Taking the Tube to the Outer Limits

by Darren Humphries

  There was no going back now. This was his one chance to fulfil his life’s work. Before, he could have descended and nobody would have known that he had defied the ruling of the council. Perhaps he would have been able to argue with them and persuade them to let him undertake the journey legally. He doubted that; his powers of persuasion were far less than those of his wife and she had failed to convince them earlier this evening. What chance did he have?

  He shouldered the pack once more and continued to climb.

  The solution to the problem of the final ascent had firmed up in his mind as he worked his way up the height of the wall. He was in no way sure that it would work, but it was the only way he could think of and he would not consider the idea that he could come so far, so close, and fail. He had paused only once more on the mammoth climb and that was to don the warm clothes as the falling temperature overcame even the heat his muscles generated by the walking and climbing. He could not consider how many steps he had taken up the sloping platforms and how many rungs he had climbed on the ladders slung between them, but he had spent twenty years of hard work in building those same platforms and ladders and that had prepared him for the effort.

  The solution was simple; a rope. Unfortunately, the problem with that solution was the wall itself. No grapnel would dig into the top of the wall and hold his weight. He had no tool that would make even a small hole in the material that the wall was constructed of and so had no way of anchoring the rope. His only hope was friction.

  In the early years of construction, he had soon found that lugging his tools up to the summit in the morning and then again down to the base in the evening was a great deal of wasted effort and so had invested in a whole second set, considered as something of an extravagance amongst the villagers at the time. These he kept stored in a bundle on the uppermost platform, wrapped in a stretch of oilskin. It was the oilskin that was the key to achieving his goal now.

  On reaching the top of the wall, Cal opened the oilskin and laid aside the tools. From his wife’s sewing kit in the bedroom, he had brought a darning needle and the coarsest thread that she possessed. He used this to fashion a small roll at one end of the oilskin into which he could sew some of the tools. To the other end, he fixed the rope. When he was ready, he lowered the rope over the edge of the highest platform and started to swing it, letting more rope out with each swing, stopping at each knot in the length in turn. Finally, when he believed that he had enough line, he launched the weighted oilskin upward at the end of its swing. It reached up over the wall and disappeared from his sight on the first attempt. Since the ladder that he had built for this final distance had been the first part of the construction, it had not been the longest, and the precious summit was not so far above him.

  The oilskin alone would not support his weight, he knew, and so Cal launched the rest of his tools up onto the top of the wall as accurately as he could, considering that he could not see his target. Their weight wouldn’t be enough to support him either, but there was one last piece of fortune that he was relying on now.

  In the same way that Cal had found the carrying of his tools up and down the height of the construction too onerous, the raising of raw materials was also a problem. He was strong enough carry the planks and spars and ropes and pins up on his shoulders, but he was also smart enough not to want to and so he had built the lifting pulleys. Simple, but delicately balanced affairs, they allowed for the bundles of materials to be lifted by the force of gravity. There were two baskets on either side of each lifting platform and by adding stones to either of the baskets, he could make the platform rise or descend. As he moved to each higher point, he added a new lifting pulley. Now, he locked the last one into place and removed all the stones that worked the mechanism. These too, he threw up over the edge of the wall, hoping that he had guessed the location of the oilskin correctly. When he had used half of the available supply, he tested the rope. It moved under his tug, but less than he might have expected and so he added the rest of the stones to his arsenal and added more weight to the oilskin. When he tested it again, the rope did not move.

  He picked up the lantern and fixed it to his belt and placed his foot on the first knot. If the oilskin didn’t hold, there was a fair chance that he would miss the platform when he fell and would plunge the full height of the wall onto the ground below. He doubted that anyone would be able identify what was left after an impact like that as being human, let alone put a name to the body.

  Such thoughts were both worrying and distracting, so he set them aside, took a deep breath and climbed. Within seconds, he was at the point where the rope’s length became horizontal and he hauled himself up into the place that had taken twenty years of his life to reach.

  He was on top of the wall.

  As he lay on his back, catching his breath, he laughed. All those years of work and effort and knowing that others were looking at him strangely and questioning his sanity behind his back came out in that laugh, which sounded a bit hysterical in the empty, dark nothingness.

  Rolling over, he grabbed some of the rocks and tools that had missed their target and placed them on the oilskin, fixing the anchor even more firmly. He then tried to climb to his feet, but was quickly persuaded against this course of action. There was a wind blowing over the wall that could barely be felt when lying down, but as he got to his knees, it started to tug at his back. When he tried to rise, it pushed hard at him and would have blown him back off the edge had he not dropped back to a prone position.

  Well, if he had to crawl on his hands and knees to the other side of the wall then that is what he would do. He set the lantern before him and started to crawl.

  Cal was in a world of darkness. There was an orb of light surrounding him from the lantern, but it illuminated nothing. The sky was black, the top of the wall beneath his hands and his knees and his feet was black. There was nothing. He was alone, pinned to the largest construction ever seen by the light of a single wick.

  He crawled. It seemed like forever that he crawled. He began to wonder if he was crawling at all because nothing changed. Perhaps he was crawling around in a circle and not actually advancing at all. Perhaps the wall was miles thick and he would never reach the end. The wind had picked up and now he could feel it pressing against him even so low against the top of the wall. It carried ice in it, which stung his exposed face. Even the elements seemed determined to keep him from his goal.

  He paused in his crawling. There, up ahead, he thought he saw something beyond the cast of the lantern. He held his hand over the lens. The white spicules of ice in the wind were extinguished with no light to reflect. Ahead, there was only darkness.

  But he had thought…

  He continued to crawl and the horizontal snowstorm grew stronger. The flurries of white flakes and icy pellets became blinding, both by reflecting the light of the lantern directly back into his eyes and by blinding those same eyes with tears from the constant onslaught.

  Peering ahead, though, he was certain that he could see the other side of the wall. There was light there. It was faint, but there was a glow of luminance spilling up over the construction’s edge. He redoubled his pace against the storm, renewed by the closeness of his goal.

  Then, he realised his mistake.

  “Fire!” someone screamed outside the house.

  Orla awoke immediately. She had only been dozing fitfully, waiting for some news, some sign, some sound to signify that Cal had returned. The alarm shout was taken up by other voices as she pulled the blanket about her and went to the door to see what was happening. There were others in the street, looking up the valley. Alarmed, she turned and saw that the wall was burning.

  No, not the wall!

  It was Cal’s construction that was burning brightly in the night, the tracery of ladders and platforms a red spider web across the dark face of the wall.

  “No!” she screamed. How could they have done that? How could they have destroyed it in the night? Had that been the council�
��s plan all along; burn down the problem whilst they both slept? They couldn’t know that Cal had gone, that he had ascended the wall and that now he had no way to come back to her.

  She dropped the blanket and ran, not caring that she was dressed only in her night shift, not caring that the night was at its coldest or that there was a drift of snow descending from the heights above the wall. She ran knowing that there was nothing that she could do. The whole of the bottom half of Cal’s life’s work was ablaze and each moment saw another level turn orange. She wondered, irrelevantly, if the flames would reach the top before they so weakened the base that it collapsed and brought the unburning levels crashing down. That was the kind of question that Cal would have asked, she knew, and that was why they were so suited to each other.

  Other villagers were running now and some of them were faster than her, forging ahead through a night that was no longer dark, but illuminated by a warm and ruddy glow. They topped a small rise just prior to the base of the wall and came to a halt, congregating there, staring. Orla caught up with them and tried to break through, but hands caught her and held her strong.

  “No, no closer,” voices warned.

  “You’ll be burned.”

  “When that comes down it will spread and we may already be too close.”

  “The whole village may be too close.”

  She fought and struggled against them, but new, stronger arms took hold of her and a voice whispered to her urgently, “Be still. Be still, my love.”

  She looked up frantically and it was Cal. His face was cut and reddened by ice and blackened by soot and there was a wild look in his eyes that she had never seen in all the years that he had been chasing his goal, but it was him.

  “Move away neighbours!” Cal shouted over the roar of the fire.

  Having only dealt with hearth and cooking fires, Orla would not have believed that something burning could make so much noise.

  “It should not topple, but I cannot be certain.”

  Orla searched her husband’s face as he shouted out warnings to the other villagers, more of whom were arriving all the time.

  “Did you… did you do this?” she asked, not able to believe it.

  “I did,” Cal confirmed and the wildness in his eyes as he did so frightened her. “Move away, neighbours!”

  The first major support spar cracked with a sound like cannon fire. Nobody in the village had actually heard a cannon being fired, but they were all able to imagine that it sounded exactly like that. Cal had to give no more warnings. Part of the base, far to the left, shuddered and groaned and sagged as the burning timbers became less able to support the weight. Then they became unable to support anything and the construction fell.

  Cal had told them that it would not topple and he was right. The base caved in with a rippling effect along its full width. As it did so, the levels above sagged down, sliding down the face of the wall and adding new fuel to the flames. Sparks flew upward in curtains of red and orange light and the villagers made an inarticulate sound that combined fear and the appreciation that they were witnessing a great sight. Bindings that had been soaked and coated to withstand the elements exploded in the heat. Sap in the wood, especially the upper reaches which had not had to weather twenty years in the open air, also erupted as the intense heat cooked it. The titanic construction fell in on itself and burned.

  The lead councilman, a bluff farmer whose willingness to admit when he had been proven wrong was tempered only by his unwillingness to listen to anyone who was trying to prove him wrong, joined the front row of the spectators.

  “Cal, Cal, did you do this?”

  Cal stared at the flames and said nothing.

  “It was his right!” Orla announced angrily, squaring up to the council leader. “The council made the decision, but it was his right to carry it out!”

  Under the intensity of her gaze, the man’s certainty deserted him slightly. “We will discuss it in the morning.”

  Orla continued to glare at him until he moved a few steps away, joining a family group to watch the blaze.

  It was dawn before the spectacle was over and people began returning to their homes to start the work of the day. The lightening sky had come to their attention late, being challenged as it was by the blaze at the foot of the wall. The bare rock there glowed red from the blaze and a few of the closer scrub plants had been scorched, but the heat had sent the embers soaring up the face of the wall to be lost in the skies above. The village’s roofs were considered to be safe. The council set a watch, just to make sure and the rest of the village drifted away back to their less interesting lives.

  Orla led Cal into the house and guided him into a seat by the table. She set about fixing some porridge and hot tea, acting as though there was nothing amiss, as though the morning was just as all the others since the day they were wed. She even hummed a little.

  Cal remained silent. As the fire had consumed his work, so it had consumed the wildness within him. Where there was a simmering pile of burned out ashen logs at the foot of the wall, there seemed to be an equally burned out shell where her husband had been.

  She placed the bowl and cup in front of him and sat across the table from him, ignoring her own breakfast as completely as he did the one she had set before him.

  “The council will want answers and we will have them to give,” she said briskly, when she saw that the food smells were not going to rouse him. “Upon hearing the decision of the council, you were upset, understandably. I think that everyone will be able to understand that and, more importantly, will be able to believe it. You tossed and turned in bed all night and then finally went out and set the fire. That is the story that we will tell. It will hold, if we remain firm to it.”

  When he did not answer, she asked firmly, “Do you understand me?”

  “What?” he said, coming abruptly back from the distant place where his attention had been residing.

  “Accepted the council’s decision, didn’t like it, tossed, turned, set the fire,” she summarised. “You can remember that?”

  “Yes, yes, I can remember that,” he told her, though his confused tone suggested otherwise. “It is a believable story.”

  “Except,” Orla fixed him with her strongest gaze, “I need to know.”

  “Need to know what?” he asked, looking around as if only now realising where he was.

  “What you saw, on the other side of the wall.”

  “I did not reach the other side of the wall.”

  “But you saw something,” she accused him. “You saw something that drove you part mad, that so terrified you that you came back and burned down the only way to reach it, or for it to reach us. I have a right to know. I have not come with you so far to be denied this at the last. What did you see?”

  “I saw me,” he cried suddenly. “I saw me crawling across the top of the wall towards me.”

  “What?” Orla asked, confused.

  “Only it wasn’t me,” Cal was speaking now, but not to her. He was staring beyond her and he was seeing not the house in which they had lived since they were married, but the dark and windswept top of the wall, ice flurrying around and blinding him and, beyond his own small globe of light, another lantern being inched forward by another prone figure. “The clothes were different, the light of his lantern had coloured glass and cast a greenish glow, his nose had been broken, but it was me, another me, crawling across the top of the wall from… from…”

  “Another Higholme,” Orla finished the sentence, her mind struggling to deal with the concept. “With another… me. Perhaps a whole other continent of kingdoms, just like ours, but not quite like ours. A place where perhaps another Cal is having this conversation with another Orla. Or perhaps he never married, or married someone else, or perhaps she died”. The idea was overwhelming. That there could be another her, another Orla. Perhaps an Orla who had done more with her life; left Higholme and travelled beyond the valley, selling her skills along the way, seeing the w
orld beyond this village she called home. An Orla who had made the most of all the opportunities that she never had, had taken the chances she never did. Or worse, perhaps that Orla was exactly the same as she was and perhaps there really was nothing more to her than wife, healer and councilwoman. And perhaps that other Orla was dead, taken from the other world by illness or misadventure. Would it be worse that there was another world like this one with a hole where she ought to be?

  Was that other Orla having the same thoughts, battling the same confusion, fear and doubt? Was she as frightened? How would she be reacting? What would she be saying, doing?

  “Another world, like ours, but not like ours, separated from us by the wall,” Cal agreed, some of the wildness returning to his eyes.

  “They cannot know,” Orla realised suddenly, wondering if that other Orla had just uttered the same words. “It is enough to send a man mad. They must not know, ever.”

  Alec stood looking at the smouldering remains of a construction that was as much a part of his life as the wall itself. Now that the delicate-seeming latticework of ladders and platforms was gone, the wall appeared naked and plain and even more imposing. Alec thought of all the years of work that Cal had put into that construction, more than twice as many years as Alec had been alive. So much effort for it all to be undone by a decision made by a fear-filled council. There had to be a better way, one that the council couldn’t interfere with. And then he realised…

  There is!

  Full Disclosure

  The door could not have been any more anonymous had it been enrolled in a witness protection programme. It was a standard, dark-coloured (they were on the shaded side of the street, so it was impossible to tell if it was black or very dark blue) two-panelled door giving access into a very unmemorable grey concrete building on an unremarkable street in one of London’s business districts. All around it, there were branch offices and corporate headquarters of accountants, legal firms, PR companies, model agencies, one luxury car showroom, an independent film production company and a national trade union. The only difference between this building and all those others was that there was no sign, or even a plaque, screaming the name of the company residing within. There was also no constant stream of people entering and leaving on a myriad of errands and tasks.