Naia, I’m writing this because there are things I must speak to you about, here in my adopted reality.
Before we meet, you should know that I was about your age when I too learnt that mine was not the only reality. I was in the garden when I came across a way through, though the reality I found myself in was so like my own that I didn’t realize I was in another until a stranger demanded to know what I was doing there. He was an Underwood, and he lived there.
But there were no Underwoods at the Withern I knew.
Following that first experience I found I could visit many realities via that route. I’ll tell you about some of those early outings when we meet. About them and very much more. Look in the old oak just before mid-day tomorrow for instructions as to how to get to me.
Aldous U.
Withern Rise
She was about to read the letter again when she heard a footfall outside. She went to the door, looked out, and saw a figure walking away, along the hall. She gave an involuntary cry, but the other Naia did not stop or even glance back. She was almost at the front door when she vanished.
6: 114/43
Ric hadn’t told the others what he’d seen: a boy who looked like him – the way he used to look – and the house he grew up in. He’d only glimpsed them, and then house and boy were gone and there was nothing but all these trees once more. He wished he had an explanation for what he’d seen, but explanations were hard to come by these days. Nothing had made sense since he came here, wherever ‘here’ was. The day it happened, a warm Sunday afternoon in July, he’d been sitting against the trunk of the weeping willow in the north garden – well hidden from the house by the tree’s cascading leaf-packed branches – sifting through the latest snaps of Garth Noy and Bonnie Barraco getting it on. Noy had a nice little business going there, and an enthusiastic helper in Bonnie the Bike. When he heard a scuffling behind him, the pictures flew and he jumped guiltily to his feet and darted round the trunk. Relieved to find no one there, he took a further step, intending to complete the circuit and return to the photos. The step was half-completed when he experienced a rush of disorientation and the willow was replaced by a great many more trees – none of them willows – and a far from pleasant odor. Alarmed, he rushed this way and that, and in so doing quickly lost all sense of his point of arrival. There was nothing but trees in every direction, so densely packed and leafed that very little light filtered between them, even from above. He found no paths as such, merely suggestions of a few that petered out at once, and the two short flights of worn steps he came across climbed only to empty space.
After a time he forced himself to pause, calm down. What this place was and how he got here could be worked out later. For now he must be more methodical in his search either for a way out or a way back, whichever came first. But even proceeding with more circumspection he was unsuccessful. There seemed to be no end to these woods; no splinter of full daylight anywhere he looked or went. He wandered all afternoon and evening, with mounting hopelessness, and passed the night curled up in a leafy bower, shivering, with fear rather than cold; fear that he was lost forever, that he would never again see the world and people he knew.
In the morning – how early he couldn’t say, having tripped over a root and smashed his watch the night before – he continued his search. Hours passed, futile hours, and eventually, very hungry and thirsty, he sank to the ground in despair.
‘Who the feckin’ hell are you?’
A heavy-set youth with an unruly mop of ginger hair stood over him.
He looked up, startled. ‘I…’
The attempt was dismissed with a wave of the hand. ‘Who cares? Company’s company.’
The youth gave his name as Scarry, but misheard the one offered in return, picking up on the last syllable only, an abbreviation which went uncorrected then and in the months that followed.
‘What is this place?’ the newly-named Ric had asked.
Scarry snorted. ‘Whatcha think it is? Buncha feckin’ trees that go on forever, that’s what it is.’
‘It must end somewhere.’
‘If it does, it ain’t nowhere near here. I been here weeks and never seen nothing but feckin’ trees.’
What Scarry did not mention was that he’d spent a great many days during those lonely, frightened weeks desperately seeking a way out, and that this tangled, festering forest had frustrated him at every turn. To tell of this would have been to admit failure to someone who didn’t know that he’d never succeeded in a damn thing he’d ever tried.
‘Wanna see me house?’ he asked brightly.
‘Your house?’
‘Yeah. This way.’
Scarry’s house turned out to be three ruined ivy-laden walls, ranging from one foot to four feet high, that met to form two corners of a primitive dwelling that had tumbled to its foundations an age ago. These remnant walls partially enclosed a floor of rock so irregular that it might have risen in a single convulsion eons since; may even have caused the building’s collapse. There must once have been a door and windows, but there was no sign of them now, and the ‘ceiling’ was a tangled lattice of branches and leaves that stretched from the middle reaches of the trees that stood like sentries all about. Scarry confided that the one time it had rained since he’d been here the trees had provided perfect shelter.
‘Must get cold at night, though,’ Ric said.
‘Not so much. Not so far.’
He was proud of his residence. It was the first home he’d had where no one lorded it over him, told him what to do, sneered at him.
‘Is there anyone else here?’
‘Only the old geezer,’ Scarry said. ‘I keep my distance from him.’
‘Old geezer?’
‘First time I saw him, he yelled at me. Typical. They always yell. My foster folks yelled at me all the time. Threw stuff, cracked me round the head. Frank raised his feckin’ fist whenever I walked in. And the probation officer, Griffiths, talked to me like I was scum. The old geezer’s the same. Knew it the minute I saw him. Keep away from him, that’s an order.’
It was Scarry’s first order, and it established their relative positions here. Ric didn’t care about position. He was grateful for the food his new friend shared with him – some potato-like vegetables he’d baked overnight in the embers of a fire – and the clear water he showed him, running over rocks nearby.
A few days after Ric’s arrival, the first of the others turned up – young Jonno – and, a couple of days after him, Hag and Badger, together. Jonno was twelve, the eldest of the three. He said that he and his pal Hendrix had climbed over the wall of this old house one night, for a nose around. He’d hidden under this big old tree to freak Hendrix out, and next thing he knew he was in these whiffy woods, alone, and he panicked and just ran and ran. When he finally stopped and shouted his mate’s name, Scarry and Ric came along.
Hag and Badger – Scarry too – had also been near a tree in some garden seconds before they walked into the forest. None of them named the species of tree or the property in whose grounds it stood, but from what they said Ric knew that, like him, they’d come here from the willow in the north garden of Withern Rise. While the three younger boys had climbed the wall or crept along the drive with mere mischief in mind, Scarry was pleased to relate that he’d planned to break into the house and swipe something from the ‘rich shits’ who lived there. The only one who hadn’t been trespassing was Ric, but he kept this to himself.
As the second to arrive, and the nearest to Scarry’s age, he was the one the head man talked to the most. The others were just ‘the kids’, whose role, as subordinates, was to do as they were told, which for the most part meant gathering wood, lighting fires, and cooking what little flesh that could be caught or found. The kids missed home dreadfully. Home, parents, their beds, proper food and drink. They sniffled and cried quite a bit at first, until Scarry made a rule: ‘No more whingeing ’bout where you feckin’ come from – right? No more lost this, lost that. Y
ou’re here, this is it, feckin’ put up with it, ’kay?’
But not talking about these things didn’t stop the longing, the misery. The only difference was that suffering was now conducted in silence, or alone while drifting hopelessly about the forest. And it wasn’t only the young boys who suffered. Ric did too. More than he could say. More than he was allowed to.
7: 114
The man who signed himself Aldous U (known simply as ‘AU’ to a few acquaintances) had come across numerous incarnations of himself in his time, all of whom he’d gone out of his way to avoid. In some realities he was a landscape gardener, in others a hotel manager; in a couple he was a painter-and-decorator who ran an Internet porn site on the side. In just one that he knew of he was a comic-book writer and illustrator who’d sold the rights to his series about dark invaders to an independent film-maker named Bobby Rodriguez.
But it wasn’t only versions of himself he kept away from. To avoid confusion he steered clear of people he’d conversed with at length in other realities. One of the few recent exceptions to this had been Naia’s garden guest, an Aldous very different to himself in all respects but name. They’d first met in February when this lean, rather confused-looking man strolled out of thin air a few yards from where he was standing, and continued walking without missing a step as though he’d been on that path all along. Fascinated by this extraordinary ability, AU had befriended Aldous, and, when he located the reality from which he’d emerged, befriended him there too, as another version of himself. In both realities, as they got to know one another, Aldous had spoken of the misfortune that had turned him into an old man while he slept. Although compelled to listen to the same tale twice with trivial variations, in the months that followed their first encounter AU, in his two personas, had gone out of his way to help his new friend adjust to the world and century in which he’d finally woken. He did this partly because he felt a great sympathy for him, partly because they shared a name, though the latter was another detail he kept to himself. It was a puzzle to him that Aldous appeared in just one reality these days, but he did not admit to this either.
Of late, AU had cut back on visits to realities in which he was not known, largely because he was sick of being called to account by owners who spotted him in the grounds, or pursued by yapping terriers or some larger beast. But now and then the old urge to experience the unfamiliar recurred, and off he would go. On one recent occasion he found himself at a Withern transformed into a retirement home, the grounds landscaped to accommodate neat islands of lawn dotted with benches, and careful paths for infirm residents to be pushed along in wheelchairs. This was a fairly amusing variation, but some were far less entertaining – like one visited a few weeks back. The garden of the Withern Rise he entered that September afternoon had seemed very standard, if somewhat disheveled. After popping a handful of grasses and leaves into the leather wallet attached to his belt, he slipped out by the side gate and headed up to the village. It was a practice of his to buy a paper on a first visit to a reality; you never knew what advertisement or tiny story peculiar to it you might find if you looked hard enough. He was about to enter the newsagent’s when he noticed that the premises across the road, which sold bicycles in most realities, was a rather tatty second-hand furniture shop, with, over the broad main window, a yellow and blue sign bearing the legend ‘Used Emporium’. This was a difference he’d never encountered before. He did not have to look hard for a reality-specific story that day. Every front page carried a variant of a single headline that could not have appeared in any other reality that he knew of. Fascinated, he bought The Times and a paper called The Examiner. Carrying them back along the lane, reading as he went, he seated himself on the cemetery steps to study the pages devoted to the big story. Absorbed, he did not hear the approaching footsteps, but he couldn’t miss or ignore the voice.
‘Shocking, isn’t it?’
He looked up. A slightly plumper Ivan Underwood than usual stood before him. An Ivan who dyed his hair – dyed it a darker shade than suited him. He too carried a newspaper: a tabloid.
‘It is.’ AU got up, dusting the seat of his pants. ‘I was just starting on the who-dun-it theories.’
Ivan waggled his paper. ‘Hot favorite in this one’s Saddam. Could be right. Gore should have gone after him once he spiked Bin Laden at Tora Bora. Now it’s up to Kerry to sort him out.’
‘Kerry?’
‘Just think. If not for that insurance fiasco just before the second term election, Kerry wouldn’t have been drafted in as Vice and it’d be President Lieberman now. Think Kerry’s got the balls for that sort of action? I’m not so sure. Fancy a beer?’
Ushered as a guest through the gate he’d crept out of like a criminal a short while ago, AU was able to inspect the property at his leisure as they strolled along the path. This part of the garden looked as if it hadn’t been touched since early summer. There were thistles and long grass where flowers and vegetables should be; once-healthy plants were struggling or choked by weeds; gravel was unraked; litter delivered by the wind remained where it had fallen. As they approached the house he saw that the drive, where it opened out before the front door and the kitchen window, was badly in need of weeding, though a few green clumps in the old wheelbarrow parked beside a grubby white Volvo estate suggested that someone had decided to make an effort. He saw who that someone was when she came out as they were about to enter the house.
Of all the Alex Underwoods he’d seen or met, this one was by far the most dismal. She was pale and gaunt, and her mouth seemed a stranger to smiles. Her hair might not have been washed or brushed for a week. Passing them on the step without a word or glance, she returned to her desultory weeding while Ivan led the way to the kitchen, where he took two cans of Rooneys from the fridge. They sat at the table and talked about President Gore’s assassination and the implications of it for America and the world. Most of this came from Ivan, of course, AU’s knowledge of this reality being limited to a few minutes’ examination of a couple of newspapers on the cemetery steps. The slant and vigor of his host’s views surprised him. He’d never come across such a right-wing, reactionary Ivan Underwood.
Ivan was well into his second beer – AU had declined another – when his thoughts turned to a topic much closer to home, in the course of which he disclosed that the used furniture ‘emporium’ in the village was his. No ‘Underwood’s Antiques & Memorabilia’ in Stone High Street for this Ivan. The sorry tale he was so keen to share with a stranger that overcast September afternoon went as follows. One Sunday a couple of months earlier, shortly after lunch, their teenage son – Al – had left the house. He hadn’t said where he was going, but that was normal for him these days. When he wasn’t back by eleven that night Ivan had phoned the homes of Al’s friends, the ones he had names or numbers for anyway. None of them had seen him all day. They waited till morning before calling the police in case he turned up in the middle of the night. Searches were then carried out, around the grounds, across the river, in the village and town. A few pornographic photos found under the willow in the north garden were a mystery, but no clue as to where he’d gone or what might have happened to him. Statements were taken from Ivan and Alex and anyone who knew their son or might have come into contact with him recently. A two-year-old holiday picture of him with his face half in shade appeared in the local papers. In spite of all these efforts to locate him there’d been no trace of the boy since that Sunday. No sign, no sound, not a word.
‘The wife’s not handling it well,’ Ivan said, nodding toward the window. ‘Blames me. We hadn’t been getting on so well lately, me and Al. Father and son – you know. She thinks I must’ve been having a go at him and he walked out in protest. But it wasn’t me. I didn’t drive him away.’
What Ivan didn’t bother to mention while relating all this (mainly because it wasn’t important to him) was that during the official search of the grounds radio contact with a young policewoman had been lost and never resumed. It was common
knowledge among this officer’s colleagues that she wasn’t happy in the job, or with her Taekwon-Do instructor husband, and the assumption was made that she’d borrowed a leaf from the boy’s book and legged it; taken that plane to Honolulu – as she’d so often threatened to do – to join an old schoolfriend who worked in a casino there. If Ivan had told him about the disappearance of the policewoman, AU would have asked him if she’d last been seen near the willow in the north garden. If the answer had been yes, he, if no one else, would have been almost certain that wherever she was it was not Honolulu. At least, not the Honolulu of that reality.
8: 47/78
Kate had been about to go to the village shop for a few things when Alaric offered to go for her. She was pleased, not because she didn’t have to go after all, but because he had volunteered, without any prompting.
He was just setting off when he saw a tortoiseshell cat wending a wayward course toward the north garden. He wasn’t a cat lover, but this was one he hadn’t seen before, so he followed it. Reaching the big willow, whose bulging folds of slender leaves fanned across the lawn and garnished the water below the river bank, the cat slipped inside. When he too entered that muted realm, the cat glanced coolly back at him as if to say, ‘Follow me or don’t follow me, your choice,’ and strolled round the trunk, tail in the air. Again he went after it, but when he got to the other side the cat wasn’t there. While peering up to see if it was climbing, he took a further step, came over giddy, and ended the step leaning against the gnarled old trunk. By the time the giddiness had passed his interest in the cat had waned, but when he returned to the garden he felt unaccountably on edge. Following the path to the gate, he looked neither right nor left, or even ahead, only at the ground in front of his feet. This preoccupation with something he could not identify was no doubt the cause of his failure to notice that the gate at the end of the path was in greater need of repair than it ought to be, or that it took a harder tug than usual to close it behind him.
The Realities of Aldous U Page 32