The Fall

The fall came without a warning. No wave of cataclysmic disasters to forecast the outcome. No prophets of woe stating the end was nigh. No politicians promising hope and a solution. It all happened in the proverbial blink of an eye. People went to sleep one night and when they awoke - the ones that awoke that is - the world was different.

It was quieter, for a start. The disappearance of billions of people from the world, without so much as a murmur, was a shock. Not so shocking as that no one could explain the why, the how, just as importantly - the who.

Who to blame? Who was responsible for this loss? Where had the people gone? How would they be returned?

There were theories of course. Everything from alien invasions to a government secret relocation scheme on a global scale. None of which stood up to scrutiny.

Scientists were sent in to solve the dilemma. There were still plenty of those left, though it was said some of the greatest minds who could have answered the question had been lost. At least, they thought they were lost. I mean, could they come back some day? Maybe having been to another world where they were taught the secret knowledge of a superior race? Or maybe they were in some underground hidden facility, so vast it had become a whole new city beneath the earth and no one knew about it.

The problem was that the truth was so impossible to believe that no one could have conjured it up in their worst nightmares, though one journalist came very close when in a feverish creative state sparked by considerable amounts of whisky and vodka he wrote in his blog - “it is like a child came along, looked at the map of the world and saw all these dots, these countless dots, which were people, and thinking they were pointless and messy, and could do with being removed, grabbed up a giant eraser and rubbed them out. Not all of them, of course, for some were missed, some were hidden by other marks on the map and some were left where the child got bored. That is surely as sound a solution as any other put forward?”

Later that night, that same journalist plummeted off his twelfth floor balcony due to the broken railing finally failing and sending him to his doom. The man who was meant to fix it had been one of the vanished.

He would die never knowing that he of all people, when writing what he considered cynical rhetoric, had come so close.

For the person behind the disappearance was a child. She was aged six and three quarters. The three quarters was important, it implied a certain prestige over those who were only six and a half and indicated the proximity of that glorious marker point of childhood, an upcoming birthday.

This child was named Grace and she lived on a farm in Wales with her mother, father, grandmother and younger brother. Who she largely ignored because he was too little to be interesting. She was a sweet child who loved lambs and baby goats, and always wanted to feed the chickens in the morning because they would follow her and cluck, and she felt important doing that.

She was never cruel or inclined to bad thoughts that could have marked her out as a global serial killer. In actual fact, little Grace had no idea she had wiped out billions of lives in the blink of an eye.

It had begun the day she found the heart shaped locket. It must have been placed in the old farm chimney as a lucky charm, or so her mother said. It had fallen down when the chimney was swept and landed in a pile of soot in the hearth. Her mother had picked it up, cleaned it and opened it to see if it contained anything of interest. It was empty and with that careless adult attitude towards anything not of immediate obvious value, she lost interest and palmed it off on her daughter.

“What does it contain?” Grace asked her.

“It can contain anything you like,” her mother said, playing along as adults do. “It could contain the whole world, if you wish it to.”

Grace liked this idea. She had only a vague idea of what the world was and how big it might be. Her little corner of it was quiet and mainly filled with animals. There were not even that many children at her school. Grace had this notion that the world was vast and contained an awful lot of people, at least one hundred, and a lot of goats and sheep, and things that looked like goats and sheep.

She very much liked the idea of it all being contained inside the locket. She had yet to reach that age when a child questions the logic of something - how can a world be inside a locket? How can we be in that world when we are also outside it holding the same locket that contains it? At six and three quarters these contradictory and philosophically confusing ideas had yet to trouble Grace and perhaps it was because she really believed a world could be inside a locket that the magic worked.

It was old magic. Something earthy and a touch broken after all these years in a chimney. It was not improved by being bounced along in Grace’s hand as she ran to the swing in the garden. The one beneath the apple tree. She clambered onto the seat and she held the locket before her eyes.

There was not much shine to the metal, though her mother had cleaned it well. It was that sort of metal that doesn’t glisten, but holds a deep, richness to itself. If someone ever took the time to test it, they would be hard pressed to determine just what sort of material the locket was made of. No metal of this world, at least.

Grace pondered the small object. Could it really contain the whole world? That would mean everything. Trees, animals, people, rivers and mountains and rain. Where did all the rain go? Maybe it got stuck in the locket and could not escape, which was why they had floods sometimes. This made perfect sense to Grace.

The chain of the locket felt warm in her hand. There was a tingle that ran into her fingers. She tilted her head and stared at the locket, checking it from a new angle. The tingle grew, but it was pleasant, not sinister.

“I really hope you contain the whole world,” Grace said. “I really, really hope. Actually I wish. I wish on my little finger you contain the whole world, everything, even Mr McClennan my teacher. Even him.”

She spun the locket on its chain. She wanted to open it, to see what was inside, but some small part of her, the part that remembered she was six and three quarters, so very near seven and that better awareness of the world, was scared she would open it and find nothing. She was reaching the point of no return, where enough disappointments had occurred to dim the magic of life. When the empty box you dreamed was full of puppies was really just empty. When summer did not start on Christmas day as you had wished for. When reality started to sneak in.

It hadn’t quite taken Grace over just yet, however, and the desire to look in the locket, the hope of what might be in it was stronger than the fear.

She grabbed the heart in her chubby fist and she held it just for a second, making another desperate wish.

“Please contain the world! Please! Please!”

Then she fussed with the catch, struggling to get the tiny thing open. She stuck out her tongue in deep concentration, and she kicked her toes on the ground, the swing moving lightly beneath her.

She had to push and jiggle the catch to make it open. Another child might have given up, but Grace was determined, her determination was akin to her stubbornness and one of her best features, according to her grandmother. The locket finally caved to her inexpert clawing and it popped open.

And Grace was amazed.

The world was in the locket! It spread out like a giant map on the ground before her. She looked at it for a long time, not sure what she was seeing, then bits and pieces started to make sense.

This was a river. This was an ocean. Here was a big yellow section of sand, which confused Grace because she thought it was a beach without the sea nearby - she had not yet learned about deserts.

She got down on her hands and knees to look better. Squinting at the strange things she saw. Those broccoli-like things must be trees, which meant this and this was a forest. Grace loved trees, she loved the rustle of the leaves and the noises of the birds and how everything was peaceful within a wood.

But then she saw some of the broccoli clumps fall over. Big sections of some of the largest broccoli forests just disappeared and were tugged away by box-like machines. Around these machines were lots of dots. They looked like ants and they were attacking the trees!

“Go away, leave them alone!” Grace said sharply and she swiped her hand over the dots and the machines and just like that they were gone.

No more broccoli forest fell, the peace had been restored. Here at least. Because there were more forests and more ants. She swiped at them too when she saw them attacking the trees. They vanished as well.

Still there were more and more. Here they were doing something to a river, stopping it from flowing. Here they were racing around all these grey lines and boxy mountains in such a chaotic cluster it made Grace’s mind ache. There were so many of them and they were everywhere!

Ants were a problem on the farm too. Sometimes they got into the house and into the cupboards. Grace recalled her grandmother grabbing up a broom to sweep a line of them out of the kitchen.

There was an idea!

Grace had a child-size broom from one of those playsets made for children. It had a blue handle and red bristles and had been left out in the rain once too often. She retrieved it and mimicking the vigorous thrusts her grandmother had made on her fruitless attack on the kitchen ants she swept her way over the map of the world and everywhere her brush touched the human ants they vanished.

It was an old magic, you see. The sort that is all blood and death and destruction, and it was broken from age, which was why a child of six and three quarters could annihilate a large chunk of humanity and not even realise it.

When Grace was done, the world looked a lot better. It seemed calmer. Grace was convinced it was happier. She was about to close the locket when it made a strange whining noise, like a whistle playing backwards. The world map shimmered, twitched and then the magic gave out, collapsing in on itself in a sparkling mess, which faded until there was nothing but an empty old locket.

Grace picked up the locket and stared at it. She shut it and opened it, but the magic did not return. She was sad, but sadness does not last long at that age, at least not when dinner is on the table and your mum is calling you indoors.

Grace skipped away, the now perfectly normal locket clasped in her fist.

And no one would ever know, could even begin to guess, how for billions of people the world ended in a garden in Wales at the hands of a six-year-old.