I filled the kettle and gathered a pair of mugs. “Would you rather have Witchblade or Souvenir from Rome?”
“Oh, let’s go with Witchblade. I always had a thing for her.”
I tried to see if I could read what she meant by that. But her smile gave nothing away. “What do you mean by ‘Nasties’?” I asked.
“Just things that shouldn’t be here, misplaced souls.”
“Oh great. Something else to worry about.” I finished making the tea and put the mugs on the table. “There’s sugar in the Dalek.”
“No thanks. It’s a nice place,” she said, casting her eyes around the kitchen. “I see you’ve got a Rayburn. They’re great, I always wanted one of those.”
“I shouldn’t bother. They don’t cook pizza, or bacon.”
“So, what seems to be the trouble with your doors?”
I felt slightly reluctant to confront the issue of the doors again. I’d been enjoying her company and I was going to look like a fool now when she saw that there was nothing untoward with my doors and I’d imagined it all. As it happened the situation unravelled without my help. A knocking on the kitchen door caught us both by surprise. Saphie gave a little start.
“That’ll be the door,” I said.
I opened it slowly, and pulled the dustsheet to one side. Saphie stood and moved slightly back from the door as if expecting the hounds of hell to burst through. Of course, she might have been right for all I knew. But fortunately, this time no hounds only a small woman who looked to be in her seventies. She clutched a blue handbag. There was something strangely familiar about her.
“Would you mind awfully if I just popped through?” she asked.
“The front door or the patio?” I held the door open for her to come in.
“Oh, the front door I think, Dearie.”
Two versions of Possicat took the opportunity of the open door and slipped in, threading themselves through the woman’s feet. I showed her through and opened the front door to let her out. Saphie followed but stayed just a little back. “There you go,” I said.
“You’re very kind.” She gave a little wave and shuffled off down the path.
I closed the door and turned to Saphie. “More tea?”
She sank into the kitchen chair and pointed towards the kitchen door. “Was that...?”
“It certainly looked like her,” I said, as I refilled the kettle. “But I doubt it was. Somebody would have missed her by now.”
“This is the door you’re having problems with I assume?”
“And the patio ones in the lounge but mostly this one.”
“Why? I mean where did she come from?” Saphie stood and pressed her hand against my new door as if feeling for a heartbeat.
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
She pressed the handle down and I felt a spike of panic when I heard the click of the latch.
“And why did she want to walk through the house?” Saphie opened the door a few inches and peered through.
I froze, steaming kettle poised above the Witchblade mug. What she saw now would determine what was in the box. Had the world really become disjointed or had I lost the plot completely this time? Either way was disturbing. She pulled the dustsheet to one side and I stopped breathing.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she said.
I couldn’t speak. Why hadn’t she been shocked at what she saw. Did that mean it was me? Then I realised she hadn’t been round the outside of the cottage so she wouldn’t know if something was wrong anyway.
She pulled the dustsheet further away and stepped through. “Nice garden.”
The kettle slipped from my grip and I jumped back just in time to avoid most of the boiling water as it cascaded out of the fallen kettle and ran over the edge of the worktop. “Damn!” I yelled as I jerked out of my catatonia.
Saphie scurried over to me. “Are you alright, Ian?” She grabbed a tea towel and mopped at the water.
“You saw it?” I said. “The garden, you saw it?”
“Of course I did. What did you expect me to see? The hanging gardens of Babylon?” she teased.
“No, but maybe my log shed. Have a look at this.” I beckoned her to follow me as I headed for the front door.
I led her round to the side of the cottage. We stopped by the missing door. “There,” I said, pointing to the area of wall that should contain a nice new Easy Fit door.
“What? I don’t understand. What am I supposed to be looking at?”
I pointed at the log sheds. “You were just looking at this from the other side. Only the sheds weren’t here then. Just the garden. But the door was there.” I pointed at the wall. “But only on the other side. You see?”
She looked from me to the wall then back at the log sheds. At first her expression told of sympathy for the lunatic that stood in front of her. Then she gazed around again and a new expression slid into view. Confusion, disbelief.
“The door? Where the hell’s the door? It should be here.”
We returned to the kitchen and Saphie opened and closed the door repeatedly.
“I’m not mad am I,” I said. “You saw it. You saw the garden?”
“Garden, yes. There’s a garden. Where did it go?”
“I don’t know. I was hoping you could tell me. You sold me the book.”
She closed the door and patted it as though it were a naughty child. “Book? What book?” She sat down but without taking her eyes from the door.
I passed her a fresh tea and sat opposite her at the table. “Schrodinger’s Cat.”
“Oh yes. I’ve never read it but I saw a programme on the telly with Brian Cox explaining it. I thought you might find it interesting with your... your, err... door issues.” She pulled a small brown bottle from her bag and measured a few drops into her tea. “From what I can make out, every time something happens where there’s more than one possible outcome, the universe divides so that both things happen.”
“So, I gather but what about the garden?”
“Tinker's Cottage is on the intersection of several major ley lines. Have you got the other book handy?”
I went into the lounge to retrieve and she followed me.
“Is that the real garden?” she said, nodding towards the patio doors.
“Yes. Maybe. I’m not sure anymore, but I think so.”
We sat on the sofa and I handed her ‘Ley Lines and Earth Forces’. Possicat and Anticat played hunting games behind the sofa. There was a sudden affronted meow and Possicat leapt on to the back of the sofa, making us both start.
“I see you like cats,” Saphie said. “Never trust anybody who doesn’t like cats, my old gran always used to say. How many have you got?”
“Hard to tell, I haven’t counted today.”
She gave me a sideways look and returned to the book, thumbing through until she found a map of South West England.
“Here,” she said. She moved closer to me to show me the page she had open. Her leg pressed against mine and I felt her warmth. “Saint Michael’s, the most important, runs right through here. And two others,” she stabbed at the page, “including one that cuts right through Stonehenge, cross over just here.”
“I’m still not sure I understand?”
“This is a very powerful place in the lines of Earth Forces. Maybe the conjunction has created links through the different universes.” She looked right into my eyes as if trying to read how I was taking this.
I sat for a moment trying to understand what she was saying. A couple of times I thought I had a handle on it and my mouth made some practise movements ready to speak before the understanding dribbled away again and I remained silent. Eventually, all I could say was, “I suppose I should block the door off again.”
She touched my arm. “Why would you want to do that? This is amazing!”
“You don’t have to live with it. Gardens that aren’t there, oak trees that were there but aren’t now and let’s not forget the magpie. And the cats of course.
Did I tell you about the cats?” I stared out of the patio doors at the area of garden I’d cleared with the chainsaw. “I also seem to have to do all the gardening twice. Here, watch this.”
I picked up a standard lamp and carried it out of the patio doors and planted it in the middle of the area I’d cleared a couple of days ago. “Now, have a look through here.” I led the way to the kitchen. “There!” I said pointing at the kitchen window.
“What am I supposed to be seeing?” she asked. “Wait... there’s no lamp? Where did it go?”
“That’s a different place again.”
“Different to the patio doors one you mean?”
“Yes.” I recalled the problem I’d had with the magpies, “And probably different to the one outside the front door.”
“But that looks the same.” She returned her gaze to the window. “The window here and the patio doors view. It looks the same.”
“I know. That’s what’s confusing, but if you want to see something really different, take a look at this.” I unhooked the Luis Royo picture that covered the new hole in the wall. “Have a look through there.” I pushed the chair underneath the hole so she could stand on it to see through. She climbed on the chair and peered through the gap. “What can you see?” I asked. I was still having doubts about my own sanity and sought confirmation that she could see the view I had seen earlier.
“Trees! I see trees. It’s a wood. How can that be?” She turned to look through the other window and wobbled slightly on the chair.
I felt partly relived that it wasn’t my sanity at fault. I remember in my teens I’d once had a T shirt that proclaimed in big psychedelic letters, ‘Do not adjust your brain, reality is at fault.’ I wondered what I’d done with that.
“So,” Saphie said then paused in thought. “So, your cottage is sitting on the conjunction of what, three... four different realities?”
“I don’t know. I lost track.”
“Where do they go?” She climbed down from the chair and I held her hand to steady her.
“I haven’t the faintest idea. I’ve not looked.”
“Aren’t you curious?”
“I haven’t got to curious yet. So far I’ve just been pretending it’s not there. When I’ve done with that, I’ll probably move on to hoping it will all go away then I’m expecting a major session of alcohol abuse before arriving at curious sometime in the next millennium.”
“But this is incredible. We have to find out where these go.”
“Some things are better left alone. Didn’t you ever see the movie ‘The Bermuda Triangle’? They never found their way back you know. I think I’ve already mislaid a handy man and quite possibly a literary agent.” I hadn’t wanted to face up to that possibility before but it did seem somewhat inescapable once one thought about it.
“But you’ve been out in the garden, you spent half a day there clearing it and you still came back okay.”
I tried to work that through. “But I didn’t go very far. Only as far as the cable would reach. So I was still sort of connected. Who knows what would happen if I went any further, probably —.”
A faint knocking from the lounge and a “Yoo-hoo!” stopped my paranoia mid flow. We both caught our breath and listened. The “yoo-hoo” repeated followed by a slightly more persistent knock.
“Wait here,” I said and headed through to the lounge, trusty shovel in hand.
A tall slim man waved through the glass when he saw me. He wore thick rimmed glasses, a small moustache and a grey tank top. As he looked fairly harmless, I left the shovel against the sofa and opened the doors.
“We heard the place was open again,” he said as he stepped inside. “Do you mind if I use the front door?”
“Be my guest.” I turned to let him past and noticed Saphie standing behind me.
“Where did you come from?” she asked the man.
“Through there of course,” he said, pointing at the doors then headed for the front door. I went ahead of him and opened the door to let him out.
I returned to the lounge to find Saphie poring over the book on ley lines. Anticat was helping by walking to and fro across the book.
“You see,” she said, pushing the cat to one side and pointing at a map overlaid with a complicated diagram of swirls and triangles. “There’s a series of vortices on some of the leys, bit like acupuncture points, and there seems to be cluster around here.”
“Yes, but how do I stop it?” I stood at the doors and stared out at the garden.
“I don’t think you can, anymore than you can stop gravity. It’s an earth force.”
“You hungry?” I asked. “I’ve got some pizzas in the freezer but that oven thing doesn’t really cook anything. Just sort of annoys them.”
“What the Rayburn? Fantastic things for cooking on, but you need to keep them going. You can’t just turn them on like a gas oven. Do you want me to show you?”
“Er... yes. Thank you, that would be great.”
Saphie led the way into the kitchen. “Where’s your coal?”
“Ah, I might be a bit short on coal.”
“Wood? These things will burn pretty much anything.”
“No, I used all that up at the last attempt with a pizza.” It had been a long time since I’d entertained and clearly I hadn’t thought this through. “Let’s say we call cooking ‘Plan B’ and we go to the pub for a pasty?”
*****
“Long time since I’ve been here,” Saphie said as we arrived at the bar. “Must be ten years. Wasn’t it called something else?”
“The King’s Head, I believe. Food is a bit of a random affair here so I apologise now.”
“Don’t worry, I spent three years in Nepal you won’t believe some of the things I’ve eaten.” She raised one eyebrow and smiled.
Arthur appeared behind the bar and started pouring my pint without waiting to be asked. “What can I get you, my dear?” he asked Saphie as he pushed my pint towards me.
Saphie glanced at my drink. “I’ll have one of those as well,” she said.
“We’ve got a barbecue special on today, if you’re interested,” Arthur said.
“Sounds good,” I said. “What’s in it?”
“Sausages mostly. We were going to do pork loin slices, spare ribs and pork chops but the pig escaped.”
“Mostly sausages then?”
“And fried onions of course. You can’t very well have a barbecue without fried onions.”
“Of course.” I glanced at Saphie. She shrugged assent and I turned back to Arthur. “Okay, we’ll have two barbecue specials then.”
“Excellent,” he said, carefully writing the order on his pad. “Do you want fried onions with that?”
“I think so.”
“And bread?”
I glanced at Saphie again and she nodded. “Yes please. Bread with the barbecue special.”
“How many slices?”
We settled down at a table near the fireplace as my favourite table by the window was occupied by man who looked oddly familiar. I stared for a moment then nudged Saphie. “I know it can’t be, but doesn’t he look like David Beckham?”
Saphie risked a glance. “I see what you mean. But I’m sure Beckham doesn’t smoke roll ups!”
I hadn’t noticed the tobacco tin next to his pint of what appeared to be Guinness. “Maybe the recession even affects football heroes?”
Arthur arrived with our barbecue specials, four sausages, fried onions and a few slices of white bread on a plate. More of a dismantled sausage sandwich than barbecue I felt.
“You missed all the fun here earlier,” Arthur said. “Right old kerfuffle. Pair of queens going at it hammer and tongs in the car park. Never seen the like before.”
“Queens?” I asked. “You mean transvestites?”
“No, I mean queens. As in ‘Long to reign over us’ type queens. Pink handbags at dawn.” He headed off back to the bar.
“That’s odd,” said Saphie. “I thought th
at woman looked like her.” She manipulated a sausage with her knife and fork and dropped it between two slices of bread.
“But where did the other one come from?” I speared a sausage on my fork and bit into the end. It was surprisingly tasty.
Arthur reappeared and asked if we had everything we needed. I assured we did.
“I'm slowly turning this place into a 'Gastro Pub',” he said proudly. “A 'Destination Pub'. I saw that on Dragon's Den. Or was it Ramsey's F Word?”
“I'm sure you'll do really well,” I said. “What's happening around here? Is there a Lookalike Fair or something going? Britain's Got Talent?”
“What do you mean,” he asked.
“Well, so far today we've had The Queen and David Beckham over there and a couple of days ago Stephen Fry turned up in my garden.”
“Probably to do with the festival. It's usually to do with the festival anytime anything odd happens around here.” He gathered some empty glasses and headed back to the bar.
“The festival's not for another month,” Saphie said. “And you didn't tell me about Stephen Fry?”
“It wasn't actually him, I don't think so anyway. His nose was straight. But it is all a bit odd.”
She finished her barbecue special and wiped her fingers on a paper napkin. “Do you usually eat here?”
“Mostly. I keep trying to cook, but one can only achieve a certain limited repertoire with a microwave and toaster. Although I haven't quite got as low as microwaved toast yet.”
“You need to get that Rayburn working. There’s a petrol station up the road, that will be open today and they’re bound to have coal. Let’s pop up there after here and I’ll show you how it works.”
“That would be very kind of you.”
“Don’t mention it. After all, you did treat me to a slap up lunch!”
“Yes, sorry about that. But on the plus side you did get to meet David Beckham.”
As Saphie had predicted, the garage did indeed sell coal. We also picked up some kindling and firelighters. When we returned to the cottage, I noticed that once more the front door was open. Saphie looked surprised as I picked up my usual weapon of choice.
“It’s a Siamese fighting gnome,” I explained. “You really don’t want to get on the wrong side of these guys.”
Schrodinger's Cottage Page 9
