Tim Lebbon - Coldbrook

‘You don’t seem that far ahead,’ Holly said defensively. But then she thought of the casting room, the incredible technology of the mini-black hole, and wondered just how much Gaia had lost.

‘You’re aware of the many-worlds interpretation?’

‘Jonah’s tried explaining it to me. An infinite number of universes, created at every possible quantum event? Everything that could have happened in our history but didn’t has happened in some other universe. Or something.’

‘Every decision, every event, creates another possible universe,’ Drake said.

‘Much more eloquent than me.’

‘So which decision or event separates our Earths?’

‘How can we ever tell?’ Holly asked.

‘It could be something as small as someone turning left instead of right,’ Drake said. He stared at her, his piercing eyes filled with his sense of wonder. Jonah would love him , Holly thought.

‘You had Beethoven?’ she asked. ‘Mozart? Brahms?’

Drake nodded. ‘Shakespeare, Dickens, Melville.’

‘The First World War?’ she asked. ‘Hitler? Nagasaki?’

‘Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt and Truman.’

‘The Swinging Sixties?’

‘I’ve read about that,’ Drake said, and Holly could see that he did not understand. How different his forty years must have been here, compared to her thirty-seven years on Earth. So different that she could not count the ways.

‘Kennedy?’ she asked. ‘Led Zeppelin? The Beatles?’

‘“Lucy in the Sky”,’ Drake said. ‘This could take for ever.’ He shook his head, smiling, and his sense of wonder was more visible than ever.

‘Jonah would so love to meet you.’

‘And I him.’ Drake stared at her, more intensely than ever, and for so long that Holly felt the true impact of the distance between them. Then he smiled again, and held her hand.

‘I have more to show you.’

‘I’m not sure that I want to see it.’

‘You have to,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘Because others here at Coldbrook insist upon it,’ he said. ‘This plague was no accident.’

‘And you have no cure,’ she said. ‘In all these years, has nothing been found?’

‘There have been attempts,’ Drake said. ‘But no cure. I’ve been looking for one all my life. Even Mannan. .’ He trailed off, clenching his hands as if realising his mistake.

‘So many secrets,’ Holly said. ‘What or who is Mannan?’

Drake shook his head slowly. ‘In your world, are there still wars?’

‘Wouldn’t be Earth if that wasn’t the case,’ Holly said.

‘That’s the one thing the furies stopped, at least. There are no more wars, because the whole world’s fragmented and regressed. From here, we sometimes deal with a dozen other communities, some of them quite large. But there is always some risk from the furies. One community gets too close to another, too tied in, and they’ll both go down if the plague catches them out. So isolation is the key to survival.’

‘That excuses secrets?’

‘From you, yes. Of course. You’re not just from another settlement or continent.’

‘Hopeless,’ Holly said.

‘Hope is what keeps some of us alive,’ Drake said, and the sudden passion in his voice was contagious. ‘Much of the world has given up, winding down as much as the furies have. But we still have reason to believe.’

‘In a cure?’ she asked. ‘Something unproven and seemingly beyond your reach? Surely you need proof to believe.’ She didn’t mean to mock him but she was tired and scared, and she didn’t care about Drake’s disquiet. She grasped at her own faith, and it gave her comfort in this strange place, with these strange people.

‘Perhaps,’ Drake said softly. ‘The Inquisitor, have you seen-?’

Someone passed by the open door — a young boy bearing a tray of food and a steaming bowl. Drake glanced over his shoulder, then nudged the door closed.

‘I’m so tired,’ Holly said, leaning back against the wall. She let her eyelids droop and willed her muscles to relax, slumping down, feigning sleepiness when in fact she felt more awake than she had since arriving here through the breach. She wanted to be with Vic and Jonah, she wanted to know that her friends and family were still well, but most of all she wanted to be alone. And then she could decide what to do.

‘I want us to be friends,’ Drake said.

‘We are. .’ she said, her voice slurring. Leave me , she thought. She lowered her head with every breath, and Drake came to her, easing her down onto the cot. His hands lingered on her shoulders, but she kept her eyes closed. He’s touching someone from another world , she thought, realising only moments later that she felt the same.

Holly breathed deeply, concentrating on the fluid movement of the darkness behind her eyelids and wondering whether that was the true space between universes. Even when Drake left the room and closed the door she kept her eyes closed. She prayed into the uniform darkness, silent prayers that banished the gnawing loneliness inside her. She had never been embarrassed by her beliefs, even though there were many among her friends and colleagues who claimed not to understand them. Even that lovely old Welshman was a staunch atheist, and they’d had many long discussions about how she could maintain such faith while remaining a scientist. Just because most things demand proof doesn’t mean that there’s something that never will , she’d say, and Jonah would shake his head and take another sip of his whisky.

She opened her eyes to silence. The room was empty, the oil lamp still alight on a small table beside the door. There’s something deeper , she thought. This Coldbrook was similar to her own in name only, and she knew she had barely touched its surface. She had to get a grip on the place.

Holly stood up and rubbed her eyes. The door was locked. She knelt and examined the lock, then carefully unscrewed the oil-flow control knob on the lamp. She plucked the pin out, and the flame increased in intensity. Kneeling at the lock again, she remembered those old days at university when she was tasked with small engin-eering problems. It’s as important to know how to take things apart as it is to know how to put them together , her lecturer had said. It took her a minute to strip the lock, and a minute more to roll the tumblers and slip back the bolt.

The corridor outside was clear, its wall lamps providing low-level lighting. The floor sloped down to the left, so she went that way, conscious that the air was growing cooler and the lighting fainter. It wasn’t far to the first stairwell and Holly did not hesitate. She went down.

A trickle of water ran along the lower corridor that she soon reached. The floor sloped here as well, and the water seemed to have been flowing for a long time — it had worn a channel at the junction of wall and floor, and she could see mineral deposits below its clear surface. She followed the slope, then paused at an intersection with another, darker corridor. Its wall held only one oil lamp, and beyond this oasis of light the darkness was deeper than ever.

Holly smelled food. Warm, spiced, perhaps a soup. And she remembered the steaming bowl passing the doorway: Drake’s reaction had been cagey — he’d nudged the door closed.

‘There’s someone down here,’ she whispered. As she edged forward, a crack of light appeared under a door in the wall to her left. She heard singing coming from inside.

The voice was low and rumbling, the tune nothing that she had heard before. She wasn’t sure whether it was words or just notes, but the song seemed to settle in her stomach and vibrate there. She paused for a few seconds, then walked on. Why keep someone locked away down here?