The Universes Inside the Lighthouse

by Pam Stucky

  “Lighthouses are elevators to other universes?” Charlie’s voice was a mixture of incredulity and delight. He couldn’t wait to hear what was coming next.

  “Venn diagrams,” said Ben. “He said the elevators are in lighthouses, not that all lighthouses are elevators. Elevators in lighthouses are a subset of lighthouses, not the other way around.” He looked at Milo for confirmation.

  “Exactly right, Ben,” said Milo. Ben beamed. “All elevators seem to be in lighthouses on Earth, but not all lighthouses on Earth have elevators. We haven’t investigated every lighthouse yet, of course, nor found every elevator. We’ve been busy.”

  Emma nodded a small nod. “Vik,” she said. As though somehow, that made everything make sense.

  “Yes, Vik,” said Milo. “We need to find him before he destroys everything.”

  “Wait,” said Charlie. “This is all … you’re going too fast. So to recap, you are aliens from another planet in another universe, and you traveled here in an elevator to catch a bad guy. But tell me this: you’ve been here for decades without getting any older. How do you explain that?”

  Eve joined her father’s narrative. “We know—or we’re pretty sure—Vik is either on Earth, or at the very least he’s somewhere that’s accessed by the Dogwinkle elevator. Could be in another universe. We don’t know. But this is where the energy trails lead, so this is where we’re looking.”

  “The Balky Point lighthouse,” said Ben. “That’s your elevator? That’s how you get to your planet, your universe?”

  Eve nodded, as though this were the easiest thing in the world—in the universes—to understand.

  “All those times my brother went up to that lighthouse to make out with girls, and he never knew,” mumbled Ben. “Elevator to another planet. Now that would have been a date!”

  Emma squirmed.

  “So why do you want to catch this Vik?” asked Charlie. “What’s he done that warrants a cross-universe quest?”

  “As I said, we’ve only known about this interuniverse travel ability for a hundred of your years or so,” said Milo. “The spots have been there forever, we assume. We have scientists studying the thin spots, but our knowledge is just in its infancy. Who knows what we’ll discover? Before we learned about this, we knew as little about aliens as you all do. Or did. We knew aliens could exist; we knew that, statistically, they probably did. We knew it was possible there were more universes than just our own, but we’d never traveled to find alien life. Never imagined we would, or at least, I never imagined I would.”

  Emma saw Eve glance quickly at her father, her eyes filled with sadness and something else, but she couldn’t read any more into the look. She tried to imagine herself as an alien. Everything that seemed so real to her, everything that seemed so normal and usual and comforting to her, to someone else, somewhere else, was alien. To Eve, she was alien.

  Then she realized something. “Hold on a minute. You look just like us. Do all aliens look like humans? And also—you were wearing different clothes when you were here earlier tonight. Just a couple hours ago. Is it still today for you? Did you travel in time, too?”

  Charlie looked disappointed that this idea hadn’t even occurred to him, but he was right on top of the concept. “Time travel! Do you travel through time? Is that how you look the same in all the pictures? That’s it! You’re time-traveling aliens! Oh my gosh. This is crack. This is insane. Time-traveling aliens.” He gazed at the beautiful girl sitting next to him, returning her earlier one-arm hug with a side hug of his own. “Eve, my favorite time-traveling alien.” Then, he paused. “Um, are you … a … girl?” He unwound his arm from the alien beside him.

  Emma cut in, not really wanting to hear the answer. “So. Okay. Let’s say you are, in fact, real aliens.”

  “We are,” said Eve, lifting her chin.

  “Why are you here, then? What made you come to Earth?” Emma asked.

  Charlie’s discomfort left him. “Yes! Are you planning an invasion? Do we have twenty-four hours to live? Are the spaceships coming to attack us?” He looked up to the sky for signs of imminent danger.

  Emma sighed. Leave it to Charlie to be so excited at the prospect of the End of the World. Sure, it was exciting in theory, but in reality, she guessed probably not so much.

  Eve also chose to ignore Charlie’s digression. “We told you about Vik,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Emma, “but who is he? Why do you want to find him? Why did he come here, and why is it a problem?”

  Milo shrugged. “It’s been interesting coming here. This is our first trip, you see, mine and Eve’s. And even though we’ve been on Earth for a hundred of your years, in our time it’s just been a few months. A year, maybe. Time is difficult to ascertain sometimes. All we can say, really,” he looked at Eve, warning her not to say more, “is that Vik is trying to make trouble.”

  “Trouble?” Charlie asked.

  Milo either didn’t hear Charlie or didn’t answer. “We think he’s been traveling through time, too,” he said. “We think some of the natural disasters you’ve had here through the years haven’t been so natural. You know that big earthquake of 2006?”

  “It was a 6.8,” Ben told Charlie and Emma, “lasted almost a minute. I remember that. I was up on top of the building, hunched under a big desk, and I thought Wishing Rock was done for. Thought for sure it was my day to die. Balky Point was right at the epicenter—wait. Was that related to Vik? To why you’re here?”

  “We think maybe it was. We think some of the unusual things that have been happening on your Earth have actually been because of Vik. No one’s noticed, because your global warming and climate change and general humanity are wreaking havoc of their own. But a few things, we think, have been Vik,” said Milo.

  “That’s crazy,” said Ben. “For how long? How long has Vik been bringing the crazy? And why?”

  “At least a hundred years,” said Eve, “Maybe more. We first landed here in your year 1874, and we’ve been moving forward a few years at a time, looking for signs that he’s been around.”

  “We’re sort of going on instinct as much as science,” said Milo with a sigh. “Or more. Hoping that if we see a clue, we’ll recognize it as a clue.”

  Charlie was less interested in Vik, however, than in the idea of traveling the universe—the universes. “How many elevators did you say there are?” Emma could see it in his eyes: escape. Adventure. Trouble of his own kind.

  “In total?” said Milo. “Millions. Billions. Finite, but for all intents and purposes, uncountable. And we don’t know whether more are being created. If it’s a natural occurrence, then as the universes expand, new elevators are probably created all the time. If not, who knows. There could be a society in some far off world where all they do all day long is build new elevators. And since time is a tricky substance, who knows if they’re doing it now, in the past, or in the future.”

  Charlie shook his head rapidly like a confused cartoon character. “Doing it in the future? Right. Totally a normal statement. Okay, so how many elevators are there on Earth, then? Round numbers.”

  “Not as many,” said Milo. “We don’t know for sure, obviously—we’ve been busy chasing down Vik. But our scientists estimate it at around a dozen, maybe two dozen at most. They’re not everywhere. Just enough to get by.”

  “Two dozen!” said Emma. “Why Dogwinkle, then? What’s so special about this island that it merits an elevator?” The idea that there were only a few handfuls more of these thin spots on her planet was mind-boggling. Actually, the idea that they existed at all was mind-boggling. But for one to be right here, at their randomly chosen vacation spot, that was unbelievable.

  “We don’t know,” said Milo, his hesitation suggesting once again that he knew more than he would say. “It’s isolated, but everything would have been isolated when the elevators first appeared. Islands seem to be popular spots. Like we said, all the elevators on Earth are at lighthouses. Coincidence? We don’t know.” />
  “So, no offense, Milo, but what good are you if you don’t really know anything?” said Charlie.

  Milo laughed. “One of the great traits shared by you Earthlings and people on our planet is curiosity. We don’t know, but we’re learning. We have scientists working on it. We’re not far ahead of you in terms of these discoveries. We have a long way to go yet.”

  Ben shook his head. “You keep talking about your scientists. But where are they? All of space and time, where are you hiding them?”

  Eve looked at her watch to check the time—about nine o’clock—then at her father for permission, which he granted with a nod. “Do you want to meet them?” she asked.

  “YES!” cried the three Earthlings in unison.

  “To the lighthouse,” said Milo with a flourish.

  chapter four

  Bumping along the winding dirt road from Wishing Rock to Balky Point in the bed of Milo’s rusty blue truck, Charlie and Ben in the back with her and Milo and Eve in the cab, Emma’s mind flooded with questions. Even the mundane was suspect: how did Milo get a driver’s license? Surely he didn’t have a birth certificate or proof of any sort of Earthly residency. Or did he? Maybe the scientists they were heading to see were masters at the art of forgery as well? Or magic? Or deception? Maybe they could influence humans’ minds: a simple “This is not the fake driver’s license you’re looking for” and the DMV worker would look away, unaware of the alien spell, not fully sure what was happening and certain to forget everything the moment the aliens were gone? And further, was Milo a safe driver? The speed at which he took some of the narrow curves suggested otherwise. Did they have cars on their planet? Where, again, exactly, was their planet? Did they even say? Layered, she remembered. What did that mean? Was this all a hoax? Island chicanery? Emma struggled to smooth her hair as it blew wildly in the wind and started looking around the truck for hidden cameras.

  “Do you think Milo has a driver’s license?” said Ben to Emma, his voice raised over the rumble of the wheels hitting rocks and the howl of the wind. He and Emma were riding in the truck bed facing backward; Charlie was sitting on the side, turned front, face up, eyes closed, smile wide as he soaked in the moonlight and the adventure.

  Emma blinked with surprise. Had she voiced her thoughts out loud? Was she speaking when she thought she was thinking?

  “I was just wondering the same thing,” she said. She couldn’t help but smile. Ben laughed, and Emma’s smile grew.

  “Crazy,” he said. “Can you believe this? I have no idea what I’m even expecting when we get there. They seem like nice people, but this whole thing is ridiculous. Aliens!” He shook his head. “Did not see that one coming.”

  Emma rubbed her arms and zipped her jacket up to her chin. The chill of the night and the rush of air as they flew down the road were making her cold. “I know,” she said. “Part of me wants to believe it, but there’s no way it’s true. Seriously. Still, I’m curious what they’re up to.”

  “I’ve always been curious about space,” said Ben, looking up at the narrow path of sky visible above the tree-lined road. “It would be cool if it were true.”

  Emma nodded just as the force from swerving around a tight curve tossed her halfway into Ben’s lap. She took her time in dragging herself up and away from Ben. If, in fact, this was all a joke, she thought, it was not without its benefits. She was pleased that the shiny intergalactic girl was inside the cab, and she had Ben to herself.

  “Me too,” she said. “I like science. I’ve sometimes thought I might do something science-y for a career, even, but I don’t know what.”

  Ben turned abruptly to face Emma. “Really? Me too. Actually, I don’t know. My brother has always known what he wanted to do—he’s studying to be a doctor now—but I’ve never known. I mean, like, he knew when he was a kid. That young. I’ve never had a clue. Everyone focuses on my brother, anyway, so there’s not as much pressure on me, but it would be nice to have some idea what I want to do.” He paused. “Maybe science.” He looked at the stars. “Maybe space.”

  “Maybe space,” she repeated. Truth was, she had no idea either. But suddenly space sounded really, really appealing.

  Emma grabbed a tighter hold of the side of the truck and adjusted her gaze carefully so her face was looking forward, but she could see Ben out of the corner of her eye. It was dark, but her eyes had adjusted to the night, and the moon was almost full. Ben’s long legs stretched out next to hers into the middle of the truck bed. She thought maybe he’d gotten taller since December, but sitting next to him she couldn’t tell. Her eyes were drawn to his hands, which looked both soft and strong at the same time. Gentle but confident hands, she thought. Could hands be confident?

  A yell from inside the cab startled her back to the present. Before she could figure out what Milo had bellowed, the truck jerked up and down as Milo drove with reckless abandon through a deep pothole.

  “Ah bit mah tung,” said Charlie as he righted himself from the unexpected topple.

  Milo yelled back out the driver’s window, “Sorry about that!”

  But Emma was not upset. She had landed in Ben’s lap again, and he was helping her get back up. Definitely gentle hands, she thought.

  Milo slowed down a bit after that, and it wasn’t too long before he eased the truck to a stop at the lighthouse parking lot. Charlie was already halfway out of the vehicle before Milo turned off the engine. He rubbed his hands with glee.

  “Aliens in Dogwinkle!” he said. “Aliens in Dogwinkle! In Dogwinkle! Em, imagine if we’d convinced Mom and Dad to take us to Hawaii? What would we have? A beach, margaritas, hot women in bikinis, sand, surf, … but NO ALIENS. Em. Do you hear what I’m saying? NO ALIENS.”

  “You can’t drink yet,” she replied, climbing out of the truck bed with help from Ben, but what she thought was, And no Ben.

  “So, where’s the elevator?” Charlie asked, as Eve and Milo slammed the stubborn truck doors behind them. He strained his neck, peering around the base of the building. “We didn’t see an elevator when we were here before.”

  “Like I said, it’s not an actual elevator,” said Milo, laughing at Charlie’s exuberance. “Just a closet, really.”

  “A portal,” said Eve. “A doorway. Not an elevator.”

  “First floor, houseware. Second floor, men’s clothes. Third floor, ALIENS,” Charlie said. Under his breath, he added, “Aliens aliens aliens aliens aliens aliens!”

  “Calm down there, cowboy,” said Ben, with a glance at Eve.

  Milo switched on a light as they walked through the unlocked front door and into the lobby where Emma and Charlie had seen all the pictures of Eve. Shadows crept across the floor, and a shiver crawled up Emma’s spine. Is this why people think the place is haunted? she wondered. Is it really aliens?

  Ben headed straight to the wall of photos and scrutinized them closely. When he found Eve in the first picture, a gentle smile of familiarity spread over his face. He pointed at the image. “It is you,” he said with delight.

  “You … you … you.” His discoveries traced the same path Emma and Charlie had taken before. “You.” He pointed at each picture in progression as he found Eve’s bright blonde hair and intense eyes amongst the crowds. “You’ve been here since before I was born. Where have you been all my life?” He caught her eye and smiled.

  Charlie coughed loudly, a cough that sounded suspiciously like a word.

  “What was that?” said Ben.

  “Just the dust,” said Charlie, waving imaginary particles from his shoulders and the air in front of his face.

  Oblivious to the drama, Eve had made her way to a closet marked “Storage: Staff Only.” She stood by it expectantly, looking at the others, waiting.

  Emma noticed Eve’s attention to the door. “The storage closet?” she said. “The elevator is in a storage closet?”

  “Life is full of mystery,” said Eve, as she opened the closet door.

  “Wait, that door was locked befor
e,” said Charlie. “I tried all the doors. That was locked.”

  “You tried all the doors?” said Emma. “When did you try all the doors? Why did you try all the doors? You hoodlum.”

  “Why wouldn’t I try all the doors?” Charlie said incredulously.

  “You wouldn’t have been able to get in. It was locked,” said Eve. “Let’s just say I have a master key.”

  With the door opened, the interior of the room was revealed. Emma didn’t realize she’d been excited until she felt the cool rush of disappointment spread over her. Barely enough for a storage closet, the room was just a few feet deep and maybe six feet wide. And completely, utterly, vacant.

  “The universe is smaller than I thought,” deadpanned Charlie, peering around the doorway into the meager space within.

  “Not much storage in here,” said Emma.

  “It’s not actually a storage room,” said Eve.

  Obviously, thought Emma. “Do the lighthouse staff know?” she asked. “You’d think eventually they’d get suspicious.”

  “The staff know,” said Milo, herding the teenagers into the room and filing in behind them. “They’re spot keepers. They work with us.”

  “Aliens aliens aliens aliens aliens aliens,” chanted Charlie quietly as he shuffled forward into the closet, his eyes sparkling.

  “But it’s just a room,” said Emma, studying the cramped space to see if she was missing something. “There’s no universe in here.” She exchanged a glance with Ben: Are they serious? Again she wondered if Eve and Milo were frauds … frauds, that was, who had now lured three unsuspecting minors (well, Ben was of age, but that wasn’t the point) into a closet. A closet! What had they been thinking! She started to panic. Did she have her Swiss army knife with her, the one her Dad had given her for her last birthday? Of course not. Of course she didn’t. Why would she carry it with her? No reason to expect she was going to be abducted. Abducted by fake aliens! The poetic license of it made her laugh out loud.