The White Fox

by James Bartholomeusz

  “What does it do?” Jack asked.

  “It’s a dimension ship,” Vince replied. “Can you do science?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I won’t go into details. Just imagine it like Star Trek. Or Doctor Who. Teleporting.” He turned and vaulted over the side, positioning himself behind the helm like a latter-day pirate—function-driven body armor at complete odds with the carefully crafted swan’s neck, embossed with mirrorlike eyes, which formed the helm of the ship.

  Gaby giggled.

  “Excuse me. I built this thing—”

  “And look what happened last time you tried to fly it,” Gaby replied superiorly. She ushered Jack and Lucy to the edge and motioned them to climb in.

  Jack tentatively stepped over the side, unsure of how fragile it was. Inside were three wooden benches, just like a rowboat. Gaby and Malik settled themselves on the back one, and Jack moved over to make room for Lucy. She looked apprehensive at anything that vaguely resembled a roller coaster cart, but when everyone else was in and staring at her, she seemed to realize she had no choice. Jack steadied her as she clambered in, and she sat close to him on the second row back. They both instinctively looked around for seat belts.

  “What are you looking for?” Gaby asked them.

  “This thing moves?”

  “Oh, don’t worry about the seat belts,” Vince said jovially, then caught Gaby’s expression.

  She pointed at her own socket.

  Jack and Lucy found theirs and pulled. As it turned out, Vince had used the term seat belts very loosely. They were comprised of a piece of rope that looped over the legs of both people on the bench and clipped together. Very loosely. Jack glanced at Lucy. She appeared equally anxious. He couldn’t shake the impression that they were sitting in an oversized holiday souvenir.

  “Okay, everyone ready?” asked Vince, glancing back.

  “Vince, put your rope on,” Gaby said exasperatedly.

  “Come on. I’ve flown this thing hundreds of times. I can deal with anything it can dish out.”

  Gaby rolled her eyes.

  Vince began shifting things on the front panel. It looked like a cross between the controls of a supercomputer and a brightly colored child’s toy, with dials, keys, and several other indefinable implements. Vince placed his palm on a crystalline orb on the control board at the front. Immediately, the same symbol-filled light the manor door had opened with spread over the board, changing from red to green to blue.

  The wings began to vibrate up and down noisily, sending shudders through the whole ship. As they beat faster and faster, it started to rise off the ground, the pressure building below it.

  It was at that moment when Jack noticed something horribly wrong. The opposite end of the tunnel was a flat stone wall—a stone wall, which, even more worryingly, looked as if it had recently been patched up. Panicked, he tried shouting, but the noise of the wings completely drowned out his voice. Worse, no one else, not even Lucy, seemed to have noticed.

  Vince brought his other hand down in a fist on the control panel. The ship rocketed forward, the wings pulsating into a hazy blur as they hurtled down the tunnel.

  Jack cried out, the air resistance beating his exposed skin. Beside him, he could see Lucy screaming, but the frantic wing beats drowned out all sound. They gathered speed. Vince was bent forward, frenziedly adjusting dials and buttons on the panel, Gaby and Malik, he could only assume, still seated behind them and not ejected backwards out of the ship to be beaten bloody on the underground floor.

  The opposite wall blasted towards them, a solid mass of skull-shattering stone—but stone that now seemed to be contorting into a spherical portal of impossibly bright white light. Jack only just had time to fruitlessly shield his face before they smashed into it.

  He waited for the impact, but it never came. The noise of the wings and what he now thought must be the roar of jet engines still resonated around him, but they had definitely not hit anything. He dared to open his eyes a fraction. As he comprehended what was around him, he could not help but widen them.

  They were soaring through a tunnel but not one of stone. This tunnel was of spinning light and energy, lightning-rent storm clouds of rainbow hues, light and dark mingling into every color imaginable. Another noise, something like a sonic boom or roar of portentous thunder, echoed around them, sound and matter churning into a pathway of spatial majesty. A bolt of umber-bronze lightning arched out of the mass some way in front of them, crackling towards their ship, but it ricocheted off. In that second of impact, an electrical buzz of energy sounded, as a dim but durable orb of protective barrier surged around them.

  In a heartbeat—or perhaps after several hours—a flash of sparkling white burst before them: the end of the tunnel. Jack was dimly aware of Vince adjusting more controls somewhere in front of him (for distance seemed to have altered the way it worked), before they were hurling towards the core of light. The colors, clouds, eternal hues of bright energy drained away as tangential, all-consuming brightness engulfed them.

  Jack’s breath caught in his throat. This time, he did not cover his eyes, but he could see nothing; Lucy, Vince, the entire ship, his own body had vanished into the portal of all-reflecting power. Then they hit the ground and skidded, normal light restored in an instant. The noise of rocks and sand showering out behind them, the lurch of being flung forward in their seats, the twinge of the belts cutting painfully into their laps. The ship rumbled to a halt, and Jack and Lucy fell backwards off the benches.

  Jack sat up, feeling nauseous. The lights he had just experienced were flashing in front of his eyes, dancing in a dizzying kaleidoscope across the steel-grey sky that he was actually seeing. Lucy remained on the floor of the ship, grimacing. Jack had seen that expression before. It was the internal struggle to prevent vomiting at all costs.

  Gaby and Malik had already undone their seat belts and got out. Vince was buried in sand a few feet in front of the ship, his head completely submerged.

  Gaby went to stand next to Vince. Her momentary attempt to look disapproving collapsed into a fit of laughter. “I think that might be the ultimate I told you so.”

  Vince pulled his head out of the sand, brushing pebbles from his hair, his face burgundy with hilarity.

  Satisfied that Vince was alright, Jack looked around for the first time. As the lights in his peripheral vision faded, he could see their surroundings. They were on a rocky beach, surrounded by obscuring walls of white fog. Grey water lapped a few feet down to the right from where the ship was entrenched. Something that sounded a bit like a seagull croaked overhead, swathed in the fog above them. There was no sign of the basement, the mansion, or the forest. He glanced behind him. No wall or bright light, only a low cliff face clustered with sparse yellowed grass and a few boulders.

  Jack untangled the rope from around his stomach and clambered out of the ship. He wasn’t very steady on his feet. “What just happened? Where are we?” he asked Malik, who was stretching out next to him. Gaby was still occupied with excavating Vince.

  “Rauthr. Small Magellanic Cloud. About two hundred thousand light-years away from Earth.”

  Even the previous day, Jack reflected, he wouldn’t have considered looking for signs that Malik wasn’t joking. Now, however, he felt he needed to verify anything that might just be true. “And we managed this … how?”

  “Spatial jump. Don’t worry, though. It’s only hours after we left. It should be about 3 a.m. on Earth.”

  Jack took a deep breath. Even with his extremely patchy grounding in physics, he was pretty sure that wasn’t meant to be possible. But then, he realized, that was pretty low down on the register of new possibilities he had been assailed with in the last few hours. Demons, secret organizations, and stolen friends came higher on that list. He was glad Lucy was in earshot, and he wouldn’t have to face the unenviable task of explaining this to her.

  “So if we’re on a different planet,” Lucy piped up in a high-pitched voice, her g
rasp of science considerably better than Jack’s, “how come we can breathe? And the gravity’s the same. Isn’t that a bit of a coincidence?”

  “It’s a lot less complicated than it sounds. Generally, oxygen is a universal requirement for intelligent life. They talk about natural selection and the variety it brings, but really all living creatures are in the same mold. Earth is perfect for life’s requirements. Other planets that harbor life are much the same. I think you’ll be surprised how familiar the people here are.”

  Jack and Lucy spent the next few minutes looking around in awe, studying every detail of the sand, the different rocks, the sea. It was largely the same as any British seaside on Earth. The air tasted cleaner, less polluted, and the larger rocks littered around had a distinct bluish tint. There was no living thing visible, though occasionally one of the seagull-like creatures’ cries could be heard. If they hadn’t experienced what they just had, neither of them would have noticed anything out of the ordinary.

  After they had exhausted all the possibilities for examination on this distinctly boring bit of coastline, they went back to sit in the ship. Neither of them attempted to start a conversation. Both seemed to recognize that the other was trying to come to terms with what had happened to them.

  Lucy, in particular, was very nervous, even though, she admitted to herself, nothing seemed to be out of place. She wondered whether it could be a trick. But then after the day she’d had so far, it was just as possible that they were on an alien planet. She shivered at the very thought. Had the Apollonians managed to find her parents yet? How would they take the news? It was bad enough having news about your daughter’s drunken antics reported to your door by a disapproving neighbor, but being told that she’d gone to another world … Come to that, when was she next going to see them?

  Jack, meanwhile, had given up trying to fit this into any frame of reference he had established in his first sixteen years. He knew that the fact they had just moved to another world would not hit him for some time. He would have to see something that could not possibly happen on Earth to convince him fully. Where they were going and from whom and how soon they were going to get all this explained concerned him more.

  No one seemed to know exactly what was going on. Gaby and Vince had moved from the place of Vince’s landing to the coastline, peering out into the fog. Malik stood nearby, equally silent, checking his watch every few minutes. It dimly occurred to Jack (amongst the many other logical inconsistencies jostling for foremost position in his head) that an alien world couldn’t possibly work on the same timescale as Earth.

  Then, after about half an hour, something happened. The lapping of disturbed water reached out to them from the shallows, intensified by something beyond their vision. A low bubbling, the frothing of displaced grey water, sounded from behind the white veil. An immense, dome-like shadow, though too faint to make out any details, appeared to be rising out of the water.

  None of the other three needed Gaby’s and Vince’s frantic cries to get up and move closer to it.

  Malik took off his watch and tucked it inside his jacket pocket. “Finally.”

  Chapter XI

  the golden turtle

  “It’s about time,” Malik said, striding over to the edge of the beach. The bubbling was receding, replaced by metallic clangs and clunks. Moments later, a wide wooden plank was shunted out of the fog from the direction of the shadow, sinking into the sodden sand, forming a bridge over the shallows. Without hesitation, Malik placed a foot on it, tested its sturdiness, and clambered up it into the mist.

  “Go on, then,” Gaby said when neither Jack nor Lucy moved.

  Cautiously, they approached the edge of the plank. Despite Malik’s ease in crossing, it didn’t look particularly stable. With an almost cartoonlike gulp, Lucy placed one mud-encrusted trainer on it and entered the wall of white. Once the wood had stopped bobbing with her weight, Jack followed.

  Crossing was unnerving. Immediately as he left dry land and moved over the waters, the fog descended like a white veil, enveloping him entirely in a bubble of sight only ten feet in front of him. The beach soon receded completely in the ivory mass, so that he was standing, entirely isolated, surrounded on all sides by impenetrable fog. He had no idea how deep the water was, how far he was along this makeshift pier, or how long he would have to walk. Gritting his teeth, he moved onwards, completely unaware of what was in front of him.

  After a few more feet, he could see the beginnings of something vast emerging from the fog. It looked like he was walking onto a dome of dull gold—a metallic bubble, like that of the Eden Project buildings, but completely opaque. He tested his footing, and it felt solid enough. Scrambling up, half-walking, half-crawling, he soon saw the faint figures of Lucy, Malik, and two others, becoming more distinct as he drew closer. They were standing by a kind of hatch in the top of this dome, the beginnings of a metal ladder visible, descending downwards. Lucy was shivering behind Malik, evidently slightly wary of the two figures Jack could not yet see. He moved up to join her.

  Malik finished talking and turned to them. His correspondent came closer out of the mist, the form becoming clearer as she moved towards them. She was a stunningly beautiful black girl, with a round, friendly face and deep brown eyes. Her jet-black hair was slightly wavy and cascaded down to her shoulder blades. She wore a white shirt, a red waistcoat, baggy trousers, and boots. A tattoo in the shape of a stylized lion wove around the upper forearm, and a crimson bandana decorated with a golden turtle was wrapped around her forehead.

  “So who are these?” she said.

  Her voice brought Jack back to reality. He found he was staring and looked at his feet awkwardly. He suddenly didn’t know what to do with his hands. At Malik’s beckoning, he and Lucy came closer to the hatch.

  “Jack Lawson,” Malik said, “and Lucy Goodman.”

  “Alright, then. How much do they know already?”

  “Well, a few hours ago they were nearly murdered by the Cult, so they’ve seen their fair share. But remember,” he replied, looking at her sternly, “Charles slipped up on this one. Sardâr left very specific instructions. He wants to fill them in personally. Actually, his instructions were far too specific, if you ask me. He always seems to plan for the most unlikely occurrences, and those are the ones that always end up happening. It makes me uncomfortable.”

  The girl rolled her eyes and looked half-exasperatedly, half-jokingly at Jack.

  He suddenly felt very hot around the ears.

  “But where would we be without him? He’s our next best to Isaac, and he’s led us right so far. The sooner he gets back, the better.”

  Malik shrugged. He turned to Jack and was joined by Gaby, issuing out of the fog like a Kevlar-clad spectre. “I’m afraid this is where we leave you,” Malik said, addressing Jack and Lucy.

  “Don’t worry,” Gaby said, laughing at Lucy’s scandalized expression. “You’re in good hands. Captain Ruth”—she gestured at the girl—”will take you to a safe location. We’ve got people on hand there to take care of you. Like Malik said, all eventualities were planned for.”

  “What about my parents?” Lucy protested.

  “We’ll handle that. We’ll make sure they know what’s going on and that you’re safe. We need to get back and start sorting out this mess—cover stories, fake scientific explanations, burying the temple … It’s going to take a while.”

  “But when can we go home?”

  Malik and Gaby glanced at each other.

  “We don’t know,” Gaby replied after a moment, looking sympathetic. “I’m really sorry, but your guess is as good as ours. We’re not sure how much damage the Cult managed to do and whether they’re planning to come back anytime soon. The idea was to stake out in that mansion until they attacked, then catch them unawares. As you can see, that didn’t all go to plan.”

  “What about Alex? What are you doing about that?”

  “We’re on the case,” Gaby replied, smiling. Jack couldn’t h
elp thinking it was more of a rebuttal than a response. As much as Gaby and Malik had been helpful, now that he was recovering from the shock of the night’s events and his sense of skepticism was returning to him, he could not help but feel a little annoyed at the lack of explanation for any of the events that had twisted their world upside down in such a short time.

  “Sardâr will explain everything,” Malik said tersely, pulling out his watch again and waving it in front of Gaby’s face.

  As they smiled at both of them (in what Jack thought was a reassuring way), considering what had gone on, he couldn’t shake a slight sense of abandonment. Both nodded at Ruth and vanished into the all-obscuring white mass, an exit as ethereal as the entrance the two had made into their lives the night before.

  “Who the hell is Sardâr?” Lucy whispered to him.

  Jack shook his head, as nonplussed as she was. Both of them stared into the fog for a moment. He felt like a package bundled from one keeper to the next. He heard the clunking of the plank being withdrawn, along with his hopes of getting back to Earth on the dimension ship. Jack glanced at Lucy. The panic on her face suggested she was feeling the same way and that she was preparing to jump off the side of the ship and demand to be taken home. Half of him got ready to stop her, the other half wanting to do exactly the same thing.

  “Well,” Ruth said after a minute or two, “I think we should get you into something more fitting. Quentin?”

  The other new figure, a man in a poorly fitting Regency wig and ultramarine jacket, stepped up to her side.

  “Take these two below deck and give them some new clothes.”

  “Aye, aye, captain,” replied the man in a badly disguised aristocratic drawl.