The Universes Inside the Lighthouse

by Pam Stucky

  “Shut the door,” said Eve to her father—or was it really her father, Emma wondered? He obliged after switching on a light.

  Emma looked to see whether she could escape. Milo was blocking the door. Clever, isn’t it, she thought, how he casually placed himself right in the path to freedom. Emma mentally scanned her body for assets. Why oh why had she cut her fingernails just two days prior? They could have been good weapons. Knees and elbows, she decided. It would have to be knees and elbows. She started to position herself to knee Milo right in the groin when—

  “Eve, open the Hub.”

  Emma sighed with relief, expecting the door behind Milo to open again. But instead, the entire back wall of the closet separated, two panels pulling apart from the center of a wall that just moments before had seemed to be a seamless wall.

  A warm natural light filled the closet. Emma gasped. Charlie cried out, “What the …!” then started his chant again. “Aliens aliens aliens …”

  “Welcome to the Hub,” said Milo, grinning.

  As the doors parted in front of Eve, a giant room came into sight. More than a room. A whole other world? wondered Emma. She had walked around the lighthouse before, and she knew for certain this space did not fit inside the other side of the closet; did not, for that matter, fit inside the entire lighthouse. Not by a long shot. She decided this was not a fake alien abduction after all … and she hoped it wasn’t a real one, either. Alternatively, she hoped she had not gone completely insane.

  “What … what is this?” said Ben, trying to take in everything he was seeing. “Is this your planet?”

  “Bigger on the inside,” said Emma quietly.

  Milo walked out of the closet into the broad open expanse before them. “This … is the Hub,” he said, arms open wide to include everything they could see. “The Hub exists everywhere and nowhere. As far as we can tell, it touches all universes, but is a part of none of them.”

  They were standing in a seemingly endless field with a tightly manicured lawn beneath their feet, the grass as tidy and trimmed as that of a golf course. The area looked like an outdoor science lab. Dozens of laboratory tables, covered in the equipment and detritus of ongoing experiments, were arranged in neat rows to the left. Dozens more tables were lined up in an array straight in front of them, each weighed down by computers and massive monitors. The monitors buzzed busily with graphs, charts, tables, moving lines, dots on grids, vast fields of text, and visions that were completely beyond the visitors’ comprehension. Much of what they saw had no wires attached, but occasional cables from some equipment led to plugs directly in the grass below the tables. At one end, a printer was producing a three-dimensional model of what looked like a planet, though definitely not Earth. To the right were what appeared to be huge panes of glass, hanging in the air with no visible supports holding them from above or below. Resembling nothing so much as screens used to track people and information from some futuristic police station in a TV crime show, more graphs and charts flashed animatedly in bright red, blue, green, and yellow across these panes. The whole of the laboratory area was surrounded by a stone walkway, with stones of various sizes and hues interlaid into intricate patterns of swirls, bringing to mind the wind, or waves, or perhaps the movement of the galaxies.

  Emma, Charlie, and Ben gawked in awe and amazement. “In the Hub,” Milo continued with pride, “Everything is possible. Everything. Our scientists have been working here about ten years, some of them even living here, in which time they’ve created everything you see.”

  “What do you mean, ‘they created everything’?” Emma asked Milo. She had a feeling he didn’t mean “built.”

  “Power of intention,” said Milo. “It works here.” He shrugged.

  “Well,” said Charlie, “Not to be rude but I guess I’ll be the one to bring up the elephant in the room.” And he meant it in the most literal sense. Off to their left, about fifty yards beyond the stone path, an elephant munched quietly on a random patch of tall grass. Not just a normal elephant: this one seemed to be a two-dimensional life-sized actualization of a drawing, the kind a kindergartener might have made during art class. When it turned its head to look at them, they could see it was truly paper thin.

  “That’s Dr. Waldo’s pet,” Milo said, waving at a middle-aged man in a white lab coat who was approaching them in a great rush. “Dr. Waldo!” he said as the man drew near. “So good to see you!” The two men hugged.

  “No time, no time!” said Dr. Waldo, breathless from the run though he looked quite fit. “We’ve found a trail! You must go immediately! Who are these people?” His face registered surprise as he finally realized Eve and Milo were not alone.

  Milo looked at the Earthlings. “New friends,” he said, “but friends who we’re going to have to leave behind. Sorry, guys, we can’t take you with us. We have to go.”

  Emma was stunned. What had just happened? What kind of trail had Dr. Waldo found, and how were they going to follow it?

  Ben’s face fell. “Will we ever see you guys again? If you find Vik, will you come back and say goodbye?”

  Eve looked at Ben and held his gaze. “I hope we see you again,” she said, “I would like that.” She looked back at Charlie and Emma. “You’re staying at Ed Brooks’s cabin, right?”

  Charlie looked pleased but surprised. “How do you know?”

  “We’ve been around a while,” said Eve.

  chapter five

  “And then, they sent us home,” Charlie finished. He, Emma, and Ben had been “unceremoniously rejected,” as Charlie had put it, after Dr. Waldo told Milo and Eve he had “a hit.” All three had returned to the twins’ cabin to try to make sense of what had just happened.

  When they got back to the cabin, they found Emma and Charlie’s parents there, as well as Ed and his wife Ruby. While at the potluck, the twins’ father, Glen, had told Ed about a leak in the cabin’s back bathroom. Ed and Ruby had come over to fix it.

  “I came over to watch Ed fix it,” Ruby had corrected.

  By the time the teens reached the cabin, the leak was fixed, and everyone was sitting in the living room chatting. Charlie, Emma, and Ben joined them, and Charlie recounted their rather unbelievable tale.

  “That’s the craziest thing I ever heard,” said Ed when Charlie finished, “and I’ve seen some crazy things. But they confirmed my UFO story, did they? I was right? Not making it up? Not insane?” He squeezed Ruby, who was sitting at his side. “See, my love, you didn’t marry a mad man, after all!”

  Ruby rolled her eyes. “I’m not sure the UFO story was the only thing in question as far as your sanity,” she laughed. “And I’m not sure I believe those people are from another planet. Anyway, we should probably be heading—”

  There was a knock at the front door.

  “Who in the world? At this hour?” said the twins’ mother, Amy Renee, as their father got up.

  Emma looked at a clock on the wall. It was nearing midnight.

  Glen opened the door.

  There stood the aliens.

  “Eve!” said Ben and Charlie.

  “Milo?” said Emma.

  Amy Renee, who had joined her husband at the door, looked from the people standing in the doorway to her children and back. “So you’re the aliens then?” she said matter-of-factly, as though people claiming to be aliens appeared on her doorstep every day. “I’m not so sure I should let you in.”

  “Let them in!” called Ed from the couch before Milo and Eve had a chance to reply. “I have questions!” Ruby elbowed him in the ribs, but nonetheless looked like she might have some questions herself.

  “You’re back!” said Charlie with great ebullience, as though he hadn’t just seen them less than an hour before.

  “You weren’t gone long,” said Emma, who hadn’t even had time to start to miss Eve. Then she noticed something. “But … you changed your clothes again?” she said, half to herself. Which made her wonder, just where did Milo and Eve live? Where did they eat,
sleep; where did they go to rest and recuperate and shower? Where did they keep their clothes? Did they live in the Hub? Emma and Charlie and Ben had been in the Hub for such a brief time that she hadn’t had much time to look around before Dr. Waldo rushed everyone away, shoved Ben and Emma and Charlie back through the closet to the other side, to Earth. Not that they’d ever really left Earth, though she wasn’t quite clear on how that all worked.

  Eve looked down at her outfit, as though just noticing it herself. “Yes, I guess we did. We were gone longer than it seems,” she said. “It was about a week, maybe. It’s hard to tell sometimes. Anyway, we showered back at the Hub before we came over. We didn’t get much chance to clean up for a few days.” She squinched her nose. “Dad didn’t smell so good.”

  Milo squinched his nose back at his daughter in reply. “We got pretty grungy this trip. I’m not the only one who didn’t smell so good,” he said. “But I won’t tell the cute boys about your stench!”

  At this, Amy Renee laughed. She extended her hand to Milo. “I’m Amy Renee. The twins’ mother. This is my husband Glen.”

  “Milo, Eve,” said Milo, indicating himself and his daughter in turn. They exchanged handshakes with the Nelsons. “We did a lot of running this time around,” Milo continued. “Ended up on a very young planet, relatively speaking. No intelligent life. Just some fast creatures looking for a quick meal. We were almost dinner.” He pulled up his pant leg to reveal a shin tightly wrapped in gauze. “Occupational hazard,” he said.

  “Hey, welcome. I’m Ed, and this is my wife Ruby,” said Ed as the group moved to the living room and sat down. Milo nodded and smiled in greeting. “Just what is your occupation, there, Milo?” asked Ed. “Indiana Jones?”

  Milo tilted his head in confusion. “Indiana Jones?”

  Ed laughed. “Well, if you don’t know Indiana Jones you’re clearly not from here! Movie action adventure hero. A dashing archaeologist who gets himself caught up in all sorts of danger, but he always finds a way out.”

  Milo’s eyes lit up. “An archaeologist action hero? Who would have imagined! Well, fact is, we never know what we’re going to meet out there, and it keeps us on our toes, to say the least. Dr. Waldo—did they explain to you who Dr. Waldo is?” he paused.

  Ed nodded. “We heard all about Dr. Waldo and The Grand Inconceivable Hub, or at least as much as they found out. Sounds like they weren’t there long.”

  “No, I suppose not,” said Milo, an enigmatic look on his face. “Well, Dr. Waldo tries to help keep us safe when we travel, but there’s really not a lot he can do about it. The universes are largely empty, but there are a lot of wild places. You here on Earth, at this time in the planet’s lifespan, you have it easy, more or less. You’ve made it pretty tranquil for yourselves. But in general, there’s more that is uninhabitable and unfavorable to life out there than there is calm.”

  “A lot of peace, though,” Eve added. “Lots of beautiful places with just nothing but serenity.”

  Emma found herself momentarily jealous. A life of quiet tranquility, rather than this chaos that normally surged through her head? She might be able to put up with some wild to get that in return.

  Ruby, however, was caught up in the idea of time. “A week!” she said. “But the kids just got here an hour ago! How does that even work?” The furrow in her brow suggested she, too, was a skeptic.

  “Time is a tricky concept,” said Milo. “It’s not as simple as people want to think it is. Don’t believe me? Your people can send humans to the moon, but you can’t keep the proper time on your clocks. Have you ever wondered why that is?”

  As Ed nodded knowingly at her side, Ruby replied, “Yes, I guess I have, actually. Every time daylight savings changes, my car clock has run forward again by five or ten extra minutes. And the clock on our DVR doesn’t even try to get it right. If I reset it, it’s anyone’s guess as to how long it’ll be before it makes up its own time again, usually several decades into the future.”

  Milo’s head bobbed up and down quickly. “Yes,” he said, a gleam of excitement in his eyes. “Time! Time is slippery. It’s not linear. People think it is, want it to be, expect it to be, and are confused when it’s not. But time doesn’t like to behave. Time envies the dimensions of space, which aren’t expected to adhere to such strict rules. Time doesn’t like being tied down. Time is your mischievous friend. Time wants to play.”

  “Time wants to play?” said Amy Renee. Emma could see her mother was having difficulty wrapping her head around the idea, around all of it. And Emma couldn’t blame her. How could time not be linear, and what did that even mean? If it wasn’t linear, then did it exist all at once, like space did? Did that mean that somewhere—in some other time? or place?—she could see her future, could know how all this would end up? They’d been studying free will in school; if all of time existed at once, could there be any such thing as free will?

  Ruby looked very intently at Milo. “Seriously, are you telling me my husband isn’t crazy? That UFO he claims he saw—it really was a UFO?”

  “Well, that depends on how you define a UFO,” said Milo. “In the strictest sense, it was an unidentified flying object. But Dr. Waldo suspects those sightings, or at least some of them, may have been disruptions resulting from Vik’s attempts to unravel the thin spot—” he looked at Ruby. “Did they tell you about Vik, and the thin spots?”

  Ruby nodded.

  “Well, it may have been something Vik did, then. Or Ed could have been seeing through to another universe, maybe another planet’s form of an airplane. Who knows. Hard to tell. What we’ve realized, though, is that Vik has been here for a long time. We can’t find him, we keep trying, but we’re almost certain he’s been here.”

  “Why here?” asked Amy Renee. “Of all the places we could have chosen to vacation! Why did this man come here? Is he dangerous?” Emma could see her mother’s mind whirling, starting to mentally pack up the cabin and take them all back home.

  Milo pursed his lips, gave some thought before speaking. “It’s close to home, relatively speaking. His elevator is your elevator. First thin spot he found, I suppose.” He looked out the window, curtains still open, to the world beyond, blanketed in darkness. “Earth has special interest to him,” he said.

  Emma had been watching the flurry of activity in a bit of a daze. It didn’t escape her attention that Milo had avoided the question of whether Vik was dangerous. She remembered, though, that she and Charlie and Ben had been dismissed from the Hub because Eve and Milo were going on a mission. There had been a “hit.” A “trail.”

  “Did you find him?” she asked. “Did you find Vik?”

  All heads turned to Milo and Eve for the answer.

  Milo’s smile faded. “No. No, we didn’t. We’re new at this. It’s an imperfect science. One person in all the universes, it’s a bit worse than finding a needle in a haystack. We didn’t find him, but we didn’t find any evidence that he’d been any of the places we went, either.” He looked at Eve. “We’ll keep looking.”

  Emma wasn’t sure if she was disappointed or glad. If they’d found Vik, Milo and Eve might not have come back. Not that she needed them to come back. But she wanted another look at the Hub. She still wasn’t fully sure she and the others hadn’t been suffering from some sort of mass delusion that made them think they’d seen a giant room with a paper elephant grazing on grass, inside the lighthouse. That was impossible! “Everything is possible in the Hub,” they’d told her, but she suspected the same might be true of hallucinogenic trips. Or maybe all of it was a dream. Maybe she wasn’t even awake yet. She knew she needed to get back to the lighthouse and find out.

  “Eve,” she said, “You told us you have some sort of ‘master key’ that unlocked the elevator—the storage room—at the lighthouse. Can we see your key?”

  Once again, Eve looked at her father for approval. He shrugged. “Why not?” he said.

  Eve reached to her neck and pulled out a pendant that had been resting
underneath the neckline of her light blue shirt. “This is it,” she said.

  Emma stepped up to inspect the pendant. It’s nothing more than a small rock, she thought. Her forehead wrinkled and the corners of her mouth tightened with displeasure.

  Ruby leaned in to see, as well. “That’s a wishing rock!” she said. “What kind of key is this? It’s a wishing rock! Are you saying wishing rocks are keys to the universe?”

  Emma was grateful that at least one other person—one other Earthling—was feeling the same disbelief she was. First, aliens from another universe. Now, common rocks unlocking doors to spaces between universes, where everything was possible. This was all too much.

  “Not all wishing rocks are keys,” Eve said. “Just some of them. But yes, the master key—at least, this one—looks like your wishing rocks, the kind your town is named after. A gray rock with a solid white stripe through it. They’re like master keys. Using one is sort of primitive, actually; Dr. Waldo and his team have figured out the properties within the rock, the energy fields, that unlock things, and they’ve managed to replicate it. More or less. But I don’t want to trust a duplicate. If we’re going around the universes, I don’t want to get stuck somewhere because Dr. Waldo missed something. It’s the real rock for me.”

  Milo pulled out a similar pendant, hanging on a leather cord, from under his own shirt. “Me as well. No offense to Dr. Waldo. He’s safe in the Hub. We’re out there getting chased by alien creatures that are looking for dinner. No leaving this to chance.”

  Ben reached out to the rock around Eve’s neck. He asked a question with his eyes: “May I touch it?” Eve nodded yes. Ben gently lifted the rock, turned it over, looked closely.