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.

An hour ago I’d been walking back from the shops—Mum had to get to Pilates or something, so no lift. I was just turning onto our street when I heard the crash. By the time I’d sprinted the rest of the way, the dust was settling and whatever did it was gone.

A hole gaped where my window used to be. Cold air poured straight into my room. I got up to look through my new breezy 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?

Cracks in the paint spread out from the dent—I had polished that thing so many times with Dad.

Dad’s an accountant. He does the tax for half the street, and the Monaro is—as Mum says—the one impractical thing he’s ever owned.

Dad’s going to cry. Actually cry.

There were news vans, and past them a woman in a puffer jacket saying, “Oh my God,” 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. I wasn’t even supposed to be upstairs.

A police officer had walked me through the house once. She wrote in her notebook: Ben, 14. Window missing. Then she asked if anything else was missing—as if I could tell—and 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. I’d left it charging when I went to the shops. If I was lucky it was smashed, and I’d get a new one instead of messing around with the half-broken charge port. Wrecked or not, it was still my room.

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

My favourite Star Wars poster was ripped down the middle, splitting up Han and Luke. My light was hanging by its wires and flickering, and the police cars were flashing red, then blue, through the hole. It was a stupid way to look for a phone.

The Lego Millennium Falcon I’d spent an entire weekend on was just loose bricks now—scattered all over the floor. Some of the pieces still clung together in what used to be the cockpit.

Next to it was my science project. Six seedlings in yoghurt cups, labelled with Mum’s marker pen because mine was hiding somewhere. Three cups were supposed to be on the windowsill. I had another three in a shoebox under the desk. I measured them every second day for two weeks and never wrote it up, because that’s the boring bit. Now the shoebox ones were squashed under a slab of plasterboard, and I had no idea where the other three were at.

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

The joke didn’t help.

I kept looking for my phone. I hadn’t been able to get hold of Jack since last night, and Jack always answers.

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. It was big and thick—about the size of an atlas.

My fingers were skimming over the cover before I really thought about it.

It was lighter than it should’ve been for something that size. The cover was worn smooth in places and rough in others. When my thumb brushed the edge, the hum got stronger.

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 bright line, 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 the flat buttons on the microwave.

I opened it. The cover didn’t flop open the way a book would—it swung back stiff on its hinge and clicked flat. I expected gritty old pages or something, but it was dark inside and there was no texture at all—just smooth. I brought my face closer and felt the hum against my cheeks. I tilted the book around—the darkness didn’t move the way it should have.

Then an image of Jack showed up, like a sketch drawn in pencil. I was sure there’d been nothing there 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.

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

I reached out to touch it—the surface rippled.

I jerked my hand away and fell backwards into the rubble. The ripples on the surface kept moving—little waves racing outward from where I’d touched—and the hum was louder. I could feel it in my teeth.

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

Okay—this is messing with my head.

I stared at it for a bit. I touched it 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 surface clung to my skin. It was cold too, a weird sort of cold feeling. The room was the same temperature it had been all morning, just 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 a drawing. Rough sketch-lines, like on old paper. The lines were wobbling a bit, like whoever did them had been in a hurry.

I could still feel my fingers, phew. I wiggled them, and the sketch-lines changed too—they took a second to catch up.

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.

The Jack drawing is looking at me, this is fine.

I pushed my arm in deeper. On the surface of the book, 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 something gave, and a puff of cold air hit me in the face with a crackle like static. The light in my room glowed bright for a second.

And Jack came tumbling out of the book onto my mess of a floor. He shoved himself backwards 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 just pulled my best friend out of a book. Out of a sketch inside a book.

“Jack?” My voice came out wrong—higher than normal.

Jack looked up at me and something in his face let go. Relief, probably. I’ve been wrong about Jack’s face before.

“Ben.” He swallowed. “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 got up too fast and stumbled a bit.

“Just—” Jack kept looking at the hole in the wall. He grabbed my camping backpack from the corner. It was still half-packed from last weekend’s trip. He shook the dust off it and shoved the book in. It only just fit. I could hear my camera and water bottle rattling around inside. The zip of the bag 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 wasn’t giving it right there.

Then he went for the door and pulled it open a little, looking into the hallway.

We could hear the voices from downstairs. Dad was talking to the police. Mum was on the phone to someone, back from Pilates in what must have been record time. All around there were police radios going off about different things.

“Please, Ben.” He looked back at me.

“Please just trust me.”

Jack doesn’t say please. He’d said it twice.

My best friend had just been inside something pretending to be a book, and now he was begging me to run.

This is insane. This is completely insane.

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

Jack cut in. “Whatever did this—it’s gonna come back. We do not want to be here when it does. Not just us. Everyone.”

Not just us. I hadn’t thought about everyone else. Mum and Dad, and the cops, all the reporters outside, the neighbours…

Mum’s voice came up the stairs—the same two words repeated, “I know, I know.” Dad had gone quiet—Dad never goes quiet.

We could’ve gone downstairs and told my parents what just happened. Let the adults sort it 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. He wasn’t blinking. Whatever had happened inside that book, he was still shaking from it.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Let’s go.”

Mum was in the kitchen with her back to the stairs as we came down. Dad and the cops were all out the front with the reporters, so we went straight out the laundry door, through the gap in the fence. The air was cold and I could smell someone’s breakfast cooking a few houses away.

Someone shouted behind us, not sure who or what. We didn’t stop. We hit the grass, then the dirt track into the reserve. We’d run this way a thousand times, never with a backpack full of book.

After a while I couldn’t hear the street. A magpie warbled overhead as we ran past—I almost jumped out of my shoes.

I ran beside Jack. My backpack bounced on his shoulders, one strap flapping because he never does up the top clip. I kept thinking about my hand turning into sketch-lines inside that book.

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.