CHARLEY BROOKS (Through Jacob's Gate) An action packed fantasy adventure for 9+
Prologue
Charley Brooks, blind fate
Charley Brooks would have relished being a regular 13 years-old boy like any other, and thrived on doing all the regular 13 year-old stuff. But unlike most kids of his age, Charley lived in two worlds that he had to keep constantly plugged into each other. His everyday world was infused with his parents’ loving attention, the sometimes dubious attentions of his two younger siblings, his friends’ high regard and admiration, and most closely with Dude, his devoted dog, closest friend, and his constant companion.
Charley’s sharp mind kept him in constant touch with everything that went on around him, from current affairs to football, and most keenly music. His everyday world would’ve been a dark, colourless and all but a shapeless jumble, but for the images that were deeply imprinted into his mind from his first ten years of life, a whole world which he had consigned entirely to memory.
He had been totally blind since the age of ten, but he was deeply grateful for being sighted in those first ten years of life. Those ten years were a vital zone in his mind that he called “the bank”, and in that bank’s vault he kept his treasure chest of pictures, faces, shapes, features and colours. It was a vault he could unlock at will, reach into and collect images for all that he heard, smelled, tasted and touched, a gallery where he saw the faces of his family and friends, a screen where he could visualise a game of football being played, and a museum where that other world was on display, as it was before misfortune switched the lights off.
If imagination was ever a guiding light it was much more so to Charley, and while everyone relied on their eyes to capture and relay images to their brains, of what was or wasn’t, where they had been and where they were going, Charley’s brain had to create images without any help from his eyes, images that were extracted from his memory. Every news item, television programme and sound he ever listened to, was accompanied by images created by his mind, and images which were so vivid that he could’ve been viewing them in real time and in full colour.
Charley would watch television with his family in the living room, or with his friends in his own bedroom, but unlike everyone else, the images he saw were scenarios created by his own mind to match the sounds he heard. His eyes might have been reduced to nothing more than orbs which decoratively filled two holes in a handsome face, but behind them he had a brain that made accurate assessments, calculated outcomes, and created complete images in instants of nanoseconds, a brain that was as sharp and quick-witted as it was perceptive, and a brain that made Charley Brooks a magnet for the esteem of all who knew him.
But Charley’s mind, creative as it was, could never have imagined the chain of extremely strange events which happened a thousand years before his time, in places where myths were born, legends lived and prospered, and magic was an accepted part of everyday life. Nor could Charley, or the new friends he was fated to make, could ever have foreseen that they might together become a pivotal part of those events in times unrecorded, places more distant than any faraway, and folks who existed only in folklore..!
Can dreams be the place where two worlds meet..? Please go to the sub-page in the navigation menu for more...