"We'll swing by your house on the way, Emily," said David. "Better check on how Heather’s going."
"I need a shower and a shave and a change of clothes," said Max. "Then I have to get to work."
"Ok. We'll make it brief. I could do with those things myself," said David. He sounded a little tetchy. He was still wearing yesterday's clothes and had a dark stubble showing. I wondered if he had a family. I had overheard a telephone conversation he had the night before, explaining to someone why he was going to be away from work today. But no personal details had emerged. I should have asked him during our walk, but the opportunity was gone now.
Our convoy of two set out for my house. David phoned his office and found there was a lot of static on that line. He held the phone close to his mouth, shouting into it sometimes, and pressing it hard against his ear. He hung up looking grave.
"Something big's going on electromagnetically," he said. "There's a stack of messages waiting on my email at the uni. But Fiona – that's the faculty secretary – says a lot of them have been corrupted during downloading. She's trying to print off as many as she can. There's telecommunications interference all over the city."
"Has anyone tried to do a fix on the source?" asked Max.
"The phone company has people out now. But no news so far."
"There's no unusual sunspot activity at the moment."
"I don't think this is sunspots," said David ominously.
"Neither do I," agreed Max.
No one said it, but we all knew where the interference was coming from.
***
David's car was still parked outside my house, but that was about the only thing that was similar to its appearance the night before.
There were about fifty people milling around, and news cars, with reporters and spectators trampling on the lawn. Overhead a helicopter was going whup-whup-whup. Standing in the doorway, hands on substantial hips and glowering fiercely, Heather was doing a good impression of Horatius on the bridge, or Dermot defending the ford against the three sorcerer kings, or any other suitable noble defence from legend.
Insert preferred fable here.
I glanced at the man standing closest to her, and cringed. It was Mr Sabatini, the landlord. I had not yet had a chance to explain to him that the inside of the house was missing. He was trying to force his way past Heather, who was moving from side to side preventing him from entering. Fortunately, he was almost as large as she, and there was no way two corporeal objects of their girth could occupy the same doorway at the same time. So far, it was a stalemate.
We got out of the car and walked towards the house. People turned in our direction. Cameras and microphones were shoved under my nose, and questions were fired, half a dozen variations of:
"Ms Branwell, what do you think is the cause of the events at your house?"
"No comment," I said, in the way I had seen politicians and crooks do it on television. Had I sunk that low? The reply was as ineffectual as usual in stopping the flood of questions. I curbed my anger, knowing that any emotional display would only give them a bigger story than before.
- Freedom of the press, I thought, and then - Yeah, right, what about my freedom?
We pushed our way through the reporters. Mr Sabatini saw me coming and turned his attention to me. He was, as I said, a large man, with a giant bristled moustache and a face that was flushed tomato red.
"Emily!" he said. "What's going on here?"
"Sorry, Mr Sabatini," I said. "I'll explain in a minute."
"You must let me into the house."
"That's going to be difficult right now."
"But it's my house! What's all this I've been reading in the paper?" He had a copy with him and shook it angrily. Around us, cameras whirred and microphones listened.
"Mr Sabatini, as far as I am aware, you have to give seven days' notice for an inspection. You have not yet given that notice. Do so, and next week I will be happy for you to inspect."
"Don't throw the law book at me," he fumed, turning even redder. Plum now came to mind. I was starting to feel hungry. "This is an emergency, and I can enter without notice for an emergency."
"What emergency is that, Mr Sabatini?"
"I don't know!"
He added beetroot to the facial salad he was making.
"I can enter without notice if I believe it's necessary to protect the premises." He hefted the paper again. "'Showers of stones!' That's enough of an emergency for me."
"There haven't been any showers of stones," I said, raising my voice and looking directly at a nearby camera for the first time. "That was made up by the paper."
"I don't care. I'm going in!"
And go in he did. He hurled himself towards Heather, who had to step aside or else be bowled over as he stormed through the door. We followed, and Heather stepped into the breach again in time to stop the reporters flooding in as well.
I really had to remember to buy her a Christmas present this year. A pair of boxing gloves might be appropriate.
Mr Sabatini stopped in the hall and stared at the gutted house. We ignored him and walked past to the lounge. David and Max started to fire up the electronic equipment in there.
"Keep back, Emily," cautioned David.
"Has the orientation changed?" asked Max.
David went to a computer keyboard and started tapping.
"Almost total reversal," he said. "If you can tell us where Microscopium is now, we can check the alignment."
"Good idea," said Max. "Let's put Emily back in the circle. See what happens." I didn't like the casual – the almost eager – way he said that.
David grunted as if he hadn't heard. There were a few moments of tapping on his iPad. An oscilloscope started up and a weird bendy green line appeared. It was impressive, if totally incomprehensible.
Then David knelt down on the floor and drew another circle around the one already there, but about a metre wider. This one was in blue chalk.
"It's larger," he said simply.
The lounge room floor was starting to resemble a bull's eye. It occurred to me that seemed a very ominous analogy indeed.
Joanna had arrived and run the gauntlet of reporters. The mad pace of the last few days was starting to faze her: there were a couple of wrinkles in her peach skirt and she was pushing back a few strands of hair that were out of place. Mr Sabatini was also in the room now, still staring open-mouthed at the lack of destruction – the lack of absolutely anything – around him. I'll bet he never expected to find the house this clean.
"I can explain, Mr Sabatini..." I began, but stopped when it was patently obvious he wasn't listening. He wandered into the rest of the house. At least he was no longer beetroot. I decided to ignore him until he chose to speak. Just delaying the inevitable, I know, but cowardice always was a hobby of mine.
"Before we ask Emily to enter the circle," said David – and it pleased me enormously that there was the faintest sign of emphasis on the word ask – "let's see what happens with our old friend the metre rule."
I was afraid of that circle. It hadn't harmed me yesterday, but some invisible force associated with it had dragged me across the floor against my will, something which all the chalk circles I had hitherto encountered completely failed to do. I knew, of course, that the chalk part of it was just a means of defining its outlines, nothing more than a perimeter. It was what was in the circle that was bizarre. But the human mind has to latch onto something substantial, and it was the two circles, one in green chalk and the newer, outer one in blue, that were giving me the willies. I had not felt threatened while I was floating inside yesterday (I had in fact felt just as comfortable as when I was lying under the tree this morning), but floating in the air to any extent when not supported by some visible means just didn't seem natural. I was reluctant to repeat the performance. David's words, "It's larger" resounded in my ears. I didn't like their tone at all.
Besides, someone had said that the split in the sky was larger, too, an
d no one had liked the sound of that.
I was standing as far from the circle as possible, back near the door. David took hold of the metal ruler and stepped towards the circle. I wanted to warn him, to grab him and stop him from getting too close, but dared not approach. Besides, it was already too late. He walked forwards, and in a moment the strange attraction had grabbed him and pulled him towards the blue circle.
He went "Woah!" and let go of the ruler, which flew from his hand. David leaned backwards against the powerful pull, as if gravity was going sideways at that point. He strained backwards as if leaning away from a cliff.
The ruler floated as it had before, twenty centimetres off the floor.
Max tapped madly on the computer, recording the ruler's orientation no doubt, which was slowly turning, but in a different direction to the way I had pointed. David managed to free himself from the grip of the circle's sideways gravity. He looked at me and smiled.
"Are you ok?" I asked.
"Sure," he said. "That was a good couple of g's I think. Straight into the centre."
The ruler stopped turning when it was almost parallel to the floor, pointed at the opposite wall to the one it – and I – aligned with the night before.
Max took his tape measure and string out and started madly measuring, using chalk to mark spots on the wall that corresponded to the direction of the ruler. "It's looking good," he muttered. "It's on a different orientation."
"I know," said David. "I already told you that."
Max apparently didn't hear. "Give me a second to work out where Microscopium is at the moment."
I was not feeling good about the situation at all.
"Please take it out of there, David," I said.
He looked at me. So did everyone else. If I could have looked at myself, I would have. I really had no idea what had made me say that, nothing definite, just a vague feeling of danger that had been growing on me. The ruler suddenly looked wrong. Not different, not changed, just wrong. There seemed to be more to it than there had been, like it had grown, or warped. I found it hard to look at and maintain focus. My eyes kept sliding over its polished surface. Then the reason hit me in a flash: it was as if it had too many dimensions.
Mr Sabatini chose that moment to walk back in, and he saw the ruler floating there in the circle. The poor man was not having a good day. He tried to speak, but gave up after a few attempts, apparently deciding that the thin gurgling sounds that emerged were insufficient to express the feelings inside him. I confess to being a little sympathetic.
The others looked at the ruler, too. Joanna said, "That's odd." So I guess it wasn't just me.
The ruler was all wrong: it now had more than two sides, was no longer a simple, flat, narrow rectangle. And somehow it was curved. Not bent, not twisted. Something had happened to the space along its length: there seemed to be too much of it, or not enough, or both at the same time. I couldn't pin it down. Too many dimensions and too much space, and yet too few and too little.
Now what I said next was even more unbidden, and less traceable to a source, than my previous utterance. But it emerged nonetheless. It went something like this:
"Let me get in."
No one moved or spoke. I had decided it was time to experiment. I had seen the swirling lights three times now, and if they appeared again in the circle I would know we were onto something. I wanted to have a closer look at them. There was a pattern – or a theme – I had missed so far. If only the damn thing would stay around for more than a second each time.
Max broke the silence first. "I have the direction. Let's see what happens with Emily." And he even took a step towards me as if to push me in right then.
Joanna moved closer to me. "I don't like this," she said, grabbing my hand. "There's bad energy here."
"It'll be ok," I said.
"How do you know?" asked Joanna.
I wished she hadn't asked that.
"Trust me," I said. No one was convinced, least of all me.
Max had removed the ruler from the circle, using a metal leg of a camera tripod to hook it away from the centre. As I had done the day before, it slowly sank as it approached the perimeter – of the blue circle this time – and then fell with a clang. But it took a strong effort from Max to drag it away a few feet further, before it left the area of attraction.
"That pull is very strong," said David. "I'll get some more equipment from the university and we can take a few measurements. I'd like to map out the zone of attraction."
"What do you think's causing it?" Max asked.
David shrugged. "I don't know yet. Gravity, probably. But a localised gravity that's separate from the Earth's. Which makes it interesting." At least he was enjoying himself.
"There'd have to be a large physical mass causing that, wouldn't there?" I asked. "So why can't we see it?"
"There's something, certainly," said Max. "A black hole?"
I frowned. A black hole? In my lounge? It was different, if inconvenient. Not the sort of conversation piece one would normally have.
"I don't know about that yet," said David. "It seems - I don't know - it seems a little too clean for that."
To my way of thinking, warped though it is, everything seemed to scream, "Hey, over here!" to whoever might be interested.
But I had a strong desire to go floating in the circle myself. "Let me get in," I said again, and started walking.
"Hold on, Emily," said David. "Let's wait until I can get the rest of the equipment."
But he hadn't stepped back from the circle when I asked him to, so I wasn't going to listen to him. I started to approach the circle, and felt that strange attraction again.
"Careful, Emily," said Joanna from somewhere. Immediately, the sounds in the room grew distant and I accelerated forwards. When my toes cleared the blue circle it was like crossing a threshold. I floated up, my feet about twenty centimetres above the floor, and hung there. Then I turned, as the ruler had done, and pointed towards the wall. Again, I felt extremely comfortable, floating in that unseen force, even though my head was slightly downwards: Microscopium was just below the horizon.
I could see the others and the rest of the room, but there was a slight vagueness about them, as if I was underwater and looking up at someone standing on dry ground. Joanna said something, but I could only see her mouth moving, I couldn't hear any words.
This was peculiar.
Perhaps I shouldn't have entered the circle after all.
But I felt no actual danger, just a disquieting sense that things had been different when the ruler was in here a few moments before.
In here. It felt very much like that, like I was inside something, or somewhere: a room, a space, an enclosure, a continuum.
And something was in there with me.
Years ago, as a little girl, I took my first swimming lessons in my parents' pool. Buoyed up by the inflatable duck around my waist, I kicked my legs frantically, madly and happily propelling myself towards my mother, who was in the water a few metres away, holding out her arms towards me.
When I was only about a metre away from her, maybe even less, I happened to look to one side and noticed a gigantic, horrible, warty toad plop into the pool. He must have been lurking in the bushes nearby, ready to ambush little girls who dared invade his private swimming facility. He was all brown, leathery skin and fat, bloated body and googly eyes.
The effect on me was galvanising. I stopped kicking, started howling, thrashed my arms and swallowed some water. The toad started swimming towards me. My mother, not having seen it, grabbed me and held me up and tried to comfort me. But I continued to squirm, dreading the touch of that slimy thing on my skin. I was literally climbing up my mother, maybe hoping to stand on her head or something, anything to get me out of that water.
The toad never did touch me. But it was years before I learned to swim. And even today I won't swim in the ocean: too many life-forms in there for comfort. The memory of the toad remains.
It was like that now. There was a toad in the pool.
The problem was, I couldn't see it. I had been able to see the real toad of years ago, in fact had seen little else as it breast-stroked towards me. But there was nothing to see here, except the vague, distorted shapes of the others looking at me. I could even see the glaring red light of the camera. But where I was, nothing. That was the worst feeling of all.
"Could someone help me out please?" I asked. But they did not appear to have heard. I tried to swim towards the edge of the circle, but it suddenly seemed to have moved away. I had that same feeling as earlier when I had entered the leaf cell, not certain whether I was shrinking or it was growing. No matter how hard I tried to push myself through the air, I didn't seem to get anywhere.
I started to feel scared. It began inside my stomach, that tight clutching sensation when you know the monster under the bed is just about to leap out and grab the sheets off you. Within a few seconds the fear had moved to the back of my neck, and tingled along my hairline. I had an incredible urge to turn around, and an equally incredible urge to do no such thing, because then It would see me and I would die.
I signalled to the others that I wanted to leave the circle, but perhaps they could only see me as dimly as I could see them. Whatever, my frantic arm-waving produced no effect. I shouted, but still no one moved to help me out. They must know something was wrong.
Something touched my foot.
Instantly, I pulled it back. There was resistance. I looked down, I had to look down, because whether I was about to die or not, It had to be recognised. The murder victim has to try to pull the mask off the face of his assailant before life is snuffed out, has to know who has stolen his soul in the one second before he dies.
Plato's Cave Page 10