Kzine Issue 3 Page 12

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said to Betty. ‘Its Christmas time. Family time. We’ll send James a letter. Make peace. You can help me write it.’

  They spent until the small hours getting the words just right.

  Mr Tibs almost cried when he read their letter. Anything he did would be a risk, and he didn’t have a good history with risks. But he owed them. He owed all of them. Very carefully he wrote a short letter. Then he emailed engineering.

  A week passed and a letter arrived from James. It was very short. They sat on the bed together, the envelope trembling between their hands.

  ‘You open it.’

  ‘No you.’

  They had no doubt who the it must be from.

  Betty opened it.

  Dearest Mum and Dad,

  I am so happy to hear you’re doing well at the Home. Little James and Mary are doing terribly well at school. You’ll hardly recognize them when you see them next. They have grown to so much. I don’t think we’ll make this Christmas. But how about March, in time for Mum’s birthday? We would have loved to come, but I promised to take the kids to one of those super playparks and I can’t go back on that, can I? I hope you understand.

  Your loving son.

  James.

  They looked at each other and saw the hope fade in each other’s eyes. He wasn’t coming. Their only son wasn’t coming for Christmas though they’d told him how very important it was to them. They must have been such bad parents.

  Betty withdrew into herself and didn’t get out of bed any more. She stopped watching for swans. Bill was distraught. This was his entire fault. He’d remembered something that would have been better left alone. But she had always worn that jacket – maybe somewhere in the corner of her mind was tucked a memory of their son. We would have loved him so much, he thought. He would have been the most loved baby ever. He felt as if he had looked under a plaster expecting to see a graze and found a mortal wound. He began to wonder if anyone else here felt like that. Could they all be the victims of some terrible disease that slowly destroyed the mind? A government experiment gone wrong? He knew his imaginings were wild, but reality made no sense. It was harder and harder sitting with Betty, so he started taking long walks through the Home. He’d never left her side for more than a couple of hours before, but she didn’t seem to notice. Or if she did, she didn’t say anything.

  The corridors here were all half-glass, showing the landscape gardens outside. As he wandered down one wing, Bill thought how much this reminded him of the layout of his old high school. In other places it reminded him of the hospital where James was born. As he walked the exercise seems to be working loose memories in his brain. On the third day of his promenade the staff adjusted to his new habit. They started to predict his route, and catch up with him at his med times. On one occasion an orderly was waiting around a corner with lunch already laid out on a tray in front of one of the reclining chairs. He’d even put out a flower in a vase.

  It occurred to him that the staff went out of their way to be nice here. Nothing was begrudged, and it didn’t feel as if it was done out of fear of imminent inspection. No, they all genuinely appeared to want to help. This made all his suspicions harder. He hadn’t ventured into any of the other rooms or wards yet, but he’d already noticed several things that were just plain wrong.

  He asked for a notebook small enough to keep in his pocket and started to make a list.

  1. It’s always sunny outside

  2. There are no Christmas decorations

  3. I never see anyone coming through the front door

  4. I don’t remember ever being in the grounds

  *****************************************************

  When he mentioned the lack of Christmas decorations to his morning nurse, that afternoon they appeared on the corridors.

  ‘See, Mr Hastings. I told you they were still in storage. Would you like a tree in your room?’

  ‘Will it be real?’ The nurse paled.

  ‘If-if you want.’

  It arrived the next morning, a miniature silver pine. He hadn’t known you got miniature silver pines.

  ‘Look, it has bells,’ said his nurse.

  Bill added another line to his list.

  5. They are just too damn nice here. It’s not natural.

  As the days inched their way towards Christmas Bill’s step became livelier. This was like old times. He recalled the flavour of pursuing a case, tracking a criminal, solving a puzzle. It was this reprise of youth that made him decide to enter a ward. He didn’t ask permission. He didn’t doubt it would be given. Senga seemed to have free reign from the stories she’d told, so he didn’t expect there to be a problem. He didn’t in any way expect what he would find in this first ward.

  At first all he saw were two rows of beds backed against the walls. Like an old fashioned hospital there were curtain rails out above each bed, and strange patterned blue curtains fasted by each headboard. The beds all had brown wooden foot ends, and white swing-over trays beside them. Sunlight flooded the room from floor length windows. There was the sound of a television at the far end. Down the centre isle had been scattered a number of deeply padded sofas and chairs. Faint music echoed round the room, and there was the smell of roses. If they didn’t have the privilege of a private room, any patient would be happy to find themselves here. Any sick person would feel welcomed and safe. Only the people he saw in front of him were not sick. A lot of them were not even old. And he knew every last one of them.

  He stopped screaming after they got him back to his room. He sat on the end of his bed shivering, and rocking backwards and forwards, hugging himself. Betty began to cry with fear.

  ‘Bill, Bill, its ok Bill. You’re safe. You’re with me now.’

  ‘They’re all there,’ he whispered. ‘All of them.’

  ‘Who’s there?’

  He turned and looked her full in the face. His eyes as wide as a child’s on Christmas night, but any wonderment was shot through with heart-stopping fear.

  ‘Everyone, Betty. Everyone from our old neighbourhood. Even the Sinclair kids.’

  ‘But this is an old people’s home, Bill.’

  ‘No, its not Betty. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not that. I don’t understand.’

  He beat his head slowly and softly off the wall, but he stayed within the circle of Betty’s frail arms.

  Mr Tibs arrived. His face full of compassion, he asked Betty to leave them alone for a moment.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Bill threw at him the moment she was out of the door.

  ‘Mr Tibs.’

  ‘Your first name?’

  The man said nothing.

  ‘You don’t have one, do you?’

  Mr Tibs drew up a chair.

  ‘I’ve lost my mind, haven’t I?’ asked Bill.

  ‘No, no, you haven’t,’ said Mr Tibs. ‘You’re trying to solve a puzzle and you don’t have enough information.’

  ‘Tell me. You’re all so damned reasonable all the time, tell me.’

  ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea. Bill, you have a good life here. We give you everything you need, don’t we? You have friends here.’

  ‘What am I? Some kind of zoo animal? You have my whole street here – all ages in some kind of hospital? Were we all contaminated in some government experiment?’

  ‘You have such a wonderful imagination. All of you do. No, it’s nothing like that. Everything will be normal again, you just have to have some patience.’

  ‘Where’s James?’

  Bill studied Mr Tibs face seriously for the first time. It was a round, friendly face, with a scrappy ginger beard, brown eyes behind round rimmed glasses. He was dressed in the same faded green tweed he always wore, and he wore a slight smile. He didn’t in any way resemble the cat with whom he shared his name, but he was the image of a Sunday afternoon children’s TV uncle. He was that mysterious, magical man, who turns up at the last minute, pulls a spell out of his hat
and saves the day.

  ‘You’re not real,’ he told the startled Tibs.

  A moment later, he said.

  ‘You’re not even human.’

  ‘You must have been a very good policeman,’ said Mr Tibs.

  Then he left.

  Now that he knew Mr Tibs was an alien, Bill felt much better. He started trying to reason out how it worked. He wasn’t afraid. If the Tibsians (as he privately called them) had wanted to harm them it would have happened by now. He began to write in his notebook again.

  Idea No 1. This is some kind of alien zoo. We have been captured/abducted and removed from Earth. Purpose: to learn more about humanity. Possibly weren’t sure we were sentient. Can’t blame them, especially if they had been monitoring the TV signals far out into space.

  Idea No 2. I am completely mad and this is some kind of insane illusion. Brought on by what?

  Idea No 3. I am wrong, and it is a government cover-up after all.

  Idea No 4. I am missing the point.

  It’s ridiculous he told himself. I’m mad to consider any of this. He told Betty nothing, and hid the notebook under his pillow at night. He tried to pretend he knew nothing. He tried to forget about it all, but his mind kept picking at the puzzle even if he was cutting his mind on a razor-wire knot. Christmas came and went. He’d asked the nurses if he had money. Apparently he had plenty, so he ordered a present for Betty. She had apparently done the same, so that Christmas morning he gave her ruby pendant, and she gave him a gold pen.

  ‘You’re doing so much writing now,’ she told him. ‘I thought this might help. Will you show me one day?’

  He distracted her with a Christmas game of scrabble; a special festive treat as he usually refused to play the game.

  On Boxing Day Betty began to ask about James again, and Bill knew that he had to find the answers, no matter how unwelcome they might be. He started by going out to the car park.

  When he walked up to the automatic door he was almost disappointed when it opened. If it failed, if he had been locked in, then that would have meant something. The winter air was thrilling. It chilled the bottom of his lungs. He took huge gulps, relishing his freedom. No one had followed him yet. The path was grey gravel. He decided to walk round and see swan lake for the first time without glass intervening. Two hours later he was still walking along the avenue; there was no sign of the lake. He was beginning to breath heavily when he found himself back at the door.

  It didn’t make sense. He had walked around the whole of the building without seeing the lake. He went back to his room; the door opening easily to let him back in. Betty was sitting up in bed reading a magazine. Through the window opposite her, two swans were gliding across the lake.

  In his notebook he wrote

  a) Inside of building does not match outside

  b) Mr Tibs is too normal to be real

  c) Mr Tibs is named after our old cat

  d) All the people from my neighbourhood are here

  e) No one seems to mind anything

  Conclusion – this is an artificial environment, and all the ‘patients’ are somehow controlled.

  The Question – where is James? Did he ever exist? If he doesn’t, who wrote that letter? If he does, where is he?

  Tomorrow he decided, he would question everyone, and he would tell Betty everything he knew.

  He awoke in the middle of the night. It was dark. He could see the shadowy shape of Betty in her bed, her chest rising and falling softly. As the dark rested on his eyes, he thought, I have never been outside at night. If this is an artificial environment, an illusion, is it twenty-four hours? I have never been out at night.

  He got out of bed quietly, found his slippers and dressing gown and feeling a lot like a schoolboy, snuck out into the hall. He hoped Betty wouldn’t wake. Maybe she would think he had another lady to visit. He chuckled softly to himself, and the slight sound seemed to bounce along the empty corridor ahead of him. There was no one around. The place had an eerie, deserted night face. The loudest sound was his slippers slapping back against the soles of his feet. Betty insisted on buying him ‘half-cuts’, as he called them. She claimed he trod down the backs so badly, there was no point them having backs at all. She wore full slippers, she didn’t have to deal with the annoying, slappy, slapperty noise, but then neither of them had imagined he would need to sneak around the Home in the dead of night. Laughter bubbled in his throat again; at his age to be a cat burglar. There was nothing suspicious here.

  He came to the front door, and walked up to it. It didn’t open. Through the glass panels he could see the quiet, woody drive outside and a cream cheese moon. Did they turn the automatic mechanism off at night? It would be too dangerous to lock them in. Then he could feel the hair on the nape of his neck rise. It was an odd feeling, and it had only happened when he was about to make a breakthrough in a case, as if a secret, hidden, knowledgeable part of him was awakening, urging him forward. He put his hands against the cold of the door; it slid easily. But as it moved, so the scene through the glass, like a taped poster, split in half, and slid too. Through the open crack he saw the drive, but beyond where the horizon and where the distant carpet of stars should have stood, was a darkness filled with broken, tumbling things. He tried to understand, to see. It was as if a giant had taken a hammer and smashed the sky and sent it tumbling into geometric shapes. The far world was a hybrid of giant child’s toy and three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Nausea swamped him, but Bill wasn’t afraid. The scene was awesome and confusing. He didn’t want to understand. He went back to bed, closing the door behind him.

  He awoke again later that night. The lamp in the corner was on. Mr Tibs was sitting in a chair beneath it. He had Bill’s notebook in his hand.

  ‘You have a fine mind, Bill. Your thinking is strong and clear. Your spirit is quite untameable.’

  ‘Is that what I am then? Was I right about the zoo?’

  ‘No. No. You weren’t. The scene at the door should have told you that.’

  ‘I thought perhaps you turned the wallpaper off at night.’

  Mr Tibs leaned forward in his chair, the buttery light flattering his soft face.

  ‘No, you didn’t,’ he said kindly. ‘But I don’t think you want to know what’s going on now.’

  Bill stuck out his chin.

  ‘Tell me!’

  ‘If I tell you nothing will change. You will be the only one of your kind to know the secret and you will be lonelier than ever. Do you want that?’

  ‘James,’ whispered Bill, and his voice was suddenly that of a very old man. ‘I want my son.’

  Mr Tibs took off his glasses and pinched the top of his nose.

  ‘Bill, I promise you I will do my best to see you are with your son again soon.’

  ‘He exists? It isn’t some insane delusion?’

  ‘He did and he will again.’

  ‘Then he is dead?’ His voice broke.

  ‘No. It isn’t as simple as that. He isn’t dead. He just isn’t here in the now.’

  Bill was furious, desperate and in terrible pain. He couldn’t find the words. Mr Tibs handed him a glass.

  ‘Drink this and I will explain.’

  Bill took it and drank to drown his sobs.

  ‘I am going to tell you a story, Bill. Please listen until the end. A long time ago, a group of people discovered something terrible was about to happen to their world. Their only chance was to flee – to leave their home and travel impossibly fast across the universe to escape the cataclysm.’

  ‘You mean like an exploding Star or something?’

  ‘Exactly. To do the impossible you have to step outside reality. You have to take on the mantel of the gods, and sadly, we were not worthy of this. Our scientists created a probability engine – I’m not going to bore you with the details, it will become clear we didn’t understand it ourselves. We needed to go faster than light, faster than time, faster than the heartbeat of the universe; and the universe could not bear the st
rain. We took a risk trying to save ourselves. But the truth was we saved our own – at a terrible cost. We unravelled the universe. We fled by turning a small pocket of reality – for want of better description – inside out. Then we pushed this pocket through the fabric of the universe, and in so doing effectively tore one of the seams. We don’t know if it is everything, but a huge unimaginable amount of the universe came undone – fractured into whirling pieces. It is all there, all alive, all trapped at that moment. Since then we have had to accept a godlike responsibility. We, my race, have vowed to pull the pieces back together. We were all that was left – all that was whole, and we will spend eternity rebuilding the universe. It takes – I would say time, but time is hardly present yet – patience and fortitude. We have only a few tiny segments joined. On this world, we tried to pull you back in your social groups. It took a long time for us to understand that living closely didn’t mean you were family, nor that association for periods of time (such as schooling) didn’t necessarily mean friendship. We have done our best to ensure the happiness of the pockets we have recovered, but we don’t always get it right. I have a huge team of people desperately trying to restore the area your son was in. He will be back. We know we can now recover everything. It takes time.’

  ‘So I might be dead before I see him again.’

  ‘No, that too would be wrong. We –my people- have vowed to set this right. The weight of our guilt is only alleviated by whatever little happiness we can bring you. We have condemned ourselves to hell and only those we restore can save us.’

  It was too much. Bill thought only of his baby.

  ‘How do you know I won’t die before you find him?’

  Mr Tibs put his head on one side and looked at him.

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ whispered Bill. ‘I do know. Time, you’ve stopped time here, haven’t you? How long have I been waiting for my son?’

  ‘As you have lived, just over a thousand years,’ said Mr Tibs.

  ‘I’m dreaming. That’s impossible.’

  ‘That’s the best way of thinking of it. One day it will be right – and until then it is only a bad dream. Go back to sleep, Bill.’ He was nodding already.