Chasm

by Stephen Laws

  They were gone.

  “Don’t be afraid,” said Robin, smiling up at Lisa and Annie. “It’s going to be okay.”

  Fiercely determined, bonded by their love, the two women and the boy walked straight across the last fifty feet and into the whirling vortex. Tracey held back, looking at the others, then back into the light. Suddenly deciding, she ran after them—and was gone.

  “I’m not sure what to believe,” said Jay. “Not sure I understand.”

  “Don’t try,” said Gordon. “There’s so much more going on here that I don’t have time to tell you.”

  “You’re different,” said Juliet. “Not just the stammering, Gordon. But something’s happened to you, hasn’t it? Something while you’ve been here.”

  “I’ve learned an awful lot,” smiled Gordon. “About an awful lot of things. Now go on, quickly. Before the vortex fades.”

  Hand in hand, Jay and Juliet walked the last fifty feet.

  As the swirling light surrounded them, they looked into each other’s eyes.

  “Do you believe it?” asked Jay.

  “I believe in you,” she replied simply.

  Jay looked back into the cave-cathedral.

  Gordon was still standing back there, not following.

  “Come on, Gordon,” said Jay. “Let’s go.”

  Gordon didn’t reply. He only stood smiling, and watching.

  “Gordon,” said Juliet. “Quickly, come on.”

  “I’m not coming,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Like I said, I’m staying here.”

  “What on earth do you mean?” asked Jay. The wind was sucking at them greedily, pulling them further into the light. The details of the cave-cathedral were fading in the glare.

  “There’s nothing for me back there, Jay. I’ve got no one. All I ever had was…well, all I ever had was my music. No family, no friends, just the music. Just the four walls of a bedroom, and loneliness.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Gordon!” Jay tried to pull forward, but could take only a single step. The vortex had its hold on them both now, and they could not go back. “We’re there for you now. All of us. Me, Juliet, the others.”

  “You don’t need a sidekick now. You’ve got to go back and start a new life with Juliet.”

  “Sidekick, fuck! If you hadn’t been there, we’d never have made it. Christ, Gordon. We’ve been through so much. Don’t you know we’ve all been through Hell and beaten it? We’ve got to all go back together!”

  “Go back, Jay. You don’t need me. They do.”

  “You’re not making sense. You’ve got to come back with us!”

  “They need me here, Jay. The Cherubim. The Chasm’s been damaged by the ’quake and by our presence. They need a ‘grown-up’ to help them through to the other side, whatever or wherever that’s supposed to be. I didn’t tell you that part, but over here I’m needed. And I can make a difference.”

  “We’re not leaving you!” shouted Juliet, straining forward with Jay against the wind. “We’re not leaving you here!”

  Gordon’s figure was growing dim, his outline vanishing in the engulfing light.

  “I’ll miss you both, but I’m glad you found each other.”

  “Gordon!” yelled Jay. “No!”

  “Go back home and make a difference, Jay. Keep what you’ve found, Juliet. Make it special…”

  “Gordon!”

  “Special…make it special…special…”

  Gordon vanished in the swirling light.

  Clinging together, Jay and Juliet were sucked deep into the spinning mass of the vortex.

  Now there was only light, and the roaring of a great wind.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Going Home

  “My God,” said Alex, as he stepped forward. “Look at the sky.”

  Candy followed his gaze as they emerged from the light. Annie, Lisa and Robin were ahead of them, standing on grass and also staring upwards.

  There were clouds there, something that no one had seen for over a year. The sun was shining. A flock of birds was wheeling overhead.

  “Birds,” said Lisa. “I never thought I’d ever see them again.”

  “They’re beautiful,” said Robin.

  Jay and Juliet stepped out of the light behind them.

  Before them was a row of terraced houses. Even now, doors were opening and curtains were twitching. Two children on bicycles had stopped on the nearby road, mouths open and gawping at the strange whirling light that had suddenly appeared on the green in front of the terrace; sitting there in their saddles and staring at the strange figures that had suddenly stepped from nowhere out of the light. Passers-by on the other side of the street had also stopped, keeping their distance. In the nearby houses, several 999 calls had been made; not one of them making much sense about what they had seen or what they thought was happening. Did they need the police or the fire brigade? They didn’t know. A car pulled up and stopped, the driver climbing out and hanging on his door to watch as the spiralling vortex began to shrink.

  “We’re back,” said Juliet. “Gordon was right. We made it back.”

  The wind ruffled their clothes; they could still feel the suction on their bodies from the vortex, as if it wanted to pull them back into its whirling centre. But as it began to shrink, the wind and the suction were diminishing as the portal between realities closed.

  “Where’s Gordon?” asked Alex, looking into the spiral, waiting for him to step out and join them in the real world.

  Jay just shook his head, and Alex knew that he shouldn’t pursue it further. There would be time for questions and answers later. Now there was only time to look around at the sky, feel the sun on their faces, the breeze on their skins, and see houses that weren’t demolished or semi-demolished. They watched the terraced doors open, smiled at the looks of astonishment and bemusement, just felt good that they were in the company of other human beings again. They were back in the Real World, and the nightmare was a long way away in a different reality.

  “My legs,” said Annie, suddenly looking down.

  Lisa followed her stare, realised that she no longer felt any pain.

  Their legs were healed, the ripped flesh no longer peppered by gunshot.

  “You see?” said Robin. “They made that better, too. Really cool.”

  “It’s all over,” said Jay. “We made it.”

  Juliet turned to the driver who was hanging on his car door, watching them. His radio was blaring out a rock number. “Turn it up!” called Juliet. The driver continued to stare in astonishment at the whirling spiral of light behind them. “The music,” laughed Juliet. “Turn it up louder!”

  “This isn’t right,” said Tracey Caffney. She had begun to walk forward, veering towards the last terraced house, perhaps a hundred yards from where they stood. “This can’t be right.”

  “What do you mean?” Annie stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. “We’re back and we’re safe. On the outskirts of Edmonville somewhere, away from the ruins.”

  “No.” Tracey shook her head. “This isn’t right at all. Not at all.”

  Her attention was fixed on the end house. There was a ragged fence there. Parked beside it was a Ford Cortina, raised on bricks, its wheels missing. There was a garden, overgrown with weeds. One of the windows in the front of the house had been broken and cardboard had been Sellotaped over the gap.

  “Take it easy,” said Lisa. “You’re back, and you’re safe…”

  “These houses shouldn’t be here,” said Tracey in a trembling voice. “When the earthquake hit us, we were lucky to get out alive. That’s our council house on the end, there. The roof caved in. All the houses on this side fell apart. There was just a pile of rubble, that’s all. There were people all around here. Lying in the street. Hurt and dying. Mrs. Rogers was lying just there. She’d been killed by her own chimney falling. This isn’t right at all. These houses haven’t been touched. It’s like the earthquake never happened…”


  The door in the end house suddenly opened.

  “Oh, good Christ,” exclaimed Annie, recoiling. She was the first to see who was framed in the door.

  “What’s wrong?” Jay pushed forward, and halted in alarm.

  Henry Caffney was standing in the doorway, stripped to the waist. No red sweat band. But it was the same man.

  “What is it?” came another hateful voice from deep inside the house. “Who is it?”

  “Daddie-Paul Caffney…?” Jay could only stare.

  Henry saw Tracey as she pushed forward, and his jaw dropped. He took a step forward, staring at his sister, then looked back in the house.

  “You’re…you’re never going to believe this, Tracey,” he said to someone inside the house. “You’re just not going to fucking believe this!”

  Horrified, Tracey had frozen, her hands to her mouth.

  She took a step back when she heard the next voice coming from inside.

  “Stop bothering me, Henry. Whatever’s happening, just sort it out. I’m busy.”

  It was her own voice.

  “Oh no,” said Tracey. “Oh no, no, no…”

  “Come and see this!” Henry said back into the house. “You got a fucking twin out here.”

  “What’s happening, Jay?” Juliet was suddenly at his side, hand on his shoulder.

  Jay could only shake his head and look.

  And suddenly Tracey Caffney was standing in that doorway, next to her elder brother, staring out at the Tracey Caffney standing with the strangers who had suddenly appeared from the swirling light in front of their house.

  They stared at each other in shock.

  “I thought…” The Tracey standing beside Jay and the others dropped her hands to her side. “I thought I’d got away.” She was talking directly to her twin now, as the other Tracey stepped out of the house, eyes wide. “I thought it was all over, and that I’d never have to live like that again.”

  Tracey’s twin looked back at Henry once. Fear had come into her expression now. Slowly, she began to walk towards her.

  “I thought I’d got away!” cried Tracey, suddenly throwing wide her arms and running towards her other half.

  There was no sense in it, but now the other Tracey was running from Henry, her own arms held wide to take this strange and frightening twin into her embrace.

  The air began to vibrate.

  It was as if someone had switched on an enormous generator nearby. They could feel the vibration in the ground beneath them; could somehow feel the very air stretching.

  “Look out!” yelled Jay instinctively, pulling Juliet back as the others cowered.

  The two Tracey Caffneys flung themselves into an embrace.

  And the resultant detonation blew in all the windows of the terraced houses.

  Jay and Juliet whirled back into the others, the blast throwing everyone to the grass. Henry Caffney vanished from the doorway, hurled back into the house. The two boys were flung from their bicycles, one of the bikes spinning and wobbling across the road. The man by the car fell back inside, the door banging against his legs, the entire vehicle rocking on its suspension. Slates began to slither and slide from the roofs. Birds flew in panic from the nearby trees, scattering wildly in the sky. Burglar alarms began going off all over the council estate, a grim reminder of the first days in New Edmonville after the ’quake had hit.

  And when Jay and the others looked back, the two Tracey Caffneys had gone.

  There was no evidence that they had ever been there.

  Just a blackened, scorched mark on the grass where they had met in that last embrace.

  “What happened?” Candy was clinging tight to Alex, still unsure of whether any of this was real; still desperately worried that Alex might vanish like a dream. “What happened?”

  “What happened, Henry?” echoed Daddie-Paul’s hated voice from inside the house. Suddenly, the door slammed shut. Henry had kicked it closed in panic.

  “Oh my God,” said Annie. “I think I see.” She helped Lisa and Robin to stand.

  “What do you see?” Jay stared at the blackened patch as if the answers might be written there. “What the hell is going on?”

  “Positive and negative,” said Annie in a dull, flat voice, thinking aloud. “Different realities, like Gordon said. Oh God, we’re not meant to be here at all.”

  “Annie,” begged Lisa. “Please?”

  “Don’t you see?” said Annie. “It’s like Gordon said. There are different realities all overlapping one another. I’ve read something about it before. The theory that there are dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands, of different realities, all overlaid on top of each other. Maybe dozens of Edmonvilles, hundreds of Lisas, thousands of Robins. All going off in different directions, depending on the different choices that people make, that circumstances dictate. Gordon just didn’t know everything that psychic earthquake did when it hit Edmonville, otherwise he would have told us. He couldn’t have known!”

  “Annie, you’ve got to make better sense than that,” said Alex. “Something bad is happening here, and we need to know.”

  “We’re still here,” Annie went on. “We never left. Edmonville is still in one piece. There are no ruins, no dead people. No great big gaping hole in the ground where Edmonville used to be before it was ripped out of the earth and transported to the Vorla’s No-Place. It’s all still here. Somewhere out there, in Edmonville, we’re all still here, as if nothing ever happened…because nothing did happen.”

  They were silent then, all looking at each other and still not comprehending as the burglar alarms continued to ring all over the council estate. Now people were beginning to emerge in shock from the terraced houses, carefully picking their way over the glass from shattered windows, carefully edging open their doors. Somewhere, a baby was howling.

  “Reality was split,” Annie went on. “Somehow that ’quake warped two realities. One of those realities was us—and Edmonville itself. We were all ripped away, and transported to that other reality, where the Vorla is. But there’s an Edmonville that was never hit by a psychic earthquake. That Edmonville is right here! And in this Edmonville, the earthquake just never happened! And our other selves are still here, still living our lives the way we used to live. Still going about our business as if nothing ever happened, because here—now—nothing has happened. We’re not supposed to be here. Tracey coming into contact with her other self in this other reality was like positive meeting negative. Matter meeting antimatter. They cancelled each other out!”

  “Oh Christ,” said Alex, understanding at last.

  “We can never go back home,” said Alex. “We don’t belong here any more.”

  “Maybe…” Candy was fighting to come to terms with it all. “Maybe…we could just move away. Never come into contact with our other selves. Start all over again somewhere else in the country. Maybe somewhere else in the world.”

  “This isn’t our world any longer,” said Annie. “Whether we meet our other selves or not, I think we wouldn’t survive here. We don’t belong. We would all die.”

  There was no way anyone could be sure that was true. But somehow Annie’s words contained a fundamental truth that instinctively no one could deny.

  “What are we going to do?” asked Candy hopelessly.

  Jay took Juliet’s hands and looked back at the whirling vortex. It had shrunk to a portal no bigger than ten feet wide, ten feet tall. The wind that plucked at them no longer had the strength it did before, but the suction was still there. In moments, it would dwindle, shrink and be gone for ever.

  “What can we do?” said Jay simply. “We’re going home.”

  They followed his gaze, into the vortex.

  No one had to ask him what he meant.

  Juliet squeezed his hand, then held her hand out to Annie.

  Annie took it, and held her hand out for Lisa and Robin.

  Alex and Candy completed the chain.

  Silently, one by one, they stepped
back into the shrinking vortex of spinning light.

  The kids on the other side of the street, bicycles recovered, stared in awe as the luminous whirlpool shrank to the size of a man’s head. The man in the car yanked the gear-stick into reverse and screeched away, back down the street, convinced that there was going to be another explosion.

  Within the Caffney house, a hated voice yelled: “Tracey? Where the hell are you, girl? Henry, get the fuck off your back and open the door! Henry…?”

  The spinning ball of light snapped out of existence.

  Overhead, the birds wheeled and circled in the sky, still alarmed at the vibrations in the air. The burglar alarms whined on and on, the baby competing for attention.

  On the grass outside the terraced houses, there was only a blackened patch of grass.

  And no sign that anyone…anyone at all…had ever been there.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The Journal of Jay O’Connor:

  Epilogue

  I’m sitting on the edge of the Chasm, not so far from the place we called the Rendezvous. It was the place that in due course we all called home after the ’quake hit; the place where we clung together, and planned together, and defied the Vorla together. It’s burned out now courtesy of the Caffneys, and we’ve spent some time wondering whether we should rebuild it, make it habitable again. There are lots of other places we could find to repair; other places with only minimum structural damage—but the Rendezvous is so special to us, despite the horrors we endured, we’re reluctant to abandon it. Alex seems keen to give it a try. I don’t know. Maybe we will, maybe we won’t. Time will tell.

  Time.

  That’s what we have lots of here.

  All the time in the world.

  I’m dictating on to the last of a dozen tapes or so, putting these last thoughts down. There’s so much to be done.

  I’m looking down into the Chasm, and still can’t believe that I was down there and that I was able to climb out. Maybe in another reality I didn’t. But I won’t go into all that, because it can do your head in the more you think about it. All I know is that once the Chasm was a thing to be feared. All of mankind’s evil, its hatred, its insanity, was down there. Thousands and thousands of years’ worth of pure Evil, generated by mankind; the pure evil energy of it somehow transported here and dumped into that pit. The sum total of all our Evil, all brewed into that great black sea. It tried to destroy us, and we denied it. More than anything, it wanted us to fear it.