Sean Gabb: The Break

With a loud crash to their left, one of the High Commission façades fell down. Jennifer looked back again. Still in one piece, the whole of the Whitehall Theatre had sunk to its upper windows into the liquefying ground. She took Robert’s hand and pulled him into the sticky mass of a road that might still be safe to run across. It was slow going across the road, but they got to the southern side of the Square. The Column was swaying slowly back and forward. She didn’t look round at the shuddering crash of its falling. The armed men whose job it was to guard Charing Cross Railway Station had come into the Strand, and, transfixed with wonder, looked at the spreading wave of destruction.

Gasping and clutching at his side, Robert flopped down beyond one of the crash barriers that had, at the entrance to Villiers Street, once separated road from pavement. “Take him, Little Bear,” he gasped, pushing Michael towards her. “I can’t go on.” But, though trembling, the ground here was still solid. The wave that had its epicentre somewhere close by Parliament, seemed to have stabilised half way across the railway station forecourt. Beyond that line, all that hadn’t sunk already was falling in on itself with a loud crash of masonry. On this side, the ground buckled and rumbled from the communication of force. Jennifer stood up and looked at the firm shape of the cobble stones across the dozen yards that separated them from what had become a boiling mass.

And now, the mist that had risen from the ground rose higher. Hardly aware of her own exhausted body, she watched it rise higher and higher, and arch over until it disappeared beyond the low covering of the rain clouds. She watched it form a blurred dome, perhaps a mile across and a mile high. “Get down, Jennifer!” she heard Michael cry weakly. A hand took hold of the riding coat she was still wearing, and pulled her behind the cover of a flight of steps. She felt Michael’s hand drop over her shoulder and try to pull her completely down. But she struggled free, and continued looking over the top of the steps. The blurred dome had now solidified and taken on the dull shine of the Gateway panels. She looked across the forecourt to the dome at its nearest point. She could see the distorted reflection of the cast iron railings and of the white buildings on the far side of the Strand.

It vanished.

Jennifer’s mind told her there should have been a loud crash, and perhaps a still more terrible shaking of the ground. There had been nothing at all. In one instant, the dome had sat upon Central London with all the apparent solidity of the Great Pyramid. Another instant, and it was gone. She tried to get properly to her feet, but was now pulled down with the whole of Count Robert’s returning strength. It was just in time. The dome had extended itself without the slightest sound. Equally quiet, it had vanished. One second—perhaps two—later, and she was struck from behind by the full and deafening blast of a hurricane. Robert screamed something, as they were lifted by some invisible but gigantic hand and hurled against the metal barrier. All about them was the crash and skipping of roof tiles and other building debris. Jennifer saw one of the armed station guards carried past into the vacuum that had opened, and another, and then a rickshaw with two passengers waving and calling out.

And then, with a kind of burp, the air that had been sucked from all sides into the vacuum met in the centre, and there was an almost gentle returning wave.

Jennifer shook herself free of the two men and stood up again. She looked up into a clean and almost painfully violet sky. It was already set with unblinking stars. She looked about. All the way back along the Strand, not one building was standing in its entirety. Half of the building above the railway station was cut away. The rest had collapsed and been mostly sucked into the void. Wherever she looked, she could see for miles—and all was as low and ruined as she’d seen in the black and white footage of Berlin or Hamburg after the bombing raids. And, where the centre of London had been, there was now a crater gouged out by the counterpart of the dome that had towered so high. Glistening smooth as glass, the perfect hemisphere stretched from Charing Cross to Vauxhall and towards Piccadilly. It covered the ground where Parliament had been, and Westminster Abbey, and Buckingham Palace, and the ministry buildings. It had swallowed the Liberal Club whole, where afternoon tea might still have been serving. It covered where countless multitudes must have been caught and annihilated. It had cut away a whole reach of the Thames and part of the South Bank. She looked down, and could see the filthy waters boiling and surging into what would soon be a vast and effectively a bottomless lake. She looked away from the wreckage of people and things that were carried here and there by the torrent.

Robert stood beside her. “It is the Judgement of God!” he announced in Latin with a smack of his lips.

Michael looked up from the crash barrier on which he’d been leaning for support. “Why must everyone keep talking about God?” he asked with quiet ill humour. “Can you not see a certain disregard for life in all that’s happened since The Break? I think I’d rather assume that it was Sweeting who got everyone here by pulling on the wrong lever.”

Robert snorted. “Did God show mercy in the days of old, when He smote the Cities of the Plain?” he asked with evident pleasure. “Or when He visited plague after plague on the people of Egypt?” He found an uncrushed cigarette and put it between his lips. He patted up and down his tunic for a box of matches. “Clear Judgement of God, if you ask me,” he ended.

“Oh, have it your way!” Michael sighed. He went back to leaning on the crash barrier. And Robert would, Jennifer told herself, have it his way. He and Duke William of Normandy would have it all their way, just as soon as they could get their men across the Channel.

There was a flight of pigeons overhead, and sounds of returning life along the Strand. Michael stood up and scratched where his beard had started to grow again. He touched Jennifer’s hand. “I suppose we should be making a move.” Jennifer nodded. She knew she’d never understand what had just happened. But she did wonder how that exact hemisphere had come about from an epicentre so deep underground. She put the question out of mind and took Michael’s hand. Together, they began picking their way through the rubbish of a broken city towards Waterloo Bridge.

Constantinople, September 1071

Jennifer looked into the mirror and tried not to laugh. She turned her attention to the big television set behind her. Though she’d had the volume turned down, she could still hear the presenter’s gushing commentary on the better life that a plumber could enjoy with his family if they relocated to Thessalonica. If she focussed, she’d be able to see the reversed Greek subtitles at the bottom of the picture. “It really doesn’t matter,” she said in Greek to the weeping handmaid. “Won’t I be wearing a veil?”

“But, Your Majesty,” came the shocked reply, “it has to be just so!”

A door opened behind her, and her private secretary hurried in with a sheet of paper. “Your Majesty!” he cried after a low bow. He held up the laser printout. “Your father regrets that he and your mother are still detained in Venice by mechanical failure.”

Jennifer took a final look at her spoiled makeup and got to her feet. “Well, that doesn’t matter either,” she said firmly. “Daddy wants to be here for the reading of the Emancipation Decree. Since that won’t be for another week, it won’t hurt him to hang around for a bit. There must already be something nice to look at in Venice.”