Blue Dome

By J.G. Gill

Blue Dome is the first part of the 'Blue Dome' fantasy series.

It's an ordinary Thursday afternoon when sixteen-year old Clare de Milo arrives home from school to find that intruders have broken into her house and everything's been destroyed. Her father and step-mother are missing and, scrawled in blood on a bedroom mirror, is the word 'RUN'. Clare and her brother Bede have suddenly become fugitives, uncertain who they can trust as they try to escape the relentless pursuit of the mysterious and dangerous Demarge. But why is Clare, a mere teenage girl, so important to a man as powerful as Demarge and why is he determined to use her to gain entrance into a secret sanctuary known as the Slipworld? These are the questions that Clare, her brother, and their friends must attempt to answer as they discover that the world they know is not all it seems...

• Language: English
• Publisher: J.G. Gill
• Release date: Nov 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781910004012

J.G. Gill

J.G.Gill lives in London where she writes novels for young adults. She is the author of the 'Blue Dome' trilogy. You can visit her website at: www.jggill.com/

Book preview

Prologue

If I started at the beginning, no one would believe me. There are days when I’m not even sure I believe it myself. I try to pretend I imagined it all, that I’m still the same person I was before I knew the truth. But it never really works. I find myself teetering on the brink of memory, before something brings me back – something as small as the imprint of perfume on the air, or Bede looking at me in a certain way. Then I remember. I’ll always remember. Because I know what happened to us was real.

Much of what is written here has come from the diaries I kept at the time. At first they were just bits of paper scribbled with fractured thoughts – a mosaic of my sanity. Now they are so crammed with my life that barely anything left of me remains outside them. I’ve had to take the pages, so thickly layered with ink that the sentences have woven themselves into a dark, dense felt, and rethread the words to make sense of them again.

Even then, my diaries can’t tell the whole story – they only ever knew about the things I saw. For the rest, I’ve had to rely on my friends’ memories of what happened to piece it all together. Bede’s helped a lot. Although my brother might be a bit unreliable sometimes (okay Bede, not always, but definitely sometimes), he’s no drama queen. I know what he’s told me will be right, even if it was painful and I didn’t want to hear it.

Then there are the bits where, I admit, I’ve had to guess, based on what I know about the people involved and the things that followed. Maybe it means I’ve used ‘artistic license’, as my English teacher might call it, but I’m kind of okay with that. Even if I can’t be sure that I’m absolutely, no-shadow-of-a-doubt right, I suspect that I’m pretty damn close.

In many ways I’m still trying to work it all out. On that score, Bede is probably having an easier time than me, but then he’s always been better at knowing when to accept stuff, and when to let it go. Still, we both come from a long line of people who’ve needed to get to the bottom of things. What I’ve realised is that there are some things that stay in the past, and there are some things that don’t, and the things that happened when I when I was sixteen will stay with me until the day I die.

CHAPTER I

I can’t remember exactly when I fell out with maths. It was probably about the same time that algebra reared its ugly head, which I guess means we parted company pretty early on. Let’s face it, algebra’s like an oil slick: it gets into everything. By the time I’d reached Year 11, every maths class seemed to be saturated with the stuff.

Maths was every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon at Wiltdsown High, in one of those new-build classrooms that looked as if it had been made entirely out of cork. It froze in winter and boiled in summer.

My desk was in the back left corner of the room, furthest from the door and closest to the drafty windows. In other words, the worst desk going. It wasn’t my choice. I’d been talking to Mrs Burlington about a possible summer internship at the College of Journalism and been so psyched about it that I’d totally lost track of the time. By the time I’d arrived at maths, everyone had already taken their desks. There was just one left: mine. I took it as an omen that someone had already tattooed the words Welcome to Hell onto its lid and as the term wore on, I couldn’t have put it better myself.

If it wasn’t bad enough that my desk was the classroom equivalent of a nuclear fallout zone, the BBTs had taken the desks immediately in front of me. The ‘BBTs’, as everyone at Wiltsdown High knew them, were the ‘Blonde, Beautiful Thin’ girls who hung around in the Main Quad, flashing their standard-issue, perma-tan spaghetti legs and applying so much lipgloss they looked as if they’d been snogging the inside of a Vaseline jar. That was, when they weren’t already busy making someone else’s life a nightmare. I forget now, who first came up with ‘BBT’, but it used to be ironic and funny. That was, until the BBTs found out about it and started treating it like a badge of honour. It was much harder to laugh about then.

The BBTs were untouchable, everyone knew it. They were the girls who’d smile to the teacher’s face, while secretly sticking an upturned drawing pin on her chair; the girls who’d wait until the bell was about to ring, before jamming the short kid’s bag in a window frame so high that he wouldn’t be able to get it before his next class; the girls who’d wait until they had an audience of the best-looking guys in the school, before calling you a fat, ugly slag right in front of them. They were the girls who had a spooky talent for smelling blood.

I guess it’s obvious, I was no BBT. I could never have been one either, even if I’d wanted to (which, for the record, I definitely didn’t). For a start, I wasn’t blonde. In fact, I’d never been entirely sure what colour my hair was. My dad used to say it was still making its mind up, caught somewhere between being ‘muddy-rust’ and ‘mousey-ginger’. Not exactly flattering (and that was my dad, so you can imagine what other people said). If anyone asked me I’d just say it was ‘auburn’. It might not have been technically right, but I figured it was a lot more glamorous than ‘mousey-ginger’. I’d always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with my hair. It was great that it was long and bushy and I could hide behind it in class, but at the same time it was mega-curly and a total pain to control.

The other thing that kept the door firmly shut between me and the BBTs was that I was really tall. Maybe that’s a good thing if you’re a guy, but when you’re a girl and one of the tallest people in school (including the teachers) it’s not cool. Most of the time I kind of forgot about it so it wasn’t really an issue. I mean, there was nothing I could do about it anyway, so why stress? In fact, it was actually pretty useful at concerts, or school assemblies, when I could see what was going on. It was also really useful on the Wiltsdown Underground, when I could see above people and didn’t have to breathe in someone’s smelly armpit like some of my friends did. But the reality was I was never going to be one of those girls who fitted neatly under the chin of some guy at the school dance, which was basically a prerequisite of being a BBT.

To put a final nail in the coffin of ‘BBT eligibility’, I was in no way thin enough to ever be mistaken for one of those girls. Okay, I’m reasonably slim, but I’m definitely no celery stick. In fact, I’m not even sure it would be physically possible for me to get that thin, and certainly not unless someone bombed Mama Jo’s bakery down on the corner (or Mama Jo simply stopped making meringues the size of my head). I did try dieting once, but it was kind of boring. The truth is, I like to eat.

It was a normal Thursday afternoon and I was in maths, taking down the equations Mr Hudson had left on the whiteboard before he’d been called away. At least, that was what I was trying to do. It was difficult to actually see the board as the BBTs had decided to sit on top of their desks. I craned my neck to see around them, but it soon felt way too much like I was trying to do yoga. They were sitting too closely together, a solid wall of school uniforms and make-up, whispering and giggling like a bunch of furtive rodents. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but every so often one of them would speak loudly, on purpose, so that everyone else in the class could hear. Then they’d all laugh, not like normal people, but as if they were acting in some really naff play, before glancing around to see if anyone (i.e. one of the cool guys) was watching. At first I tried to ignore them, and was actually doing okay until finally they became so loud it was impossible to block them out.

Hey, have you heard what I’ve heard? one of them said.

No, what? one of the others replied. I could see her out of the corner of my eye, smirking to the BBT on her left. Someone was about to cop it, I just knew it. There were days when those girls reminded me of a giant zit, the way their blonde heads would swell together, then burst apart with something nasty. I just hoped it wasn’t going to be me in the firing line.

I heard that Thomas was caught doing it with Mrs Burlington down the back of the field!

I breathed a secret sigh of relief – at least it wasn’t me they’d decided to pick on this time. My relief was quickly followed by a sharp pang of sympathy for Thomas. I had a horrible feeling that whatever happened next, it wasn’t going to be pretty. I concentrated on the whiteboard and tried to keep my face as neutral as possible. The BBTs had the eyesight of circling vultures and they could see the facial twitches of prey a mile off. Once they did, boom, it was all over.

The four of them were laughing hysterically now and a bunch of their loser friends were joining in. It seemed like everyone was staring at the guy sitting in the corner of the room opposite me. He had his head down, his long, floppy fringe dangling in his eyes. Thomas was doing a good job of pretending he hadn’t noticed what was going on around him. I knew from my own experience, though, he’d be painfully aware. I felt a hard lump form in my chest.

No one knew much about Thomas. Actually, scratch that, no one knew anything about Thomas. He’d just been this small guy with shaggy blond hair and pale blue eyes who’d turned up in our class earlier in the year. Someone said that he’d had major dramas at home after his parents’ divorce and that his mum had decided to make a new start in Wiltsdown. He was so quiet though, and barely said a word to any of us, so it wasn’t like we could just stump up and ask him.

The sound of a loud, wet belch suddenly invaded my thoughts. I didn’t even need to look up to know where it had come from.

What, old Mrs Burlington? Way to go, Tom-bo. Vince’s sneering, arrogant voice blazed its way across the room like a heat-seeking missile.

Oh, so mean Vince, said the BBT who’d kicked off the whole thing in the first place. The other three ogled him flirtatiously, while I felt my stomach churn. Even the thought of Vince made my skin crawl. The guy milked his status as captain of the football team for all it was worth and even the headmaster thought he was God, which left little hope for the rest of us. It didn’t help that, in addition to the unquestioning adulation of the teachers, Vince had enough raw animal cunning to get away with murder. His involvement in the BBT’s stage show was a deadly cue for all hell to break loose. The BBTs were now chanting Tom-bo, Tom-bo over and over again, as if they had some sort of collective brain injury.

It really was pointless now, trying to do any more maths. I stared out of the drafty window behind me. The clouds were becoming steadily heavier and greyer, flexing their muscles for a storm. I began to wonder how the sky might feel, just at that moment, just before it let go of the rain. Maybe it was like being a large wet dog in the seconds before it had a chance to shake itself dry. I thought about Val, the dog we used to have before my mother died.

Jinx. I’d done it again. I’d thought about my mother. A faded image of her face swam across my mind and I felt a pang in my stomach. I closed my eyes, using the darkness to sharpen her profile. It had been such a long time since she’d died, I wasn’t sure any more whether the face I saw in my memories was truly hers, or partly a mix of Aunt Pixie’s as well. Bede and I had stayed with Aunt Pixie for several months immediately after the accident, while Dad had been recovering in hospital. I hadn’t seen her for years now and certainly not since Dad had remarried.

Whoever’s face I saw, it was kind and always made me feel calmer. I concentrated on the shimmering features, trying to hold them still in my mind. I wondered if there’d ever been a time when my mother had had to sit through a class like this in order to become an anthropologist. If she had, then it was kind of reassuring – maybe things could get better. For the zillionth time, I wished she was still around to ask.

I kept staring aimlessly out the window, hoping that the BBTs would either give up or jointly become one of the freaky spontaneous human combustions I’d sometimes read about. No such luck. I glanced at the clock on the classroom wall and began counting down the minutes before I could escape cork-classroom hell.

It was then that I suddenly got the horrible feeling I was being watched. I turned to my right and, sure enough, there was Thomas, bang in the middle of a full-on stare. He quickly looked away, but it was too late – we both knew I’d seen him. Weirdly, it wasn’t the first time I’d caught Thomas staring at me. He’d been doing it a lot lately, quickly darting his eyes away the second I’d clued onto him. The first time it happened, I thought I had something stuck in my teeth like spinach or something embarrassing like that. But after a few days, when he kept randomly staring at me, I figured it had to be something else. I’d been trying to ignore him, but this time, unfortunately, I was not the only person who had noticed.

Hey, Tom-bo got a thing for gingers, eh? Vince shouted.

I looked down at the desk as I felt my cheeks flush with heat. I could just imagine how bad my face looked as the redness began to fill in all the white gaps between my freckles. At first, I hoped the BBTs hadn’t noticed, before realising that my face was the least of my worries. They’d now whipped up a new chant and were actively encouraging everyone else to join in.

Tho-mas loves ging-ers, Tho-mas loves ging-ers.

Now I really cringed, big time. It was hard to work out which was worse, the fact that people who I’d already shared a class with for two years still didn’t seem to know my name or the fact that they were calling me a ‘ging-er’. If that wasn’t bad enough, Justin had also started watching as well. Great. The coolest guy in the class (maybe even in the whole school) was now going to see just how uncool I was.

Justin’s reputation had preceded his arrival at Wiltsdown High. The rumour mill had gone nuts in the Main Quad as soon as the news had broken that a new kid was coming who was so bad he’d been expelled from every other school in the district. No one knew exactly what he’d done, which only made the mystery and hype worse. By the time Justin had actually taken his first step through the school gates, speculation had reached fever pitch and the guy was guaranteed a one-way pass to BBT headquarters.

I never really knew what to think about Justin. There were times when I thought he was a right dick, the way he’d swagger around school, wearing his jeans way down low and trying to act cool. He was also immediately friends with Vince and the BBTs, which was a pretty lousy character reference as far as I was concerned.

At the same time, though, it was always Justin who’d never think twice about challenging something he thought was unfair, regardless of the consequences for himself. For instance, there was the time when someone set fire to a table in the science lab and the teachers had threatened to cancel the inter-school sports day unless the culprit owned up. It wasn’t exactly a major tragedy for me (‘co-ordination’ is something I can spell, not something I can do), but the rest of the school went pretty mental about it. Vince had been training for weeks and had a major hissy fit in the Main Quad, which only ended once he’d vented his anger by punching out a Year 9 who was half his size.

But was it Vince who had the nerve to take the teachers on about it? No way. It was Justin who made the stand, even though he didn’t do sports. He complained in front of the whole assembly, promptly landing himself in yet another after-school detention. In the meantime, whoever had lit that fire was way too chicken to own up. Another week went by and it looked as if the sports day was well and truly dead. Then, on the final day, Justin owned up. None of us believed it was him – if it had been he’d have owned up straightaway with his ‘I couldn’t-care-less’ attitude. As far as the teachers were concerned though, it didn’t matter, a scalp was a scalp and the sports day went ahead. I hated to admit it, but I couldn’t help admire Justin for taking the rap.

There was also another reason why I had difficulty sticking Justin in the same box as Vince, although I’d never admit it to anyone. If I was completely honest, Justin was pretty good looking. Not in a conventional way really – his face was too lopsided – but there was something kind of soft about him. It was a look he’d sometimes get, when he didn’t realise anyone was looking, as if he was harbouring a small, crumpled secret that he was afraid to tell anyone. It was hard to explain, but sometimes, when I looked at him, I’d get a weird kind of twinge in the pit of my stomach and for the briefest of seconds I’d wonder if maybe, just maybe, I actually knew him better than the BBTs did. I knew it was totally stupid, especially when Justin didn’t even know I was alive.

If things weren’t already humiliating enough, they were about to get even worse. I should have clued onto it straightaway, the minute I saw one of the BBTs looking right at me and giggling, but it took me a couple of seconds to realise what was going on. Vince had started doing an ape dance behind my back and before I could stop him he reached across and snatched the hairclip from my ponytail. It hurt, too, as he grabbed a whole fistful of my hair with it. He waved the clip in front of my face, before shoving it into his pocket and laughing like a deranged hyena. Now the whole class was looking. I wanted my desk to open its lid and swallow me whole.

Give it back, I said to Vince, trying to keep my voice as calm as possible and not draw any more attention to myself.

Give it back, he mimicked, while the BBTs laughed maniacally.

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Thomas watching with a kind of horrified disbelief and for a moment I forgot all about the hairclip. I turned to see him quickly shovelling his stuff off his desk and into his bag, before heading for the door. He almost made it too, before Vince slid out of nowhere and blocked his exit.

Ah, not so fast, he said.

Thomas quivered. The top of his head only just reached the bottom of Vince’s throat and whereas Vince’s shoulders jutted out from the base of his neck like a broad coat-hanger, Thomas’s sloped away like a sheet draped over a piano stool. There was no way he’d be able to take on Vince without being pulverised. I cringed as I saw a mix of humiliation and defeat flash across Thomas’s face. Then, suddenly, a voice piped up from across the other side of the room.

Let him go Vince. I need a smoke. Justin was walking towards the door, pulling a packet of cigarettes from his back pocket.

But what if Old Crusty comes back? said one of the BBTs. You’ll get seriously done.

Justin shrugged. Shit happens.

As he brushed past Vince, a small gap opened in the doorway and Thomas leapt through before Vince could stop him. The sound of panicked footsteps thundered down the hallway outside, as if Thomas was running for his life.

I glanced at the clock again, willing the big hand to be on the six and the small hand to be on the three. Surely, if there was a God, he’d make the damn bell ring. Then, as if my prayers had suddenly been answered, the gorgeous, ear-splitting sound cracked the air like a pneumatic drill. The BBTs immediately slid off their desks and oozed out of the door faster than wet slime. Vince followed them, but not until he’d had a chance to flash my hairclip at me one more time and smile nastily. It struck me that he had way too many teeth.

I gathered my stuff and crammed it into my bag. My hair was now driving me crazy, falling forward over my face and making it difficult for me to see what I was doing. As I left the classroom the sound of ‘ging-er’ kept replaying in my head, like a buzzing insect had flown into my ear and become trapped. The most frustrating thing was that I knew there was nothing I could do about it. Going to a teacher and complaining about a stolen hairclip was obviously unthinkable. They’d probably just look at me as if I was about three years old. As for telling them what had actually happened, well that was just too mortifying. I hardly wanted to admit to myself, let alone to anyone else, that I was a social pariah. Besides that, it was Vince, the school darling who’d done it, so there was no chance the teachers would even believe me. My only consolation was that it was Thursday and there was only one day of school left to go. Plus, Dad and Arlene would still be at work by the time I got home, so the house would be mine for a couple of hours. Perfect.

I turned out of the school gates and started heading towards the shops. It was the long way home, but I really needed the walk to clear my head. I’d only gone a short way and had paused at Mama Jo’s to watch a four-layered cake stand being squeezed into an impossibly small corner of a window, when I heard a familiar, flap, flap, flap of fast-moving feet approaching from behind. I froze, forcing myself to keep staring at the glass. The last thing I wanted to do was make eye contact with Mary.

I don’t remember when I first became aware of Mary, but I know that she’d lived on the streets of Wiltsdown for as long as anyone could remember. She was often seen around the shops, her wide, startled eyes permanently haunted. She was very thin and very tall – at least as tall as me – with a mop of crazy, steel-grey hair that looked like something you might scrub the bottom of a pot with. Her skin was so weathered and wrinkled it was like a piece of old brown parchment that had been screwed up and then flattened out again, hundreds of times. Arlene simply branded her ‘The Resident Crazy’.

It wasn’t just the way that Mary looked that scared me, it was her unpredictability. I still remembered the time I’d been standing at an intersection with a whole bunch of people, waiting to cross the road, when I’d suddenly felt someone pushing and shoving behind me, trying to get to the front of the queue. It was Mary. The lights had turned and we’d started to cross, when Mary had danced out into the middle of the intersection, tilted back her head and begun screaming like she couldn’t quite work out the difference between pain and laughter. It had seriously freaked me out. Since then I’d always tried to stay well out of her way. Today was no exception.

I subconsciously drew closer to the window, allowing Mary as much room as possible to pass behind me. Suddenly the manic footsteps stopped. Had she passed already, gone around the corner? She must have. I breathed a sigh of relief and turned to move away from the window when I found myself suddenly face to face with her. Unfortunately Mary doesn’t do ‘personal space’, so our faces were now uncomfortably close. Her violet-blue eyes drilled into me as if I was some sort of science experiment that had produced an unexpected result. She suddenly grabbed my arm, making me jump.

Can I help you? I stuttered.

Mary ignored the question and kept staring at me with the same unflinching intensity.

It won’t always be like this you know, she said.

Like…what?

Mary was now so close that I could feel the stale moistness of her breath against my cheek. I drew back, desperate for some space, as she studied me curiously.

Sometimes we bite the apple to the core. We don’t mean to. We don’t want the pips. But that’s the risk. We still have to bite.

She nodded at me, as if we’d just reached some sort of common understanding, then spun on her heel and scurried up the street as quickly as she’d arrived, the soles of her shoes flap, flap, flapping against the pavement. I watched, dumbfounded, as Mary quickly melded into the sea of backs. Had what just happened really happened, or had I imagined it? I could see that Arlene had a point, Mary was seriously weird.

The rest of the journey home passed in a fog and I was soon on Hern Street. Our house was the third on the left, one of those red-brick bungalow things that Arlene had decided would make ‘a good family home’. As far as I was concerned, we already had a perfectly good family home – the one that Mum had helped choose – but somehow Arlene had managed to convince Dad otherwise.

As I turned into the driveway I noticed something odd. Our fence was buckled and the post that used to stand closest to the concrete driveway was lying on its side in the grass. Fresh clumps of dirt were strewn roughly around the hole where the post used to stand. Still, it wasn’t the first time that something like that had happened. Even Arlene admitted she was pretty lousy at backing the car. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d just run over it again without realising.

It was only when I’d reached the front door, and was fishing about in my bag for my keys, that I noticed something really was wrong. The door was slightly open and hanging lopsidedly on its hinges. I gave it a slight push and it made an unhealthy splintering sound. I pushed it again, a little harder this time, and the whole door collapsed in a diagonal heap across the entrance. Man, whatever excuse my brother came up with this time, it was going to have to be good.

Bede! I shouted.

There was no answer. I waited a couple of seconds then called again. There was still no reply. Dumping my bag, I carefully edged my way through a gap in the doorframe.

Chances were, Bede had taken off for the night to give Dad and Arlene time to cool down. I stepped inside the house, then stopped short, as my eyes struggled to make sense of the carnage that had become our lounge. Both sofas had been turned on their sides, the stuffing ripped from their bellies, and the coffee table was