The Girl in the Blue Shoes

by Shaun Hume

  ‘So you see my lad,’ he said, drawing a huge breath from a new breeze that had just sailed in through a thin set of open French doors, ‘yours are not the first observations to be kept on these strange people wandering our fair town. These have been the only three I have seen so far, although I have read but a dusting of my encounters with them. I have not yet the full facts, I feel, to make sense of them. But I dare say you have a theory?’

  He peered at me with clear intent, the same sort of look the old man plastered upon his face and set often toward me whenever he sought to challenge my quickening mind. But before now these had been tasks of thought purely in the spirit of spirit’s sake. Mere brainstorms of low precipitation when compared with the hurricane we had both unearthed. Now it felt a much headier weight was behind those lions eyes, one filled not only with expectation, but this time dependance, a rigid steel of hope and longing attached to his otherwise normalised eagerness.

  ‘Of course,’ I said without, at least not at that moment, the highest grade of confidence that I did. I knew what I had been told, but now I wasn’t entirely sure what I believed.

  ‘I spoke to one of them,’ I said with as solid a set of words that I could muster, ‘well, one of the originals of their copy.’

  ‘You what? To one of the Echos?’

  ‘Echos? She called them Duplicates.’

  ‘Duplicates, eh? Yes. Duplicates. Yes, that does make more sense. And this lines up more into your theory I dare say, my boy? What did this “Duplicate” tell you then?’

  ‘She said she wasn’t an actual Duplicate, but that what I had seen before, her exact copy, was one. It was a being which was created when she or another in her team did something they called “Otherworld Stepping”. She described it as a –’

  ‘Wait a nanosecond right there – team? What team?’

  The wind around the house whipped up just then, and a light spring shower cast a veil over the house now, thin droplets of water beading like glass freckles on the faces of all the windows in sight.

  ‘She said she was working under the instructions of some professor.’

  ‘From where?’

  ‘From Oxford – I gathered.’

  ‘Which college?’

  ‘She couldn’t say.’

  ‘She couldn’t or she wouldn’t?

  ‘She said even she didn’t know his identity, no one did, that there was some sort of manifest and instructions left behind, and her name was among it. That’s how she became involved in this business.’

  Bertie paused and took his eyes off me for a moment, tapping his two index fingers against each other in front of his nose.

  ‘What is her background?’

  ‘That she wouldn’t say either, but I suspect it isn’t academic.’

  ‘What made you think that?’

  Here it was my turn to pause and to contemplate, and I recalled my dream of the night before. There was little smooth detail which crystallised in my mind right then, but the memory of a connection, between The Girl in the Blue Shoes and I, throbbed somewhat at the base of my body.

  ‘Just a feeling, Bertie.’

  The old professor sat back a mite in his chair, considering me again from his perch. I didn’t like to speculate anything about his thoughts of me right then, but I sense he knew I was not revealing all which I had experienced. His shifting face structure I took as compromise, and he slotted himself back into a more regular pose.

  ‘And what of this so called professor, is he truly of Oxford ilk?’

  ‘I can’t believe I allowed her to divulge so little, Bertie, I could get nothing out of her about this so called professor. Of his true origins I know nothing, only that of her word.’ Bertie sat back in his chair and gave me an appraising look, one I had seen in his earl grey eyes before, him gazing at me as if I had just handed in an essay a week early.

  ‘So you doubt this person is even a professor?’ said he, catching my drift in an instant.

  ‘They may well be a professor,’ I replied, feeling a little easier that I could release my suspicions onto someone who would take them seriously. ‘But that is not all he is. Certainly no lifetime scholar. Whoever this orchestrator is, they have dabbled their hand in much more than ancient theology among the stones of a college.’

  I waited, as I knew I should, as I had done many times before, like watching a mighty cloud skirt slowly round the spiking edges of a craggy highland mountain; the master mulled his problem until it was time to say his bit.

  Bertie took a long time before allowing words to pass over his lips. Only a small number of gruffly hums and feathers of breath escaping his mouth otherwise, before finally he spoke.

  ‘Well … I suppose there is much we can do at this point, but many times more which we cannot. I don’t like the tides that are turning now on our shores, my boy. It bodes us something ill. Something ill to us all. But enough of this! This is the first time you have visited me in almost two years since you walked out on the college, old boy – come! Tell me what else you have been doing with your no doubt now wasted existence.’ Bertie smiled. He had never meant an ounce of malice towards me, only the outward spoken wisdoms of a well wandered man.

  I then regaled him with a watered down description of what had become of me in the last twelve to twenty four months. In truth, there had been a lengthy gap from any paid work, my time during the last year or so spent mostly drifting like a ghost, through the libraries and archives and churches of London. I had been looking for some vital pieces of a puzzle which I had set myself upon solving some time ago. I was still in Oxford when I began work upon the real reason I made my way to the rusty city of London to live, and I hoped, to solve.

  ‘And the grotesques?’ he asked with a raise in his features, ‘you’re keeping away from the roofs while you are back here?’ He said it by means of fighting back to normalcy, I was sure of it, ready for idle chit chat after the intensity of what he needed to get off of his chest had passed.

  ‘Of course,’ I replied without hesitation, the even lie a grateful one to keep upon in order to maintain such serene circumstances as the meeting of discoveries and the pooling of information.

  ‘Ah,’ Bertie motioned in tired approval. We then talked on further about times of old, and into the night we sat with a constant stream of hot tea on the table and Bertie’s favourite French cream biscuits building up in our stomachs. Late enough in the evening Bertie adjourned to his Egyptian cotton and I took place on the couch and settled in for the night.

  7.

  The young hours of the morning failed to deliver much sleep, and instead a new twist turned my mind and warped my skin. A creeping paranoia had nested in my mind like a restless spider, and now set about touching nerves and prickling thoughts.

  I spent waking hour after waking hour with my ears sharpened on every sigh of the night air, every footstep of the creeping moonlight, now determined that my new foes would soon make their strike onto me without delay. So potent were my thoughts of encroaching ill that I steeled myself to, for the first time in my life, sleep upright and in a seated position, back to the wall and my face to the door. But the next moment I considered this idea fanciful, and the knowledge of what I had found out empowered my spirits, letting me in with a keener sense of confidence that felt dangerous to say the least, and a new hotness took over me.

  I had discovered their secret, me. And there was nothing too outwitting for the one who had left all others outwitted. A strange sense of steady euphoria began to loosely wend its way through my bloodstream. Or so it felt like, the feeling like that of sitting in an empty bath that was slowly being filled with perfectly warm water, the sensation of total warmth and total comfortability a present one.

  After this stage of inwards boast there was not much chance of reaching any deep state of rest, and the sum of the night was passed through in a succession of small and intense naps, culminated with quick and feverish bouts of self talk and planning.The plans I was making were to do with
everything. Some of them, quite ludicrously enough, were about how I was to live on in the future, after I was made famous by the public revelations of my sensational discoveries.

  By the first tiny creeping fingers of daylight I fancy I had wadded into the shallows of a mild delirium, the combination of sleeplessness and nervous adrenalin swilling together to make a mixture not unlike that of someone who had been chemically addled. However, the next actions I remember were my ears drinking in the sound of the crisp chink of tea cup on saucer and a kettle at the height of its boil, Bertie in the midst of preparing breakfast. I can only assume that sleep, in some form, had reached through the brambles of my previous shrubby state and met with the rest of me, a small bubble of gratifying rest rising in my chest.

  I rolled aching joints from the spongy couch to be greeted by a plate of fried egg sat upon butter soaked toast. A steaming mug of English Breakfast stood proudly within arms-length of me, and I reached for it thankfully. Gulping down hot tea and shovelling fried food into my mouth like an undergraduate late for an exam, I spoke little as Bertie watched me eat.

  Although it was not uncommon for him to take a liquid breakfast of coffee and nothing more, this morning Bertie seemed on edge, and not even a steaming beverage touched his lips as he continued to sit by my side.

  As I polished off my well prepared meal I noticed his vision stray more than once out of the living room windows and into the garden behind, a less wistful but more alert look about his face.

  ‘You must still tread with enough caution, my friend,’ said he finally, now with a special brand of concern in his voice.

  ‘I will, I will,’ I said, an almost offhand note in my words as I got to my feet and made ready to leave. But to my surprise, my old friend rose to his own slipper-clad feet quicker than I, rushing to face me head on with the speed of a child.

  His behaviour saw me feel further thoughts of shock, as Bertie grabbed the sleeve of right arm, his tangled grip a strong one, pulling me closer to his eyes. I stared deep into them, cool and shiny pools of liquid platinum, before he uttered a handful of words that while soft, rattled with emphasis.

  ‘The matter is a nefarious one – keep your wits about you,’ he said, his eyes like molten metal now. Bertie gave me one more heartfelt little shake of my shoulders, and then just as quickly released me, waving my clutching words away as he walked into his study.

  As if to fulfil Bertie’s prophecy of warning, that day I had real occasion to be concerned that I was being followed.

  After turning from Bath Place into Longwall Street I glanced up at the Magdalen College sundial, and had the strangest compulsion to look back over my shoulder and down the street from where I had just come.

  A feeling like a tentacle had just been grappled round my neck was the impetus for what quickly became a rational reaction, an instinctive movement that could not be left undone at that exact moment. Later I suppose I would have thought it impulsive. What I saw was nothing more than I expected, except that a cold thought took me on a day barely below twenty six degrees in the C.

  I saw a man in a blank navy coat and tan trousers. He was the usual specimen anyone would expect to see on the ambling streets of Oxford at any time of the afternoon, so I can’t say why the sight of him took me so.

  I turned my attentions back onto my path and soon crossed Abberbury Avenue and down the short Rose Lane, my nose pointed towards the Meadow. I manoeuvred my way though the tall gate and chanced another look to my back, my eyes resting on the same man I had seen not more than a few moments ago.

  It was no irregular thing for anyone to copy my path with similar intentions of walking towards the laid out green beyond, but it never struck me for a moment that this was the intention of this man.

  He had sunglasses upon his face, and for a moment I laughed at the absurdity of his cliché appearance. I quickly thought better though, and hastened myself even quicker along the path which borders the sports fields on one side, Merton College on the other.

  Still he followed my progress, and even matched my pace, failing to fall back from my heels despite the rise in my foot-speed. I could feel sweat beading on the back of my neck like blooming flowers and headed for the most crowded spot close to hand, then sitting down on a bench.

  I gazed up at Christ Church in polite recognition and watched the Sunglasses Man pass me by without so much as a dirty stare. He kept on passing until he was on St. Aldate’s and out of sight. My pulse fell and my neck dried as I sat for a good half hour, trying to calm as well as trying to think.

  My assumptions, and more so Bertie’s warnings, had not only been proved correct about the whole business of sinister goings on, but also my premonitions about what might next be the move of those involved. Of this I was now certain. They were watching me, and watching closely. Their profile was low, but animated, leaving me with trepidation soaked thoughts of how next to proceed.

  8.

  I stayed where I was for a further good forty-five minutes. In that time I allowed myself to trivially scorn the absence of the plaguing ivy that once took control like a virus over almost the whole of the south facing facade of Christ Church, my thoughts dipping into such shallow waters of mild annoyance a welcome boon.

  I had never seen the creeping greenery as a hindrance, and had until this day and further on questioned the college’s insistence on being rid of it.

  Dust is what I could taste in my mouth now, so long had I been among the thousands of wandering shoes of tourists, the particles of path below their feet flying up and sitting in the air like tiny yellowy-brown flies.

  I walked the shortest route back to my B&B room, keeping a weary eye on my path as I went, both of the stone that lay before me and that which I had just trod upon. My special attention was sharpened for quick walking characters emerging from thin streets on my flanks.

  I got to the establishment and ascended the stairs with quick intention, none of it for wanting to see the lady of the house. But as it is with these places, the hosts of them seem to be capable of a superhuman ability when it comes to noticing shoes passing over their thresholds.

  ‘I told your friends that you were out,’ she called from the depths of the kitchen, an admittedly persuadable pungent smell of roasting lamb wafting up the stairs with her clear words. My progress crumpled and froze.

  ‘Friends?’ I called back.

  ‘Yes, two gentlemen. They seemed rather keen to get a hold of you.’

  I didn’t bother to waste a millisecond more as I took the next half dozen or so steps at a leap and dived into my room.

  Deciding to leave the bulk of my possessions I had brought down from London for my extended stay, which had never been much in the first place, I hurriedly threw my notebooks into a carrier bag and had turned towards the stairs again when I stopped myself.

  Prickling thoughts fell about my mind, and I asked myself of their meaning. Why would my pursuers go to all the trouble of calling into my lodgings, making themselves be known, and then desert the area? It was clear – they were watching. They were still watching. And now they were laying in wait to snap me up like a vole in the jaws of a dog, the despicable mutts already self-assured in their catch.

  I crossed the room and opened out the small lattice window, taking care to do so slowly and without yet protruding my head from within. I took a full look out and was inwardly thankful of Oxford for its many roofs and drainpipes and gutters that interconnected with one another, like man-made creeping vines, criss crossing their way along the rooftops like black dew laden spider webs.

  As I edged myself out of the window and onto the ledge, I briefly registered the approaching twilight and thought of Bertie’s words, and the grotesques who would soon be set free. Surely they were already watching me with hungry eyes, not daring to believe their luck had been aided so fortuitously in the pursuance of some prey.

  The drop to the next roof was barely a large step down, and I took it slowly enough to keep plenty of balance. I trod a
s carefully as I was able, all the while trying to infuse the mix with as much pace as possible too. I did my best impression of an alley cat, scurrying towards solid ground, and was conscious of not putting myself in more mortal danger than I was submerged into already.

  I soon came to the edge of a small but impeccability well kept back garden. It was my nearest opportunity for a way down, so I dropped my Tesco bag gently to the grass below and turned around backwards, throwing my legs over the side, letting the rest of my body dangle downwards until I could feel solid ground underneath my soles again.

  I edged down the thin path that ran along the side of the house and managed to exit the property without being seen by its inhabitants, nor being noticed by the surrounding suburban traffic. I immediately set off into a brisk pace, following on no real path of determination, as long as it took me away from where I had just been. Distance was key at the moment, distance between me and my pursuers.

  I got what I thought was at least a mile away from my previous lodgings when I stopped and took a seat on a low wall. As I caught my breath a little, I allowed my mind to calm somewhat, challenging my apprehensions.

  Could it have been a mere coincidence, a fluke of misunderstanding which had seen the two men that had stopped to visit as friends cross paths near me? Were they really meaning me ill?

  Of course they were.

  What other alternative could there be? No one that I knew back in the city was even aware where I was, nor any of my limited friends. I had not visited anyone from my past while in Oxford either, with the obvious exception of Bertie. And these were people I seldom saw on a regular basis at any rate. How were they to know nor care of my current whereabouts? The answer was they couldn’t nor wouldn’t. The only people eager to see me now were those keen to stop me being seen by anyone else ever again.