Free The Second Forever by Colin Thompson

even imagined could exist. The two children became so wrapped up in the book that the minutes picked up speed until it was almost eleven o’clock and time to go.
    Peter could see light and hear soft muffled voices under his parents’ bedroom door as they tiptoed past and left the apartment. The moon was trying to shine through the glass dome above them, but the dust would only allow the faintest glow into the main hall as the children made their way to the cat mummy room.

    When they got there, Peter’s grandfather was sitting in the small chair with Syracuse in his arms. He had managed to push the glass case away from the wall and had pulled down the broken panelling that Peterhad clumsily put back after his first visit with Festival. There was a candle burning in a holder on top of the glass case, and its shadows danced around the room as a faint breeze came through the hole in the wall.
    It reminded Peter of when he and Festival had destroyed the original book in the small cave, and as the book had died it had summoned one last breath and blown out the flame. This time, however, the breeze was warm and inviting.
    Festival reached down and took the young cat in her arms while the old man handed Peter the book wrapped in its strips of red velvet curtain.
    â€˜Here,’ he whispered, ‘keep this close.’
    A few years earlier, when he had been searching through old forgotten storerooms, Peter had found a place full of Victorian explorers’ equipment. Every now and then, for no particular reason he could pin down, he came across odd things that he took back to his room and stored in a small cabinet. In the Victorian explorers’ room he had discovered a brown leather waistcoat with secret pockets and that evening, for another strange reason he couldn’t pin down, he had put the waistcoat on beneath his shirt.
    It was into a small inside pocket of this waistcoat that he now put the book, which slid inside as if it had always meant to be there.

    As the minute hand of Peter’s watch approachedeleven, the two children walked over to the dark place in the wall. The old man put his arms around both their shoulders and hugged them.
    Then it was eleven.
    Festival turned to Peter, hugged him and kissed him again as she had in his room. There were tears in her eyes and, still holding each other tightly, they leaned through the hole into the darkness. Before they could change their minds, Peter’s grandfather gave them the slight push they needed to tip them over the edge and they fell into the darkness.

The darkness felt like nothing – neither falling down nor flying upwards. It was as though they were absolutely still while everything else moved around them. The first words of the book flashed through Peter’s mind and he understood exactly what they meant.
    Before the beginning was the void, before time, before light, before day and night. I was the darkness that created the first breath of life. I was the vacuum that was nothing. Yet it was not nothing, for I was there. And I was part of it, the spark that lit the shadows for the very first time, as life crawled out of the abyss.

    I was the darkness.
    I was the vacuum.
    Yes, that was it. Back before the beginning of everything, that was where they were. This was not a place in the museum. The museum was part of it, created to contain it. The growth of the entire city had been controlled from the very start, centuries ago when the first house had been built, so that the museum was exactly where it was meant to be. And in the heart of the museum itself, behind the wall of the cat mummy room, was the very start of everything that had ever existed.
    The journey lasted less than a minute and then Peter and Festival were back in Festival’s world and it was raining. It was that sort of rain that stays for days – not thunderstorms or a gentle drizzle, but constant rain, halfway between the two. It was almost silent as it fell,