The Realities of Aldous U

by Michael Lawrence

  ‘What!’

  ‘Someone to see you!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘SOMEONE TO SEE YOU!’

  The music stopped. The door opened.

  ‘It’s a man,’ Kate said. ‘At the front door, for you.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Didn’t say. No one I know.’

  He went ahead of her down the stairs, along the hall; pulled the front door back.

  ‘You?’ he said. ‘Here?’

  ‘Come with me,’ Aldous U said gruffly.

  ‘Why? Where?’

  ‘Just come. Quick now.’

  Alaric turned to Kate, a little way behind him, trying not to seem nosy.

  ‘Got to go out.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong, is there?’

  ‘No,’ he said uncertainly.

  The step had been vacated while he answered Kate. He jammed his feet into his shoes, snatched his jacket, closed the door behind him. AU was already in the north garden, closing on the willow. Catching a glance back at the southern sky, Alaric also looked, and saw, amid the blue-gray above the Family Tree, a quivering red sphere that was not a sun.

  ‘That’s weird.’

  ‘Come on!’

  When they were both within the willow, AU reached into the leather satchel slung over his shoulder; took out a small transparent phial with a plastic stopper in the end.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A urine sample-bottle. It’s going to take us to the place its contents come from.’

  ‘But there’s nothing in it.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘Is that supposed to make sense?’

  ‘It doesn’t have to.’

  AU took him by the arm and, with a single step, walked him from that reality into –

  56: –

  – nothing at all.

  Alaric’s first reaction was to grab hold of something, but there wasn’t a thing to grab. AU steadied him, then walked him away from their point of arrival, through and into perfect white space without blemish, contour or form. There was no ground, no sky, any sense, anywhere, of distance, depth or volume. It was impossible to tell whether their surroundings went on forever or ended an arm’s reach away.

  ‘What kind of…’ Far too loud in this boundless space. ‘What kind of reality’s this?’ Almost a whisper, but sufficient.

  AU returned the empty sample-bottle to the satchel and took out a fawn-colored pouch. Even the sound of his hand brushing the leather could be heard here.

  ‘Did I say it was a reality?’

  He popped the pouch into one of his jacket pockets and strolled several paces in one direction before turning sharply in another, as though needing to stretch his legs. His feet made no sound and did not sink, as they would have into snow or some other soft surface. Nor did he cast the slightest shadow, and when next he spoke he had no need to raise his voice in spite of the distance between them.

  ‘Let me tell you about a dream I had when I was a lad.’

  Alaric said nothing. He couldn’t, any more than he could move. This utterly barren realm frightened him more than any place he’d ever seen or imagined.

  ‘Same dream night after night, went on for almost a week,’ AU said, starting back toward him. ‘It was of a completely featureless white room, no door, no windows, quite empty. Each night I’d go downstairs to try and shake it off, but when I went up again, went back to sleep, I’d be in that room once more.’

  Alaric tried to focus. Any distraction.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Happened?’

  ‘To you, in the dream?’

  ‘Nothing happened. It was terrifying.’

  ‘You think it was a trailer for this… whatever it is?’

  ‘I’ll leave you to speculate on that,’ AU said, walking past him. ‘Something to think about while I’m gone.’

  Panic. ‘You’re leaving me here?’

  ‘It’s all right, don’t worry, I won’t abandon you.’

  ‘I can’t stay here by myself!’ Too loud.

  ‘You’ll have to. Can’t go where I’m going. Just stay away from the point at which I disappear, or we may never see you again.’

  ‘But what do I do while you’re away?’

  Aldous U waved a hand around – ‘Mingle’ – and took the step that left Alaric alone in the midst of absolutely nothing.

  57: 39

  The cat’s death still filled their minds. Aldous’s particularly. Burial somewhere in the garden had been agreed upon, but ‘somewhere’ was as far as they’d got. Kate was trying to divert him and Naia by marshalling their forces in a grand tidy-up. While the fallen bough was the most conspicuous casualty, a number of smaller plants had been uprooted, and scraps from many more scattered to the furthest reaches of the garden. While Kate helped Aldous round his side of the house, Naia, preferring to be alone, gathered loose material from the lawns at the front, dumping it in the old wheelbarrow on the drive.

  ‘Some storm, by the look of it.’

  She glanced up. Mr. Knight.

  ‘Didn’t you see it?’

  ‘I was away last night. The old oak hasn’t come out of it too well.’

  ‘No.’ Pause. ‘Alaric died.’

  ‘Alaric?’

  ‘The cat you gave me. He was out in it. Fright, we think.’

  ‘Ah, poor little mite.’

  ‘It’s my fault. I should have made sure he was indoors.’

  ‘Don’t blame yourself,’ Mr. Knight said. ‘Very independent spirit, that one. I doubt you could have coaxed him in.’

  ‘We coaxed Aldous in.’

  ‘Cats are more independent than humans.’

  ‘But I should have tried.’

  She continued stuffing debris into the wheelbarrow, mildly irritated when Mr. Knight, though the conversation seemed to have ended, did not move away. She was about to ask him if he’d come to lend a hand when the path, the lawns, everything within and around her field of vision, briefly but dramatically turned ice-blue.

  ‘What was that!?’

  ‘Naia,’ Mr. Knight said. ‘Will you come with me please?’

  She straightened her back. ‘What was it?’

  ‘Post-storm shadow. There’s something in the north garden you have to see.’

  ‘Post-storm shadow? I’ve never heard of such a thing.’

  ‘Nevertheless. Come on. It’s quite urgent.’

  ‘Oh, not more damage.’

  ‘You have to see for yourself.’ He started away.

  ‘Did you two see that?’ Kate called from the corner of the house.

  ‘Couldn’t miss it,’ Naia answered.

  ‘Naia! Now!’

  Startled by his tone – so unlike him – she said: ‘Mr. Knight wants to show me something.’

  ‘More damage?’ Kate asked.

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘Shall I come?’

  ‘No.’ This from Mr. Knight, very firmly, still walking.

  Naia removed the gardening gloves she’d borrowed from Kate, draped them over the side of the wheelbarrow, and set off after him. When she realized that he was heading for the willow, she became anxious. Had he found something intended for her eyes only? Another of those pouches perhaps? He reached the tree, waited for her, holding an armful of leaves aside for her, like drapery.

  ‘In here.’

  As he said this he looked over her head. Turning, she saw a blood-red glow, like a bodged attempt at a sun in an uninspired watercolor sky.

  ‘Another post-storm effect,’ he said before she could ask, and rustled the leaves to indicate urgency.

  Inside, though the light was low, she could see no evidence of further calamity. She was even more relieved that there was no pouch that would have to be explained away.

  ‘What was it you wanted to show me?’

  ‘Round the other side.’

  He took her arm, began steering her round the trunk.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think we ought to g
o round h – ’

  She didn’t finish. In any reality.

  58: –

  Alaric advanced, step by very tentative step, across the flawless white space. There was no sense of connection with any ‘ground’, yet he did not feel that he was floating. He paused once and stamped his foot. It descended with the anticipated force, stopped at the right level, but there was no impact, and no sound of any. Walking further, he looked back to determine how far he’d come. The soles of his shoes were far from spotless yet they’d left no marks, which suggested that nothing from outside was permitted to leave evidence of its passing here. It must be some sort of non-reality, with its own physical laws – which could amount to no laws at all. But he was breathing normally, so there must be air. Or was there? Could he be going through the motions of breathing merely out of habit?

  He continued to walk about for something to do, trying not to think the unthinkable: that there was no guarantee Aldous U would keep his word and return. If he didn’t, he would be stuck here for as long as he lived. Could he live here? Could he die here? If nothing changed here, or advanced in any way, maybe he would remain his present age for all eternity. If that happened, what about the need to eat, drink, sleep? Would he have such needs here? Any needs? Any bodily functions even?

  He stopped. Turned his head this way and that. This had to be the loneliest place any imagination could conjure, yet just a step away universes pulsed and flared, life teemed, realities flourished in countless variations, bustling independently through all the horrors and absurdities that ‘humanity’ was capable of. But here, from here, it was as if none of that existed, as if night never fell, stars never appeared in any firmament, nothing grew, developed, evolved. What a place. To be forced to stay here, where time had no meaning outside of your head. You’d go crazy. Utterly, stark-staring m –

  It happened in a split second.

  One instant he was in that featureless abyss, the next he stood by the cemetery wall in the grounds of Withern Rise, gasping for breath he suddenly needed. Struggling to adjust, he stared around. The little apple tree he should be standing near had been replaced by a wooden shed that smelt of creosote. Up above, a fine blue sky; far to the right a cylinder of smoke unraveling from a corner of the kitchen garden; to his left, just past a Family Tree that had not lost a limb to a storm, a grass tennis court; by the house, four unfamiliar adults watching children play some dashing and darting game – until they noticed him, when they all stopped what they were doing and stared across the garden, at him.

  ‘Mr. Ochs! Who’s that?’

  A man rose like a genie from a nearby bush.

  ‘Who are you?’ Alaric’s lack of response was evidently suspicious, for the gardener said to his employer: ‘Nother of them yobs, miss. Dun you worry, I’ll see ’im orf,’ and came round the bush wielding a garden fork.

  Alaric took a step backward. The wall prevented further retreat. But not for long. Suddenly there was no wall, no garden, no one coming at him, and he was falling silently onto nothing. He remained there, sprawling, too stunned to even think of moving, until –

  ‘Sunbathing?’

  He lifted his head. A long way off, where the willow in the north garden had been moments before, stood Aldous U. With Naia.

  59: –

  Naia gaped about her, trying to find something to focus on, finding it only in Alaric, getting up from what looked like nothing and walking toward them, also on nothing. When he said ‘Her too now?’ it barely registered that his words were crystal clear even though he was some distance away and had not raised his voice. She turned to her companion.

  ‘Mr. Knight, where are we? What’s going on?’

  ‘Mr. Knight?’ Alaric said across the void. ‘Why’d you call him that?’

  ‘It’s his name,’ she told him.

  ‘That’s not his name. He’s Aldous U.’

  Anywhere else, another occasion, she might have laughed. ‘Where did you get that from? He’s Mr. Knight, he helps in our garden. Tell him,’ she said to the man who’d brought her here.

  He confirmed this. ‘I am John Knight.’ But added: ‘And Aldous U.’

  She frowned. ‘What are you saying? I know who you are. I’ve known you since April.’

  ‘You’ve known me since January,’ he said.

  ‘No, that was another Mr. Knight. Somewhere else.’

  He shook his head. ‘There was only ever one.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘And I’m still working with your mother as well as with Kate. Bit of a stretch, two part-time gardening jobs. Never worked so hard in my life.’

  ‘Am I missing something here?’ said Alaric, approaching.

  But this, for now, was a conversation he had no part in.

  ‘You can’t be both Mr. Knights,’ Naia said.

  ‘Yet I am.’

  ‘Both Mr. Knights and Aldous U? No.’

  ‘Yes. Sorry.’

  ‘But... the letters. You handed me one of them. As Mr. Knight.’

  ‘Necessary, I’m afraid. There was no reason to suppose that you would look in the message hole in the foreseeable future, so I thought it best to give it to you in person.’

  She almost exploded at this. ‘In person!’

  ‘No need to shout here,’ Alaric said.

  ‘I’ll shout if I want to,’ she retorted, but more quietly.

  She closed her eyes. Intending to count a slow ten, she got as far as five before opening them again. Glaring at Aldous U.

  ‘Why me? Why me?

  He did not answer at once, but when he did he spoke very gently. ‘Why you? Because, to my knowledge, there’s just one other Naia who knows that hers is not the only reality, and – ’

  She stared. ‘Another Naia?’

  ‘ – and she still has both her parents and the life she’s always known, while you’ve lost everything yet come through so bravely. I felt that you deserved to know more.’

  ‘I want to know everything,’ she said. ‘The reason for all the play-acting, the secrecy, and – ’ she cast bleakly about her ‘ – what this is.’

  ‘Hell without the fire and brimstone, that’s what this is,’ Alaric said. ‘Or anything else either.’

  He might as well not have spoken.

  ‘The gardening persona first,’ AU said to Naia. ‘You saw the patch of ground around my house. It was quite a nice little garden once, but over the previous eighteen months the soil became unworkable – the reality was dying, you see – and toward the end of last year I began to long for a proper garden. But there was only one I really wanted.’

  ‘Mine,’ Naia said.

  ‘Yours. As was. The one my dad once tended. I offered my services to your mother, and might have been content with that to this day if not for you.’

  ‘If not for me? What does that mean?’

  ‘There was something about you. Something a little hard to pin down. But I was drawn to you.’

  Naia looked at him askance. ‘This is beginning to sound a bit pervy.’

  AU smiled. ‘It isn’t. The puzzle of “you”, if I might put it like that, was cleared up the week you two met.’

  ‘How did you know about that?’

  ‘I’ve developed a kind of sixth sense about inter-reality activity in The Underwood See. In my cluster anyway.’

  ‘The Underwood See?’ Naia said.

  ‘Don’t ask,’ said Alaric. ‘We’ll be here forever.’

  But it was he who enquired what AU meant by his ‘cluster’. This time AU answered him.

  ‘A while ago I conducted a major overhaul of my files. I had pouches for so many realities that the numbers had gotten ridiculously high. I dumped those I doubted I’d want to return to, and re-numbered the rest, grouping them by various criteria or associations. The group that I call my cluster – Realities 35 to 48 – includes your two and R43, my former base-reality. No reality is closer than any other, of course, but by numbering them in that way it felt like having neighbors. True neighboring re
alities.’

  Naia said: ‘Your former base-reality?’

  ‘R43 expired late yesterday afternoon. I got out just in time.’

  ‘What about the boys?’ Alaric asked.

  ‘I returned the other Alaric to his home, as you “requested”.’

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘It happened so quickly. They were nowhere to be seen at the end.’

  ‘So they died.’

  ‘There was nothing I could do.’

  ‘This isn’t what’s left of your reality, is it?’ Naia said, glancing around.

  ‘Oh no, this is something else entirely.’

  The timing of this reply, though not calculated, was perfect, for within a beat of its utterance the empty space in which they stood was transformed into the north garden of Withern Rise, under a perfect blue sky in which birds –

  And then it was gone. All of it. The life, the color, the world.

  Naia reeled. ‘What was that?’

  ‘A new reality,’ Aldous U said, unfazed. ‘Fully charged and populated in a jiffy, extinct a jiffy later. That’s the way of it for most of them. Realities come and go like the flashes of fireflies.’

  Alaric might have mentioned the slightly longer-lived reality he found himself in shortly before their arrival, but Naia, though bemused by all these revelations – to say nothing of standing so suddenly and briefly in the garden of a Withern Rise – was already there with her next question.

  ‘What was the point of those letters? You were there all the time. You could have just given them to me. Or better still told me what you wanted me to know.’

  ‘It was never my intention to deceive you,’ AU said with genuine humility. ‘The first letter wasn’t meant for your eyes at all. It was just one of the many flights of fancy I’ve committed to paper over time. I dropped it in the tree shortly after I began helping Alex in the garden – weeks before you found it.’

  ‘Even if that’s true,’ she said grudgingly, ‘it doesn’t explain the ones in my present reality, in June and this week.’

  ‘Your present reality?’ Alaric said.

  ‘Now they were for you,’ AU said – to Naia. ‘It was your transfer to that reality that made me approach Kate with an offer of garden help, as I had your mother three months earlier. I wanted to be near in case you couldn’t handle it. As it turned out you could, so I kept quiet. Stayed around to keep an eye on you, but that’s all. I only put the letter in the tree in June because something was happening that might have harmed you.’