A Broken Darkness

by Premee Mohamed

  “...What.”

  “Can you get me some coins from the fountain?”

  “Can you go back to what you said a second ago?” But she was already fiddling with her laptop, not listening. I walked back to the fountain and scooped up a handful of change.

  She pored over them, frowning, then held them out on her palm for me to look at: blank discs of metal, though with edges clipped or serrated as if they were real coins. You fucked up, I almost said, then bit my tongue. Stick with the mission, can’t get information if you lose your temper at her. “Let’s go see if we can find some street signs or something,” I said.

  “No, hang on,” she said slowly. “I asked the spell to take us back to the… to the last place that that place had led to. Which I assumed would be where we came in.”

  I looked around, cautiously, in case the sky wanted to fry my eyeballs again. It looked like the little of Edinburgh I’d seen so far, I had to admit. The shape and size of the buildings, their architecture, the cobbled ground, even the fountain. The only weird thing about it was the apparent lack of a way in or out, though perhaps that was common for courtyards, maybe you just used the doors. You wouldn’t have built anything wide enough for a car if you were just going in and out of the buildings on foot…

  “Maybe we’re back,” she said, “but not exactly where we came in. Maybe while we were walking, we came out somewhere… from the vaults, I mean. Not under the Castle any more. But…”

  She fell silent too, thinking. I hoped we weren’t thinking the same thing, though without much hope. The sea, the pool of water, the trees, the roof. That last glimpse of the sign on the door. Not The Matrix, but the Matrix.

  I said, “I don’t think They did get back. I think They figured something else out. How to… turn things. Into Themselves. They started with… well, who knows, probably too gross to think about. I don’t know. But at some point They tried it with people. Those things at the party, those tourists we saw. And it’s… not just people. I think it’s things, too. Turning our stuff into their stuff. Turning Earth into…”

  And then I really did have to stop, because I had no idea. There was nothing like this in the books or the stories, or nothing I’d seen anyway, from the histories of Their repeated invasions and attempts; which made sense, I guessed. No time for small-talk while you’re getting killed and eaten. “Over there,” I said, when Johnny still did not reply. “Their dimension. Their place.”

  She nodded, still playing absently with the handful of blank coin-things. “Theory five,” she said at last.

  “What?”

  “That spell felt practically effortless,” she said. “It shouldn’t have. There was a lot of magic, free magic, right where we were. And with the gates shut, there should be virtually none on Earth. So did we leave our dimension and go somewhere else, or did a lot of magic flood into ours somehow? I’m thinking the second. So, theories. But let’s look for a way out while we theorize.”

  “We?”

  “I was being generous. Theory one: those things were hiding here, left over from the Anomaly. Except the spell I used at the alignment in 2002, the Heracleion Chant, that’s designed to tag and eject Them to the far side of the gates before shutting. And the gates did shut, so the spell must have succeeded.”

  “Okay. What’s theory two?” The air was damp, heavily charged; it was hard to breathe, and crackled in our lungs like it was forty below. We moved methodically around the cobbled square, checking for a way out. The things that looked like doorways were actually just arches filled with stone, corner-to-corner, like the plaster decorations placed as faux-fancy architecture in chain restaurants. One of the walls was crosshatched with chisel marks if you were being generous, claw marks if you weren’t.

  We gave that one a good long look. Eventually she said, “Theory two is that some of Them were in some kind of… suspended animation, or a juvenile form, or a spore. We don’t know much about Their biology, because They’re not really biological creatures as we understand them, Their physics don’t work like ours, how They experience time, gravity, electricity, light, magic. But supposing They were in a form insensible to the spell, or had been shielded somehow, perhaps in an artifact, a hoar-stone or a statue or a geological formation, supposing They weren’t alive enough for the spell to work on them.”

  “I don’t like that theory much.”

  “Me too. Or three or four, either. Theory three, something like accidental transport. But I’ve only ever read that it’s extremely difficult. You can only get through a gate under the correct conditions, and if you know the spells to make it open. And even then, crossing it is dangerous and exhausting, apparently. Like squeezing yourself through a revolving door that’s moving too fast, They get battered, beaten up, drained of magic and life force, or whatever They call it. Four, deliberate transport, but outside of a gate. A dimensional tear, perhaps. Like walking through the drywall instead of using the door. But They’ve always used gates because gates, frankly, work. Did They find out, figure out, something else that did? Maybe. But if so, why not launch a full-scale assault? Why this… this piecemeal, half-assed, picking on us?”

  We were back at the fountain. I sat on the edge and looked around again, trying to surreptitiously relax my painfully-clenched jaw. Why us. Why us in this perfect square, something off-putting about the way we had been placed in it, had walked its perimeter and crossed it. I thought of the summer Johnny had taught Carla how to play chess; Carla had immediately turned around and tried to teach it to me and the twins, but only Chris had figured it out.

  I don’t get it, Carla had said, baffled, a kid of nine or ten gesturing past her long tangled curls at the orderly squares. They can only move one way.

  I know, I’d said; I know, I still don’t get it. I couldn’t understand why Chris got it, either. Carla was the only one Johnny liked to play. I knew that the pieces only moved a certain way; I just couldn’t figure out how to make them move in a way that was useful for what I thought I wanted to accomplish. The pieces didn’t know what they were doing either, and couldn’t stop someone if they were breaking the rules.

  Who was moving us now, I wondered? Someone was. Pawn, knight, bishop, queen, king. We were only moving in the ways we were allowed to move. I was sure of it. Or if they were not yet, if they had just begun to watch us with a kind of horrified amazement, accidentally going places that we were not supposed to be, then the game would start very soon. Now that we had been spotted on the board...

  “Theory five,” I said. “They couldn’t get here from there, so They just started turning here into there.”

  “Yes. Is that the winning theory? I don’t know. I need more information. And we need to get the hell out of here. How’m I supposed to do anything stuck in a courtyard? This is worse than the woods.”

  “Yeah, we can’t even eat leaves here.”

  “I could eat you.”

  “I’d eat you first.” We began another circuit. “If we’d ended up in a city that looked like Edinburgh,” I said, “maybe exactly like it, but it wasn’t, would we know?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  She shrugged, and knocked on the stone inside an arch with her knuckle. “If we were in an Edinburgh in a dimension a lot like ours, but not exactly.”

  “Are there dimensions like that?”

  “Probably.”

  “A long time ago, you told me...” I paused at the next arch, which was particularly deep, and pushed experimentally against it, to no effect. “That the universe was a certain shape because it wouldn’t work otherwise. But you also said every universe in which a spell is cast is... is a completely different one from the universe that existed before it.”

  “Yeah. And we should both probably stop saying ‘the’ universe. You mean ours.”

  “So... what happens to all those old universes? Do they disappear?”

  She blinked. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  We walked for a few minu
tes, as she grew increasingly agitated, till I could nearly hear the gears in her head moving. “I don’t know. Like, there’s only so much energy and mass, so you’d think... but that’s not true either, when you think about it. That’s never been true. There’s both energy and mass coming in from somewhere else. Somewhere outside.”

  “Outside where?”

  “Outside everywhere. Where They come from. And a lot of other things. Things we don’t know about. Things They fear, because They can’t control them.”

  I didn’t ask where she had learned that, but filed it away to panic about later. “If those universes still exist, and you can travel to them, we could have ended up in one of them. Right? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Well, I don’t think we did, actually.”

  “But are they all exactly the same except for the spell? Or are they different in other ways? Are there ones where... I don’t know. That guy didn’t get shot and World War One didn’t happen? Or like... U2 stayed together? Maybe one where the terrorists did fly the planes into those buildings in New York?”

  “I suppose anything’s possible. You can’t account for knock-on effects after a single change; sometimes there probably aren’t any. Maybe there are billions or trillions just like ours, maybe there are an infinite number that only differ in a single point in history that affected everything after it. Or all those might be unstable and gone.”

  I thought about that for a minute. “Do you think there’s one where you’re not a huge asshole?”

  “Maybe. Infinite, remember?” She paused under the stone arch we’d hidden under originally, staring up at it, flexing her fingers.

  “No,” I said, patiently.

  “Hold my bag for a second.”

  “We are not climbing out of here.”

  “That’s the thing,” she said, sliding the bag off her shoulders and putting it on the ground. “I don’t think we can. I think we’re in a kind of... pocket. It’s not an entire universe, but it’s a piece of one that fulfils all the requirements except coordinates. It’s a place but it’s not in a place, if you know what I mean.”

  “I do not.”

  “And in theory, if it’s the specific pocket I’m thinking of, what we just did was impossible, because no one gets in or out. It’s not a place between places. It’s its own place. So if we got in, what does that mean? Boost me up.”

  “What part of ‘no’ did you not understand? And also, pockets have an opening.”

  “Well do you have any other—eep!”

  I caught her as she tripped backwards over her bag, resulting in a brief but paralyzing moment of terror as I felt her full weight descend on my forearm. The plain stone had begun to... sprout, there was really no other word for it. Grow, twig by twig, rapidly and sinuously, from the cobblestones up to just over her head. The twining wood extended tiny sprigs that met, clasped, rustled into place, till finally it was a bristling but solid oblong in the shape of a door.

  I knew better than to reach for it, and waited patiently next to Johnny until it opened from the inside, golden light flooding out onto the gray stones. It was strange, I reflected as we waited to be invited inside, how quickly you recalibrated your entire existence. Before the Anomaly, I’d have thought I was losing my mind. But now, like the rest of the world that had survived, I knew better. Nothing could be disbelieved and nothing could be dismissed. Everything had to be investigated. You couldn’t walk away from anything any more; you had to walk towards it, so that it couldn’t sneak up on you.

  A querulous voice said, “Did you know that the original meaning of prodigy was ‘an unsolicited message from the gods’?”

  “We can just talk here,” Johnny said.

  “…In.”

  The door nearly shut on my face; I had to shove my foot into the opening, breaking a handful of the twigs. The woman inside stared up at me as I apologized, then let me in.

  “Of course,” I said into the silence.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THREE SPIRALING STAIRCASES of brass and wood rose into the impossibly high ceiling, connecting dozens of catwalks, ladders, and cables between hundreds, maybe thousands, of bookshelves. Bats formed small joyful tornadoes in the highest part of the ceiling, where a dozen ornate chandeliers, chains glittering between them like spiderwebs, supplied most of the light.

  The woman who had let us in was short and elderly, with a ragged halo of silvery hair, clearly in a pair of green-and-white striped pajamas under a thick scarlet robe. She was also, forgivably, holding a cricket bat. “How the hell did you get in here?” she said to Johnny, her accent not, I thought, Scottish, nor English, but some muddle between the two. “You working for them shifty buggers now? Eh? Is that it?”

  “We didn’t come on purpose,” Johnny protested. “It was an accident.”

  “Was it now.”

  “Nick, this is Dr. Huxley,” Johnny said unhelpfully, gesturing between us. “Dr. Hu—”

  “I know who he is. Take your shoes off, you’re tracking in half the outdoors.”

  Still carrying the cricket bat, she led us under the stairs and down a hallway also lined with bookshelves, past rooms filled with heaps of scrolls and huge tomes, crumbling zig-zag creations stitched and stapled together like Frankenstein monsters, tiny books stacked like bricks and making little houses on their shelves, books on chains, books under glass domes, books clearly designed to look like other things: a small chest-of-drawers, a safe, a gargoyle. I wasn’t sure how you would read that one, but it clearly had pages, old and yellowed, and a cracked, gold-stamped binding. I wondered what the walls looked like, behind all the knowledge.

  Eventually, we reached a relatively book-free room (only six shelves), a small kitchen with a low wooden ceiling and plaster walls. Somehow this was more disorienting than the sudden transition from tunnel to forest, or forest to fountain; I leaned heavily on the doorway and rubbed my temples.

  Huxley lugged a large plastic kettle to the sink, filled it, and turned it on, muttering to herself as she got out three mugs. Even though we were out of sight, I felt oddly watched by all the books, as if they weren’t just inert paper waiting to be bought, nor yet (as I often felt) sleeping until they were selected and read, but as if they were listening. There was a weight to them that felt like the weight of a crowd, sweaty and alive and attentive. I thought of the worms I had seen as we had walked through the vaults: watching, turning to watch.

  “You don’t get here by accident,” Huxley said, not turning. “As you bloody well know, because I happen to be the one charged with keeping out the rabble. Which is you. What were you really doing?”

  “We got stuck somewhere else. Like this.”

  “And you got out how, precisely?”

  Johnny stared intently at the floor. “Um, the Distortion of Adar.”

  “Bloody hell. And they let you go around calling yourself a genius. Christ! Drink this.” She slammed a thick white mug of Ovaltine onto the table; I sat and helped myself as Johnny continued to stand awkwardly in the middle of the room.

  “Uh,” I said, when no more information seemed to be forthcoming. “Ma’am, where are we, exactly?”

  “Disneyland. Behave yourselves and later on you’ll get an ice lolly and a photo with Bugs Bunny.” She put another mug down, this one prominently emblazoned with the Olympics logo and a little MOSCOW 1980 plaque. “You’re in a place that doesn’t exist. Where d’you think?”

  Johnny swayed a little, and managed to sit in one of the stiff-backed wooden chairs, curling her hands around the mug. I looked out the lace-curtained window over Huxley’s shoulder, not very surprised to see more books.

  “I never thought I’d see this place in person. I wasn’t even sure we were here,” Johnny said.

  “Damn right you thought. ’S why they put it in a bloody remnant, isn’t it? Formerly the Rodhalazz Repository, now known officially as the Huxley Archives, lucky me, ho ho, ha ha. That’s sarcasm, by the way, go on and laugh. Books here from places yo
u’ll never go, places that don’t exist yet, and places that quit existing on a timescale we can’t even know. You know what it cost them to keep this running? No? Me neither. You know what they’ll do to you for this? Eh? They don’t tell you, y’know. And why all the lightning?”

  “Dr. Huxley, I’m not working for the Society! I’m not here for them!” Johnny said.

  Huxley snorted, and leaned against the counter with her own mug. Her eyes were nearly the same colour as her skin and hair: a reflective, pearly white. “Mm. Very convincing. If you’re not on the job, then just what the hell are you up to, gallivanting around in remnants? Tell me that.”

  Johnny opened her mouth, but Huxley cut her off before she could speak. “No, you’ll just spew bullshit all over my nice clean kitchen, and I don’t want to have to clean the Equalizer again,” she said, apparently referring to the cricket bat. “You,” she said to me, “you tell me.”

  I cleared my throat and straightened up. Johnny, meanwhile, adopted a posture so exaggeratedly casual and relaxed that I half-expected her to slip off the chair. “Ma’am, if you don’t mind, who are you?”

  “Don’t answer a question with a question, Nicholas.” She snapped her fingers at me. “Now.”

  I gave up. “We were at this party... well, the one at Edinburgh Castle. Which you maybe heard about already on the news? Don’t know if you get the news here, wherever this is? Anyway, in the Great Hall, we were looking at...”

  “I changed my mind,” Huxley said, and turned back to Johnny. “Well?”

  Johnny gave me a helpless look, and then recounted a reasonably accurate story, I thought, though with several major lies of omission (a concept I had to re-teach the twins about once a month or so), beginning with the attack at the party.

  Huxley listened without interrupting, somewhat to my surprise. When she was done, the shocked silence stretched out for what felt like forever, but I was getting used to those now.

  “You hit the czeroth with a rock?”