Chapter One

London, Europe, was a fine place to vacation, even if it meant having to meet many elderly people that she would rather not.

Mother had so many relations from her past days as a traveling journalist that she could not help but want to meet a thousand people over again, and her lonely daughter had nothing better to do (or so she thought) during that summer.

"There was this time," her mother, or Mrs. Bly, said as they walked past a fine-looking railway station, "long ago, that a horrible train wreck killed – hmm, let me see – nearly a whole family, the father, mother, two sons, a daughter, a cousin, a friend, and an elderly man and woman, and an old professor - family friends, I think – which makes ten!– right at this station."

"Did they redo it? It looks too new," Alexandra asked her mother, staring at the shiny paint. She waited for her mother's British accented voice to clearly tell her the answer to her question.

"Oh yes," her mother replied. "The whole front of the train slipped right off of the tracks, killed the two boys who were waiting at the front of the platform, and jolted the family, who were in the front. Terrible, terrible. The whole side of the platform and much of the train was destroyed. But isn't it odd - the conductor didn't die! All the rest were only wounded. I made sure to mention that in my report."

"The whole family - just died?" Alex asked, horrified.

"Well, they had a sister, who wasn't with them. Oh, she must have been heart broken! I visited her once, actually -Somewhat on mistake, you see- but, she was a gorgeous girl. I can't remember what she did. Maybe… no, I don't know if she did work. I can't remember… But I would like to talk to her again. Find out what has become of her. She was such a lonely girl, after that."

There was quiet as the two walked further down the old street.

Mrs. Bly raised her hand to signal for the cab, and then they both got into the first one that stopped.

The ride was quiet. Alexandra was watching the old houses that the cab passed in silent wonder. She had read the Chronicles of Narnia, some time back,and thought, from what she remembered, that they looked like the kind of places that the children from those tales might have lived in. She wished for a moment that she could see her own home, back in America, and her cat and her things. London was very different, and though her mother was at home here, she was not. She wondered how long, also, they would be out, before they could go back to their hotel and she could sort her luggage and relax.

They hadn't gone far on the long, old streets, when the cab pulled aside to one of the dingy houses, and mother paid the driver, and then got out.

"Whose house is this?" Alex asked.

"The girl from the family of the train wreck," her mother said, nodding and walking up the small stone steps, to knock on the door. Alex followed shyly behind. She could think of many more questions to ask now, but it seemed too late for them. She did not want to be speaking when someone opened the door, and have them hear something she might not want to be overheard saying.

She stayed behind her mother, waiting for the wooden door to swing aside. But it didn't.

Mrs. Bly knocked again.

Finally they heard a shuffling noise, and the door swung open.

"Sorry, all empty!" the man tried to say, but Mrs. Bly caught the door and pulled it back before he could close it.

"What do you mean by 'all empty'?" she demanded.

"I'm cleaning the lady's mess. I daresay she left a lot of filth!" he said, and once more tried to abandon the scene.

"Why, where is she?" Mrs. Bly said loudly, as if in charge of the situation. He paused, then stepped more softly out so that they could see his dusty clothes and one arm full of boxes and papers.

"Dead, Ma'am."

"Oh!" Mrs. Bly said very despairingly. "So… you are her relative?"

"Distantly," said the man. "Did you know her?"

"A little," Mrs. Bly said. "I had wanted to see if she still kept any copies of the 'Family Train Accident'."

"An article?" the man asked curiously.

"From the newspaper – 'the London Spy'," Mrs. Bly said.

"She had a full board of them, and I was just about to sort it through. You'll come inside?"

Mrs. Bly looked back at Alexandra, who shrugged. She nodded, and followed the man forward into the old house.

It wasn't a peculiarly pleasant place, knowing that its mistress had died. And the floorboards were dusty and creaked when you stepped on them, and the rooms where very empty, because the man had already cleaned many of them (out of the few there were to clean).

The man led them to a very small back room, and opened the door to reveal it still furnished.

"This was her bedroom," he said, and instantly left.

Mrs. Bly walked undaunted into the room, Alex hesitated behind. She had no fear of spirits or the dead, she didn't believe that when people died they haunted places, or anything like that which little children try to scare each other with.

At fourteen she felt fairly mature and significant over these fantasies.

She stepped into the old bedroom and watched her mother go to a board where many paper clippings and notes were all posted with metal pins.

Mrs. Bly searched all up and down, but couldn't seem to find a thing.

Below the board was a chest of drawers, also covered with newspaper clippings. One of the drawers of it was opened, and this too had one last clipping in it.

Mrs. Bly slipped her hand through the space of the half-opened drawer and pulled it out. It said on the top, in large letters: "Ten killed in Family Train Accident".

Alex stepped forward to see the writing better, which her mother seemed so engrossed in.

But as she hesitantly walked forward, the side of her dark red long coat (a pride of hers) caught against some old wood, and knocked something onto the ground.

There was a not-so-comfortable crash as the small, dirty wooden box hit the boarded floor and broke open. (And when I say broke, I don't mean it just came unlocked, for the real wood around the edges shattered around the metal lock and unsealed it, scattering whatever was inside on the floor).

"Alexandra!" her mother exclaimed in an oddly loud whisper. "This is not our house! You must be very careful! Hurry and clean that." Then she turned back to the article in her hands.

Alex lifted the tiny wooden box delicately and sighed miserably to herself as she saw it was broken. The contents on the floor, though, made her stop.

They were the most beautiful, brilliant jewelry you could ever imagine in these days. They were not fake and bright, or painted to look somewhat silly and childish, or simple – they looked to be the same material, all the way through and through, and round eternally – because they were beautiful, and real, not playthings, but true rings.

There was only one pair of them, one yellow ring and one green ring.

She reached down with one hand to carefully close it around them… …And then suddenly, she was gone. Disappeared.

She and the rings had all vanished, leaving only the empty wooden box on the floor.

Alex had a fleeting sensation of horrible terror, guilt, and yet freedom.

Where was she going? It seemed she had been dreaming the last few minutes, of knocking down the box, of finding the rings, and of feeling bad because she should not have seen them in the first place.

Slowly she felt herself rising, upward, out of the dreamy, underwater sensation, and then with the completion of her feeling of freedom, her head broke the surface of the water, and she was dazzled with warm, green light.

She forgot everything that she had felt and known before, as she walked, dry, out of the pool of water, and sat at the base of a tree next to it.

Her eyelids instantly seemed to sink downward, dropping toward sleep, but she found that she could not allow herself to fall to that.

She sat up, and stared at the trees above her.

They were so high that she could not seem to get past their enormous, leafy tops. All she saw above was green. Even the light, in that, place, she realized, was green. It was spectacular.

So there she sat, perhaps for a very long time, how long she never knew, and watched the pool at her feet, staring at the smooth water.

And suddenly she saw pictures in it. Not just pictures, but images, that shifted, and then began to move. She concentrated harder on them. The first was an image of her mother, reading the article about the very bad train accident. The next was herself, dropping the box, and picking up the rings, and vanishing.

The rings!

She looked down at her own hand, and saw, resting softly in her own palm, a shiny yellow ring, and a glittering green ring. They were both still there.

She stared at them, as though they were very familiar. But she could not quite make out why.

She stood, and at that moment her concentration on the pool slipped away, and the pictures vanished. She was disappointed for a minute. But then she thought, Maybe the other pools do the same thing. So naturally she turned to look for another pool beside the one she had just been looking into, and was rather surprised.

Instead of water, it seemed sad, and empty. At its base was what looked like bloody dust, left over from the strain of a great battle. But as she stared at it, she seemed to think that it was not dust, but crystals, tiny, tiny crystals of deep red and pale blue.

She leaned onto her knees and stared at it even harder. It was so beautiful, she wanted some of it, just to remember the place.

She looked for somewhere to store the two rings.

Her great coat was covered with pockets, and there were two upward, with one on either side of her chest. She decided to give them separate pockets, because the pockets were so small. So she dropped the yellow one, with careful note, into the left pocket, and the green into the right.

Then she knelt and scooped up some of the shining crystals.

Her hands seemed to tingle with that feeling you get when the blood goes away from your foot or fingers, and you must shake them to wake them up. But it was an even stronger sort of feeling than that, though her heart felt very heavy, as though she held the last remains of something very beautiful, that had become very sad. A voice seemed to whisper a word in her head; Narnia. And the clear, smooth pronunciation of the word was very familiar, as if she had heard it many times before, but she could not remember where.

She dropped the crystals in a pocket of her right side, down on the bottom of the coat (which ended at her thighs, it was rather long), and then stood again, to stare at the little hole in the ground. Suddenly she noticed, that leading away from the hole, were large, deep footprints, and in them was mingled more of the dust, as though a great creature walking there had tread it with finality before leaving. They were, on closer inspection, the great footprints of a lion.

To some, to think that there might be an enormous, wild lion in a large forest along with only you, would be very frightening. But to Alexandra, this was almost a comfort, thought she couldn't understand why. Her eyes watched the footprints that led ever deep into the forest, and she decided that she wanted to follow them. But before she could, a noise from behind her startled her.

She pivoted on her heel, so that she spun very suddenly, but halfway missed what was happening anyway, it all happened so quickly.

What she did see, however, was a form, bearing itself out of another little pool, weakly, as though it had hardly managed to get there, only just so.

It was a boy, maybe a little older than her, but at first she did not think so, for he was very thin, and pale, and looked awfully sad and sickly.

He crawled out of the pool, also dry, and did not seem to see her, as he breathed a deep breath and sat down with his legs before him and his hands out behind him, to steady himself.

Instantly, as he breathed, his face was full of color, and his form seemed a little less weak. He breathed with his eyes closed for some time, and then finally opened them, and saw her.

They might have sat there staring for a very long time, if he had not asked; "Where am I now?"

It did not seem that he should be the one to talk, so for a minute Alex only stood dazed, trying to clear her mind for a sound reply. But she found that all she could say was; "I don't know either," as she stared at his peculiar clothes -(they looked old-fashioned she thought)- for he wearing a sharp-cut, high-collared shirt under a wool vest, and his pants were loose, and ended just after his knees, and she found them to be just rather strange, as she looked down at herself and saw her long, wide denim jeans, and white t-shirt (which said "LONDON" on the front in large pink letters – her mother had bought it at the airport for her when they arrived) and her long, maroon jacket.

"Well then," he said breathily, with a calm smile, "where did you come from?" and then waited, watching her earnestly with large, very light blue eyes, so light they were very close to white, but you would still call them blue.

She had been thinking, since she arrived in the strange woods, of the Chronicles of Narnia, and the worlds there, and also someplace else, which she could only remember as "Earth" (and she thought maybe she knew it best).

"It's called… called… Narnia… or Charn… or Earth… I think," she said, irresolute.

"I have heard of a place called Charn, before," the boy said softly. "Is that where you came from?"

"No…" she said suddenly, a bit more decided. "I don't think so. I think I've only read about it."

"And Narnia?" he asked.

Here she turned to look at the pool of crystals. She felt her own finger drawn to point in that direction.

He leaned forward a little, and saw it.

"It looks… gone," he said very reverently.

"I guess so," she said sadly, as if she had known it all along. But I wish not, she thought, though afterward she couldn't figure out why.

"Where have you come from?" she asked. He closed his eyes.

"That pool, behind me," he said, and shuddered.

"Can we go there?" she asked.

"Oh no!" he said so quickly and breathily that she hardly heard him. He closed his eyes tighter and shivered. "No… I am very ill there."

There was a quiet moment where the two staid frozen in the same places they had started in, but much more uneasily.

"Then why are you not… ill here?" she finally asked.

"I don't know," he said, and bit his lip. But then he looked back up. "…Do you know of a place with free herbs, that anyone could use?" She looked puzzled.

"No," she said.

He looked greatly disappointed.

"But there ought to be one, somewhere in this wood."

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"In this wood. Through a pool," she said matter-of-factly.

She stepped forward, and looked down at the many pools, and he got up, and began to follow her. Together they walked a little distance.

"There," she said suddenly, pointing, and he followed her gaze. It was a large pool, and the water was somewhat green. They both stared at it.

"It looks like the kind of place where things would grow, I think," she said, which was funny, as all they were looking at was water, and no real land.

"How do we enter?" he asked.

This is when she remembered the rings, and some part of her knowledge in world-traveling.

"Hold my hand," she said, extending her left hand. He took it, hesitantly, and she noticed that he felt very cold. "Now, I touch this yellow ring, in my left pocket," she said, and reached into the pocket, and touched the ring, which made her fingers feel as thought they were sparkling.

"And now we jump into the water," she said. He looked at her with an expression of bewilderment.

"Come on," she said, pulling him a little.

But they didn't really have to jump. As soon as her toe touched the water, they vanished.