by A. A. Bell
‘Can you smell anywhere else I’ve been?’
Mira laughed. ‘What do you think I am — a bloodhound?’
‘You haven’t ceased to surprise me yet.’ His body relaxed a little. ‘So, seriously,’ he said, ‘can you tell where else I’ve been today?’
She forced her smile aside and made a concerted effort at sniffing his shirt, and detected the faint scent of charcoal, as if he’d been near a campfire. Fumbling to find his hand, she raised his arm to her nose and smelled it all the way down to his open palm. His fingers curled to touch her cheek.
‘Yes,’ she teased, prolonging the moment, ‘I know exactly where you’ve been.’ A grin cracked her lips again. ‘You’ve been … in a van, a pharmacy and a hotel room. And you stole some of my chocolate.’
‘You can smell all that?’
‘Only the chocolate.’ She giggled. ‘It’s on your breath.’
‘Oh, is that all?’ He sounded more relieved than she’d expected.
‘That, and maybe you had something to do with a campfire.’
An awkward silence followed. She set his hand back down on his leg, but he clasped her fingers a little longer, then raised them to his lips for a fleeting kiss. Startled, she pulled back her hand, instantly regrettingher reflex. Her fingers tingled where his mouth had drawn a response from her skin and she rubbed the small place, fascinated.
‘What was that for?’ she said.
‘I didn’t mean to scare you, sorry, I just … If you don’t mind me asking, how long has it been since anyone kissed you?’
‘You mean on my hand?’
‘I mean at all, for any reason.’
‘You did, at the treehouse.’
‘I did?’
‘When I gave you the mulberry, remember?’
‘I’m pretty sure I would have remembered something like … Oh, you mean when my mouth touched your fingertips?’
She nodded, blushing again at the pleasant memory.
‘Aside from that. I mean a real kiss, face to face?’
Mira shrugged. Never, she thought, but couldn’t bring herself to admit it.
‘Not even from your mother?’ Ben asked.
‘I’m not sure I want to answer that. I hope I’m wrong, but the first thought that springs to mind is that she didn’t.’
‘And you think that response comes from your subconscious?’
‘I hope not, but … You know, when Dr Zhou hooked me up to his machine and I was guessing answers from my subconscious, I started to get the feeling of when I was right or not before they confirmed it. Isn’t that funny? It’s like my brain is a new toy and I’m only just starting to get a feel for the controls. Except that makes me wonder how old I was before my brain started recording things reliably, because it’s pretty hard, don’t you think, to imagine a mother who didn’t kiss her baby? So I prefer to think that she did, and my brain just hadn’t switched on yet to record it. Then I think … I should be able to ask myself how old I was when my brain did start recording things reliably and get the right answer … That sounds logical, doesn’t it? But it almost feels as if my brain was switched on before my body was born, which brings me back to suspect that a part of me is still crazy.’
Familiar voices entered the hall from the nearby conference room. ‘They’re coming,’ she warned.
Ben chuckled and patted her hand. The only warning was the movement of his arm, but she didn’t startle. She craved his touch again.
‘You’re amazing,’ he whispered.
Footsteps approached and she counted them: enough for the two doctors, their two assistants and two others, but only two sets kept walking past Mira towards the exit onto the street.
‘Do you still need bodyguards?’ she asked, surprised.
‘Afraid so,’ Van Danik replied. ‘We’re still valuable to them until the reports are done. But ignore them. As far as they’re concerned, we’re on leave until we catch a cargo plane back to Sandy Creek.’
‘That’s Monday,’ Zhou explained.
‘A cargo plane?’ asked Ben.
‘Mitch won’t go anywhere without his hog,’ Zhou replied. ‘That’s what he calls his motorbike, Mira — and unfortunately for me, I have to stick with him.’
‘What do we do now?’ Mira asked. ‘We only have the rest of today.’
To her left, she heard Duet and Sei discussing who’d take first break for lunch when the time came.
‘As I remember,’ Zhou said, ‘Sergeant Hawthorn didn’t go missing until yesterday evening, after we returned from Serenity, so there’s no point following his ghost all the way there and back. We can playaround here in the meantime. We need to establish a timeline in relation to the various shades of sunglasses you’ve tried so far. For instance, we suspect that a purplish tint allows you to see yesterday.’
‘Or as much as a week ago,’ Mira said. ‘Ben’s glasses make the fog slightly more blue than purple, and last night, through them, I think I saw things that happened to me last Sunday, while this morning, I saw things that happened at breakfast on Monday — I think. It’s hard to keep track of days sometimes.’
‘Interesting,’ Van Danik said, taking a seat on the arm of the sofa beside her. The guests on that sofa — two Italian-speaking women — got up and left. ‘That shows a certain consistency.’
‘So it seems that shades of purple offer visions of recent events,’ Zhou said, ‘while your naked eyes seem to register a blue fog through which buildings and traffic appear to be about a hundred years old. That would also account for that unusual sensation of being suspended in the sky and looking down on other people each time you open your eyes in a multi-storey building that wasn’t built at the time.’
Mira nodded. ‘That’s right!’ She was surprised to feel a faint inner warmth from a part of her skull that she now related to being her subconscious.
‘Through orange tints,’ Zhou continued, ‘you reported hunters, which suggests you may be looking back thousands or tens of thousands of years, and through red you may be looking back millions.’
‘With your eyes shut,’ Van Danik added, ‘you can detect a combination of light and radiations that can provide shadows of the present, and all of these are bombarding your eyes as soon as they open. Sounds technical, but it’s not really. If you can imagine a straight line of light that starts off violet at one end of the visible spectrum, where wavelengths are the shortest and have the highest frequencies and energies, and then changes colour progressively along the line to indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and finally red at the other end, where wavelengths are comparatively much longer and with lower energy, then you’ll notice an obvious trend. The longer the wavelength, the further back in time you seem able to see. I can’t account for the brownish tint yet, except to suggest that brown isn’t a pure colour, it’s a blend, so it’s logical to extrapolate — sorry, Mira, I mean it’s logical to theoretically forecast — that blending tints may allow you to focus on different days, weeks or years within each time period.’
‘Like the different shades of purple fog I can see through my glasses compared to Ben’s and Corporal Duet’s?’
‘She used his briefly on the way here,’ Ben explained.
‘That’s exactly what I mean.’ Van Danik grabbed her hand without thinking to warn her first, and her pulse quickened, but with excitement now, instead of panic. ‘Let’s play with that idea now. Can you see any newspapers out here, Mira?’
‘No, but there’s a young Asian couple over there signing the hotel guestbook. Ben tried to lead me through its podium on the way in.’
Ben muttered an apology, but she was already bounding across the room, causing invisible guests to complain as they leapt out of her way.
At the podium, she peered over the shoulders of the ghostly couple to read aloud what they’d written. ‘Wonderful hotel. Nice roof, great value and big meals, but sushi is supposed to be raw.’
‘I think they mean sashimi,’ Van Danik said.
Mira shrug
ged. ‘It says “sushi". I can’t read their signatures, but the date is Friday the thirteenth.’
‘That’s yesterday’s date all right,’ Ben said from a short distance away. ‘And look, here’s their comment and signatures: Sue Tan, it looks like to me, and somebody Ho.’
‘How can you read it from that far away?’ Mira peered closer at the page now that the young ghost couple had headed for a taxi that was pulling up outside.
‘Someone must have shifted the podium since yesterday,’ Van Danik said. ‘It’s over here with us now. Read the next entry, Mira, as an extra test.’
‘Okay, it’s a comment by Stanley Woodhurst from London, who says that he’s never enjoyed such cold beer before and that he had a jolly good time fishing off the pier.’
‘Flux me,’ Ben said, adopting Van Danik’s expression. ‘There’s no way she could have known that! Still, I wish there was some way we could narrow down the time frame to hours and minutes.’
‘Well, it’s 11 a.m. now,’ Zhou said, ‘and with those glasses, she saw you walk into our room about fifteen to twenty minutes ago. We know for a fact that you arrived shortly before 9 a.m., which suggests the time differential for those particular lenses may be about twenty-two hours behind us.’
‘Hey, Mira, can you see a clock anywhere?’ asked Van Danik. ‘Or I suppose we could go up to our hotel room and check the radio-alarm on my bedside table? It probably hasn’t moved since they built the place.’
Mira scanned the busy foyer. ‘There are no clocks out here but there are plenty of ghosts with watches …’
She went across to the reception desk, mindful that she was entering a much busier area for both ghosts and invisibles, and found a scruffy yachtsman who was telling someone else in the long queue that he was looking forward to a bed that was longer than him for a night or two. ‘It’s 9:04 and 34 seconds … 35 … 36 … 37 …’ she counted off from his digital watch.
‘10:58,’ Zhou reported when she rejoined them. ‘Assuming we’re not all crazy, you do indeed seem to be seeing things that happened here approximately twenty-two hours ago.’
‘Now try Ben’s glasses,’ Van Danik suggested.
Mira swapped them and looked around again. ‘There are only two ghosts waiting at reception now — both young men with very short haircuts wearing strangely patterned multicoloured clothes. The fog is still brownish-purple, except it’s slightly bluer.’
‘Slightly further back in time?’ Van Danik proposed.
‘I can’t see their watches but one of them just signed a check-in card and put the numbers 18:20 in the box where the time should go. What does that mean?’
‘That’s military time,’ interrupted Duet. ‘It means 6:20 pm, and from your description of their clothes and hair, they’re army.’
‘Can you see the date?’ asked Ben.
‘The sixth of this month.’
‘Now we’re getting somewhere.’ Van Danik hugged her shoulder. ‘That’s last Friday. Try another pair.’
Mira swapped glasses again with Ben and reported the fog to be golden-orange. ‘Whoa!’ she yelped. ‘Another wall just appeared. It’s timber, I think, but it looks like the top half is wallpapered with newspapers! Too blurry for me to read. Could you hold my hand, Ben?’
He did, and she leaned through the ghostly wall to see if the elevators were still there. Instead, she found her face only inches from the rump of a horse. Startled, Mira sidestepped and saw out through the open front of the stall to a line of ten other horses, all tethered in their own roped-off compartments. She leaned out a little more to see around the horse, but it spooked, asif it had sensed her, and she pulled her head back in, glad that she’d kept hold of Ben’s hand.
‘Stables,’ she reported, still a little disoriented. ‘The high-rise wing was built where the stables used to be. Not much has changed in here, though. Except …’ She paused to read the lips of a plump and stern-looking hotel manager who was reprimanding an old woman for adding too much kerosene and soap to her mop bucket. ‘Reception is over there now, behind him. And so is the visitors’ book.’
She walked along the short bare counter to read the page that was standing open beside an inkwell and quill.
‘This is a different book,’ she reported. ‘It’s still got a timber cover that’s much bigger than the pages, but the binding is ribbon instead of metal and the pen is like a feather. I can’t read much of the handwriting because it’s very messy in some places and very fancy in others, but there’s one name here — Rupert Bottomley. He writes that his meal was amply sufficient to its cost and the date on his entry is … the twenty-third of March, 1899.’
‘We’ll have to trust you on that,’ Van Danik said. ‘This book only goes back ten years.’
Mira turned and jumped to avoid the cleaner’s mop.
‘What was that?’ asked Ben, still keeping hold of her hand.
‘Just a cleaner scrubbing the floor with soap and kerosene.’
‘With what?’ asked Zhou. ‘Are you sure?’
‘That’s what her boss said. Actually, he was complaining that she hadn’t diluted the kerosene enough. The cleaner argued that she might as well be using trough water then.’
‘My grandmother used to scrub her floors with kerosene,’ Ben said. ‘It was the cheapest way to sanitise timber floors back then. But she switched to soap and water after she heard about a spate of house fires caused by floors igniting near woodstoves and gas heaters.’
‘That’s it!’ Zhou blurted. He gripped Mira’s arm in excitement, then pulled her into a bear hug. ‘You wonderful, amazing, beautiful girl! Oh, p-pardon me!’ he stammered, letting go of her.
Mira gasped, bewildered.
‘You just solved a mystery that’s been haunting me for decades!’ he explained, still sounding embarrassed. ‘My sister died in a house fire. Neighbours accused us of playing with matches, but I know for certain that we never did. The heater was already lit, and when I bumped it over, it … It was only for a few seconds, so it shouldn’t have ignited the floor, but it did. You have to know how monumentally significant this is for me, Miss Chambers! I’ve devoted my whole life to revealing the truth, and it’s been extremely frustrating to get so close with this project only to learn from my own subconscious that I was both guilty and innocent.’
‘Lucky break,’ Van Danik agreed. ‘You’d never have nailed it without the right set of questions. The subconscious is a whimsical vault with a riddle for a key.’
‘Not mine,’ Mira replied. ‘You taught me to get inside.’
‘What?’ Zhou said. ‘That’s impossible!’
Mira laughed. ‘Impossible is a temporary concept, isn’t it, Mitch?’
‘Indeed it is.’
‘Ben and I were just talking about it a few minutes ago. After a while of answering your questions, I started to notice a funny feeling in here,’ she patted her stomach, ‘each time I had to guess an answer, and if the feeling was the same up here,’ she rubbed a small area near the top of her head, ‘then I knew my answer was right before you confirmed it.’
‘That sounds like gut instinct,’ Ben said. ‘I get that too sometimes.’
‘Me too,’ Van Danik agreed. ‘But science hasn’t yet found a way to map the phenomenon.’
‘Perhaps you’re on the right track now,’ Mira said. ‘This is fun!’ She clapped her hands excitedly. ‘Can we buy some more sunglasses?’
‘Yours first,’ Van Danik said. He clicked his fingers.
Mira wondered who he meant until Duet spoke. ‘I need them,’ he complained.
‘Not for the next two minutes you don’t.’ Van Danik offered the prescription glasses to Mira. ‘These look almost the same shade as Ben’s.’
‘Much clearer purple, though,’ she reported.
‘They look like normal black sunglasses to me,’ argued Duet. ‘Where does the purple come from?’
‘Refraction,’ Van Danik explained. ‘It’s how they look to Mira that counts.’
&nb
sp; ‘Well, to me, the purple leans towards brown, not black,’ she replied. ‘But everything’s also sharper and clearer. Not so unfocused or foggy.’
‘Sounds like you may also be a little short-sighted,’ Zhou suggested.
Mira grinned. ‘Ha-ha, very funny. Now I’m a blind girl who’s short-sighted.’
‘Notice anything else different?’ Ben asked.
Mira shrugged. ‘The reception counter is back where it was, and so is the wing with the elevators. Oh, and the visitors’ book is very close to where I left it.’
‘Date and time?’ Ben asked as his footsteps followed her.
‘I’m not sure.’ She turned around, scanning the foyer. ‘The book is closed today, and there are no ghosts around to open it.’
‘What about staff at reception?’ asked Ben. ‘Anyone there?’
Mira shook her head. ‘There’s only one small light that’s focused on a sign that says reception hours are 7 am to 5 pm.’
‘It’s just turned midday,’ Duet argued. ‘It’s broad daylight and even I can tell without my glasses that the sign says they’re out to lunch and back at one.’
She ignored him, listening instead to other voices around the corner, and walked to the end of the long reception counter to investigate where they were coming from. ‘Sounds like the gift shop is open. I can hear foreign chattering down there, as if a lot of people are hurrying to buy things —’
‘Oh, please,’ Duet interrupted. ‘There’s an empty tour bus pulling up outside for them.’
‘Not then there wasn’t.’ She saw a shop assistant emerge to roll a display case of postcards into the store. ‘It looks like the sales lady is closing up for the night.’
‘So it’s probably closer to six,’ Zhou suggested. ‘That narrows it down a little. Let’s go and —’
‘Wait!’ Mira pointed to the door of the men’s room adjacent to the gift shop. ‘There’s Sergeant Hawthorn! He’s coming this way.’ She watched him intently until he’d passed her and walked around the corner. ‘He’s headed for the fire exit.’
‘Follow him!’ Sei ordered, rushing to Mira and grabbing her arm. ‘That leads to the alley.’