The Girl in the Blue Shoes

by Shaun Hume

  ‘But it’s gone into Stepping Phase, Professor,’ uttered The Girl in the Blue Shoes. I knew her voice enough, even if it was the first time I had heard it in that tone, strained and excited at once.

  ‘Any step you take closer towards the archway is a step you take closer to your death,’ said the original me, ignoring The Girl in the Blue Shoes’ words.

  ‘What choice do I have? To perish at my choosing or to perish at yours?’ I said.

  ‘But surely that would serve us both. You were created to serve my purpose, to fulfil the exceedingly important work that I have been doing here. Surely there is no nobler occupation than to be in the service of such a phenomenal discovery and effort?’ the other me retorted.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be my discovery too? Wouldn’t I be entitled to bask in its glories as well?’

  ‘You make an interesting argument,’ said the bearded, and for the first time, bedraggled me, an edge in his voice now betraying the terror. ‘But that is all it is, interesting, nothing more. Your purpose has been served, and now you need to relinquish that service. And later another will be made in your place.’

  ‘If that is truly your belief, that you would cast aside as quickly as you would create a being in your own image, that within flowed your own blood, then you are truly not me after all. We are not the same. We may have even ceased to be in any way alike.’

  ‘Maybe it is so,’ the other me said slowly, ‘but none of the past matters here and now. What is important is the future, and what can be revealed to the world though my discovery.’

  ‘You didn’t discover it, you invaded it, the portal was here an eon before you came along, surely you know this?’

  He smiled. Through wrinkled cheeks and stubbly hair, he smiled.

  ‘There’s still much of us both that remains intact. A discovery can be described as so many things. The public weren’t ready to see what could be seen back then.’

  ‘What makes you think they are any more ready now?’

  ‘I will make them ready,’ said he, as close to a manic gleam in the eye of someone that I have ever seen. It was this exact moment that I realised how much the two of us had truly changed in the time our souls had been apart.

  ‘Well, if I am of no further use to your plans,’ I blurted, ‘then I need not be a hindrance in this world.’

  ‘Finally you are embracing your fate. Nothing personal was ever meant; how could it be? You are, for all intents and purposes, my own flesh and blood. But in order to rise up and cast off the grappling chains of obscurity, one must make even the toughest of sacrifices.’

  Like Hell … Or perhaps, Heaven too.

  ‘It has been a long contemplation, I assure you,’ the self proclaimed original me went on in superiorly iced words. ‘But when you strayed back onto my path, there was no other choice to be made in the end than the one I have put before you. Don’t worry, we may yet see each other in another life.’

  ‘Or even,’ I breathed, ‘another world …’ And I leapt.

  19.

  I was bracing myself before I had realised, expecting the hard wall to greet me first, that I had done it all wrong, that the simple cinematic step through the portal was too cliché, too fanciful to be fantasy. But no wall did I hit, no fall to searing pain or throbbing stop did I experience.

  A flash pulled into my mind, of cold November days, dirty amber light and chill train windows. A full melody in my ears, speeding me on but letting me down. I was both content and incomplete at once. A memory? Or premonition? I was unsure of either, but I was unable to open my eyes to check. I plummeted deeper, the blackness grew greater, and all else fell silent.

  *

  Dark, breaking shadows flickered above me like shards of oil covered glass. My back felt cold, the back of my head wet.

  How long had I been lying on the chamber floor? Because that is where I must have been, having just bounced against the solid stone wall framed by the large carved arch. But it had been glowing, shining white and shimmering clean. No light was about me now, though, no nothing at all. At present I fell dozing into a small nap, but was abruptly woken by the sound of a sharp intake of breath. A breath, I only slowly now realised, was my own. I felt so tired. Layers of lethargy were dripping off me like coatings of paint. I thought best to allow myself this small parcel of rest, and so drifted away into sleep again.

  I dreamt tersely but vividly, visions of darkened silhouettes followed by even darker voices rang through my head. And when I woke it was with the thought of never actually gaining any respite. It was still cold and black all around me. Of course, being locked in, underground, this would continue to fit my fate. Prickles now pressed at my ears and I thought this was the forewarning of some sound coming my way, the time before, all silent. But the sharp bristly sensation died away and I was left alone again with my own breathings as soundtrack.

  I had not yet sat up, and with my eyes looking skyward still there came another sensation to me. Objects, slow moving but moving still, continued to do so above me. They were not living, nor mechanical, and caused me to rise to my feet in curiosity, that attribute outstripping what should have been one of fear and self preservation, so unusual were these slinking figures. The movement was smooth and clean and could only put me in the mind of clouds scudding slowly across a midnight sky. But how was this possible, inside? To see such things held in by four walls and roof? I resolved instantly to adjust my eyes, or else make them get on to do so, that I might make better sense of what I could see.

  I flicked my lashes together many times and with pronounced intention, the lids falling up and down like heavy clothed window blinds. I could make out blades of stone that rose up into the air, noticing them as walls that stood sheer and colourless against the sky. My mind then turned numbly to the thoughts of where it was I now resided, if not inside and among the walls of Christ Church.

  For the first time I felt a raspy breath on my face, a clammy breeze that was not fresh nor welcoming. Had I done it? Had it all really been true? Had I now passed from my own and into another world? Could it really be this, the spoken of Otherworld, that I had not let give me much other thoughts but of fantastical things in dreaming places? And the Girl. The Girl in the Blue Shoes. It had all been her, all her own persuasion, the reason I had followed so closely to the tail of … me. The thought stuck at my brain, a hammer of ice, solid and chilling, its crushing blow scolding and burning the soft mush now left inside my skull. Who was I? What was I? It was all too ghastly to consider.

  Taking great effort I pulled myself away from such contemplations, preferring to not enter into anything at all of the matter but concentrate instead on where I was, instead of what. I pulled what pieces it seemed there were left of myself, and then steeled to make my next move one of study in my surroundings. It was plain in my mind now that I had gained next to no information about this Otherworld, and even less was known to me about how one was to get back again to the world I knew. The arch I remembered well from Christ Church, but no counterpart around me could I see. The architecture before me was instead quite bleak in comparison. No details or flair was disposed onto the dirty rock fissure which I looked up towards at present.

  As my eyes finally did their work and began to steal what little light there was about this place, I considered myself to be along a small lane or street. It was too wide indeed to be an alley. But with the flat and featureless walls on either side, ones reaching high as if longing to bring the grey from above towards it, to brighten its sheen, the same claustrophobic pangs rang true along it. The ground was thankfully familiar, rough and cobbled, as are so many ways in Oxford.

  But what was this place?

  There was not a soul about to ask, the abundance of shadow and darkness rivalled for supremacy by the heaving silence that filled the place. Enough sense had returned to me to think about Time, and if it were exclusively concurrent from this world to my home that I had left behind. If it were so, this would be near middle night and, therefore,
a dark and lonely picture would not at all be an unusual one to witness.

  In the few words that had passed across her lips about the place, The Girl in the Blue Shoes had still said it was not a nice place. I huffed my chest up and tried to prepare myself for these devilish niceties. It certainly was a fearful looking place, beseeched with shadows of an ill manner and kind.

  Just then a cool wind whipped at my face and I was put in the mind of movement nearby. Gentle rustlings gave credence to this thought of something creeping close to me. Looking up again and about me offered no reward, and I felt my muscles tensing terribly, unsure if this was a side effect of the Stepping into the Otherworld or a symptom of the new fears which now gripped me. I wanted to slip into the cracks of the walls on either side of me, and for a manic fraction of a second I wrote this thought on my mind as an escape. But as quickly as the moment had arisen, then it was replaced by a more logical, if also more rash and hectic thought of where it was I would rush next. The sounds of movement thankfully only rose from one end of the deserted street I was in, the other laying in relative dormancy. With no other intention but that for preservation of life I hurried up towards this more dimly lit, but welcome looking end of the street.

  The burning moonlight now ignited above my head, and there was no other light but this. In my daze and confusion I identified my surroundings to be that of Oxford, even though I had no real confirmation that they were anything of the sort. The only cue the familiar tinge in both architecture and feel of the city I had left behind, slippery and uneven cobblestones in abundance below my feet. The liquidity and profundity of the darkness around me being as it was, I could scarcely trust any summation I would make about the construction and location of my new surroundings at any rate, and resolved quite rapidly to push the concern from my mind, its priority in all things current and pressing being now a low one.

  All sorts of frightening thoughts then began to drip into my mind. The determined regard with which I had followed my path, my whole obsession with what was afoot, what I thought was afoot, took over me then and I felt the sickly murmur of prickly regret. An almost suffocating sense ebbing out across me like cold sweat. It was then that I not only began to question my own decisions, but scepticism came with flooding rush, as though if what I was seeing was anything at all. Had I truly driven myself mad? Had I left myself behind when I had taken swift stride through that shimmering spectral archway? Was I now fast asleep, alone in a fitting bed, my body pained and strained in jerking rest? I didn’t care to speculate in which condition I now resided in.

  I cast around me for something, anything, to put me on track. But little could I see.

  Blue streets, black streets, darkened city by-streets. Amber streets, brown streets, yellowing like teeth streets. Red streets, purple streets, green and shining white streets.

  More thoughts like these drove themselves across my mind, and it was during this moment I feared I had truly descended into madness. There was no explanation for what I was seeing, and the thoughts were not thoughts. They were descriptions. The visions were not in my mind but unfolding in front of me.

  Then from the edges of my vision there began such a rush of figures as I have never seen. Although more engorged than a rush hour in London, I could by no clear means call them people. These floating monstrosities no more walked or moved than oozed into the streets ahead and all around me. Their dress was of what could be called human, but it was as though they were playing the part. So effectively repulsive were their features that I lost my own ability to stand, falling to my knees in contemplation. I felt then as if in a river, the growing tide enveloping me, but not with water. Instead, the pushing of these loping figures all around me heaved closer and closer, the drain on my mind as if it were bleeding its contents onto the ground.

  Suddenly then I felt pressure upon me and my senses set to explode into terror. They had found me! The beasts and twisted souls of this darkness-riddled place had found me, and lay upon my person their dirty claws!

  ‘Professor!’

  But no, a twinkle of light was there.

  I strained my eyes, my body, my whole being to look up at who it was now with arms around me, pulling me forward and away from the swell of sludge. I blinked through light like tar, the dim atmosphere now seeming to be devoid of gravity as well as light, and my eyes were ignited by a flourishing sight – The Girl in the Blue Shoes!

  ‘Come on, professor, we need to get you out of here!’

  It was then I surely receded almost back to my childhood, as I felt the power of the Girl take over. I have a passing memory that she near carried me away from that ghastly scene, as my eyes were clasped shut in the moment as though sealed by glue. The last moment of wakefulness I recall is the prising of my eyelids open once again, and to be laying catatonic on the cobbled ground. There were no angels in this world, nor any other, a blinding realisation then hit me like the cleaving of an axe. She cut the figure right then of a warrior. A light which was not of this world was emanating from her or around, of which I was in no shape to define, and I felt myself drink it in. Bathed as I was and some calmness returned.

  But this too was short lived.

  All too soon I had taken leave of my consciousness and, again, I saw darkness and nothing.

  *

  I lay, prostrate, on hard cold ground once again. My head no longer swam but paddled, as I regained the strength in the rest of me quite quickly. I raised my head to gain a bearing of my new surrounds, and almost fell deep into excruciating madness all over again.

  On my haunches, scrabbling backwards, I made a feeble attempt to get away from a clearly dead body right next to me. My dead body.

  I was dead.

  On the ground next to me was the bearded and dishevelled looking corpse of the real me, the me who had been the orchestrator of all the past week, the past years. The instigator of all which had ruled over my life in that recent time.

  ‘It had to be done,’ she said, my non-angel, my warrior saviour, The Girl in the Blue Shoes. ‘He ordered me to kill you.’ I looked down at the slowly greying me, a twisted neck on the otherwise unharmed body. ‘I followed my orders,’ The Girl in the Blue Shoes added on, more to herself than any other, ‘I just killed a different you – him.’

  She allowed herself a laconic smirk at this and I could not help but join her. I sat up a little more stoutly in my place and she met me on the dusty floor, crouching down to then sit cross-legged beside me. Her features relaxed, the Girl’s face sang. A perfect blend of radiance and power and wit.

  She smiled at me.

  ‘I’m Celine, by the way,’ said The Girl in the Blue Shoes, and held out her hand.

  ‘Jack,’ said I, taking her fingers and palm in mine, ‘so good to finally meet you.’

  You made it, you read the whole thing – thank you! In fact, it’s actually bloody freaking AMAZING! I can’t really ask more of you, to be honest, you just read my book … But if I could, maybe, possibly, I would give a pretty please to just one more thing. That thing, would be to ask you to leave a review for this novel on Amazon. To be fair, that’s about the best thing you could do. Even if you didn’t really like it. That’s cool too! A simple “I didn’t like it”, or more preferably, let’s be honest now, an “I liked it!” is all I would further ask. It would mean A LOT. I mean, a staggering amount. Really. Even close to how much it means that you read my book. Which you’ve already done. So super duper thanks again!

  All gratitude and respect,

  Shaun Hume

 

 

 
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