Tomorrow Will Never Come By Gianna Scannell

Chapter One-The Attic

Rattle, rattle, scratch, shuffle, shuffle.
Daniel woke up, kicked his blankets out of the way and sat straight up in bed. The street light projected creepy, swaying shadows through the window. Millions of snow flakes reflected the glow and the shadows danced on the wall like skinny ghosts. Just grey lines from nearby tree branches he said to himself, nothing to worry.

The snow was pounding down. The land was buried under several feet of white stuff, and getting thicker by the second. It muffled every noise. No, almost every noise....

He stood still in the dark and started to count.

One-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand, four…

Rattle, shuffle, shuffle…right down from the attic.

He couldn’t stand it anymore, he had to make it stop. The fifteen-year-old boy was annoyed. He needed some shut-eye or he'd be a wreck in the morning, unable to function for lack of sleep. Because of the blizzard, school was out. Nathan, his best friend, had agreed to pick him up at 8 AM to go skiing. And it promised to be an amazing deep powder day, the powder day of the century!

Born in a small town high in the mountains, they loved their life as total Colorado ski bums: nothing came between them and a day filled with black diamond runs packed with moguls. But the two shared another passion: archeology. They had cooked up a plan to visit Dinosaur that summer, and dig up bones. Minimal adult supervision, just the two archeologists that organized the trip. One problem remained. He hadn't told his parents. Not yet.

He shoved his head under the pillow and achieved one thing: near suffocation. But that rattling noise continued to echo in his ears like the blow of Mount Krakatau.

Scratch, scratch…

He turned his bedside light on, jumped out of bed, put on his slippers and wrestled for at least ten minutes with shoes, clothes, hiking stuff and digging tools, all piled up disorderly in his crowded closet. He found his flashlight.

"I'll be back in no time," he whispered, "ready for my final snooze in peace and quiet."

Armed with the flashlight, he opened his bedroom door.

Rattle, rattle, shuffle.

The hall was cold, dark and narrow. No sound came from his mom’s bedroom; the usual snoring was missing since his dad had left for a business trip to Seattle. A deep sigh rushed through his throat. Dad would be home soon, only a week from now.

Daniel had no brothers or sisters and though he loved his mom, he and his dad were as close as superglue and fingertips after a messy pasting job. He even looked like his dad: same thick, curly blond hair, same long face, green-blue eyes and tall, slender figure. His mom handled the part about restrictions; dad... well, dad was his easy, fun, kick in the pants dad. What was there not to totally, completely fall over backward for?

Right now, Daniel's figure wasn't so warm and cozy in his light blue pajamas, as he approached the stairs leading to the attic. Being cold only increased his aggravation. It won't be long, he thought, and he'll be back in his sack. And Nathan better be on time tomorrow; he was sooooo ready to attack the mountain.

One by one, landing on key spots to avoid squeaks, he negotiated the steps to the pitch-roofed room with renewed deliberation. But once there, he held his breath as he pushed the door.

He stopped at the entrance and listened.

He didn’t want to admit it even to himself, but he was scared of the place. It was spooky, dusty and way cluttered. When he was younger he had often thought that alien creatures hid here, in the shape of giant spiders that shrunk at daylight.

And spiders still terrified him.

His mind stuck on images of giant alien eight-legged creatures, he flashed his light around, shaking a little. An enormous amount of stuff had accumulated in the tiny room over the years. His baseball bat, glove and his dad's rafting helmet peeked from under a pile of broken furniture.

The place was dead quiet. He waited, standing still, motionless.

Nothing.

Then he did something bold.

He turned the light off.

Scratch, shuffle, shuffle…the sound was louder; it came from the far corner. He pointed his light in the dark and turned it on. The sound stopped.

His light illuminated a red cherry chest, half hidden under a mound of stale-smelling clothes and stacks of family photo albums. The scratching noise could only have come from there.

He cleared the junk in front of it and dragged it to the center of the room.

"Whatever you are, you’ve got no way out. You’re mine." And he opened the chest.

It contained loads of old issues of Dig and National Geographic Kids. No monster, no giant spiders, no paper-eating mouse. But who had made that noise?

Frustrated, he delved in, fished out stashes of magazines, threw them on the floor, and grabbed more. With them, a strange item popped up-- a thick burgundy leather-bound book. It was old, with chewed-up edges. Its buckle hung on by a thread.

“What’s this? It doesn’t look like a magazine,” he mumbled.

Shuffle, shuffle, scratch…

Now he could feel that noise: the book rattled in his hands. As if he held scalding coal, he let go of it. With a thud, it landed on the floor. The buckle broke and the book opened.

And then a mysterious and amazing thing happened.

“Zeus most powerful god, I thank thou for releasing me!” The tiny voice of a girl come from somewhere among the yellowed pages.

Daniel slammed the cover shut, frantic. What kind of trick was this? He was almost at the door when he stopped, and slowly walked back. He scooped up the old volume and turned it back and forth in his hands. He pinched himself to make sure he wasn't dreaming. He wished he were, particularly because a tiny imploration now followed a stronger rattle.

“Let me out! This is not fair. Zeus please, incinerate that boy!” He took a deep breath and slowly opened the pages.

This time, a small figure appeared, no more than a few inches tall. She raised her round, fair face, pointed her straight nose in his direction and planted her two big blue eyes on him in contempt.

“Such impudence to act against the will of Zeus!” He stared at the tiny figure who spoke with a strange accent.

“Who…who…”

“...And tooting like the mighty bird, the owl queen of the night will not help. I’m Calypso, and what is your name? Are you Trojan?”

“I’m Daniel, Daniel Hiempsal and I'm not an owl...or a Trojan.” By now the night must be half gone, he thought helplessly, wishing he had left that rattling noise alone.

He didn’t have the guts to close the book, seal it somehow, and bury it in the snow, but the thought crossed his mind. It was too cold out for his slipper-wearing feet. He would have to go back, put on his ski attire, open the front door...

And he didn’t want to make a lot of noise that could wake up his mother. But how else could he get rid of this girl? Meanwhile, she kept talking, seemingly unaware of how close she was to being buried alive.

“Hiempsal you said? Then we share our ancestries!” The translucent, shiny figure in front of him remarked. Daniel’s attention returned to the girl.

“We do? How? Why do you talk so funny? And how did you end up in that book?”

“Funny? What do you mean, funny? I am the spirit of this book. It tells my story, and the true story of my people. I drew breath and was once living as a thirteen-years-old Trojan princess.” She squinted, tilted her head to the left and tightened her face. The resulting expression alarmed Daniel.

He poked on the pages with the edge of his flashlight hoping to find some kind of miniature projector hidden under a hole, but all he saw was a bunch of squiggles on very aged paper.

“How did you make those rattling noises? I heard them from my bedroom, downstairs.”

“Rattling noises? I was just running from page to page, looking for that prayer. It took me a while to find it. I read it so many times, but it never worked until now. Why, you heard me?” She sat down on the sheet, crossed her legs and leaned on her back-stretched hands. She wore a short, sleeveless blue tunic and a pair of matching baggy pants fastened around her ankles. A shiny bracelet spiraled up her left forearm. Her sun-streaked blonde, curly hair was long and a complete mess of tangles. Had her shoe tips been pointy, she could have passed for a genie, but she wore plain leather string sandals.

“Sure did, loud and clear. You woke me up.”

“And you came to find me! Where am I? This isn't my home.” She checked out the dusty room with apprehension, probably wondering how in the heck she had ended up here. Daniel thought the same.

“It’s my attic. Are you really a princess?”

A giggle came up from the pages.

“Why, you don’t believe me?”

“No, it’s not that…” Daniel had read about Schliemann, who had discovered the lost city of Troy on the western coast of Anatolia, present day Turkey. Now he was looking at a Trojan princess…well, the image of one. He found that totally fascinating.

“Do you wish to know more, Daniel?”

“Yes of course, but you see, I’m supposed to go skiing tomorr --”

“Yes! You said the magic word. We are going!”

Suddenly fog filled the attic and the walls disappeared. He was weightless, like Aladdin sitting on his magic carpet, except he wasn’t sitting on anything.

The girl floated in mid-air ahead of him.

They zoomed straight up through the mist.

The solid granite of a mountain appeared, and they were about to turn into pancakes when Calypso swirled her body around, causing a vortex that sucked him in.

Cities, countries, oceans flashed beneath them through breaks in the clouds.

“Where’re you taking me?” He screamed, his eyes wide open, his head spinning, his heart racing.

“Home.”