by Brian Hughes
Jess looked around at the blackening walls.
Almost all gone and still no closer to an answer.
Thoughts buzzed around his head. He threw one in Hobson’s direction.
“So, you an’ Samuel Foster made a time machine?”
“No…no!” Hobson snapped angrilly. “I made the bloody thing. They were my scientific principles. My equations. They were even my carved mice for Christ’s sake!”
Carved Mice, thought Jess, his mind going off at a tangent. What the Hell was this bloke on? No wonder the world was under threat.
“That bloody Samuel Foster just came along for the ride.” Thomas lifted an anorexic finger, stabbing the space before his nose as though Foster himself had been occupying it. “He resented what I’d done. He resented everything I did. Bloody idiot.”
Tiny pieces seemed to join together inside Jess’ head.
“And most of all he resented gettin’ stuck in the past?” Jess thought aloud. “He didn’t go along for the ride. You made ’im go! An’ he resented that.”
That made sense. Jess knew it made sense and Thomas Hobson’s expression confirmed it.
“You took ’im away from his ’ome and his family. Then the bloody thing broke down and y’ couldn’t get back!”
Thomas Hobson scowled.
“Yes…so that filthy bastard killed me! But I came back to finish him off. I returned to put an end to the bugger’s bloodline...no matter what the cost.”
“He killed you because...because...” Jess’ mind was now charging. He could sense the darkness drawing across him like death. “He killed you because…when he’d finally sorted out ’is new life you screwed it all up agen, by gettin’ that promotion. The last great bastard. Up until the end.”
Jess concluded this exposé with a thump to Hobson’s head.
“He killed me ’cos he was a bastard with no bloody standards. But he never understood the full implications of my work.”
Hobson paused, drawing in as much of a breath as Jess would allow.
“I couldn’t die, you see? Not here. Not where we’d ended up. So I was willing to destroy everything to sort him out. And I mean everything!” The old man was screaming, now wrapped up in his own revenge.
“The end of the World.” Jess said quietly. “It was you comin’ back that brought about the end wasn’t it?”
He paused to study the hideous gargoyle sitting apathetically on the upturned tea chest.
“W’at did y’ do wrong?”
“Nothing...” Hobson laughed again, only instead of echoing off the walls this time it fell dead. There were no longer any walls for the sound to bounce off.
“Y’ did somethin’ wrong...” Jess was talking half to himself. “Somethin’ stupid. Somethin’ so terrible it brought an end to absolutely everythin’.”
“It was your fault, Jess!” Hobson dropped his voice to a croak. He jabbed a finger at Jess’ nose.
“Why was it MY FAULT?” Jess shouted. “Tell me!”
His mind started to wander. He wanted answers before everything was swallowed into oblivion.
“What about the glass balls? What about the goblins? An’ the plane crash? What about...” He gritted his teeth, staring maniacally in front of himself. “Everythin’ you OLD FART?! What about EVERYTHIN’?!”
“Figure it out for yourself, Jess.” Hobson seemed resigned, almost pleased that it was ending. “You wouldn’t let me take possession of you before. Now you find the answer.”
“Take possession?” Jess randomly searched his recollection of the past few days. All those times he’d said and done things against his better nature. “That was YOU? You were inside me ’ead? Y’ scabby old bastard!”
There was that laugh again.
Jess tore Hobson from the chest by inserting a finger up his nostril. He threw the frail body onto the floor.
There was a crunch as his boot came down heavily on Hobson’s neck.
“Go ahead, destroy me!” Hobson stared up without concern, the red glow in his eyes growing dimmer. “Go ahead. It won’t alter a damned thing. It’s over Jess and there’s nowt you can do to stop it! The world has to end this way.”
“I can’t kill you. No, I won’t kill you. We might be related but genetics don’t account for everythin’.” Jess gently moved his boot up and down, figuring out his next move with some caution. “But I can make it so uncomfortable that you’ll beg me for death t’ come quickly.”
That had sounded dramatic.
Now to add emphasis to the words with some physical action.
The heel of his boot ground into Hobson’s throat. Hobson’s grey tongue flapped from his lips.
“Now! W’at went wrong?” Jess twisted his heel a bit more. “’Urry up. ’Cos you might find it ’ard t’ speak with a mouth full of blood.”
It wasn’t the words that made the old man stop struggling. It was the honest threat with which Jess’ delivered them.
“That paperweight in your box...” A crooked finger pointed at the tied up parcel. “That’s where the end came from.”
“What?”
The light switches on the skirting board disappeared with the faintest of crackles.
“You’re an anomaly, Jess. Just like me. We’re both paradoxes. For one to exist we both need the other.”
“So? Do you want a bloody medal?”
“You still haven’t figured it out, have you?”
Hobson fought against the obstructing foot. He failed to lift it.
“This isn’t reality at all, you arse. The whole bloody thing is just fiction.”
Sometimes some topics are difficult to comprehend.
It takes time to digest them.
“What the ’Ell are y’ talkin’ about?” Jess wasn’t sure if another turn of his boot would snap the old bastard’s neck or not. So he left it and hoped for the best.
Behind him a suitcase went fizzle and vanished.
“This world. This universe. It isn’t real. It never was.”
Hobson choked, attempting to wriggle his neck free. But the boot came down that harder.
Jess might have been many things, but most of all he was incredibly strong.
“We’re all anomalies,” Hobson continued. “You created me. I created your grandfather. There’s no ancestry further back than me and no descendants further on. I created all of this.”
He made a sweeping gesture of what was left of the room.
“I unleashed time from its boundaries by creating this fantasy. This, Jess, is the fifth dimension.”
“This isn’t real?”
“No. None of it ever was.”
“It’s all an invented extra dimension?”
“Christ...it’s a good job I was the quantum mechanic and not you.”
Another crunch brought an abrupt halt to Hobson’s condescension.
“When you unleash time,” he continued, feeling his neck grinding against the stone floor. “It expands. Like turning a circle into a sphere.”
“I don’t understand,” admitted Jess.
“But it’s simple...”
“No it isn’t!”
“What’s the problem? I’ve explained the bloody thing for God’s sakes!”
“No you ’aven’t.” Jess wanted to kill him.
“If…” He struggled to find the right words. “What...”
Get them in the right order, Jess Hobson. Breathe deeply and start again. “’Ow can y’ come from the future if the future doesn’t exist?”
Hobson returned Jess’ stare as if the answer was so obvious he shouldn’t have asked it in the first place.
“Simple temporal mechanics,” he ventured. “Why should the past affect the future if it’s already happened?”
“Because it should!” There was the minutest pause before Jess added, “Shouldn’t it?”
“If you move a pepper pot from a table does it upset the cutlery?”
Jess frowned and shook his head.
“If you drew a l
ine, then rubbed out one end, would it alter the other?”
If he’d have had time then Jess would have taken this logic to greater lengths. But the disappearance of a hat-stand acted as a reminder that time was not something he had much of.
“So what about the goblins an’ the ghosties an’ the...” Jess confronted the unhappy memory. “That bastard chicken inside the wicker man?”
“All fiction,” squealed Thomas. “All inventions from the imaginations of men and women...”
“Right...so, ’ow come they weren’t all around before? I mean, why did it all start at once and then suddenly decide it couldn’t stop?”
“Because Samuel Foster brought that bloody paperweight through with him. He brought reality into a world where reality doesn’t exist. It was like anti-matter meeting matter. Bloody stupid thing to do!”
“But there were loads of them! Not one but ’undreds of the buggers.”
“Bollockin’ Hell. It’s like trying teach elocution to a Clanger.”
There was a thud as Thomas’ frail old head received a boot beneath the chin.
“Circle to sphere!” he screamed. “Expansion. The creation of millions of choices. Understand?”
“No, I don’t understand.” Jess thought about everything he’d been told. So many things still weren’t adding up.
“What about the chicken?” he said again, not one to let a subject drop.
“It was an explosion of anti-reality. Truth meets fiction and ‘Caboom!’”
Several bubbles of spit left Hobson’s rank mouth.
Momentarily Jess thought he’d understood.
So, that was why Beethoven and Cervantes had been grotesques? Because they had just been fictionalised versions of their true selves.
This was unreal...all of it. Mrs Prune and Benjamin, Jannice, even Jess himself.
There was a faint sizzling noise as the darkness partially removed the brim from Hobson’s hat.
Hobson flinched in desperation. But the strong boot held him back.
“But Samuel Foster. And you? You come from reality. ’Ow come you didn’t create this chaos when y’ first arrived back in eighteen ninety-odd?”
“But I don’t come from reality, Jess. I come from you. And you’re not real. It’s all very recursive. It just goes round in circles like a snake trying to eat its own head by starting on the tail. And every time it does a loop it gets more and more twisted. It’s impossible Jess. It’s a fiction, an anomaly. That’s how it all started…that’s how it ends.”
Although he wasn’t sure he understood, Jess was beginning to realise that any last minute attempt to save the world was out of the question.
He looked down at the prostrate old man.
“It started with the child,” he said. “Why did y’ take the Wambach child?”
“Let me go and I’ll tell you.” Thomas Hobson wheezed optimistically, his voice nothing more than a chirrup.
“If y’ don’t tell me, I’ll snap y’ neck like a twig,” Jess reiterated calmly.
Thomas Hobson relented, managing to add a tiny amount of shrug to his shoulders. “I just wanted to attract your attention.”
“What?” Of all the things that had been said this particular admission puzzled Jess most of all. “Attract me attention. What for?”
“Because I knew that Samuel Foster would come. If I could come back, then so could he.”
“So that’s it, is it?” said Jess. “The whole soddin’ universe destroyed for the sake of bloody revenge.”
“Hmm?” Hobson shrugged again. “If you like.”
Then he started singing in an asphyxiated voice. A voice filled with mockery for the mass genocide of everything Jess had ever known.
“Round and round the mulberry bush. All around the steeple.”
He wheezed and embarked on the next line with vigour.
“That’s the way the universe goes. ‘Pop’ goes the weasel.”
“So w’at did Mrs Prune know that warranted your death threats?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothin’?”
“Not a bloody sausage, dear boy. I just couldn’t stand the old bag. All that goodness in one body. I always ’ated witches. They weren’t scientific enough.” He tapped his forehead with a straying finger. “No prospect of progress.”
“And that’s why, is it?” Jess was almost dumbfounded by the sorry truth of it all. “You’re a bigot and a bastard. And if this is your idea of progress I’ll take stagnation any time!”
Another chunk of floor gave way and Thomas felt the sleeve of his coat give.
“Whatever,” he said. “It’s all academic now, anyhow. Isn’t it?”
And his eyes glowed as brightly as a pair of red brake lights in the night.
“So that’s it, is it then? There’s no bloody answer ’cos there’s no bloody question? You can’t stop the world from ending ’cos it never existed in the first place?”
Thomas cackled once more.
“That’s right my boy.”
“Right.” Jess looked sadly at his collection of valuables all tied-up with a bit of old shoelace and reached a decision.
“Then fuck off y’ old twat.”
He brought his foot down in an arc.
It had the power of an iceberg connecting with Hobson’s ruddy chin.
There was a sickening crunch as the body doubled backwards towards the darkness.
And with a scream that seemed to last forever, Hobson toppled into the void.
It swallowed him whole.
Nothing more than a morsel of food falling deep into a well of resentment.
No one would miss him.
No one would know.
Now Jess was alone on a piece of floor about one foot in width.
Nowhere to run…nowhere to hide.
The darkness closed in.
He sat down on the edge of death with his knees tucked beneath his chin, his back against the roaring column of light, holding the box to his chest and sensing a fizzle round his boots.
He waited for the end to arrive.
And whilst he waited he thought about it all, with confused regret.
All going round in circles.
A whole universe that had never existed, but had existed briefly, somewhere.
It was just like life when you thought about it. A tiny sliver of light in an eternity of darkness must be so infinitely small that it could never have existed, but for one brief, twinkling moment in time.
Jess hadn’t woken up that morning thinking ‘This is where the fun stops’. Nobody had told him it was time to curl up and end his life.
There would be no more tomorrows.
No more time to make amends.
“Somewhere,” he thought. “At the core of all this madness, there’s a reality that’s closing its door. So let me get this straight. Forty years in the future, Thomas Hobson built a time machine and to travel backward in time he had to create another dimension. That dimension turned out to be us but we didn’t know, because to us it had always been reality. Samuel Foster took a glass orb with him into this fictional universe. And the result was an explosion.
But if that was the case, where the Hell did Samuel Foster get the real object from? Because both he and Thomas Hobson came from the fictional universe. Somewhere there must be a real universe, with real things and real people.
So why did he say it was all my fault?”
And Jess thought about that.
And he thought.
And he thought.
And the answer struck him at the same time the darkness chewed one corner from his box. “Because I’m real,” he said. “I’m the only real thing, in a whole invented universe. I had to be here to start the whole damn thing off.”
Then he turned. A brief spark of light, no matter how long, in an infinity of darkness would never have existed at all. But if infinity were to go round in a never ending loop, then a brief glimpse of brightness somewhere along its length would make a differ
ence. All the difference in the world.
A look of worry crossed his face as the darkness stroked the end of his nose.
He got to his feet, breathed in deeply and walked into the column of light, with the box tucked securely under his arm.
Chapter Twenty-Five: One Last Perusal of the Box
Several sheets of notepaper had been added to Jess’ box at some time in the future. The notes were written in Jess’ child-like script, with an accompaniment of doodles and coffee mug rings.
June 6th. 1999.
There’s some doubt concerning this date as it was smeared with a large thumbprint.
Over the past six months I…
This word was crossed out and the word ‘We’ inserted above it in red ink.
…have been trying to figure out what brought about the End Of The World. It is complecks…
This word had been altered to read ‘Complex’ by the same red pen.
…and I have found that it is to…
An ‘O’ was added here.
…much for my brain to handle. So I—We—have decided to write it all down and see if it might be easier to understand like this…
I will attempt to set things out in a Chronological order. Please bare with me—Us.
There was a drawing here that supposedly represented a penis, although the species was unknown. What relevance it had must remain a mystery.
Four years ago I—We—had a son—Thomas—In another forty years that boy—Thomas—will be a leading figure in the World of Cwontuum—Quantum—mechanics. In order to create time travel he must first create a fiff—altered to Fifth—dimension. This dimension, he discovers, is a dimension of thought. It is not a real dimension in our sense of the word. It is a fiction. Once created, it will release time so that he can travel through it.
Most of this paragraph was covered with thumbprints. A smile had been added in red ink at the bottom. A scrawled note in the margin that had been later scribbled out, read: ’Jannice Applebotham Is An Interfering SL.’
Unfortunately he—Thomas—travels backwards in time and becomes trapped along with a colleague of his. Samuel…Samual…Samuel…
All of this was crossed out and a simple SAM squeezed in above it.
Unable to do anything about it, he marries and has a son. This boy grows up, has a child of his own, who then has a son also. And that son turns out to be me.