by Ian Whates
Life is full of uncertainties—Chris’s more than most—but one thing he was sure of: Whoever he’d just had sex with, it wasn’t Claire.
CHAPTER FOUR
CHRIS LEFT THE HOTEL EARLY, not bothering to shower for fear of waking ‘Claire’. There was a train due out of King’s Cross at around 6.00 a.m. and he wanted to be on it. The underground platform was deserted at this hour, though the tube service had already come to life. He found it weird, standing on a completely empty platform. He tried to recall if that had ever happened to him before; probably, most likely when he’d narrowly missed a train—rushing up infused with the misguided belief that he was going to make it, only to have the carriage doors snap shut in his face—but this was different. On occasions like that, the emptiness would have been fleeting and in a matter of seconds other travellers would have bubbled out of various entrances to fill the void. Not this time. This time the void felt less ephemeral, as if it had settled in to stay for a while.
Hunger tweaked his stomach as he waited for the next train. When was the last time he’d eaten, aside from a few snacks snaffled from the hotel minibar? And whatever happened to vending machines on underground platforms? This one, at least, lacked any. Given the choice, Chris would always go for something savoury rather than sweet at breakfast, but just then he would happily have settled for anything. In an effort to take his mind off the subject he checked his phone, which had been switched off shortly before entering Claire’s flat the previous day. With all that had happened subsequently, he hadn’t thought to turn it back on. There was one message, from an unfamiliar number. It proved to be from Jad, inviting Chris to ring him before lunchtime tomorrow—today, now—after which he would be ‘out of town’. Chris was tempted to phone there and then, despite the early hour—sod politeness, he needed information—but refrained. Since he was the one asking for help, it seemed prudent to keep on Jad’s good side, which meant not dragging him awake in the early hours to badger him with questions.
Moments later the train pulled in. Chris boarded a near-vacant carriage, sat down, and took the opportunity to think things through. In the many years he had been dealing with alternative Londons, he’d encountered all manner of things: werebeasts, cyborgs, religious fanatics, Victoriana, necromancers, technological marvels, a succubus or two, even a human hive society. But at no point had he met an alternative version of himself, nor of any close friends or relatives…Until now.
Oh, intellectually he’d always accepted that they had to be out there. With myriad different versions of London—possibly an infinite number, who could say?—it was inevitable that other versions of Chris, of Claire, of his sister Susan, and doubtless everyone else in his life, existed somewhere…And now he’d finally met one; had slept with one, come to that.
It was a simple detail that had given her away, the smallest of things. Chris’s subconscious had picked up on the anomaly when she came out of the shower last night, but at the time he couldn’t put his finger on what the discrepancy was, and she had immediately distracted him; very effectively, it had to be said.
The earring; that was the detail: her flying V guitar. Claire always wore it, but the woman he’d spent the night with wore a gold one: yellow gold. Claire—his Claire—would never have been seen dead wearing gold, for, as she once told him, ‘Silver is the metal of magic and moonlight’. He always remembered that, perhaps because it said so much about who Claire was. She considered yellow gold to be garish, vulgar, and would neither wear it nor stock it in her shop, which among many other things sold a range of delicate rings and earrings, all wrought in silver. Never gold.
The switch must have happened early on, at Claire’s flat, almost immediately after she went upstairs. A quick exchange of clothes, a ruffle of the imposter’s hair with beret discarded on the bed, and everything was set for Chris to charge in and find her ‘struggling’ with one of the brown coats. Rescue effected, they’d been running ever since. No wonder she hadn’t been wearing the contact lenses he’d given her—a detail they couldn’t have prepared for.
He now viewed their getting lost on the way back through the different versions of London in a far more favourable light. At the time it had seemed an energy-sapping frustration, but without that little diversion they would have arrived back in time to catch a train and he would have blithely led the imposter to his home, never suspecting a thing…The less these people knew about him the better.
Chris had no idea where they found her—this doppelganger, this Claire from another world—but the fact that they had and that she was on hand ready to slip seamlessly into her role spoke of considerable forward planning. She must have been coached for the role, briefed…It also cast everything that had happened to date in a very different light.
The brown coats had never been after Claire at all, or even Bartosz.
They were after him.
He was pretty sure he hadn’t been followed, but even so Chris eyed the only other passenger to alight from the train at the same time he did with a degree of suspicion, until she was met by a taxi and whisked away. The opposite platform was crowded, commuters jostling for position as they waited for the train that would carry them into the capital, doubtless hoping for a good seat or perhaps any seat at all. Despite this being the first stop after the terminus, Chris knew full well how swiftly the London-bound trains could fill up during rush hour.
Once home, he popped a couple of slices of bread into the toaster by way of concession to his grumbling stomach, quickly showered and put on a clean pair of pants but resisted the temptation to change either his shirt or his trousers. He hadn’t yet worked out the best way to play this, but there seemed little point in making it obvious to Claire that he’d nipped back home. The note, left for her to find when she woke up, suggested she should go ahead and have breakfast without him, adding that he’d just popped out and wouldn’t be long. There was even a kiss at the bottom, added after the briefest of hesitations.
The thought of her panicking on finding him gone gave Chris some slight satisfaction; a petty triumph, perhaps, but there you go. He didn’t want to alarm her too much, though. This imposter represented the only chance he had of getting his Claire back—so he couldn’t afford to hang around.
The brown coats were beginning to seriously piss him off. They’d played him from the start, pushed him around from pillar to post…But not anymore.
He checked the feeds from the youth hostel where the gun had been stashed. Neither of the two cameras was still operating. The last transmitted images showed a brown-coated figure reaching up to cover the lenses. Hardly a surprise, but he still regretted missing the opportunity to examine the weapon properly, at the same time feeling grateful for the foresight that had caused him to stash the gun rather than bring it home.
He was still digesting the weapon’s loss when his mobile rang. Paul, hopefully with news on the blood sample.
“I hope you enjoyed your fun,” the haematologist said when Chris answered, “because you and I are through.”
“Pardon?”
“Don’t call me again, Chris. I really don’t appreciate having my time wasted like this.”
“Which is why I would never dream of doing so.”
“Really? Then how do you explain this ‘blood sample’ you left with me?”
“Is it that unusual?”
“Unusual? This is a hoax, right? It has to be. You’re doing this to wind me up; and it’s working.”
“No hoax, I promise. That sample is genuine. I extracted it myself and brought it straight to you.”
“Bollocks. It must have been tampered with somehow.”
“Please, Paul, what’s the issue here? This could be important.” At least he hadn’t hung up.
“The issue? Okay, I’ll explain. This is recognisably human blood, sure. Everything I would expect to find is present: the normal proteins—globulins, hormones, enzymes…”
“So what’s got you so upset?”
Chris heard him
take a deep breath. “It’s the haemoglobin. One of the first things I did was to run an FBC—a full blood count test—and the results that came back are, frankly, impossible. All the parameters are way outside the normal range. In fact, they’re so bizarre that I thought there must be a fault with my automated blood analyser. But there isn’t. I ran controls on a couple of other samples which I knew to be ‘normal’, including my own blood, and they came back just fine. So it’s not the machine. I then took a closer look at the haemoglobin in your maverick sample and… Look, over the years I’ve seen plenty of examples of pathological haemoglobin—faulty, if you like—common in conditions caused by genetic mutation: sickle cell, the various forms of thalassaemia, etcetera. In those cases the Hb doesn’t work properly, which leads to illness. We know about those, we understand them; but this… this is something else. It’s not really a fault, you see. I’m almost tempted to suggest that this might actually be an improvement. Whereas a normal haemoglobin molecule contains four iron atoms, the ones in your sample contain double that: eight, which means that each Hb molecule is capable of carrying twice the amount of oxygen. Now, this is pure conjecture, but I see no reason why somebody with this sort of blood pumping through their veins wouldn’t have muscles that are twice as efficient as ours, be able to hold their breath for twice as long as we can, be much less compromised by blood loss resulting from trauma or injury…
“Chris, someone with blood like this might not be faster than a speeding bullet or able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, but…”
A chill ran down his spine. “To all intents and purposes they’d be a superman,” he said as Paul let the sentence hang.
“Pretty much, yes—compared to you and me; if this is real, and I still don’t see how it can be. Mind you, whoever’s responsible knows what they’re doing, that’s for sure. There’s a beautiful logic to the whole thing, a balance. Where the hell did you get this from?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“You reckon? You’d be surprised at what I’m willing to believe where you’re concerned.”
“Thanks, I think. Look, Paul, I can’t tell you how grateful I am for this. Could you email the full analysis over to me?”
“I could, but I’m not sure how much it would mean to the lay-man.”
“Would you send it through anyway?”
“Maybe. How about we make a deal? I’ll send you the analysis if you tell me what the hell is going on here.” There was a moment of silence, as his challenge hung between them, but he relented before Chris could formulate a response. “Who am I kidding? You won’t, will you?”
“Sorry, Paul. I can’t. Really.”
After a brief pause, the voice at the other end said, “Promise me one thing: If you ever can talk about this…”
Chris felt certain Paul had him down as working for some sort of covert organisation or government department. If only it were that simple. “I’ll be straight on the phone to you, I promise,” he said.
“Okay, I guess that’ll have to do then. And make sure you are. The report will be across to you in a few minutes.”
“Thank you, Paul.”
Chris felt grateful that he hadn’t known any of this before. The knowledge might have proved unnerving and caused him to hesitate at a vital moment—going up against a superman? Really? But ignorance is bliss, as they say: It’s amazing what a person can do when they don’t realise how heavily the odds are stacked against them. Or perhaps not. After all, the brown coats had clearly wanted him to get away from Claire’s flat with faux-Claire; they’d just ensured it wasn’t too easy. Suddenly he couldn’t help wondering how many of his little ‘victories’ over the past day or so had been won and how many had been permitted. No point in dwelling on that. He had to proceed on the assumption they’d all been won.
The conversation with Paul had proved helpful in unexpected ways. Chris now knew what he was going to do, what he had to do no matter how distasteful.
Before that, though, there was someone he needed to speak with.
Jad answered on the third ring. His rich deep voice saying, “Chris, I wondered when you’d get round to calling me.”
“I didn’t want to disturb your beauty sleep, Jad. I’d ask what you were doing here, but I don’t suppose you’d tell me, which leaves… the gun.”
“Straight to the point, as ever. Very well; in your travels, have you ever come across an organisation called the Faramund?”
“No, Can’t say that I have.” The moment he heard the word, Chris started dissecting it, looking for derivation and meaning. It sounded Germanic, a compound of fara (journey) and mund (protection). Journey protection? How did that gel with the brown coats?
“Lucky you,” Jad continued, “but if that gun’s what I think it is, you have now.”
“Okay, so who are these Faramund?”
“Bad news, very bad news. They come from a hi-tech reality, and they’ve been flexing their muscles of late. In some ways, you and they have a lot in common—you take on similar work…But in other ways you’re poles apart. They’re the mafia to your Robin Hood.”
“Oh please! Don’t make me out to be something I’m not, Jad.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, but hear me out. Yes, you need to make a living—people understand that—but when you do something for a client, you care. Anyone who employs you soon realises that they can trust you, that you’re on their side. Not with this lot. To the Faramund, everything is a means to an end. They fulfil a contract—a business transaction, pure and simple. But there’s more to it than that. I can’t offer any rationale for this, but I’m convinced they have an agenda, that their primary concern is getting their hooks into people, establishing a foothold in every new London they come across in order to spread their influence. I get the sense that they’re almost…empire building.”
“So they’re ambitious.”
“And then some. Look, what I’m saying is, don’t mess with them, Chris. Not unless you can see an angle, and even then, make sure it’s a damned good one.”
“I will. Anything else you can tell me about them?”
“Sorry, no. Wish there was, but I’ve stayed clear of them.”
“No worries. Thanks, Jad; both for the information and the advice. I’ll bear it all in mind.”
“Make sure you do, and…good luck.”
After ending the call Chris took a few seconds to mull over what Jad had told him. Empire building: now there was a chilling prospect. Was the concept even possible across different realities? He would have thought that logistics ruled it out. Communication, let alone any sort of coherent control, would be a nightmare, surely. But, given what he’d seen of these Faramund, it wasn’t a possibility he was prepared to dismiss out of hand. There was something about them—the uniform coats, the hats—that seemed to fit the concept all too well.
He was determined not to be away from Claire any longer than necessary, and there was still a lot to do before heading back to the hotel, so proper consideration of all this would have to wait.
Paul’s email arrived as promised. Chris opened the file and read through it quickly, skimming the jargon and isolating what he needed. He then copied and pasted the relevant details into an existing tailored form—a sort of idiots’ guide. Having checked the completed form twice to ensure nothing had been missed, he downloaded it onto an empty flash drive, which he then disconnected from the computer.
Next he typed a series of six letters and digits onto a blank page and pressed enter. While doing so, he glanced towards the middle of the room. Stupid; he knew there wouldn’t be anything to see but he could never resist that glance, on the off-chance that this time there might be.
Suspended from the centre of the ceiling was a simple light fitting—nothing fancy, just the single plain shade which had been there when he bought the place. He never turned it on, preferring the more subtle illumination provided by standard lamps. In fact, for the last few years there hadn’t even
been a bulb in the socket, but it provided a useful marker.
There was no other indicator, you see, not even a hint of a tingle in the corner of his mind that responded to rifts. This was something quite different.
Leaving the computer, he walked at a tangent, so that he faced the centre of the room with his back to the window, and then reached forward. His hand disappeared.
Chris thought of it as a pocket universe, but that’s not what Myra, the physicist who came over from her own reality to install the hidden space, called it. Chris had met Myra during what proved to be a fairly straightforward case—the retrieval of a stolen object. It was obvious from the start that she was star-struck, not so much by who he was as by what he was: a human from another reality. While accepting the theoretical likelihood of alternative worlds, it had never occurred to her that she might one day meet somebody from such a place, let alone get the chance to visit one. In exchange for bringing her across to this London and acting as her guide for four days, she agreed to install his own private ‘space’. It proved one of the most enjoyable commissions he’d ever undertaken; Myra was good company, and spent most of the time acting like a kid let loose in the ultimate toyshop—and yes, he did include a visit to Hamleys in the itinerary.
Myra tried to explain the maths behind the hidden space, but even her ‘layman’s terms’ left Chris baffled. “Not another reality at all,” she’d insisted. “It’s more a bit of this reality that’s been tucked away out of sight…Think in terms of a wrinkle in a sheet of fabric, with the surface on either side pushed together so that a small furrow drops beneath and is hidden from sight.”
Whatever the rationale, the pocket, or space, or wrinkle, made an excellent hiding place. During his occasional reflective moments—usually when alcohol was involved—that ‘space’ had set Chris pondering Schrödinger and his cat, and even the old philosophical chestnut about whether a tree falling in a forest makes a sound if there’s nobody there to hear it. Did his ‘space’—and by extension the objects he hid within it—exist when he wasn’t around? Did he merely expose these treasures by entering the key code, or was he summoning them fresh into existence each and every time?