The first chapter of my children's novel, Lightsleep

A bit of a change of pace for you now. This is the first chapter of my children's novel, Lightsleep. It's a gothic, other-world fantasy. I self-published it back in 2006 when my agent died half way through reading it. I took that as a sign and decided just to get on with it. It was an interesting experience. I managed to get a full page feature published in the Uxbridge Gazette (my old home town) and in the local Islington paper, plus was featured on a Norwich radio station while doing a book signing there. This was before social media really took off, so publicising it was hard, but a good learning experience. 

I've re-published since, through www.completelynovel.com, after the first self-publishing company turned out to be more of a liability than a help, and it looks much better (plus I took the chance to correct some of the typos that had snuck in).

Don't forget,  you can buy it now from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com It's often on special offer for less than £2 on the UK site, so worth checking out!

Lightsleep

Chapter One

Damon Dodge was a brat. He did bratty things like faking hysterical crying when his mother wouldn't buy him what he wanted and flicking bits from his nose into other people’s dinners. He looked like a brat too. His face was round and pale – it rarely saw any sun – his nose was small and turned up like a pig’s snout and his dark hair was always messy because every time his mother tried to comb it he threw a tantrum and broke the comb in half. It wasn’t an ugly face exactly – on another, pleasanter child it could have looked okay. But Damon was thoroughly unpleasant and this seeped through into his features like a disfiguring poison.

He lived with his mother in a three-bedroom semi-detached house in a suburb of London called Ickrington. He didn’t know his father, who had left home when he was a year old. There was only his mother to discipline him, or at least try to, in between working part-time as a secretary in an estate agents.

Damon took advantage of his mother. He knew she was too busy to notice all his hateful antics. Once, he had trampled on her vegetable patch, just for the fun of it. When his mother had come out to water her precious produce she had found a bed of mashed up cabbages and pulped potatoes. Damon denied everything. Another time he had deliberately blocked the lavatory bowl with tissue paper and wallpaper paste so that when his mother pressed the flush, water had poured all over the bathroom carpet. These are just two examples of the hundreds of brattish things Damon had done over the eleven years since his birth.

Damon, as you can imagine, was very unpopular at school. He was extremely proud of his reputation as a sneak, a bully and a dirty schemer. His cruel pranks ranged from placing a cockroach in the lunch box of a timid girl called Lucy Pollot – who had to be shaken before she would stop screaming – to spraying furniture polish on the classroom floor so that the teacher skidded and fell as she bid her pupils “Good morning”.

The teacher, Mrs Hicks, had been taken to hospital with concussion, which Damon thought a great result.

The day on which Damon’s real story begins was not a school day. It was a day during the summer holidays and Damon was bored from the moment he climbed reluctantly out of bed.

The table was laid ready for his breakfast when he stomped into the dining room. He complained about the type of cereal and said the milk was sour, before stomping to the living room to watch television. There was a programme on about a man who raced around America in an expensive car, being very nice to beautiful women and solving all sorts of mysteries. Damon didn’t like him. He also wondered why his mother’s car was so small and why she wasn’t nearly as pretty as the women on the telly.

Soon Damon became bored again, and this meant his mind returned to plotting his next devilish scheme.

Because he was on holiday his mother had taken time off from her Job. She was at home, but too busy catching up on housework to keep an eye on him every minute of the day. Damon could hear her washing up in the kitchen as he crept upstairs thinking: “What can I do to make her life more difficult?”

By the time he had reached the top of the stairs he had thought of something and it was an extremely wicked idea. Probably his nastiest yet.

In her bedroom, Damon’s mother kept a box of matches. They were hidden in the drawer of a small bedside table. She used them to light a candle to read by at night because Damon had accidentally – or so he claimed – knocked the bedside lamp over and broken it. Damon knew the matches were there. He had found them one day when he was routing through his mother’s room looking for Christmas presents.

“I’ll start a fire,” he was thinking. “A great big one which will burn the house down!”

As he stepped towards the side-table he tripped and landed heavily so that air rushed out of him with a whooshing sound and tears sprang into his eyes. He sat up rubbing his head, which hurt, even though he couldn’t remember having hit it. His attention soon returned to the bedside cabinet and the small drawer that contained the matches.

Damon hadn’t really meant to burn the house down. He had just wanted to start a small fire that he could stamp out quickly when his mother smelt the smoke. But matches are dangerous and fire has a life of its own. Damon took a match from the box and struck it. He stared at the flame with glee, fascinated by how something so small could cause so much damage. The flame crept down the match until it reached his fingers.

“Ouch!”

Damon dropped the match and put his burnt fingers into his mouth, feeling angry.

A snake of flames weaved across the pink carpet. Damon screamed, which he knew was not a boyish thing to do, and leapt to his feet. The snake of fire had reached the bed and suddenly the quilt, which hung to the floor, was ablaze. Damon screamed again as the flames reached for the ceiling like great red ghosts.

There was no way he could reach the bedroom door – the flames had formed a hot, wavering barrier. Behind him was another door which led into a long thin room which ran along the side of the house. One side of the room sloped with the roof. His mother called it the 'long room'.

Damon pulled this door open and fell into the long room, choking, his face burning. He slammed the door closed to hold back the flames and black smoke. But the thin wood was no match for the horror Damon had created with one small match. Soon smoke was crawling underneath and the crack around the door began to glow red.

At the far end of the long room, where boxes of old toys and books were stacked, was a small hatch which opened into a dusty little room full of gurgling pipes and a tank full of water.

Damon ran towards it and as he ran he heard something strange. Someone seemed to be knocking on the door from the other side. Damon hesitated in front of the hatch, listening to the Tap! Tap! Tap! and wondered who could be hiding in the pipe room. He suddenly remembered, with a pang of horror, a picture he had seen in one of his mother’s big books. It was a picture of Death tapping on the door of a house belonging to an old man covered in warts.

“Maybe this is Death come to take me away. Maybe I’ve burned to death in the fire,” thought Damon, desperately.

“Open up!” came a high-pitched voice. It didn’t sound like the voice of Death. Damon took a step backwards, his mouth open wide. But smoke was billowing down the room, curling around the boxes, sneaking up like a living creature.

“Open up!” came the voice again, and Damon pulled back the small bolt which fastened the hatch and flung it open. Sitting cross-legged on one of the water pipes was the weirdest little man Damon had ever seen.

He was tiny, shorter than Damon, with a large head like a melon. His eyes were wide and bright green, his nose so long it nearly touched his grinning mouth. He wore a green tunic and boots that curled at the ends. In his little pink hands he held a clipboard, which he glanced at before returning his gaze to Damon.

“Hello there.” he greeted.

Damon stared, his mouth still hanging open.

“No time to be shocked,” said the man.

Damon noticed that where the floor to the pipe room should have been there was a black hole which appeared to go on forever.

“Come in,” said the man, beckoning.    

“There’ s no floor,” stuttered Damon.

“Stand on the pipes, stand on the pipes,” chirped the little man.

“It’ll break,” insisted Damon, looking doubtfully at the nearest rust-encrusted pipe.

“That’s not important.”

“It is to me!”

Damon was regaining some of his usual brattishness.                 

“Fine,” replied the man and he wrote something on the clipboard with what looked like an ordinary ballpoint pen.

“What are you writing?” demanded Damon.

“Sorry?” The man looked up, startled, as if he had forgotten Damon was there.

“What are you writing?"

“Damon Felix Dodge, burned alive in house fire,” said the man.

He stood on his stubby legs, slipping the clipboard into a large pocket in the front of his tunic.

“Nice to meet you. Hope the flames lick you up quickly so there’s not too much pain.”

The man made to jump from his pipe.

“Wait!” Damon could feel the heat from the fire burn his back.

“Hurry then,” snapped the man, his grin dropping into a frown.

            Damon jumped onto the nearest pipe and the small door slammed shut behind him.

“Now jump,” said the man.

“What?”

            Damon looked at the man as if he were mad.

“Jump!”

“Don’t be stupid!”

The man shrugged and began to take the clipboard from his pocket.

“All right! All right!” said Damon. “But what’s down there?”

He peered into the dark pit below them.

“You’ll see,” said the man, and he grabbed Damon by the arm and jumped into the abyss.

Damon screamed his loudest and longest scream of the day.      

Don't forget, you can buy Lightsleep now from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com