had ransacked the room? But that wouldn’t explain the green glow; he couldn’t think of any reason for that. He checked the door anyway to find it locked.
Another creak. Was it from upstairs? He wasn’t sure.
He positioned trembling legs at the ready with his latest kick boxing stance just in case any surprises came his way, but his limbs felt heavy and cumbersome at the thought of a burglar hiding under the sofa. Maybe now would be a good time to wake Mum and Dad after all.
An angry voice boomed, causing him to nearly jump out of his pyjamas. Dad stood in the doorway with his cricket bat. “What on earth are you up to, Bulldog? Get back to bed!”
Mr Lock wasn’t normally an angry man, but when he did get angry people generally let their feet do some serious running and he would soon be left on his own. As a rule, he was invariably jolly with an enormous food belly and a head full of bad jokes. He loved to build things, but he didn’t really know how to apply his strength so most of the time he just broke anything delicate in his huge hands.
The landing light came on and Mrs Lock appeared half way down the stairs all bleary eyed. Her black hair stuck out in every direction like she had just been electrocuted.
Jamie had heard people describe her as a skeleton in a stretched onesie of skin. Her tongue was so sharp it would lash anyone into submission with a volley of abuse and most of the time his dad would be on the end of it. She never mucked about with words, she said what she thought and she thought a flea had more brain power than his dad.
Words fired out of his mouth before she got the chance to unleash her tongue. “I saw a green light in here from half way up the stairs!” he said incredulously. He quickly told them about the sound of fluttering paper and the chinking of glass. On hearing the words ‘chinking of glass’, Mrs Lock charged the rest of the way down the stairs and barged her husband out of the way. She gasped at the sight of her precious crystal, each one about to topple to its doom.
She quickly pushed them to the back of the shelf, spun to face Jamie and, with a laser beam stare, she growled, “Jamie! What have you done in here?”
“Nothing, Mum!”
“You must have done! Glasses do not just move by themselves! And look at all this mess!”
“But I haven’t done anything, Mum!”
Realisation suddenly fell across her face. She morphed into an angel which he found very worrying. “Ah… you’ve been sleep-walking, haven’t you, darling?”
“No…”
“YES YOU HAVE!” She took a step closer, waved a witch-like bony finger at him and said softly. “You’ve come down and ran around the room pretending to be a superhero… just like you used to do when you were six, haven’t you?”
A tornado whirled inside his head. He thought of all the things that had happened since waking to Sam’s growl. The muffled three o’clock dunks of the clock and the moonlight through the window; the smell of new stair carpet and its softness between his toes; the cool laminate against his bare feet in the hall.
“I haven’t, honest, Mum,” he said indignantly.
She placed a skinny arm across his shoulders which worried him even more. “You won’t remember making any of this mess, darling. The light you saw was just in your dream… your mind playing little tricks on you that’s all.” The angelic face vanished and the lioness returned. “But don’t you worry; I’ll make you tidy it all up in the morning!”
“But it wasn’t a dream, Mum. I saw and heard everything!”
“Your mother is right, Son,” grumbled Mr Lock. “I mean, just think about what you have told us. It could only be one of your episodes couldn’t it? A green whirlwind in the room...? more like an alien invasion in your head!” He laughed. “Come on, Bulldog, back to bed with you. And what’s up with the dog? It looks as though he’s guilty of something too.”
Sam gave a low gruff of a woof from the bottom of the stairs.
Mrs Lock sighed. “Oh, who knows? Let’s all go back to bed.” She pointed at Jamie. “And you’ll have to be up and ready by nine o’clock if you want to go with your father to see Mr Oswald about that homework of yours.”
He had forgotten about that. Dad’s friend, Mr Oswald, wrote children’s stories and, as he had to write a rather large story for summer holiday homework, it made perfect sense to go and pick the brain of a writer.
Everyone trudged back up stairs and, with all creaky doors closed (except for Jamie’s which closed quietly because he oiled the hinges himself), the house returned to near silence with only the clunk-clunk of the grandfather clock’s swinging pendulum.
02:58
It wasn’t like the dog to make a noise in the night; once he had curled up in his basket at lights-out Jamie never heard a peep out of him until he continually pawed at the door to be let out for a pee in the morning.
“Quiet, Sam. Go back to sleep.”
Beyond the bedroom door, the distinct sound of the living room door’s creaky hinges drifted up the stairs. His dad would often get up in the night when he couldn’t sleep and Sam never reacted to that. The dog growled again, his ears erect and alert. In the glow of a tiny light plugged into a socket, he hauled his sheepdog body out of his basket and sauntered to the door, tail down, sniffing the gap at the bottom.
“You can’t want to go out, Sam; it’s nearly three in the morning!” Jamie switched on his bedside light, swung his fourteen-year-old legs out of bed and got to his feet as another creak came from downstairs. He found it strange that Sam didn’t run out when he opened the door. The dog just stared at the landing, head cocked on one side, listening.
“What’s the matter, big fella?” he whispered, “don’t worry; it’ll just be Dad making a brew. Come on, let’s let you out.”
From the top of the stairs he couldn’t see any light spilling into the hall which he found a little odd. He couldn’t imagine his dad bungling around in the dark. He glanced at his parent’s closed bedroom door and listened to a cyclic snore from within. Only Dad snored.
A cool draft drifted up the stairs, it heightened his senses and, even though he was warm, it sent a tingling shiver through his core. Mum told him responses like that were caused by anxiety; by negative thoughts and fear of the unknown. She told him he was big enough to deal with any problem that came his way; and she was right of course. Being square jawed and rugged before his time and built like a bulldog (which his dad often called him), he knew he shouldn’t be bothered by anything really.
But, even though he had taken up contact sports including kick boxing and rugby union, he remained apprehensive about investigating peculiar occurrences on his own. It was at times like this when he wished he had a brother or a sister to bounce ideas off; to feel the security of someone else by his side; to bond with someone his own age and not his parents.
Mum had had three pregnancies. He would have had a younger brother and sister if not for the ‘complications’ as she called it. He never really found out what they were until he overheard a conversation between his dad and his friend Mr Oswald when he was seven. He had to look up miscarriage and hysterectomy on Dad’s computer.
The minute hand of the grandfather clock in the hall reached the top of the dial and the old monster of time thumped out three muffled dunks – definitely dunks, not dongs. Everyone liked it to sound that way, nice and quiet, especially during the night. That’s why it had one of Dad’s socks over the bell.
As the dunks ceased and silence descended upon the house, a cloud cleared and the moon cast a window-shaped square of light on newly carpeted stairs. Maybe the sounds he and Sam heard were just whispering breezes passing through an isolated creaky, old house.
His fingers intertwined like snakes in clasped and clammy hands. “Do you really want to go out, Sam? I hope this isn’t going to happen every night otherwise you’re not sleeping with me.”
Forcing the thought of burglars and hideous monsters from his mind, he tip-toed down the stairs but stopped halfway down. He inhaled sharply. The hair on the back of his neck stood to attention like an army, and an icy shiver felt like a glacier gouging its way along his spine.
A green glow increased in intensity from the gap around the living room door. The flutter of paper, the chinking of glass and an engine-like whine cut through the silence. And then, as seconds seemed like minutes, the strange light and sounds vanished leaving nothing but the clunk-clunk of the clock’s pendulum and the dull glow of the moon once again.
His mind raced back to when he was five and six years old when his dreams would cause him to bang on his parent’s door in the middle of the night. Mum and Dad were sympathetic at first, but as his dreams led to sleepwalking and more nightly disturbances, the sympathy soon turned to telling offs and cries of ‘get back to bed’ – usually from his mum. No wonder he was anxious.
He listened intensively while watching the pendulum gently swing from side to side, wondering if he had just woke up – the transition from dream to reality as unnoticeable as all those years ago. Sam eyed him questioningly with his head on one side. The dog didn’t look in any rush to get outside for a pee.
His heart beat like a rock band’s bass drum as he gingerly trod the last few steps down to the hall. He couldn’t go back to bed until he knew for certain he had been dreaming. He needed to prove he could overcome his fears. He would open the living door and there would be nothing out of the ordinary.
He could do this.
He ran a sweaty, nervous hand through locks of shoulder length brown hair and stared blankly at the door before slowly pushing it open. It groaned on dry hinges like the door of a haunted house. He reached through the gap and quickly flicked the light switch, half expecting a hand to grab his wrist.
The door half opened before jamming against scattered magazines on the carpeted floor. Pictures lay face down on the dresser and his mum’s precious collection of crystal glasses balanced precariously on the end of the cupboard shelf. Sam looked too, didn’t like what he saw, and returned to the bottom of the stairs.
Jamie ventured into a room that was so charged with electricity his hair quivered. Perhaps the patio door had blown open and a sudden gust of wind had ransacked the room? But that wouldn’t explain the green glow; he couldn’t think of any reason for that. He checked the door anyway to find it locked.
Another creak. Was it from upstairs? He wasn’t sure.
He positioned trembling legs at the ready with his latest kick boxing stance just in case any surprises came his way, but his limbs felt heavy and cumbersome at the thought of a burglar hiding under the sofa. Maybe now would be a good time to wake Mum and Dad after all.
An angry voice boomed, causing him to nearly jump out of his pyjamas. Dad stood in the doorway with his cricket bat. “What on earth are you up to, Bulldog? Get back to bed!”
Mr Lock wasn’t normally an angry man, but when he did get angry people generally let their feet do some serious running and he would soon be left on his own. As a rule, he was invariably jolly with an enormous food belly and a head full of bad jokes. He loved to build things, but he didn’t really know how to apply his strength so most of the time he just broke anything delicate in his huge hands.
The landing light came on and Mrs Lock appeared half way down the stairs all bleary eyed. Her black hair stuck out in every direction like she had just been electrocuted.
Jamie had heard people describe her as a skeleton in a stretched onesie of skin. Her tongue was so sharp it would lash anyone into submission with a volley of abuse and most of the time his dad would be on the end of it. She never mucked about with words, she said what she thought and she thought a flea had more brain power than his dad.
Words fired out of his mouth before she got the chance to unleash her tongue. “I saw a green light in here from half way up the stairs!” he said incredulously. He quickly told them about the sound of fluttering paper and the chinking of glass. On hearing the words ‘chinking of glass’, Mrs Lock charged the rest of the way down the stairs and barged her husband out of the way. She gasped at the sight of her precious crystal, each one about to topple to its doom.
She quickly pushed them to the back of the shelf, spun to face Jamie and, with a laser beam stare, she growled, “Jamie! What have you done in here?”
“Nothing, Mum!”
“You must have done! Glasses do not just move by themselves! And look at all this mess!”
“But I haven’t done anything, Mum!”
Realisation suddenly fell across her face. She morphed into an angel which he found very worrying. “Ah… you’ve been sleep-walking, haven’t you, darling?”
“No…”
“YES YOU HAVE!” She took a step closer, waved a witch-like bony finger at him and said softly. “You’ve come down and ran around the room pretending to be a superhero… just like you used to do when you were six, haven’t you?”
A tornado whirled inside his head. He thought of all the things that had happened since waking to Sam’s growl. The muffled three o’clock dunks of the clock and the moonlight through the window; the smell of new stair carpet and its softness between his toes; the cool laminate against his bare feet in the hall.
“I haven’t, honest, Mum,” he said indignantly.
She placed a skinny arm across his shoulders which worried him even more. “You won’t remember making any of this mess, darling. The light you saw was just in your dream… your mind playing little tricks on you that’s all.” The angelic face vanished and the lioness returned. “But don’t you worry; I’ll make you tidy it all up in the morning!”
“But it wasn’t a dream, Mum. I saw and heard everything!”
“Your mother is right, Son,” grumbled Mr Lock. “I mean, just think about what you have told us. It could only be one of your episodes couldn’t it? A green whirlwind in the room...? more like an alien invasion in your head!” He laughed. “Come on, Bulldog, back to bed with you. And what’s up with the dog? It looks as though he’s guilty of something too.”
Sam gave a low gruff of a woof from the bottom of the stairs.
Mrs Lock sighed. “Oh, who knows? Let’s all go back to bed.” She pointed at Jamie. “And you’ll have to be up and ready by nine o’clock if you want to go with your father to see Mr Oswald about that homework of yours.”
He had forgotten about that. Dad’s friend, Mr Oswald, wrote children’s stories and, as he had to write a rather large story for summer holiday homework, it made perfect sense to go and pick the brain of a writer.
Everyone trudged back up stairs and, with all creaky doors closed (except for Jamie’s which closed quietly because he oiled the hinges himself), the house returned to near silence with only the clunk-clunk of the grandfather clock’s swinging pendulum.