All around them hung an awful, infinite silence.
‘What do we do now, Pierre?’ asked Viola, her voice dry and tiny. She had her arms crossed and her foot was tapping a rapid beat on the floor. ‘You do have a plan, right?’
Pierre dropped himself onto the nearest bench and buried his face in his hands. Viola yanked them away again. Before he could protest she grabbed him roughly by the shoulders and pulled his face to within an inch of her own.
‘How are we getting home, Pierre? How are we getting home?’
Chapter Fifteen
‘What are you saying? That we’re trapped here forever?’
Viola kept hammering on the door of room 271 as if she expected someone on the other side to come answer it… as if she expected the door to open onto anything other than the back of the empty hall. Pierre had promoted himself from a position groaning on the benches to one sitting cross-legged in front of the open chamber doors, staring out at the endless white void.
‘Well, we are in an inescapable prison outside of space and time,’ he replied, not turning around. ‘I imagine not being able to leave was a pretty big part of the design brief.’
‘Come on,’ she muttered, giving the door handle another tug. ‘Would it have been so hard for them to leave it open for us?’
Pierre looked out at the nothingness. Well, the almost nothingness. The odd bit of waste and miscellanea spoiled the perfect, ivory ocean by daring to drift across it. The door of a refrigerator. The millstone from a Dutch windmill. An old, gas-lit street lamp. And here and there a tiny speck of blue - those of the Torri-Tau too lost, mad or forgotten to make the trip back into the multiverse, Pierre hazarded a guess.
There was little point in pondering how far the Space Between Worlds stretched, but Pierre couldn’t help but wonder how many poor souls were out there wandering it.
Like him and Viola, now.
‘Goddammit!’ shouted Viola, giving the door an almighty kick. Pierre winced. The door might have been bastardised into something better suited for a dump, but that didn’t stop it from belonging to Le Petit Monde.
He didn’t stop staring out into the void even as Viola marched up, huffed in a heavy and deliberate manner, and then plonked herself down beside him.
‘Don’t suppose you were carrying a spare key, were you?’
Pierre shook his head. ‘Ever since George took the spare and went after an alternate dimension’s version of his wife and kid, the Council haven’t been so keen on my carrying an extra on my person. It’s in a lockbox back at the hotel, under the desk.
‘Oh. Really useful in that lockbox, is it?’
Pierre shrugged. ‘Don’t suppose it would have mattered. Could you imagine the look on that blue guy’s face if I’d brought him two keys instead of one?’
‘Is there any way to reach anyone back home? Get someone to come to us?’
‘Cross-universe communication is possible, but not without the right equipment,’ sighed Pierre. ‘Besides, we’re outside of traditional space here. The signal simply wouldn’t work.’
‘Oh.’
‘No wavelengths, you see.’
‘Ah.’
They sat in silence and watched as a plastic carrier bag floated past the scrap-metal bridge.
‘You know,’ said Viola, taking the sort of deep breath that precedes all unpopular opinions, ‘maybe it was just the way Wesker told it, but the Torri-towels…’
‘Torri-Tau,’ Pierre corrected.
‘…the Torri-Tau didn’t seem all that bad. Aside from leaving us trapped here for all eternity, I mean. That was a dick move.’
Pierre’s brow furrowed and he turned his head towards her.
‘Now that you mention it,’ he said, ‘I was imagining them to be something more… well, monstrous. Like giant, interstellar cockroaches, or a sentient cloud of anthrax. Not… not blue people, I guess. Still, I suppose it’s what’s inside that counts. And deep down they might be proper horrid.’
‘Maybe. But do you honestly think that?’
‘No… No, I suppose I don’t. They didn’t seem bad, not really, just…’
‘Desperate?’
‘Yeah. Desperate. That’s it. Like they had no other choice. Oh, I don’t know. Maybe the Council has been keeping secrets from everyone. And maybe keeping those secrets was for the best. It wouldn’t be the first time. No wonder they wanted to leave though. I mean, look at this place. Look at it. There’s literally nothing here.’
‘Nothing apart from your own thoughts, and nothing to keep them at bay. Christ. How long does it take for someone to go mad in a world like this, do you think?’
‘Oh, not long. Everyone’s just one quiet day away from going over the edge. Out here there’s nobody to talk you down.’
Viola stood up and, before Pierre could transform himself into a two-tonne anvil of grumpiness, pulled him up onto his feet.
‘Come on then. Either there is a way out or there isn’t, but we won’t find out by sitting and staring out the door. This might be our home for the next few hundred billion years. We might as well get a feel for the place.’
The structure built around the chamber was much bigger than Pierre or Viola had guessed. Or so they concluded from the endless corridors and hallways, at least; it wasn’t as if either one of them was willing to step outside and take a proper look.
All of it was assembled from the same metal (and occasionally wooden) scrap as their original cell. No inch of it appeared to require natural or electric light in order to be illuminated. One “wing” appeared more consistent and complete than the others, until Pierre realised that an entire rusty, spacefaring frigate had been teleported in and bolted to the side.
They hadn’t run into anybody else, which came as little surprise.
‘We’ll need to find a couple of bedrooms, or something,’ said Viola, peering into yet another empty storage room. ‘Surely all those people used something more comfy than the girders of a bulkhead to sleep on.’
‘Bedrooms?’ replied Pierre, drumming his knuckles against the hollow shell of the corridor. It was all rivets and bolts. ‘Doubt it. There’s no need to sleep, not here. I suppose you could try, but why bother? No space and no time, remember. You won’t get tired because you’re not spending energy, and you’ll wake up at the same time you went to bed. Just imagine what the Torri-Tau could have achieved here if there’d been any bloody point.’
‘Christ almighty. Well I’ll need somewhere private for myself. I’m not having you follow me around for eternity. What about showers?’
Pierre shrugged.
‘But I was sweaty before I even got here, thanks to our little trip to Wesker’s hometown,’ she said, throwing her hands into the air. ‘I don’t want to stay sweaty forever!’
Pierre turned the crank of another dilapidated door and pulled it open with a grunt.
‘Hey,’ he said, peering into the room beyond. ‘Come take a look at all this.’
Viola poked her head around the doorframe and whistled.
‘Boy, we’ve got ourselves a hoarder.’
They were looking into a hall - though perhaps it was more of a hull - packed full to every wall and corner with relics and antiques and misplaced valuables. Vases and candelabra were precariously balanced on top of desks and chairs and drawers (and more than one mountain of glistening, golden coins). Viola didn’t recognise some of the alien devices stored in there. Of others even Pierre was ignorant.
‘This is insane,’ muttered Pierre, squeezing between two original and identical copies of Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee. ‘Look at this vase. It’s from Athens, circa five hundred B.C. And that there,’ he added, pointing at a round, silver and spiky ball about the size of a bull, ‘is a Crytellian quantum engine. They don’t go on to invent those for another twenty-six years!’
‘Looks like somebody didn’t want to miss out on how the universe was doing,’ said Viola, rifling through a pile of newspapers and journals. Some of them w
ere in English. Others weren’t written in languages fit for the human eye. ‘Or how all of the universes were doing, actually. See here.’ She held two of the papers up. ‘In this edition, man landed on the Moon in 1969. In this one, we reached it in 1902!’
‘Must be hard to accept the world is carrying on without you,’ said Pierre, blowing the dust off a fossil. ‘Let alone that all of the past, present and future is happening someplace else entirely.’
He jumped all of a sudden, almost knocking the fossil off its stand.
‘Did you hear that?’ he whispered.
‘Hear what?’ replied Viola, putting the newspapers back on their pile.
A faint and delicate melody was drifting down the corridor outside as quietly as a mouse would scuttle along the wall of a pantry. It was a folk song, and hidden amongst the crackles and pops was a woman’s voice, singing in French.
‘There’s someone else here,’ said Pierre.
They left the storage hall and followed the corridor further, taking care to muffle their footsteps as much as possible. Both were sure that if there were any other prisoners, those prisoners must have heard the two of them talking already, but neither wanted to take any chances.
The recording kept playing all the while they approached, growing slowly louder, occasionally skipping a bar and sometimes rewinding. Pierre and Viola came to a stop outside another chunky iron door. It was cracked open wide enough for them to peer through.
The octowürm was on the other side, gliding from one end of her room to the other, arranging pictures on shelves with one tentacle and putting Viola’s fluffy toy pig on top of a dresser with another. One a small, wooden table sat a phonograph, playing the song they’d heard. It looked like a miniature beer-barrel being roasted on a spit above a sewing loom. The rest of the room was far more cosy than the rest of the Torri-Tau’s makeshift home; there were bookshelves and armchairs, and even a few ceramic plates.
‘Hey!’ hissed Viola, pointing at the pig. ‘I was wondering where that had got to!’
Pierre held a finger to his lips and pulled Viola over to the other side of the doorway.
‘This is not good,’ he whispered, wringing his hands together. ‘There’s only one other creature in this entire dimension and it’s a goddamn octowürm! I suppose we don’t need to worry about never growing old here - we’ll be torn to bloody shreds sooner or later!’
‘Or we can use the worm to get out of here,’ Viola suggested, shaking Pierre until all of his nerves rolled out. ‘There are only two ways in or out, right? Using one of the Council’s keys, or…’
They peered back into the room. The octowürm was trying to hum along to the old song, which, in its invertebrate form, appeared to be a struggle.
‘So what, we grab hold of a leg each and hope it teleports us back home? It could send us to a tundra planet, Viola. It could drop us off in the heart of a sun!’
Viola tapped her finger against her chin. ‘You said these creatures are smart right? Or was that Wesker?’
‘Yeah, they’re not stupid. And this one was clever enough to impersonate a hotel inspector, remember?’
‘Then we threaten it. We make it take us home. I saw a pretty sharp-looking lamp inside that room. I’ll skewer it if it tries anything funny.’
‘You saw what it did back in New Havant, and in Tokyo before that! You really think a poke with a lamp is going to scare it?’
Viola shrugged. ‘It’s that or wait here forever. Maybe help will come. But how long do you think it’ll take before you get so desperate that we go through with my plan anyway?’
Pierre groaned. ‘This is not a good idea. I just want you to know that, for these last few seconds we spend alive. Not a good idea.’
The gap in the door was almost too narrow to slip through. Viola went first and immediately disappeared out of sight towards the right. Pierre followed, clutching the door frame as tight as he could, dragging his chest across the metal, certain that he would bump the door and send its ancient hinges groaning… but in the end he was just as silent as Viola.
He looked around the room. The octowürm was still busying herself with chores. Viola was lifting the cream-coloured lampshade off the end of the lamp’s long, wooden pole, preparing it into the world’s most embarrassing spear.
Pierre scoured his immediate vicinity for a weapon of his own. In a choice between a potted peace lily and the unrolled note of a fortune cookie, he opted for neither.
Viola counted down from three to one with her fingers. Pierre raised his fists and tried to look threatening. It was hard, knowing that death was only one bad and imminent decision away.
Three.
Two.
One…
The octowürm glanced over what would have been her shoulder if she’d had any, in the midst of rearranging the contents of an umbrella stand.
‘Oh, hello there! I thought everyone had left already.’
Pierre’s fists deflated. Viola’s makeshift spear dipped in her hands. She began to look more like a lost oarsman than an enraged warrior.
‘I’m sorry, what?’ Viola spluttered.
‘Hasn’t everyone gone through the door yet? I would have thought they’d be in a rush to leave, what with having been here for a near-eternity. Are you going to put that lamp down, miss?’
Pierre shot a questioning eyebrow at Viola. Neither of them seemed quite sure how to handle the situation. Viola reinforced her grip on the spear and tried again.
‘If I put this down, you’ll try to kill us! Or eat us!’
‘And why in all the multiverse would I do that?’ replied the octowürm, going back to her painted clay pot of umbrellas.
‘Because you’re a giant monster worm from space and that’s the sort of thing you do!’
The octowürm hesitated, then shook her head and carried on. ‘By the seventy-nine moons of Jupiter. I should rip you in half for a comment like that. Now put that thing down before you knock something over.’
Viola brandished the lamp for another couple of seconds before giving up. She put it back in the corner of the room with a laboured sigh. She left the lampshade off, out of principle.
It was almost funny. The octowürm might have been the one opening and closing her mouth, but it was Ms. Rundleford Pierre could hear speaking. It was her voice coming from someplace inside, just with a fleshier accent and punctuated with a lot of clacking teeth.
‘What about all the Yakuza?’ asked Pierre, taking a step back towards the door. ‘You slaughtered them!’
‘Well of course,’ chuckled the octowürm. ‘They were going to shoot you, silly.’
‘What about all the outlaws in that dusty old town?’ asked Viola, crossing her arms.
The octowürm paused.
‘They were going to shoot me,’ she replied, stopping what she was doing and turning around to face them. She filled an unnerving percentage of the room. ‘What else was I supposed to do?’
Viola shrugged her shoulders. Turning to Pierre, she added, ‘The girl’s got a point.’
The octowürm wriggled into an armchair. She didn’t sit in it so much as engulf the poor thing.
‘Oh, I get it. You’re annoyed about all that kidnapping business, aren’t you?’
‘Yeah, that’s part of it,’ snapped Pierre. ‘That and impersonating an inspector so you could steal my keys from me. I’m pretty sure that’s a criminal offence, you know.’
The octowürm nodded. ‘Yes, I suppose I do owe you both an apology. I only meant to snatch the keys when you weren’t looking, but it all turned into a bit of a mess, didn’t it? Oh! Where are my manners? I’m not Ms. Rundleford, if you’re still wondering. My name is Doxym’awron. Call me Doxy. And sorry, madam, but I don’t think I caught your name…?’
‘Viola. Viola Kadwell.’
‘A pleasure to meet you, Miss Kadwell. And you too, Mr. Pierre. You run a very nice hotel.’
Despite himself, Pierre felt a blush rush to his cheeks.
‘I ho
pe I didn’t disrupt your business too much,’ Doxy added, ‘but I had to do it, see? My friends here, well, they’re so desperate to get out of this… empty nothingness. And they let me stay here for as long as I wanted, and let me have a place to put all my things…’
Doxy drifted away in thought for a second, then carried on.
‘It isn’t right, all those good people being trapped here forever. I guess I thought one concierge’s inconvenience was worth a few billion people’s freedom. Have they gone yet?’
‘Yes, and they left us here to rot in their stead,’ said Viola. ‘Those friends of yours shut the bloody door on us!’
‘Oh, they never!’ said Doxy, standing up on the armchair. ‘Well, that is rude. I’m sure it was a mistake, though. They’re good people. You didn’t see them when they first arrived in this place - oh, they were so scared, they were. They were probably just very excited to get back to the multiverse and everything. I daren’t say they’ll be coming back any time soon though - want me to give you a lift?’
Pierre and Viola looked at one another.
‘If that wouldn’t be too much trouble?’ asked Pierre.
‘Oh, not at all, not at all,’ said Doxy, spilling off the armchair and into the centre of the room. Fully extended, her tentacles were long enough to touch all four walls at once. ‘I mean, it is somewhat my fault you’re here in the first place. And it’s not like any of my things are going anywhere, is it? Grab a leg each, my dears.’
They stepped forwards and did as she said. It was like holding a joint of raw ham. She could have worn mittens, Pierre found himself thinking.
‘Anywhere in particular you want to go?’ asked Doxy.
‘Le Petit Monde, please,’ said Pierre, getting ready for another rushing, sucking sensation. ‘My Le Petit Monde. And as soon as possible after I… ahem… accidentally pushed you through that door, if that’s possible?’
‘Of course! Just so long as I don’t see the past version of myself. Always gives me a terrible nosebleed.’
Pierre looked up at the nematode’s fleshy, noseless lump of teeth… which smiled, encouragingly.
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