Dimension A

by L. P. Davies

  I must have dropped for only the split part of a second, but it seemed to last an eternity. Then my heels struck something hard with a jerk that jarred my whole body. My knees buckled and I lurched forward, with no way of helping myself, hitting something solid with my elbow and then rolling sideways and downwards for a few more heart-stopping moments. Then I came up against some invisible obstruction that finally brought me to a halt, the impact driving the last gasp of air out of my lungs.

  Stunned, I lay there—on some kind of slope, it seemed—in the darkness, only vaguely aware of a scuffle of movement towards one side. While I was fighting to regain my breath, I remember turning to look backwards and upwards in the direction in which I felt the door must lie. But there was nothing to be seen, nothing at all. And I remember too that I lifted my wrist to look at my watch, reading the message of its luminous dial. Why I should have wanted to look at the time, I don’t know. Perhaps the gesture was automatic. Perhaps I was trying to find reassurance in something ordinary.

  The breath returned to my lungs, sensation took over from numbness. I moved my legs tentatively but could not even make out their outlines, so black everywhere was. As far as I could tell I had suffered no damage.

  I sat up, steadying myself on my hands—they felt as if they were resting on rock—and looked about me in all directions. I tried to pierce the intense darkness, hoping to find somewhere a break in it, a small gleam of light. But there was nothing—nothing to see, nothing to hear. Until the relief of Lee’s voice, unsteady, coming from somewhere close.

  “Gerald? Are you there?”

  I nodded into the blackness. “I’m here.” Then I moved my legs again, and my feet lost their grip and slid away. A rustling was Lee, moving in the direction of my voice. There was inexpressible comfort in the touch of his groping hand on my shoulder, in his sigh of relief, in his “So there you are….”

  I wondered if this strange new dimension was always like this, if we had fallen into a world of perpetual midnight. At least the air was breathable, and warm, perhaps even warmer than the laboratory we had just left.

  And making that comparison brought home to me what had happened. It was my fault that we were here. When I saw the glowing filaments I should have reacted more quickly. Instead, with sluggish senses, I had just stared at them, the door had opened, I had been drawn through, and I had dragged Lee with me. There was some excuse in that I couldn’t have known that the magnetic field would be so powerful, the force perhaps creating a vacuum that sucked everything towards it.

  An apology would be so much wasted breath, but I tried to stammer one just the same. Lee’s voice waved it aside.

  “We found the door,” he said. “That’s the main thing. But by the look of it, the door has gone and shut itself again. At least, there’s nothing to be seen back yonder. I think we can say it’s closed.”

  He had an explanation to offer, and I was content to listen to the familiar tones of his voice.

  “Overloaded. That’ll be it. The opening has either switched itself off, or else blown itself out as it did when Uncle John came through. But this time things will be different. Leming’s up there, and he’ll know what has happened. He won’t take long to sort things out. All we have to do is hang on here till the door reappears. And we may as well make the most of our time here.”

  Which was all very well—reassuring, certainly, for I had to agree with his assessment—but what could we do in a place where there was nothing to see, where it was too dark even to consider moving about? And how long would it take Leming to open the door? If that damned first section had blown itself out again, then he would first have to set about patching it up. And then would come the routine of dials and switches. And this time he would be working alone.

  Digging my heels more deeply into the ground— grass, it felt like down there—to make sure I didn’t start sliding down the slope, I looked about me again. My eyes must have accustomed themselves to the darkness. Far away to one side I could see light— I was sure of it—thin streaks of pearly-grey light.

  Lee must have seen it too. “Dawn breaking?” his voice wondered. And then I heard the intake of breath of a yawn. “Boy, am I tired …” He discovered something else. “See, over there, Gerald.” By the sound of his voice he had turned to look in the opposite direction to the streaks of luminescence. I turned. There, hanging in the darkness, far away, were two pale yellow globes about the same size as each other. It took me a moment to realise what they must be. We were beginning to learn about this new world. It had two moons, and if that was indeed dawn breaking above the opposite horizon, then night and day here didn’t correspond with night and day on earth.

  I heard Lee sniffing.

  “The air’s all right,” he offered belatedly. “Fresh. That’s something we can be thankful for. No scents borne on the breeze. Nothing to be heard either. Dead quiet. So where are we—out in the wilds somewhere? By the feel of it, I’d say we’re on a steep hill. And that drop—” He grunted at the memory. “It certainly shook me up. How far did we travel before hitting ground?”

  “It’s hard to say.” I watched the distant light get brighter. Then it was my turn to yawn. And quite suddenly, although I had been awakened from a sound sleep less than an hour earlier, I felt very tired. Could it be caused by reaction? I wondered.

  “I reckon we must have fallen about five or six feet,” Lee mused. “Which means the door—when we can see it again—must be hanging in the air.

  The ground level here is that much lower than in the same place on earth. It’s going to be a tricky job getting back through it again.”

  The light was steadily increasing. Now I could make out the pale oval of his face. And colours were tinting the sky—reds, blues, greens . ..

  It was possible to make out something of our surroundings. The ground sloped away in front of us, steeply for a few yards, then levelled out to form a miniature plain, bordered with piles of tumbled broken rock. Backing the open space was a curtain of mist, motionless—but then, there was no breeze —that reached up to become part of the hazy sky. As the light grew, so the mist took on a weird greenish tinge.

  All about us—we could see reasonably clearly now —stretching as far as the eye could reach, was a desolate, inhospitable landscape of red rock, interspersed with patches of sparse brown grass. Apart from the grass (and poor-looking stuff it was) the only living things seemed to be small, almost leafless shrubs that sprouted from crevices in the grotesque piles of rock. In the distance were one or two stunted trees or what, through the haze, might pass for trees, clusters of broad, palm-shaped leaves sprouting from the tops of very thick gnarled trunks.

  “Alien landscape with a vengeance,” Lee observed. “No little green men? It doesn’t look very inviting.”

  “It could be worse,” I said, remembering some of my past imaginings, and Leming’s fears. “At least it’s solid. And we can breathe.”

  He grinned. “And here we are talking about it just as if we’d gotten off the train at some village station and were taking our first look at some fresh part of rural England.” He yawned again. “Damn! What’s gotten into me?”

  His yawn was more than infectious. I produced two of my own in quick succession and then had to rub my eyes to clear my vision. And just for a moment I caught a whiff of some sort of smell, not the scent of growing things or the smell of soil warming under the sun, but a sickly sweet animal odour that was distinctly unpleasant and brought a small twinge of apprehension. When I tried to trace from which direction it was coming, it was no longer there. And neither, surprisingly, was the fear it had brought.

  I looked at the curtain of mist, perhaps fifty yards away from where we sat on the slope. There was something about it, its stillness, the almost straight line of its base, the way it curved so evenly away on either side, the way it reached high into the sky, that suggested it wasn’t a natural thing, not the product of warmth on moist earth. But I was too tired to think about it, too tired to
draw Lee’s attention to its strangeness. Weariness had taken hold of me, a comfortable, drifting weariness. There was no fear, not even concern at why I should feel so utterly tired after having just slept for over seven hours. I was completely relaxed and at ease.

  Through narrowed lids I watched Lee lie back and close his eyes. I think he must have fallen asleep immediately. Without his voice and active presence I felt very alone. Uneasiness came then, and a return of reason. This sensation had to be unnatural. It was impossible for me to feel so tired otherwise. It was an effort now to keep my eyes open. Fighting leaden lids I was vaguely aware of the feeling of being watched by invisible eyes. The uneasiness grew. Then I was suddenly washed away in a warm tide of lassitude. I felt safe and secure. My drugged senses assured me that everything was all right, and nothing was going to happen. The door would open again; we would find Professor Maver and his assistant and take them back through to our own world. We would go back home again… . My home, a cottage set amidst trees, water sparkling, birds singing … I lay back, closed my eyes, and fell asleep to dream of the woods and fields of the countryside where I had been born.

  There was no way of telling for how long I was asleep. I opened my eyes—not sure for a moment where I was—to find myself blinking at the mottled sunlight that filtered down through a tracery of branches and leaves. Then awareness returned, and memory. I sat up quickly, all tiredness gone, and stared about me, unable to believe the evidence of my own eyes. At my side Lee was doing the same, his face filled with incredulity as mine must have been. We had fallen asleep on a rocky, inhospitable slope in a desolate landscape that might have been on another planet. We had awakened to find ourselves in the green and gold of a very ordinary woodland glade.

  Still on a slope, we were sitting on thick luxuriant grass of a brilliant emerald green. My first impression was of colour. All around were trees and bushes, banks of lush greenery dotted with the scarlets, blues, and yellows of flowers. In front of us a path opened invitingly between smooth brown trunks to meander away and melt into distant shadow. The sun was hot on our backs and a gentle breeze played on our faces.

  Still looking about him, Lee pushed himself to his knees.

  “I’m imagining all this—” His eyes rested on a bush of spiked purple flowers. “Lavender?” His gaze moved on. One hand moved through the grass. He looked down at it, tearing up some of the bright green leaves, holding them in his palm, then letting them drift back to the ground. “It’s real enough …” And then he was angry. “What’s going on? What’s been happening?”

  If I hadn’t been so lost in my own incredulity and so startled, I would have found his anger comical. I think I did start to smile, but then, just for a moment, I caught or imagined I caught a whiff of that same cloying animal smell as before. And again I had the neck-tingling feeling of being watched by invisible eyes. I looked round quickly, fearfully. There was nothing to be seen but the flowers, the bushes, and the trees.

  Lee had found an explanation for the transition. “Someone’s been busy while we were asleep. We must have been moved bodily.” He cocked an eyebrow at me. “I don’t know about you, Gerald, but I didn’t feel a thing.”

  “Neither did I,” I replied. His assumption that someone or something had transported us here while we were unconscious seemed the only sensible answer. Until I came to move. Then I made a discovery. My heels were still resting in the hollows they had dug for themselves. And more than that: I had gone to sleep with my left hand resting on a small flat rock. The rock was still there, and round it the grass was still as sparse and wiry as it had been before—a circle of thin brown in lush green.

  “We haven’t been moved,” I said in a voice I tried to keep steady and matter-of-fact. “We’re still in the same place as before.” And when he gaped at me, I showed him the proof.

  “That’s impossible!” On his feet, he gestured roughly. “All this? You’re trying to say all this grew up while we were fast asleep?”

  “We haven’t moved,” I said stubbornly.

  He looked at the stone and the circle of brown. He moved across the glade to touch overhanging leaves. “They’re real enough too.” A thought struck him. “Just how long have we been asleep anyway?” He looked at his wrist-watch. “Ten past seven? No, surely not …” He held it to his ear and grimaced. “Stopped.”

  I looked at mine. That had stopped too, at quarter past seven. Probably damaged by the fall. But the glass was still intact, and the over-zealous shop assistant who had once talked me into buying a more expensive watch than had been my intention had assured me that among other things it was guaranteed shockproof. Practically unbreakable, had been the gist of his sales talk. Certainly, during all the years I had had it, this was the first time it had stopped.

  Lee, a slim figure in white shirt and grey slacks, hair tousled, chin dark with embryo beard, spectacles as usual halfway down his nose, was making an exploratory tour of the little glade. Like myself, he had come through the door without a jacket.

  “Rhododendrons,” he discovered, and looked back over his shoulder. “In full flower. Aren’t they autumn flowers? That’s more your line than mine, Gerald. Maybe the seasons are different here, even if they have the same flowers. Primroses too … And they’re out as well. I’m damn sure they’re primroses, and they’re supposed to come out in spring. That’s something I do know.”

  Still exploring, he moved on. “Poppies. Buttercups. Plain ordinary buttercups and daisies. And that’s an oak tree. See the acorns? Those are poplars. And the lavender—” He stooped over the cluster of purple spikes and then turned, puzzled in my direction. “But no smell at all. Not a whiff of lavender.”

  He came back to where I had struggled stiffly to my feet.

  “I don’t get it,” he said worriedly. “It’s all wrong. The whole set-up’s wrong. First it isn’t here, then it is. And now we might be in an ordinary everyday wood back home—just like the one behind the farm. At least at first sight … But the flowers aren’t right, and the colours are far too bright. Like scenery on a stage, but not flat—three-dimensional.”

  I found something else that was wrong.

  “Notice how quiet everywhere is, Lee. No insects humming, no birds. There’s a breeze, but you can’t hear the leaves rustling.”

  “I don’t like it.” He shook his head. “I think I’d rather have the rocks back again. And talking about that—before we fell asleep, when we were on that slope, I had the idea we were being watched. You know the feeling … It’s the same now.”

  “Me too. I didn’t say anything in case I was imagining it.”

  “It’s not imagination. Neither is a rather nasty smell from time to time, like the lion house at the zoo on a hot day.”

  I nodded. “I noticed that too.”

  He frowned, pushed his glasses into place, and then shrugged resignedly.

  “It’s no use trying to make sense out of all this. I mean, we’ve got nothing to go on. This isn’t our world. We’re in another dimension where things are obviously very different.” He grinned faintly. “Even if this part of it at least looks vaguely familiar.”

  “Different laws of nature,” I suggested.

  “Different laws of everything, I would say. We can’t even start off by saying that all this stuff”—his gesture took in the glade—“grew from the soil the moment night had gone and the sun rose for a new day. It could be like that, but I don’t think it is. The place has a different feeling … We’ll just have to live from minute to minute, make the best of things and learn as we go along.”

  “And hope for the best,” I said stupidly.

  “As you say. And keep our eyes open. There’s one thing I’ve noticed already. Whoever arranged for these trees to sprout out of nothing made a damned good job of it. It may be unintentional on the part of that certain mysterious someone or something, but they’ve arranged them so thickly together it would be impossible to force a way through them. And those at the back lie between us and the
door.”

  He was right. Behind us the trees and bushes were packed so tightly together that they formed an impenetrable barrier. The only way out of the clearing was by the path.

  A perfume of some kind wafted across the glade. Lee must have noticed it too, for he turned to trace it to its source. He looked up from a second close examination of the lavender bush.

  “This is it, all right. No smell a few minutes ago; now it decides to reek to high heaven.”

  Somewhere in the distance a bird whistled an odd, off-beat melody like nothing I had heard before.

  “And don’t let anyone try to tell me that was a thrush,” Lee remarked. “Or any other plain ordinary bird. Like everything else in this place there’s something wrong with it. On the other hand, we could be the ones who are wrong. If you see what I mean. We’re the aliens. Alien babes in the woods. So what do we do—venture further afield? We just can’t stay here. Shall we see where that path leads to?”