Coldbrook

8

All the time Jonah ran, he expected the Inquisitor to appear in front of him and trip him, stun him, carve him up and implant those grotesqueries that would make him one of its own. But he was starting to think that he was precious to the Inquisitor. He was his world’s chosen one — his reality’s human who would become one of their wretched missionaries — and so perhaps he now held the highest card. He had to submit to his fate in order for the Inquisitor to operate. . because the being had no wish to harm him.

It would have been funny if it were not so perverse.

So he slowed to a walk, always conscious of the gentle tug drawing him forward, the stronger force pushing him from behind. If he veered aside from the invisible path the sensation would tell him, and he could easily correct his course. He had always been one to take his own route through life, but things were different now. He felt the spike of the alien object nestled against his heart, and the warm flexible globule in his pocket. In many ways he no longer belonged to himself.

Jonah absorbed the experience and relished every sight and sound, though many of them were bad. This world had once been wondrous. It was dead now, haunted by shadows, inhabited by slow-moving things that were easy to outrun. His heart thudded, stumbling frequently, palpitations taking his breath away. He considered the irony of dying now of a heart attack, and thought of the science that the Inquisitors must have to enable them to change him so thoroughly. You will never die, he had been told. If that was the literal truth, then the knowledge and technologies involved were incredible.

And I’m going to kill them all, he thought. But he couldn’t let any craving for understanding distract him now. It was all so tragic.

He allowed himself to be steered, passing those strange shell-like structures, until he found the breach that must have broken through into this world. It rested in a natural dip in the land, and a stream flowed directly into it. Jonah did not even break his step.

The pull that Jonah felt was subtle, the repelling pressure from the world he left huge. Memories struck him as soon as he entered. In many of them, Wendy seemed to exist in other people’s snapshots — walking in the background of a holiday photo, passing a group of people playing frisbee in a park, sitting five tables away in a restaurant as romance blossomed between a couple she would never recall seeing. His heart warmed at the sight of her, and yet the memory of her seemed more remote than ever. And as he emerged into raging snow, he already felt cold and distant.

Jonah had always loved the snow. When he’d been a child it had been something that transformed the South Wales valleys into a kids’ playground, and as an adult it had always reminded him of those times, giving him a glimpse and a memory of home. But emerging into this other Earth, the shock of dislocation was almost enough to stop his ailing heart and kill him.

He gasped and sat down hard. Flakes settled in his thinning hair and clung to his stubble, dancing in front of his eyes, landing on his tongue. When they melted there they tasted of distances he could never imagine. I’m leaving a part of myself everywhere I go, he thought, and it was a strangely comforting idea for someone so rooted in science and reason. Much of this new world might well resemble the one he had left behind, but an understanding was slowly dawning — the more breaches he found and fled through, the further away he was from home.

Then he lifted his head and really looked, and wonder overcame his trauma for a time.

This dark breach was set atop a pedestal in a wide room. The roof was holed in several places, the whole structure charred and warped as if by some huge fire, and the snow swirled through the gaps. Surrounding the breach was a circle of solid desks, half buried by snow but their purpose obvious and thus reminiscent of Coldbrook. Some were barely damaged, others had been melted into grotesque shapes by the fire that must have ruined this place long ago.

The little stream passed around Jonah’s feet and added its contributions of ice to the frozen sculptures that hung from the pedestal.

There were five other pedestals, leading off from his in a broad curve around the room. Two of them were empty, but the other three supported obsidian globes, depthless black orbs that swallowed the snow and gave back nothing.

‘Bloody hell,’ Jonah muttered into the gusting snow.

Breathing hard, he stepped forward and almost slipped on ice. Carefully, he descended from the pedestal: three steps to the floor, where the snow came up to his shins. He glanced back at the breach he had come through, ready to bring his gun to bear against any threat that presented itself. None of the furies from that world followed him, and neither did the Inquisitor.

There was no movement around him apart from the falling snow. Whatever had befallen this world had occurred long ago, or if it was still going on it was happening elsewhere. The massive holes in the roof seemed to have been punched in, not out, and he imagined the people of this Earth lobbing artillery shells at their Coldbrook facility from a distance in a vain attempt to close the breaches they had made, shut them off from the terrors pouring through. But by then it had already been too late.

Something rose across the room. It crackled and snapped as it pulled itself from the ground, frozen there, a sticklike figure made into a snowman. Jonah took a few steps towards it and put a bullet into its head. The snow was splashed red. All those years the fury had lain there dead, and its brains were still wet. Jonah wondered at its dreadful dreams.

He turned a full circle, taking in the whole huge room, intrigued by notions of the possible technologies hidden beneath the white blanket. But he did not have time to explore. That was not why he was there.

The Inquisitor stood at the end of the room in an open doorway. The space behind him was shaded and free of snow: a corridor, perhaps, leading deeper into this Earth’s Coldbrook.

Jonah backed away towards one of the other breaches. The Inquisitor advanced, matching him step for step. The wound on its shoulder had ceased bleeding, the blood by now a stiff black carapace. He hoped that the wound might even have left a scar.

I’m not running, he thought, because it was obvious that this was something that could not be escaped. So what was he doing? He felt the awfulness of the distances he had come.

‘Accept,’ the Inquisitor said.

‘No,’ Jonah replied, and he dashed at the next breach. He didn’t even pause for breath before walking through, though he did have time to think I wonder where all the others go?