Alice Through The Multiverse

by Brian Trenchard-Smith

  Once Jones had closed within fifty yards of the BMW, he took the gun, a standard-issue Glock, out of his shoulder holster, opened the driver’s side window, and maneuvered to a position where he could get a shot at the BMW’s rear tires. In training his shooting scores had been high, but this was the first time he would use a weapon on active duty. His orders were clear. Follow them. Capture alive. Hold them till backup arrives.

  Paul could see what his pursuer’s game was. So Paul turned it into zig versus zag, never allowing his rear tires to align with the gun extending from the pursuing driver’s window for more than a second. This frustrated Jones’ aim.

  Alice gasped as the car’s motions jostled her in her seat, but she did not look afraid. Even while his whole focus was in pushing the car to the max, Paul nonetheless caught the expression on her face. A nine-year-old girl on her first roller coaster ride. Petrified with delight.

  As Alice’s experience of this sorcerer’s world expanded, its wonders became more apparent. Such wonders could only come through The Hand of God. Wonders, like moving at great speed, faster than any horse ever could run, while looking outside from inside the belly of a metal beast. Awe eclipsed fear. Satan had no such marvels. She was re-united with James. A new James, now blessed with the powers of a wizard. God had not abandoned her.

  As the BMW rounded a bend, Paul saw an opportunity to throw a curveball. He swung the wheel sharply, smashing through a wooden gate into a small field full of sleeping livestock. Jones, in the pursuing SUV, could not turn in time and overshot. But the fact that his adversary had chosen to drive into a dead end was encouraging. Then he heard the blare of a car horn. Tires squealing into fast reverse, he gunned it over the splintered gate into the field, not expecting what came into view.

  In the intervening moments, Paul had switched off his lights, and hit the horn repeatedly, as he circled behind the herd of suddenly awakened and grumbling cows. They cantered away from the intruding presence, mooing their disapproval.

  Alice giggled. She knew cows well. Obstinate beasts sometimes, so it always amused her when they lost their dignity. Then the entry of the SUV startled them further. The rumps of wheeling cows collided, as Paul circled the perimeter of the herd driving the cattle inward. Jones found himself in the midst of a confused stampede. Dark shapes rushing round him in all directions in bellowing cacophony. Alice could see the trap her James had led him into. She suddenly screamed with laughter, as she had when a pompous tax collector had got himself tangled with a herd of cows on their way to market in Farnham High Street.

  Paul looked at her as she became convulsed with laughter. Perhaps the adrenaline built up in her was seeking release. But laughter was a sign of trust. Paul was going to need her cooperation in the hours to come. He folded another group of cows back into the bovine whirlpool he was creating around the SUV, then headed for the smashed gate.

  Jones was looking in every direction for his quarry. Then he saw the escaping vehicle going out the way it had entered. Instinctively, Jones swung the wheel. Wrong way. The SUV broadsided with a sickening crunch into an indignant cow, which smashed its horn through the windshield. The glass gave way. The point of the horn stopped inches from Jones’ nose. The BMW fishtailed back onto the road, and with it went Jones’ chance of early promotion.

  Paul checked the GPS. In half a mile he would reach the M3 motorway and blend into the constant stream to London. Alice’s laughter had given way to short giggles and loving smiles. She squeezed his arm, and laid her head against his shoulder. Paul decided that it was time to have a serious conversation now that she had seen the reality of their situation. He tried a different tack: “Alice, try to remember who you really are.”

  “James? You know me...” She could not fathom what he meant.

  “These men intend to kill us,” Paul said as flatly as he could, but perhaps his exasperation showed.

  Why was this James saying what they both knew right well? Alice wondered. Did he not understand what they were fighting for? “They mean to kill HER too! By cunning and lies so no one will know it is them.”

  A note of unease rang in Paul’s mind. “Her?”

  “If she succeeds, she will change everything, and they will be swept away.” Alice meant that the Princess Elizabeth must become Queen. She must succeed her sister Mary, as monarch, upon Mary’s death, which some rumored might be none too far off. But the Princess would not succeed if she were attainted as a traitor, or if she were dead.

  Paul pondered Alice’s cryptic statement. So far, her intuition had been uncanny. Could she mean that their adversaries were going to kill a woman, before she could “...change everything and sweep them away,” whatever that meant?

  “They’re going to kill ... who?”

  “The Princess!” It was Alice’s turn for exasperation to show. “The Princess Elizabeth…You know that.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “James! Don’t blaspheme.” Alice crossed herself.

  Paul was at a loss. Back to square one. But with a flicker of unease.

  “I heard them,” Alice added. “They were crowing about it.”

  “When did you hear them?” asked Paul, sucked back in.

  “When they caught me yet again, the knaves, may the Devil seize them!”

  Paul was silent for a while, his mind spinning. The BMW entered a long ramp, passing a vandalized sign covered in spray painted slogans which would otherwise have indicated the M3 Motorway North.

  “This way to London Town?” asked Alice, hoping the silence had calmed his mood.

  “How do you know we’re going to London?” Paul asked. The sign had been unreadable.

  “You told me at the river, silly,” she said with such a sweet smile.

  This simple girl was running rings round him. “We’re going to a safe house, where they won’t find us.”

  “A safe house. Like a castle?”

  “A small personal castle. I’ll explain everything when we get there. I don’t want to talk any more right now. I need to think. Do you like music?”

  “Church music,” said Alice piously.

  Paul hit the button to the CD player. Music by The Rolling Stones burst from the speakers. Alice nearly jumped out of her skin. He adjusted the volume. But as the band segued into driving rhythms, she calmed and her smile returned.

  “Where are the minstrels?” she asked, looking towards the rear speakers.

  “Same place as the horses,” Paul matched her tone. He pressed a button and the back of her seat reclined. She reacted, then shook her head ruefully.

  “More sorcery.” She gave him a knowing look.

  “Progress,” said Paul. “Rest now.”

  She settled back, wondering whether she would be allowed to learn sorcery, the good kind. She closed her eyes.

  Paul glanced at her. She could be the death of him, yet he was drawn to her. As he reflected on this, he saw her foot twitching to the beat of the song.

  CHAPTER 14

  Safe House

  Selwyn awoke in a fog with a foul taste in his mouth. As he slowly sat up, he felt a painful bruise where the girl had kicked him. Then he felt the moisture round his loins. While unconscious he had wet himself. Waves of shame and anger swept over him. He had been about to relieve himself, while waiting in the trees, when he had seen the targets approaching across the car park. No time after he had called it in. He was ex-SAS. Incontinence was not in the field manual, but his trousers were totally soaked. Luckily he kept some old track suit pants in the trunk of his car. The muddied jacket and paint-stained gym pants combo would look ridiculous in front of his colleagues. He would be the butt of their jokes till he could get new clothes. He often was the butt of their jokes due to his religious beliefs. But he shrugged it off, secure in the knowledge they would not be laughing when they were Left Behind. However, he would make that American pay for this affron
t to his dignity, made worse by the theft of his weapon. He would redeem himself in the eyes of his superiors for losing this contest. Selwyn’s lapel was wired with a live feed to HQ, so they already knew about the escape. He volunteered to join the pursuit but was told curtly by Brandt to collect Dr. Picton and deliver him to an address that they would nominate in due course.

  Still at their headquarters, Nelson and Brandt disconnected the battery pack that ran the temporary lighting. Jaws clenched, they were thinking furiously. Brandt pulled out a pill bottle, and offered it to Nelson. “Thanks.” He took two, and passed it back. Brandt did the same. They chugged half-empty water bottles to wash them down. They knew that they needed to be alert and high-functioning for an indefinite period, and these pills taken daily were designed for that, courtesy of the EST pharmacy. There was a danger of heart attack if used for longer than a week.

  “Thirty-eight hours,” mused Nelson. He had never had an operation go pear-shaped so close to the deadline.

  “Aye, thirty-eight hours,” echoed Brandt with a reassuring tone. “We’ll get there.”

  Before ascending to the ground floor, they walked past another room sealed from the corridor by a chain link and razor wire fence which could be slid back and forth across the open doorway. Inside was a cot and blankets. A cell had been prepared.

  They exited the graffiti-sprayed building and made their way to a padlocked gate in a high fence that sealed the building off from squatters. Prominent signs warned trespassers of armed response. Next door was a large construction site on which an office block was being built. Work was still going on under floodlights. Brandt had picked the HQ well, a place where their irregular visits would blend with the constant activity next door.

  Paul sped into the outskirts of London just before midnight. To insure that they weren’t being followed, he drove randomly through its darkened suburbs for about an hour. Then his BMW cruised along a recently gentrified Brixton back street to a row of identical three-story town houses. Paul turned into the driveway of the last one and buzzed the carport. As the sliding door slowly rose, he looked at Alice, now deeply asleep. He was going to have to carry her in. This was not his official address as Dr. Montgomery, visiting American psychiatrist. The hotel on West Street, Farnham was his accommodation for the purported three-month residency. Brixton was his safe house, rented under another alias; his bolt hole, the location of which was known only to him. This was his second visit to it.

  Paul carried Alice up the stairs from the garage into a standard town house living room: couch, desk, faux antique rocking chair, TV, bookshelf, wet bar, with adjacent kitchenette, leading to a small garden. A staircase to bedrooms and a landing overlooked the living area. As Paul laid Alice down on the couch, her eyes fluttered awake.

  “Go back to sleep Alice. I’ll get you a blanket.”

  “Water...?” she requested in a sleepy voice

  “Right away.”

  Paul got up and headed for the kitchenette. He placed Selwyn’s Glock in the kitchen drawer where he kept his safe house weapons. He wanted to get her settled down for the night quickly, so that he could contact Washington and upload the files he had extracted from June Daly’s computer. Paul took a blanket from the laundry cupboard, filled a glass with water, and returned to the living room.

  The couch was now empty. Paul paused by the wet bar. His head swiveled towards the stairs and landing. Did she go upstairs? Suddenly Alice rose up from behind the counter with a face like fury. She swung a large coffee table book hard at the back of his head. There was a blinding flash in his brain. Paul staggered, then blacked out.

  CHAPTER 15

  “It’s Jane.”

  As the lights of his mind flickered back on, Paul saw that he had miscalculated. The worst fuck up of his life, in fact. Then the pain kicked in, surging through his head like a fireworks display. He uttered a series of gasps as he forced the pain back into a manageable corner. Then he realized that his arms and feet were secured tightly to the faux antique rocking chair with duct tape. The situation was FUBAR. Paul didn’t realize that things would get far worse.

  “Alice...?” he croaked.

  Alice walked in from the kitchen, holding a cup of steaming coffee in one hand, and a large set of scissors in the other.

  “Alice doesn’t live here anymore,” she said with a wry smile. “It’s Jane.”

  Alice looked just the same as before, but her archaic rural accent, it seemed to Paul’s ear, had changed to contemporary British. Paul struggled against the tape. Useless. Jane sat on the sofa in front of him. Her demeanor was confident; super-smart assurance masking anger and fear.

  “So...” Paul uttered, trying to sound as calm as possible, “we’re not in the 16th century any more, it seems.”

  “Who are you?” asked the girl who before had been sweetly anxious Alice, but was now coldly contemptuous Jane, as she placed the gleaming scissors across her lap.

  “I am Dr. Paul Montgomery,” he replied with as much authority as he could muster, “and you are my patient, so please release me.”

  Jane interrupted. “What’s my disorder, Doctor?”

  “Multiple personality disorder. It’s treatable.” Before he had uttered the last syllable, she interrupted him again.

  “No, it isn’t. Outmoded term.” And the conversation continued much in that vein, as they both tried to talk over each other.

  “…you’ve had a transient psychotic episode ...”

  “…helps to call it by its proper name ...”

  “It’s over now so ...”

  “... think I’ve been around more shrinks than you have, ‘Doc’,” said Jane with a hint of a sneer. Psychiatrists, and she had gone through at least five, were pompous, arrogant know-it-alls.

  Paul made a fast recovery. “Dissociative identity disorder. DID. Scores of different personalities have been recorded inhabiting a single patient,” he said, finally without interruption. “One is usually dominant. Is that you? I can help if you cut me loose.”

  For a moment Jane was silent. She lifted a cushion, revealing the Glock and Paul’s Walther PPS, an 8 round slim line model ideal for concealed carry. It was his safe house backup weapon. How long had he been out, he wondered. What else has she found? She spoke again.

  “Here’s a question for you. Hippocratic Oath...How does it go? First do no harm?” She twirled the trigger guard round her finger. Paul hoped he had left the safety on.

  “That’s for my personal protection.”

  Jane arched an eyebrow. “From your patients? Doesn’t seem like your brand of therapy is working, Doc.”

  She placed the cushion back over the guns. Paul tried a conciliatory tone.

  “Look, I can understand your...” he started to say before being interrupted again.

  “Have you had sex with me?” Jane snapped.

  “What!?” exclaimed Paul, “NO! Of course not.”

  Jane left the couch and squatted between his immobilized legs. “Because if you have,” she brushed the scissors across his crotch, “snip, snip...off with his head.”

  “I have not had sex with you, Alice!” Paul yelled, straining against the implacable tape. “Stop this! Alice! Cut it out!”

  “Mean it?”

  “No, please, Alice!”

  “Not Alice, it’s Jane,” she said, unzipping his pants. “Lucky you caught me in a good mood. I can be mean as a cut snake sometimes. Oops! Freudian slip.”

  “Jane, you’ve got to stop this!”

  Paul carried on in that vein, but she ignored him. She opened the fly wide. After she knocked him unconscious, it seemed as though something inside her must have snapped. The idea first took shape when she had hidden behind the wet bar. On a shelf in front of her nose was a roll of duct tape. Then after he fell from her blow, it came on her like a fever, she had to do it. Apparently the ground rules to her life
had changed dramatically. Were there any rules anymore? Why not? Pretext became necessity, or was it the other way round? Had she been kidnapped by a sex trade gang? She needed information quickly; this was the quickest way. Violating the sanctity of a man’s underpants with a sharp instrument. Enhanced interrogation. Choose your euphemism. But still, Jane knew she had really gone off the deep end this time.

  Paul bucked in the chair, which Jane immediately stabilized by leaning her weight onto it.

  “I wouldn’t make a sudden movement if I were you,” was her only response to Paul’s demand that she stop.

  Paul flinched as the blunt edge of the scissors lightly brushed the tip of his penis. Every muscle in his lower abdomen clenched inward. He knew that he had to regain control of this relationship as soon as possible. Somehow he had to maintain the mantle of an authority figure.

  “Alice...Jane, I meant Jane, don’t do something you’ll regret.”

  “The regret will be yours, if you’ve used me,” said Alice with a dark smile.

  “I have not! I swear to you ...”

  “You see, I do feel...interfered with.”

  “I assure you no one has interfered with you sexually in any way...”

  She widened the blades.

  “You’re a virgin!” shouted Paul, “You were examined at the hospital! Internally. A full medical examination, that’s all! Doctor Unwin said you are a virgin. Stop!”

  This registered. That fact was known only to her and her gynecologist. She withdrew the scissors. Ten minutes ago she had woken up in a strange place, with a vivid memory of what had occurred before she blacked out.