Chapter One

The Footprint

My room smelled weird. Plaster dust and something sharp under it, like the smell a power point makes when it’s been sparking.

I sat on my bed, springs poking up through the shredded mattress, and waited for it to start making sense.

My room was destroyed. Something big had come through the wall on its way somewhere, and it hadn’t slowed down for the bricks. Rude.

My favourite Star Wars poster was ripped down the middle, splitting up Han and Luke. The red and blue lights from the police cars below flashed over the poster. A hole gaped where my window should have been. The cold air poured in, distant sirens heading our way and people chatting in the street below.

A police officer had walked me through the house once, asked if anything was missing—as if I could tell—then told me to wait downstairs while they sorted out the scene. I waited until she was out the front talking to someone, and came straight back up to find my phone. It was my room. Wrecked or not, it was mine.

Somewhere downstairs a police radio squawked and clicked and then squawked again. It kept doing it.

The Millennium Falcon I’d spent an entire weekend on was just loose bricks now—scattered all over the floor. Some grey pieces still clung together in what used to be the cockpit, and for some reason that made me angrier than the hole in the wall.

Somewhere in all this mess was my phone. I left it charging for my trip to the shops because it was flat. If I was lucky I’d get a new one instead of messing around with the half-broken charge port. Fingers crossed.

My science project was crushed under a slab of plasterboard. Six bean seedlings in yoghurt cups, labelled A through F in Mum’s marker pen because I’d lost mine. Three on the windowsill, three in a shoebox under the desk. Measured every second day for a fortnight, and not written up once. Damp soil had leaked out of the crushed ones. It smelled like a garden, mixed in with a bit of burnt plastic.

Well. Mr Cross can’t fail me now. Hard to turn in homework when your room is a disaster zone.

The joke didn’t help.

I was walking back from the shops—Mum had to get to Pilates or something. I was just turning onto our street when I heard a crash. By the time I sprinted the rest of the way, the dust was settling and whatever did it was gone.

I got up to look through my new window. From up here I could see Dad’s classic Monaro. It had a footprint in its roof.

An actual footprint.

About twice the size of a normal foot, pressed into the roof like someone had stepped on a tin can. What has a foot that big?

The paint had cracks creeping out from the dent—I had polished that thing so many times with Dad.

Dad’s going to cry. Actually cry.

Past the news vans I could hear a woman in a puffer jacket saying, “Oh my God,” stuck on repeat. Then I realised the people on the street could see me. Reporters were probably trying to catch me off guard doing something stupid.

I ducked down out of sight and kept looking for my phone.

Then I felt a hum—felt, not heard—and it made me drift towards the rubble near my wardrobe. One door was ripped clean off and thrown across the room. The other one sagged from its last hinge. All my stuff was dragged out and scattered everywhere—shoes, sports gear, comics.

I picked my way across my broken room, wood creaking under my shoes. A nail poked up out of a plank and hooked my shoelace. “Crap.” I pulled it loose. Tetanus, anyone?

I dug a few more things out to trace the hum, and there it was. An old leather-bound book, half buried in what used to be my wardrobe. Not one of mine. I would’ve remembered a book that looked like that.

So whose is it?

I crouched and pulled the book free.

My hands wanted to touch it. My fingers were skimming over the cover before I really thought about it.

It was lighter than it should’ve been—the weight didn’t match the size. The cover was worn smooth in places and rough in others. When my thumb brushed the edge, I felt a faint vibration—faint, but something.

And for a moment—a trick of the light, or maybe my eyes were still watery from the dust—I thought I saw the spine of the book glow. A thin line of light, there and gone. I blinked and it was just old leather again.

Weird.

There were strange symbols around the book’s borders. Not quite letters, not quite pictures. They looked almost like you could press them, like buttons on a device.

I opened it. This was not a normal book. It was dark inside. I expected gritty old pages or something. There was no texture to the surface—it was just smooth, and somehow it swallowed the light. I brought my face closer and I could feel a hum, really quiet, but there. I tilted the book—the darkness didn’t move the way it should have.

Then an image of Jack showed up, like it was drawn in dark pencil lines—I was sure there was nothing before. It was just him, from the shoulders up. His head was turned and his mouth was half open, like he’d started a word and hadn’t got to finish it. He looked scared, and whatever had scared him wasn’t finished.

Jack? Why would there be a drawing of Jack in here?

I reached out to touch it—the surface rippled.

I jerked my hand back so fast I sat down in the rubble. The ripples kept moving—little waves racing outward from where I’d touched—and the hum got louder, until I could feel it in my teeth.

Then the surface went still—smooth and flat, as if nothing had moved at all.

Well that’s messed up.

I stared at it for a bit. I touched the book’s surface again, slower this time.

My fingertip met the surface and kept going through.

My finger went into the book up to the first knuckle. The edge of the “page” clung to my skin for a bit. It was cold too, a weird sort of cold feeling. My room was the same temperature it had been all morning, extra breezy. My finger felt like it wasn’t in the room.

I should probably stop right now.

So I didn’t, and I pushed my whole hand in.

My hand was like a drawing. Rough pencil lines on old paper, wobbling a bit, like whoever did them had been in a hurry.

I could still feel my fingers, phew. I wiggled them, and the drawing changed too—it took a second to catch up.

Well this rates high on the freaky scale.

The “sketch” of Jack was closer now, and that’s when I worked out he wasn’t just a drawing. His eyes moved in jerks, like a security camera skipping frames, and followed my drawn fingers as I reached in further.

Okay, the Jack drawing is looking at me, this is fine.

I pushed my arm in deeper. On the page, my sketched hand reached towards Jack’s shoulder. Towards his arm. Towards—

Then it—then Jack—grabbed me.

Without thinking I pulled. It was like dragging him out of the pool. The more I pulled, the more he “weighed”.

Then a sudden give. Air rushed outward, crackling. The lights in my room flickered. Somewhere downstairs, a lamp popped and someone shouted.

And Jack came tumbling out of the book onto my mess of a floor. He shoved himself backwards across the floor until he ran out of room, hitting the wall. Dust came off the cracked plasterboard and settled in his hair, and he didn’t brush it out.

He didn’t look at me. He looked at the ceiling, then the hole in the wall, then the rubble on the floor around him.

I had just pulled my best friend out of a book. Out of a sketch inside a book. My brain didn’t have a way to handle that.

“Jack?” My voice came out wrong—higher than normal, almost someone else’s.

Jack looked up at me and something went out of his face. Relief, probably. I’ve been wrong about Jack’s face before.

“Ben.” He swallowed. His voice was raw, scraped thin. “Thanks. I—thanks.”

He lunged for the book, snatched it up, and got both arms around it.

“We have to go,” he said. “Right now.”

“What? Go where?” I stood and stumbled a bit, like my balance hadn’t caught up with what my eyes had just seen.

“Just—” Jack said, moving, watching the hole in the wall like he expected something to come back through it. He grabbed my camping backpack from the corner—still half-packed from last weekend, my camera and a water bottle rattling around inside—and shoved the book in. The zipper snagged on a thread. He swore at it, got it free, zipped it shut.

“We have to go. I’ll explain later, I promise, but right now we need to move.”

“Jack. What is going on?” I could hear myself getting loud. “What happened to my house? What happened to you?”

Jack froze for a second just looking at me. If he had an answer, he didn’t start telling it.

Then he went for the door and pulled it open a crack, peering into the hallway.

Voices drifted up from downstairs—Dad talking to police, the low murmur of Mum on the phone, radios crackling.

“Please, Ben.” He looked back at me. He was scared and he wasn’t bothering to hide it, and that made me scared too.

“Please just trust me.”

I looked around my room. The rubble, the misplaced hole. The street full of strangers and flashing lights. And my best friend, who had just been inside something pretending to be a book and was now begging me to run.

This is insane. This is completely insane.

“Jack, I can’t just leave. My parents are downstairs. The police are—”

“Whatever did this, Ben,” Jack cut in, “it will come back. And when it does, we do not want to be here. For everyone’s sake.”

For everyone’s sake. I hadn’t thought about everyone. He meant Mum and Dad, and the cops downstairs, and that woman in the puffer jacket.

From downstairs, I heard Mum’s voice—the same two words repeated, “I know, I know,” in that flat, careful tone she only used when she was trying not to cry. Dad had gone quiet, and Dad never goes quiet.

We could have gone downstairs right then, right there. We could have told them everything. We could have let the adults sort it all out.

Jack looked like he might fall apart if we didn’t move right now. Thing was, running away seemed like the best choice—or the easy choice. The police were going to ask questions. Reporters were going to want to talk to us. My parents would drill me. I don’t know what happened.

I grabbed Jack’s arm—hard enough that he stopped scanning the hallway and looked at me. His eyes had a weird look to them. Whatever had happened inside that book, he was still shaking from it.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Let’s go.”

We slipped out the back. Through a gap in the fence we’d used a hundred times before, where the palings had warped just enough to squeeze through sideways. The backpack caught on a splinter and Jack wrenched it free without breaking his stride. The air outside slapped my face. I could smell wet grass and someone’s breakfast cooking a few houses away.

Behind us, someone shouted—not sure who—but we didn’t stop. Our shoes hit the grass, then the dirt track that led towards the forest reserve.

The ground got softer the deeper in we ran, leaves and bark padding our steps. The trees closed in around us and the street noise got further and further behind us, until it was just us and our shoes on the dirt. A magpie warbled just above us as we ran past—I almost jumped out of my shoes.

I ran beside Jack, the backpack bouncing, one strap flapping because he never does up the top clip. I kept thinking about my hand turning into pencil lines inside that book, over and over.

Why are we running?

I didn’t know. But somewhere behind us, something had put a footprint in a car and a hole through a house, and it hadn’t stuck around to apologise.

We ran.