The Power of Five Oblivion

ONE
    It was the week before my sixteenth birthday when the boy fell out of the door and everything changed . Is that a good start? Miss Keyland, who taught me at the village school, used to say that you have to reach out and grab the reader with the first sentence. If you waste time with descriptions of the sky or the weather or the smell of freshly cut grass or whatever, people may not bother to read on, and I’ve got a big story to tell. In fact, it’s the biggest story in the world. The end of the world … and stories don’t get any bigger than that.
    Maybe that’s where I should have begun. All these different things were happening in Britain, in America, in the Middle East – and, of course, in Antarctica. That’s where the armies were heading. There was going to be this huge battle in which the future of everything and everyone would be decided. And I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t even realize how horrible everything had become.
    Well, it’s too late now. I’ve started so I might as well keep going. Me. The boy. The door. Let’s take them one by one.
    My name is Holly – at least, that’s what everyone used to call me. I was christened Hermione but that was considered much too posh for the sort of girl I became, and anyway, Holly was easier to spell. Nobody ever used my family name. Like a lot of kids in the village, my parents were dead and everyone found it easier just to stick to first names. I expect you want to know what I look like. I’m not sure how to describe myself but I might as well say straight off that, back then, I wasn’t pretty. I had straw-coloured hair and unfortunately it looked a bit like straw too, long and tangled like something falling out of a mattress. I had round cheeks and freckles and bright, blue eyes. I’d been working on the farm since I was old enough to push a wheelbarrow (which was actually very young indeed) so I was quite stocky. My nails were chipped and full of dirt. If I’d ever had nicer clothes, I might have looked all right, but the shirt and dungarees I always wore had been worn by several people before me and they didn’t do me any favours.
    I lived with my grandparents. Actually, they weren’t related to me at all. We didn’t have any shared blood. But that was how I thought of them. Their names were Rita and John and they must have been in their late seventies … they were the sort of age that’s so old you don’t bother trying to guess any more. To be fair, they were both in pretty good shape; slow but they could get around and they were fully compos mentis ( compos meaning “in command” and mentis meaning “of the mind”, from the Latin. Miss Keyland taught me that). If I had a problem with them, it was that they didn’t talk very much. They liked to keep themselves to themselves – which wasn’t that easy once they’d adopted me and taken me into their house. They had been married for as long as anyone could remember and they would have been lost without each other.
    There was a church in the middle of the village, St Botolph’s, which dated back to the Normans. It stood at the crossroads next to the main square and it was a grim old place, bashed around by the centuries and rebuilt so often that it was a complete patchwork, as if a bulldozer had crashed into it at some time and they’d had to put it back together quickly before anyone noticed. It was full every Sunday, but then, nobody in the village would have thought of not going to Sunday service, and even Rita and John put on their best clothes and hobbled down there arm in arm. Personally, I hated the place. For a start, I didn’t believe in God and often used to think that if there was a God, even He would get bored of the same hymns and prayers week after week. That didn’t stop the vicar though. His sermons went on for hours and they never varied. Pray for mercy. We’re being punished for our sins. We’re all doomed . He may have had a point but I never believed the answer was to be found on my knees, on that hard stone floor.
    The church was also used for village meetings every Wednesday, but we weren’t allowed to go to them until we were sixteen. Until then, you weren’t considered grown up enough to join in the discussion, even if you were grown up enough to slog your guts out from dawn to dusk. It was funny how it worked.
    The door wasn’t actually in the church. It was round the back. The church was surrounded by a cemetery full of wonky