by Tom Holt
Stunned, dissociated from reality, like someone on morphine or having an out-of-body experience, Polly reached into the fridge and picked up the cucumber, frowned at it and dropped it on the floor. She really wasn’t in the right frame of mind for cucumbers.
What the hell, she asked herself, was she going to tell her mother? Yes, Mum, he got into the fridge and shut the door, and when I opened it again he’d gone. Vanished. What? Oh, eggs, tomatoes, cheese, olives, a cucumber. Look, does it really matter? Yes, I guess it does go to show he’s eating properly.
Someone was ringing the doorbell. It took her a moment to identify the sound. Reluctantly she closed the fridge, then quickly opened it again, just in case something had changed. Very silly of her, except that something had. Under the Stilton crumbs, next to the olives, was a small rosewood box. She grabbed it without thinking and went to the door.
“Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”
Rachel Briggs, sister of Don’s upstairs neighbour (the one he’d presumably disintegrated, the one who’d caught the two of them burgling his flat) pushed past her, followed by a small, balding young man with a very sad face, who muttered an apology then stopped dead and stared at her. Alan Stevens, her immediate superior at BRHD.
“Alan?” Ms Briggs, Polly decided, would have made a first-class dog trainer. “Don’t just stand there gawping. We’re going to search this flat from top to bottom.”
“Fine,” Polly murmured. “Carry on. Tell me if you find anything interesting.”
In spite of the word of command uttered with total authority, Mr Stevens didn’t move. He knew he was disobeying a direct order and that at some point there’d be serious repercussions, but it didn’t matter. He felt as though he’d just been torn in half. On one side of him stood his fiancée, Rachel Briggs, on the other, his subordinate, Polly Mayer. He knew them both very well, obviously. But – and this was what was ripping his brain to pieces – he was somehow aware that the Alan Stevens who worked with Ms Mayer wasn’t the same man who was engaged to Rachel. They were both talking to him, but he couldn’t make out a word they were saying. He was a trick coin, with the head of Alan Stevens on both sides. One side existed in a world with Rachel in it, the other—
“Star Trek,” he said.
At least that had the effect of shutting them both up instantly. He didn’t explain. He didn’t bother trying to tell them about the episode of Star Trek where the matter and antimatter universes collide, and the guest star from the antimatter universe gets loose in the matter universe, and, well, he hadn’t understood it at the time, but it was all right because it was only sci-fi and a pretext for William Shatner to charge around in a torn shirt. Naturally, if he’d thought that one day it would happen to him, he’d have paid closer attention.
Rachel was in his face, yelling at him; under other circumstances, something he’d have done anything to avoid. Lazily, he extended his arm and pushed her out of the way (stupid, aggressive woman, no idea what he’d ever seen in her). It was bloody Star Trek, that’s what it was, and here he was bang in the middle of it. Also, just to make things a little bit more interesting, he was feeling very strange: dizzy, bunged up like a bad cold, woozy like a hangover, more than a little nauseous (watch out shoes, here comes lunch) and somehow as though he wasn’t altogether there. Maybe, he thought, and grinned, Scotty’s beaming me out of here, in the nick of time. Good old Sco—
He vanished.
Rachel Briggs stared at the cubic metre of air that no longer encompassed her fiancé and screamed. Polly, who’d always had a secret fondness for loud noises, let her rip for two and a bit seconds, then smacked her round the face. She’d always wanted a legitimate opportunity to do that.
“It’s all right,” she said, rubbing her hand. “He’s gone.”
The contradiction in that statement wasn’t lost on her. Ms Briggs’ brother, her brother and now Alan Stevens: three, to her certain knowledge. Maybe “all right” was stretching it a bit. Oh yes, and Mr Gogerty. Four. Well, at least they’d none of them be lonely.
“Now do you believe me?” she said.
Ms Briggs looked at her as if she was the ground, and Ms Briggs’ parachute had somehow failed to open. “What happened?”
“We think it’s magic,” Polly said. “Sit down and I’ll make us both a coffee.”
“He just—”
“I know.” With a gentle hand on her shoulder she steered Ms Briggs to the sofa and folded her onto it. “So,” she said, “how long have you been working at BRHD?”
Ms Briggs’ eyes were a very pale blue and completely blank. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Lots,” Polly said. “Sit still while I get the coffee.”
Making coffee meant being in the kitchen, where the fridge was. She tried to keep as far away from it as she could. While the kettle was boiling, she examined the rosewood box, thinking about something Mr Gogerty had said, about a box. When she felt brave enough, she opened it, but it was empty. Just an empty box, a bit like the fridge, if you didn’t count Stilton crumbs and cucumbers.
She frowned. Maybe that was it. Maybe you had to count everything.
Ms Briggs hadn’t moved while she was away. Polly pushed the coffee mug into her hands, and Ms Briggs grabbed it like a lifebelt, spilling a bit. “Now then,” Polly said briskly, like a nurse. “We know that there’s something going on. Don and I used the word magic because, well, it seems to be doing magic-like stuff, and we don’t know what else to call it. We know it’s something to do with Blue Remembered Hills. Don had a theory.”
Ms Briggs looked at her helplessly. “Don’s your brother?”
“Yes, that’s right.” Firm, reassuring nod of the head. “His idea was that there was a whole lot of us working at BRHD, and we were all sort of there simultaneously, if you get what I’m saying. We couldn’t see or hear each other, but we were occupying the same space at the same time, but in a different…”
“Dimension?”
“That’s right,” Polly said quickly. “And I know it sounds weird, but please hear me out, all right, because I think I know where I’m going and I need someone to tell it to, just to see if it really hangs together. You’re all right for time, are you? Not on your way anywhere?”
Ms Briggs shook her head, though her eyes stayed fixed on Polly.
“All right then.” Polly took a moment to shepherd her thoughts. “We have no idea how long it’s being going on for, but my guess is, it’s been a while, and up till very recently it was working just fine. Then, a few days ago, everything started to go wrong. The darts match,” she remembered. “Do you know anything about a darts match?”
Ms Briggs pulled a deep-concentration face. “Alan said something. He’s…”
“Captain of the office team,” Polly prompted. “That’s right. You don’t play darts, obviously. There was a darts match, against Thames Water. Alan – that’s Alan where I come from – made me play because he was one short. I had a dress I wanted to wear for the match, so I took it in to be cleaned.” She paused. “With me so far?”
“I think so. But—”
Polly held up her hand. “We think,” she went on, “that something happened at the cleaners. Don took something in there to be cleaned, and when he got it back there was this brass thing in the pocket.”
“Thing?”
“It was a pencil sharpener, but it may not have been. It’s complicated. But the point is, that’s when all the screwy stuff started. We think it got in the pocket of his coat by mistake. Anyhow, it was after that that things started coming apart. For one thing, the dry cleaners vanished. Then Don started having these –” she winced “– powers. Magic. That was when he vanished your brother.”
“He vanished…”
Polly nodded. “Apparently, your brother annoyed him and Don wished he’d just go away, and he did. At the time we both assumed it was something Don had actually done, but now I’m not so sure. Not after what just happened to Alan. Anyway, we thought we�
�d better find someone we could ask about what’s going on, an expert, so we looked on Google and found this man Gogerty, and he—”
“Who?”
“He’s a weirdness expert,” Polly said. “Don’t ask. Anyway, he came round to see us earlier today, and he was really interested in the pencil sharpener, but he seemed to think it should’ve been in a little wooden box. But there wasn’t a box. Only now it’s turned up,” she added, “in Don’s fridge. Is this making any sense to you?”
“No.”
“Nor me.” Polly nodded to convey approval of a correct answer. “But I was just thinking,” she went on, “about what Alan said, just before he vanished.”
Ms Briggs frowned. “He said ‘Star Trek,’” she said.
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
Polly smiled and told her about the episode where the matter and antimatter universes collide. She got the impression that Ms Briggs wasn’t a Trekkie, but never mind. “I think that’s what’s happened,” she concluded. “I think there’re at least two different universes, and you belong in one and I belong in another, but somehow Alan belongs in both.” She paused to draw breath. “I think that when these two universes sort of bump into each other, where there’s an exact match, one of them gets cancelled out. They overlap, if you see what I mean. Don’s my brother and what’s-his-name, Kevin, he’s your brother. Two brothers of a sister who works in the conveyancing department of Blue Remembered Hills bump into each other – both of them musicians, come to think of it. They’re an exact match, so one of them gets cancelled out. Ping,” she added, then wished she hadn’t. “But we can’t be an exact match, because we’re both still here, and Alan’s gone, so I’m guessing that when two almost-the-same-but-not-quites meet and there’s a shared factor from both universes present at the same time, it’s the shared factor that gets vanished. Alan,” she explained. “Of course, it was different with Don and Mr Gogerty, because they went inside the fridge.”
“Ah,” said Ms Briggs.
“Exactly,” Polly said. “I think the fridge is the container, you see, the thing the other stuff goes in. The box. That’s why Mr Gogerty couldn’t find the box, because it was already here. The box must be the fridge, a bit like the chicken and the egg. So when Mr Gogerty took the pencil sharpener back inside the box, where it belonged, I’m guessing everything started putting itself back how it ought to be. Which isn’t necessarily how it ought to be for us, you understand, because we’re just innocent bystanders caught up in it all. Well?” she asked eagerly. “What do you think?”
Ms Briggs looked at her for a very long time, as though formulating a considered opinion. “I think you’re a witch,” she said. “Get away from me, you evil—”
Polly sighed and folded her arms. “Now that’s not very constructive, is it? I really don’t—”
“Evil!” screamed Ms Briggs, crossing her index fingers in front of her face, in the manner of a Labour backbencher heckling Michael Howard. “Get away, get away.”
She was getting quite impossible, and it was probably just as well that she vanished a moment later. Even so, Polly couldn’t help feeling vexed. True, she was glad she wasn’t being yelled at and having the sign of the cross stuck up her nose. On the other hand, that was her beautiful hypothesis down the toilet. She mourned its passing with a shake of her head then, much to her own surprise, burst into tears.
Stupid, she thought, and really not helping. She fumbled for a tissue, found none and headed to the kitchen for some paper towel. No such thing (she winced as she passed the fridge), so she went to the bathroom for some toilet paper. Trust Don not to have a single Kleenex in the flat.
She was all alone. Everybody else had vanished. She had no explanation for what had happened and absolutely no idea what to do about it, if there was anything that could be done. Basically, then, she had two choices. She could think hard and try and figure it out from the few scraps of evidence at her disposal, or she could curl up in a ball on the floor and start sobbing again.
She thought. Suppose, she thought, the universe is like one of those coats they sell in camping shops: reversible, so if you turn it inside out there’s a completely different coat on the other side. Suppose that, and then suppose it’s a coat you can inside-out not just once but lots of times, one coat you can hang on one hanger, but also loads and loads of different coats at the same time. A feature of the camping-shop reversible coat is that the two different coats share the same pockets; you just get into them from different sides. Suppose the reason she hadn’t vanished when the coat of reality got turned inside out was that she was a pocket, a fixed point shared by all the various different versions.
Well, you could suppose that, if you wanted to, but it wasn’t a great deal of practical use. Besides, shouldn’t Alan Stevens have been the pocket? Or maybe he was something inside the pocket (hanky, biro cap, small copper coin, bit of fluff ), whereas she was the pocket itself. Eew, she thought, and cast around for a rather less revolting analogy. Suppose the universe was a set of concentric spherical Russian dolls. No, that was just silly.
Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of the rosewood box. She’d forgotten about it in all the excitement, but Mr Gogerty had been very interested in it, so it had to be important. It lay on the table, looking remarkably like a small rosewood box, the sort of thing they make in India by the million and sell in gift and craft shops. She watched it for a moment or so but it didn’t do anything. Just a box. Something tickled the back of her mind, but she couldn’t get hold of it to find out what it was. She picked it up.
Well, she’d opened it once before, and nothing bad had happened. Which meant, of course, that there was no point opening it again, was there? Just a box. She put it back on the table, then picked it up again. Why would Gogerty be so concerned about an empty wooden box? Or was it because the brass thing had somehow managed to get out of it, presumably at some point while it was at the dry cleaners? Total waste of time opening it again.
She realised she’d slid one fingernail under the lid. Well, she thought, it really can’t hurt, and carried on opening it, remembering as she did so, in the split second before the box grew huge and ate her, that the thing she’d been trying to call to mind a moment ago was her mother once telling her that before she was born, they’d seriously considered calling her Pandora.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“As a matter of interest,” Don asked mildly, “why is it the chicken?”
The voice didn’t answer, and from the depth and quality of the silence, he knew it would never speak again. A cloud must have passed in front of the sun, because the light no longer streamed through the stained glass window. He thought about trying to find the monk but decided not to waste his time. Game over, he said to himself. And presumably I won.
He got up and walked slowly and wearily to the door. On the threshold he stopped and turned round for one last look, but there was nothing to see. Some old church, its purpose long since obsolete. He supposed someone from English Heritage would be along sooner or later to lock up.
He walked out into the sunlight, reflecting that this was the weirdest time he’d ever spent in a toilet. Even the grass was different now. It wasn’t nearly so smooth and regular; there were dandelions and docks in it, and here and there it had been nibbled at, so the ends of the blades were square, not pointed. A crow flew slowly past, wallowing in the still air. That cheered him up, a bit. OK, so it was still the countryside, but he was morally certain it was now real, not gamespace. What he wanted most of all, he decided, was a bus stop.
If he was honest with himself he wasn’t really all that bothered, but since he had nothing else to think about that wasn’t depressing or annoying, he thought about what he’d just been through, rationalising, order out of chaos and stuff like that. It had, he was pretty sure, been a competition, hence all the terms and conditions, a competition to solve the unanswerable and fundamentally stupid question of which came first. The
voice had mentioned a date in the fourteenth century, round about the time (he was no expert) the abbey was built. Guessing here, but presumably the abbey was someone’s idea of a games console, a gadget designed to choose the winner. Only there couldn’t be a winner, because there was no right answer to the question, not a real answer, at any rate. He shunted that train of thought into a siding, and rejoined the main line.
Obviously, whoever designed the competition had access to some pretty high-level technology. Furthermore, at some point in the intervening centuries the secrets of that technology had been lost and forgotten, so that when he, a native of the twenty-first century, happened to stumble across it, he found it completely inexplicable and assumed it must be magic. But it wasn’t, no more than electricity or digital information are magic; that had been his first mistake, and it served him right for not having faith in his own scepticism.
He was climbing uphill now, though he had no real idea where he was going. He’d come out of the abbey and started to walk, choosing a direction at random. While the game was still running, of course, there was no such thing as random. He could have chosen any vector he liked, but every compass point would have brought him to where the game wanted him to be. Now, though, he was on his own. He stopped and looked around, but it was still all just empty green desert. Buggery, he thought, and walked on.
So, the game. He wished he knew what the prize had been; must have been worth picking up, or why would people bother to enter? Mind, he had no evidence that anybody ever had. At any rate, the competition had remained unsolved and unwon, and since the technology still worked and the batteries hadn’t run down, six hundred years or so later, here it still was. The pencil sharpener, he decided, must have been some sort of interface that plugged you into the game. The powers must be things you needed to be able to do in order to get here, or to operate the console. At any rate, by sheer bad luck it had come into his possession and forced him to take part, screwing up his life and the lives of those around him. Some people have no consideration for others.