We’d had a barbecue on that deck just last summer—half a moose, ten crates of beer and as much rum as we could get down us, late into the night laughing and joking and singing the old songs. That had been my memory of their porch—one that I’d never revisit—it had been supplanted by the horror I’d just seen, the horror I hadn’t quite managed to blank out and which was even now creeping back.
“You saw it again, didn’t you?” Pat said softly.
“No—I didn’t see it—but I saw where it had been.”
The old man didn’t prompt me, but I started to tell him anyway—he particularly enjoyed the part about me trashing the big plow, but went quiet when I got to telling about what I saw on that damned porch.
“Both of them? Alistair and Janine?” he whispered.
I nodded again and sucked smoke for a while.
“We need to get out of here,” Pat said after a time. “We’re sitting ducks.”
I’d had this conversation already, with Dick in the hydro van—no doubt I’d be having it several times before the night is over.
“We’ve no heavy gear, and the main road is blocked—ten feet high by now in the hollow, I’d guess.”
“But we can’t just sit here—”
I interrupted.
“We had a plan—quartering the town and keeping our eyes open. That didn’t help the Connors much, did it? The cavalry is on its way—well, the government boys anyway. As long as we keep our wits about us, it might be best to sit it out.”
Pat wasn’t too keen, I could see that, but he was also old enough to know better—trying to run anywhere in this storm was a sure way to get yourself dead.
* * *
George arrived back just as I was starting my second smoke.
“How was the meeting?” Pat asked, as he made his way straight over to the stove.
“Not good,” George replied. “The “fucker” has taken a dozen folks—and that’s a low estimate, they think. Half the town is in hiding—hunkering down in their basements and cellars—and the other half is over in the church hall.” He turned to me, and I saw fear in his eyes. “They’re going to do something stupid—and our lad Jimmy is egging them on—they’re going to make a run for the highway.”
10
From the journal of Duncan Campbell, 22nd July 1955
The locals have asked—rather, demanded—that I intervene with Muir. They have become increasingly worried about the direction Muir’s so-called research is taking, and Muir himself isn’t helping with his high-handed attitude toward their protestations. The last straw for them came last night.
Muir had not left the shed all day apart from making some rather strange requests of both the innkeeper and myself in the morning for the supply of copper wire, crystal valves and an array of acid batteries. I didn’t know what he wanted with the gear—I only knew that no good would come of it. The innkeeper had to send to Clarenville for some of the items, and a pretty penny was going to be added to our bill on our eventual departure, but Muir seemed unconcerned at the cost, and continued to demand that all haste be made to procure his requests.
He eventually took delivery of the goods at the shed door, opening it just enough to allow passage of the items inside, not enough for me to get a glimpse of what he was doing. I got a good enough look at the thing in the tank again though. It had grown—or should I say, it had developed. It was the size of a cat, and there seemed to be more of the octopus about it now, and less of the crab, although there were four eyes on crustacean stalks, and a single massive claw that looked more than capable of having a man’s arm off.
In the late afternoon I gave up watching the door and headed for the bar, where the innkeeper and I were the only patrons. I got a potted history of the town, he got the brunt of my frustration at Muir’s pigheadedness, and together we got through the best part of a bottle of some of the local firewater. Rum, he said it was, but it tasted like nothing I’ve ever drunk before, hot and spicy with a distinct treacle-like aftertaste. I developed rather a liking for it over the next hour or so.
It did have one other effect I was thankful for—it dropped me into a deep, dreamless sleep as soon as my head hit the pillow in the early evening.
* * *
When I woke, it was dark, and I was disoriented for several seconds trying to remember where I was and what I was doing there. I rolled over and stared up toward the ceiling, watching the play of light and shade. A shimmering rainbow aura lit the room, sending shadows dancing. I felt a tingle—like pins and needles, but crawling all over my body—it was a most unpleasant feeling indeed. Blue light flashed, then again, and the shadows danced and capered faster than before. I knew immediately who must be the cause of this light show.
Muir! What the blazes is he doing now?
I dressed quickly—almost too quickly for I almost tipped over trying to get my leg into my trousers and just missed smacking my head off the wardrobe. I had enough foresight to pick up my smokes from the bedside table, then left the room at a run, heading for the back garden.
Half a dozen of the locals were out there already, having obviously just left the bar—some of them were still carrying their beers—but no one was drinking. They stood on the back porch of the inn in a huddle as if unsure whether they should get any closer to the shed, which was indeed the source of the light show. No one spoke to me as I joined them—I’m not sure they even registered my presence; the lights were more compelling than I could ever be.
Irregular flashes of blue light blazed inside the shed, casting outlines around the door and windows and even showing through where board butted against board in the wooden walls. A rainbow shimmering danced across the roof, like thin smoke that refused to dissipate in the breeze, but insisted on clinging to the building. Most eerily of all, there was no sound—I heard the breeze, the startled exclamations from the men on the porch at each new flash, but the shed itself sat strangely quiet.
“Where’s Muir?” I asked the innkeeper. Of all of us on the cramped porch, he stood closest to the shed door, as if he’d made an attempt to step into the garden, but turned back at the last moment. He didn’t reply, merely cocked a thumb at the source of the light. And he didn’t try to stop me as I stepped off the porch and onto the trodden track through the grass that led to the shed door.
“Muir,” I shouted, my voice sounding too loud. “Are you in there?”
The blue light blazed again, so bright I had to avert my eyes. The rainbow aura on the roof thickened into more of a fog.
“Muir. You must stop this nonsense.”
I put my hand on the door, intending to push it open.
And stared, uncomprehending, as my hand, wrist and most of the forearm went straight through it, as if it was no more than a projected image.
I do believe I might have let out a yelp of surprise. I tried to pull my hand away, expecting at any instant that the door might become solid, trapping me there, bound to the wood. Even as I started to step back, a hand gripped mine from inside the hut and dragged me forward. There was the strangest sensation of lightness, as if I might have bobbed like a balloon on a piece of string. I saw the door come toward me, felt a shiver and tingle rush through my whole body, then I was through, standing inside the hut with Muir gripping tight at my hand.
“Try not to touch anything else,” he said. “There’s a good chap.”
* * *
I turned back and gingerly put a hand on the door. It was solid once again, and I was able to open it and look out to see the startled faces of the men on the porch. If they had thought to come to my aid, they had not as yet done anything about it. I waved at them to show I was not in any immediate danger, and closed myself back in the hut with Muir and his equipment.
A glittering contraption of copper wire, coils, crystal valves, batteries and roughly cut pieces of wood and metal sat on the long work shelf. It gave out a blinding flash of blue light from the valves as I noticed it.
“Don’t look directly at the lig
ht,” Muir said. “It leaves one with a stinking headache.”
I looked around the shed.
Muir had totally commandeered it for his “experiment”—apart from the strange device on the shelf, he also had numerous cages and boxes filled with biological samples, the largest of which was the strange crab-octopus hybrid I’d already seen. The beast in the tank was scuttling and slithering with what seemed to be excitement as it bathed and luxuriated in a thicker section of the dancing rainbow aura. It had got larger again—pretty soon Muir was going to need a bigger tank.
“What are you trying to achieve here, man?” I asked. “The locals are getting ready to run you out of town.”
“Let them try,” Muir said. “This is Nobel-winning territory, Duncan. I believe I have discovered a way to access the most basic building blocks of reality itself—the stuff of primal creation—a gateway to the secrets of the universe.”
I did not quite know how to reply to that; I certainly suspected it of being more of Muir’s hyperbole, but it was clear that he believed at least some of what he had said. I turned my back as the contraption on the shelf pulsed blue again, so intense it was brighter than the sun, even through my closed eyes. Muir patted me on the shoulder a few seconds later.
“Open your eyes, Duncan. Look here.”
I looked where he pointed. It took several moments for my eyes to adjust to the glare, and I had to squint. Even then, it wasn’t actually clear what I was observing, but there was obviously something happening.
A tear in the fabric of space, no bigger than a sliver of fingernail, appeared above the work shelf and hung there. As I watched, it settled into a new configuration, a black, somewhat oily in appearance droplet little more than an inch across at the thickest point. It seemed to be held quivering in midair by some strange force emanating from Muir’s makeshift contraption.
It looked like an egg.
Muir looked like the cat that had got the cream, a broad grin plastered across his face.
“We did it, Duncan. How does it feel to be a god?”
I looked at the black egg, then Muir, then back to the egg again. The rainbow aura thickened again, dancing around the shimmering thing that hung impossibly real in the air above the work shelf.
I knew exactly how I felt.
Bloody terrified.
“What in blazes is it?” I whispered.
“Think of them as soap bubbles.” Muir replied. “Reality consists of many of them—multiple, maybe even infinite, universes, each in its own bubble, each connected by the thinnest of membranes to many of its neighbors. Quantum foam, if you like.”
It made more sense for me to think about them as eggs, if truth was to be told. Maybe I should have let Muir die back in the wreck of the boat, that dark night out on the bay. Maybe it would have made a difference. That’s what I was thinking about when I turned away from the shelf to face him.
“So what happens now?”
“Now we study it. Think of it, Duncan. A whole new universe at our disposal.”
“And what’s inside the bubble?”
He laughed.
“That’s what we’re going to find out. Of course all we know about space and time may or may not apply on the other side of the field boundary. No one has ever done this before.”
“I’m starting to understand how Oppenheimer felt,” I said.
His smile faded as quickly as it had come.
“Don’t you dare go soft on me. Not when we’ve come so far together.”
He was right—we’d done this together. I was just as culpable as he was for what was done in our name.
I had another look at the egg.
Had it grown?
It certainly looked larger to me. The shed started to throb, like a heartbeat. The egg pulsed in time. And now it was more than obvious—it was most definitely growing larger.
“The field boundary is collapsing,” Muir shouted.
The throb became a rapid thumping; the shed shook and trembled. The vibration rattled my teeth and set my guts roiling.
A blinding flare of blue blasted all coherent thought from my head. When I recovered enough to look back at the shelf, there was nothing to be seen hanging there but empty space. The black egg was gone as quickly as it had come.
“Quite impossible,” Muir whispered, talking to himself. He was staring right at the spot where the egg had been.
“What did you see?” I asked.
“For a moment there I thought—no, it can’t have been.”
“Muir, you’re not making any sense.”
He looked at the shelf again, then back at me. He seemed to come to a decision.
“The boundary collapsed, that’s all. We need more batteries to sustain a more stable magnetic field. We’ll try again tomorrow. But we’re close, Duncan. We’re nearly there.”
* * *
When I left the shed, it was to face a barrage of questions from the men on the porch. I had no real answers for them, and I fear my attempts at dispelling their very real concerns might have been half-hearted at best.
“We all saw you,” the innkeeper said. “You went through that bloody door as if it wasn’t there. You can’t stand there and tell me that’s natural.”
“I can assure you—” I started, but was interrupted. The big innkeeper poked me in the chest with a stubby finger, punctuating each word hard enough to cause me some degree of pain.
“No. You can’t assure me of anything.”
They mean to give Muir an ultimatum sometime soon, and if he does not comply, they intend to make him leave by any means necessary. Mention was made of putting a torch to the shed and its contents.
I am by no means sure that is a bad idea.
11
Present day
By the time we struggled down the road to the church hall we were too late to stop Jimmy from giving false hope to the folks gathered there. There was a crowd of around fifty. I knew every one of them, but they looked at me as if I were a stranger—and a foreign one at that—when I tried to dissuade them all from heading out into the storm.
“Yes, Jimmy has the plow—but it’s not the big one—we lost that—and the hollow at the campsite is going to be too deep—it’ll take him half an hour and more to clear it. And that’s only if the snow stops and the wind drops now. Meanwhile the snow will keep drifting up on the parts where he’s not working, and you’re all going to get stuck in it. Add in the weird shit that’s going on around here tonight and it’s madness to even think of trying.”
Jimmy, despite being one of the youngest adults present, seemed to have been appointed spokesman and leader.
“It’s madness to stay,” he said, almost shouting. The rest of the hall fell suddenly quiet around us—we had everybody’s attention. I’d seen the school bus in the parking lot on the way in—and the pickups, some of them loaded with suitcases—and even furniture. Some folks were intending to leave for good. And Jimmy had their blood up—along with his own.
“You saw what it did to the Brodie place,” he continued. “And it’s done for the Connors, the Fothergills and old Mrs. Johnson down by the bank. How many more, we just don’t know. We’ll take our chances with the weather—at least we know what’s what with that.”
There were murmurs of agreement around the room, and nobody would meet me in the eye. It seemed that minds were already made up—but I gave it one more try.
“I’ve called it in. The government men are on their way—”
I didn’t get to finish. Jimmy shouted me down.
“And what use are they going to be? Even if they get here before we’re all taken, what are they going to do? What can they do? As old George said earlier, it’s hardly going to respond to harsh language, is it?”
That had me stumped. What we were dealing with was so far beyond my ken that I could not even visualize what might be done about it. I only knew about snow and wind—and I knew enough to know that there was no chance of any escape from either until they’d
both settled down for a spell. My mouth spoke before my brain was ready.
“They’re scientists—they get paid to think shit up,” I replied. I realized just how lame I sounded. At least nobody laughed. But when Jimmy turned away to the door, everyone present apart from Pat and George started to follow him.
I collared Councilman Robertson at the door.
“Don’t go along with this, Wayne. These people need leadership, not spur-of-the-moment decisions.”
He pushed me away.
“What they need is to get the fuck out of here,” he replied. “I saw what happened to the Connors—if you did too, then you know what I’m talking about. I’m not going to let that happen to my family—not while there’s a chance of getting to the highway.”
He turned away before I could protest further and headed for the door.
“At least check in with us at the depot,” I called after him, but he didn’t acknowledge that he had heard me. The rumble of engines starting up was loud even above the whistling wind of the storm.
I didn’t bother going outside to see them off—I’d seen idiots driving in heavy snow before. Seeing more of them was just going to depress me.
* * *
We left a note in the church hall in case anyone else came along, and the three of us headed back to the depot. It took us twice as long as it had on the way down, fighting the wind every inch of the way and trudging through snow that was more than a foot deep in places on the road. I looked up every ten steps or so, hoping to see the lights of a returning convoy, but there was only the biting flurry of wind-whipped snow and the dim orange of the almost obscured streetlights.
Fifty souls had gone out into the storm—I was worried that far fewer than that would come back—if any.
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