The Lights
At
first it was almost imperceptible. She could have been listening to the
throbbing frogs and crickets. Beyond that, though, there was a
different sound. It was as deep as thunder, but consistent. It grew
louder, the pitch became elevated, until it was a clear tone, a hum that
drowned everything, even the rapidly increasing heart rate that she
felt pounding beneath her ribs.
Lucy
tipped her head to the left, and the sound decreased. She tipped her
head to the right and heard it more clearly this time. Softly,
hesitantly, she hummed the note. It sounded like an ‘A’, she thought. At
nine years old, she’d discovered she had almost perfect pitch. She
could sing a note and say what it was, and be at most a semitone off. As
she hummed, she was astonished to hear the sound grow more intense, and
go up two tones. She momentarily stopped humming, but the sound
continued. She began again, and held her tone. It harmonized with the
sound around her. Lucy scanned the sky from end to end, her eyes
enormous in the dark, her senses keen. She stopped humming and the sound
diminished. She had never been so awake in all her life. Her skin began
to tingle. She had pins and needles all the way up her arms and her
neck. Her face tingled. She even imagined, for one insane moment, that
she could feel her thighs tingling. But that was impossible.
Suddenly,
just in front of her, a blue-green light appeared. It was so bright it
dazzled her completely. It was as large as an open beach umbrella, and
it moved until it was right over her head, no more than an arm’s length
away. Around it, the night sky seemed consumed by the light. It looks
like a miniature sun, she thought. The humming began again. It seemed to
come from the light, but it was all around her at the same time.
Surround-sound, the thought. In C major. This time, she felt the
tingling right the way from the top of her head down to her waist.
Prickles of feeling seemed to shoot in small slivers down to her hips,
though she knew she had no sensation there. Lucy closed her eyes for a
moment. The light was too bright. As her heart raced, another sound
joined the first. And then another. And when she opened her eyes and
looked up, a white light hovered above the blue-green light, and beyond
that, slightly to the left of both lights, was a small orange light,
similar to one she’d seen before.
The
blue-green light pulsed brightly, and emitted C. The white light
followed, pulsing twice, emitting an A. Then softly, the orange light
flared, and the tone she heard was B. She threw her head back, aghast.
Was this something intelligent? When the sequence of pulses and tones
repeated itself twice, Lucy thought that there was no doubt. It was
music. It followed a pattern. What she was hearing, was a musical
sequence! Her hands, which gripped the chair tightly, were vibrating as
though she were on a bridge above a massive freight train. The
vibrations were intoxicating. ‘Oh. My. God. It’s real,’ she said
hoarsely to the night, to the lights.
Lights Over Emerald Creek by Shelley Davidow
Lucy
Wright, sixteen and a paraplegic after a recent car accident that took
her mother’s life, lives in Queensland on a 10,000 acre farm with her
father. When Lucy investigates strange lights over the creek at the
bottom of the property, she discovers a mystery that links the lights to
the science of cymatics and Scotland’s ancient Rosslyn Chapel.
But
beyond the chapel is an even larger mystery. One that links the music
the chapel contains to Norway’s mysterious Hessdalen lights, and beyond
that to Saturn and to the stars. Lucy’s discoveries catapult her into a
parallel universe connected to our own by means of resonance and sound,
where a newly emerging world trembles on the edge of disaster. As
realities divide, her mission in this new world is revealed and she
finds herself part of a love story that will span the galaxy.
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Genre - Young Adult SF
Rating - PG
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