by Ian Whates
On the top was a folder containing passport, birth certificate, and a few other papers, few of them in English. Was anything here worth killing for? It seemed doubtful. Under the folder were two photo albums, which came as something of a surprise. Chris tended to associate such physical memorabilia with an age long gone now that so much was stored digitally. He flicked through the pages. The images were presumably of Bartosz and his family—two adults and three children recurring frequently among other faces, the children developing into teens as the sequence of photos progressed. Again, these could almost have been taken fifty years ago rather than fifteen or even ten, as they presumably were.
Beneath the photo albums was a weighty, battered plain-covered book with the word Biblia on the front. Another surprise—he didn’t need to speak Polish to recognise this as a bible. Nothing Claire had told him about Bartosz suggested him to have been a religious man. He need not have been, of course; this could merely be a keepsake, something with nostalgic personal associations. Beside the bible were half a dozen CDs by groups Chris had never heard of. These looked more promising—no telling what was actually on the discs—and he set them to one side. If they were simply music, presumably it wasn’t stuff Bartosz cared to listen to anymore, or why stash them away in here? And if that were the case, why keep them at all? Mind you, in this age of the download perhaps they had simply become redundant.
Next he came across a set of keys—one Yale, one longer key, and two smaller ones that might have fitted a case or a cabinet. These offered the most promise to date and Chris pocketed them, determining to ask Claire if she knew what they opened when she came down.
That pretty much accounted for the first box. He was about to start on the second when an odd sound from upstairs caused him to pause. It was followed by something that wasn’t so much a scream as an enraged roar, which had him on his feet and racing through the lounge in an instant. He distinctly heard Claire snarl, “Get your fucking hands off me!” as he charged up the stairs.
He reached the top of the flight and burst into the bedroom, to see Claire grappling with a brown coat. Her hair had come loose, the beret lying on the bed, and she was doing her best to pull free—twisting and kicking—but the man had his arms wrapped tightly round her. Nor was he alone. There were two other brown coats—Where the hell had they come from? At least Chris’s curiosity about those strange silver guns seemed destined to be satisfied, since he now found himself staring down the snub-nosed barrel of one.
CHAPTER THREE
THERE WAS A SPLIT-SECOND when the two of them—Chris and the man pointing a gun at his face—hesitated. Doubtless they must both have known what to expect when Chris burst into the room, but their minds still needed that fraction of a second to digest the reality and respond appropriately. Chris reacted first, flinging down the two pellets he’d fumbled from his pocket while charging up the stairs.
Not quick enough to stop the brown coat holding Claire from delivering an open-handed slap to her face, but the two flash bombs hit the floor at the same instant and a pair of micro-suns flared into life.
Chris’s contact lenses did their job, opaquing to protect his eyes from the searing light and phasing back to normal transparency in smooth graduation as the intensity faded—the whole process cycling through in little longer than an exaggerated blink.
The brown coats weren’t so lucky. Predictably, the one holding the gun fired—most likely an instinctive tightening of his trigger finger—and a beam of something sizzled through the open doorway where Chris had been standing. He wasn’t there anymore, though, having moved in and to the right, sprinting and hunkering down to slam into the nearest brown coat shoulder-first—the sort of crunching impact that his old rugby coach would have applauded.
He didn’t stop to see his victim go down but moved straight on to the man grappling with Claire. A punch to his ear, a twist to an arm and she was free. She seemed disorientated, as if the flash bombs had affected her as well. That was something he hadn’t counted on. The lenses he’d persuaded her to wear were designed to stop exactly this. He could only think that the blow her captor had landed as the bombs went off must have dislodged them… No time to worry about that now, not when they still had to get out of the room. Even if the brown coats were unable to see they could still hear, and they were evidently professional enough not to let a minor thing like temporary blindness incapacitate them.
As Chris dragged Claire towards the door someone grabbed his leg—the one he’d shoulder charged. Before the brown coat could use that grip to either haul himself up or pull Chris down, Chris stamped on the fellow’s hand and swung his free arm. It wasn’t a powerful blow, but the combination of stamp and thump proved enough to shake the assailant off. The exchange had slowed them, though, allowing the third attacker—the one who had wielded the gun—to make a grab for Claire.
The comparatively cramped space worked against them, Chris knew that, making it inevitable that they would have to deal with all three of the brown coats to make their escape, and logic dictated that those that still could would have moved to try and block the exit. Blindness made this one clumsy, however, and his grip wasn’t a firm one. Claire shrieked—a roar more of anger than dismay. She twisted and kicked him in the shin. That, combined with a shove from Chris, was enough to break the man’s hold and send him stumbling back against the wall.
Chris propelled Claire ahead of him and they were through the doorway, out into the hallway and at the top of the stairs. He stepped past her and went down first, keeping hold of Claire’s hand.
“Don’t worry about falling,” he said. “I’m beneath you. Just run!”
“What the fuck do you think I’m doing?”
Even so, she was slower than he would have liked. He could hear them above, getting organised, and half-expected an energy beam or whatever the guns fired to come lancing down the stairwell, but they made it to the first landing without being shot. He dragged Claire on—his grip a little tight, perhaps, but she didn’t complain—and pulled her around the corner to the second flight, the one leading to the front door.
“What happened to your contact lenses?” he asked.
“I…I took them out as soon as we got here.”
“Claire…!”
“What? They were uncomfortable.”
He didn’t say any more, realising it was his own fault as much as hers; hindsight is such a wonderful thing. He should have told her at the start that the lenses were intended for more than just camouflage, but it hadn’t occurred to him that he needed to. Besides, recriminations weren’t going to help the situation. Heavy footsteps thudded down the stairs behind them.
“Come on!”
As they reached the bottom of the flight and ran to the door, Chris risked a glance back, to see a pair of legs come into view at the top—the angle of ceiling hiding the rest of him. He hesitated for as long as he dared, letting Claire brush past him. The first pair of legs was already coming down, one foot on the second step. He could only hope the other two were close enough.
Taking a deep breath, he shouted “Cullah!”—the only word he’d picked up from a language he didn’t speak, memorised by associating it in his mind with the Gaelic word codladh, or sleep. Presumably the two shared a common root.
Now he just hoped to God that his pronunciation was near enough right to trigger the charm he’d set on the landing earlier. It must have been, because the pursuing legs collapsed, and he was dimly aware of at least one other figure doing the same beyond. The first abruptly comatose brown coat came tumbling down the stairs towards them. Chris didn’t stop to confirm how effective the charm had been but wrenched the door open and rushed into the street before the fallen brown coat had even come to rest.
Once outside, Chris led Claire to the left, heading back towards the station. She was stumbling a little but managed to keep up with a bit of guidance.
“How’s your vision?”
“Still not great, but clearing…I think.”
Which was just as well, because they still had plenty to worry about: another two brown coats had appeared on the opposite pavement. They were keeping pace, waiting for a break in the traffic to cross over. With Claire still suffering the after-effects of the flash bombs, Chris didn’t much fancy their chances in either a scrap or a chase.
“My eyes were shut when those flares went off, from where the bastard hit me,” Claire was saying. “I think that must have helped. I didn’t expect to ever be thanking him.”
Chris was only half-listening. As far as he could see, they only had one chance, which was why he’d elected to head back towards the station—a choice that had nothing to do with catching a train. On the way over here he’d sensed something, and just prayed that it was close enough.
He felt it almost at once; that strange tingling—a ripple across the front of his mind—which announced that a weakness, a potential gateway to another London, was close by.
Crossing over in plain sight was not something he liked to make a habit of. Night time, dark alleyways, quiet deserted streets and dingy doorways, maybe a bit of rain or fog—he would take any of those every time over Bethnal Green Road in broad bloody daylight. But needs must, and today they didn’t have much choice. CCTV cameras were another concern. With a bit of luck, any in the area would be looking the other way; otherwise this was going to give their operators one hell of a shock.
At the last possible moment, as they were almost on top of the spot, Chris reached out with his mind, took hold of that weakness, and pulled. In the corner of his eye he spotted the two brown coats running across the road, and then he stepped through to somewhere else, taking Claire with him.
He released his mental hold immediately, allowing reality to flow back into its natural state, closing the rift—as much to stop any innocent members of the public stumbling through as to deny their pursuers access.
Claire’s vision was clearly recovering rapidly. “Fuck me!” she said. As observations went, this might not have been the most specific he’d ever heard, but as an expression of awe it worked just fine.
Nor could he blame her for being a little overwhelmed. On the opposite side of the street the buildings pulled away, retreating as if recoiling from their presence in horror. Well, no, the receding was just their minds’ way of coping with the abrupt change. In reality the buildings had always been that far away in this London, due to the road being so much wider. It needed to be in order to accommodate the red and white liveried tram that now trundled down the centre of Bethnal Green Road, clanging its bell to hurry along two pedestrians who scurried across its path. The retro-sounding bell must have been a deliberate affectation, because in all other respects the tram came over as sleek and modern; more akin to a high-speed train than any tram Chris had ever seen. The rails it ran along gleamed. Somehow he expected tramlines to be dulled by age and constant use and tarnished by grease and other pollutants, but not these; they caught the sun like ribbons of polished silver.
A man coming towards them started as they nearly collided. He looked confused, as if convinced they hadn’t been there a moment ago; and a boy stared at them wide-eyed from the back window of the tram. Anyone would think they’d just appeared out of thin air or something.
Those two aside, nobody seemed to be taking any notice.
“Is it always like this?” Claire asked, her voice subdued almost to a whisper.
“No, not always,” he assured her. “I don’t generally materialise in the middle of a busy street.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know it isn’t.” How best to answer her? “Whenever I cross for the first time into a new London—at least one chosen at random like this—it’s impossible to know whether the place will be hi-tech, lo-tech, or at a similar level to the version you and I are both used to. But one thing I can always be sure of: It will be different.”
A young girl, blonde curls peeking from beneath a pink and grey knitted hat and her coat buttoned to the neck with barrel-shaped togs despite the mildness of the day, stopped and stared. Her bright blue eyes seemed to pierce through their attempt to blend in. Children can be so unforgiving. Unhampered by the shackles of polite behaviour, they are happy to openly examine the unusual whenever they encounter it, where an adult might deliberately look the other way. Already the girl’s immobility had caused her mother to stop too, and soon it might force her to notice them.
“Come on.” He put his arm around Claire’s waist and hurried her down the street, away from those clear blue eyes that saw all too much.
They didn’t look that out of place here, he knew that. As with most other Londons, there was enough of an ethnic mix and enough variation in the clothing and general appearance to fudge the issue, but if someone should trouble to consider them at length, they might realise that everything about these two was different, just by a little bit. It was the details, the smallest of things, that would give them away—the cut of their hair, the weave of Claire’s coat, the length of Chris’s, the style of his shoes, the colour of hers, the incongruity of his rucksack—each insignificant when considered in isolation, but their accumulation jarred and would mark them indelibly as ‘other’. Fortunately, there seemed little likelihood that anyone would bother to pay that much attention. Except, perhaps, for a child.
Chris didn’t know what prompted him to glance back—the healthy paranoia born of being pursued, perhaps—but he was glad that he did. The two brown coats were behind them. Still a little way back, but closing fast.
“Shit!”
It should hardly have come as a surprise that they could cross between realities; after all, they came from a different one in the first place, and how else did three of them suddenly appear in Claire’s bedroom? None of which made the presence of these two any less alarming. Chris and Claire did the only thing they could. They ran. So much for not drawing attention.
Chris quested ahead with his mind, seeking desperately, and was rewarded by a faint sense of…something. As they came abreast a charity shop, he grabbed Claire’s arm and dragged her towards the door, still running.
The weakness was more tenuous this time, but it was there. He wrenched a rift open at the last second, with none of the gentleness he would usually employ. The look of shock on the face of the bespectacled elderly woman who suddenly found them bearing down on her as she was about to leave the shop might have been comical under other circumstances. One moment they were charging straight towards her, the next they stuttered to a halt in what was clearly a refined women’s clothing boutique. Claire collided with a mannequin sporting an elaborate dress with a layered skirt, just managing to catch hold of a synthetic arm before it toppled over.
Now, the open-mouthed astonishment of the prim-and-proper sales assistant, that was hilarious. Chris couldn’t blame Claire in the least for the laughter that burst out of her—either the woman’s expression or good old-fashioned hysterics might have been to blame. He grabbed her hand again and pulled her back towards the door.
“Sorry, so sorry,” she said to the assistant between subsiding giggles as they exited into the street.
Having seen what the brown coats were capable of, they didn’t hang around this time but ran, without giving themselves a chance to acclimatise. Not ideal—they couldn’t help but be noticed. Chris caught only passing glimpses of this new London: no tram; the street had drawn in again to assume a more familiar width. Cars seemed more compact, smaller, and were predominantly white or silver. Everyone appeared to be smartly dressed and hats were evidently in fashion—a sort of tall, elongated bowler for the men and all manner of extravagant elaborations for the women. He felt as if they had stepped into a surrealist’s depiction of a Victorian street scene, or perhaps Ladies Day at Royal Ascot with a nod towards Dalí.
“Chris…”
Claire was looking back the way they’d come. He did likewise and saw that their two friends were behind them again, but not as close. They’d gained some time. Clearly
, however the brown coats managed their reality-hopping, it wasn’t as natural a process as his, and therein lay hope.
Chris was also reassured by the fact that there were only two pursuers. To return to their own London, he and Claire would need to retrace their steps at some point; otherwise it would be impossible to get home again—randomly jumping from one reality to the next was a sure-fire way of getting hopelessly lost. Had there been a whole mob of the brown coats, they could have afforded to simply deposit one individual at each crossing point, to watch and wait, while the rest of them kept up the pursuit. With only two, that wasn’t an option. They had to keep chasing, which meant there was every chance of giving them the slip somewhere further up the line and doubling back unhindered.
Good plan—assuming, of course, that they could keep ahead of the brown coats, which was looking increasingly uncertain. There were people about, sure, but not enough to seriously delay anyone, and the two brown coats were coming fast, closing the distance with every stride. Their only hope lay in another jump to another London, and Chris couldn’t count on stumbling across so many weaknesses so close together. Sooner or later, his luck was bound to run out.
Not this time, though. He felt the familiar tingle of a nearby potential, off to their left down a side street, and steered Claire that way.
There were fewer people here, which had its good aspects and its bad: good in that they would stop drawing so much attention, bad in that there would be even fewer obstacles to slow down pursuit, and the brown coats were proving a lot quicker than they were in terms of straight line speed.
He could hear the slap of their shoes pounding the pavement behind them and knew their pursuers were close, but he refused to look round. Instead he concentrated on the weakness ahead, determined to get there before being caught. He tore the gateway open and flung himself through, his left arm around Claire’s shoulders, letting the rift slam shut immediately they were through.