by Gary Fry
Table of Contents
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Emergence © 2013 by Gary Fry
All Rights Reserved.
A DarkFuse Release
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
1
“You will help Paul to read while he’s staying this week, won’t you?” Jack’s daughter had said before driving back alone to West Yorkshire in her company car.
Jack had agreed, of course; he’d do all he could to support his beloved grandson, all seven-year-old, infectious inch of him. It was the school holidays and Ruth, a single mother, had been unable to arrange child care facilities. And so a groveling call to her dad in his home on the northeast coast had secured a week’s free accommodation in a way that benefited all parties: Ruth got to commute around the UK, furthering her career; Paul got to see his only living grandparent; and Jack…well, Jack got the best deal of the lot.
“We can do lots of things this week,” he told the boy, while tucking him into the spare room’s bed that first night. “Go on the beach, make sandcastles, chase seagulls—”
“Eat ice cream?” Paul asked brightly, his hands clutching a book his mother had left with him, while he swung his thin legs under the sheets.
“Yes, of course,” Jack replied, feeling a little like the boy he’d once been, back in the 1950s, a much more innocent era. That was when he’d met Christine, who’d have given anything to live long enough to enjoy Paul’s visits… But there was nothing to be gained thinking that way. Looking back at the boy, Jack said, “Now then, about this story you want me to read…I mean, you want me to help you read.”
“My teacher says I’m…”—Paul struggled for words, the way Jack had done often lately, but had kept to himself—“… says I’m dyslexic. So I’ve got to go…very…slowly.”
The boy spoke with the same speed he presumably expected his granddad to anticipate from his reading. Then Paul opened the book—a paperback of about 150 pages, with a cover bearing creatures Jack found difficult to approve of—and turned to a page marked with the leather bookmark his granddad had bought him last Christmas. Moments later, squinting in the gloom of the scarcely lit room, he began to read.
“The…the monsters lived in an-…an-…another world, but…could travel…to this one…through a…a…” He broke off, looked up plaintively, and then asked, “What’s that word say, Granddad?”
This was the moment Jack had dreaded, the one even forty years spent teaching children the boy’s age stubbornly refused to help him through. Jack had always been a reader, but since moving to the coast a few months earlier (his and Christine’s only real ambition, even though his late wife had had only six weeks to enjoy it), he’d struggled to sustain concentration on his beloved books. Maybe his aging mind—he was sixty-three—was softening a little, but what frightened him more was when he sometimes failed to recognize certain words, as if components parts of the letters—uprights, crossbeams and varying curves—broke apart under his gaze as he tried grasping their collective meaning.
He experienced something similar now, the word his grandson pointed at with one fragile finger trembling with inky disdain. The first part leaped into Jack’s mind the moment he glanced at it, but as he tried skipping to the second and combine it, the sounds scattered in his head, like thin, febrile things bullied by a rough gale.
“Por-…” he began, pretending his hesitation was an attempt to get Paul to help himself. As a former teacher, Jack knew that “spoon feeding” children information was less effective than getting them to grapple directly with material. To employ an appropriate coastal metaphor, rather than giving them a fish, you taught them how to fish… But none of this was getting him closer to supporting the boy. “Por-,” he repeated, smiling weakly. “Come on, Paul, what does it say? Por-…”
“…-tal,” the boy replied, and after drawing breath in response to his granddad’s enthusiastic (not to mention relieved) nod, he finished, “The monsters…lived in another world…but could travel to this one through a…portal.”
“Bravo!” said Jack when Paul broke out in an instant smile. And for a short while at least, Jack could convince himself that darker issues in his private life weren’t afoot.
Choppy autumn wind gusted against the windows as the boy continued reading from the novel. The story involved hideous beings from another dimension sneaking through a “wormhole” onto Earth and causing all kinds of mayhem. This summary proved more unsettling than the tale itself, which mostly involved cartoonish descriptions of the various ways human beings tried defeating the creatures, including tanks, helicopters, bombs, and other violent methods. Although Jack had grown up with nothing so graphic, he imagined youngsters saw far worse on TV these days, or in the games they’d played on computers.
Jack, a reluctant recruit to the twenty-first century, had succumbed at last to technology, having the Internet installed in his seaside bungalow a week earlier. The rest of the detached property he’d tried keeping simple, the way he and Christine had always preferred life. But to discover things about his new community, he considered the Web essential, as if he’d be missing out on something by not having online access. Jack hoped his grandson—a whiz with machines, like his absent, feckless dad was reputed to be (Jack had only ever met the man once, and hadn’t cared for the experience)—could help him surf the big, bad world…
But his mind had begun wandering. It did that often these days, but he shouldn’t be afraid of the tendency; it was just an inevitable consequence of aging. Then he turned his attention back to his grandson, who’d now read several pages of the book, with only a few more stop-starts Jack had let him sort out for himself. When the boy yawned, Jack realized the session had served its dual purpose: giving Paul practice with an aspect of school he’d struggled with, and getting him tired enough for sleep.
“I think it’s time you built up some energy for all the fun you’re going to have this week, don’t you?” Jack said, taking the book from his grandson’s hands and placing it on the bedside table, which bore the only lamp burning in this part of the property. The light cast a feeble glow across the floral carpet, leading to a hallway in which little stirred other than a few errant insects, stubborn refugees from summer. Wind continued to perform a contemporary dance against the window, and a few flecks of rain tapped against the roof, like the fingertips of hungry wastrels eager to get inside… It was good to have some company at this time of year, Jack reflected; Christine’s death had left him feeling vulnerable, no longer bullishly ignorant of the world’s insatiable stealth.
“Can we go onto the beach tomorrow, Granddad?” the boy asked, his face all sleepy zealousness, soporific passion.
“We’ll see what the weather brings,” Jack replied, resorting to the most effective way of dealing with children, for whom a verbal promise was always considered as binding as a written contract. But Jack loved every minute he got to spend with Paul. After crossing the room to the exit, he added, “Now get some sleep. Ice cream has to be earned, you know.”
“You’re silly,” the boy replied, but dropped his head onto the pillow and pulled the sheets up to his throat. “Night, night, Granddad.”
“Night, night, Paul,” said Jack, closing the bedroom door with his grandson inside.
I’m silly, he thought. Yes, I’m deranged. And then the word he was most afraid of came inexorably to mind: I’m demented.
Jack was a reasonably educated man, and knew a thing or two about the world at large. He realized life was tough, and people subject a wide range of insuperable fragilities. His late wife’s cancer was one good example, but more recently, Jack had begun worrying about another characteristic of modern life: the aging population; a rising tide of older people and their associated ailments; the so-called “silver tsunami” expected to engulf the developed world in as little as a generation.
A major concern of governments—and the unfortunate people who developed the condition—was the increasing prevalence of dementia-related illnesses: memory problems, cognitive impairments, and full-blown Alzheimer’s disease.
Jack’s understanding of this group of illnesses was that of a layman, a long-term Guardian reader, but even so, he realized the ability to process language was one of the abilities most vulnerable to ossification of the brain and central nervous system. And he was frightened because he’d now begun to develop symptoms redolent of such linguistic erosion.
He tried pushing aside these thoughts, however. This was supposed to be a happy time, with Paul over for the week. Moving to the coast had been a big decision, principally because of how difficult it made seeing their grandson back in West Yorkshire; but Christine’s diagnosis had expedited the decision and there was no easy way of turning back. Not that Jack necessarily wanted to. He loved it here. It was just the…loneliness that got to him at times, with no neighbors around for miles.
Peering briefly through the curtains of his sea-facing lounge, he noticed the tide snaking along a line of the beach, causing sand to ripple and stones to move. This was a wonderful area, peaceful and majestic, in communion with many of the planet’s fundamental features. Christine had loved nature, especially the sea, having grown up on the southern coastline, in picturesque Kent. They’d bought this place with their savings, and run it on their generous public sector pensions. Money had never been a problem, but it often proved ineffectual when dealing with things that truly mattered: fragmented family, disease, and poorly understood conditions like his grandson’s dyslexia.
The world could be fickle, Jack knew that well; he also realized how pernicious it often was, leaving victims with nothing to blame for misfortune…
At that moment, he spotted something waving back and forth on the beach, a single strand of an elasticated substance, as narrow as rope… But then it was gone, just a momentary illusion caused by Jack’s aging visual apparatus.
Good God, he thought, attempting to suppress too many nebulous fears. And then he took himself off to bed.
2
The following day, there was no chance of going outside, on the beach or otherwise: a great storm was underway, staking its territory with many shadows cast from a moody-looking sky.
A tension was in the air with which Jack had grown familiar since moving into the area, but this morning it was cranked up to an unparalleled degree. After stepping outside and sweeping a glance along the rugged coast, he felt the air pressure firm against his flesh. Huddled in only his robe, he paced back inside the bungalow, assuming the low-key humming sound he’d briefly detected in his front garden had been just wind in his ears, overruling the threat of the crashing sea and a hissing, incipient rainfall.
Paul had yet to arise from the spare bedroom, so Jack busied himself with household duties, sweeping the tiled kitchen floor and then making breakfast. These were all skills engrained in his body and as likely to be subject to forgetting as ancient fossils were to erosion. A core set of abilities constituted the heart of individuals. The capacity to walk, talk, work, play—all were the basic building blocks of life… And to love: arguably the most important of all.
As Jack removed eggs from a frying pan, his grandson emerged from the hallway, scrunching up his eyes against bright daylight streaming in through the kitchen window.
“Morning, sunshine,” Jack said, because that was what his late father had called him and it had always made him feel warm inside. That might be important on a day like this; raindrops pattered against the kitchen window, driven by the unrelenting wind.
“Hiya, Granddad,” said the boy, and after sitting at the small table to receive his breakfast—surely its fried scents alone had roused him from his dreams—he smiled his gap-toothed grin, one of the finest sights Jack had seen since Christine on their wedding day.
They sat and ate, talking of all and nothing. How was school? Jack asked. It’s all right, Paul replied. Do you like living out here on your own, Granddad? Yes, Paul, it’s just what I needed after years of teaching in a classroom. Then they exchanged laughter, making slurping sounds with the mugs of tea with which they washed down the food. And half an hour later, they retreated to their respective rooms to put on daytime clothes.
As it turned out, however, there’d been no point. The storm had grown more ambitious, rugged winds cutting across the restless, muddy sea. There were many blusters and whistles, like giants puffing and panting, trying to break through some stubborn barrier. The sky resembled a frenzied tapestry, expelling endless needles of rain that left all the land near the bungalow looking as washed out as the amorphous tide.
Standing at the kitchen window and observing this dismaying spectacle, Jack turned to the boy, briefly shrugged, and then said, “I’m afraid those sandcastles will have to wait, lad.”
“Yeah, and the last thing I’d want to eat on a day like this is ice cream,” the boy replied, and this comment made them laugh again. Moments later, once their mirth had settled, Paul added, “Why don’t we go on your new computer, Granddad. I could show you how to use it.”
This struck Jack as a good idea, not least because there were many issues he wanted to explore
(dementia)
and he thought the Internet might help.
“Okay,” he said to his grandson, who’d already advanced on the PC in the lounge with all the experienced assuredness of a natural programmer. The boy booted up the machine, logged on with the password Jack had revealed yesterday, after Paul’s mother had dropped him off, and finally summoned the World Wide Web.
The whole world seemed to hold its breath as the page onscreen snapped into life, but that was only wind pausing between gusts, building up another indifferent assault on the fragile stretch of bay.
But then the other world, the virtual one, was ripe for exploration: silent, profound and dutiful.
“What do you want to look at first, Granddad?” asked Paul, but already appeared to have an idea of his own. “How about Google Maps?”
“Google…Maps?” Jack replied, realizing he’d heard of each concept independently, but unaware they could be combined. Google was an index of virtual space, where territory and directions had no real meaning: in truth, a non-world. Maps represented a more concrete notion, referring to physical space and actual objects, all tangible commodities. He wondered how the two notions worked together, and then admitted as much to a person nearly a tenth of his age. “Okay. Show me Google Maps.”
As the boy uploaded the relevant page, Jack retreated to the kitchen and put on the kettle again. Beyond the window, his front garden tossed and churned, dancing under imperious instructions from its taskmaster storm. Hedges whipped and autumn-naked trees bent and groaned, but this didn’t put him off making a drink. After manufacturing the coffee, he poured his grandson a glass of juice from the fridge and then returned to the lounge, where Paul had already summoned faraway locations into vivid digital existence.
“This is my street, Granddad,” the boy said, pointing at the screen while accepting the drink. “Where me and Mummy live.”
“Mummy and I,” Jack replied, clinging to at least one quality that hadn’t been superseded by technological developments. Then he leaned closer to the monitor, which displ
ayed a street-level view of the avenue in which his daughter owned a functional semi. He could see the curtains he and Christine had bought for Ruth and Mark when they’d first moved in together. None had been replaced, or at least hadn’t before this image had been captured… Indeed, this thought prompted a question. “When were these pictures taken, Paul?”
“Dunno, Granddad,” the boy replied, and Jack resisted the temptation to correct him again—“don’t know” would be an improvement, and including a personal pronoun wouldn’t go amiss—because that was when Paul hacked another postcode into the search column at the top of the screen and then clicked SEARCH.
Jack had recognized the postcode at once: his own.
Despite his reading difficulties, the boy had a retentive mind and must have seen Jack’s address on one of the many letters he kept in a rack beside the fireplace: application forms for a variety of local societies, correspondence about his state pension, a few letters from former colleagues and rarely visited friends… But he was supposed to be focusing on what his grandson had located online.
The image when it finally appeared was a bird’s-eye view of the North Yorkshire coast. Jack recognized its shape, because he’d examined many paper maps of the area, in the expectation of taking walks when the weather became fine again. At the moment, Paul had the image on “graphic” and the lens a good few miles from the ground. But then he switched it to “map,” and the territory under scrutiny took on the green and brown patchworks of a satellite photograph. He began zooming in on an area marked with a bubble in an arrow. This was Jack’s house, now growing closer and closer with each clipped-in sequence.
“Why can’t you…well, why can’t you reach all the way down, into the street, like you did with your place in Bradford?”
“It’s because the camera van that took all the pictures couldn’t get to your house from a main road, Granddad,” Paul replied, sounding about ten years more senior.
