The Realities of Aldous U

by Michael Lawrence

  Hunching up the lane and past the old primary school tucked into the corner, he turned left into Main Street. Entering the village shop a little way along he was startled by a sharp buzz rather than the undisciplined ringing of the bell always, until now, attached to the inside of the door. He was further surprised to see an unfamiliar face behind the counter. The only time either Mr. or Mrs. Paine wasn’t at the till was during their annual holiday, the same two weeks every August. If they’d taken a few extra days off for once, Lenny hadn’t mentioned it. Still. Whatever. This woman was obviously standing in for them or helping out. He passed along the three short aisles with a basket from the stack behind the door: new baskets, blue plastic, about time too; the old metal ones had sharp bits sticking out of them. In minutes he had everything on the list. He put the basket on the counter. The woman began running his purchases across the scanner.

  ‘Good deed for the day?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Shopping for Mum.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Live in the village, do you?’

  ‘Down the lane,’ he said.

  ‘The bungalows?’

  ‘No.’ He hesitated – what was it to her? – but when she seemed to expect more, added: ‘The house by the river. Withern Rise.’

  The woman’s hand froze above the carrier bag she was packing for him. ‘Stace never said nothing about no lodger.’

  ‘Stace?’

  She dropped the box of tea bags in. ‘Mrs. Curtis. She’s been alone there for nine years, since…’ She gave him a sharp, bright look. ‘It’s all right, you don’t have to say where you live, just me being nosy.’

  ‘No, I really live th…’ He trailed off, suddenly in need of allies. ‘Mr. and Mrs. Paine know me.’

  ‘Who?’

  Her expression suggested that she’d never heard of them. Alaric’s confusion increased. He’d been coming to this shop all his life, first in a pushchair, then as a toddler holding his mother’s hand, for the past few years on his own or with his mates. The owners were the parents of one of his best friends. He’d often stayed to tea in the flat upstairs. Slept over a couple of times. He glanced about him, a reflexive check that he was where he’d intended to be, and noticed labels he’d missed or thought nothing of when passing them – Battle Creek Cornflakes, Heinz 59, Boulanger’s Soups (like Campbell’s in every detail but the name) – and that where a framed poster of the Queen usually hung there was one of an unfamiliar man in a gray suit.

  ‘That’ll be eight twenty-six,’ the woman said.

  He handed over the tenner Kate had given him. The note was half-way to the till when she looked at it, smiled frostily, and returned it.

  ‘Good try.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  The woman snorted. ‘What’s wrong!’ She gripped the carrier – ‘I’ll put these back in a minute, shall I?’ – and stashed it under the counter.

  Red-faced, and very bewildered, he left the shop. The door buzzed contemptuously at his going.

  Outside he moved along the pavement to be away from the woman’s glare through the window. There was never much traffic in Eynesford and there was none now, not even any temporarily-parked cars or delivery vans, so he had a clear view of the street – a view he hadn’t taken in when turning the corner from the lane. He reeled at what he saw. The buildings were taller than they ought to be, most of the doors were wider, and many of the windows were arched, like church windows. But it was the lines below the curbs that clinched it. They were narrower than usual, and not double, but triple. And they were green, not yellow.

  A curtain twitched in a window opposite. To avoid busybody eyes, he crossed the street to look in the bike shop while he tried to make sense of these anomalies. He stood before the big plate-glass window, not really focusing until it registered that the handlebars of every bike on show were equipped with small plasma screens. He’d also never seen a scooter like the one to the side of the main display. It had a very high seat, no wheels, and bore a sign which read: ‘The digitized Hoverscoot from The Independent Republic of Chechnya’.

  He heard a car coming and turned from the window to watch its approach. It was an ordinary enough car, if not a model he could put a name to, but it wasn’t the make or design that caused him to stare. It was the way it was being driven. On the wrong side of the road.

  9: 39

  Naia puzzled over the letter, particularly its statement that there’d been no Underwoods at Withern when Aldous U was young. Having free access to the garden, and with such a first name, and that initial for his surname, he had to be an Underwood himself, so what was that all about? With little expectation of it being relevant, she decided to try and discover the family name of the people who’d lived there from 1947 to 1963 (in this as well as her original reality), the only period since its construction that Underwoods had not owned Withern Rise. She’d never enquired about them before. For her, their occupation was best erased from Withern history, if only for what they did to the south garden. She’d seen the south garden as it was in the mid-1940s, albeit under water, and could tell even from that unflattering glimpse that it would have been a glorious place to walk and sit and think if those philistines hadn’t stripped it of its trees and shrubs, dug over the flower beds and paths to lay a grass tennis court. There was no tennis court today, or much indication that there’d ever been one, and with only the Family Tree standing to one side, the south garden was the least interesting part of the entire property. When that magnificent old oak was felled – as it looked like it would have to be – there’d be nothing worth looking at there, nothing at all.

  She asked Kate if she knew how she might find out about the non-Underwoods who had lived there, and Kate suggested a visit to Stone Town Hall; a very good suggestion as it turned out, for there she learnt that copies of earlier deeds to many of the older houses, including Withern Rise, were archived and available for public scrutiny. A few minutes’ search by a helpful clerk revealed that the family that had bought and lived at Withern Rise during those years was called Ravage. Naia almost laughed out loud at the aptness of the name, but its discovery was no more helpful than she’d expected in that it did not explain Aldous U’s presence there in his youth. She reminded herself that she’d only seen the deeds for this reality and that her correspondent had spoken of her visiting him in another. But even that thought did not explain what a sixteen year old called Aldous Underwood was doing in the grounds of a Withern Rise owned by a family other than his own – whatever the reality.

  10: 78

  Alaric

  returned from the village rather more alert to his surroundings, but if there were any differences along the lane they were so few and slight that he couldn’t be sure he wasn’t inventing them. The side gate, now that he knew it was not the entrance to his garden, was another matter. His gate, in far better condition, was set into a six-foot-high brick wall that ran all the way down to the river. This one hung badly between the posts of a wooden fence so disregarded that, further along, two of the panels leaned out dramatically from the top. He went to inspect these, then a little further to look at a panel that had broken free and fallen the other way, into the garden. This one had been there for some time. Weeds and grass had forced their way between the strips that formed it, and it was littered with twists of paper, bottles, and crushed drink cans presumably tossed in from the lane. Lengths of barbed wire had been strung inexpertly between the posts to which the panel had once been attached. A bit of old rag, ripped from the shirt of an intruder perhaps, hung from one of the barbs.

  The grounds, as seen from here, were a mess. Where Kate did her best to keep everything in check, this Withern Rise’s residents seemed to have given it up as a bad job a long time ago. Where plants had withered and fruit fallen, they’d been left to rot. Grass grew tall. Weeds flourished. There was a greenhouse, but most of the glass had been smashed. A generation must have passed since anything was cultivated in it. He could also
see two very old cars, darkly rusted, one of them lacking a front wheel. Beyond these, on the grass where the south garden began, stood a small brown caravan that had seen better decades, and behind this a great many trees where at home there was but one.

  He put his forehead against the wire to peer into the part of the garden that led to the gate he’d left by. All the way to the cemetery wall, where the kitchen garden should be, there was nothing but wild grass, swollen earth, and the twisted specters of long-dead plants. How could he have failed to notice all that during his walk from the willow?

  The willow. He recalled his brief dizziness when he went after the cat. That must have been when it happened. He considered the implications. Until now he’d thought the only extant way into other realities was via the old oak in the south garden. But now... the willow in the north garden too? He remembered Grandpa Rayner describing peculiar feelings he used to get under that tree as a boy, and odd sounds, but he hadn’t said anything about other realities. He might not have used such terminology, of course, but if he had found his way to an alternative Withern Rise wouldn’t he have mentioned it? Well, maybe not, to a young boy.

  Interested to see how this pitiful version of his home looked from the opposite end of the garden, he walked back to the cemetery steps and followed the path through the graveyard to Withybank Lane, on the far side of which, as in his reality, there was a small housing estate. Here, though, the houses were closer to mock-Jacobean than mock-Tudor. Turning right and reaching the head of Withern’s drive, he found that the five-bar gate had fallen or been bullied free of its hinges, to lie bound to the unweeded earth by ligatures of ivy. The drive’s single track, which after a twist or two would open out in front of the house, was divided into three strips, the middle one, thick with matted grass untouched by wheels, standing up like a deformed spine. The trees, bushes and shrubs that lined the drive were impenetrable, allowing no glimpses of the house, A fence similar to the one that defined the northern boundary stretched from the gate to the river, but this one had fared even more badly. The entire length of it, panel after panel, along with their supports, lay broken in the ribbon of wild wood formerly just inside it.

  What he did not know was that the one wall that bordered this version of the property already existed at the time of the house’s construction. Until the 1880s the stretch of land between the river and the cemetery wall was wooded, primarily by willows. In the late 1920s the Eldon Underwoods of almost all the realities in which a Withern Rise had been built erected two additional six foot high boundary walls. The Eldon of this reality, and this only, choked to death on a chicken bone in 1924, whereupon his eldest surviving child, Larissa May, sold the property to Henry Rackenford, a local magistrate, who was pleased to leave it bounded by trees. The present fences were erected in 1958 by the Pilgrim-Hope family when they purchased Withern Rise from Rackenford’s estate upon his death at the age of eighty-seven. The house was sold twice more after Dominic Pilgrim-Hope’s assets were seized following his trial for embezzlement, first to a family of nine called O’Farrell, and finally, in 1989, to Stacey and Stephen Curtis. These days, her three grown-up children and her husband having long since flown the coop, only Mrs. Curtis lived here. After almost fifty years the boundary fences would have been in a less than first-rate condition even if cared for, but as they had been ignored by the owner for the last eight of those years – during which they’d been ritually abused by local vandals, drunks and malcontents – it wasn’t altogether surprising that they were now sinking into the earth.

  Knowing nothing of this history, it depressed Alaric that any Withern Rise could have been so reduced. He returned the way he’d come, through the cemetery, and lifted the rusty latch of the side gate. Convinced that the way back to his reality was by way of the willow in the north garden, he looked for the concealed path that should run parallel with the wall, but found it obscured by tangled scrub thick with nettles. He gave this route a miss and cut across the garden, running low as though dodging searchlights.

  He was about half-way to the tree when an enormous black Alsatian appeared at a far corner of the house, the River Room corner, and bounded toward him, barking furiously. Alaric stopped in his tracks. Only when a woman followed the dog, waving a stick and screeching, ‘I’ve warned you young sods, I said I’d set him on you next time, you asked for it!’ did he continue running, with greater urgency than he’d ever run in his life.

  Plunging through the dense wall of leaves, he struck the willow’s trunk with his palms and reached for something to haul himself up by. The Alsatian was there seconds later, teeth closing on one of his trainers. Alaric kicked in terror, but the brute held on, snarling and tugging, dedicated to pulling him down and setting about him properly. He swung the heel of his other foot, kicked again, again, again. The dog’s jaws parted in pain and fury just as the branch snapped. Alaric hit the ground hard, but he was up in a trice, ready to run, run anywhere, when flight suddenly became unnecessary.

  The dog was no more. Mrs. Curtis’s shouts of vengeance had ceased.

  11: 43

  Battered and cumbersome as it was, Aldous U was very attached to his typewriter. It would have been sensible to buy a more modern product – a wind-up Linux-K from Reality 467 or 470, for instance, or a solar-powered laptop from any one of half-a-dozen realities around the mid-two hundreds – but he enjoyed the physical effort of hammering those bolshie old keys, even if the result was not very refined. He’d acquired it years ago at a junk shop in R675 (as he listed it at the time), staggered back with it to that reality’s Withern Rise, and slipped in the side gate, cautiously because he wasn’t known there. From the gate, a lumbering rush to the crossing point, tiresomely situated in a bed of nettles behind the old tool-shed that had since been taken down in most realities; then the journey through the forest, where every obstruction brought an oath for his foolishness in buying the thing simply because the manufacturer’s name tickled him. But later, when he’d cooled off and stretched his back, he was pleased that he’d made the effort.

  He sat back from the typewriter. Fond of it as he was, he doubted he would take it with him. Too many other things to get out, and no helpers. He wished he knew precisely how long he had here. Going by the sky and the speed with which the vegetation was turning, not long at all. Over the next five or six days he would remove everything he really needed to the rooms he’d taken at the Sorry Fiddler in R36. Temporary rooms. Soon, months at most, he would have his house. The one Withern Rise he’d always coveted. Mustn’t let it slip through his fingers, but he didn’t want to seem predatory. Put in an offer in a day or two.

  Something soft wound itself languorously around his legs. He bent to tickle the warm tortoiseshell fur. ‘Where’ve you been this time, old lad?’ There was more to the question than the words implied, for he had discovered a long time ago that cats, and this cat in particular, could pass through crossing points and return without any kind of device – something he himself could not do. What it was in a cat’s physiology that allowed it to do this had at first intrigued him, but finding no explanation for the ability he had eventually settled for its being a fact of feline life. If he’d learnt nothing else over the years it was that some things would always be beyond his understanding, and contented himself with the knowledge that this cat cared enough for him to return to him time after time from his wanderings. No human had ever gone to such lengths to keep his company.

  He was still stroking the creature’s neck when he caught a movement outside. He straightened up and looked out, saw no one in the yard or at the edge of the forest, but imagined that one of the boys had been there. He recalled the day he saw the first of them, the stocky ginger-haired one. He’d been doing some weeding when something made him look up, and there he was. So surprised had he been to see a human face where there’d never been one before that he cried out, which must have startled the lad, for he dived straight back into the undergrowth as though he’d been shot at. There’d been the o
dd sighting of him since, usually with one or more of the others that had presumably joined him later, but they’d all kept their distance and not responded when he called a greeting.

  He’d felt sorry for the boys in the beginning. They were probably frightened, having no idea how they’d got here or how to get back, their only shelter and source of food the forest itself. For a time he’d left provisions for them, brought in specially from one reality or another, along with matches, cooking implements, crockery, cutlery, but returning from an extended trip away (*) he found that they’d stolen from him, damaged his wall, trampled his garden. Outraged, he had not renewed the meal ticket. Whenever he caught sight of them now they glared belligerently as if he were their worst enemy. Young idiots. He was the only useful contact they were likely to find in this entire reality and they’d chosen to alienate him. With some success.

  12: 47

  From the willow, after checking that his surroundings were as they should be, Alaric headed for the rear of the house, intending to go to the landing stage and think over what he’d just been through, all that he'd seen. Rounding the River Room corner, he pulled up sharp. Kate was down by the back porch, kneeling on some sort of pad, fiddling with the white roses that grew there. Wanting to be alone, he would have retreated, but –

  Too late. She’d sensed him.

  ‘Hello! Get everything?’