The House Next Door Trilogy (Books 1-3)

by Jule Owen

“I don’t know. They wouldn’t tell us. They were careful about speaking in front of us.”

  “You didn’t hear them talking amongst themselves?”

  Mathew shakes his head, “They had us locked in a room the whole time.”

  Winthrop looks at Isaac, “You’re quiet. Is this what happened?”

  Isaac nods his head dumbly. He is amazed at Mathew’s ability to lie.

  Forty minutes later they are in an interview room in the nearest police station. The door is open and three officers are peering in, still marvelling at the boy’s return from death. There’s an officer sitting opposite them and one standing. They have managed to verify Isaac's identity using old records and have finished taking an emotional statement from him about what happened to his parents.

  Winthrop comes into the room with drinks for them both. She crouches by Isaac and puts her hand on his back to comfort him. He is sobbing.

  She says to Mathew, “I got through to Panacea. They will send people for you in the morning, Mathew.”

  “And Isaac?” Mathew asks.

  “We’ve contacted social services. There is no record of next of kin.”

  “He needs a hospital,” Mathew says.

  Winthrop looks at Mathew sympathetically but she says, “He doesn’t have insurance.”

  “I want to speak to my grandmother.”

  “Yes, you should.” She looks at one of the other officers, “Bosko, can you find a quiet room for Mathew to make a call?”

  Mathew follows the policeman out of the interview room and into an empty room a few doors along the corridor. He switches on the Canvas and shows Mathew how to get an outside line. The officer says, “I’ll be outside when you’ve finished,” and he closes the door behind him to give Mathew some privacy.

  Mathew initiates the call.

  “Hello?” It is Ju Shen’s voice. For several long moments Mathew finds himself unable to speak.

  “Grandma,” he says finally. “It’s me.”

  “Mathew!” His grandmother’s voice cracks. “Oh my God, I thought…”

  “I know. But I’m okay. I’m safe.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Somewhere in Yorkshire,” he says. “In a police station.”

  “Are they treating you okay?”

  “Yes, yes, they are being kind. Panacea people will come for me in the morning and then, I presume, I’ll be taken to Elgol.”

  “Oh. Thank God. Mat, I cannot even begin to tell you what I’ve been through these last few days. First Hoshi, then you…”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry! They said your car had been hijacked.”

  “It was. My guards were killed.”

  “So how did you…?”

  “I’ll tell you everything when I see you, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Grandma, there’s a boy with me. His name is Isaac. His parents were killed.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “Yes it is. They took his eye, grandma, the boys who attacked us, they gouged out his eye to get at his Lenz.”

  “The poor kid!”

  “He’s alone. He has no family. He needs a doctor, but he doesn’t have medical insurance. The policewoman said she was going to call social services.”

  “And you want to bring him here, to Elgol?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good boy. If he will come, bring him. We’ll find someone to help him with his eye.”

  “I knew you’d say that. Thank you.”

  “You’re a good boy, Mat.”

  Mathew shakes his head. “I’m so glad to hear your voice again, Grandma.”

  “Me too, Mat.”

  “I’d better go back to the others.”

  “Will you call me in the morning when you know what is happening with the Panacea people?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Love you.”

  “Love you too.”

  They hang up.

  Their bedroom is a cell, although the door is left open. The beds are hard and the blankets scratchy but they are a million times more comfortable than the floor of the animal shelter on the moor, and they are both grateful. The other officers go home as evening stretches on. There’s a private doing the night shift at the desk in reception. He comes to check on them after ten and turns off the light. When he has gone, Mathew goes to his rucksack. He takes out a sheet of paper that contains the printed names and contact details of the friends and relatives that the people from Amach had wanted him to contact. Mathew digs in his jacket pocket and finds and unfolds the Paper he has carried with him and starts to send messages.

  “What are you doing?” Isaac whispers.

  “I’m letting Dr Russell’s family know she is safe but she needs food, water, fuel and candles. And Jack and Elia’s and all the others.”

  “Won’t the police know?”

  Mathew says, “Not the way I’m doing it.”

  Having found Dr Russell’s contact, someone called Jan Hasson, he types within a secure window, as follows:

  Dear Jan,

  You don’t know me. I am writing to you on behalf of Dr Russell. She needs your help. You may remember her telling you about the strange sleeping sickness in Amach and how the government didn’t take them seriously about it. Well now they do, and Amach has been cut off from the rest of the world for weeks, with no one being allowed to go in or out. They are running out of supplies and the government will not help them. They need water, food and candles or wind-up torches. It is not safe to come to the village, but it is safe to leave anything you can spare in the old barn in Cooper’s field. It’s the one off the lane as you drive into the village from the south. You will need a boat to reach it. The field and the lane are flooded. The hayloft is a good place to leave things. There is a ladder up to it. Dr Russell will leave her notes on the sleeping sickness under a blanket on a crate in the hayloft. She will also leave the data she has gathered so far on the sickness. It is not contagious. She suspects transmission was by spraying or contamination of food or water supplies.

  Mathew starts a new note, for Elia, copying from the one she has written by hand. It is rare for him to read handwriting and he struggles with this, as her note is in long-hand and not printed like the list of names.

  Dear Anashe,

  I am sorry I have not been in touch, but as you see it is not through choice. Jack has been sick and so have many others in our village. At first the government wouldn’t listen to us, but now they do and they keep us prisoners. We only have a few weeks’ food left and we only have the water that we can gather from our roof tops when it rains. Thank God for the floods! I shudder to think what will happen if it stops raining. We have no electricity or sanitation. We go to bed when it gets dark, which as you know at this time of year is early, because we have no light. We need food, water and candles or other means of light. Anything. But you cannot bring it to us because the army is guarding our town and won’t let anyone in or out. I am only able to send this to you because by some miracle two strange boys made it through the patrol. There is a barn on the outskirts of town, I am sure you know the one. We walked to it the summer you came to stay with Yanai. You will need a boat, I think. The whole town is flooded. I hope you are well and Mama is well too. Tell her and Yanai what has happened, tell the whole family and anyone else who will listen. I think they will keep us here until we die.

  There are many notes to write. By the light of his Paper he can see Isaac is asleep.

  When Mathew has finished sending the messages, he thinks about logging on to MUUT to send his story, but decides he will wait until he gets to Elgol and can talk in person with the Lich King about how best to reach the most people.

  At four AM, Mathew writes a note to Clara.

  Hi, it’s me. We had a bit of an adventure, but it’s all over now and I am fine. I hope you didn’t hear anything about it and you are surprised to hear from me, but just in case, this is to let you know that I am alive and kicki
ng. I wanted you to know.

  Mat xxx

  14 Ghost in the Machine

  Monday 12th February 2091, London

  Clara and August Lestrange are standing in a long white corridor lined with hundreds of doors on either side, in each direction, as far as the eye can see. It is like one of those tricks with multiple mirrors. The corridor is overwhelmingly white, blindingly so.

  “Mathew described this,” Clara says.

  “It’s the portal,” Lestrange says. “Once you have selected your book from the library and put it on the table, you need to find your door. The book unlocks the correct door.”

  “But there are hundreds of them.”

  “Actually thousands.”

  “So there’s a door for each one of those books in your library?”

  “One for each significant event described.”

  “Those books go back to the start of human history.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So have you travelled back to pre-history?”

  “Not me personally; there are others covering that period, but the portal will allow me to travel freely. I could go if I wanted to.”

  “You must understand human history better than we understand it ourselves.”

  “Well, of course.”

  They walk along the corridor until they come to a door with a lifejacket hanging next to it.

  “What’s this?” Clara asks, running her hands over the shiny orange material.

  “Just a prop. A little bit of whimsy. You won’t need it. It’s a clue to the means of exit. The visitor to this world needs to jump into the Thames from a tall building.”

  “Why make it so difficult?”

  “You forget, Clara, to us this is a game.”

  Lestrange opens the door.

  They are standing in a large, dank, dimly lit room. Water drips from the ceiling. Pipes, wires and sheets of foil hang down. What’s left of a carpet is mouldy and rotten underfoot.

  “What is this place?” Clara asks.

  “It’s an old office building. There’s a good view from the window.” They step carefully across the office floor together, August offering Clara his arm, rather gallantly. “Well, there is if you clean the window.” August uses his sleeve, as Mathew did, to wipe a patch in the green moss and decades of black grime.

  Clara peers out. She sees a broken version of the London Eye, half-submerged in brown swirling water. It seems like everything in London has sunk twenty feet or so and the river has spread out. On the other side of the Thames, the Parliament is encased in a huge rusting metal box, corseted in grey scaffolding, on which tiny people, the size of ants, scramble up and down. There are boats, too, of all sizes and kinds.

  Lestrange taps her on the shoulder and pulls her around so she faces the way they came in.

  “What?” she asks.

  Lestrange puts his fingers to his lips.

  Mathew appears at the door, the lifejacket grasped in his hand. He stares about him and then starts stepping carefully, as they had done, over the debris.

  Clara’s face lights up, but Mathew’s eyes aren’t focused on hers. “Mat,” she says. Mathew walks away from them, heading for the south part of the office.

  “Mat!” she says again, moving towards him. Lestrange reaches out and grips her arm, holding her back.

  “He can’t see you,” Lestrange says.

  “But…”

  Mathew goes to the window. The patch Lestrange rubbed at has disappeared and Mathew has to clean it again with his own sleeve.

  “I want to talk to him,” Clara says.

  Lestrange shakes his head. “We’ve not come into this world in a material way. No one can see us or hear us, unless we specifically want them to.”

  “You mean we’re ghosts?”

  Lestrange cocks his head slightly as if considering this, “Yes, I suppose we are.”

  “So how do I make him hear me?”

  “I’m not going to show you now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’ll talk to him.”

  “So?”

  “Then we would have yet another version of history and we would need to do even more work to convince the young Mathew that he’s dreaming. The only Mathew you should be talking to in this world is the older Mathew, the one you’ve come here to rescue.”

  They both turn to look at Mathew as he trips and swears. He is walking along the perimeter of the room by the windows, towards them. He stops only a few feet away. Clara wants to reach out and touch him.

  “Can he really not hear or see us?” she says.

  Lestrange shakes his head. “He has no idea we’re here.”

  “It’s so strange, when we can see and hear him so perfectly.”

  As Mathew stares out of the window, the building shakes under the force of thunder and a bright flash of lightning. He staggers away from the window. He seems to think for a moment, spins around, focuses on the stairwell on the other side of the room and walks towards it. Clara moves to follow. Again, Lestrange holds her back.

  “He’ll be back,” he says.

  They can hear him in the stairwell, trying to clamber up the stairs. They hear him run up and down.

  “What’s he doing?” Clara asks.

  “Panicking,” Lestrange says.

  “Shouldn’t you help him?”

  “I can’t, unless I want to disturb history.”

  “But you know what is going to happen?”

  “Of course. I’ve seen it all before.”

  “Why didn’t you help him the first time?”

  “We did. We tried to get him out once we realised he was here. But it didn’t exactly go to plan. He didn’t want our help, you see. He wanted to stay here. We tried to help him by taking him home.”

  “He was trying to save his mother.”

  “I know.”

  “I still don’t understand why you couldn’t help save her.”

  “I told you. We considered it, but discovered Mathew would not have pursued the Yinglong project with such determination.”

  “How did you discover it?”

  “We ran a simulation.”

  “I thought this was a simulation?”

  “No,” Lestrange says. “This is real. Although, it has to be said, it is often difficult to know the difference between our simulations and reality. Sometimes we get confused ourselves.”

  They hear a splash. Clara turns to look out of the window. Things are being thrown into the water from above. Large things.

  “What was that?” Clara asks.

  “A garden chair, I think,” Lestrange says.

  “Did Mathew throw it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s trying to get someone to help him.”

  There’s a boat with a cabin and two people in it, floating steadily towards the building.

  “He’s going to hurt someone,” Clara says.

  “It’ll be alright,” Lestrange says.

  They both peer out of the window and watch. A short, portly woman with close-clipped dark hair, wearing mannish clothes, shakes her fist upwards at the building.

  “Come on,” Lestrange says.

  Clara follows him across the room to the stairwell. Mathew comes thundering down, slipping on some board that has fallen from the ceiling. Clara puts out her hand to steady him as he skids towards them, but he falls right through her.

  “Ugh!” she says. “That was odd.”

  Mathew continues down the stairs and they follow after him to a level below, where the water is lapping at the side of the building, below the windows Mathew is banging on. They watch as he throws an old office chair at the glass. The chair skids off. Abandoning the window, he spots the fire exit door on the other side of the room.

  They are on the flat roof of a smaller wing of the building. Not far below the brown Thames churns around. Mathew is trying to get the attention of the women in the boat, who have floated off around the corner. The
y come back and he discusses with them how he is going to get down.

  “He’s not going to jump?” Clara says. “That’s ridiculous! He’ll drown.”

  Lestrange raises his eyebrows. Mathew jumps.

  Clara watches in horror as he is pulled under by the current.

  “Oh my God! Help him!” she says, running to the edge of the roof.

  “Clara, Clara, you know he survives,” Lestrange says. “Here, take my hand.”

  Clara finds it hard to take her eyes off the river, where Mathew is now being hauled into the boat. He lands in the bottom like a large dead fish.

  “Take my hand,” Lestrange insists.

  She does as he asks and a moment later they are in the boat, watching Mathew recover, dry himself with a towel and talk to the two women as they start to travel down the Thames.

  “How did you do that?” Clara asks.

  “We’re not matter here. We can jump to wherever we want to.”

  “But what specifically did you do to jump here?”

  “I thought about the location I was at, and the location I wanted to be at, and then thought about jumping.”

  “Could I do it?”

  “Of course. But you’d need to be able to visualise the location you wanted to go to, quite clearly. Exactly, in fact.”

  “But I’ve never been here before. This particular London doesn’t look much like the one I used to know. Look, St Paul’s is missing.”

  “They’ve moved it.”

  “How could they move it?”

  “Bit by bit. It was flooded, like everything else. I think it’s incredibly admirable, in fact, that they would go to so much trouble for a building. It gives me hope.”

  “So could you, for instance, go to the top of there, by thinking about it?” Clara asks, pointing to Tower Bridge, or what remains of it.

  “Of course. Do you want to go?”

  “Will we be able to come back here?”

  “Yes, whenever you’d like.”

  Lestrange puts out his hand and Clara takes it. It seems like she blinks and in the four hundred milliseconds it takes for her eyelids to close, her eyelashes to sweep down, and then back open again, she is standing on a high-level walkway looking down on Mathew’s tiny boat as it passes beneath the raised and broken bascules.