The Realities of Aldous U

by Michael Lawrence

  Indoors, Alex gave her the gist of her conversation with Ivan. Naia was pleased to hear about Kate and the boyfriend. Nothing could excuse her father for what he would have done to Withern if Mum hadn’t been there to keep things in order, but she was glad to be able to set aside the suspicious notions that had begun to fester about him and Kate alone together in Bristol.

  Day Three / 7

  From the foot of the stairs Alaric slipped into the Long Room and stood behind the door trying to hold himself together. The TV blared from the far end. Some rowdy game show. Bewildered and frightened, it barely registered that there was no reason for the television to be on if the only people in the house were burglars. The subdued lighting was provided by tulip-shaped wall-lights that would never have found their way into a house of which an Alex Underwood had charge. She wouldn’t have chosen the flock wallpaper either, or displayed the studio portraits of freckled kids with missing teeth. The only furniture at this end was a teak writing bureau, a matching sideboard, and a walnut display cabinet with fancy scrollwork on the glass doors. The cabinet contained a collection of decorative plates and nauseatingly pretty figurines of Italian abstraction.

  Alaric shook himself. I have to get out of here. Rather than go back the way he’d come and risk being seen from the landing, he set off along the room toward the door that would return him to the front hall and the window by which he’d entered. As at home, and at Naia’s, armchairs and a big couch took up most of the TV end of the room, though the ones here were excessively floral. Briefly puzzling over a wedge-shaped log on the floor, he saw over the back of the couch that the original fireplace no longer existed here, its place taken, in small part, by a flame-effect gas fire. Beside the fire stood a shiny black log basket with ornate brass curlicues. The logs in the basket had no practical function. As he approached something else caught his eye just below the top of the couch. Stretching up he saw the dome of a bald head with wisps of white hair. There was someone there. Someone who only had to glance over his shoulder to see him.

  Preparing to make a run for it, Alaric moved silently toward the door. He was almost there when it occurred to him that the burglars were banging about so loudly upstairs that even a game show fan couldn’t fail to hear them. Yet the man on the couch didn’t move a muscle. Was he deaf? If so, he couldn’t be enjoying the show much: no subtitles. Reaching the door, Alaric looked along the couch. There were two people on it, not one. An elderly couple. The man sat upright and his wife lay half across him. She seemed to be asleep, while the man’s head lolled a little. The one eye that Alaric could see in profile stared in the direction of the TV, unblinking. Something wrong here. At the risk of being caught, he craned his neck until he could see part of the far side of the man’s head. There was a massive dent in it and the right eye looked as if it had burst. His shirt and the couch on that side were stained with blood. Suddenly the log on the carpet made sense. The woman might have been treated similarly or she might not, but as her face was turned away he couldn’t see any evidence of it. Perhaps her heart had given out when the men rushed in and one of them seized the log from the basket and struck her husband his death blow.

  Crashes from upstairs. Raised male voices.

  Turning to the door, Alaric misjudged its position and bumped into a little telephone table. It was an odd sort of bumping, like nudging marshmallow. He looked at the phone. He ought to call the police. Isn’t that what you do in situations like this? There might be time to ring before he made a break for it. His hand closed round the receiver and lifted it. It slipped through his fingers. He picked it up again, and again failed to hold it. This time it fell on its side on the table. Puzzled, he leaned over the phone and listened for a dialing tone. It was there. If he couldn’t get a grip on the thing, he could surely manage to press one little button three times. He touched the ‘9’. The button went down, but not far enough. He stabbed at it. The button resisted. No matter how hard he pressed, it wouldn’t go any further than half way. The dialing tone continued without pause. It was like the meeting with Naia in the garden before he was absorbed into her reality. Nothing had real substance for him. So, within the past ten or fifteen minutes, he had somehow strayed into this reality, but instead of waiting to be drawn into the house from the garden, if that was possible here, he had crawled through the window and –

  Thud. Thud. Heavy feet on the stairs.

  He leapt at the door and yanked the handle, intending to run into the hall, grab his boots, jump out of the window before he could be seen. The door opened – just a little. He tugged again. Another few inches, but that was it. He turned sideways, tried to squeeze through. The gap was insufficient, yet the door itself proved no obstacle. Part of him passed through the wood. He felt it, but only as a mild discomfort. On the other side he pressed back into the recess and looked along the hall; saw the man in the leather jacket cross from the foot of the stairs to the River Room. His entry was followed by crashes as he set about tearing the room apart in search of a safe or valuables.

  Alaric snatched up his boots and chucked them through the window. Climbing after them he sat on the step to pull them on, trying to decide where to go from there. His own footprints, surprisingly shallow given the depth of the snow, pointed the way in reverse. He got up and ran, dreading a yell as someone came after him wielding a weapon. There was no yell, no pursuit, but he reached the old oak just moments before the fractured beam of headlights appeared in the tunnel of trees along the drive; then a white Mercedes was drawing up in front of the house and three kids were tumbling out. Their parents stepped out at a more leisurely pace. The man, who’d been driving, said to his wife: ‘Bung the kettle on while I put her away, Sal, I’m gasping.’

  ‘What did your last slave die of?’ she replied.

  ‘Love,’ the man said, clumping toward the garage.

  The children were already stamping their feet in the porch. ‘Mum! Hurry up! Cold!’ Their mother inserted a key in the lock and they pushed past her. The light came on. As her husband pulled the garage doors back she followed the kids into the house.

  While Alaric watched from behind the tree, the two intruders, unseen by him or anyone else, made a hasty exit via the French doors in the River Room. The man in the leather jacket was a petty thief called Wally Musgrave, who as a boy had exchanged his grandmother’s false teeth for a model racing car. The taller man had much more form, mainly for GBH and robbery with violence. Twice divorced, he had two children from his first marriage, Adam and Nicole, but his violent history had led to a court order forbidding him to see them. His name was Ivan Charles Underwood. His family had once owned Withern Rise, way back, long before his time, and all his life he’d resented the people who lived there instead of him.

  Screams from the house. The driver, about to climb back in the car, stopped, then ran toward the porch. He’d just reached it when Alaric felt a tremor from the tree and the screams ended. The Mercedes was gone. The garage doors were closed. There was a light in an upper window, with Liney moving across it.

  He pushed himself away from the tree and made for the house. This time the window would be shut, the door unlocked.

  Day Three / 8

  They’d been chatting with the TV turned down, laughing about something stupid Dad once did, then Naia had excused herself to go to the bathroom and gone up, but not to the bathroom. She needed to keep looking in her room in case Alaric made an impromptu visit. She wasn’t sure what he would do if he arrived and she wasn’t there. Come looking for her perhaps, the prospect of which made her very nervous. She went into her room. Alaric wasn’t there. But someone was.

  ‘Mum…?’

  There was only one route to the first floor and Naia had just taken it. There was no way her mother could have got there before her. But here she was, sitting on the bed, sobbing into her hands.

  ‘Mum, what are you…? How…? I don’t…’

  The sobbing continued. Naia’s bewilderment increased when she heard a name betwee
n the sobs.

  ‘Alaric. Oh, Alaric.’

  Her mother, who simply could not be there, had no idea that Alaric existed, yet here she was wailing his name as if he’d just died or someth...

  The Alex Underwood on the bed had vanished, taking her sorrow with her. There wasn’t even a dent where she’d been sitting.

  Day Three / 9

  He closed the front door, locked it, bolted it, put his back against it. The house was quiet. No sound of the TV this time.

  ‘Alaric? That you?’

  Liney, jogging downstairs. Reaching the back hall, she saw him at the door, smiled, came toward him. The smile faded as she drew near.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yeah, why shouldn’t I be?’

  He removed his coat and kicked his boots off. Liney hovered, uncertain what to do or say next. Teenage boys weren’t a species she’d ever had much to do with, even when a teenager herself. Conversation with them had always been like trying to communicate in a dead language, then and now.

  ‘I’ve cleared just enough space to sit down in there,’ she said, indicating the Long Room. ‘One or two of your videos I wouldn’t mind seeing. Donnie Darko, Final Destination. What do you say?’

  Alaric recalled all too vividly the old couple on the couch in their Long Room. Different couch, but the same position. He couldn’t sit in that space, even here. Not tonight.

  ‘I’ve seen them,’ he said, and walked past her.

  Half way upstairs he heard again the conversation between the two men on that other landing. His stomach turned. He rushed up to the bathroom, raised the toilet seat, vomited so stridently that Liney couldn’t miss it even downstairs. She came running, and was leaning over him before he’d finished, patting his back, making soothing noises that soothed not at all.

  She helped him up, flushed the bowl, put the seat down while he slushed cold water in his face.

  ‘What brought that on?’

  His reply was little more than a grunt. She guided him to his room, but he couldn’t face lying down immediately. Liney draped his duvet around him. He tugged it across his chest. He was shaking.

  ‘Anything I can get you?’ she asked. ‘Cup of tea? Glass of water?’

  ‘Water,’ he said, to get rid of her for a minute as much as anything else. She left the room, pleased to be of use.

  Without her there to distract him, the corpse or corpses on the other couch again filled his mind. Who were those people anyway? Not Underwoods, obviously. Sick as he felt, he concocted a possibility. In 1963 Grandpa Rayner bought Withern back from the family who’d owned it since the late Forties. Maybe the deal had had an equal chance of success or failure, and a reality had come into being in which Rayner hadn’t been able to raise enough money, or his offer had been rejected, so that the Underwoods of that reality had never moved back. A son and his wife of the resident family – or a daughter and her husband – had also lived there, and when they too became parents they were given a part of the house for their own use. The arrangement had worked well enough until tonight, when the lives of the two who’d kept the place going all these years were terminated horribly by a pair of evil bastards looking for trinkets. He saw how it might be for the survivors. The middle-aged parents would become terrified of shadows and sounds in the night, and their kids, wherever they went in the world, would be haunted by the sight that had met their eyes when they burst into the Long Room that terrible February evening of 2005, when they were young.

  Day Three / 10

  She couldn’t begin to account for it. Her mother downstairs in the Long Room and up in her bedroom at one and the same time, the one upstairs sobbing a name she couldn’t possibly know and disappearing before her eyes. Could she have been the ghost of Alaric’s mother? Were ghosts able to wander in dimensions other than the ones they’d inhabited when alive? That might explain the sobbing. Mourning the loss of a beloved son. It was she who died, but the loss would have been as great for her as for him, in a way. The only trouble with all that was that Naia didn’t believe in ghosts. Ghosts were hogwash. But if the Alex in her room was not a ghost but a living person, where had she come from? Where did she belong? And why had she been sobbing her heart out over Alaric?

  Day Three / 11

  Liney returned with a glass of water. A pint glass. She never does things by halves, he thought.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  She held the glass to his lips, which made it impossible to answer without creating a wet aunt, so again he merely grunted. She sat down beside him and put her arms round him; began rocking him like a baby. Rocking was not something he needed just then, but it seemed churlish to pull away, so they sat like this for some time, rocking silently back and forth, until their mutual self-consciousness became tangible.

  ‘Better now?’ Liney asked.

  ‘Mm.’

  She set him free. ‘Want to lie down?’

  ‘Kay.’

  He stretched out and she arranged the duvet over him. Neither of them mentioned the fact that he was still fully dressed. She went to the door and turned the light off.

  ‘I’ll pop in later to see how you are.’

  As she went downstairs Liney’s imagination kicked in. He’d been to a mate’s in the village and drunk something that didn’t agree with him, or taken some bad dope. Had to be something like that. A teenage boy doesn’t go out on a freezing winter night in reasonable spirits and health, and return deathly pale and puking if he’s just been for a stroll. She was unsure whether to phone his father or carry on as though nothing had happened. If she told Ivan she ran the risk of alienating Alaric just as they were beginning to feel at ease with one another. But if she kept her suspicions to herself…

  While Liney was reviewing her choices, Alaric, swaddled in feather and down, closed his eyes and stumbled into sleep. Fortunately, next morning, he did not recall his dreams.

  DAY TWO

  Day Two / 1

  Overnight Alaric’s nervousness about attempting further visits to Naia’s had increased considerably. Bad enough, the risk of finding himself back at the reality where the other version of himself lived; but now there was the even more unnerving prospect of ending up once again at what he was already calling the Murder House. What would it be like there today? Buzzing with police and forensics, no doubt. A cordon round the property. TV crews, reporters, neighbors peering over the walls, trying to get up the drive, hiring boats for a glimpse or picture from the river.

  To take his mind off these things he tried to concentrate on the most mundane aspects of life at his version of the house, which meant helping Liney clear up the mess they’d made while the domestics were working elsewhere. The kitchen was the worst, with paint pots, brushes, solvents and newspaper everywhere. At teatime, when it was still not clear, Liney rang out for fried chicken.

  ‘I feel terrible, not providing better fare for you,’ she said when it was delivered.

  ‘Good,’ Alaric said, tucking in.

  While they were eating Liney asked, without preamble, if he was warming to the idea of Kate coming to live there. He muttered something into his chicken that she didn’t catch. She asked him to repeat it, instead of which he said, ‘She’s after his money.’

  ‘Money?’ she said. ‘The tight-fisted sod has money?’

  ‘The compensation.’

  ‘Oh, the compensation, I’d forgotten that.’

  ‘Bet she hasn’t. Be at least two hundred grand, Dad says.’

  ‘A tidy sum. But I doubt it’s enough for a woman of any intelligence to up sticks and throw in her lot with a slob like your father. Have to be pretty desperate for that.’

  ‘Maybe she is. Desperate.’

  ‘Did she strike you as a gold-digger when you met her?’

  ‘She’s clever,’ he said gruffly.

  But these were just words, conjured out of the moment. The truth was that his feelings about Kate were no longer as clear-cut as they had been. A few days ago he’d hated he
r, pure and simple. She was an outsider about to impose herself on his life. No matter that his life was a grim trudge, devoid of light and hope, Kate Faraday had no place in it. But that was before Naia, before her Withern Rise, and the chance encounter in the cemetery. Today he was no longer sure what he felt about anything, including Kate. He almost preferred it the other way. You knew where you were when you hated someone.

  In the afternoon, needing other things to think about, he called on Len and Mick in the village. Both were out. He went on to Stone, looked in some shop windows, quickly became bored, and ambled home via the marina bridge. He didn’t go indoors, however, but to the south garden, the Family Tree. He’d been putting this off, but could do so no longer. He’d climbed this tree all through his childhood, scrambled along its boughs and branches to his heart’s content, monkeyed about in it on his own or with friends until the age of thirteen or fourteen. Through all those years it had seemed the best tree in the world. But after last night he was suspicious of it. And nervous. He hadn’t previously given a thought to why the tree’s reach was the stopping-off point between the realities, but he’d woken this morning with an idea that had grown in him through the day and was with him still: that it was the tree, not the Follies, that linked the realities.

  He tried to reason it out, as Naia would have done, starting with the supposition that when the limbs of a tree fall or are removed the connection between the separated parts remains. The model houses in the glass shades, carved of wood from variations of the tree, were consequently linked to it – and to one another. The physical link, the interchange, might or might not have been sparked by Naia’s ‘factors’. What intrigued him more, now, was that there’d been no model of Withern Rise to draw him to the non-Underwood house. There’d been something, though, which might have come from the same source: the logs beside the fire, and in particular the one used to bludgeon the old man to death. Could it be that when that former part of the tree had taken the man’s life, it had absorbed the misery it had inflicted and passed it to the tree from which it came, an emotion which had been shared with versions of itself in other realities? Alaric, touching his Family Tree, had received the emotion, full force, and, while enduring it, been transferred to the reality in which the distress had been initiated. Such transferrals might be very rare; a quirk of nature perhaps. Versions of the tree had stood in variations of the garden for a full century, growing and maturing over the body of Withern’s creator in all his incarnations. In the course of that century the tree, being at the heart of life at Withern Rise, had absorbed the breadth of feeling of those who had lived there during its lifetime, and in so doing developed – only recently maybe – the capacity to shuttle at least two Underwoods between realities when they were at their most vulnerable. As for why he’d felt no pain when transferred from tree to tree, could it simply be that starting from the tree itself was simply more... ‘direct’?