“I asked Odd to put the scars back so I could feel them and remember.”
“Remember what?”
“That even those who claim to be on your side might shoot you in the back one day.”
Joni could imagine the pain - she could clearly remember the sensation of being shot on the beach. But Charlie had been shot three times - and still escaped. How? Joni’s face must have betrayed her confusion.
“Yeah, some people are born lucky, right?”
“Not really what I was thinking. You did get shot, after all. Not so lucky.”
“Maybe. I’d got the twins into my car, but Gregor—the gang leader—had come after me. He didn’t shout a warning, he just started shooting. I managed to get in and start driving. I could feel the blood running down my back. I was struggling to breathe. Made it across Putney Bridge and got to Parsons Green before I felt like I was going to fall asleep. Then I realized if I fell asleep, I probably wouldn’t wake up again. But I was too far gone. I managed to pull the car to the side of the road. There were trees there. Dying didn’t seem so bad if I could see trees. Silly, really.”
She looked at Odd. “I was unconscious for the next bit. You tell her.”
He smiled a strange, tight little smile aimed at no one in particular.
“I was trying to mind my own business, trying to keep my hose clean, you understand?”
Joni remembered Odd’s little missteps with the English language. It was so hard not to find it endearing. She reminded herself that he was a cheating bastard, and managed to stop herself smiling.
“Nose,” said Charlie. “Trying to keep your nose clean.”
“Thank you,” said Odd. “I was staying out of trouble. It was 4am, and I had almost got caught by the police once that night. I just wanted to get home. I was living in another squat then, in Fulham. I was about a ten-minute walk from home when Cass is running up to me and pulling at my sleeve. She brought me to the car. Just in time, I think. There was much blood. Charlie was not conscious. I got in the front seat and sat next to her. Removed the bullets, got her functions, er, functioning. Used every last bit of Manna I had.”
Charlie sat back at the table.
“Long story short, almost got caught by the police. Odd showed me his tag - he’d taken such a risk helping me. When I found out about his situation, I suggested we team up, find a safe house. I knew this area fairly well - I even worked here for a while. And it’s a long way from Putney.”
Joni knew she wasn’t getting the whole story, but was glad Charlie had trusted enough to open up as much as she had. The older woman was trying to put her at ease.
At least, that was what Joni thought she was trying to do, right up until she asked the next question.
“So, Joni,” said Charlie, looking at her steadily. “That’s our story. What about yours? One thing I’m particularly interested in. How do you know Odd? Especially as he doesn’t seem to know you.”
31
Joni swallowed hard. She liked Charlie - and the twins. Even Odd, a little, although she knew what he was really like. She didn’t want to lie to any of them. But she didn’t really want anyone to know about her ability, either. Then it occurred to her that she didn’t have to lie. She genuinely hadn’t ever met Odd. She could brazen it out.
“I don’t know him,” she said. “Honestly, the first time I ever saw him was this morning.”
“It’s true,” said Odd. “I’ve never met her before, Charlie.”
Charlie looked at Odd, then at Joni. Then she looked away from both of them.
“Odd is telling the truth,” she said, finally. Joni felt a sense of relief. She didn’t want to complicate anything by dragging them into her crisis. And she wanted to get as far away from Odd as possible because, incredibly, she still wanted to stay here, with him. It was hardly fair, or logical, but she couldn’t help how she felt. Best she move on today.
“But you, Joni, you’re full of shit,” said Charlie.
Joni stiffened. “What? No, seriously, I don’t know him. How could I?”
She looked where Charlie was looking. The twins were shaken their heads solemnly.
They know I’m lying. I really have to get out of here.
“Look,” she said, standing up, “thanks for everything, I really appreciate it. But it’s time for me to move on.”
She smiled at the twins and managed a quick look in Odd’s direction.
“Thank you for the, er…tea,” she said.
“Oh, everybody knows it tastes like crap,” he said.
Charlie looked her in the eye.
“Sit down, Joni,” she said. Joni looked over at the door. She could always run for it. Charlie shrugged.
“You could run,” she said. “How long do you think you’d last? You have no idea what you’re doing. There are so many kinds of trouble out there, you can’t even begin to imagine. And you’re fresh meat. They can smell you coming. We’re offering you a safe place for a while. Maybe we can help you, I don’t know. But I can’t do anything for you if you’re going to sit there and lie to my face.”
Joni sat mutely, her brain seemingly frozen. She didn’t know what to say.
“I think you could use some friends,” said Charlie, more gently.
Joni burst into tears. “You’re going to think I’m crazy.”
“Try us. I’ve been watching you all morning, ever since you woke up. I saw the look on your face when you saw Odd. You looked like you’d seen a ghost. And that entry in your journal they were reading last night. I heard his name. It’s not exactly a common name.”
“Ok, ok,” said Joni, sniffing, desperate to stop Charlie saying any more about the journal.
The twins made lunch while Joni talked. Making lunch consisted of going outside and using Manna to produce bowls of soup and crusty bread. Joni wondered briefly why Odd insisted on making foul tea and burnt toast.
“I need to practice,” he said. It really is like mind reading. “If I ever have kids, they won’t be able to make Manna food, so I need to be able to show them how.”
He was looking at Joni in a way that made her feel very, very uncomfortable.
She told them about her ability to revisit a point where the multiverse split. She explained that was how she had known Odd. She had met him on the writing course in that universe. She didn’t explain why she had reset, that first time.
“So you know me, but I have not met you,” he said. “This is very confusing. I hope I was behaving myself.”
Joni couldn’t help it. She blushed and gulped, trying to hide her reaction and failing spectacularly. She tried to change the subject, but her subconscious had other ideas.
“Was Mell on the course?”
He looked at her quizzically. “Yes, there was someone called Mell.”
“And the two of you, um…I mean, did you…and Mell…er…”
Odd just looked perplexed. “I don’t know what you mean. I didn’t really know her. Is she a friend of yours?”
“Hardly,” said Joni, sharply, glaring at Odd angrily. In response, he looked even more confused.
“Look, Yoni, that course was the last normal thing I did,” he said. “It seems a bit unreal now, like it has been happening to someone else, you know?”
Someone else. You don’t get off that lightly.
“Yeah, well, that’s how I know you.” She looked at Charlie and blushed, willing the older woman to change the subject. To her intense discomfort, it didn’t work.
“You haven’t told us why,” she said. “Why did you go back to—what did you call it—a reset point?”
Joni knew then that she had reached a new low in her life. Seeing her mother and uncle killed, being shot and watching a psychopath prepare to carve her up in some kind of twisted ritual had been bad, but compared to having to admit to falling in love while he’s sitting right there, it had been a walk in the park.
She mumbled her way through an excruciating account of their relationship, keeping it as brie
f as possible. When she reached the part when she saw him with Mell, she couldn’t stop herself flashing him an angry, hurt look. He still looked utterly bewildered, although he had the decency to blush on behalf of the version of himself in the other universe.
“Oh,” said Charlie, when Joni had finished talking. “Sorry, that couldn’t have been easy for you. And Odd, I had no idea you were such a bastard.”
Odd stood up. “Hold on, this was not me,” he said. “You cannot blame me for what I did not do, no?” He looked at the two women. There wasn’t much sympathy there.
“Oh, please come on,” he said. “I have not done this.” He looked at Joni.
“Did we..?”
“No, we bloody didn’t,” she said.
Charlie rolled her eyes.
Odd got up and started clattering around the kitchen again, opening drawers and cupboards. He found a jar of instant coffee that looked like it pre-dated Year Zero and used a knife to chip away at the solid mass of granules inside, before tipping it—in chunks—into a mug. As he was filling the kettle, he suddenly stopped and looked back at Joni. This time, she managed to hold his gaze.
This is as bad as it gets. I won’t let him hurt me again.
“I think I know why,” he said, quietly and came over to sit down again. “Why the other me did it. I think I know.”
Joni just looked at him in silence.
“That last morning on the course, I got a missed call from my parents,” he said. “I had left it on silent, I didn’t hear it. This is my fault.”
Charlie put a hand on his arm. “You couldn’t have done anything, Odd,” she said. “You must stop blaming yourself.”
Odd carried on speaking as if he hadn’t heard her. His voice had lost its lilting quality, sounding flat and emotionless.
“When I called back, there was no answer. I texted my oldest brother, Anders. A few minutes later, he was calling me.”
He stood suddenly and put the kettle on the hob. He stood there with his back to them, watching it until it began whistling, then he poured it into his mug. The twins brought in the lunch and put it on the side. They looked at Odd and took their soup upstairs.
Odd sat down again and took a sip of the murky liquid. He grimaced but managed not to spit it straight out again.
“For helvete,” he muttered. Then he looked up at Joni. For the first time, she had a little flash of empathy. He knew now that they had been very close. Maybe he had fallen in love with her. And yet, not only hadn’t he met her in this universe, but she already didn’t trust him. It couldn’t be easy.
“Anders told me there had been a fire. Someone in our street had found out we were Users. That was how my parents had lost their jobs in Norway. Someone saw them healing a patient and told the chief administrator. We thought things would be better in London.”
He sat in silence for a while, taking a few more sips of coffee before giving up and pushing it away.
“Someone put a petrol bomb through our letter box. My family could have saved themselves if they had woken up, but the smoke killed them while they slept. Anders was on night shift at the hospital. When he came home, they were gone.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Joni. It seemed a pathetic response, but she couldn’t think of anything else to say. The tears dropped steadily from her eyes. She remembered Odd speaking proudly of his family. This was unthinkable.
“Anders is still on the run. The police didn’t want to help find the murderers, they wanted to take him in as a suspected User. He ran. He does not answer my texts or emails. I do not know if he is alive or if he is dead.”
Without thinking, Joni reached across the table and took his hand. He looked down at her hand, then up at her, his eyes dry. When he spoke, his voice had a strange, distant quality to it, but the pain was apparent in the way he held himself, as if the weight of the tragedy had literally settled onto his shoulders.
“I have a question for you now, Joni.”
She nodded.
“We were very close, yes? Would you even say…in love?”
She couldn’t speak. She nodded again.
“If I had told you that morning what had happened, that I was returning to London and you must not follow—because of the danger—would you have agreed?”
Joni tried to follow his logic. “I…I don’t know. Maybe.”
Odd shook his head. “And if you didn’t follow, but you lost contact with me, would you come looking then?”
She knew the answer to that. “Yes.”
He nodded at her. “Then I have one more question. What do you think would be the only sure way I could stop you trying to follow me - stop you putting yourself in terrible danger?”
Joni thought about it and realized not only that she already knew the answer, but that she desperately wanted it to be the answer. She almost didn’t dare trust herself to believe that Odd had only kissed Mell because he was willing to sacrifice his own happiness to keep her safe. She didn’t answer, just squeezed his hand, still crying. Then, she started laughing and crying at the same time and couldn’t seem to stop herself.
“What is it, Yoni?” Oh, she had missed hearing her name pronounced that way.
Joni looked at him, then at Charlie.
“It didn’t work, did it? Even after resetting the whole sodding universe, it didn’t work. I’m here, aren’t I? And it’s worse. This time I’ve brought the danger right to your door.”
32
The bookstore looked like an illustration from A Christmas Carol; a narrow-shouldered, dark-timbered building squeezed between a tailors and a firm of lawyers, with a name that could only be British: Sprocket, Curdle and Winterbottom. Adding to its timeless charm was the winding, cobbled street which supplied its address, having done so for nearly two centuries.
Adam knew he was indulging himself, but he thought he could allow it. For one thing, the girl would be dead in a matter of hours. Consequently, this last afternoon before the great change would always be remembered with a particular fondness. His role in the return of the Master was likely to produce disciples wanting every last detail. So it seemed fitting, on this final afternoon, to meet, face-to-face, the man who had authored the book which finally opened Adam’s eyes to the truth.
The book was Demiurge: The God Christianity Tried To Hide, by Robert Byfield. Adam had found it in one of the esoteric libraries made available to him by colleagues of his father.
Most of the volumes in this particular library had been somewhat of a disappointment. Its owner was a rich widow who dabbled in the dark arts as others might dabble in Scottish dancing. She had looked Adam up and down when she had handed over the key to her basement room, and greeted him as if the Acolytes of Satan were a particularly amusing shared joke. Adam had taken the key and willed himself into absolute stillness, allowing a little of the darkness—with which he had only recently begun to become familiar—to rise like smoke into his conscious mind. The old woman had been reduced to a gibbering fool just by his silent presence. She scuttled off to a far part of the house, leaving Adam to find the library without her help. Later, when he emerged from the basement, she was conspicuously absent. Adam left a note with the name of the book he had borrowed and his address, should she want it returned. He wasn’t surprised when he never heard from her again.
He had never intended returning the book. While reading it—and for the first time he could remember—everything had started to make sense. It was if a complete stranger had looked at the disparate elements of his life and showed him the hidden pattern. He could see where Father had been right, but it was also now blindingly clear where he had gone awry.
The story behind the titular subject of Demiurge explained the error made by theologians—particularly Christians—and Satanists alike. They had looked to one god as being either the source of all good or the enemy of humanity’s true nature, according to which particular truth they posited. They had pointed to Satan as either the source of evil or a savior and—as the centuries
had worn on—more liberal thinkers on both sides had begun to suggest the evil one was just a figurative representation of a psychological condition. People could be evil if they were predisposed to be that way, through genetics, conditioning during early childhood, or even en masse under the kind of extreme, societal peer pressure brought to bear by the Nazi party in the mid-twentieth century.
All these theories were plain wrong, and the truth—as revealed in this timely book—had finally become apparent to Adam.
There might be a God, one deserving of the capital G, a supreme being of some sort. If so, history shows that his/her/its relationship with humanity is a distant one. By crediting God with the creation of the world and the creatures upon it, theologians created an insurmountable problem. How could a being which was all-powerful, all-good and all-knowing allow suffering? So-called great thinkers had tied themselves in knots trying to answer that one, yet every schoolchild, with an as-yet untainted grasp of logic, saw the answer at once: He could not. He would not. Suffering made no sense - the killing of innocents, the slow death by starvation of babies in the developing world, the indiscriminate way Nature chose her victims; burying them in earthquakes, drowning them in floods, turning cells cancerous and eating the innocent from the inside out. No, it just would not stand. God with a capital G was either a product of wishful thinking or so unconcerned about His creation that He could safely be ignored.
The answers of the theologians made no sense. Science had a better theory: evolution, the survival of the fittest, the callous but effective ascent of the best-adapted series through the process of natural selection. But there was a weakness here, too, and Byfield’s book pointed out how easily it could be proved.
“The early Gnostics, who had rediscovered the truth and were trying to make it their own, never doubted the existence of the god with whom they were constantly in touch. Their personal experience of a deity was as normal to them as the sun rising in the morning. Every aspect of their lives was colored by this tangible relationship. Their riposte to the theory of natural selection would have simply been to ask, ‘Who set it all in motion, and what creative force continues to push life onward?’ Modern science may scoff at the naiveté of the so-called ‘first cause’ argument for a creator, but they have missed a crucial point. The Gnostics, the early Christians, the Jews, the Moslems, the so-called ‘People of The Book’ were not intellectual weaklings clinging to illogical beliefs. In fact, they were quick to shed many of their treasured beliefs as new evidence emerged. But, and this is the crucial point, they could never abandon that first principle - that of a Creator. Not because they were willfully ignorant, but because they were in daily contact with this being.”
The World Walker Series Box Set Page 84
