The day before  Eliza found the portal, it was pouring with rain. The sky was a cold silver, and fog had encased the city of London in a ghostly shroud, swallowing every obstacle in its path and wending its way through the streets. Eliza shivered as she stepped outside, her bare hands and cheeks tingling with cold. Rain pricked her skin like needles and her shoes began to fill with water. As she began her walk to the bus stop, buildings and skeletal trees loomed menacingly out of the mist, seeming to appear out of nowhere.She finally approached the main road, where the hubbub of day to day life and the warm yellow Christmas lights strung across the street made the ominous weather seem less threatening. 

Eliza joined the crowd of people huddled like penguins under the bus stop shelter, trying in vain to protect themselves from the torrential downpour. She felt a light tap on her shoulder and smiled when she turned to see a familiar figure.                                                                                  

‘You really deserve a medal.’ Said Eliza’s best friend, her voice dripping with playful sarcasm. ‘You’ve managed to be late every single day of this week. I’m rather impressed.’                                                                                                                                                                       Eliza replied in mock seriousness ‘Well, Fiona, it takes a lot of hard work and dedication, but I’m very committed.’The girls both snorted with laughter, earning disapproving looks from the adults around them. ‘Come on then,’Said Fiona as a bus screeched to a halt at the stop. ‘We don’t want Ms. Griffiths to murder us.’ They boarded the bus, Eliza’s spirits much lifted despite the prospect of facing the wrath of her form teacher for being late . The girls sat down  sat down, Fiona lowering the hood of her rain jacket and allowing her bright red curls to spring up into her eyes. Eliza gazed out of the window, watching the rush of early morning traffic. Her brow furrowed as something strange caught her eye. A pulsing blue light had appeared on the pavement , almost like a spotlight. ‘Must be a reflection from one of the shop windows.’, she thought. People seemed to be parting around it, almost as if there were an invisible obstacle there, but no one paid it any attention. ‘That’s odd.’  Suddenly, the light expanded into a large circle, like a pupil dilating. A shimmering, humanoid apparition appeared in the circle and materialised into a man, who began walking leisurely down the street as if nothing at all had happened and quickly disappeared into the crowds. No one else seemed to have noticed anything. Eliza’s heart hammered in her chest and she stared out of the window, stunned. She searched for the man desperately in the flurried crowds of commuters bustling up and down the main road, but the bus was already speeding away from the stop.

‘You ok?’ Fiona asked ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

She tore her gaze from the window and forced a smile. ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ She didn’t know what she’d just witnessed, but there was no need to make her best friend think she was crazy. Besides, there was nothing to tell. ‘Just your imagination, or a trick of the light.’ She said to herself firmly. But the more she thought about it, the more unlikely that sounded. It had seemed so real.

When the girls arrived late to school, they received a 2-hour Friday detention from Ms. Griffiths, a punishment that any reasonable teacher would never have given a student for such a minor offence. This outraged Fiona, who tended to have quite a fiery temper, and abused the vindictive teacher all day. ‘What an old hag, does she not have anything better to do with her time than to make kids miserable for being 10 minutes late?’ This was usually an activity that Eliza would have happily engaged in, but the strange occurrence on the bus was nagging at her. Why had no one else noticed it? Was she going crazy?Thoughts and questions were roiling in her mind the entire day. Eliza was a very capable student, and all the teachers were bewildered by her complete lack of focus in their lessons. At one point, the usually easy going music teacher, Mrs Rollins, said, exasperated ‘Eliza, what is so fascinating about that window?

‘Get back to your work please.’ Eliza mumbled an apology and looked back at her textbook, but soon her eyes glazed over and her mind was in a completely different place. 

Eliza’s teachers were not the only ones who noticed her strange behaviour. Fiona had known her best friend since primary school and had never seen her act this preoccupied. Though she insisted that she was fine, Fiona knew her friend too well to believe that. She barely spoke the whole day, which was very unusual for her, and she seemed distant and cold. 

At the end of the day, when the girls caught the bus back home, Eliza scanned the street where she had seen the man with the precision of the surgeon, trying to find a clue that would explain what she had seen, but the search was fruitless. As they got off and stepped onto the street, Fiona gave her friend a long, searching look, her blue-green eyes boring into her. 

‘Are you sure you’re ok?’ She asked.

Eliza smiled, touched by her friends concern ‘I’m sure.’

‘You can tell me anything, you know that, right?’

‘I know, and thanks. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘Bye.’ Fiona turned and began walking down the street, shaking her head in bemusement.

Eliza felt a pang of guilt. She was deceiving her best friend, the one person she told everything. ‘But there’s no point in getting her worked up for nothing.’ She said to herself. ‘If I’m sure there’s something strange going on, I’ll tell her. There’s probably a completely normal explanation for all of this, If only I could work it what it was.’  She began her walk home, completely absorbed in her thoughts, not noticing the cold or the strange, golden-eyed man watching her from a rooftop. 

When Eliza got home, she went straight to her room and slumped onto her bed with a sigh. Her mother was not home from the office yet, and Eliza wanted nothing more than to be alone right now. She made herself some hot chocolate  and took out Lord of the Rings from her overstuffed  bookshelf, hoping that one of her old favourites would keep her mind off things, at least for a little while. She curled up in the armchair in the living room and allowed herself to be transported to a different world. About half an hour later, Eliza heard the click of keys in the lock and ran to greet her mother with a huge hug. ‘Woah.’ She laughed, stroking her daughter’s hair. ‘Hi.’ Clare Reinhardt looked into her daughter’s green grey eyes, identical to her own. ‘Is everything ok, honey ?’ Eliza nodded, snuggling into her arms. She hadn’t realised how much she had missed her. Clare kissed her daughter on the forehead and walked into the kitchen, kicking off her elegant high heels as she went.  ‘I’ve had quite the day.’ She sighed. ‘But how are you doing?’ Suddenly, Eliza felt an uncontrollable urge to tell someone, anyone what had happened, as if it were going to come spilling to the surface any second. ‘Something weird happened today.’ She blurted.

‘What’s that?’ Her mother frowned.

The story tumbled out of her without resistance. Telling someone had lifted an enormous weight from her shoulders. But as she finished, Eliza noticed her mother had turned a deathly white, her eyes wide with horror. She looked as if her worst fears had been realised.

‘That’s just ridiculous.’ She snapped, her expression returning to normal. ‘ It must have been your imagination, don’t get yourself worked up about such silly things.’ She turned on her heel and walked into her bedroom, running her hands through her long, dark curls.

Eliza stood there for a moment, completely taken aback by her mother’s reaction. She hardly ever spoke to her daughter so sharply. Why had the story bothered her so much? When they sat down for dinner, they ate in awkward silence, neither one of them wanting to bring up what had happened. Eliza barely tasted the spaghetti her mother had prepared, a dish she usually loved. She was thoroughly confused and burning with questions.. Eventually, with a weary sigh, Eliza’s mother said ‘I’’m sorry I snapped at you , sweetheart. I’ve had a really long day and I haven’t had a break. Don’t worry about what you saw. I’m sure it was nothing.’ Eliza nodded and forced a smile. She went to bed, and after a few weary hours of tossing and turning, she finally fell into an uneasy sleep.

Clare Reinhardt lay awake all night, shrouded I’m darkness. A keening anxiety had settled into the pit of her stomach, a nervous energy that she could not get rid of. She paced up and down her bedroom for what could have been eight minutes or eight hours, and by the time she had calmed herself enough to return to bed her nails were bitten down to the beds. Eliza was at the age where most children began to See, but Claire had hoped that keeping her daughter her ignorant of her abilities would hinder it. ‘There must be another way. I’ll do whatever it takes.’ She thought. She could not and would not lose the most important person in her life. A few hours later, Claire picked up her phone and shakily dialled the number of the one person that could help her now.

‘Hello?’ The bass-drum voice that she knew so well crackled on the line.

‘It’s Claire.’ She replied.

A pause. ‘You shouldn’t be calling.’ He sounded tense, pensive.

‘This is important. I’m worried about Eliza. She’s started to See.’

‘I know. She’s on our radar.’

‘What? Why didn’t you tell me?’ She hissed.

‘I’m sorry, but it’s law. I can’t get in the way of it, even for you.’

‘Please, she’s the only family I have left, and you know about the prophecy. If anything happened to her... I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.’ Claire’s voice broke with emotion and her eyes began to fill with tears.

‘One way or another, Eliza will fulfil the prophecy. There is nothing I can do .’ The line crackled and went dead.                                                                                 

The next morning, when Eliza woke from her fitful dreams , the events of the day before came rushing back to her. She groaned and flopped back into bed.  She didn’t want to think about any of it, but the memory of what had happened kept repeating in her head like a broken record. She was determined to find out what was going on, and what she had seen yesterday. Eliza was naturally very curious, and she knew something like this would constantly pester her until she understood what she had seen. 

She got ready for the day very quickly, hoping to investigate the place where she had seen the strange apparition. For once, she got to the bus stop before Fiona and walked up and down the street, trying to find something that could give her a clue as to what had happened. Frustrated, she was about to walk back to the bus stop she noticed something strange on the pavement. A mark that looked almost as if it was scorched into the ground, but more purposeful. She bent down to get a closer look, trying to avoid being stepped on by the swathes of people making their way along the street. It was a circle, an din the centre of it an eight pointed star, almost like the points of a compass. It was ordinary enough, and there was graffiti like this everywhere in London, but she felt as if the mark held some kind of power. Eliza didn’t know how to explain it, but she could sense a strange force emanating from it, drawing her to it, almost like a magnetic pull. She frowned, and almost without thinking about it, placed her hand on the mark. All of a sudden, it  burst into a fiery orange glow. Shocked, she quickly pulled her hand back, and the light faded. She glanced around quickly, but no-one seemed to have noticed. She looked back down, and cautiously placed her hand on the mark again. For the second time, the mark burnt orange. ‘What is going on? She thought, stunned  ‘  I must be going mad.’  She stood up and ran her hands through her hair desperately. ‘I’m hallucinating, that must be it.’ She paced up and down next to the symbol. She stopped for moment and stared down at it. 

The mark surrounded her in a circle of orange light and the world  faded into darkness