Katheryne’s eyes were wet. “When my mum died the way she did...it destroyed me, Perri.” Katheryne let go, the tears flowing freely down her face. “I thought at the time that I had no one. My mother and father were my best friends. I know I was sent away to school, but that didn’t bother me. I know why it had to be like that, and we talked every single day, about absolutely everything.”
Perri wanted so much to gather her friend up in her arms right now, but she knew Katheryne needed to unload all this baggage she had been suppressing for years. So she sat back and listened as her friend continued.
“But then mum was gone, and every time I looked at dad all I could see was him looking back at me, seeing my mother and recoiling with guilt.
“It wasn’t in my head, Perri!” she insisted, as her friend started to shake her head to try and persuade her she was wrong. “I knew it was true; I could feel his hurt.” Katheryne was shaking again.
“I could feel it, but I couldn’t do anything but add to it, so I helped my dad to do what he thought he wanted. I helped to push him away.” Katheryne sat still, and Perri reeled from her admission. They’d never talked about the reasons her father never called her, but Perri always assumed it had been his decision to distance himself.
“He called me, a month after the funeral, twice. He left a voicemail. He wanted to talk. But I didn’t call him back.” Katheryne’s voice broke. She looked over at Perri, pleading with her to understand, without realising her friend had already decided how she felt, and that she loved her and respected her even more than before.
“You thought if he didn’t see you, he’d be able to heal, to get over it faster, didn’t you?” asked Perri. As her friend broke down again, she went to her and gently stroked her hair as she pulled her into her arms. Katheryne nodded, still sobbing.
“Kat, it wasn’t your job to be strong for your father. You were what, seventeen when it happened? It was his job to be strong for you!”
Perri was furious. “And a month….he waited a month, after his wife….your mother... died, to call his only child. And all he did was leave two feckin messages?”
Katheryne raised her head, just enough so Perri saw the anguish and self loathing in her eyes.
“But Perri, that’s not the worst, not by a long shot,” she cried, turning away, as if she didn’t want Perri to see the guilt in her eyes and condemn her as she told the final truth.
“Part of me never survived what happened,” Katheryne explained, looking back, willing herself to meet her friends gaze. Perri looked back in confusion.
“I never let anyone into my heart from that point on. No one was able to come close, so no one would be able to hurt me like that again. And I wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone again either.
“Aye, I let a few people get part way, like your parents...and you, but never all the way in.” She looked at Perri in resignation.
Perri simply stared back for what seemed like an eternity. Katheryne was about to ask her to say something when Perri broke the silence.
“Liar,” she exclaimed abruptly. There was no anger in it. It was a simple statement. In fact Perri looked back and broke into a smile, a tender loving one you might show a silly kid that had got something totally, innocently wrong.
Perri cried, tears running down her cheeks. “You keep telling yourself deep down you don’t love me or Amanda or Chris, and I’ll keep calling you a liar.”
Katheryne looked back, eyes wide in surprise, and something else. Doubt perhaps?
“You think you have this hard heart, untouchable and unbreakable? Well baby, let me tell you, you’re wrong, you have the biggest heart I know.”
“But it...” began Katheryne, but Perri interrupted.
“And don’t you even think about saying it was all an act, you can’t tell a lie to save your life, Katheryne; even the time we were caught in my dad’s car, all you had to do was say you were me and you’d have gotten off scot free. But no, that copper saw straight through you, and that’s why you still take the bus everywhere.”
A ghost of a smile appeared on Katheryne’s face, but it wasn’t going to be that easy.
“Perri, you don’t understand,” she started, but Perri interrupted again.
“Tell me you don’t love me; tell me I’m not closer than a sister to you. Tell me you don’t love Chris and Amanda as if they were your own mum and dad,” demanded Perri, almost shouting now as she held Katheryne’s gaze.
“And don’t you dare tell me I don’t understand!” Perri shouted. “Who was it that tried to act all hard while you got dirt rubbed in your face and gum thrown at your hair in class? Who was it who joined in the name calling, while all the time feeling sick to her stomach, because she knew you were doing all of it for me. You knew I wasn’t like the others, but I put you through hell and you just came back for more.” Perri was screaming now, “so don’t you dare say I don’t understand, because damn you, you saved my life!”
The silence was palpable. Both girls faced each other, tears streaming down their faces, Perri daring Katheryne to contradict her.
“I...I...but it’s not possible,” whispered Katheryne. “I tried so hard.”
“No, you didn’t Katheryne.” Perri smiled. “You just didn’t have it in you to do that. Your heart’s too big...thank God.”
Perri wasn’t religious, but at this point she would have praised the lord almighty in thanks. For a minute she’d thought she had lost her friend, but as she looked into Katheryne’s eyes, she saw dawning acceptance.
“So what’s it like to not be the stone faced bitch you’ve been trying to tell yourself you were?” Perri wasn’t about to pull any punches, lest her friend try and talk her way back into denial.
They sat for several seconds, faces inches from each other as Perri dared Katheryne to shy away, but dreading that she would.
“Damn you, Perri.” Katheryne hissed through clenched teeth, “Why did you have to make this so hard?” She turned away, but Perri knew she’d made a huge step forward. She’d been afraid that her friend’s spirit had broken, but the anger proved otherwise.
“What did you expect? I’m your friend; you think you can get rid of me that easy?” Perri taunted, more relaxed now the spell was broken.
“So are you going to tell me what this is all about?” Perri asked, “The truth this time, not the bullshit attempt to drive me away.”
Katheryne looked up, shock and guilt etched on her face. She was still reeling from the realisation she had let her defences fail so abysmally, but as she looked at Perri, she drew strength from the solidity of their friendship. A smile glanced briefly across her face.
“I’m scared, Perri,” she cried. “Terrified. Something is happening and I have no way to control it, and I’m afraid that everyone close to me will get hurt.”
“But haven’t you just finished telling me how you were able to control it?” Perri started, before taking the next step and realising how wrong she’d been.
“The guy in the dream, he’s real isn’t he? That’s how you were able to remember, because you saw him tonight. When you said it earlier you were serious, weren’t you?”
Katheryne looked over and nodded, unable to voice what was going through her mind. But as usual, Perri had the uncanny ability to finish her train of thought.
“So if he’s real—” began Perri, but she stopped herself, unwilling to finish the terrible idea forming at the pit of her being.
“The dream, all of it, must be real too,” whispered Katheryne. She just sat there, with her hands clasped in her lap like a lost child. Which as Perri realised just then, she was.
The strength she’d witnessed just moments ago ebbed away, and Perri knew what she did in the next few seconds would decide the fate of not just the two of them, but of countless lives.
“Who is he?” Perri blurted out. It was all she could think of to break the downward spiral, but the result was totally unexpected.
Katheryne jerked upright and stood up.
Perri saw pain and uncertainty, but along with this came an expression she couldn’t remember seeing on her friend’s face before. A kind of expression you have when you’re struggling to accept something you’ve been trying to deny for years.
“Perri, you’re not going to understand what I’m about to say,” said Katheryne seriously. “I’m not sure I’m going to understand it, and I’m the one saying it.”
Katheryne’s head reeled with indecision, but deep down she knew without a doubt what she was about to admit was true.
“He’s the reason I tried to push you away, and Jesus, Perri, I’m terrified of him,” she breathed, her face white with fright.
Perri struggled to understand where this was going, but after the revelations this night she wasn’t about to interrupt her friend. Part of her knew she wasn’t going to like what she was about to hear. Looking at the expression on Katheryne’s face, she knew she, too, was struggling to come to terms with what she was about to say.
“The reason I tried to push you all away, why I thought what I was doing was the right thing,” she began, “was because I thought if I could close myself off from the people that I love the most in the entire world, maybe I’d be able to protect myself from him.”
“Protect yourself from him?” asked Perri, taken aback. “Didn’t you just say he was protecting you, or looking over you or something like that?”
“He is, I think,” Katheryne wavered uncertainly. “I’m pretty sure he’s the one who hid us from that, that.... monster.”
Perri sensed a “but”, however she managed to button her mouth and let her friend continue.
“When I first sensed he was there, there was something else.” The fear in her voice had given way to a sort of wonder, and for a second there was a warmth in her speech. “Almost as if he had seen me, not for the first time, but that he’d known me for years. He was so vulnerable just then, almost like he’d bared his soul...no, that’s not right.” Katheryne searched for the right way to describe the instant of closeness she’d experienced.
Her face reddened, colour rising on her cheeks, as she finally understood what the stranger had felt towards her. Part of the memory held over from the dream, experience, whatever it was, still lay beyond her reach, but the sheer emotion present in this moment was almost more than she could stand.
“He’s in love with me,” Katheryne turned to Perri, the sudden realisation etching shock onto her face, “and I’m in love with him.”
It took almost a whole second, longer than Katheryne had thought, for her friend’s reaction.
“Are you fricking serious?” Perri almost screamed. “Jesus, Kat, that has got to be the craziest thing I’ve heard tonight, and think about it; if this is more crazy than the rest of what’s happened, it is fricking out there!”
Katheryne took a deep breath. She knew her friend meant well and she’d been grateful more than once in the past for her ‘guidance’ for want of a better word, with guys.
“I love him,” she breathed finally, as if she had been holding a breath for so long her lungs were fit to burst. She didn’t want to say anything more and turned to her friend.
“Don’t ask me how. I know I’ve never even met him, but I know, Perri,” Katheryne insisted. “It’s as if he’s a part of me, and I know now that no matter how hard I try, there’s no way I can keep him out.”
For a second Perri almost dismissed what she’d said. Katheryne had had several boyfriends over the few years Perri had known her, but most hadn’t lasted more than a few weeks.
There was one who had been around for a few months, but it had ended badly when he’d tried to come onto Perri one night, while Katheryne was at her parents’ house.
Perri thought back to then, and recalled the feeling of betrayal she’d felt as he tried to force himself on her. Perri had never told Katheryne about that night, not in any detail at least. She’d told her friend she’d seen him with another girl, and after what she’d done to him during the assault, he was in no mind to deny it when Kat faced him with it.
She’d simply had to clear up the mess afterwards. Katheryne had loved the asshole. It hadn’t been pretty.
But now, how was Perri supposed to protect her best friend from a guy who she’d not only met in her dreams, but who was also some sort of guardian angel?
“Kat, I know you think you’ve got some sort of feelings for this...whoever he is, but you have no idea who this guy is. Jesus, if he was even halfway normal, and by normal I mean remotely connected to this reality, then maybe, just maybe it might be OK.”
Katheryne started feeling guilty at this stage. She didn’t know how to make Perri understand, because she didn’t understand herself. How she could be in love with someone she’d spent a fleeting instant with, in a dream? What had happened earlier was surreal now but she couldn’t block her feelings. All the barriers she had imagined she had erected had been smashed to ruins. And the realisation that this brief encounter had proven how vulnerable she had become scared her to the centre of her being.
Katheryne sat on the edge of the chair, at odds with her feelings, when someone knocked loudly on the apartment door.
Both she and Perri nearly jumped out of their skins; it was as if they’d been in their little bubble of reality and the knock had just burst it. Both of them stood just staring at each other for a second, before Perri crossed to the door, put the security chain in place, and cracked it open.
What happened next was a blur of motion as Perri stepped back, breathed in sharply and turned to Katheryne. Her face was as white as a sheet. There was a strange humming noise, and the chain fell apart as the door was pushed open from outside. Both of them stood unable to move, as the dark form with the impossible eyes stood silently in the doorway.
Katheryne’s heart leapt as she realised it was him, but she surprised herself when she realised she still had a measure of control on her emotions. He stared back at her, and in that instant she realised how mistaken she’d been.
She’d been afraid that the being, this man, would seek to use her vulnerability against her. She still knew, standing here now, she would have been powerless to prevent him doing just that. The face which looked back at her, however, reflected the same desire, but also the same hesitation to give in to the inevitable bond she also felt.
As they stood there, gazing intensely at each other, she also saw surprise on his features, as if he, like Katheryne had been in denial until this moment. Neither of them seemed capable of movement, as to do so would break the spell. They were lost in each other.
“Well, this is awkward,” said another voice, and it wasn’t until then both girls realised there was someone else standing behind the man.
He smiled crookedly, and Katheryne’s heart skipped a beat as he did so, but he moved sideways far enough to reveal a slim woman with the palest blonde hair, and eyes like morning dew.
“I think what my brother neglected to ask was, ‘May we come in?’” said the woman in a musical voice with a vaguely English accent, before gliding past the man, glancing up at him with the same lopsided grin, “Men!” she snorted.
8 – Switzerland – The Rabbit Hole
Four years earlier
“It’s working,” said Julia, her eyes alight with excitement as she watched the display. She couldn’t decipher visually what was happening, but the instruments were programmed to display the events happening at the sub-quantum level in an easy to understand fashion. Easy, that is, for an accredited holder of the Nobel Prize for Physics, or his senior lab assistant at least.
“No, it’s not,” said Jason, cursing under his breath. “Emitters are destabilising on the number four array. We’re going to have to collapse the field.”
“Shit, Jason. It’s only just out of variance,” said Julia. “It’s taken us five years to get this far. If we stop now…We’re so close. Come on, let’s ride the storm.”
“The storm is exactly what we’d be riding if this reaction got away from us, Jules. Yo
u know that. Beginning shutdown sequence.”
Jason typed a code into the master console and watched the displays as the super magnets moved the particle beams out of collision configuration.
“In the words of the great man himself, ‘Better to have lived to fight another day than have your atoms smashed to, well… atoms.’ Anyway, I need an early night. I have a flight to catch at 5am.”
“You know, for a scientist with so many credentials, your devotion to your family is just, well... weird,” teased Julia.
“You’re just biased due to your own terrible record in that department,” retorted her boss. “I mean, why do you keep doing it? It’s what, three divorces now?”
“Two. I wasn’t married to Mark,” Julia snapped indignantly. “Oh, and there was the fact he was an asshole.”
“Hmmm, yes, I’d forgotten that. I’m not sure how, though, seeing as you continue to bring it up,” said Jason, teasing her. “Maybe there’s more there than you’re willing to admit?”
“Bite me.” Jules snickered, sticking her tongue out briefly.
Jason smiled. Jules had been with him for the last seven years, ever since she’d debunked a theory of his during a lecture at MIT, while on a consulting tour of the USA. Jason was of the opinion that, if a grad student her age had the sheer balls to argue the validity of two of his published papers, in front of a crowd of his peers and her seniors, he was fully entitled to get his own back.
The form of his revenge, however, had been to offer her a post on his team. A very junior one, at least until she’d finished her education. He’d offered to pick up the tab, of course, and the rest, as they say, is history.
“You know, maybe you were right all along.” Jules became thoughtful. An idea was rolling around in her head, just barely formed, but gathering momentum.
Jason saw her expression go vacant as she grappled with whatever was hatching in her mind.
Souls of the Never: A Fantasy Scifi Romance Time Travel series, with Dragons, Elves and Faeries. (Tales of the Neverwar Series Book 1) Page 5
