by Jeff Povey
I saw footprints, I sensed danger, and still I didn’t heed any of it.
I kick again but my legs just won’t respond.
‘I said lie still,’ the voice soothes. But it comes out as sinister.
I heard the talon; I know what it means. The fear pumping through my blood is starting to warm me. I’m getting some feeling back. I try to curl my fingers into a fist. But they still won’t co-operate.
‘Please let me go!’
‘Easy now.’
‘You’d love that.’ I try with all my might to wriggle away but the monster has me in a fierce grip and even if I wasn’t frozen half to death I still wouldn’t stand a chance. They’re so much more powerful than us.
‘Look at me, Rev.’
I open my eyes. The light stings and I blink rapidly, trying to see something more than a blur.
As soon as they focus I can see a statue of Jesus peering down at me. His kind but reproachful face is telling me I’m an idiot. No one sledges into a lion’s den. No one. They move quietly, with stealth and cunning. They don’t yell ‘yippee’ and hurtle down a hill.
I deserve this, I think. I’m too stupid to warrant further existence.
But no matter how stupid I am, Reva Marsalis does not die easily.
I have shaken off enough numbness to fight. Thanks to my wet slippery skin I slither free of the inhuman grip and try to swing a punch but a fast-moving hand grabs my wrist again. As it does I catch sight of a glint of metal.
The metal that is the shiny horror of the doppelgangers’ hideous teeth.
Where the hell are the Ape and GG? They should be crashing in here to rescue me. The Ape can kill them. He can kill anything!
Hands curl round my wrists and push my arms back. The monster holding them looms into my eyeline.
The monster is Johnson.
I don’t know what has happened to him but the boy I fell in love with is about to gut me.
Johnson’s face slips into view. I finally – finally, finally – get to look into his eyes gain.
Johnson usually has blazing blue eyes. These are coal black. This is Other-Johnson. But Johnson said he hadn’t seen the others for a while . . . had I been speaking to Other-Johnson without realising it? Was it all a hideous trick?
‘I’m trying to cut you out of those clothes,’ he says quietly. ‘I don’t want to cut you though.’
My teeth are chattering and my chin is twitching violently from the cold. ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘I don’t care. You need to get warm.’
Other-Johnson starts slicing at my soaking, freezing clothes. ‘Need you out of these.’
The first time I spoke to the real Johnson was when I was here last time and he saved me from burning to death in the supermarket and, just like then, this version of him is trying to get me out of my clothes.
But the clothes are clinging to me, sticking to my skin like glue, and he can’t peel them off.
‘You’re turning blue.’
‘Blue?’
‘This is not looking good, Rev.’
I would panic but my brain is moving way too slow for that.
‘Listen, uh . . . Before I die, kiss me . . .’ I cough again and can taste river water dribbling between my lips.
‘You’re not going to die.’
I can’t help but think about when Other-Johnson kissed me. I always thought my heart only lay with my Johnson, but that moment changed everything. Metal teeth or not, Other-Johnson turned my heart inside out.
‘Kiss me. Like last time. Remember how you said it meant we would always be together. Well, we are, I promise you. We absolutely are. There’s no denying that. I came back for you. And we’ll kiss and love each other every day, always, for ever. Just do it before I die.’
Other-Johnson hesitates. He peers closer, his black eyes searching mine. The tiniest sliver of pain crosses his face.
‘It’s me, Rev. Remember I swapped bodies? That other version of me, he put me in his body.’
My fuzzy mind takes an age to process this.
‘Johnson?’
He nods. And looking closely, his eyes, black as they are, reveal a very human hurt.
‘Yeah. That’s me. I’m Johnson,’ he says, more matter-of-fact this time.
He tugs at my sliced dress but it still won’t come off. It’s plastered to my soaking skin, shrink-fitting round me.
‘Ow!’ He yanks too hard and almost dislocates my elbow.
‘Don’t know my own strength.’ Johnson sits back, trying to think of another solution.
But he is hurting more than any dislocated elbow would. He looks back at me and something has died in him.
‘I . . . I . . .’ I can’t control my chattering teeth and twitching chin. ‘I didn’t . . . I mean, I thought you were . . .’
‘I know what you thought.’
Why did my stupid frozen brain put those words in my mouth? All I wanted was to see Johnson again and when I did I said that!
‘Billie?’ I mumble, trying my best to deftly steer the conversation elsewhere.
As soon as I mention her name Johnson looks away, his eyes finding the floor. My heart staggers. Or wobbles. Or does something that makes it bounce hard off my ribs.
‘Oh no.’
He looks back at me quickly. ‘No. It’s not that. Billie’s OK.’
‘Is she hurt?’ I ask.
‘No.’
‘Missing?’
‘No.’
What then? What the hell else can be wrong with her for him to look so – well – pained?
‘I need to get you warm.’ His voice is quiet.
There is something he doesn’t want to share with me and it is not filling me with much in the way of hope.
‘Tell me about Billie,’ I say, pushing him.
‘Let’s worry about you first.’
‘And the Moth,’ I add. ‘Where’s the Moth? You texted. You said he was with you.’ Johnson’s text was sent earlier today when I was still in this world. But I didn’t read it till I got to the alien world. But somehow it’s not today any more. It’s about a hundred and fifty days later so I doubt if Johnson will even remember sending that text.
‘He’s around.’
Around? How can he be so casual? There could be evil versions of us lurking in this town, and Johnson, the boy who kept us all alive, left a paraplegic, who doesn’t even have a wheelchair, to somehow crawl around out there? And in the snow?
It takes all my strength to put a frozen hand on his forearm. ‘Talk to me.’
‘Later, Rev.’ He still won’t meet my eye.
‘What is it? What’s wrong? What’s happened?’ I ask him.
‘It’s been a long time. We need to get to know each other again.’ He tries to evoke some of that easy ironic tone of his, but he’s not pulling it off.
And there it is: the resentment that five months ago I abandoned him. I left him for dead, or at least that’s what it must have looked like. I honestly had no idea. I thought he was right there beside me in the town square. How could I possibly know that Other-Johnson had swapped bodies with him? They are identical.
‘I thought you were dead,’ I tell him. ‘The other Rev took your life, I mean, his life, the other you. I wouldn’t have left you—’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ His voice is neutral, giving little away, but by giving so little away he is telling me everything. He still can’t believe I abandoned him.
‘And GG punched me,’ I add desperately. ‘He knocked me out, next thing I knew I was in the classroom.’
‘GG punched you?’ Which when you say it out loud is the most unbelievable thing ever. Evil GG might be the very definition of evil, but our GG is the sweetest person you’ll ever meet.
My words are bouncing off his alien skin. Nothing is penetrating. Right now all he knows is that I kissed Other-Johnson and in doing so I gave my heart and soul to him.
‘Anyway,’ he says but doesn’t finish. Instead he gives me the cursory
glance to end all cursory glances and disappears.
I try my best to move, to go after him.
‘Wait,’ I croak. I need to tell him I didn’t mean that about Other-Johnson. It was panic and fear. They were the words of a desperate fool.
But nothing is working. I can’t move and my limbs might as well belong to someone else.
A cupboard door opens at the back of the church and a creaky hinge screeches.
‘Johnson?’ I cough.
The creaky cupboard door closes and he heads back towards me. Maybe he’s forgiven me, maybe when they swapped he got Other-Johnson’s telepathic power and can read my mind and heart.
Johnson sinks down to the floor of the altar area with me. He has decided not to strip me and instead wraps me in a priest’s thick billowing black cassock.
‘Wrap this round you.’
I’m shaking and trembling with cold. He tries to rub my hands but nothing is working.
‘Johnson,’ I try again.
He quietly climbs inside the great billowing cassock with me. ‘Body warmth,’ he whispers, and then wraps himself round me and holds me tighter than tight.
‘C’mon. Close as you can get. Tight. Tighter.’
I still can’t move my stupid arms properly and Johnson has to do it for me, wrapping me into him, entwining my soaking, frozen body with his. Our faces are level with each other, we are nose to nose, and I think, This is the way it should be, the way it should always be between us. We could lie like this for ever and I’d live and die happy. Well. Once I find the Ape and GG and get reunited with Billie and the Moth and then get us all home and . . . Damn it, can’t I just lie here for a few minutes?
‘How can it be five months?’ My teeth are chattering so hard they’re going to break.
He holds me as tight as he can, rubbing me with his hands, blowing warm breath on my exposed skin. Johnson moves his hand up my back, rubbing it in slow circles. I can feel the denim of his skinny jeans rubbing against the freezing skin of my exposed legs. As feeling returns to my body, I notice my right foot has lost a boot somewhere.
‘Listen to me,’ I tell him.
‘Later.’
‘You don’t understand, Johnson. We were only gone for an an hour or so.’
He stops rubbing my back. It might be the first time I have ever seen Johnson look speechless.
Johnson keeps me crushed into him and I can feel his taut thin body pulling me as close as he can. His dark curly hair falls forward, covering his eyes for a moment. I wonder how come his hair isn’t longer if he’s been here for five months. Has someone been cutting it for him? I want to brush it away but my arms refuse to obey my brain.
‘An hour?’ he asks.
‘Maybe a few minutes longer.’
‘Seriously?’ His eyes search mine, as if trying to work out whether or not to believe me.
‘I swear to you. As soon as we find GG and the Ape they’ll tell you the same thing.’
‘Wow,’ Johnson whispers. ‘That’s, uh . . . That’s . . .’ He loses his way and doesn’t bother finishing his sentence. ‘I don’t understand.’
Suddenly the church doors are flung open and footsteps hurry towards me.
‘OhmyGod!’
I recognise the voice immediately. It’s Billie.
Johnson tenses and quickly removes his arms from round me, almost as if he’s embarrassed.
‘I’ve done what I can,’ Johnson says and starts to wriggle free of the cassock. I try desperately to hold on to him but my numb hands and fingers just won’t respond.
‘Don’t go,’ I say.
‘What are you doing?’ Billie asks him.
‘Body warmth,’ he replies. ‘She fell in the river.’
‘What the hell, Rev?’ Billie hurries over. ‘I mean, my God. It’s really you!’
Johnson eases himself out of the cassock, slipping free of me, and I have this terrible feeling that I will never be this close to him again. Something has shifted between us.
A thick blanket is draped over the cassock. ‘Sit up,’ Billie orders me.
I try to do as she tells me, but I still don’t have the strength. She helps and there’s a quiet sinewy strength to her that I didn’t know she possessed.
She gets me upright. ‘Twit,’ she says and then hugs me tight. ‘Only you could fall into a frozen river.’ But rather than being comforting, the hug is almost too tight, and crushes me a little, squeezing the breath from me.
‘Billie,’ I croak.
‘Where have you been?’ she asks.
The hug is going to break a rib if she doesn’t let me go.
‘Uh . . . Billie, listen . . .’
‘You found a way home, right? That’s why you came back, isn’t it? You’ve finally found a way.’
‘No . . .’ A bone is about to snap, I know it.
‘No?’
‘Billie, you’re crushing me.’ I can’t take in any air.
Finally she releases me and I suck in air, gulping it down. That hug was borderline fatal. But at least she’s pleased to see me.
‘You left us here for months,’ she says. ‘We thought you’d gone for ever.’
‘Billie, I think there’s been a weird shift in time.’
‘What are you talking about?’
Johnson looks on in silence. He wants answers as well.
Billie keeps staring at me. ‘Rev, what d’you mean?’
I get a proper look at her face and see that after five months the deep gouges from Non-Lucas’s attack have healed but left faint scars down her right cheek. Non-Lucas, the double of our Lucas, who the Ape and I found hanging from his kitchen ceiling, was the first doppelganger we met. He lashed out at Billie and in many ways he started what turned into a war between human and alien. If he’d been a little less aggressive and a lot more understanding we could have probably all have got along. Maybe.
‘I haven’t been gone five months,’ I tell Billie.
‘Uh, yeah, you have.’
‘Billie, I haven’t.’
And that’s when the movement comes.
Out of the corner of my eye Billie’s arm slips protectively round Johnson’s waist. A familiar and easy movement that stops my heart.
‘Are you hearing this?’ she asks him.
I wondered what they’d been doing for five months here. Alone. And the closeness of the gesture gives me my answer.
‘We really thought you’d gone for good,’ she says quietly to me. ‘That you weren’t coming back.’
But I’m not listening because all I can do is look at her arm wrapped round Johnson’s waist.
I think back to the river and realise that however frozen and numb the water made me, it’s nothing compared to how dead I feel now. He saved me when I was burning, and he saved me when I was drowning, and all of it has been for nothing.
Johnson darts a quick look at me then looks down at his hand. My eyes follow his and I can see he still has a few strands of my wet electric-pink hair stuck to his palm from where he yanked me out of the freezing river. He studies it for a second and then gently picks it from his palm and lets the hair – my hair – fall lightly to the stone floor.
A whirring noise breaks the quiet hush of the church. I look up and see the Moth in a new electric wheelchair caked in snow. The tiny engine that powers it has been working overtime to battle through the rotten weather and it smells of burning oil.
‘Rev!’ he calls out.
‘Moth.’
I don’t care how cold I am – I struggle to my feet, throwing off the blankets and head straight for him.
It’s not as easy as you’d think hugging someone in a wheelchair, but I do the best I can and hug him tight. His face gets buried in my chest but I’m sure he can live with that. I hug him tightly, not Billie tight but tight enough, like he’s a rock I’m clinging to. Which at this moment he is.
‘Couldn’t believe my eyes when Johnson texted me,’ he says.
I’m aware of Billie and Johnson wat
ching us but I focus my attention on the Moth. ‘Did you see GG or the Ape out there?’
‘They came back with you?’ he asks excitedly.
‘Only just. You wouldn’t believe how close it was, Moth. We ended up in the wrong world. Their world, the doppels. There was a whole town of them.’
I draw away from him. His glasses have slipped from his flat boneless nose and I push them back on for him. He is grinning, still in shock at seeing me again. ‘I knew you’d come back for us. I kept thinking, the Rev I know wouldn’t leave us here. Can’t believe you survived all that time in their world. But you would, Rev. You always find a way.’
He sees a doubt flicker across my face.
‘What?’ he asks.
‘It wasn’t five months,’ I tell him.
‘Rev said they’ve only been gone an hour,’ Johnson says.
The Moth’s brow furrows.
I nod. ‘It was, I swear. GG’ll tell you.’
Wherever he is.
‘An hour?’ The Moth’s voice is caught way back in his throat. He gulps. ‘That’s . . . that’s impossible.’ The Moth scrutinises me. ‘I don’t understand.’
Join the club, I think.
Because I certainly don’t understand how time has passed so differently here. I just assumed we’d come back to the same world we left. I glance at Billie and Johnson. Even after being wrapped up in blankets and a cassock I am still frozen. It can’t be this way; it’s not how these things turn out.
Girl meets boy.
Girl gets boy.
Not girl meets boy and then girl’s best friend gets boy while first girl is stuck in an alien world. I knew she really liked Johnson but I didn’t know he liked her in return. To be honest, and I sound like I’m boasting, but I really thought it was me he was interested in. Other-Johnson certainly was, but I guess I had this Johnson wrong all along. The only good thing is they’re all safe and now we’re back together we can work on a way of getting home again. If Johnson wants Billie, then who am I to stand in the way of that? Which is a lot more understanding and mature than I actually feel underneath.
The church door bursts open and GG and the Ape walk in, GG huddling from the cold while the Ape crushes a snowball on top of his head.