Prologue: England 1987 Prologue England 1987
Pixie shuffled beneath the covers to the foot of her bed and curled into a tight ball. The shouting in the kitchen below was getting louder, penetrating the floorboards like bullets and filling her small heart with terror. In the darkness, she pressed her toy dog to her chest, but it was a useless shield against the barrage of anger that reached her through the duvet and sheets. Her parents’ fighting was all too common, but Pixie suffered each stab of vitriol as if it were the very first time. She squeezed her eyes shut, dampening the cotton sheet with tears, and waited for the inevitable release.

It always came. Just when she was on the point of losing her mind to despair, she’d feel it. The gentle thrumming in her ears, the familiar heaviness in her limbs, the blissful sensation of rising out of her body, of leaving the physical part of her there on her bed and floating away as easily as if she were a wisp of smoke, her spirit expanding with joyful anticipation and an overwhelming sense of relief.

She found herself in the meadow. She couldn’t remember when she had initially discovered it, only that, for as long as she had lived, she had known it. She was not crying now. She knew no one would find her here. They never had and, somehow, she understood that they never would. That it wasn’t possible. This was her place, and she was quite alone.

She took a deep breath and savoured the smell of the countryside. The gentle breeze stroked her hair and a friendly grasshopper chirruped in the wild grasses. The evening sky was a watery blue and upon it clouds floated like cotton-wool boats with pink hulls. The gulls that wheeled beneath it were pink too and Pixie knew she had time – she always had time – to play in this enchanted place, for it was enchanted to a child who had only ever known the city. Who had only ever known the grass and flowers from the park and the small patch of neglected garden at the back of their house.

For Pixie, the meadow was simply a welcome escape from an unpleasant situation. She was too young to know what it really was. She imagined she must be visiting Heaven. But she knew not to ask. Instinctively, she understood that it must remain a secret, that if she told her parents, they simply wouldn’t believe her. They might even accuse her of lying. However, one day she would learn what it was and how to control it. She would realise what a special gift it was, to slip out of her body and slide through the veil. And one day she would give it a name. A good name. A name that said exactly what it was. Timesliding.

Knowing not what the future held, Pixie played in her own private heaven, chasing butterflies and observing the bees foraging about the daisies and knapweed. She could not know that she hadn’t travelled any distance at all, that she was, in fact, in the very same place, only in a different time. A time long before she had been born. Long before her house had been built. Long before even her grandparents had come into the world.

She was ignorant of where she was and what was to come. And it was blissful and uncomplicated, and completely without jeopardy.

For now.