Escape

by Jeff Povey

  I wipe my eyes, suck in a few deep breaths. ‘It’s OK,’ I tell them. ‘It’s OK. Keep writing.’

  Non-Lucas looks reluctant to do so as if the formula might turn out to be a prescription for food poisoning.

  ‘Please,’ I tell him. ‘Finish the formula.’

  New-Billie makes slow circles on my lower back with her hand, soothing me. ‘It’s all right,’ she says over and over. ‘It’s all right.’

  I nod, suck in more air and straighten. My eyes find New-Johnson’s. For a moment something crosses between us, a sliver of something deeper, but New-Ape looms up behind him and pulls New-Johnson out of the way.

  ‘That’s my friend,’ he tells New-Johnson.

  ‘Get your own.’ New-Ape squats level with my eye line, his one good eye finding mine. ‘You going to spew?’

  I shake my head. ‘I’m good,’ I say.

  I straighten then get to my feet in time to hear New-Lucas declare, ‘Finished.’

  We all turn as one as New-Lucas steps back from the whiteboard and there is it is. The equation. The formula. Written large in front of us.

  We wait a moment.

  Then another.

  And another.

  ‘Nothing’s happening,’ New-GG speaks first.

  I’m waiting, hoping the molecules will start shoving and pushing until they force more molecules to open a door into another world. ‘Come on,’ I mutter under my breath. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Rev?’ Already New-Billie is anticipating another crushing disappointment.

  I cross to the whiteboard. ‘COME ON!’ I yell at the formula.

  ‘What did your dad do? Exactly and precisely,’ New-Carrie asks.

  I try to think back to when I was trapped under the bed. ‘He said he built a key, created new matter. Matter that doesn’t belong so it forces a hole; it pushes the boundaries of reality and cracks it open from the pressure.’

  ‘But is it the right formula?’ New-Lucas asks. ‘Is this the actual one? Only on the way here you said it comes from this world. Which means it isn’t the one that brought you here.’

  My stomach lurches, climbing all the way to the back of my throat before thudding back down again.

  ‘But he burned it,’ I say weakly. ‘Why burn it in front of me if it wasn’t the right formula?’ I’m scrambling for clarity as I grab the formula from New-Lucas and make sure he has written it out properly, checking every number twice over.

  ‘I think we were drawn to this world for a reason,’ I tell them, trying to keep my voice from cracking with hopelessness. ‘Me and my Non-Dad came here because it’s a moment in time. It’s twenty-four hours and nothing more.’

  ‘So?’ New-Billie asks as her spirits sink right in front of me.

  ‘So . . . ’ I’m talking just for the sake of it, as my eyes flick back and forth between small formula and giant formula. ‘So maybe it captured a moment from Non-Dad’s old life. Who knows how the multiverse works.’ I’m saying anything that comes into my head because I’m scared that if I stop talking I will run out of all hope.

  New-Ape stands beside me, his good eye flicking from the formula to the whiteboard until a big stubby finger lands on a single digit. ‘You wrote a two, not a three.’

  The hairs on my neck rise as I check New-Ape’s spot-the difference brilliance.

  ‘I’ve got great eyes,’ he tells me.

  ‘Make that one great eye,’ New-GG calls out.

  ‘Why does it have to be written out?’ New-GG asks. ‘You’ve already got it in your hand?’

  Rather than answer I reach up and erase the number two digit. I take the black Sharpie that New-Lucas was using and, after a moment I write the numeral three in its place.

  ‘Rev?’ New-Billie asks. ‘Does it have to be written out?’

  ‘Molecules,’ I tell New-Billie. ‘It’s the last thing I remember from the empty world.’

  Then I glance at New-Johnson. ‘You ready for an adventure? Like nothing you’ve ever known or felt before?’

  New-Johnson strikes a match and lets it burn before flicking it away.

  New-Ape places a big meaty paw on my shoulder and it’s the best feeling in the world. An Ape taking care of you.

  ‘We got this,’ he grins.

  The white light appears before I can say another word.

  HOME IS INDEED SWEET

  Sometimes you get a lucky break. Sometimes you open a portal to another world and it leads straight back to where it all started.

  Detention.

  I can hear a fire alarm, I can hear people raising their voices and before I know it Mr Allwell strides back into the classroom.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he tells me.

  Correction. Tells us.

  To help make his point, the fire alarm rings off, leaving only a tinny echo in my ears. The excitable voices outside die away just as quickly.

  Allwell takes a seat and barely glances our way.

  New-Ape kangaroos his desk and chair towards me. ‘Did it work? Did it?’

  New-Lucas and New-Billie let a small laugh escape from their lips. It’s the laugh of the astonished, the barely able to comprehend.

  New-GG squeals in delight, which makes Allwell look his way. ‘Yes?’ Allwell asks New-GG.

  New-GG waggles his fingers at Allwell. ‘Just so glad you’re back,’ he jokes.

  Allwell doesn’t engage with New-GG and instead goes back to marking some papers. New-Carrie is staring all around the classroom, taking it in, until I watch her subconsciously pinch the skin on her bony wrist.

  I hear New-Johnson let out a slow sigh. ‘I thought you said this was going to be the adventure of a lifetime.’

  I have to turn in my seat so that I can face him as he lounges at the back of the class.

  ‘Patience is a virtue,’ I tell him. ‘Not . . . ’ I grin at him.

  Allwell clears his teacherly throat. ‘Is there someone missing?’

  We turn as one to face him.

  The Moth.

  His absence kills all sense of wonder, relief and excitement dead.

  I have to remind myself not to act as though I haven’t seen my mum in what must be weeks. That I expected to die – many times over – before that could happen.

  But I have raced home and my lungs are aching, along with all the cuts and bruises I’m not going to be able to explain to her.

  The others were less keen to split up. They felt safer in each other’s company, but I told them no one will ever know the difference, that their family, friends and relatives will accept who they are.

  It’s so far from ideal that I think one of them will crack. We’re going to discuss saving their original families when the dust settles. It’ll involve asking for help and revealing to the world that there are other worlds. I know the Moth would warn against it. He’d tell me in no uncertain terms that that would spell disaster, that humankind would inevitably become greedy or envious about what another world has, and, before you know it, there’d be interdimensional warfare. No one likes a change, he’d tell me. It never goes well. We have agreed to stay silent on New-Moth’s absence for now. But when the time comes our story will have to be told.

  I’m waiting in the flat when Mum walks in from her waitressing shift in the restaurant. All decorum flies out of the window as I literally hurl myself at her and throw my arms around her in a hug an Ape would be proud of. I crush her half to death as I cry and wail and slobber all over her. Mum is instantly worried because she’s a worrier on a professional level, and she keeps asking me what’s wrong. I mumble and blub that nothing is wrong, that everything is just peachy. Then she starts crying because I’m crying and we slide to the floor in a truly daft heap of tears and hugs. But when we look at each other and realise what we’re doing we start laughing.

  I love the sound of her laugh.

  The next day I don’t get detention. Other people do, and I hope that none of their dads or mums happen to have opened doors into other worlds. That they haven’t died in thos
e worlds, that their parents were watchful.

  It’s only when I leave school amongst the throng of a hundred other schoolkids that I realise what needs to be done.

  It’s New-Johnson who takes my arm, coming up from behind me and leading me to one side. ‘Rev,’ he tells me. Then points. ‘Look.’

  The Moth’s parents are at the school with a female plain-clothes detective and two uniformed police officers. Some teachers and the head of school are in grave talks with them.

  But it’s the Moth’s parents I focus on. They have that pale, lost look of yearning and pain and fear that is near unbearable to witness.

  ‘What are we going to do about that?’ New-Billie joins us from the throng.

  ‘What can we do?’ I mutter, but to myself.

  ‘We can’t just take another Moth and bring him back here.’ New-Carrie has also found us by now. ‘We’d only hurt that Moth’s family.’

  ‘We can’t be that selfish.’ New-Lucas has silently emerged behind us.

  ‘We’re going to need a bigger formula.’ New-GG skips and glides through the schoolchildren before stopping beside us.

  ‘It’s a shame we can’t pluck one out of thin air,’ New-Billie says.

  Which is when I look at her and think back to my own Billie and the things she could do. The thought of Billie doubles the pain I feel for Moth’s parents. Loss is a dreadful thing, but, as I have learned from a version of my dad, it also fuels us. It impels us to do what we hope is the best thing even if it turns out to be the worst.

  I set myself and find clarity in everything that has happened to me. I get what it is about me now: I really don’t know how to give up.

  ‘Whatever we do, it’ll only take a second,’ I tell them. ‘Time is one weird, screwed-up dimension.’

  ‘A second?’ New-Johnson asks.

  ‘That’ll feel like a lifetime,’ I tell him.

  New-Ape barges through the crowd, a boy turned proper Ape now, and looms over us. He’s eating a Greggs’ steak bake, shovelling it down his throat. ‘I thought you said you were somewhere else. This is the same place.’

  ‘So let’s go somewhere else,’ I say.

  The formula is at home in my bedroom, hidden at the bottom of a creaky old drawer. I have only just got back and, as much as I yearn to be here with my mum again, I know that we’re not complete without a Moth.

  CODA

  The brute laid waste to them with all the fury that comes from a broken heart. He stood at the gates of certain death and held firm, no matter that the black-panther boy fell beside him, no matter how many of his own kind came at him and no matter how many tried to defeat him. He broke them all. He beat every single one of them until all that was left was a man-boy with a loud bellow.

  The rotten weather, the floods, the blizzard and the giant holes in the ground didn’t faze him because he knew there was nothing in any world that was stronger than him.

  He waded through everything, kicking a path between the broken and the dead. As usual, he had only one thing in mind and nothing would sway him from that single thought. He stomped into the school, his left leg dragging badly, but he didn’t care as he leaped over the widening hole that cradled the school. By now the weather was dying away; the silent earth had done whatever it could. The big boy was just too strong and it gave up and accepted defeat. Hey, you can’t win them all, it silently thought to itself and the winds died down like a giant defeated sigh.

  The big boy then found the smaller version of himself, his best friend, his kindred spirit, his brother of the soul, and picked him up from where he’d fallen. He arched his great neck and looked to the ceiling and tried not to cry. For a moment he wanted to bellow again but didn’t. He couldn’t find his voice. He passed the other friends he’d made. The one who couldn’t walk, then the skinny one, the homo and the cool guy. All dead, but they had clearly died gloriously in battle because doppelgangers with busted and bloodied throats were strewn all around them.

  He felt pride swell in his great chest; he hadn’t known them very well before, but he could now see they were definitely worth being friends with. GG was brave and refused to give up. The Moth was clever and even with useless legs he kept on going. Lucas was a scared mouse, but it didn’t stop him from trying his best not to be. Carrie seemed too skinny to do anything worthwhile, but she proved everyone wrong. Johnson, whom he should still hate, turned out to be a decent fighter. The man-boy then saw the tall, mixed-race Indian-Irish girl lying at the top of the stairs and he’d always had a soft spot for his version of her. He stopped to reach for her hand and his bad leg seemed to feel better already. He wasn’t blessed with the most intuitive or imaginative of minds. Thoughts came and went like strangers in a park, never connecting, never meeting, but this one time it felt good to hold her hand. In truth he still dragged his bad leg, but he was convinced it definitely felt better now that he’d touched her. That’s probably why he liked her the most: she made him feel good.

  The exit door to the school was kicked off its hinges as the man-boy limped back into the night. He found the other supermodel, her twin, and while the very last drops of her life ebbed away he took her broken, twisted arm in his meaty paw and placed her wickedly bent hand against her heart. He knew what he wanted from her and he had no doubt that he would get his wish.

  The moment her eyes had opened and she had managed to sit up he told her to go to work, to do what she was born to do. She started by laying her hand on the smaller of the man-boys.

  Until he woke up. And belched.

  After several hours the boy who couldn’t walk was grinning and crying at the same time. His athletic friend, the Perfect One, still looked apprehensive. Unsure. The skinny, pointy girl clapped and twirled on the spot which made the boy with now good legs cry and laugh some more. The smoking boys watched her the whole time, even though both seemed irretrievably lost and weren’t really looking at anything.

  ‘Where’s Boob Girl?’ The Ape asked.

  ‘She’s gone.’ Carrie stopped twirling.

  ‘Gone where?’ the Ape asked.

  ‘Just gone,’ Billie said sadly.

  The Ape breathed out slowly. ‘She isn’t gone,’ he said with complete assurance. ‘I’ll find her.’

  Somehow they knew he would. Because when an Ape first stares at you it means he has locked on to you. Forever.

  But what you also have to understand is that you lock on to an Ape in return; it’s a fundamental part of the silent bargain they strike with you. Whether you like it or not, it goes both ways.

  Which is when the air started to burn around them and the Ape purred as his true best friend emerged. Her pink hair was unmistakable.

  She saw him and immediately ran to him, not believing that he could possibly still be alive.

  ‘Ape!’ she cried. ‘Ape, Ape, Ape!’

  As more people appeared behind her, more copies, even one of himself with a funny eye, the Ape looked at Rev and gave her a gentle reminder.

  Some people never learn, he thought.

  ‘It’s Dazza.’

  Other Books by Jeff Povey

  Shift

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  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © 2017 Jeff Povey

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

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  PB ISBN: 978-1-4711-1872-2

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-4711-1873-9

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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