The World Walker Series Box Set

by Ian W. Sainsbury

  As Joni drifted into sleep, she could almost imagine Dad’s smell was still on his T-shirt. It couldn’t be, of course. He hadn’t worn it for seventeen years, and it had been washed countless times since then. But it was a comfort to imagine some part of his presence might still be clinging to the tattered cotton garment.

  That night she saw him. It was a dream, of course—Joni knew it must be—but it was more than that, too. For a start, it interrupted a different dream, which had never happened before. And Dad saw her.

  Joni was walking up a hill. She recognized the location. It was behind the Winterbourne hotel, where she had never attended a writing course and certainly hadn’t met any Norwegians. She looked over her shoulder. Odd was about two hundred yards behind her, looking up, calling to her, waving and gesturing her to slow down. She increased her pace and headed toward the top of the hill. Odd was also waiting there, his blonde hair blowing across his face. He was smiling. She wanted to go to him, but she also wanted to get away from him. She hated herself for wanting both, or either. Or neither. She felt completely confused and frustrated.

  She heard bleating above her and looked up. McG had sprouted a glorious pair of white wings and was flapping his way to the summit, gliding and darting like a fat, hairy bird of prey. He was chewing her journal. Joni jumped to try to snatch it from him, but the flying goat was too fast and beat his powerful wings, gaining height quickly. Within seconds he was just a speck in the clouds.

  Joni carried on climbing. Although she had picked up her pace, she noticed she wasn’t getting any closer to the Odd at the summit. Looking behind her, the Odd trying to reach her wasn’t making any headway either. The distant bleating above her sounded a lot like laughter.

  That was when she woke up within the dream. She knew she was still asleep, but she felt fully awake, conscious, totally aware of the ridiculous nature of what was happening. The confused, circular nature of the dream seemed suddenly to be under her control. She looked ahead and blinked. Odd vanished. She looked behind her to confirm the other Odd had also disappeared. McG remained - she could hear him bleating excitedly. As she looked up, she saw him experimenting with loop-the-loops. Since she now felt in control, she decided to join him. She wouldn’t need wings. If she could imagine it, she could do it. She grinned, squatted then threw herself upward toward the sky, aiming squarely at the winner of the World’s Ugliest Bird competition.

  It didn’t work. Instead, she was somewhere else. Somewhere hot. Very hot. There were flames all around her. She could feel the intensity of the heat, but it didn’t burn. She knew that if this was real, it would scorch the eyebrows from her face. Her skin would be reddening, wrinkling, crackling, splitting, and popping. Her eyeballs would melt, her tongue would turn black. Somehow none of these things were happening. And there was no pain.

  At first, she could see nothing at all. Orange, red, yellow, blue-black, green, purple, the flames danced across her vision. After a moment, she found she could move. She looked down toward her feet and was unsurprised to find she didn’t have any. No arms, either. She didn’t have a body at all. She was a wraith, a spirit, a movement within the flames themselves. She thought herself forward, and it happened, her awareness dancing through the heat-haze to a place where darkness began to interrupt the constant colors. There were specks of light within the dark patches. Then the darkness grew greater, a vastness opening up above her. The specks were stars. The night sky stretched above her, every constellation clear. Joni was no cosmologist, but she knew what The Plough looked like. And The Bear. Orion’s Belt, that was an easy one. They weren’t there.

  Joni forced her eyes away from the sky. At ground level, the flames threw light out to a distance of about fifteen meters before becoming lost in the shadows.

  I’m in a fire. I am a fire.

  At that moment, she realized how familiar all of this seemed, and she remembered why. This wasn’t a dream - it was a memory. A memory of the vision she had had while falling from the tree on her ninth birthday.

  At the edge of the clearing, she could make out trees, comfortingly familiar yet disconcertingly unusual. Some kind of fruit was hanging from one, dark, swollen, longer and thinner than a banana. As she watched, there was a flash of movement and some kind of furry creature a little like a squirrel, but with far longer arms, dropped onto one of the fruits and was gone, climbing up through the branches in a blur of movement.

  She heard shouting somewhere, then silence. She tried to move. The result was disconcerting. She didn’t move, but the entire scene seemed to pivot around her. It was as if she was at the center of a slow-motion spinning top, or at the hub where the spokes of a bicycle meet.

  Then she was able to see what the shouting had been about and—if her flame-body had been equipped with a beating heart—she was sure it would have stopped during the following thirty seconds.

  Around the edge of the clearing, men and women were sitting or kneeling. Except they weren’t men or women. They were humanlike in appearance, but there was something off, something wrong about them. They were small, for a start - although it was difficult to get a true sense of scale when she didn’t know how big the trees were. Their faces were flatter than humans, their eyes set too far apart.

  She would have studied them more closely if it hadn’t been for the events taking place in the foreground.

  Between the fire and the watching crowd, two half-naked figures made up a tableau that looked like a movie poster. One figure was standing, his arm raised in an obvious gesture of victory. Blood ran down one side of his face, and there was a shallow cut down his side. He was breathing heavily and shouting something incomprehensible.

  On the ground another figure lay still, his face turned away from the fire. He was breathing in short, shallow gasps and his hands were pressed over a wound in his stomach. He groaned and rolled over, his face now visible. It had the same flattened features, the strange eyes, but as he groaned in pain, the face morphed, flickering and sliding into something else. The face Joni saw then was one she knew intimately, even though she had only ever seen it in photographs.

  It was her father. It was Seb.

  She tried to move forward, go to him, but she was unable to get any further than the outermost limit of the fire which, somehow, contained her consciousness.

  Joni didn’t know where she was, what she was, or how she could possibly be where she seemed to be, but she knew why she was there. Dad needed her.

  She thrashed around impotently, trying to get to him as she watched thick, dark blood seeping through his fingers. His three fingers, she noticed. Three fingers and a thumb. Long, powerful-looking fingers, dark, with tapered, sharp nails at their tips. That must explain the injuries on both combatants, who were otherwise unarmed.

  As Joni frantically tried to do something, anything, to help, she found herself screaming soundlessly and wordlessly.

  It’s not working. He’s going to die. This is real, and he’s going to die in front of me.

  Seb’s eyes flicked open. He looked right at her. He saw her. There was a long moment, outside any familiar measurement of time, when they connected. Somehow, Joni felt his confusion - he recognized her but didn’t know her, he loved her but didn’t know who she was.

  The moment passed, and he smiled.

  It was as if she was seeing him as he really was, simultaneously with this other creature, knowing they were one and the same. His eyes never left hers, but they slid apart and narrowed, becoming more deep-set as his nose simultaneously flattened itself into the hard, bony face that was re-appearing. He moved his hands away from the wound and Joni watched in awe as the blood stopped flowing and the gash closed up. It was as if it had never been there.

  Seb stood up. His attacker still had his back to the fire and was pacing back and forth, pumping his fist, shouting something at the watchers, their alien features unreadable as they watched him. Then, as their eyes swiveled back to Seb, the fist-pumper stopped and spun around. Even on a face as
physically unfamiliar as his, the expression on it was instantly recognizable as shock. He recovered quickly, though, raised his lethal-looking fingers and threw himself toward his opponent, snarling with fury.

  Joni woke up. She was in bed in her room in the Keep on Innisfarne. She sat up and listened to the birdsong. It was dawn. One of Mee’s occasional expressions, reserved for special occasions, came spontaneously to her lips.

  “Fuck-a-doodle-do.”

  She pulled on a pair of jeans, before running down the hallway to the furthest door. She knocked and waited. After a few seconds, Uncle John’s unshaven face appeared, his thin hair sticking up in tufts. He had a book in his hand.

  “It’s 5:30,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Sorry to wake you,” she said “but—,”

  “I’m always awake before dawn,” he said. “I don’t sleep so good.” He looked at her face. “What the hell happened? You still working on your magic powers?”

  “I had a dream.”

  “A dream?”

  “Yes. Well, no, maybe not. But I need to tell you about it. And I think we should tell Mum. And I want you to tell me everything about Dad.”

  “Everything?”

  Joni nodded. John sighed, shook his head, then held up a hand.

  “You know what I’m going to say, right?”

  “That it’s better that I don’t know everything? That it’s Mum’s decision? That she’s only trying to protect me? That’s bullshit, John. Things are happening, and I need to understand why. Or at least get a sense of where I come from, what’s going on and—,”

  She stopped. John was now holding up both hands.

  “You wanna wake up the whole entire house, hon?” He smiled, resignedly. “Anyways, that’s not what I was going to say.”

  “Ok. Then…”

  “I was going to say we need coffee. Lots of coffee. My workshop in five minutes.”

  He shut the door.

  17

  Joni told John that the dream had been a memory of a vision she had had when she was nine.

  “I had totally forgotten it, had no memory of it at all. But all this practicing with resetting somehow triggered something, brought it back.”

  John asked some questions about the dream, got her to describe Seb as he was when she saw him as human, not as some alien creature. He sat in silence for a long time as a half-finished cup of coffee went cold beside him. Then he reached over and took Joni’s hand.

  “Honey,” he said, “I want you to consider the possibility that this was a dream after all.”

  Joni started to speak, but he stopped her with a gesture and squeezed her hand.

  “I’m just asking you to think about it. I know it was incredibly vivid, that it seemed utterly real. Just a couple things make me question it a little. First, you had a long day yesterday, right? I mean, if you were practicing your resetting in the morning, I’m guessing your morning was a lot longer than mine, right?”

  “Yes,” said Joni. “But when I reset, I’m back where I was - my body is no more tired than it would have been anyway.”

  “Ok, maybe, but mentally, you live through these different time lines, different futures. There must be some kind of impact from that.”

  Joni considered this. In one sense, he was right. She had been thinking along similar lines the previous afternoon on her walk. The main by-product of multiple resets was a feeling of confusion, a sense of reality as being something slightly slippery, not reliably solid. It wasn’t a pleasant sensation, and she’d already decided to keep her experiments down to one or two every morning. Otherwise, she might run the risk of losing her sense of what was truly real, or important.

  “Yeah, ok, I have thought about that.”

  “Another thing. You described how Seb looked. Just think about that for a second. He’s been away a long time, Joni. You were nine years old when you had this vision of him. By then, he’d been away nearly ten years. Ten years. But you described him looking exactly the same as he did the day he left. The same as he looks in all those photographs you’ve seen.”

  His voice was gentle. He smiled sadly at her. “He wouldn’t look that way, honey. I know you thought it was real, but just consider the possibility you were seeing what you wanted to see.”

  “But you said he’d be back. You think he’s out there, somewhere.”

  “I do believe he’ll be back. And I want to believe that, somehow, you connected with him wherever he is, that you truly saw him and he knew you were there.”

  “He did,” said Joni. “I know he did. He didn’t know it was me, exactly, but he knew someone was there, someone close to him. I could feel it. And if this whole thing was just my brain-fucked fantasy, he would have known who I was, would have known I was his daughter, but he didn’t. He didn’t know.”

  She was standing up now, her eyes full of tears. John reached over for his coffee, took a sip and spat the cold liquid straight out again.

  “Brain-fucked?” he said. After a moment, they both laughed.

  “Joni,” he said, “don’t get me wrong. On balance, maybe you’re right. Maybe this was—in some weird way—real. But Seb’s been gone so long that I’m doubting my own motives. I want to believe it, but I’m scared to. And I’m scared about how Mee’s going to react.”

  “You think I should tell her?”

  “Yes,” said John, and stood up. He checked his watch. It was just after seven. Meditation was over, and breakfast would be served in a half hour. “I’m on washing up duty this morning. I’ll meet you after, and we’ll go talk to her. And you’re right. It’s time we told you everything.”

  That was the day Joni finally found out the truth about her father.

  Breakfast had finished, the washing up and cleaning done. Members of the community had gone to weed the vegetable patch, muck out the goats, or repair a wall. The island was always busier during the summer and—since no one paid to stay on Innisfarne—guests were expected to help out, picking jobs from the list Kate pinned on the noticeboard.

  “Oh god,” said Mee, looking at the expressions on Joni’s and John’s faces. “This looks a lot like an intervention. I should remind you both, I'm down to about two spliffs a day now.” Neither John nor Joni smiled at this, and Mee sighed heavily, put her hand in her purse and brought out rolling papers.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, “I’m not going to smoke it. Yet. I’m going to listen. This will help me concentrate. Once I’ve heard what you have to say, then I’ll probably smoke it.”

  While Mee started the ritualistic rolling of a giant spliff, Joni took a deep breath and looked at John for encouragement. He smiled at her.

  “Mum, I’m going to tell you about something that happened to me this summer. Then I’m going to tell you about a dream I had last night. I think the two are connected in some way. Both things might freak you out. And the thing that happened this summer that started all of this didn’t actually happen. That’s part of what I need to explain.”

  Mee had stopped what she was doing and was now holding the joint halfway to her lips, ready to lick and seal it. She tilted the spliff first one way, then the other, peering at it as if confused.

  “Nope,” she said, “haven’t smoked it yet. Thought for a second I already had.” She put it back on the table and smiled at her daughter.

  “Jones,” she said, “you’re everything to me. I’ve tried hard not to smother you, I’ve tried to let you know that you’re loved and that you can tell me anything. Right?”

  Joni could already feel her eyes brimming with tears. Mee kept talking.

  “These last few weeks, I can see you’ve been struggling with something. I could see you considered talking to me about it, but felt you couldn’t. Here’s what I kept thinking - tell me if it sounds crazy. There’s no one on this island your own age or even close to it this summer. And I pretty much know how you spend your days. It’s not as if anyone gets much privacy here. So why do I think you’ve fallen in love and b
een dumped?”

  Joni threw herself into her mother’s arms, and the two of them cried together, while Mee stroked her daughter’s hair and spoke the same soothing, meaningless words that everyone needs to hear.

  John went back to the workshop to brew a decent jug of coffee. He took his time. When he came back, the two women were dry-eyed. Joni was just coming back into the dining room with a box of tissues. She had already explained the details of her ability to reset.

  “Shame you can’t demonstrate, really,” said Mee. “It’s kind of scary, but kind of abstract, too.”

  “I can demonstrate it,” said Joni.

  “How?”

  “When you were almost exactly my age, you stole a ring from Granny.”

  Mee froze, saying nothing.

  “It was her grandmother’s ring, a family heirloom. You pawned it to buy dope but didn’t get back to the pawn shop for months. When you did go back, it had gone. You were in a terrible state. You always intended to get the ring back. Then one night, you saw the ring on Granny’s finger. She must have seen it in the window of the pawn shop, bought it back, and said nothing about it. You realized she knew you had stolen it. You kept meaning to apologize, thank her, hug her, but you didn’t know where to start. You finally told her when she was in hospital, just before she died. She smiled, said there was nothing to forgive.”

  Now it was Joni’s turn to console her mother as she wept. When she could speak again, she only had one question.

  “How?”

  “When I went to get tissues, I created a reset point.”

  “A what?”

  “I’m getting in the habit of doing it whenever I make a decision. Even one as small as ‘do I get a box of tissues, or wipe my eyes on my sleeve?’ I make sure I feel the tingling, hear the hum. It takes half a second. I didn’t go for the tissues the first time. I stayed. You said it was a shame I couldn’t demonstrate, so I thought of a way. I asked you to tell me something you’d never told anyone. Something no one else in the world could possibly know. You told me about Granny’s ring. Then I reset and went to get the tissues.”