Multiversum (13 page)

The minute she got home, Jenny dropped her backpack in the front hall and flopped down on the living-room sofa in the living room, exhausted. She sat there for a few seconds, almost afraid that she might doze off again. Then she went upstairs and into the bathroom, lingering in front of the mirror.

‘A hot bath,' she said to her reflection in the mirror. ‘That's what I need. A hot, scented bath.'

She turned the handle of the tap marked with a red disc, then she slowly undressed, folding each article of clothing and placing it in the basket next to the washing machine. Next, she pulled out two bubble-bath tablets from a glass jar on a shelf. She held them up to her nose to inhale the scent of lavender, before dropping them into the water. She also lit two small candles and turned off the light, as a cold shiver made her tremble.

A short while later, immersed in the water up to her neck, she finally shut her eyes. The delicate aroma enveloped her, lulling her like a mother's arms. It was one of the most effective methods of stress relief that she knew.

The hot bath did restore a measure of serenity. When she got out of the water she was breathing deeply, and it seemed to her that the weight she'd been feeling on her chest had lessened, at least to a certain extent.

Wrapped in a white bathrobe, she headed down the hall to her bedroom. The photos of her first victories as a competitive swimmer were hanging on the wall, lining the whole length of the hallway upstairs. A healthy haul of gold medals, she liked to joke. It made her father, Roger, proud of her, and that was unquestionably the greatest satisfaction of all. When she got back to her bedroom, she positioned two pillows at the top of her bed, lay down, and rested her head on them. It still felt so heavy.

She pulled a small remote control out of the top drawer of her bedside table and turned on the stereo. Music filled the room. It was a Sarah McLachlan song she adored: ‘Angel'. The rain was beating against the window while the delicate voice of the Canadian singer provided the soundtrack to that grim afternoon.

Jenny stood up and slowly let the bathrobe slip to the floor. She stood there, naked, for a few seconds, looking at herself in the closet mirror, admiring her athletic body and her golden skin. Then she glanced around her. The door was ajar and she was alone in the house. Still, for some reason she couldn't fathom, Jenny felt she was being watched.

The vortex.

A jumble of wailing and crying, words, and gigantic, indistinct shapes. Millions of voices overlapping, blending with elusive images that whirled through her head as if in some awful centrifuge of feelings and visions.

A few seconds passed. Then, silence.

Alex's eyes focused on his surroundings. The little houses on Blyth Street, next to one another, all so similar, all so conventional and predictable. The incessant rain was pounding on the roofs and drowning the plants in the front gardens. When he tried to look down at his feet, Alex saw nothing. Only the street. A sign next to an intersection fifty metres away said
Blyth St
. At the end of the street, though, he didn't see the roundabout with the wind-tossed trees that he'd noticed before. There was only a traffic light at a normal intersection.

What does this mean?

He walked over to the gate in front of Mary Thompson's house. He looked at the mailbox. There was a sign on it:
Graver
.

Alex felt a sense of fear like a razor-sharp blade against his neck. But he was surprised and excited too. He moved forward, though he did not feel himself physically walking. When he found himself outside the gate, he moved through it. There was no need to open it. The same thing happened with the front door. In a few seconds he was inside the house.

I just passed through it …

The decor inside was different from what he remembered. For instance, there was no longer a painting of the Earth as seen from the moon. That wall was bare. Alex moved forward and started up the steps. At the top, he glimpsed a half-open door. The walls of the corridor were lined with photographs in this order: a brown-haired girl holding a trophy; a girl in a swimsuit standing on the highest level of a podium; a girl in a swimming cap who was high-fiving a man, their faces beaming as they held two colourful ribbons tied to a gold medal.

Alex kept going, heading for the door that was ajar. The tension was sky-high, but he couldn't feel his chest bursting with emotion. He had no bodily sensation of any kind. Anxiety was nothing but an
idea
, linked to no physical symptoms at all.

When he reached the door, his eyes crossed the threshold in a split second.

Jenny was standing in front of the cupboard door, naked. She was looking around and seemed frightened. It was her. He knew it was. The white bathrobe was on the floor, at her feet. Her body was a vision that was both astonishing and captivating. Her long-limbed figure, her athletic legs, her golden skin, and her firm breasts cast a spell over Alex. Her chestnut hair, still wet, tumbled over her broad swimmer's shoulders. And there was no mistaking her eyes. He'd seen them before. He'd dreamed them before.

I'm here
…

He didn't have time to think anything else. The vortex took him away.

When he opened his eyes again, he was lying on the ground, next to a road. It was still raining, and his clothes were drenched. The sky was dark, as if it were already evening. Cars were driving by on the asphalt. Alex dragged himself down the pavement until he reached the wall of an apartment building, then he pulled himself to his feet. His eyes were filled with water: it was hard to make out his surroundings. He could taste blood in his mouth.

With a quick glance, Alex noticed his backpack. He grabbed it, unzipped the outside pocket, and rummaged inside for his phone. He found it and tried turning it on. He absolutely had to talk to Marco, but the display refused to light up.

‘Damn it, get going!' he shouted. But nothing happened. Maybe the battery had run down, or, more likely, water had gotten into the circuitry, damaging it irreparably. He looked around, dejected, and saw a pink-and-blue neon sign at the end of the street. It was blurry in the wall of rain, but Alex could still make out what it said:
Internet Café
.

A few seconds later, he was talking to his friend. He had tattered earphones clamped to his head, and a small, beat-up microphone that he had to hold up to his mouth. The manager of the internet café, an Indian guy who looked around thirty, was eyeing him suspiciously.

‘Alex, do you understand what this means?'

Marco's questions always started with the assumption that it was just as clear to Alex what was going on as it was to him.

‘This can only mean one thing,' Marco continued. His voice rang out loud and clear.

Now that his phone was unusable, there was only one way left to communicate with Marco: talk to him on Skype. Alex was sitting in a corner cubicle, between a fairly chubby kid and a woman with Asian features.

It was about ten in the morning in Italy when the Skype window had opened on Marco's laptop. He was reading the headlines of the morning newspapers. Pale daylight filtered in through the window, reflecting off the steaming cup of tea that he'd set down on his desk.

From the PC in the internet café, Alex couldn't make a video call, but the audio quality was perfect. He noticed the people around him looking at him curiously. Perhaps they were staring at him because he was soaking wet from head to toe. His blond fringe was stuck to his forehead and kept dripping, and his clothes had become heavy and cold.

‘You were in her world. You went outside your own dimension, with your mind.'

Alex sat there for a moment, thinking about what his friend had just said. ‘That's exactly the sensation that I had. The feeling that I was being detached from my body and that I existed only in my mind.'

‘You can cross the threshold between two worlds …' said Marco, as if talking to himself. He needed to repeat this, which, until just a short while ago, had been nothing but wild conjecture. ‘We don't know how you did it, we only know that it wasn't your body on the other side.'

‘Which has nothing to do with what happened in this world, in the house that belongs to Mary Thompson over here. Marco … I saw Jenny, the six-year-old girl, and she talked to me.'

‘What?'

Alex told Marco about the vision he'd had in the living room of Mary Thompson's house and how he'd run away, only to find himself in the middle of a thunderstorm before fainting. He told him Jenny's phrase:
Remember, Alex? If we wanted to travel, we stared at the belt.

Marco remained silent for a few seconds, while the connection became patchy, with an intermittent buzzing.

‘I can't hear what you're saying,' were the last words Alex managed to make out before the call was cut off entirely. He tried to call back, but he saw that the computer was now offline and, when he looked around at the other people in the room, he realised he wasn't the only one with this problem.

He stood up, paid, and left the internet café. He'd call Marco later, one way or another. Once he was out on the street, a gust of chilly wind hit him. He pulled his iPod out of his pocket and slipped in his headphones. The opening arpeggio of ‘Getting Better' by Tesla started playing in his ears. The first words sung by Jeff Keith, about rain, seemed to describe a situation pretty much like his own: in fact, the water kept coming down incessantly, and Alex was drenched and starving.

Jenny got dressed hastily and went downstairs. In a fit of anxiety, she entered the kitchen and sat down to think over what had happened. There had been someone in the room with her. She was sure of it. It hadn't been a hallucination. It was a presence.

I'm here
… The words reverberated in her head. She'd heard them clearly. It had been Alex's voice.

Jenny got up again, went over to the stove, and opened one of the kitchen cabinets. She pulled out a bag of chamomile tea and started the kettle.

‘I have to stay calm,' she said to herself. ‘Nothing, none of this at all, really exists. It's all just in my head.'

17

After closing the Skype window, Marco picked up a pen from a holder that had originally been a Sprite can, and grabbed a ream of paper from his desk. It was a printout of the findings from the search done by the software he'd designed. He preferred to go through the results one by one on paper, rather than strain his eyes staring at the monitor.

He started striking off the ones he found the least interesting: entries on several blogs, jokes on Facebook, Twitter messages from around the world. The software had listed, catalogued, and translated into Italian all types of correspondence worldwide about parallel dimensions and the theory that Marco had explained to Alex.

Useless garbage, the kind of results you'd get from Google: let's take a look at the text messages
, he thought to himself as he drew lines through the various hits, the lid of the pen clamped between his lips. Sifting through those results could take all day, but Marco had invented the program to find private content, the kind of things a simple web search could never have come up with.

There weren't many text messages that mentioned the Multiverse. Most of the ones that did had to do with scientific theories read on some tech journal or other. Nothing interesting.

Suddenly a message caught his attention:

Yes, I know it. The problem is that this ebook is impossible to find. I downloaded it last year and read it, but a week later I couldn't open it again. The file appeared to have been corrupted. And I couldn't find it online anymore.

Marco's eyes lit up.

I have to find the previous message.
He set down the stack of papers on the desk and went back into the program with a click of the mouse.

Once he'd found the message, he right-clicked it, opening a window and selecting the button marked
More Information
. The recipient's phone number was right before his eyes. Marco selected it, copied it, and pasted it into a search field in his software to see whether he got any hits. He wanted to see if the program was able to dig up any earlier messages from the same conversation.

‘Yes! This is it!' he said exultantly as he read the contents.

The sender's number was a match. And so was the topic of discussion.

It's called: Thomas Becker's MULTIVERSUM (Die Realität, die uns umgibt, ist nur eine der unendlichen parallelen Dimensionen).

The translation of the subtitle read:
The reality that surrounds us is only one of an infinite number of parallel dimensions
.

‘Excellent,' whispered Marco as he reached for his pen and noted the two mobile-phone numbers on a sheet of paper.

He punched in the first number on his Skype keypad. It proved to be out of service. He drew a line through the first number and went on to the next one. The same thing happened. Then his fingers clattered on the laptop's keyboard, and he opened three windows with websites of online bookstores.

‘Damn it, nothing's showing up. It must be out of print,' he said, as he opened up his software again.