The Rift

by Nina Allan

  Not that that explained everything, but it was a start. They’d find out the rest in due course, probably. No point in getting into details with the sister – best to spare her the worst of it. Civilians and death don’t mix, how many times have I had to tell you, DCI Schechter?

  Schechter shook his head as if to clear it. We should have the full forensics in a week or so, he said. He gave Selena his card. If there’s anything I can do in the meantime, don’t hesitate to call.

  Thanks, Selena said. I won’t. After he’d gone, Selena wondered why he hadn’t asked her about her own movements on the day Julie’s rucksack had been found, then supposed he hadn’t seen much point in that, either. Schechter had no reason to investigate whether there was any connection between Selena and Vanja, and so he hadn’t. No one had, and Selena wasn’t about to bring it to anyone’s attention. Even if Schechter or one of his colleagues eventually cottoned on to the fact that Vanja Sukhanov was Selena Rouane’s boss, what did that prove? That Selena had told Vanja about her sister’s long-ago disappearance, that Vanja had become curious and decided to have a nose around down by the lake?

  It was hardly a crime. Selena came to the conclusion that what the police didn’t know couldn’t hurt them. As a general rule to live by, it was pretty much iron-cast.

  * * *

  Schechter brought round the forensics report himself. There’s a lot of technical stuff, he said. But what it boils down to is that the remains are your sister’s.

  Definitely? Selena asked.

  Almost certainly. There’s a two percent margin of error, but that’s so the lab guys can cover themselves, basically. Your sister is dead, I’m afraid. We’re as certain of that as we are ever going to be.

  When Selena phoned her mother later that evening, Margery made no mention of DCI Schechter, even in passing. She nattered on about her trip instead, the fly-drive expedition to the United States that she and Janice were planning for the following spring. Margery had seemed different since she came back from Janice’s. Younger, more like the person she had been before the summer of her affair, although Selena’s memories of that time were hazy, it seemed so long ago.

  Julie’s memories would be clearer, more accurate. The night after Schechter’s second visit, Selena dreamed she was waiting for Julie outside her flat. It was the rush hour, and there were cars tailing back down the road all the way to the traffic lights. She pressed the bell push again, thinking Julie hadn’t heard, and the button disappeared right back inside the little box. It’s broken, Selena thought. It seemed like a disaster, and she began to cry. She awoke with a start, relieved to find the dream hadn’t been real.

  If she never called Julie again, no one would blame her. The DNA test said her sister was dead, she had Schechter’s paperwork to prove it. So what was wrong, then, what was wrong?

  Her sister was alone on an alien planet, and she had no one.

  No one but me. So what if she isn’t the same as she was when she went missing? What difference does it make?

  Whoever the hell she is, she’s still my sister.

  * * *

  “I’ve been thinking,” Selena said. “What if we bought a place together, the two of us? I saw one of those big three-storey houses just went up for sale, round on Parsonage Road? We could do it up.”

  Her voice trailed off. She had no idea how Julie might react to such a suggestion, whether she was moving too fast, whether the whole idea was madness anyway. There was also the question of Johnny, but they could cross that bridge when or if they ever came to it. If Johnny came marching home again, they’d have to see how things stood.

  “You’re trying to protect me,” Julie said. “You think I’m like Dad, that I need looking after.”

  “Dad didn’t need looking after,” Selena said, and it wasn’t until she spoke the words that she realised how true they were. Ray had been fine the way he was, he didn’t need fixing. It was everyone else – the doctors especially – who kept insisting he was a problem.

  Ray had always believed that Julie was alive. Which meant either that he’d never been crazy, or that she was crazy too.

  Selena couldn’t see that it mattered much, either way.

  “He was lonely, that’s all,” she said. “He needed to talk, but no one would listen.”

  “And you think that’s what I need – to talk?”

  “I don’t know what you need, Julie. I don’t have a clue. I just thought things might work out better for both of us if we stuck together.”

  “Two mad ladies?”

  “Two bad ladies.”

  “That sounds OK to me.” Julie put down her fork and reached across the table. She grabbed Selena’s hand and held it tight.

  * * *

  The sky was covered with cloud and there were no stars visible. Before Julie came home, Selena hadn’t taken much notice of the night sky, except to note if it was beautiful or sullen. In Manchester it was often difficult to see the stars in any case, there was too much artificial lighting.

  These days, she found herself looking upwards more and more often. She did not know the names of any of the stars, or how to find the constellations. Dad had taught them a few once, when they were kids, but she had forgotten. Selena resolved to learn them again, properly this time. How hard could it be?

  * * *

  One afternoon in early April, Selena went with Julie to have a look at the house on Parsonage Road, a tall Victorian terrace with a narrow back garden and one off-road parking space. From the inside it looked as if nobody had touched it since the war.

  “It wouldn’t take much,” Selena said. “Not once we get all this rubbish out.” She hesitated. “We could strip the floors.”

  “We could convert the attic,” Julie added. “We’d have even more space then.”

  Selena put her own house on the market the same afternoon. When she told Margery she was buying a place with a friend named Julie, her mother seemed happy to accept her decision. “It’ll be nice for you to have some company,” she said. “More secure.”

  When eventually she came to visit, she chatted away with Julie as if she’d never seen her before. “It’s lovely to meet you at last,” she said. “Selena’s told me so much about you.”

  She admired the improvements they’d made to the house and then they ate supper, a lamb and apricot stew made to an Armenian recipe that Selena had prepared beforehand.

  “If that’s the way she wants to play it, I guess I can live with that,” Julie said afterwards. “At least she seems to like me now. Better than she did before, anyway.”

  “I don’t know how you can be so laid back about it,” Selena said. “I’d be furious if it were me.”

  “No you wouldn’t,” Julie said. “Just think – she’ll never be able to bitch on at me about what a ghastly teenager I was.”

  “There is that,” Selena said. She laughed. “Kind of like a Get Out of Jail Free card.”

  * * *

  When Selena typed The Mind-Robbers of Pakwa into Google Books it came back unrecognised. She tried other search engines, and other configurations of the title, but with the same result. She made a point of looking in second-hand bookshops instead. She felt certain the book would turn up one day, a nothing-looking volume with a scuffed cloth cover and no dust jacket, the kind that falls down the back of the shelf without you realising, that when you find it again by accident some years later, you can’t remember how you came to have it in the first place.

  Julie carried on with her job at the Christie and soon got promoted. She took up running again, and photography, and seemed much happier generally. She kept on at Selena about applying for the Open University.

  “You could go part-time at work,” she said. “We can afford it now, easily. It would be stupid not to.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Selena said. In the end they agreed she’d enrol for the following March.

  If I Could Tell You I Would Let You Know

  In 1899, the Serbian experimental physicis
t Nikola Tesla built a radio transmitter and receiver at his laboratory in Colorado. The device intercepted radio signals of unknown origin. Tesla claimed they came from space, possibly from an alien craft that had been sent to gather information about the Earth and then report back.

  Tesla thought the signals might be coming from Mars, but no one took Tesla seriously. He was everybody’s tame mad scientist, a showman and an eccentric, brilliant but unreliable, running up massive electricity bills and then absconding with no forwarding address. How could anyone believe a man like that? Reports of the radio signals didn’t stop though, and as the space race gathered momentum, sightings of the actual object began to filter through. It was a satellite, reporters claimed, an unidentified flying object, spinning about the Earth in a polar orbit. The object was first photographed in 1957 by Dr Luis Corralos of the Communications Ministry in Venezuela. Dr Corralos was attempting to track the progress of the newly launched Soviet satellite, Sputnik 1. This other object, its unidentified twin, appeared to be shadowing the Sputnik, although neither the Americans nor the Russians stepped forward to claim it. Nobody official was prepared to admit that it was even there.

  A possible explanation was offered by space enthusiasts who suggested the UFO must be a piece of debris left over from the Black Knight missile testing programme, a series of dummy runs set up by the British in the mid-1950s. The theory was fatally flawed – the Black Knight scientists did not at that time have the technology to send a rocket into orbit – but it gave the still-unidentified object the name that it has been known by ever since.

  The Black Knight satellite flies in a polar orbit, which space scientists agree is the kind of orbit most commonly used for the purposes of reconnaissance, or information-gathering. The satellite has been variously identified as space-station garbage, wreckage debris, an insulation blanket, an ejection seat, a rogue spy satellite. But still, no one seems to have a definitive answer as to what it is, or where it came from, or why it is there. Nobody seems able to track it properly, either. It has a habit of vanishing off radar screens, sometimes for years, only to reappear again just as mysteriously and without any warning. It has an orbit unlike any other man-made or natural object. The Black Knight satellite, named or otherwise, is still a UFO.

  There have been theories, of course. Some have believed the signals could have been produced by an emissary probe from a distant star system, thousands of years ago. One particularly enthusiastic ufologist even extrapolated the signals into star charts. Other ufologists were enthralled. Astronomers and physicists refused to give such lunatic propositions a second glance.

  It’s strange though, don’t you think, that no one has ever really tried to track the thing, or get up close to it? It’s almost as if people think it might be dangerous.

  The satellite is still up there, Selena. God knows where it came from, or what’s inside it. I wouldn’t go near it, if it were me. I wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole.

  Most UFOs get identified pretty quickly. Nine times out of ten a UFO will end up being a weather balloon or a Chinese lantern or an albatross that’s swallowed a radio transmitter or just a flock of geese. Every now and then there’ll be an unidentified flying object that no one can immediately identify. Those are the ones that annoy people, because they leave room for doubt. I’ve read about scientists – astrophysicists and flight technicians and aeronautics engineers who’ve worked for NASA for twenty years – who have publicly denied UFO theory whilst admitting off the record that they just don’t know. Any public statement suggesting they believed in flying saucers would be career suicide. Not worth risking their reputations over, anyway.

  You remember that old Police song we used to love, ‘Message in a Bottle’? We used to belt it out, didn’t we, whenever we heard it come on the radio, singing at the tops of our voices, miming actions to the lyrics, pretending to search the horizon for rescue ships. There was something about that song that made us mad for it, something catchy and deadly serious and just a little bit frightening. Sting sung about a year passing since he wrote his note, but what if thirteen thousand years had passed, or more, and the message wasn’t a message in a bottle but a series of radio transmissions, or an unidentified flying object? What if it came through the rift, that thing, that repository, whatever it is?

  Even if the whole Black Knight satellite story turns out to be a fake, a hoax, that doesn’t mean we’re safe. That bottle, with its deadly message, could be hurtling towards us, even now. Even as we sit here talking over our day and putting wood on our lovely new stove and thinking about what film we’re going to see at The Dancehouse on Saturday night. Even if it isn’t us, it will be someone. It’s like Noah said: the rift exists. Something is bound to come through it, sooner or later. I wish I could forget what happened to me and go back to normal. I wish I could tell you I made it all up, but that wouldn’t be true.

  From the ruins of Pakwa you can see Tristane, huge and bright as a beacon, like a silver globe. Even in the daytime, you can see her, even when it’s cloudy. That’s what Linus Quinn wrote in his memoir, and even though I was never on Dea I believe what he said.

  End

  Acknowledgements

  Huge thanks to Cath Trechman, Natalie Laverick, Chris Young, Lydia Gittins, Julia Lloyd and Ella Chappell of Titan Books for helping The Rift through to completion and getting it out there, and to all the wonderful friends and colleagues who offered encouragement and support along the way. In particular I would like to thank Anne Charnock, John Clute, Carole Johnstone, Vince Haig, Mike Harrison, Paul Kincaid, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Helen Marshall, Andre Paine, Cleaver Patterson, Cath Phillips, David Rix, Priya Sharma, Robert Shearman, Emma Swift and Douglas Thompson for their inspiring conversation and excellent company. Love and thanks as always to my mother, Monica Allan, and to my partner, Christopher Priest, for being the best.

  About the Author

  Nina Allan’s stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best Horror of the Year #6, The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2013, and The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women. Her novella Spin, a science fictional re-imagining of the Arachne myth, won the British Science Fiction Association Award in 2014, and her story-cycle The Silver Wind was awarded the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire in the same year. The Race was a finalist for the 2015 BSFA Award, the Kitschies Red Tentacle and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Nina Allan lives and works on the Isle of Bute with her partner, the science fiction writer Christopher Priest. Find Nina’s blog, The Spider’s House, at www.ninaallan.co.uk

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