The Impossible Boy

by Mark Griffiths

  About a mile from the plant, on a bleak stretch of moorland, Chas and Gabby re-entered our universe. Gabby reeled, open-mouthed, afraid she was about to lose her balance. Seeing the layers of soft bracken and spongy moss beneath her feet, she let herself fall to the ground, giggling. She stared up at the darkening sky and the few evening stars that were emerging tentatively from it.

  ‘The word “wow”,’ she said, ‘is so small, so useless, so totally incapable of expressing how absolutely woooooooooowwww I feel right now. I may need some time to think of another word for the job.’ She giggled again.

  ‘What you’ve experienced so far,’ said Chas, ‘is tiny. An infinitesimally small area of hyperspace. Merely the bit of my universe that touches yours. Once I’m able to move freely in the fourth dimension again, then we can really go places.’

  ‘Just looking at ordinary stuff from your world – a leaf, a stone, the sunset . . . So much beauty in the must mundane things! I don’t think my head’s big enough to fit all this wonderfulness in,’ Gabby said.

  Chas smirked. ‘Your head’s pretty big already, I reckon.’

  ‘Hey!’ She sat up and thumped him playfully. As she did she caught sight of the fusion plant in the distance, its bold geometric shapes resembling an oversized version of a toddler’s building blocks. ‘We’re here! What do we do?’

  ‘We wait a moment.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘There! Watch!’

  ‘Where?’

  Chas shrugged. ‘Everywhere, pretty much,’

  ‘Huh?’

  Gabby got to her feet and looked around – and then she saw. All over the moor, in every direction, in hundreds and hundreds of separate locations, boys were appearing – hands, noses, knees forming in mid-air, then thickening into arms, torsos, heads and legs. Chases – hundreds of copies of Chas wearing school uniforms of all colours – were creating themselves out of nothing.

  Once fully formed, they turned as one and marched towards Chas and Gabby, a silent army. Gabby squeaked in alarm.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Chas. ‘It’s only me.’

  ‘I know,’ said Gabby. ‘But there’s an awful lot of you.’

  ‘To break through completely into the fourth dimension I’ll need to concentrate all the energy of the reactor into a single space.’

  ‘What does that mean?

  In reply, Chas merely smiled enigmatically and stood with his arms outstretched. A white ghostlike glow appeared around him.

  The first of the duplicates arrived. It winked at Gabby and touched Chas’s outstretched hand. The duplicate vanished and the white light around Chas pulsed and grew stronger. Soon, more duplicates drew near, touching Chas’s hands in turn and disappearing, causing Chas’s aura to grow and pulsate further. Gabby sensed the duplicates were somehow merging with him. In the space of a minute, all the duplicates had made contact with Chas and evaporated. The glow around him was now a strong silvery gleam that lit up the desolate landscape around them.

  Five hundred kilometres above, a satellite’s camera whirred silently.

  Chas looked at Gabby and grinned. His bright silvery aura gave him the look of some restless Greek god come down to Earth to cause mischief. ‘We need to get inside the reactor now. It’s time.’

  ‘How do we do that? Another shortcut through the fourth dimension?’

  Chas nodded. ‘This will be the last one for a little while. In this somewhat energetic state I’m in at the moment –’ he flapped his arms a couple of times, leaving feathery streams of white energy billowing in their wake, ‘– it’s too risky to keep hopping from one universe to another. With all the power of the duplicates concentrated within me, my molecules are all a bit unstable.’

  Gabby’s eyes widened. ‘You’re not in any danger though, are you?’

  ‘No. I’ll be fine.’ He held out a hand to her. His long fingers left little vapour trails like comets.

  Gabby took it.

  ‘There! That light! Did you see that? Head for it!’ Barney pointed a decisive finger into the distance as the old Cortina rattled along the narrow road.

  Beside him at the wheel, Gill nodded. ‘Same kind of light we saw when Fleur disappeared. Well, a weaker version, anyway.’ She slammed her foot on the accelerator and Daisy sped forwards through the darkness.

  ‘Harland radiation,’ said Barney.

  ‘What’s that?’ came Dave’s voice from the back of the car. Minutes after setting off he had been struck down with a headache and decided to have a lie down. The back seat was not the most comfortable of beds and he was rattling about like a dried pea in a maraca.

  ‘I fished a bunch of documents out of the recycling bin,’ said Barney, holding up a sheaf of papers. ‘One of them’s about the angel lockets. Thought it might be useful. This one says the bright flashes of light that accompany the opening of doorways to higher dimensions are caused by Harland radiation.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Dave. ‘The hole between dimensions sends out ripples of gravity that our eyes interpret as white light.’

  ‘That’s exactly what it says here!’ said Barney. ‘I think your memory’s improving, Dave!’

  ‘Thanks, Rufus!’

  ‘It’s Barney.’

  ‘Damn.’

  There was another burst of light, a fierce yellow glare that hurt their eyes. It was very near. There came a second and then a third. These weren’t sudden flashes, though, like the light they had seen earlier. These were powerful searchlightlike beams that cut like sabres through the darkness towards them. They were more like the headlights of cars, Barney realised. But what would a bunch of cars be doing here in the middle of the moor?

  ‘Halt! Stop the vehicle or I fire!’ called a voice through a loudhailer.

  Gill looked at Barney uncertainly.

  ‘Probably best not to disobey someone who ends a request with “or I fire”,’ said Barney. ‘Stop the car.’

  Gill brought Daisy to a halt and switched off the ignition. They could hear the sound of running feet and frantically revving engines outside. Blazing beams of torchlight crisscrossed the sky.

  ‘Step out of the vehicle!’ commanded the loudhailer.

  Barney shot Dave a quick glance. Dave nodded and kept as low as possible on the back seat. Gill opened the door and began to climb out. ‘Hold your horses,’ she called to the unseen owner of the loudhailer. ‘I’m not as young as I once was, so it may take a moment or two . . .’

  Barney quickly got out of the car and scooted around to help Gill. Torchlight blasted their eyes.

  ‘Freeze!’ called the loudhailer voice.

  ‘On a moor at this time of night in just a cardigan – I probably will,’ said Gill, squinting into the torch beams.

  ‘The prisoners will desist in making sarcastic comments!’ commanded the voice.

  ‘Why are we prisoners?’ asked Barney. ‘There’s nothing illegal about going for a night-time drive near an experimental nuclear reactor, is there?’ He paused. ‘Mind you, put like that it does sound a bit suspicious.’

  ‘Good evening,’ said Gill, changing tack and giving a charming smile. ‘I’m afraid we’re in rather a hurry. And as you can see, we’re not terrorists, so . . .’

  ‘How do I know you’re not terrorists?’ asked the voice.

  ‘We’re just an old lady and a kid,’ said Gill. ‘A wild guess tells me we don’t fit the usual profile of people who’d want to blow up a reactor.’

  ‘Then it’s the perfect cover, isn’t it?’ said the voice.

  ‘What?’ said Gill.

  ‘If you wanted to blow up this reactor, who better to send than some harmless old granny and a dozy-looking kid? Terrorists aren’t stupid, you know.’

  ‘Who are you calling dozy-looking?’ asked Barney. ‘And you might as well know we’re actually here to stop the reactor being blown up.’

  ‘Barney’s right,’ said Gill. ‘There are immense and dangerous forces at work on the moor tonight and if we can’t–’


  ‘Hang on,’ interrupted the voice. ‘Did you say Barney? As in Barney Watkins? From Blue Hills?’

  ‘Erm, yes,’ said Barney. ‘How do you know who I am? Who–’

  The dazzling torchlight snapped off and a tall dark figure marched out of the darkness towards Gill and Barney. When the after-images had stopped jigging across Barney’s retinas, the figure suddenly resolved itself into a shape he recognised.

  ‘Orville?’ said Barney. ‘Is that you?’

  ‘You know this person?’ asked Gill.

  ‘He works for the government,’ said Barney. ‘He helped sort out some weird stuff in Blue Hills last year. Orville’s a friend of Gabby’s dad.’

  ‘Sir Orville now, actually,’ replied the figure. ‘I might have known you were mixed up in this somehow. And where’s your partner-in-mischief? I daresay Miss Gabrielle Grayling has a hand in proceedings too?’

  Barney nodded. ‘Yup. We reckon she’s in the power plant. With a very dangerous creature from another universe. If we don’t get to her soon we’re afraid there may be consequences – the sort that end with a “boom” noise.’

  ‘You know of the hyperbeings?’ Orville McIntyre’s face creased into a grim, heavy-shadowed mask in the dim light.

  ‘Sure do,’ said Barney. ‘I’ve sat behind one in my maths class for the past four weeks.’

  ‘What? There’s been one in your school? The whole world is in danger! You realise these things are as powerful as gods?’

  Barney nodded. ‘Yeah, and he’s a bit of a show-off, too, if you ask me. We need to go and speak to him and Gabby. Right now.’

  ‘Our satellite picked up traces of something called Harland radiation at this location,’ said McIntyre. ‘It’s something that accompanies the opening of doors to other dimensions. Now we know why. This really is most worrying.’ He clicked his fingers and two armed military policemen strode forward through the darkness. He nodded to Gill and Barney. ‘These two people will be accompanying us into the plant, and by “people” I actually mean “prisoners”. By “accompanying us into the plant” I actually mean “will stay close to us at all times or risk ending the evening with considerably more bullet holes in them than when they started out”. Everyone understand?’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  FOUR DREADFUL THINGS

  Gabby materialised inside a large hexagonal room. She caught her breath and took in her surroundings while her senses readjusted to three-dimensional space. The room was walled with pale green metal panels and contained a single massive control console. There was something reassuringly sturdy and old-fashioned about its rows of switches, dials, flashing lights and computer monitors, she thought. It inspired confidence in the same way that a vintage car does. She guessed it was the reactor’s main control centre. Though Chas had been sketchy on the actual details of his plan beyond saying he would ‘concentrate the plant’s energy into a single space’, she began to feel more confident that he would succeed in escaping from Earth.

  Then she saw the things.

  Things was the only word Gabby could think to call the . . . things . . . she was now looking at. There were four of them. They were sort of person-sized and sort of person-shaped but considerably more blurry and nightmarish than the average person generally prefers to look. Shifting columns of grey-pink light, they twisted and writhed like jellyfish, faceless as processed meat.

  ‘You may be wondering what those . . . things . . . are,’ said a tinny voice.

  Gabby tore her gaze away from the four dreadful things and saw an image of Chas on one of the computer monitors. He was wreathed in his silvery glow and appeared to be floating in a tank of bubbling water.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘And yes, I am wondering that. I’m also wondering why you seem to be doing an impression of a green bean in a saucepan.’

  Chas chuckled. ‘First things first. Let me explain. The four things you can see in the control room there are the four members of staff who were working here when we arrived.’

  Gabby looked aghast. ‘What? What have you done to them?’

  ‘It’s OK! They’re not being harmed. You remember when you folded the football pitch through the fourth dimension and no one could leave it?’

  ‘You’ve folded these people?’

  ‘I’ve folded the space immediately around them. Whenever they try to move more than a few centimetres, they reappear back where they started. It’s just my way of keeping them out of our hair while we go about our business. And a bit classier than clunking them on the head with a spanner and tying them up, eh?’

  ‘I see,’ said Gabby. She shivered. The explanation did nothing to make the four things any less unsettling to look at. ‘And the reason you’re scuba diving in an enormous kettle is . . .?’

  ‘I’m in the main reactor itself,’ replied Chas. ‘This water I’m in is superheated and super-pressurised. No being from your world could survive in here, of course, but to me it’s just like dipping your toe in a lovely cool pond.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re having a relaxing time of it,’ said Gabby. ‘Tell me what I have to do.’

  The image of Chas on the monitor grew larger until his face filled the entire screen. ‘We’re going to overload the reactor, Gabby. To do that we’ll need to bypass all the safety features. Basically there’s a whole load of buttons on the control console you need to press and then a few commands to type into one of the computer terminals. You understand?’

  ‘Pushing buttons and using computers are the things I like doing anyway,’ said Gabby. ‘So the fact I can do those things and help free an amazing hyperbeing from a dimensional trap is a bit of a bonus. In many ways this is my ideal job.’

  They both laughed.

  Chas stared at Gabby through the monitor screen. His flick of blond hair twisted and swirled in the boiling water. ‘You are the most incredible three-dimensional creature I’ve ever met, Gabby.’

  She felt herself blush. ‘You’re the most incredible four-dimensional creature I’ve ever met. Not to say the only one.’

  ‘I’m not kidding,’ said Chas. ‘Out of all the hundreds of schools I was in, only you thought to investigate me. You’re a special and unique kind of girl.’

  Gabby remembered with a twinge of guilt how Barney had wanted to investigate Chas too. She pushed the thought from her mind. ‘I’m not all that special, you know.’

  ‘You’re a rare kind of spirit. You know that. This world can’t contain you, Gabby. Come with me. For a visit, at least.’

  ‘I’d love to! The last place I went on holiday was Southport. I imagine the fourth dimension is even more exciting.’

  ‘That’s pretty tough competition,’ laughed Chas. ‘You’ll just have to wait and see. Are you ready, then? Shall we do this momentous thing?’

  ‘Absolutely!’

  ‘Right. You see that row of red buttons across the middle of the main console?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Press them all in turn. Starting from the left. That will disable all the reactor’s safety systems.’

  Gabby found the buttons and did as Chas asked. After she pressed the fifth one, an ear-splitting siren filled the control room. She squealed in fright and looked at the computer monitor questioningly.

  ‘Don’t worry about that!’ shouted Chas above the din. ‘It’s just the overload alarm. Keep pressing the buttons. It’ll go off when you press the . . . ah! –’ the alarm ceased abruptly ‘– when you press the last button. Good! Now, look at the second computer screen on the left. Go to the keyboard and type the words “deactivate safety features”. Got that?’

  ‘Got it.’ Gabby’s fingers danced lightly over the computer keyboard. ‘Now what?’

  ‘You should see a little red icon on the screen now called “overload”. Can you see it?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘All you have to do is copy that icon into the folders on the desktop called “reactors”. They should be numbered one to five.’

  ‘Okey-dokey.’ She quickly c
opied the icon and began pasting it into the five folders. ‘All done.’

  ‘Great! All you have to do now is reboot the entire system.’

  ‘Righto. Won’t that alarm have attracted attention from the other workers here?’

  ‘Not a problem,’ said Chas. ‘They’ll be dead in a few seconds once this reactor blows. Now, you can do the system reboot from the start menu like any normal computer-’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just click on the thing that says “start” in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen.’

  ‘No, not that,’ said Gabby. ‘What was that about the reactor blowing up and killing people? Are you serious?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Chas casually. ‘It’ll be quite a bang. Should take out everything within a – oooh – thirty-mile radius, I should think. Be pretty spectacular.’

  ‘That’s monstrous! I can’t do that!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why not?’ hooted Gabby. ‘Are you completely mad? I’m not going to cause a massive explosion!’

  Chas laughed. ‘It’s OK, Gabby. I’ll protect you. Once I’ve absorbed the energy of the fusion reaction I can quickly slip you into the fourth dimension where the blast can’t touch you. You’ll be fine. I probably should have mentioned that earlier.’

  ‘But what about everyone else within a thirty-mile radius? The people who work in this plant? The people in Blue Hills? My mum?’

  Chas shrugged. ‘Well they’ll all be blasted to smithereens of course. Shall we continue?’

  ‘You’re totally out of your mind if you think I’m going to help you kill every single person within a thirty-mile radius!’ Gabby stepped back from the console. ‘Is there no other way at all to get you back home?’

  ‘Honestly, what are you so concerned about?’ asked Chas impatiently. ‘A few thousand measly three-dimensional creatures will be killed in the explosion. But so what? How many insects and other small creatures do you think were killed when they built this plant? How many animals are killed every day to feed human beings? Or what about this – how many microscopic creatures like bacteria is your own immune system killing right now as we speak, Gabby? Hmm? Think about it. Inside your blood stream right now, white blood cells are killing millions and millions of innocent bacteria, viruses and parasites. Tiny little creatures just trying to get on with their day like anyone else – and you’re killing them. Do you feel sympathy for the common cold virus when your immune system destroys it? Of course not. So why should I feel sympathy for a few human beings?’