The Narrows

by James Brogden

  So he did, and he found that the gaps, where they came, filled themselves. By the time he’d told his tale, evening had fallen, and the last of the augurs had been removed, as if he’d made himself whole again in the telling.

  He dressed, ate, and went in search of Bex.

  ***

  He found her on the caral’s roof deck, under a sky so ablaze with stars that for a moment it took his breath away. The great vehicle had stopped, having made good ground on the rest of the Nation but still unable to chance the road in darkness, and several of the smaller roof-sails were left unfurled as shelter against the biting night wind. Bex and Ted were sitting together in the lee of one of these, swathed in thick robes and playing cards with a pack which had presumably come out of her bottomless rucksack of odds and sods. A scattering of coins – some pre-decimal – sweets, and small, coloured stones lay in piles between them. It appeared that she was teaching him poker.

  ‘Deal me in?’ he said.

  Her eyes, when she looked up at him, were guarded. ‘Depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On whether or not you’re completely batshit. On…’ Her voice was suddenly thick, as if the words were fighting each other in her throat. When the battle was won, what emerged was little more than a whisper. ‘On whether we’re going home. Or not.’

  ‘We are. We most definitely are.’

  ‘Prove it,’ she demanded tightly, fixing him with such intensity that he could see coils of it wrapping themselves about him like pythons. ‘Prove to me that I’m not stuck here for the rest of my life. That our homes didn’t get wiped out for nothing. That this is not all some kind of cosmic-sized fuck-up. I mean, I’m basically a pretty resourceful gal, and you know, if this is it, then this is it, and I’ll find a way to get by – but not with you. I don’t think I could stand being here with you like that: waiting for some kind of miracle. Hoping for… no. I’d rather just get on with getting on. So you want in, you damn well prove it to me.’

  He thought of a dozen things to say, knowing that none of them would make any difference. Bex had heard every variation on the theme of empty promises in her time on the streets and, no doubt, long before that. Laura would have told him that in the end it was really only actions which carried weight, and she’d have been right. Even Clarke – fat, complacent git that he was – had a point with his pet mantra of ‘there’s no profit margin in window-shopping lads; a sale is a sale’. But these were, in the Lady Holda’s words, nothing more than the tales that other people had made of him. After Holly End, he knew now not just who he was but what he was, and more importantly what he could do. There’d be time enough to explain it all, but right now he simply had to sell it.

  Putting out his right hand, he unfixed it, and felt through the skins of the worlds which lay between their current realm and home (there were so many of them; had they really travelled so far?) until he found something which felt like it would do for proof.

  Bex and Ted gaped in amazement as he withdrew his fist from the apparently empty air and opened it to reveal a cupped palmful of clean, white snow.

  ‘Not even Barber can do that,’ he said. ‘We’re going home, and we’re going to put a stop to him. I swear.’

  PART FOUR: TOWER

  1 On the Outer Circle

  Rosey set out in the dark of a midwinter morning to do battle against arcane forces beyond his comprehension, armed only with a homemade map, a thermos of tea, and his bus pass.

  He’d sellotaped together the photocopied pages of Bex’s Birmingham A-to-Z, working late into the night after an exhausting drive back from Aston-sub-Edge, though it wasn’t the drive which had kept him awake so much as the mental shockwaves which kept bouncing from one wall of his skull to the other. Having seen the way the landscape had unfolded when she’d jammed that stake into the hollow of the missing Kiftsgate Stone, it was impossible for him to simply walk away from all of this. It occurred to him that whatever she’d been looking for wasn’t likely to be found flicking piecemeal through its pages, so he’d cleared a space on his lounge floor, laid them out like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle and stood back.

  And then he saw it: the markings that her missing friend Dodd had drawn – the ones that looked a bit like astrological symbols – formed a rough circle approximately four miles in radius around the city centre.

  Moreover, they described a very particular route, one which he doubted would have been recognised by a homeless teenager whose life was geared around shortcuts and straight lines. It was the sort of slow, meandering route used by schoolchildren and pensioners, and occasionally by pensioned-off ex-policemen who couldn’t drive anymore but needed to attend physio clinics and spinal scans every few months. It was, of all things, the legendary Number Eleven Outer Circle bus route.

  He’d googled it to be certain. It was one of the city’s oldest, having come into service in 1923, when the West Midlands was not much more than a loose collection of villages. It was apparently so picturesque that holiday-makers used to spend day-trips on it. At twenty-six miles in length, it was the longest urban bus route in Europe, taking just over two hours to complete. People who did so were called ‘all-rounders’ and one chap had even organised an 11-hour marathon on it in celebration. Poems had been written about it. It passed more than two hundred schools, forty pubs and six hospitals – not to mention the childhood homes of JRR Tolkien and WH Auden – and Rosey had absolutely no idea why any of this was significant. What had any of it got to do with ley lines? Why would Barber choose to map out the reconfigured topography of a fragmented magical landscape onto a bus route? Rosey suspected that it was nothing more perverse than the reason he’d chosen to heal his back: because it simply amused him to do so.

  What mattered was that he do something with the knowledge.

  Two and a half hours later, he was now officially an All-Rounder. He had also discovered with a weary lack of surprise that every point marked on Dodd’s map marked a location which had something to do with the name ‘Jerusalem’. Mostly they were construction sites owned by a development company called Jerusalem Industries, but there was also an Arabic ‘Jerusalem Travel Agency’, a ‘New Jerusalem Christian Bookshop’, and even a Jerry Salem Hair Salon.

  ‘Okay, now you’re just taking the piss,’ he said when he saw that last one.

  It’s so deliciously perverse, he heard Barber say, as if in reply. So delicious that he had apparently spent god-only-knew how much money and pulled a lot of strings over a very long time to acquire these properties. The amount of forethought and planning that it implied – not to mention the resources and connections he must have – was staggering. Rosey spent his first orbit of the Outer Circle simply identifying these locations, and as the bus came back around to where he’d got on at Bearwood, he prepared to spend the rest of this short day investigating them in closer detail. He felt the familiar old satisfaction of seeing the pieces of somebody else’s puzzle begin to fall into place. Barber had overreached himself; there was no hiding this kind of paper trail.

  Someone sat down heavily next to him. Right next to him on an otherwise empty top deck. Every instinct in his body began screaming at once, but before he could do anything about it a gnarled hand (almost a claw, really, he thought, will you look at that) clamped down on his shoulder and shoved him back in his seat.

  ‘Hello, policeman,’ said Carling.

  ***

  Andy sat on the caral’s roof deck and explained everything.

  ‘I know what Barber is planning,’ he said simply. ‘All of it. When he got into my head and tried to kill me, I got into his, because that’s how it works. There’s no such thing as a one-way connection. I think he knew that, but he was prepared to take the risk anyway, because he though he was strong enough to kill me. He had no idea that I’m unfixed and that his power couldn’t even touch me.’ He laughed a little. ‘Come to that, n
either did I.’

  ‘Us being here isn’t an accident. There are no such things as accidents or coincidences. There’s only Pattern. We’re here because I needed somewhere as safe and as far away as possible to rest and get myself together; I found this place in Barber’s memories, and it was simple enough to ride the ley here.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, answering Bex’s look of sudden surprise, ‘Barber has been here before us. When he first escaped Holly End, he had no idea of the forces he was working with, and he simply got lost – went wandering in a lot of strange places before he found his way back again.

  ‘The Dobunni, or at least the race of people that the Dobunni belong to, are already quite advanced in their knowledge of what they call the ‘telluric sciences’. In our world, we started to get a basic idea when we cottoned on to electricity and magnetism, but since then we’ve dead-ended in our obsession with all things electrical, and it’s really only part of a very big picture. Imagine a caveman finding a flute. He discovers that it’s a hollow tube and makes an excellent blowgun, and from then on all he ever uses it for is hunting. It works fine, but sort of misses the point a bit, you know?’

  ‘Actually,’ interrupted Ted, ‘a flute would be useless as a blowgun because all the holes would…’

  ‘Ted?’ said Bex sweetly.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Shut up, dear.’

  ‘Yes. Right. Sorry.’

  Andy continued. ‘Barber was here for years, living with them, learning from them. At first it was purely for the purpose of getting home, but then, when he discovered the time dilation effects which operate between the worlds, he realised that he a had a little bit more luxury to explore. A short six-month absence at home could afford him decades here in which to learn their science, and then return to put that knowledge into practice in a little experimental bubble of time which had hardly changed at all. How could he resist?

  ‘And the Dobunni were only too happy to teach him. They were flattered, and I think amused. The caveman decides he wants to learn how to play the flute. So they taught him everything that he was capable of learning – I don’t think it occurred to them for a second that he would turn any of it to destructive purposes. If you taught a skavag how to light a fire, you’d hardly imagine that it would be able to build an atomic bomb.’

  ‘Yes, but we’re not skavags,’ Bex protested with an expression of distaste.

  ‘We are to the Dobunni. You know we have seven energy chakras running down our bodies from crown to crotch? The sources of all our physical, mental and spiritual power? They have twelve.’

  ‘Well whoop-de-doo for them.’

  ‘Our world isn’t on the surface of the Cosmic Onion. We’re probably not even halfway up. There’s an infinite number of worlds above and below us; places where even the Dobunni are like apes, and the skavags are like angels.

  ‘The point being that whatever he learned here, it gave birth to an ambition much greater than just playing Cold War silly buggers. He’d never been particularly bothered about rescuing Holly End in the first place, mind you. He hadn’t even wanted people there at all – but something about the experiments wouldn’t work without the interaction of human beings. We know why now, of course.’

  ‘We?’ Bex looked at him suspiciously, but he was ploughing on without really listening to her.

  ‘It’s because earth-leys and acupuncture meridians are all part of the same system. We are the world writ small; it is us writ large, and not in some hippy bullshit way but in actual, measurable terms. The only difference between something like Stonehenge and the human heart chakra is one of scale, you see?’

  ‘I see that you’re getting a bit over-excited. Why don’t you calm down a bit and tell us what Barber’s big plan is.’

  ‘But I can see it all!’ Andy was grinning the kind of feverish, jouncing grin which she’d seen on the faces of crack-heads. His eyes were wide, and his pupils very dark. ‘I can see everything! The Pattern! I understand how it all fits together!’

  ‘Andy!’ She used her voice like a slap, and with what seemed to be a great effort his attention returned to the here and now. ‘Focus! What is he planning to do?’

  ‘It’s nearly finished.’ His voice was hushed now, low and scared. ‘He’s been setting it up for nearly fifty years. The disappearances, the closures – they’re just the finishing touches. The final adjustments. Calibration before the big switch-on.’

  She wanted to really slap him this time, but something about his fear was infectious, and she stayed silent. She was suddenly very aware of the distant murmur of voices drifting up with woodsmoke from the campfires below – voices talking in a language which nobody in her world had ever heard before – and of the clear sky above, blazing with stars beneath which they were utterly insignificant. The prospects of either returning home or tackling Barber seemed absurd.

  ‘Holly End was just a test,’ continued Andy. ‘A prototype, to see if the mechanism works. What he’s got planned now is the real deal – it’s an absolute killer, you might say. It’s going to make what happened to Ted’s home look like a dolls’ tea party.

  ‘I’m unfixed, okay? The ch’i meridians of my body aren’t tied to their proper nerve clusters in the same way as everybody else. It’s like, imagine the electrical wiring of a house, only the wires and plugs aren’t fixed in the walls where they should be; they can be moved and reconnected and made to do weird stuff. I don’t know why. In all probability, I should be dead. I don’t know if it’s what Barber intended when he… when I was a kid, or if it’s just a crazy, random happenstance. Either way, it explains how I can open Narrows that have been closed and see auras and the thing with needles – and everything, basically.

  ‘But I think it also makes it harder for me to hang on, so to speak, when things get stressful. There’s not much to anchor me. So when that ley hit us it did more than just throw me physically, it also splattered my mind across dozens, maybe even hundreds of worlds. It’s taken a long time to come back to myself, bit by bit, bringing back little snippets from all up and down the Cosmic Onion, and here’s a really weird thing… by the way, what was the date when you found Holly End?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’ll make sense, trust me. What was the date?’

  ‘The twentieth, I think.’

  ‘Ted, what date was it in Holly End when she arrived?’

  ‘December twentieth, too.’

  ‘Same date, fifty years apart,’ said Andy. ‘Time in our world moves nine times faster than in yours, and it just happens to be exactly the same day?’

  The boy whistled. ‘Crumbs, that’s a coincidence.’

  ‘You’re going to love this, then: as far as I can tell, everywhere, in every realm, at every possible level of the Cosmic Onion, or what our hosts call the ‘Tellurean’, right now, it is exactly the same day.’

  ‘Yes,’ protested Bex, ‘but not everywhere has a December, do they? If these people have got twelve chakras, then they’ve probably got thirty-seven months or something.’

  ‘I didn’t say date – I said day.’

  Bex’s eyes suddenly widened. ‘Oh my god!’ She’d just realised what he was getting at.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The Winter Solstice!’

  Ted was looking increasingly baffled. ‘What’s that got to do with the Professor?’

  ‘He knows about it too. He’s always known. Right from the moment he returned to Holly End after his travels with the Dobunni. They surely must have known about it long in advance: the Great Convocation. The first, and for all we know only time in all of the aeons of existence that the concentric layers of reality have aligned on one of the four great Gates of Life: the two solstices and equinoxes.

  ‘The ch’i system of the cosmos is a circulatory system like that belonging to any living being. It e
bbs and flows, like the tide, or breath, or a heartbeat. There’s the moment of inflow, the moment of outflow, and the pause in between. The equinoxes are the pauses: spring, when life is just beginning to stir, and autumn, when it ceases, and ripeness turns to rot. The summer solstice is the absolute riot of heat and vitality, sex and drugs and rock-and-roll. Winter, on the other hand, Bex?’

  She shuddered. ‘You don’t go into the Narrows at midwinter. You just don’t. You could end up anywhere. And sometimes things come out. Walter once said that the midwinter solstice is like a cyclone in the Arctic ocean; it dredges up all kinds of black, frozen stuff from the bottom of the sea that’d be better off never seeing the light of day.’

  ‘And this year it’s midwinter everywhere,’ Andy continued, ‘in every world, all the solstices lining up, stacked up one on top of another like a huge, cosmic combination lock.’

  ‘What does it open?’ Ted was almost afraid to ask.

  ‘The centre of everything. The absolute source of existence. The Navel of the World, the Great Void, the Throne of God. Our hosts call it the Omphalos. It’s the place where all lines meet, and where all circles emerge.

  There all the barrel-hoops are knit

  There all the serpent-tails are bit

  There all the gyres converge in one…’

  Bex finished it for him: ‘There all the planets drop in the sun. Omphalos. Jesus. Do you think Walter knew?’