Tim Lebbon: Coldbrook

During the day the distant hillside was a flower-speckled wonderland, with swathes of purple and pink blooms huddled low among the larger bramble and wild rose bushes and the graceful curls of tall ferns. Birds fluttered from tree to tree, and higher up they’d seen larger, more obscure shapes gliding on thermals, barely flapping their wings. Small rodents rooted around in the vegetation. A stream flowed through the shallow valley, turning left a hundred feet from the breach and continuing out of sight. It was beautiful, and though no one had seen anything shockingly alien or unknown all of them could sense a difference about the place. This was somewhere further away than anyone could imagine or even conceive, brought close enough to touch. When Vic had shown a smuggled-out photograph of the place to his six-year-old daughter Olivia, he said she’d called it ‘all wrong’, broken out in goose bumps, and started crying.

Out of the mouths of babes.

It’s somewhere else entirely , Holly thought. A chill went through her. And the familiar conflicting desires arose to tell her father and brother all about this, or protect them from it.

Melinda glanced back at her and offered a half-smile. The biologist now seemed to occupy a state of permanent distraction.

‘You should go get some sleep,’ Holly said.

‘So should you.’

Holly nodded and sat in a swivel chair without taking her eyes off the breach. Staring into a world so far away, yet alongside their own, gave her mind a surprising freedom and focus. As she watched darker colours in alien skies, she thought about Vic and that touch on the back of her hand. However much she tried to delude herself, she could not deny that she thought of him every day. And memories of their affair were elusive things. When they were working together in Control or sharing a meal in the canteen, he was a colleague and a friend, somewhat volatile but marked by genius. His background in military research and development had given him access to the forefront of technological progress, and he was the most brilliant engineer working at Coldbrook. The science might elude him sometimes — even after all this time, Holly believed that only Jonah came close to really understanding — but he could strip and reassemble any piece of equipment they used, and make it perform better in the process.

It was when they weren’t working together that she dreamed about those two years when they had been lovers. It had ended seven years before when Vic’s wife Lucy had fallen pregnant, a mutual agreement that had hurt them both. But Holly had been pleased that they’d remained close friends. That was important.

Coldbrook was filled with memories for them both. They’d once made love in Control behind her work station, a quick, giggling liaison back when the place had been empty at night. And her own quarters still sang with the cries of past pleasure, sometimes breathed again in the dark as she remembered.

We’re grown-ups , Vic had said when they’d ended it. And we’ll always be friends . He had been right. But there were times. .

Like when he touched my hand , she thought.

‘Holly.’

Her eyes snapped open, she jerked, and the swivel chair slipped a foot to the right. ‘Wha-?’

‘Wake up, Holly. There’s something. .’

Holly blinked the brief sleep away, looked into the breach — and squinted as she saw movement.

She gasped and felt the hairs rise all across her body. The conviction she’d been feeling for three days pressed on her again: that they were balanced on the precipice of change. She focused, glancing to the left and right to give her eyes time to work in the dark.

There was a weak moon-cast shadow that should not be there, because there was no tree or rock to form it. Once again, it moved.

‘Melinda?’ she said quietly. ‘What do you see?’

The other woman took another step across the breach floor and lifted her binoculars. No closer! Holly thought, panic prickling her scalp.

‘Something coming,’ the biologist confirmed. ‘Can’t see what. But. . it’s bigger than anything we’ve seen.’ She looked back at Holly and her eyes were alight with excitement.

Holly dashed up the two steps to her desk and initiated another systems check of the eradicator. ‘Let’s get ready,’ she said, louder than she’d intended. She watched the viewing screen, waiting for the shape to arrive. Satpal glanced over, then turned back to his own bank of computers. The four guards stood in their assigned positions, in two pairs. All was well.

Down by the breach, Melinda crouched with her camera.

I wish Vic was here , Holly thought. She should have contacted Jonah then, told him that something unusual was happening. This was no bird or insect. She should have called Vic as well, but there was no guarantee that he had even arrived back at his room. He might have returned to the common room to find another drink from the canteen’s small bar. So she waited instead, ignoring established protocol to give her old boss the sleep he so needed, and to avoid possible conflict with the man she probably still loved.

Even a third of a bottle of good Welsh whisky couldn’t grant him sleep.

Jonah lay back on his bed and stared at the ceiling. He hadn’t turned out his light when Vic had left, and the room was bathed in sterile fluorescence. The crystal tumbler was propped against his side, empty, and the bottle on his bedside table taunted him with its liquid gold.

He’d left Wales the year his dear Wendy had passed away, taken from this world by a cruel cancer that none of his love or anger could counter. He had raged and railed against such unfairness when he was alone, maintaining his composure when he read aloud from the newspaper as Wendy drifted in and out of a morphine-fuelled sleep. And when she was gone he had continued to rage on his own, except this time there had been no one to compose himself for. Three months later he was living in the USA, and three months after that he met Bill Coldbrook.

Coldbrook had already received approval for his project by then, and while politicians politicised and funding bodies negotiated funding, Bill was already setting up temporary base in a trailer high in the Appalachians, collecting together his books and documents, planning the project scheme by scheme, and contacting people who he wanted to poach from other projects to help him. Jonah came to meet Bill through a mutual friend of theirs at the Harvard-Smithsonian, and the thought of retiring to the mountains — immersing himself in such radical physics that many regarded it as science fiction — had appealed to a grieving Jonah.

From the day when he and Bill met, their relationship had felt like that of two brothers. They’d bickered and argued, brought out the best in each other, drank and raged, and sometimes Jonah had believed they were two elements of the same mind. Yet, ironically, the catharsis that Jonah had believed he might find in such a project was not forthcoming.

His disbelief in an afterlife had never pained him until he’d met Bill. The American had seen a like mind in Jonah, not only a brilliant scientist but a man with passion in his heart and disaffection simmering just below the surface that he presented as a public front. And Bill’s talk of the multiverse and all it might be — world upon world, a perpetual variation of quantum universes echoing with each and every decision taken or moment passed — had fuelled a frustration in Jonah’s heart. His religious friends were content in their beliefs, and Jonah slowly found himself seeking his own. This was no deity that lured him, or teased him, or subjugated him with promises of pain and pronouncements of sin. It was a faint hope — vain, though he knew; naive, so Bill told him — that, in one of those endless worlds, Wendy might live still.