The Girl in the Blue Shoes

by Shaun Hume

  This girl before me did belong where she now stood. The girl I had seen twice before had not.

  It was an intricate thing to explain, the way the previous Girl had moved like she was a beat off everyone else in the street, the demeanour she had projected then of gazing unseeing at everything she passed. Despite the discrepancies, they were both indelibly connected, and my pursuance of this one would definitely lead me toward the existence of the other. There was no room in my mind, the swimming mess it now seemed, to think anything else.

  ‘What is your purpose here?’ I said with such conviction that I feel I may have frightened her for the mere moment it took this Girl to take a step back, her shoulders then drawn up, her chin aimed at my chest.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Doubt chased confusion over her face, but for a tart moment only, a hardened sheen of toughness then brought back to her expression. She paused, for only a second in our Time, before then adding: ‘We are right near the college here. If you make one more move towards me I’ll scream my lungs out.’

  ‘Are you sure you have any vocal chords to do such a thing?’ I offered as lightening in response, surprising even my own thoughts of wit and quickness of word. Here The Girl in the Blue Shoes seemed frozen as if an ice sculpture, her eyes filling with a glaze that no longer showed confusion but clarity, and some fear began to ebb in from her high cheeks.

  ‘Wh - what did you just say?’

  This struck me like a steel spoon on finest China, the reaction of someone who had heard perfectly well what I had said, and what’s more, understood its seemingly bizarre and cryptic meaning. I told her as much and she hastened to breathe an utterance further.

  ‘Who are you working for?’ she finally said, and although vehemently cliché, was neither a surprising nor strange reaction to me this time.

  ‘I work for myself, to answer my own questions and see to my own ends,’ is how I replied. ‘And unless you have an identical twin sister, then I shall be pursuing those ends upon your work, or whatever deleterious trade you dedicate your skills and time to.’

  A rather cantankerous slash of sentences as I had heaved at her was more than likely to inspire a faithless answer, an unfavourable attitude and flight. But so confident was I in my suppositions that it stoked the coals in my belly, the ensuing flames rising high to meet the back of my throat, a sharp hotness lighting my insides and spurring me along.

  At this point she gave a single but slight look over her shoulder, before then squaring the sharp pair of those peepers onto me, her darkened pupils shining with an eerie glaze. As though they had just been freshly painted onto her face.

  ‘Meet me on the top floor of the Starbucks on Cornmarket Street – tomorrow morning at ten.’

  I did no more than to nod conspiratorially in agreement and she left me then and there, her navy steps soon a far off blue dot on the grey pavement, and once again, out of my sights.

  It had been like a dream. All of a sudden, like a tornado touching ground in an instant and causing the deadliest of damage, I had seemingly just found the connection I had been looking for, and the promise of more to come in less than a day.

  I thought of going to a park and taking a load off, but I was much too excited to sit and wait. I would be useless, perched on the edge of some polished timber bench, twiddling my fingers as I counted the seconds until the meeting that was sure to put a blinding light on it all, the veil that I had seen freely floating in front of my eyes now swiftly cast aside.

  As the baking orange light of late day passed over into indigo dusk, and then bluing night crept close towards me, I thought of practical things. My day had been so filled with crackling anticipation paired with dogged determination, and my mind had in truth flowed through much darker and mystical valleys than I have relayed to you here.

  It moves in wicked ways, on occasion, of beats and flows which the world, this one we speak of, is made and ruled by. But elsewhere it can wander, across lands of unspeakable ruin and intricacy.

  But practicality was what I needed now, to calm my bones if nothing else.

  I set my memory, and then my feet, towards the train station once again, reluctant as I was to leave Oxford when all was oscillating around it, and me. What if The Girl in the Blue Shoes was to take flight? What if she had put word to her conspirators? I didn’t see that my predicament held much choice in the matter, so back again to London Town I sped.

  The hours that passed were ones of exhaustion and blurs, a subconscious preparation for what was to come. Before I had any firm grip back onto my most delicate of thoughts, I was back in the ancient university town once again, and ready for what this new day would hold.

  I paced the streets like a newborn, the day opening up as soft light greeted the streets. As the time came around and the event of my meeting with The Girl in the Blue Shoes approached, I had a quick dilemma with myself about whether to be early or late. In the end I settled with early, there then being no possibility, I hoped, of risking the loss of my only significant lead.

  I had bested her secret, but now was no time to play smug. Despite this, I was riding on a strengthened wave, all but certain that I even now knew enough to put pay to whatever The Girl in the Blue Shoes was up to.

  4.

  The establishment she’d chosen for our meeting was a settled crackle and hum, as I moved in to take my place in the far corner of the space.

  There were enough people present to give a steady buzz to the air, but not enough to drown out a full conversation. A sudden change to the room would be noticed, but then soon after forgotten. And any scene made would be remembered. My allowance of moments to ponder the outcome of my meeting expired soon though, as the appointment maker ascended the stairs.

  She had on the same attire as the day before before, with the addition of a thin jacket as companion to the rest of her outer skin. She had sharpened her facial features too, somehow, her nose a mite keener, her eyes a tad more threatening. These alterations, I envisioned, were not meant for me, but for any other forces who might already know her alliances, but not her full intentions.

  I let her eyeballs feel me out on their own, not meeting her gaze until she had approached the table, seconds before having had a visual appraisal of me finished in her mind.

  ‘Why did you agree to see me? I could have been anyone,’ I said by way of greeting.

  ‘You still could be,’ said The Girl in the Blue Shoes. ‘But is that really what you want to know? Why I agreed to meet you? Not what I agreed to meet with you about?’ Her tone of voice was rising already, and I was sure I could see the tiny hairs along the ridge of her neck bristling. I settled my breath.

  ‘No. Yesterday you seemed to know before I had even asked it.’

  ‘I admit that I knew what you were asking,’ she said, ‘but I didn’t know how.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘How do you know – know of any of this?’

  Here it was indeed my turn to hold and pause, as I rethought how I would proceed. I did of course have a strong, and now well and truly proved correct, idea. But what that idea meant I was as dark as night about.

  ‘I saw you. The day before yesterday – twice. But of course, it wasn’t really you, was it?’

  ‘You have no idea of the significance of what we are doing.’

  ‘We? Who are you? What is it you and your allies are working on?’

  Here The Girl in the Blue Shoes paused again, and although I sensed she was ready to divulge what she knew, there was a keen glimmer of something else. Not mere reluctance but contemplation, a careful and mechanical thinking, if what she was doing was right.

  ‘It’s called Otherworld Stepping. Steeping into a singular other world that is quite unlike our own in many ways, but still irrevocably connected to it.’

  Whatever the ‘this’, the whole idea or encompassing plot was that I had been expecting before, it was certainly not this.

  ‘You mean, it’s another dimension?’ I ventured, although th
e footsteps of my words slipping on dark and unseen ground.

  ‘No ... it is this world, it exists in all the space we have here. But it’s … different … ’

  ‘Different? What do you mean?’ She looked around her again, that pale friendless kind of look, as if her next words spoken might upset her own ears.

  ‘The Otherworld is just that, a new world where people walk, talk and think differently. Much like this … but in order for it to survive, this world can not exist. Not at the same time anyway.’

  My mind had traversed the summit of its most dizzying height. The Girl’s words were like buckets of thick tar, each being poured over my head in turn, so that with each layer of sludge my incomprehension grew thicker and thicker, blocking the resonance of any other idea, any sound at all.

  ‘The Otherworld has to be created,’ she went on, I feel finally sensing my mind was beginning to loose its grip. ‘Every time someone steps over, the Otherworld must be created again, from scratch. For this to be possible, the world as most of us know it can not longer exist, not simultaneously with the Otherworld. Another, kind of copy, must be made. When a person steps back into our own world, it must be reformed, swapped with the copy, in the blinking of an eye, just as it is with the Otherworld.

  ‘Our world needs to be put back together just as it was, and the Otherworld stops being. It’s a kind of like having a cosmic remote control, and being able to press pause on our whole existence, just exceedingly more complicated. But it can never be done perfectly, things can never go back to the way they have always been. There are sometimes glitches, small mistakes in the split second process it takes to rebuild our physical world entirely. That’s what you saw the other day … a glitch.’

  ‘What did I see? It wasn’t you, but it was …’

  ‘It was … but not the original me.’

  Crash!

  A barista carrying a tray of used cups and plates lost control of his load, and the lot thundered to the floor.

  I have to admit that for me the coffee shop had already dissolved all around me, falling into the black hole which surrounded everything which wasn’t The Girl in the Blue Shoes and the words she was speaking. At least, I think she was speaking them. I was no longer sure. The energy needed to attempt to process what she was telling me was almost beyond my reach. But not quite.

  I though of the grotesques, and of my friend. His story, his belief. And then I thought about him … he was an intellect of which rare minds are even scared of. Like a bull horn the fact slammed against the inside of my skull – this could be true. This could all be true!

  What was true was that, for now, I couldn’t believe my ears. I almost wouldn’t let myself. It was too fantastic, too remarkable to be so. Despite the determined certainty, the fractured thoughts I had had about the significance of The Girl in the Blue Shoes, they had still remained only that, ideas and theories.

  ‘When our world is recreated, it is done so just as it was,’ she went on, ‘every mountain, tree, animal and person. The world makes itself again, but does not take into account one thing … the person who has crossed over. They are created again, with everything within them that they were, but without the yardstick used for everything else still there.’

  ‘So what you’re saying is that what I saw was you?’ The sentence came stumbling from my mouth, tripping into another mix of words thereafter. ‘But only you up until you stepped into this Otherworld? If I had walked up to that you they would have no concept of having ever crossed over?’

  ‘Not that crossing, no.’

  ‘That time? You’ve been more than once?’ The Girl in the Blue Shoes replied to this particular question with a nod only. ‘But surely these … people, they don’t just continue with their lives? They’re clones.’

  ‘In many senses, yes,’ she said, ‘but as you have seen, this is a side effect we are still yet to have full control of.’

  ‘But it’s … dangerous. You can’t go forcing the whole world to reform itself, creating copies of yourself with each dash at it. People will notice.’

  A little white hot lick of anger rippled across my person now, and my intrigue subsided, giving way to my original feelings. Those of determination, of resolve to stop what was being done. At all costs.

  ‘Luckily, so far you are the first.’

  It was here when The Girl in the Blue Shoes became totally even. Her expression was one of calculation, not timid anxiety. She peered at me with thin eyes before turning her head again away. After this brief dip into measured calm, the Girl regained her cautious self and seemed ready to talk furthermore.

  ‘What you are meddling in shouldn’t be trifled with.’ I stamped my words down in front of her, determined to have my concern considered.

  ‘Whatever danger there may be is far outweighed by the significance of what we are doing.’

  ‘We? Again, we … ’

  ‘We are following the work of a professor, and the strict instructions he left behind that have allowed us to replicate and recreate the same circumstances that led to his initial passing over. He found a way to not only step into another world but exist there. Not a parallel dimension, or even a world on a far off planet, but a world in both chaos and order simultaneously. The only thing I’ve heard it contemporarily compared to is Hell.’

  ‘Are you telling me that this professor found passage though the fiery gates of Hell? It doesn’t exist. What you say is pure madness.’

  ‘I didn’t say it was Hell, it isn’t, but the best way to describe it would be as a form of afterlife, I suppose. Hell is just the title that it would be associated with, the terms that any other victim of popular culture would instantly assign to such a thing in order make sense of it. There are no souls rotting in internal damnation, no Devil sitting on his flaming throne. Nor is there any ethereal figure in white, either. But the appearance of the world, the reason for its existence, these would match most closely to the popular notion of both of these.’

  ‘Its existence? You mean it was created as an afterlife?

  ‘Not created, no.’

  ‘Found?’

  The Girl in the Blue Shoes hesitated, and cast her eyes over each shoulder in another brief fit of cliché cautious behaviour. She seemed not only unwilling to answer my last question but unable to also.

  ‘And where is this professor?’ I asked, by means of changing tack.

  ‘He is … in transit.’

  I puzzled on the information bombarding me, and then quickly questioned if it really was information at all. This all sounded like the frenzied ramblings of some crackpot old Oxford lad gone wrong. Surely I had only just stumbled upon one delusion facilitating another, a young protégé lapping up the crazy thoughts of their addled of mind role model.

  ‘I’ve been there.’ She spoke with careful elegance right now, her wisps of breath more pronounced. She cared not to tell me more, but the significance of the telling was laced with a profundity of her own heart that was as clear to me as street spattered mud on a pure white dress.

  Her three words were said in accentuation, but they were spoken as if for the first time, almost like she was trying to remind herself, convince herself it was all true. As if maybe a part of her still thought it could all be a dream.

  And then I thought about who these few people were in this cumulative ‘we’ she spoke of, and why they were selected. And who was this professor she spoke of … ? Again, I thought of my good friend.

  The Girl in the Blue Shoes had struck me as being many things, but more and more, a college professor was not one of them. Even the title of astute student would not have fit her bill. She had a deep and brutal courage within her, that was evident to see, a strength that would easily not be seen by most people behind the fine mask of her clear beauty. She had hardened herself through other tests. They may have included those studied for and faced at a desk with paper and pencil, but for the most part they were not.

  She gave me a look now, the power of soldier across h
er face. The look of a fighter.

  Wherever this place was she spoke about, this Otherworld, if it was real at all, and if it was all that she had said, a college professor would be lucky to last five minutes among the demons and toil and storms and formidable foes that presumably existed there.

  I crooked another look at her and began to doubt the whole story, and whether any of this could truly be the work of a scholar. The professor she spoke of was clearly not just that, but a combination of many things, the university acting merely as port for his latest docking.

  ‘But how do you get back when you want to? Why didn’t this professor just come back the same way?’ I set upon her another two pronged question.

  ‘Return relies on being in the right place at the right time, and when the right circumstances are put into place. Much like it is to cross over in the from here to there.’

  She paused for a second, as if to gather her wits a little. But within a swift second further she seemed to regain whatever composure she had lost, and streamed on.

  ‘He wanted to explore more deeply. He listed his intentions in his notes quite clearly, along with the evidential risks that might arise from doing this.’

  ‘And who is this professor? What’s his name?’

  ‘We don’t know it, no one does.’

  ‘Surely he left a name?’ I confess to becoming a little frustrated at this point, the excitement of my gaining an audience with The Girl in the Blue Shoes replaced here and there during our conversation by little twists of disappointment at her lack of tangible forthcoming information.

  ‘No. Nothing but the instructions. He was working, as far as we can gather, in complete isolation on the project. He told no one of it. All we know is what he wrote in his notes, and what was to be done if he had not returned by his specifically planned time. His first crossing was by complete accident, and it was only after this that he began to look into things more deeply, searching for explanations to his growing questions. The first time he returned it was no where near Oxford, not even in Europe. It took him two months to get back to Oxford. He was’t sure if it was ever going to be possible to control the return. He could have ended up anywhere. ’