Shift (27 page)

"What if I fall back into one of Peter's worlds?"

"Easy answer—don't. You should see a faint light long before you get anywhere near Peter. Look for a change in the void, a patch of grey, a point of light, something like that. But make sure you keep me in sight at all times. I'll stay here."

And hope. At least doing it this way they couldn't make things worse. Wherever Louise went, they'd have a reference point that they knew was only a matter of metres away from Upper Heywood.

Unless there were currents.

He cursed his imagination. Why couldn't he have stuck on the image of himself as an anchor in an unshifting, featureless void? Why introduce the concept of currents?

"Can you still hear me?" asked Louise. He could barely make out her image—a distant smudge against an immense black blanket. But if he could hear her didn't that mean she was less than ten metres away?

"Can you see anything?" he asked.

"I can barely see you."

"Try other directions," he suggested. "Use me as your centre and spiral out. Upper Heywood can't be far."

Unless we're racing away on a higher dimensional jet stream. Which, of course, we wouldn't be able to feel as we have no sensation of movement in the higher dimensions. Or touch—we could be travelling at a thousand miles an hour and not feel the slightest wind.

Nick added sensory deficiency to his list of things to curse.

Time passed. Nick waited while Louise spiralled and orbited. She hadn't found anything but did she really know what to look for? And was she trying all ten axes of movement? Not that he knew how to discriminate between ten axes of movement but he had the feeling—the certainty—that he'd be able to do it better than Louise. He was more receptive to that kind of thing, more experienced.

He called Louise back. "You stay here while I have a go."

He threw himself into it. He imagined his mind a holoviewer and projected an image of a ten-dimensional universe inside. Then imagined moving within it. He thought up, he thought left, he thought back, he thought 'a' axis, 'b' axis, 'c.' And tried to translate that thought into movement. Whether it worked or not he wasn't sure. But he felt better for trying. He pushed himself out to the limits, pushed Louis's image to that of a vague star. And hovered, imagining himself a huge mirror, a huge mirror of infinite diameter, sucking up the faintest image from the palest, most distant light source.

But saw nothing.

They had to travel farther afield. It would be a risk, but Upper Heywood couldn't be that far away and what else could they do? They couldn't wait forever.

Louise agreed. The physical world had to be close. They couldn't have been travelling out of body for more than a few seconds.

They set out from their starting point in a slow spiral, Nick taking the lead and Louise taking a wider position, six maybe ten metres to his side.

They scanned as they went, stopping occasionally with a surge of hope as first one and then the other thought they detected a change in the cloying blackness of the all-encompassing void.

Each time they were wrong.

They swung out wider—changed planes, changed axes—or maybe they covered the same ground as before. Who could tell?

"This isn't working," said Louise.

Nick had to agree. "There must be another way," he said. "If John Bruce managed it, so can we."

"It took John eighteen months."

"But he wouldn't have known where he was or what he was looking for—we do! There must be some way of navigating through this. Some innate skill we've forgotten about. Something that drew that part of John Bruce home."

"Like what?"

"I don't know! But there had to be something. The fact that he returned to a place he knew makes me think it wasn't coincidence. Something drew him there, a memory, maybe a memory of visiting his father at the air base, something that made him feel safe and something he latched onto at a time of need."

Or maybe not. Maybe he just orbited the Earth for eighteen months until Peter, the psychic fly trap, extended some higher dimensional snare into the void and snagged him.

He felt like screaming. The frustration of it all. He couldn't think in this void. It was like a vast blanket of thought-destroying matter. There was nothing to look at, nothing to catch your imagination and send it spinning down some unexpected path of brilliance. He liked distractions, movement, sparks to ignite his creativity.

Silence was for contemplation, thinking things through when you had a semblance of a thought that needed refining but it couldn't provide that initial spark of inspiration and that's what he needed now. Inspiration.

Or maybe something intuitive . . .

Yes!

"What is it?" asked Louise.

"Blank your mind, Lou. It's got to be worth a try. Trust to instinct. See if something leaps in and tells you the way home."

"You call that a plan?"

"I do when I'm desperate. And I've seen what the human mind can do. I've read the case histories. Some people say we all have these latent abilities, vestigial knowledge from earlier times, that we can tap into during times of need. And all we're asking for now is a sense of direction. Just an inkling—this way or that."

"A homing instinct."

"Exactly. It's not that far-fetched, is it? Think home and see what happens."

They thought home—nothing—they cleared their thoughts, they waited, they offered up their minds as empty vessels for some arcane process to fill. Still nothing. No blinding light of revelation, no tug in an unexpected direction, no . . .

It came upon him slow and unexpected. Not the sense of direction that he'd been hoping for, but another sense entirely. And something quite unexpected.

The sense of not being alone.

Louise couldn't see anything, couldn't hear anything and couldn't smell anything. But she knew. Something was out there. Close by. Watching them.

"Nick?"

"I know. I can feel it too."

They threw their senses to the far horizons, along every plane of thought they could imagine, trying to dredge up an image of whatever was out there. They trawled their minds, their subconscious, tried to trigger some long-forgotten sense that would light up their surroundings like a sonar screen.

A silent blackness stared back.

Calm down, Louise told herself. You're letting your imagination turn shadows into monsters. There's nothing out there except Nick and the pair of you are behaving like a couple of schoolgirls swapping ghost stories at midnight.

But . . .

What if there really was something out there? Not being able to see it didn't mean it wasn't there.

Another image forced itself into her mind. Two swimmers treading water in a deep, dark ocean with sharks circling beneath them. If the shark's fins didn't break the surface who'd know they were there? The swimmers wouldn't. Not at night. Not with everything black and fathomless.

Once started upon that line of thought, she couldn't shake it. They were being menaced by the higher dimensional equivalent of the Great White. Invisible and intangible, it circled: sometimes swimming between them, sometimes passing within inches.

The entire void might be full of them.

Flash! The void lit up for an instant. A brilliant burst of blue-tinged white. So bright it felt to Louise that it had originated from inside her. There it was again. She felt it that time. It hurt. And again. Ow! The flashes coming fast and intense. And the pain. It was like a migraine, her head exploding like a firework factory.

"Nick!" She mentally bent double. Pain, disorientation, panic. What was happening to her? Was she being eaten alive?

No word from Nick, or was that him screaming? It was like some lunatic was flipping HV channels inside her head—a confusing cacophony of voices, music, sound bites and images.

And then it stopped. Total silence, everything black.

"What the hell was that?" she shouted. "Nick? Are you there?" She couldn't see him. "Nick!"

"I'm here." He sounded distant and in pain. And then the lights started flashing again, not as intense as before but just as disorientating. Her mind was being invaded. She . . .

"Get out of my head!" She struggled, tried to flee, tried to close her mind and squeeze whatever was in there out. Neither succeeded. She thought move and she stayed put. She thought get out and the images flashed faster.

Respite. A few seconds and then it started again. On and off. Was she being played with? Was she a mouse being tossed up in the air by a higher dimensional cat?

The bombardment continued; less painful now and the cycle between images was lengthening. Intense flashes replaced by jerky freeze-frame views—some she recognised: people she knew, places she'd been. But others were incomprehensible—random patterns, nonsense shapes. And one—a kind of triangle within a circle but far more complex—was repeated several times.

"I think someone's . . . trying to communicate with us." Nick's words crawled inside Louise's head. He sounded exhausted and strained.

Was someone trying to communicate with them? Or were they ill? Maybe the void was poisonous to them, their brains being eaten alive, higher-dimensional synapses firing and exploding and triggering all kinds of death-throe images.

Back came the triangle within a circle, the image rotating, changing shape, gaining depth and . . . confusing the hell out of her. It looked like an optical illusion, the shape almost made sense but it hurt to look at.

Ow! Pain, sharp and sudden, then nausea, dizziness, a dull ache and—wow!—what was that? Elation, sadness, fear, trepidation, hunger—she was hurtling along an emotional roller-coaster. Her mind hijacked, a thousand hands inside her head pressing buttons at random, experimenting with every facet, every feature.

Had Pendennis found them again? Was this their final rinse on the brainwash cycle to hell?

Smells hit her: some foul, some fragrant. Sounds rang out: bells, voices, laughter, gun shots. Tastes, colours, the sensation of wind in her hair, rain on her face, heat, cold . . .

And then everything stopped. She felt mentally winded, as though her brain had been in free fall and then a parachute had suddenly opened and yanked her back to reality.

And yet, she felt safe. Overwhelmingly so. For no reason at all.

Around her, the void began to lighten. Features began to appear—a landscape, fields and trees—the blackness of the void peeling back like night before day.

"Is this real?" she asked Nick. "Are we back?"

"I . . . I don't know. It looks too sharp and . . . I can't see behind me any more."

He was right. She had to turn too. The 360 degree all round, up down, left and right, fuzzy vision had gone. She had eyes. And a body.

And then nothing. The image broke up and the void returned. Anger. Was she being toyed with?

Her anger evaporated, back came that feeling of calm serenity. And with it a certainty that everything was going to be all right.

She tried to be suspicious of it. She could still think, she still had free will. But her emotions—they were no longer her own.

A light appeared in the distance. A blue light growing and spreading across the void towards them. She could see sea and sky and . . . was that a boat?

The light swept past them, chasing the void away like sunlight chasing cloud shadows across a wind-blown landscape. The boat passed beneath them. It was cutting through azure waves beneath a blue cloudless sky. Dolphins led the way. At least a dozen of them, leaping from the water at the prow of the boat.

Follow.

A voice inside her head. "Nick? Was that you?"

"I heard it too," he said. There was a pause and then he asked. "Do you feel anything?"

"I wouldn't trust anything I felt at this moment. My emotions were hi-jacked a while back."

The dolphins changed course, veering to the right. The boat followed. Was it a message? Dolphins lead lost boats to safety. She'd read about it. The memory of her reading about it was suddenly fresh within her mind.

The dolphins and the boat began to move away. And behind them the void was sweeping in across the sky like night.

"They want us to follow," said Nick. "I think we should."

"But what if it's a trick? Pendennis or evil aliens?"

"Can it be worse than staying here? We asked for a sign to take us home. This one's neon lit."

The void swept past them chasing the blue bubble of light towards the horizon. They had to follow. Nick was right. It might be their only chance of finding Earth.

They chased after it, fixing their minds on the retreating bubble and dragging it towards them. As soon as the bubble filled half the sky, it accelerated forcing them to do likewise. And again when they closed a second time, and a third, and a fourth . . . Louise had no idea at what speed they were now travelling, the void was featureless and gave no clues. But it had to be fast. Their speed increased with each iteration and how many of those had there been—ten, twelve?

And where were they going? Surely Earth couldn't be this far away?

A wave of well-being shot over here. Brilliant, she thought, someone had hit the endorphin button. She couldn't even be allowed to grumble in peace.

In the distance, on the ocean horizon, a new image appeared. A sail? Another boat? No, an island. The dolphins were heading towards it, a shimmering rock rising out of the sea. The sun glinted off craggy cliffs, shining colours of every shade of brown through red and orange.

"Is that where you're taking us?" Louise asked. "Isn't it about time you told us who you are?"

No one answered. They didn't even push a soothing image into her head. She stared at the growing island. Did it look familiar? Could it be Earth?

"I don't think so," said Nick, surprising her. She didn't think she'd transmitted the question. "I think we've travelled too far to be anywhere near Earth."

Brilliant. She waited for the endorphins to kick in and . . . there they were. She'd been abducted by aliens, experimented upon and drugged with chocolate. Could the day get any better?

The sky began to darken. So did the sea. And the boat and dolphins disappeared. Only the island remained. And now even that began to change.