Chapter Twenty-Nine

Perihelion

 

 

31st October 2016

 

ALICE REACHED THE end of Mary Carson’s narrative in silence. She didn’t dare glance at John. After a moment she heard him breathe out, then settle back on the bed. That was when she finally turned to him.

He looked back at her, eyes bloodshot. “You know,” he said at last, “when Sixsmythe said Thorne was more than he seemed, I thought –”

“That he was better?”

“Yeah. He’d got a bad reputation, but under it, he was...”

“I get you. I thought the same way when I started reading that. But he was worse.”

“Yeah.”

“That poor woman.” Alice turned away and peered out of the window; the slope outside was deserted.

“You feel sorry for her?” John asked.

“Hell, yes. You don’t?”

“’Course. I just thought you might – I mean, giving up her baby and all.”

“Because of Emily, you mean?” Alice glared. John looked away. “That bastard went to work on her, John. He took her apart psychologically. In the end, she was in no shape to outwit him. The blame’s on him. Not her.”

“I knew that. But she blamed herself.”

“Of course she did. There’s no way you can’t.”

She realised they were both speaking in whispers. The house was silent. She looked back out of the window.

“Nothing doing?” whispered John, crawling onto the bed beside her to look out as well.

“Can’t see anything. Not even the Red Man.”

“That’s a long time,” John said. “Normally it’s only a few minutes, and then it’s back to our world.”

“I know. Maybe this is the end-game.”

“In which case,” John pointed out, “it’s our move.”

“I know. But what are we supposed to do?”

He rubbed his face. “The children want something, right? We can see that. And the Red Man wants something else – enough that he’s stuck his oar in with the kids.”

“Yeah,” said Alice, “and I’m caught in the middle. Question is, which side should we be rooting for?”

“The Red Man’s protected you, and the children tried to kill you. But at the same time, the Red Man didn’t want us reading that box-file, and the children stopped him burning it.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t be backing either side, then. At least...”

“At least what?”

“At least until we understand what the fight’s about.”

Alice got off the bed; suddenly she felt charged-up, full of energy. I’m close to something, she thought. It’s at my shoulder, behind my back, maybe even right in front of me, but it’s like a ghost and I can’t see it – can’t see it, unless. Unless what, though? Unless what? Unless something happens to make the ghost visible. What would do that? Did the ghosts need to absorb more energy from their environment to register visually – absorbing heat radiation to convert into a visual image? Wasn’t that why ghost-chasers like John claimed haunted houses grew cold when ghosts appeared?

“Alice?”

She shook her head, held up a hand to ward him off. He had the sense to fall silent: he’d seen her like this when they’d lived together, when some train of thought kicked off – except that it was more like lines of dominoes, each knocking over the next to show some odd pattern on the underside.

The ghost. Yes, the ghost. The ghost she couldn’t see but had to. What made a ghost become visible? Did the ghost have to do something, or was it the viewer? Did she need something, some shift of perception – the kind the Moloch Device had created in its victims, or the ancient priests had achieved in their trances?

Perception, observation. The Fire Beyond. Perihelion.

“Perihelion,” she said. She turned to John. “It’s about proximity. In certain times, in certain places, the Fire Beyond can be reached more easily. A force – and/or a location – that lets you see the past or the future. Or heal the sick or the dying – whatever. Something that lets you make changes to something at a fundamental level.

“We’ve been assuming that all this is supernatural in nature. Paranormal. Magical. But what if it isn’t?”

“I don’t get you,” said John.

“What if all this is natural, scientific phenomena? Just stuff that’s been badly understood and poorly explained?”

“You’ve got a scientific explanation for this? I’d love to hear it.”

Alice snorted. “Don’t know if it’s anything old Doc Peabody back at Salford would have had much time for. You remember her?”

“Don’t I just,” said John. “She was the one always telling us not to get quantum mechanics confused with magic or the paranormal.”

“Just try this for an idea. What if this place – Redman’s Hill, Collarmill Height – what if it was some sort of soft spot?”

“Soft spot?”

“Remember how they told us to picture space and time as a flat sheet?”

“Right,” said John.

“Yeah. But there’s this thin, quantum foam theory, which suggests that space-time isn’t of a constant, uniform texture – there can be areas of instability.”

“Right,” said John. “And this –”

“The Fire Beyond. That’s what it is. It’s a point where everything’s unstable, in flux. And if you can locate that, connect to it in some way, you can control it. You could, say, open a wormhole.”

John clicked his fingers. “Wait a sec, I know the technical name – an Einstein-Rosen bridge, right? It’s like you fold the sheet over and push something through, make a hole going from one side to the other.”

“Yeah.” Alice snatched up an old envelope and a biro, then drew two dots, one marked ‘A’ and one marked ‘B’, at different ends. “Points A and B are separated in space or time or both. But fold the envelope like so, and –” she unfolded one of the Swiss Army knife’s spikier components and pushed it through, transfixing both dots. “Ta-da! You’ve got a hole that links them. You can put something into that hole...”

“And it’ll come out on the other side,” said John. “At a different point in space or time. Instantly.”

“Instantly,” Alice agreed. “Halfway across the galaxy, or a hundred years in the past. Or in the future.”

“And if you created the right kind of bridge,” said John, “you could, say receive light signals through it. From another time, or a remote location.”

“Yeah,” said Alice. “You could see into the past or future, or watch something happening far away. Or you could perceive matter on the quantum, sub-atomic level. And then manipulate it.”

“Creating fundamental changes on the basic composition of matter.” John was nodding now. They were slipping even further back into old intimacies. These were the kind of conversations the two of them had had at university, bouncing ideas off one another over bottles of red wine or rum at silly o’clock in the morning. “Like lead into gold, right? Or, say, miraculous healing. But control it? Control it how? And this is just a freak occurrence? It sounds a little too useful for a natural phenomenon.”

“Maybe it isn’t natural,” said Alice, “maybe a thousand years in the future, someone built a machine to look through time or manipulate matter at the sub-atomic level, and this is just like a side-effect from it, or the result of an accident. Or maybe there’s been some sort of trillions-to-one-against naturally-occurring freak event. Maybe there’s something in the cave walls that amplifies the effect. Essentially it acts as some kind of tachyon detector or attractor. Either way, to see it, to connect with it, you have to be in a particular state of mind, like an ecstatic trance or the state one of the sacrifices went into.”

“A sort of heightened level of awareness, so you could perceive things you normally wouldn’t?”

“Right.”

“But then wouldn’t the sacrifice be the one who controlled the thing?”

Alice shook her head. “The sacrifice would barely be capable of any conscious thought – my guess is that once the Fire Beyond became visible, it would be first come, first served.”

John scratched his beard. “And the children, the ghosts? Where do they fit into it?”

“If there’s some kind of mental connection with the instability,” said Alice – she knew she was winging it, but she knew, knew, she’d make some sort of breakthrough here – “then maybe some trace of their personality gets caught up in it, like old computer files on a network.”

“Ghosts in the machine,” said John. “Literally. Cheery thought, huh? But that might explain the hill’s reputation, the time travel, even the children, but what about...” he nodded out of the window “... those two?”

“On that,” sighed Alice, “you’ve got me.”

“And this ‘Perihelion’,” said John, “that means it’s close – or that it’s stronger than at other times. That tracks with Halloween, because it’s traditionally when all sorts of supernatural shit is supposed to go crazy. So, okay, the Moloch Device makes the initial connection, so the Fire Beyond becomes visible, and then what?”

“What Thorne said he wanted. To enter the Fire itself and use it. He could plug in directly, step outside time and space. In theory, at least, he could live for ever.”

“Except he didn’t,” said John. “He died, remember?” He picked up the Confession and turned to its final pages. “See? She says here they found a body.”

“And you saw what else she said.”

“Come on, that can’t have been –”

“Can’t it? According to whom?”

John sank back onto the bed; Alice slipped the Confession out of his hands.

“What do any of this lot want?” he said at last. “The kids, the Red Man, the Beast, any of them? I mean, if we knew that...” He snorted. “Like it matters anyway. We should have just left this place behind and forgotten about it.”

“You could have,” Alice pointed out. “I don’t think the place is done with me. The kids, the Red Man – they’ve all got plans that seem to involve me, somehow.”

Whispers came back to her, from when she first moved in, Does she know? Will she help? Help who? Him or us? She’ll help him. It’s why she’s here. Can’t have that. So we’re going to have to –

“She’ll help him,” she said.

“What?”

“When I first moved in, I heard whispers – the kids again, I guess. They were talking about me helping someone else. ‘Him’, that’s all they called him. Whoever it was, they didn’t want it happening. And not long after that –”

“They tried to kill you.”

“Yeah.” She plopped down on the bed beside John.

“So, who’s this ‘him’?”

Alice took the Swiss Army knife and the remaining rowan twigs from her pockets, fumbling at her scalp until she found a few more longish hairs. She snipped them off. “At a guess, the Red Man. Or Arodias Thorne, if there’s anything left of him.”

“Always assuming they aren’t one and the same.”

Alice stopped and blinked. For some reason that had never occurred to her. “I don’t think they are, you know.”

“Why’s that?”

She bit off another piece of sellotape and wrapped it round the juncture of the twigs, over the hair that bound the cross. “Something about the Red Man himself. There’s something almost... kind... about him, somehow. Maybe not kind, exactly. I can’t put it into words. But he isn’t cruel. Arodias Thorne was.”

John puffed out his cheeks. “He might have been two hundred years ago. If he’s still around now – if he managed to reach the Fire Beyond – he might have changed.”

“Yeah.” Alice passed him the second cross and got up. “He might be worse.”