Excerpt of Intangible by C.A. Gray

So this is how I’m going to die? The thought formed in Peter Stewart’s mind in essence if not in actual words as the silver Land Rover hurtled through the air, upside down, and headed straight for the windshield of the Jeffersons’ BMW. Instinctively Peter turned to look out the window on the passenger side, and he saw just a flash of a face standing on the side of the road, with a jagged scar across the right cheek and a vivid expression of pure terror. Brock sat in the front seat next to the driver. Lily Portman, the new girl, and Cole, Brock’s younger brother, were in the back seat beside Peter. He could not possibly have imagined a more unlikely group of people with whom to die. In that split second, he thought of his dad’s face — his sellotaped glasses and lopsided grin. He’d never see him again. Then – Just at the moment when impact should have occurred, the entire scene vanished. Peter blinked, his heart still pounding, and looked around. All he knew for sure was that he was in a very bright place: it was a meadow, peaceful and quiet, with a pool in the middle. A rainbow radiated from the surface of the pool, and he felt himself compelled irresistibly toward it. As he approached, it grew larger. Am I dead? he wondered. Is this heaven? But he didn’t see the others – he was alone here. Then he saw that the others were in the rainbow- and they were still in the car. He recoiled: the rainbow showed him horrific, brutal images of the accident. The crushed front seat of the BMW obscured the driver completely beneath the wreckage. The other four were very clearly dead. He fought the nausea threatening to overtake him. He looked again and realized that the scene took on an eerie red hue, as if viewed through a pair of tinted glasses. At first he thought that was because of the blood, but the upholstery was red too, and the trees – He took a step back and saw the rest of the rainbow again. Cautiously, he moved toward orange, and the accident again blossomed into view before his eyes… but this time, the impact occurred slightly to the left of the previous one. Peter bit his lip, concentrating hard, trying to understand how reality could shift with each color, as if it were a physics problem to solve. He looked at Cole. He was still dead, but he bled from a wound in his cheekbone this time instead of just above his eye, like in the red version. Peter stepped back again. Infinite variations existed in the rainbow between red and orange, each showing the impact at a slightly different angle. From his perspective on the bank of the pool, each ephemeral view of the accident was like a thousand shimmering possible realities inside a kaleidoscope. Peter searched through the colors of the rainbow frantically, looking for one, just one, which might offer some hope… He found it buried somewhere between blue and violet. In that image, the Land Rover sat on the side of the road. Lily gasped for breath and Brock clutched the sides of his seat, but they were all otherwise all right. It looked as if the accident had never happened. Without thinking, without any idea what he was looking at, Peter somehow knew what he had to do: he aimed at the precise place in the pool where that shade of blue-violet emanated, and he dove in. Instantly he was back in the car, his arms outstretched. Sweat poured from his brow, and he trembled from head to toe. The silver Land Rover hovered over the BMW, suspended in mid-air. “Well, set it down then!” Cole shrieked. The statement jarred him. What did that mean? That was the moment Peter realized he was the one holding up the Land Rover. His lips started muttering something without his permission, but he could not tell what they said; the words were unfamiliar. As he spoke, the car reversed its trajectory and landed on the side of the road, in exactly the same place it had started. Except for the hammering of their hearts, it was as if the whole thing had never happened. But really, it had just begun.