Tim Lebbon - Coldbrook

‘That’s why it shows me the fates of worlds,’ Jonah said, understanding at last.

He felt the immensity of time, space, and reality, and recognised his own size and worth among it all. He was a short-lived animal in the ever-evolving, ever-expanding actuality of the multiverse, a speck of sand on a world where time had reduced everything to sand. He had always done his best. But however much he had done, and however much he still had left to do, he was nothing compared to this.

Nothing, in the face of the truth before him now. Here was a pathway from one universe to another, and it existed not because of him and his work but because all realities combined had sought it — and allowed it.

He could not even claim to have found the way. It was always meant to be.

‘Oh, fuck my old boots,’ Jonah muttered.

He and Drake walked forward and entered the breach together.

Jonah tried to breathe, but he found no air.

He walked and his senses worked, but he felt removed from his body — a consciousness hitching a ride in something mindless and soulless. It was a shocking sensation, because for a moment that might have stretched into years he saw himself as a fury, an automaton without thought or feeling. Then Wendy was with him, changing his mind, telling him that he was wrong and that he was an animal, a beautiful, genius animal with a precious mind and memories that were always, always his. He remembered her saying that on his fortieth birthday when they had picnicked together at the top of the Sugarloaf mountain in South Wales, watching families gasping and sweating as they completed their climb, and dogs panting, and Wendy had poured him another glass of wine. He walked on and his father came through the front door, his skin blue from impacted coal dust, his eyes red and his face lined with years of hard graft. He ruffled Jonah’s hair and never once looked back to check that his son was following him into their small back garden, because he always followed. Jonah’s mother brought his father a huge mug of tea and sat with him for a while, and neither of them spoke. That had been the day when four of his friends had died down the mine.

More memories flowed together like a dream, senseless and yet meaning everything to Jonah. His grandmother told him to do ‘a good lot’ when he went to school — her way of saying work hard — and he’d spent his whole life trying to do a good lot. He hoped that she would have been proud. His friend Bill Coldbrook raced over the edge of a ridge on his mountain bike, screaming with glee as he rocketed out of control downhill, his long hair swishing behind him, and Jonah could only follow, aghast at the flippant way in which Coldbrook put his genius mind in danger. It was only as they reached the valley floor that he realised that genius could stagnate — and how to keep it alive.

He would have gasped if he’d had any breath, and as he was drawn on he felt a tug coming from behind him, a gravity exerted on every atom of his body and tying him to every other part of his universe. This is where it’s all wrong . The wrench gave way and he felt the pull of the new world, and realised that what they had done should never have been allowed. Matter cannot be created or destroyed. There were consequences to removing himself from one universe and entering another. The look in Drake’s eye, a startled bird taking flight from the other side of a small stream — these were immediate effects of his arrival in this new place. And he could breathe again. But perhaps his intrusion would echo on. Maybe, in a billion years, stars would twist into the bellies of black holes because of him and galaxies would collide. He was the butterfly, and the multiverse his hurricane.

Jonah went to his knees and drove his fingers deep into the soil of this whole new world.

Drake had released his hand at some point, though Jonah felt as if someone was still grasping him. He looked at his right hand, pressed to the damp grass, fingers curled into the soil, and he felt the warm presence of another.

‘Jonah, stand up,’ Drake said. ‘I’ve got so much to show you.’

Jonah stood, and several people who were standing around him took three steps back. To begin with he thought they were scared, but they were smiling softly, and one of them — a short woman, with dyed purple clothing — nodded a greeting.

‘It’s beautiful,’ he said. He breathed in and smelled heather and the subtle perfume of unfamiliar flowers, and beyond the gurgle of the stream all he could hear was the soft whisper of a breeze through the shallow valley. The sky was a startling red, and he glanced at his watch to see how long past dawn it must be. But the watch’s hands had stopped.

‘Just past noon,’ Drake said.

Jonah turned and saw a pile of beheaded furies’ bodies stacked a hundred feet away from the breach. A couple of people were piling wood around the heap’s base, preparing a bonfire. There were plants close to the stream that seemed to be propped on three stems instead of one. They looked alien and elegant. He looked up.

‘The sky,’ Jonah said.

‘Dust,’ Drake said. ‘Final solution. They nuked New York first, then Washington, then the West Coast.’ He shrugged, stretching. ‘Europe, too.’

‘Bombs against that?’ Jonah asked, looking at the stacked bodies once again.

‘Nothing else had worked,’ Drake said. ‘I’m not sure I can blame them.’

‘What about fallout?’

‘Levels can still be high, if the wind’s in the wrong direction. But the bombing was quite limited. They soon realised it was useless.’

Drake signalled to one of the guards with a series of bizarre finger gestures. Jonah was just about to ask about the sign language when Drake held a finger to his lips.

‘From here to the facility, we move in complete silence,’ he said softly. ‘They can scent us but they home in on sound as well.’

They set off and as Jonah walked he looked at a sky made beautiful by the dust of destruction.

In Coldbrook they took him down to stare at something monstrous.

‘This isn’t what you said you were going to show me.’

‘Yet it’s something I thought you should see.’

They had walked across Gaia’s strange yet familiar landscape, and though Jonah itched with questions he had obeyed Drake’s instruction to remain silent, observing with an intense excitement the variety of flora and fauna, and the distant hills hiding valleys that might contain anything.

Now, in the depths of Drake’s Coldbrook, he looked at something that did not belong in this — or any other — world.

‘Kathryn Coldbrook ordered it retained,’ Drake said. ‘My father said she believed some cure could be created from the thing that came through and infected our world. The first vector. Then she disappeared, and everything died, and it’s been here ever since.’

‘And you’ve been experimenting on it?’ Jonah asked, horrified.

‘Not for decades,’ Drake said. ‘The few efforts we can still make, we concentrate on Mannan.’

It was chained to a wall, a manacle around each wrist and ankle. They were tightened around bones, not skin and flesh. There was another restraint around its neck, screwed securely around its spine. Dried skin and flesh hung around the rusty iron like some sort of grotesque plant growth. Three sets of iron gates and a scratched glass screen locked it in, but somehow it could still sense them standing just inside the large cell’s door.

‘How can you live here with this in the same place?’

‘Most people have forgotten about it. And. . we keep others.’

‘But not like this?’

‘No, not like this.’ Drake sounded almost respectful. ‘This one is unique.’

Locked away for forty years, infected on another Earth before that, whoever it had once been was long since gone. But the physical aspect of its heritage was still visible.