Following the Children into the Dark, Chapter 20 to 22

I love how much I can completely be taken into a story world, where the words on the pages seem to conjure shape and picture and emotion. I can feel everything the characters are feeling and feel a part of the world they are venturing through as if I am there with them. This story holds up to these imaginative and beautiful experiences of reading a book. I’ve been on plenty of adventures already with these cast of talents and monsters, both dark and scary, tender and happy, fantastical and dreamlike. We have finally reached the mysterious Cairndale, which houses children and adults alike that harness and live with a special gift. The more Charlie and Marlowe study and walk the corridors and grounds of this giant manor and landscape around it, the more I learn about its secrets and the history and terminology of the talents. Each gift is given a scientifical name. For Charlie’s healing abilities and his body’s manipulation of dead tissue, he is categorized as a “clink”, specializing in “haelan” skills. I like that the word haelan seems to be derived from “heal”, matching the very essence of Charlie’s automatic cell regeneration after injury, broken bones or loss of blood. I am very intrigued to know about Marlowe’s official term for his shining talent, as it is still not specified or explained by any teacher, figure or doctor at Cairndale. They don’t really talk about his talent or show is training, but I am sure I’ll be invited into this window of his perspective soon and reveal more of his nature. The manor serves as a school, a refuge and home for all talents and those individuals who protect and guard them there. Not everyone who lives at Cairndale has a talent, but they do share a love and affection for the children and their wellbeing. The kids around the school have a lot of ghost stories and conspiracies they like to tell, which I suspect most to be true. Marlowe is among the talks and the whispers of the classrooms and dormitories. Many of the students also talk about a special talent that the teachers say does not exist, one that is a dark talent and can remove the gift of another. This does not sound like Marlowe’s talent, but I am starting to believe that his gift is rare and the only one of its kind that they have now discovered. Doctor Berghast, who founded Cairndale and has devoted his life to studying talents and the bridge between the living world and the dead world, is supposedly Marlowe’s guardian and is harbouring secrets about Marlowe’s true talent, among other secrets too. I am hoping the main children that the story follows, Charlie, Marlowe, Ribs, Komako and Oskar and his mutated friend Lymenion, can find all of this out. They have already begun their work in trying to solve the cases of missing children in their school by stealthily entering the Doctor’s study using their respective talents at night and looking through his files and journal. I love that the children are the heroes, its one of my favourite things in storytelling where a child must fight off against darkness for not only their friends, but for their world and the adult figures they care about. They bring with them heart and a way of looking at the world that we can learn from and I treasure that and connect with it tenderly. I also really have fun reading about the friendships that build between the children, especially Charlie and Marlowe who have become like brothers. Those two are the sweetest together. Whenever Marlowe holds Charlie’s hand or Charlie comforts him from a bad dream, I feel a great and powerful love between them that can defend against any monster. The children after reading the Doctor’s journal, want to speak with the glyphic talent known as the Spider, who has the gift of keeping the bridge to the dead world locked with his power and finding lost talents using an invisible weblike mechanism that comes from inside him, like a spider feeling the touch of other things on its web. I follow the children now, into the Spider’s nest and hoping they don’t get caught.