The Light Between Us

by Katie Khan

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  She waves towards the glass house. ‘The glass house – it diverts the blue and violet end of the spectrum, more than the red and orange. The red wavelength continues on a direct course and is reflected off the clouds, so the sky turns red –’ she beams – ‘and the blue light is scattered by the portal.’

  Isaac looks at her, eyebrows raised.

  She rolls her eyes. ‘A red sky is an after-effect of a time leap. A red sky means somebody has jumped.’

  ‘Ah. Shepherd’s “warning”.’

  She grins again. ‘Come on. Let’s go and explore my world.’

  The outbuilding courtyard is disappointingly familiar. They walk past the dried-out firewood and dovecote, making their way across the three slabs of crazy paving – one, two, three – until they’re at the kitchen garden, just as overgrown as the garden back in Isaac’s universe. The morning air is fresh, and the flowering vegetables are covered in spider webs that glisten in the light with dew.

  ‘Thea,’ Isaac says, stopping in the middle of the overrun courgettes. ‘Do we need to be worried about meeting … the other you?’

  She tilts her head, then moves to avoid a spider weaving an intricate web. ‘I honestly don’t know,’ she says.

  ‘Because in all the science fiction I’ve seen, meeting yourself is never a good idea.’

  She hides a smile. ‘This isn’t a movie, but if you’re worried about violating the laws of physics …’

  He shrugs. ‘I don’t know about the laws of physics, just the books and the films and the games and the—’

  ‘I get it.’ She smiles openly. ‘Let’s be careful, then. Statistically speaking, depending when the timelines split, there’s a much smaller chance of … the other you … being here in Dunsop Bridge, than me.’

  He looks at her soberly.

  ‘So you go first. See if … the other me … is in the house. And I’ll wait here. Avoiding some sort of self-paradox.’

  He makes a face, wondering if she’s mocking him.

  ‘Don’t let me meet my grandfather,’ she murmurs, ‘or step on any butterflies.’

  Isaac walks hesitantly from the overgrown garden to the kitchen door, crossing his fingers the other Isaac isn’t, in fact, here in this parallel Dunsop Bridge. He tries the handle, but the door is locked. He turns it again to no avail, then knocks on the glass, the sound loud in the early morning. ‘Thea?’ he calls. ‘Are you in?’ He waits, then tries again. ‘Theodora?’ It’s early, but at Oxford she always woke up at six to start her studies before class. He scratches his head, trying to remember if he’s ever seen Thea stash a key somewhere, even for her rented house in Oxford … He reaches up on top of the doorframe, running his hand along the splintered wood until he finds it. ‘Bingo.’ Quietly he inserts the key in the lock, turning the handle until the door opens into the kitchen of Thea’s farmhouse.

  He coughs. Not to warn he’s in the house, but because he has a tickle in his throat. He covers his mouth with his hand and notices the dust he’s disturbed, the airborne motes around him. Dustsheets cover the kitchen table and hang suspended from the light fixture, giving a spooky effect. ‘Thea?’ he says again, more weakly.

  ‘Huh.’ He walks out into the hallway. A covered chandelier hangs from the ceiling; the only sign of life is Thea’s crate of textbooks at the bottom of the stairs. She’s here, then. He picks up the book on top, thumbing through it, then flicks over the cover of the next one down to see what else is in the pile. So far, so familiar. But why is the farmhouse untouched, like nobody’s been staying here?

  ‘Thea?’ he says, and coughs again. The onset of a headache throbs at the back of his head. He jogs up the stairs, taking them two at a time, putting his head round the door to where he last saw Ayo and Urvisha sleeping like inverted commas in the spare room. The bed is covered in white sheets, the dust on top long settled. All of the other rooms are untouched, so he heads, a little confused, to the master bedroom.

  He pushes open the cranky wooden door. There are no dustsheets – it is exactly as it was when Thea told him she loved him, in another world entirely.

  He sniffs, his nose streaming, then walks back out of the room, running down the stairs and out of the kitchen door.

  ‘Thea?’ he calls towards the garden. ‘It’s safe – there’s no one here.’

  She steps out from the shrubbery and he catches his breath as chestnut strands of her hair catch the morning light, her green eyes shining in the cold. ‘Come and see this,’ she says, beckoning him over.

  He walks back into the wilderness of the kitchen garden, and Thea leads him to a medium-sized pond. She moves aside some weeds to reveal an old water feature, the huge basin of murky water topped with slimy green pond scum. She feels along the outside of the feature for something, and Isaac rubs his temples, confused and feeling worse by the minute, until the stinking water begins to drain out. ‘Do you notice anything?’ she says, intently watching the water. ‘Keep looking.’

  Isaac’s sinuses are burning as he sniffs again, the cold making his nose run. ‘What are we looking at?’ he says finally.

  ‘The direction the water’s draining. Does that strike you as weird, at all?’

  He blinks, watching the water run away down the drain. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Objects not attached to the surface of the Earth – like water, cyclones and hurricanes, even winds – will rotate clockwise in the northern hemisphere, and anti-clockwise in the southern hemisphere. It’s a consequence of the Earth’s rotation,’ she says. ‘In your world, in the northern hemisphere, the vortex of this pond’s drain in Dunsop Bridge, England, will flow clockwise. But here, the water is moving anti-clockwise. Like a mirror image.’

  ‘Can you tell me what that means, so we can get on with why we’re here, please?’

  She looks at him, frowning. ‘Are you all right?’ she says, reaching for his hand. ‘You’re burning up.’ She moves her hand perfunctorily across first his wrist, then up to his forehead. ‘Christ, Isaac – are you okay?’

  ‘I feel a bit weird,’ he admits, the illness sliding into place and clamping visor-like over his eyes. ‘I must be coming down with something.’

  ‘Let’s get you into bed,’ Thea says, and for once, he can’t even make a coy joke.

  Twenty-one

  Isaac is sick. As the fever grips him, climbing to 40°C, he calls for his mother, which Thea finds touching but also curious. She wonders if she has ever done that; she supposes everyone calls for their mother at times of distress, whether they’ve been comforted by them or not. Her memories of her own mother are hazy, though she holds on to the few she has tightly, terrified that the tighter she grips, the more likely they are to shatter and recede from view altogether.

  Isaac wakes as if from a dream, reaching out for Thea’s arm where she sits on the bed next to him. ‘Hello,’ she says, but he speaks at the same time.

  ‘Which hand do you write with?’

  She shakes her head. ‘You’ve had a terrible fever,’ Thea says, ‘I think it’s the flu.’

  ‘Are you right- or left-handed?’ he insists, looking at her hand as though he could imagine it holding a pen.

  ‘I’m ambidextrous.’

  He lies back. ‘That’s probably why you didn’t notice,’ he says. ‘The water – what did you call it?’

  ‘A vortex.’

  Isaac nods. ‘This world is a mirror of … my world. My water goes clockwise, your water goes anti-clockwise.’

  ‘Two worlds in reflection symmetry,’ she muses. ‘Wow. Two possibilities there, I suppose: the reflection only began after my and Thea’s jump – one world goes left, the other goes right. Or there could be hundreds – thousands – maybe millions of mirrored worlds. Every possible universe piled up on top of each other.’ She smiles. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Crap.’

  ‘You’ve had a terrible fever. I probably gave you the flu when you came to Dunsop Bridge �
� I was pretty ill then, myself.’

  He squints. ‘Have you seen anyone?’

  ‘No – the house is deserted.’ She looks around in the afternoon light at the bedroom that once belonged to her parents. It’s hard to believe the same tragedy could play out on more than one timeline, in more than one universe. ‘There’s nothing to eat, I’m afraid,’ she says. ‘Are you up for heading into the village to get something?’

  He sits up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. ‘I suppose so.’ He moves from the bed, his skin aching, finding the rest of his clothes and taking large doses of paracetamol and ibuprofen with a glass of water Thea has put on the bedside table.

  They wrap up and head down the lane of trees, the fallen leaves crackling underfoot. ‘Same time of year,’ Thea notes. They admire the open fields beyond the farm’s borders as they head into the village, following the low stone wall. Isaac runs his hand along the shingle in an echo of another time, remembering to lift it in the exact place where previously it was cut by a jagged loose stone.

  The chequered Georgian windows of Puddleducks look warm and inviting, so they cross the road towards the tearoom. Isaac pushes open the door for Thea, but as she makes to walk in, he quickly slams the door shut, holding it closed.

  ‘What the hell?’ she says.

  ‘We can’t go in there,’ he whispers urgently: ‘Thea’s in there.’

  She peers through Puddleducks’s steamed window, trying to see in. ‘Oh.’ She hesitates, trying to decide what to do. ‘You go in,’ she says at last, ‘and I’ll go for a wander. Maybe we could meet past the bridge, down by the river?’

  ‘Sounds like a plan,’ he says, his voice betraying his nervousness. ‘Shall I get you something to eat?’

  ‘Anything will do,’ she says, waving her hand in thanks.

  ∞

  He pauses for one moment alone before he pushes the door to the tearoom open again, letting the noise of chattering locals and the clash of plates seep out. The bell on the door jangles as he walks in, and a few people look up. Thea Colman is sitting at a table near the middle, facing him, and he urges himself to walk across to her – noticing at the last moment that she’s sitting opposite someone else.

  ‘Hi, Thea,’ he says, as he pulls up level with her table, then almost falls to the floor with shock. ‘Rosy!’ he exclaims. Then: ‘How are you? You look well,’ as he desperately tries to recover, attempting to appear nonchalant.

  ‘Isaac?’ Thea says curiously. ‘You look dreadful. What are you doing back from New York?’

  He looks at her. ‘I’m in New York?’

  ‘Aren’t you? We spoke yesterday,’ she says. ‘You were raving about the pizza.’

  ‘Of course I was,’ he says, his mind working like mad. In this world, he hasn’t yet travelled back for his visa. At least that makes it easier here – one Isaac on each side of the Atlantic. ‘I thought I’d surprise you,’ he says weakly. ‘Surprise.’

  ‘Sit down,’ this Thea says, motioning at the seat next to Rosy. Cold-weather coats hang over the backs of their chairs and Isaac notices they’re both wearing walking boots.

  ‘We’re taking a hike up to— Isaac, are you poorly?’ Rosy says, looking at him with concern.

  ‘I’ve had the flu. Nasty bugs flying round at this time of year.’

  Thea stares at him hard. ‘Let’s get the bill,’ she says, pushing her chair back with a loud grating noise, making Isaac and Rosy jump.

  ‘Already?’

  ‘I need to get something to eat—’ Isaac protests.

  ‘Grab a sandwich to go,’ Thea says, moving to the till to pay for hers and Rosy’s. ‘Let’s take a walk and catch up. Rosy, do you mind heading back to the house? I need to talk to Isaac,’ she says, ‘alone.’

  Rosy’s lips form an O of surprise. ‘Of course,’ she says easily. ‘I’ll see you back there.’ She reaches across to hug Isaac, then remembers his flu and pats him formally on the shoulder instead. ‘Lovely to see you. Maybe we can catch up later?’

  ‘That would be nice,’ Isaac says genuinely. After all the worry and concern for Rosy’s wellbeing in his world, seeing her smiling in Puddleducks here has thrown him, not only for a loop, but for an elliptical orbit.

  He orders two sandwiches, stuffing one into his pocket. ‘Saving it for later,’ he says at Thea’s inquisitive gaze. She stalks out of the tearoom and Isaac hurries behind, looking forlornly at the display of scones and cakes as he steps back out into the open air without having eaten a thing. He unwraps the wilting sandwich, taking a bite as he catches up with her on the main road through the village. ‘Where are we going?’

  She strides in the opposite direction to where the other Thea is sheltering by the bridge over the river. ‘The Hanging Stones.’

  The Whitendale Hanging Stones are a few miles from Dunsop Bridge, through the dramatic Dunsop valley. Adorned with purplish ferns and dark green conifers, the hills undulate in a series of knolls, and Thea and Isaac climb the valley, panting slightly at the incline. They cross a weir where the water runs flat on one side, the other in whitewater rivulets.

  Isaac stops, ostensibly to read a weathered information board about the local area, but really to catch his breath. ‘How far is this walk?’ he says, still feeling the palpable effects of the flu.

  ‘Only a couple of hours.’

  Fuck.

  ‘How was your journey?’ Thea says casually beside him, reading the sign too.

  ‘Turbulent,’ he says.

  ‘Travel far, did you?’

  He casts a glance at her. ‘New York to London?’

  She skips across some stepping stones rising out of the water, then waits on the other side for him to do the same. ‘Oh, I think you travelled a bit further than from New York.’

  He considers the implication. ‘How do you know?’ he says finally, as they walk through the boggy land past Whitendale Farm, a remote, low-level network of buildings nestled in the valley.

  ‘Did you know,’ Thea says, ‘that news of the end of the First World War took six weeks to reach Whitendale and the neighbouring farms?’

  ‘I can believe it.’ Isaac is cold and unwell, confused by her frosty behaviour and how she seems to know where he has come from, so he doesn’t answer in the usual jaunty manner for their game.

  She arches an eyebrow, but slows her pace to allow the struggling Isaac to keep up. ‘I got the flu, too,’ she says softly, over the wind blowing across the fell. ‘After I jumped.’ He looks at her, saying nothing. ‘You’re in a new world, Isaac; you don’t have the antibodies here. Everything you built up as a kid was for the germs in our own universe.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says. She knows everything – of course she does, she always has. He also takes a moment to realize that might be why the other Thea – his Thea, he reasons – was recovering from the flu in London. ‘So you remember?’ he says.

  ‘I know that I jumped.’

  Isaac is shocked, and he takes a few moments to collect his thoughts as they hopscotch along a muddy path, avoiding dips and puddles filled with brown water, until they get to a traditional kissing gate. They filter through in single file: Thea first, Isaac second.

  This isn’t a walk; it’s a hike. Ramblers would spend an entire day tackling this route, and weeks beforehand planning it. Isaac meekly follows Thea, who clearly knows the paths backwards, as the minutes turn into hours. His skin has a sheen, his temperature still not back to normal.

  They stand where the moors meet the sky, the green and purple hills rolling angrily beneath the grey clouds. Isaac feels almost vertiginous.

  ‘It’s like we’re on top of the world, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’ He snatches a look at her, his old friend standing to his right, behind her some deeply sinister rock formations.

  Thea sees where he’s looking. ‘Wolfhole Crag. Well done, we’re nearly there.’ She leads them south, and finally Isaac sees them: huge boulders like melted faces on the side of the fell, as though Mount Rushmore has come t
o Lancashire, a clumsy homage by a sculptor with an indelicate hand.

  The Whitendale Hanging Stones hug the knolls of the fell like they might tumble down the hill at any moment. Thea and Isaac make the final push up towards the rocks, choosing to stand on the flat top of the smoothest one.

  ‘The official centre of the country,’ Thea says, pulling her North Face jacket around her. ‘If you include the four hundred and one outlying islands.’ The wind batters clumps of ferns and heather around them, the vegetation bristling in the breeze.

  ‘You find it creepy up here, don’t you?’

  Thea shakes her head. ‘No, I like it.’

  Isaac pinches the bridge of his nose, partly to relieve his painful sinuses, partly to make sense of what he’s hearing. He’s sure Thea had told him the Hanging Stones were ‘creepy’ and ‘meditative’ … He’d compared standing stones to gravestones, and she to the Holocaust Memorial. Hadn’t they?

  ‘Can you tell me what happened when you jumped?’ he says. ‘And how come you can remember, but—’

  ‘But what?’ she says lightly.

  He decides not to tell her there is another Thea, not to tell her the chaos she has caused by switching to a parallel timeline. ‘Oh, nothing,’ he says. ‘So you remember what you did to get here?’

  She sits down, dangling her legs over the top of the Hanging Stone in a manner Isaac finds horribly precarious. ‘A lot of it has to do with you,’ she says. ‘When I first got back to Dunsop Bridge, you said something about my memories at the farm being “only ghosts”. I thought a lot about confronting those ghosts – I was working out in the barn when I realized the key to travelling back in time was a personal connection to the past. And here I am.’

  He considers what she’s saying. ‘You jumped then?’

  ‘Yes. Right after I left Oxford, my first day at Dunsop Bridge.’

  Holy wow. Every single exchange he’s shared with Thea since he arrived from New York has been with the other Thea. The revelation takes his breath away. ‘That’s earlier than we thought.’