Coldbrook

9

As Holly fled into the breach she thought of the man who had come through, and wondered whether he had been like her when he’d stepped past the threshold. She could see through — the dark valley, shadows of plants and boulders across the hillside, the red sky brightening as the sun slowly rose — but that didn’t mean it was as close as it seemed. Distance and direction were concepts that lost meaning in the science of the breach. It’s exactly where we are and a trillion light years away, Jonah had whispered once as they’d sat drinking and musing upon their efforts. Maybe now, she would be walking for ever.

And then she felt the breach’s clasp.

Holly would have gasped, had she still been breathing. Her legs moved and her arms swung by her sides, but it felt like the processes of her body were frozen in the moment. Her skin chilled, as if it had been exposed to an open freezer. Thoughts jumped and scattered, formed and shattered: perhaps this was how everyone felt at the moment of death.

A slew of random memories erupted all at once, each of them richer in tone and sense than memory should normally allow. Holly at four years old, making mud pies in the back garden with her brother Angus, parents looking on with indulgent smiles, the wet soil warm between her fingers, the smell of dirt. The time in school when she had told her friends that she was seeing Ashley, the boy who’d been the object of her desires for months; their jealousy, and her certainty that the relationship would be short and precious. Her drunken eighteenth birthday when her mother had cleaned up her vomit and gently chided her, then sat on her bed and reminisced about her own youth for an hour while Holly sobbed herself to sleep, the acid smell, of puke tingeing the air. A long afternoon in college when the sun shone and she was filled with an unaccountable sense of joy; the death of her mother, withered and faded yet still smiling; one mealtime at Coldbrook when Vic had smiled at her and she’d truly noticed him for the first time, burning her finger with the coffee she’d spilled.

And many more memories came and went, each of them so intense that she relived them all again, crying and laughing, smelling and tasting, sighing with pleasure and cringing in pain. Then the brief yet endless moment of pause passed and she ran on, swinging her arms through air that felt heavy with potential. She experienced a momentary tug as the world she was leaving urged her back, and then the sensation suddenly shifted and she was drawn forward. She was aware of every movement of her body, every muscle stretching and contracting, and the first touch of somewhere else brought the smell of spicy heather and the taste of cool fresh air.

What was that? she thought, the scientist in her trying to make sense of what had just happened to her, and why. But Holly ran on. It was a few seconds before she realised that tall wet grass was whipping at her trouser legs, and that her boots were impacting on soft ground, not the uncertain hardness of the breach. She skidded to a halt, and when she blinked she saw red. She gasped in fear and fell onto her back, kicking out at anyone or anything that might have followed her through. But she was alone. Melinda’s bloodied face was not staring at her, and the guard’s ravenous jaws were no longer gaping at the thought of rending her flesh.

Tears burned in her eyes but she wiped them away. She was shaking. Holding up her hand, she saw that it was jittering uncontrollably, and she clamped her mouth shut to stop her teeth from chattering. I’m through, she thought, and what had happened so recently in Control began to retreat into the realms of memory. Holly welcomed the dimming of the terror.

Perhaps the dawning sense of wonder was drowning it out.

She closed her eyes and stood still, holding her breath, hearing her heart thudding and blood pulsing. I’m elsewhere, she thought, and she breathed out and inhaled again, slowly. Definitely heather, wet and somehow spiced, and below that she could smell damp soil and something like old chocolate. She held out her hands and felt a brief misty rain cooling her skin. She stuck out her tongue and tasted moisture on the air, frowning as the tang of something unknown played across her taste buds. She didn’t like it, but perhaps only because it was a mystery.

Silence hung around her.

And then she opened her eyes and gazed upon this distant Earth. She saw trees and grasses and plants and hillsides, and a stream running through the small valley, and a sky smeared with the gorgeous colours of an extravagant dawn. The alienness was staggering.

Holly looked for anything she might recognise — Coldbrook’s structure, its surface buildings, or the Appalachian mountain landscape that surrounded it. Even if she saw something familiar and identical to how it appeared on her Earth, counterpart theory suggested that it could only be regarded as similar, a separate form of the same object. But what she saw was unfamiliar, and though she could not pin down why, it seemed wild.

‘I’m somewhere else. .’ she gasped, aware that these could be the first words ever spoken here.

This could have been a place on her Earth, but her knowledge that it was not hit hard. The small valley was home to several types of plants, not all of them completely familiar. Higher up the valley a clump of black oaks hid darkness beneath them, and closer to her a single tree bore what might have been apple blossom. The heather she could smell was soft and silky to the touch, but the flowers were unfamiliar, and Holly was not sure she’d ever seen their like before. The stream gurgled merrily by to her left, whispering past rocks protruding from its bed, and a thousand small plants grew along its bank on tripod-like stalks. They unnerved her. They seemed to be waiting for something.

Dawn was peering over the hillside to her right. The colours were stunning, smears of yellow and orange merging into a deeper red higher up, though the clouds must have been high indeed, because she could not make out any texture to the sky. High up, a few hawks circled slowly on morning thermals.

A fly landed on the back of her hand. She studied it, the first time she’d seen a living insect from this world, and did not recognise it as any of those caught by the eradicator. And prompted by this thought she turned around again to see from where she had emerged.

The breach sat in a hollow in the hillside, a fresh wound in the land. Shards of stone and clumps of soil were scattered around the hollow, and the breach itself existed as a vaguely wavering smudge of light ten feet across, opaque and mysterious. Holly squinted, but could not see within. There was no framing to it on this side, and she remembered Jonah saying something about it mirroring itself in the target area. It held a hypnotic power. She closed her eyes and a staggering loneliness hit her. Would she ever be able to go back through? Could she?

She muttered to herself, ‘What have I done?’ She looked up at the brightening sky, stars still just visible but fading quickly, half-moon sitting low above the valley.

Satpal had so wanted to see the alternate world’s stars. She tried to spot a constellation she knew, but there were too few now, and she looked away, afraid of seeing nothing, afraid that-

Something called softly. She turned back to the breach, terrified that Melinda had come through. But there was no movement there, and when the call came again she looked up at the hawks, swooping now instead of circling.

‘Gaia,’ she said. The breach was too close. Terror had already stepped between worlds. She could not stay here.

Holly started walking. She followed the stream and aimed for one of the ridge lines. From there she hoped she would have a good view across the surrounding countryside. She had no idea what she would see. As she went she assessed what she had come through with, and it was not much. The clothing she wore — casual shirt, trousers, boots, none of it heavyweight. There were two pens in her pocket, and her satphone. She checked it: no signal. She gave a short bark of laughter: of course not. As she walked, she checked behind her regularly. She kept her eyes peeled for movement because she knew for sure that this world was inhabited. The man who had come through had brought some unknown, sickening danger with him, and now she was stranded in his world. She would have to be careful every step of the way.

The loneliness was constant and bruising, and several times she found herself singing childhood songs under her breath as she climbed over rocks, skirted marshy areas of ground, and passed into a heavily wooded area. Her clothes were damp from the earlier misty rain, but she was not too cold. What will happen when I do get too cold? she thought. Or if I fall and break my ankle? Or if I get lost and can’t find my way back here? At the back of her mind was the idea that she was still within reach of home, however different the breach looked from this side, and however terrible, however unbelievable the events that had happened in Control. She would have to give them time to get some kind of order restored and perhaps then they’d send someone through to find her. But the ridge and whatever might lie beyond beckoned, and she could not ignore the call.

‘Just be careful,’ Holly whispered to herself.

As she climbed slowly out of the small valley, dawn brought this new world — this Gaia — to life around her. Crickets scratched in the grasses and heather, birds welcomed in the dawn from the tree canopy with songs she knew and some she did not, and a muted sunlight touched the hilltop above her. She emerged from the woodland onto a bare slope, still in the opposite ridge’s shadow, but a growing feeling of warmth was close and inviting.

A few hundred feet from the ridge she passed into sunlight and turned to stare back at the sun. It was a yellow smudge against the clouds, still splaying exotic colours across much of the sky before her. She’d never seen such a gorgeous sunrise. Looking back down along the valley she could still just make out the shimmer of the breach, a slightly blurred area against the valley floor. It was the only familiar sight in this new world, and she was keen to keep it in view.

Holly had left the stream behind now and was climbing directly for the ridgeline. The closer it drew the faster she moved, spurred on by the thought that she was the first person from her Earth to witness this world. The sunlight felt both familiar and shatteringly alien across the back of her neck, like a surprise kiss from a stranger. That’s our sun, she thought, but of course that was not quite true. She had already seen, and felt, and smelled this world’s subtle differences, and witnessed the horror of a more extreme divergence. There really was no telling how unlike her own planet it might be.

There might be mountains up here, she thought, or lakes, or cities or ruins, or something unrecognisable. And when at last she reached the top of the ridge and stood staring out over the vista ahead of her it took her breath away.

The mountains stretched to the horizon, as they did at home, and beyond the valley the landscape was more familiar. The muted sunlight bathed its features, forest and bare slopes alike, and the darker depths of the valleys could have held any number of mysteries. What disturbed Holly so much was the mystery of what might lie beyond them.

Exhausted, scared and feeling more lost and alone than ever before, she managed to walk a dozen steps to a small mound of rocks. Here she sat, leaning back with her eyes closed to catch her breath. The breeze was stronger up here, and it was fresh and untainted by the tang of industry. That doesn’t mean anything, she thought, and she pictured that shuffling, monstrous thing once again. She opened her eyes and stared directly at the sun. She’d never been able to do that at home. The whole sky was tinted a faint pink. Maybe this sun is dying, she thought, and she wished Jonah were here to tell her why that might or might not be possible. The last time she’d seen him was when he’d been pressed against the glass wall, his face slackened by hopelessness as he watched events unfolding in Control. She looked into the valley as if those things had happened down there, but the breach was hidden from her now by the curve in the hillside.

‘I’m so far away,’ she said, her voice surprisingly loud. She rested her elbows on her knees, her head on her forearms, and then she saw the single word carved into a smooth rock at her feet.

Exit.

The word seemed to pin Holly to the rocks. She glanced to the left, and saw that another of the seemingly random stones had a sharp, regular edge. She hadn’t looked for it before, but now she could see.

Exit.

She heard movement behind her, sliding, slithering, skin over wet stone. And as she stumbled from her perch and turned around she realised that she was not alone. The thing was rising from beneath thick vegetation atop the stones, lifting through twisted roots, parting leaves. It looked old and withered, similar to the man in Control, except this being had once been a woman. And she wore the scrappy remnants of clothes.

As the gaunt thing reached out something flicked at Holly’s hair, whistling past her ear, and an arrow buried itself in the woman’s face.