Tim Lebbon: Coldbrook

The man’s mouth hangs open as he screams at the woman to run. They’re in a modern building, the huge open-plan room well furnished, and one glass wall offers views out across a complex of some kind. There are several large featureless buildings, and a place that might be a power plant. The ground is flat, a few benches dotted here and there in the shade of black oak trees. It is sunny: springtime. Beside one bench, three people in red-splashed lab coats are attacking someone squirming on the ground. One of the large buildings is on fire. And inside the room, something is coming to an end.

Run! the man screams again. He is tall and familiar, and it’s not until Jonah is mere feet away that he realises why. The man is him. . although not quite. He’s slimmer and fitter than Jonah, his eyes are green rather than blue, and his facial structure is not identical — heavier cheekbones and brow, a longer, flatter nose. But the similarity is shocking, like looking in a subtly distorting mirror. This is not just someone from the same family or even the same parents, but rather a different version of him. This is what I might have been , Jonah thinks.

The man grimaces as he raises a heavy pistol and points it somewhere past Jonah, and there is the look of inevitable defeat in his eyes. Hopeless . The gun has a small circular magazine and the wisp of a blue pilot light below its barrel, and as the man pulls the trigger the room lights up, splashing fire and heat-

Someone opened his left eyelid.

Jonah’s heart fluttered in shock, and his breath locked in his lungs. He clenched his fist and felt sheets crumple between his fingers. He was frozen, motionless, and though the vivid dreams were already fading to monochrome he smelled the rot of dead things, the sweet stench of old decay, and felt an intense heat across his face. That’s what those people on the burning plains smell like , he thought, and the wound on that man’s arm, and the heat is fire eating at my flesh .

He tried to speak, but breathed out only the faintest of gasps.

The thing leaning over him was poorly illuminated by the night light. It was humanoid, with a smooth head and bulging eyes, and a bulky protuberance where its nose and mouth should be. A mist of steam hung around this strange mask. Protective suit , Jonah thought, and for an instant that tempered his fear. But then he saw the redness around one swollen eye, the moisture collecting on one edge of what he’d thought of as breathing apparatus, and realised that what he’d believed at first was material stretched across the dome of its head was actually spiked with countless short, thick hairs. It held something, a red object from which a network of slick threads protruded and kissed gently against Jonah’s scalp. They might have been wires but for the feel of them there — like cold, dead worms. Still the scream would not come.

It leaned in closer, looking, and Jonah could smell its stale fish-breath.

Then it let go and his eyelid twitched shut, and Jonah exhaled a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. Sucking in air, filling his lungs again, he knew he had to look, must look. . but for a couple of seconds he kept his eyes squeezed closed. He heard no movement, and intuited nothing in his small room; the shadow he’d sensed while falling into sleep had gone.

Jonah sat up and opened his eyes, letting out an involuntary gasp when he realised that the room was empty. The door was closed, and he would have heard the catch clicking. In his sparse room, with its bed, chair, desk, clothes rail, chest of drawers and haphazardly stuffed bookshelves, there was nowhere to hide.

‘Bloody hell,’ he muttered, pressing his right hand to his chest and trying to calm his galloping heart. He slipped from the bed and rubbed his eyes. If that was what sleep brought, then he was going straight back to Control. Holly could berate him all she liked. He wasn’t going to shut his eyes again any time soon.

He dressed and paused with his hand on the door handle, thinking of sleep deprivation and how the significance of what they had achieved might take some time to truly dawn. And then Jonah cast this new dancing partner aside and went to gaze once again upon another universe.

This is the last of my Penderyn whisky.’ Jonah nursed the bottle in his hands, turning it this way and that so that light caught the fluid inside. He swore that in sunlight it was the colour of good Welsh soil, but he rarely saw the sun.

‘Been saving it for a special occasion?’

‘I have,’ Jonah said. ‘And in the chaos of the last three days I’ve been waiting to put it to use.’ He looked at the man sitting across from him. Vic Pearson was not someone with whom Jonah would have made friends if circumstance had not thrown them together. He still didn’t think they could really call each other friends — when one of them eventually moved on, he doubted that they’d remain in touch — but they were certainly respectful colleagues.

Vic smiled, tapping his fingers on the table.

Jonah turned the bottle again and thought of home.

‘So. .?’ Vic said, and Jonah heard the familiar impatience in his tone. Jonah was used to existing far more inside his own mind than outside, and sometimes, so his sweet departed wife used to tell him, it was as though he disappeared altogether. It was said that Isaac Newton would often swing his legs out of bed and then instantly be overcome by a flood of waking thoughts, and that he’d often still be there an hour later staring at the wall, thinking. Jonah had always understood Newton’s distractions.

‘So,’ Jonah said, ‘perhaps our first drink should be to Bill Coldbrook.’

Vic leaned forward in his chair, folding his arms on the polished oak desk and looking down. When he glanced up again he was still smiling. But now tears were coursing down his cheeks.

‘Vic?’ It shocked Jonah. He’d never seen Vic as the crying type.

‘Three days since breach. It feels like three years. We’re in the middle of forging history. But when times are quieter, I wonder what the hell have we done down here. . what have we done?’ He was still smiling through the tears, because he knew well enough that their names would soon be known. Theirs, and Bill Coldbrook’s, may he rest in peace. But here were Vic’s damn doubts again, and Jonah was buggered if he was going to let them spoil the moment.

He pulled the cork and breathed in the whisky fumes. Heavenly. Closing his eyes he tried again to think of home, but Wales was far away in distance and memory. Twenty-seven years since he’d left. Perhaps now he could make that journey again.

‘We’ve made history,’ Jonah said. ‘We’ve changed the world.’

‘Don’t you mean “worlds”?’ Vic’s tears had ceased, and he absent-mindedly wiped at his face, unconcerned that Jonah should see him like this. That made Jonah respect him a little bit more. They both knew that what they’d achieved was much larger than either of them, and that history was being made with every breath they took, every thought they had. I’ll write a book about this one day , Vic had said after another failed attempt several years before, and Jonah had smiled coolly and asked if that was all he wanted.

Now he knew that within a couple of years what they’d done would fill whole libraries.

They’d drunk together many times before, discussing the day’s work and speculating about the future. They’d been accepting of each other’s differences, and over time had developed a mutual respect. But Vic’s lack of passion — his doubts and concerns, which Jonah had always taken as a lack of confidence — had always formed a barrier.