Down: Trilogy Box Set

by Glenn Cooper

  “I believe you do know one of them by name. Lucas Hathaway.”

  Giles Farmer’s bedsit in Lewisham was too small to swing a cat. From his bed he could touch his chair and from his chair he could touch the fridge. Sponsored ads on his Bad Collisions website and odd editing jobs for technical journals paid his rent and broadband service and kept him in Ramen noodles, but not much more. His career, if one could glamorize what he did with that label, had begun shortly after dropping out of Leeds University where he had been a restless student at the School of Physics and Astronomy.

  Anthony Trotter’s operatives at MI6, who had purposely strayed onto the domestic turf reserved for MI5, had been acquiring a dossier on Farmer. His tutors at Leeds had a somewhat different version about his leaving than his. On the biography section of his blog he wrote about his unconventional mind, his quest for “big answers to big questions.” His tutors spoke of a highly irritating young man given to conspiracy theories who regularly disrupted lectures with absurd and off-the-mark comments. Though bright enough to complete his course, they strongly encouraged him to take time off to collect himself.

  The year he found himself cut loose was the year the MAAC was scheduled for completion and commissioning. He threw himself into the blogosphere, taking up the cudgel of skeptics who saw a path fraught with waste and peril, and when the inaugural collider start-up was marred by an electrical fault causing a magnet quench and a helium explosion and fire, he had his platform. He spent two years railing against the huge cost of replacing the damaged superconducting magnets and warning of existential dangers to the planet should the project continue.

  Farmer wasn’t much of a drinker but the night before he had drunk four pints at a pub in Brixton where he had met his mate, Lenny Moore, who enjoyed his gadfly rants. And Lenny, gainfully employed, had been buying. This morning his head was thumping and while the kettle went on the boil he checked his email and Twitter. As soon as he was caffeinated enough he planned to finish the post he had been composing for a week.

  It was the big one, the one he had been building toward for over a month when he began to notice telltale signs of weekly MAAC restarts registering on the power grid following the one publicly announced startup. To his mind he was nearing the critical mass of data accumulation that would force the government to come clean. He went searching for his bottle of aspirin to quiet his headache.

  His laptop was on the small table by his chair and as he reached for it, he made his hand stop in midair. Farmer was particular in his habits. Although the bedsit was tiny and not scrupulously clean, it was meticulously tidy and organized. By habit, after using it, he always left the computer pinned to the far left corner of his tray-top table.

  But now the laptop was a quarter-inch from the left side.

  He stared at the machine for a few seconds then picked it up, shook off his sense of unease, and began to work. He scanned his work-in-progress, flitting from paragraph to paragraph. It went further than his previous posts, much further. After reminding his readers of the theoretical hazards of high-energy supercolliders that included the formation of microscopic black holes and strangelet production, he had laid out the sequence of recent unusual activities at the MAAC. The security breach for which a suspect allegedly had never been apprehended. The successive weekly power dips affecting the London grid, all compatible with MAAC firings that had never been acknowledged. The “bioterror” incident at South Ockendon that was subject to a severe information blackout. The lack of availability of Dr. Emily Loughty, a scientist who had been willing in the past to speak with him. The unwillingness of Dr. Loughty’s father to be forthcoming. And now, the smoking gun, as he saw it. Amidst another London power grid dip, Farmer had turned on the police scanner app on his phone and heard a curious exchange between dispatchers and Buckinghamshire police units, directing them to respond to intruders at the Iver North waterworks, only to be waved off and informed that “other agencies” were responding.

  Farmer began to type where he had left off the day before.

  What, you may ask do an estate in South Ockendon, the Iver North Water Treatment Works, and the MAAC laboratory in Dartford have in common? I’ll tell you: all three are located directly above supermagnet components of the MAAC and all three have now been the scene of “intruders.” Would you know what I think, dear readers? I think that…

  His screen froze.

  He couldn’t move the cursor with his track pad and none of the usual maneuvers could unfreeze it.

  “Bugger, bugger, bugger,” he muttered before re-booting.

  The computer failed to properly reboot, landing him on a blank blue screen, not once or twice, but three times.

  Alarmed he stood and began searching around the room for anything to corroborate his earlier observation about the out-of-position laptop.

  “Are you fuckers watching me?” he said out loud. “Well are you?”

  He whipped out his mobile phone and got a friend, Laurence, on the speaker.

  “Laurence, Giles here. Listen I think I’m being hacked or watched or both. By whom? By them, of course. Listen, I need you to just stay on the line while I use my mobile as a signal detector. Yeah, just be quiet until I come back on the line.”

  He began systematically moving the phone around his tiny flat, listening for telltale clicks produced by the electromagnetic interference of a bugging device. Other than his friend’s breathing, the phone was quiet until he passed it in front of the ventilation hood over the cooker.

  Click, click.

  He slowed down and repeated the maneuver and reproduced the clicking with each pass.

  “Laurence, I’ve got to ring you back. Actually, I won’t be ringing you back. They’ll have your number now. If I go missing, go to The Guardian with the stuff we talked about. They’ll be the most sympathetic.”

  Six miles away, an operative at MI6 working on an upper floor of the Albert Embankment, watched and listened on a monitor while Farmer unscrewed the vent cover and cursed the camera when he found it. When the bug went dead, the officer picked up a phone and rang upstairs.

  “Sir, this is Evans in Special Surveillance. We’ve got a situation with Giles Farmer.”

  “What kind of situation?” Trotter asked.

  “Farmer has found and neutralized our device in his flat.”

  “That’s not very good, is it?”

  “No sir. Fortunately, we wiped his blog before he could post an incriminating entry. I’ve just sent you a screen grab.”

  Trotter read it and grunted. “Well, keep following his telephone traffic and keep eyes on him.”

  “We don’t have eyes on him, sir.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “The lawyers were concerned about using physical assets on a domestic target.”

  “Bugger the lawyers!” Trotter shouted. “This is a matter of high national threat and we’re listening to the lawyers? You get eyes on him immediately and leave the bloody lawyers to me.”

  Farmer pocketed the tiny camera, took his wallet and keys and left his mobile phone behind. Ten minutes later he was catching his breath, his head buried in a newspaper, on a train from Lewisham to Charing Cross station. He looked up furtively every so often, wondering if any of his fellow passengers were onto him and if his life would ever return to normal.

  Hathaway steered the Hyundai through the dark and largely deserted streets of Nottingham, trying to square his memory of the roads and architecture with what he was seeing.

  “The streets are all mucked up,” he mumbled.

  “Easier for you, I reckon, than for me,” Talley said, waking from another brief nap. “This whole land is mucked up. Makes my head spin.”

  “Would do,” Hathaway said. “I’m foxed by thirty years of change. You’ve got three hundred years to square with.”

  “All these infernal machines and high buildings,” Talley said, “I can’t get on with it.” He was about to perform a characteristic spit to mark his displeasure but
remembered the car window.

  “You saying you’d rather go back?”

  Talley rubbed at his eyes. “No, I think I’ll give this a go. Good grub, good molls. We almost arrived?”

  “If I can find it.”

  “Who’s the fellow?”

  “My brother, Harold. If he’s still about he’d be in his sixties.”

  “Likely to be any molls about?”

  Hathaway didn’t answer.

  He eventually found his way to Sneinton, the neighborhood where he had grown up and where his parents were living at the time of his death. If he knew Harold, the shiftless, school-leaver he was, odds were he’d be right where the acorn fell, in the same house, on the same road, in the same neighborhood.

  To Hathaway’s pleasure, Holborn Avenue was in a time warp. The same long rows of two-story brick houses on either side of the dead-end road. The same fanciful Moorish arches leading to recessed front doors. The same rows of parked cars jammed half-on, half-off the sidewalks. The only difference he could see was that the brickwork on some of the houses had been painted white or tan and most of them had curious gray dishes with wires bolted onto the second stories.

  “That’s the one,” Hathaway said to the others, slowing and pointing at the shabbiest house on the block. The bricks needed pointing and the paint trim was peeling.

  “Are we getting out of this crate now?” Youngblood asked.

  “Not yet,” Hathaway said. “I’ll scout it out first. Let’s see if I remember how to parallel park.”

  There was a tight space past the house and he managed to cram the Hyundai into it. He told the men to stay put and keep out of sight. Chambers promptly relieved himself in the back seat.

  Most of the houses were dark and this one was too. Hathaway tensed and rapped lightly on the door. He’d left his knife in the car but he didn’t need it. He’d learned how to destroy people with his fists, feet, and teeth.

  After a short while he knocked again, this time louder. There was a slight glow above his head and when he stepped back out of the archway, he saw a light had been switched on. Then the front window glowed and a muffled voice came through the door.

  “Who’s there?”

  He made himself talk. “Is that Harold? Harold Hathaway?”

  “Yeah. Who’s this?”

  His heart leapt. “If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Piss off. Tell me who it is or I’m calling the police.”

  He took a very deep breath and said, “It’s Lucas.”

  There was no response, none at all.

  “I said it’s Lucas. Your brother.”

  “Okay, you’ve got three seconds to leave or you’re going to get nicked.”

  “Our cat was called Agatha. Our goldfish were Ronnie and Reggie. Mum’s favorite food was chips and Daddies Sauce. Dad was drunk on barley wine nearly all the time.”

  After a long pause the door opened a crack, then a bit more. A fat, bald man appeared in his boxers, his gut ballooning a wife-beater undershirt. It wasn’t until the door was open wide and the light from the hall fell upon Lucas that his brother’s face fully registered what he was seeing. A second of an abjectly shocked expression was followed by collapse as the blood drained into his stout legs. He fell backwards into the hall.

  From upstairs a woman called his name and asked if everything was all right.

  Lest she ring the police, Hathaway called up. “It’s all right. He’s just fainted. It’s a mate of his.”

  A woman, also in her sixties appeared at the top of the stairs. She looked like her round body had been stamped from the same mold as Harold’s.

  She came waddling down the stairs and got to her husband’s side at the same time as he began to come around.

  “Get him some water,” Hathaway said.

  “I don’t know you,” she said, cradling Harold’s head. “Who are you?”

  “A mate, like I said.”

  “He don’t have no mates your age. What did you do to him? I’m going to ring the police.”

  Harold tried to get to his feet but only managed to sit. He stared at his brother. “It is you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who? Who is it, Harold? Should I ring emergency?”

  “No! Just help me up.”

  Hathaway had phenomenal strength. He lifted his brother as if he were a child and carried him to the sitting room. Some of the furniture was familiar.

  Harold came to completely. “How is it possible?” he asked, over and over.

  “How is what possible?” his wife asked.

  “It’s Lucas, my brother.”

  “What do you mean, it’s your brother. Your brother’s been dead for thirty years.”

  “You look the same,” Harold said. “Exactly the same as I remember you.”

  “You look different, mate,” Hathaway said.

  “Are you dead?” he asked in a rasping whisper.

  “I don’t know what I am, to be truthful. It’s a ridiculously long story.”

  “You smell like you’re dead.”

  “You smell like booze.”

  Harold told his wife to get him a large gin.

  “Bring us a glass too,” Hathaway said to the woman. “Listen, I’ve got some mates in the car. Mind if I bring them in?”

  “Are they like you?” Harold asked.

  “Similar, I’d say.”

  Molly and Christine made their way through dense woods until they came to farmland. They climbed a wire fence and in the near distance heard the lowing of cows in the dark.

  “Better not be a bull about,” Molly said.

  Christine took her hand. “Better a bull than rovers.”

  They walked for at least a mile before they saw the roof of a farmhouse silhouetted against the starry sky.

  “No lights,” Christine said. “They’re either asleep or away.”

  “You sure it’s a good idea?” Molly asked.

  “We’re hungry, we’re dirty, we’re cut up. Yeah, let’s try it on.”

  All the windows were pitch black and there were no cars in the driveway. They spent a few minutes in whispered debate before deciding to break a window with a rock. The sound of the glass shattering was louder than they hoped so they hid behind an outbuilding. When no lights came on, they returned to the house, unlatched the lounge window from the inside and climbed in.

  Armed with brass lamps pulled from the mains as weapons, they made a slow and cautious tour of the dark house, floor by floor, searching for occupants. It was only when they finished creeping through the small bedrooms on the third floor that they were able to relax and begin to luxuriate in the idea of having the place for each other.

  Unsure how near they were to the closest neighbors, they were reluctant to switch on lights. Instead, they found some candles and matches in the lounge and headed straight for the fridge. Inside, to their delight and amazement was a roast chicken, bowls of mashed potatoes, and vegetables, and in the freezer, several tubs of ice cream.

  “This isn’t Earth,” Molly said. “It’s Heaven.”

  When they couldn’t eat another morsel they turned to the next object of their desire: the bathtubs. Each one filled their own hot tub, the water promptly turning brown and almost black from their grime. Christine decided to drain the tub and have a second fill with clean water. She spent a full hour in bliss, her skin wrinkling, her mind at peace for the first time in thirty years. But drying herself with a marvelous fluffy towel she saw herself in the mirror and began to cry. Gone were her saucy good looks and big hair. The woman in the mirror was skin and bones with gaps in her teeth and sagging breasts. It was a wonder that Jason still cherished her, though he hadn’t exactly escaped the ravages of their harsh existence. Pulling herself together she found a bottle of cologne and applied it heavily to try and mask her odor. She couldn’t bear to put her ragged, filthy clothes back on so she had a rummage through the bedroom dressers and wardrobes but the lady of the house was several sizes larger. Molly
had been pursuing a similar course of ablutions but was having better luck in a daughter’s room where she laid out several outfits on the bed. The two women spent a half an hour like teenagers, trying on clothes and laughing, but the reality of their situation intruded and they forced themselves to gather clothes, toiletries, and food in a sports backpack they found in one of the closets and reluctantly they left this bountiful, fantasy of a house.

  Molly thought to check the outbuildings for vehicles and inside a barn they found a fairly new Cooper Mini in racing green. The keys weren’t in the car so they re-entered the house and soon discovered a key ring on a peg in the kitchen.

  The car interior was difficult to decipher and by the glow of the instrument panel they read the driver’s manual and figured out how to start it.

  “Do you need a map?” Molly asked as Christine drove off.

  “Unless the roads have changed I know the way.”

  “Are you sure we should go there?”

  “I don’t know too many other places we can go.”

  Left behind in the kitchen was a note Christine wrote for the homeowners done in halting penmanship. It was the first time she had put pen to paper in three decades.

  We’re sorry for using your house and stealing some items. It was the best night we’ve had for a very long time. Please forgive us.

  An emergency telecon was about to begin. Ben logged on at MAAC and before long the screen filled with participants joining from London and America. Ben opened with a preamble. He reminded everyone that the goalposts had shifted. One-for-one exchanges were still happening but now they were geographically dispersed around the huge MAAC oval. The appearance of the Iver Hellers was particularly disturbing.

  Leroy Bitterman was at the US Embassy at Grovenor Square where he had been briefing the president on secure comms. He looked up from the map of Greater London spread before him and said, “It seems to me that the implications are profound. Each MAAC restart must be altering the dimensional fields in ways we don’t understand. Previously the connection between them and us was only a pinhole. Now I would say it’s a portal. We have no way of knowing what the restart in four weeks is going to do. I’m concerned that further collider activity will open the door wider. We don’t want to see a floodgate. Fortunately we made the decision to have only one more restart.”