Anticlockwise

by T W M Ashford

  Instead of shock or horror, I felt a sharp and violent pain in my temples. Only a few metres behind our mining vessel was the missile, still doggedly pursuing us, its metal shell showering apart.

  It could have been a millisecond; it could have taken me a thousand years. In that timeless, spaceless fissure they were one and the same. I turned back to the controls and jammed the accelerator level forwards. But it was no use; whether set forwards or back, our speed - or lack thereof - remained the same.

  ‘George,’ came Pierre’s voice. His lungs were under six feet of salt water. ‘I think we’re going to…’

  There was an explosion, or rather an implosion - the rear half of our vehicle was torn away into nothingness. An alarm went off in what was left of our cramped little cabin… but that could have been my imagination. For all I knew, the alarm could have been coming from everywhere else.

  We were spinning, spinning through a gap between universes, spinning through a space where there was no up or down, no left or right, no right or wrong way round.

  There was a horrible cracking noise, like the sound of a taut and frayed climbing rope snapping in two.

  Then suddenly the white was replaced by blues and greens and silver chromes, tumbling in a kaleidoscope of colours and tones and blurred, shapeless streaks, and our screams turned loud and immediate as if they were actually coming from our own mouths, and the nothingness vacuum was swapped for a sharp, cold air, an air that whistled a shrill melody as we fell…

  And we were introduced to the ground with a crash.

  Chapter Thirteen

  For a while I assumed I was dead, which should probably have been a pretty good indicator that I wasn’t. That’s about all I remember doing - assuming the worst. I couldn’t see anything, or hear anything, or even think all that much. Everything felt a painful sort of numb.

  I didn’t know what state Pierre was in. I had no way of finding out.

  I think I blacked out.

  When I came to again, I’d regained my sense of touch. Sound was making a sluggish, reluctant return as well. Grass was brushing against my face, fresh with morning dew. I could hear it rustling. I could hear footsteps stamping it down. I could feel a weight pulling at my arms and legs - not towards the earth, but away from it.

  People were talking. Well, they were exchanging grunts. Whether it was an actual form of language was impossible to tell.

  I tried talking but only gurgles came out of my mouth. Nobody replied. But as far as I can tell, nobody hit me to make me stop.

  There was blood in my mouth anyway. I tried to spit it out, but it stuck to my lips. It was easier to swallow it.

  Somewhere through the grass, I blacked out again.

  ‘George. George. Wake up.’

  I woke into a grey-green haze of a headache, my eyes all out of focus, feeling as if someone had injected glue into all of my joints. There was a faint ringing in my ears and my mouth tasted of copper and two-day hangovers. I blinked heavily as I cast my eyes in the direction of the voice.

  It belonged to Pierre. I expected to feel relieved to hear his voice but instead I found looking upon his face to be surprisingly sobering; there was a long, wide, bloody gash across his forehead and a purple bruise was blossoming on the side of his neck. The stitching of his uniform had come loose and one of its arms was hanging off at the shoulder. I wondered if I’d fared any better in the crash. I lifted my hand to my face but it wasn’t my face that stung. My right arm throbbed something terrible.

  ‘Eurgh,’ I groaned, rubbing my right arm with my left hand. ‘What happened?’

  ‘The rocket hit us, I guess,’ replied Pierre. ‘We must have been catapulted outside of the fissure by the blast. God knows which universe we’re in right now. Well, I have a rough idea, but…’

  For the first time since coming around, I took in our surroundings. We were in a cave, and a particularly damp one at that. Fields of moss and mould grew over the tall, damp walls. A crack in the rocks above us let in a small sliver of light; more flowed softly, muted and stale, from somewhere deeper in the cave. Water, either from rainfall or a subterranean stream, dripped from the ceiling into a shallow, brown pool a few feet long and wide. Pierre was sitting up against a stalagmite pillar. I was lying down, propping myself up on my elbows. Below me, and beside Pierre, were two sets of rudimentary bedding - blankets of straw and grass.

  ‘Wait a second,’ I said, pushing myself up into a sitting position. ‘Where’s the wreckage? How on Earth did we get here?’

  ‘Woah there, George. Stay calm. Everything’s fine. Well, we’ve lost our one way of getting into the Space Between Worlds and putting everything right so everything is most certainly not fine, but…’

  ‘We should get moving.’ I tried getting to my feet, but I slipped on the wet stones and landed on my ribs. ‘Argh. Whoever brought us here could be back at any second.’

  ‘What, them?’ said Pierre, nodding towards the space behind me.

  I spun around on my bed of straw, expecting some hulking, armoured alien beast to be lurching towards me. What I saw shocked me even more. A trio of small pink faces with wide, curious eyes and brown hair that fell in messy ringlets, peering out at us from behind another mossy wall of rock. As my own eyes grew wide with surprise they scarpered back into the depths of the cave.

  ‘Pierre, they were…’ I spun back around and glared at him. ‘They were human, weren’t they? Where are we?’

  Pierre sighed. ‘Can you walk?’

  ‘What? Erm, I think so. Why?’

  ‘It might be easier to show you.’

  Pierre helped me to my feet, which was a rougher ordeal than I anticipated. I must still have been in shock from the crash. The knee on one of my trouser legs was split open and my shoes looked as if someone had polished them with sandpaper. With my arm around Pierre’s shoulders we set off into the caves. It didn’t feel like a very safe move, but I suppose there weren’t many other moves we could make.

  My heart caught in my throat as soon as we rounded the first corner.

  A dozen humans sat huddled together, dressed in furs. There were men and women, there were children, there were grandparents; all of them with mud and fear upon their faces. The adults pulled the young ones behind them as we approached, but the oldest of the women surprised me by taking a step towards us. She spoke calm words to Pierre, though I doubted he could understand them any better than I did.

  I looked around at these people’s home. There was a rug on the floor where they’d been sitting; it was bear skin, the head still intact. Freshly skinned rabbits were hanging from stalactites where the air was cooler. There were sticks impaled into the earth; scavenged pieces of metal armour hung from them, making them resemble macabre scarecrows. Primitive spears and bows were leant against the wall beside them. Light crept in through the mouth of the cave, which was further ahead. A pile of ash sat within a ring of stones towards the entrance. It must have housed fires come the nights.

  I tried smiling at one of the children, who can’t have been older than four, but he hid his face behind his father’s back. His father did not smile back.

  Pierre made a simple motion of pointing at first his eyes and then the mouth of the cave. ‘We just want to take a look.’

  The old woman shook her head, more concerned than angry.

  Pierre patted his heart then pointed to the ground, then repeated his original gesture. ‘We won’t leave. We just want to take a look.’

  The old woman paused, looked at me, and then nodded. Much to my surprise, she was walked with us to the entrance. Even with a hunched back and a knotted walking stick she made lighter work of the short distance than Pierre or I could.

  A cool but pleasant breeze wafted into the cave as we approached its end, and the light turned first from white to colour, and then from colour to shapes… shapes I found hard to believe.

  ‘Oh my God,’ I whispered.

  I was looking out at a world with two disparate identities. To
the right were rolling hills of lush grass and rocky outcrops - specks of grey and white. Forests rose up like an ocean shore, starting shallow and sparse and growing so deep you could drown in them. Birds called out to one another as they crossed over the clouds above. But to the left grew a forest of an altogether different sort. Great towers of shimmering blue glass and chrome rose up and through those same clouds, glinting in the bright sunlight. Shuttles orbited them like electrons around a nucleus, and a familiar-looking battleship hovered above its outskirts like a small and angry moon.

  But it was the real moon that gave the game away, peeking through the peaceful blue of the sky. Small, grey. A familiar face. This wasn’t just a planet similar to my own; this planet was my own. This was Earth.

  ‘What have the Torri-Tau done to the place?’ I asked, flabbergasted.

  ‘Reshaped our planet in their own image,’ replied Pierre. He shook his head. ‘Take any of the great empires of the human race. The Egyptians, the Mesopotamians, the Chinese dynasties, the Greeks and the Romans. Hell, the British Empire. Any of them. They never happened. Or never will happen. It’s impossible to tell if we’re far in the future or the past anymore.’

  He tipped his head in the direction of our wrinkly escort.

  ‘All I can tell is the human race never got the chance to develop much past the Stone Age. It’s better than nothing, I suppose. When I saw London getting replaced bit by bit, I assumed we’d been made extinct.’

  ‘Well, this isn’t good.’

  ‘Nope. And it’s probably only a matter of time before the multiverse catches up with us and rewrites us out of existence too.’

  We stood in silence for a moment, soaking the new reality in.

  ‘They’ve done a better job with the planet than we ever did, to be fair,’ I said, nursing my arm. I smiled at the old woman. ‘I assume these people found us when we crashed.’

  ‘Hmm? Oh, yes. Can you see the smoke over there? Past the tree-line.’

  I looked as far to the right as the hillsides would allow. Just over the top of the highest mound, above the dense tree canopies, was a thin, dark, rising plume of smoke.

  ‘That’s where we, erm, landed,’ said Pierre, pinching the bridge of his nose. ‘The impact threw us clear of the wreckage. We’re lucky we weren’t both killed. Huh. Lucky. I was conscious for long enough to see you were still in one piece, but I couldn’t get up. Next thing I know I’m being dragged through the grass by our friends back there. God knows what they thought was happening.’

  ‘Same here. I thought I was in the afterlife or something.’

  ‘Well, it’s a good thing they came. There’s no way the Torri-Tau didn’t see us tearing through the sky like a bloody asteroid. The crash site is probably crawling with their soldiers. Not that it really matters, even if they know it was us. We failed. We didn’t get into the Space Between Worlds, and that’s that.’

  Pierre wandered back into the cave, and the old woman followed. I went to say something, but what would have been the point? He was right. There was no putting the multiverse right, not anymore.

  I lingered in the mouth of the cave a few seconds longer before a cold wind encouraged me to venture back into shelter. Something along the inside wall stopped me short.

  ‘Pierre?’ I called out into the cave. He turned around, tired. ‘Come take a look at this.’

  He trudged back to where I stood, not in a mood to do much but mope. ‘Take a look at what?’

  I pointed to the cave paintings on the wall. They were crude but clear… and fresh, in striking reds and blues.

  ‘Yes, they’re beautiful works of art,’ Pierre sighed. ‘What about them, George?’

  ‘Don’t be like that. Try again. What does that look like to you?’

  Etched across the stone in simple strokes was a red square, and from out that square walked three rudimentary figures. They were coloured completely blue. And ahead of those figures were three tall, thin, upright streaks, also blue.

  I watched with hope as Pierre’s eyes grew wide.

  ‘This is the door,’ he said. His voice was low, weighed down with awe and anticipation. ‘This is the door the Torri-Tau came through when they first occupied this world. There they are, right there, walking through it. Hey, you. Yes, you.’

  He waved erratically at the old woman, who came hobbling back our way. Behind her the rest of her family still cowered away from us, arms around one another.

  ‘Did you see this?’ he asked her, pointing to his eyes and then to the image of the Torri-Tau marching through the door. ‘Did you see this happen?’

  She placed her hand on her heart and said something we couldn’t understand.

  I shrugged. ‘I think that’s a yes?’

  ‘These lines,’ continued Pierre, pointing at the three thin streaks of paint and then out the mouth of the cave. ‘Do they represent the skyscrapers out there? They do, don’t they?’

  She tapped her heart and then pointed outside, just as Pierre had done. Then suddenly she was throwing her hands to the ground, only to raise them back up to the ceiling, over and over again.

  ‘You saw them build everything?’ I asked. She couldn’t have understood English - especially given that England never did and likely never would exist - but she stopped her gestures all the same. Her eyes were old and sad. I’m not surprised. To see aliens arrive on her doorstep and start tearing up the world she knew must have been terrifying.

  ‘Of course, of course,’ said Pierre, pacing back and forth. ‘It makes sense now. It makes perfect sense.’

  ‘Erm, does it?’

  ‘Of course it does! The octowürm stole a door from Le Petit Monde so that the Torri-Tau could escape the Space Between Worlds, right? But she must have stolen another door from the hotel - a door for them to come through on the other side. Think about it: why would they have wanted to escape to what we consider the modern day, when everything before that point would have stayed the same? That’s just making more work for themselves! They must have got Doxy to set up a door as far back in time as she could. The simple act of arriving here changed everything that came after it…’

  ‘Erm, okay? But why would they choose Earth of all places?’

  ‘Because the door came from Earth, of course! Not just that: the same Earth! The wavelengths had to match otherwise they wouldn’t have known where they were going. No wonder she was making a note of all those door numbers…’

  ‘So you’re saying the city over there is where the Torri-Tau came out when they escaped from the prison?’ I asked, keeping up with Pierre’s rambling with all the success of a paraplegic trying to ride a bicycle. ‘All of them?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Pierre, grabbing hold of my arms and beaming into my face. ‘All of them. And that means the door is down in that city too. A door that might lead us straight back to the Space Between Worlds.’

  ‘A door that…? Jesus Christ, Pierre. Even if what you’re saying is true, how do you know the door is still there? Or that you’ll be able to decipher its… whatchamacallits… wavelengths correctly?’

  ‘I’ll be able to do it,’ said Pierre, nodding confidently. ‘I know I can. I just know. And of course the door’s still down there. If you’d escaped through it, would you throw it into a shredder? No. You’d build a shrine around it, that’s what you’d do.’

  I threw my hands into the air. ‘Say you’re right. Say you’re right about everything. None of it matters. A Torri-Tau battleship just hunted us down and blew us out of a cosmic fissure. Do you really think they’re not going to notice us if we stroll right into their flagship city?’

  ‘So what? Maybe we’ll be killed if we go down there, but we’ll definitely die if we sit in this cave and do nothing. I’d rather die trying.’

  ‘Sure. But between possible torture and being painlessly erased from existence, I know which one I’d choose.’

  Another silence fell. Even the old cavewoman looked awkward as she shuffled away again. Pierre scratched the back o
f his neck and looked around the cave, shaking his head. He froze on the spot as his eyes fell upon the makeshift scarecrows.

  ‘Now, don’t get too worked up,’ he said, turning back to face me, ‘but I think I have another plan.'

  Chapter Fourteen

  This was ridiculous. Utterly, utterly ridiculous. I couldn’t believe that with everything we’d been through since reuniting at the bar in Port Iridium, this was the most stupid plan yet.

  Pierre and I were walking down the wooded hills towards the outskirts of the city, dressed in the Torri-Tau armour we’d “borrowed” from the cave people. They hadn’t objected to us dismantling their scarecrows - in fact, they were eager to see us put them on. We must have looked to them like gods that had crashed down from the heavens. I wish they could have told me how they came about having the armour in the first place. I assumed they’d ambushed a wayward patrol at some point.

  Still, it was nice to be rambling through the countryside again. Crisp leaves cracking underfoot, crisp air in my tired, aching lungs.

  ‘It’s not the weight that bothers me the most,’ I said, rearranging my blue chest plate for what must have been the thirteenth time. ‘It’s how poorly the armour fits me. I can’t bend my elbows or knees properly and my shoulders keep nudging my helmet up.’

  ‘Take it off then,’ said Pierre, walking the way a cat does when it’s been dressed up and doesn’t know what to do with its limbs. ‘See how far you get without it.’

  He had a point. As uncomfortable as the ramshackle sets of armour were, they went quite some way in disguising our true identities as rebels against the Torri-Tau cause. Our arms and legs were already covered by our jackets and trousers, and our feet by our shoes. The helmets covered all but a sliver of our faces; there was just enough of a gap, about one inch by four, for us to peek through. The only parts of our noticeably not-blue bodies that weren’t disguised were our pasty white hands, but our pockets solved that problem… for now.