The Impossible Boy (12 page)

‘It was at the park, wasn’t it?’ Barney cut in. ‘When the mayor was unveiling that statue?’

Gill nodded. ‘The locket opened. There was a white light. And Fleur vanished.’

‘And that was when the statue got reversed, wasn’t it?’

‘Some force from the fourth dimension nudged the statue,’ said Dave, ‘rotating it about a 4-D axis, turning it into its own mirror image.’

‘But how could it do that?’ asked Barney.

Dave held up a plate, one of the few on the draining board that was still in one piece. Painted on it was a picture of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. ‘See this plate? See the
picture on it?’

‘Yup.’

Dave turned the plate over in his hands. ‘Well, I can rotate the plate two ways – forwards and backwards, and from side to side. When it’s upside down it looks different,
doesn’t it? But it’s still the same plate.’

‘Obviously.’

‘Obviously. But there’s another way I could rotate the plate if I were able to. Through the fourth dimension. It’s not a direction we humans have access to normally, but if I
did, I would be able to rotate the plate so that when we looked at it we saw it as a mirror image of itself. Do you see?’

‘And that’s what happened to the statue?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Shall I stick the plate away in the cupboard now? I don’t think it actually belongs in the cutlery drawer where you’re putting it.’

Dave chuckled. ‘Thank you, Barney.’

‘If we gave the locket to the four-dimensional creature,’ reasoned Gill, ‘it could use it to go home without having to absorb the energy of the fusion reactor. And if we were
very careful, no one need get hurt at all.’ She put a hand to her throat and lifted a thin silver chain from around her neck. Dangling from it was a small silvery shape. She handed it to
Barney.

‘You’ve still got the locket?’ Barney stared at it in awe. He felt like he was holding a very small but immensely powerful bomb.

‘Couldn’t get rid of it, risk someone else vanishing into it. Far too dangerous. And it reminds me of Fleur. Maybe it can do some good today for once.’

‘We should get going,’ said Dave. ‘We can’t afford to hang about. Too much is at stake.’

‘How are we going to get there?’ asked Barney. ‘It’s twenty miles away.’

‘We’ve got our bus passes,’ said Gill. ‘Have you got enough money for the fare, Barney?’

‘What?’ He looked at her, momentarily dumbfounded. ‘Uh, yeah. I guess. But isn’t there any quicker way of—’

Gill and Dave looked at one another and suddenly burst out laughing. Slowly and painfully, Gill rose to her feet. She hobbled with her walking frame over to a kitchen cupboard and fished out a
key from a bowl. She held it up for Barney to see.

‘This is the key to a nineteen seventy-three Ford Cortina XLE. She hasn’t been out of our garage for nearly fifteen years, but every weekend we give her a polish and start her up
just to hear the engine.’

‘Her name’s Daisy,’ explained Dave.

‘And you haven’t driven her for fifteen years?’

‘We’ve never had anywhere to go,’ said Dave.

‘Until now,’ said Gill. ‘Come on.’

‘Are you sure you’re both up to it?’ asked Barney, eyeing them uncertainly. ‘I mean, I don’t mean to be rude or anything but neither of you are as young as you once
were . . .’

Gill kicked over her walking frame violently. It clattered to the kitchen floor. ‘Time’s a-wasting,’ she said. ‘Let’s hit the road. Geek Inc. and the Society of
Highly Unusual Things have a problem to solve.’

It was a clear, chilly evening and the two massive cooling towers stood silent and brooding like twin giants surveying the vast stretch of barren countryside that formed their
kingdom. They rose amidst a complex of buildings – boxy control rooms, pipe-sprouting reprocessing facilities, vast cathedral-sized turbine halls and an enormous hexagonal-patterned reactor
dome resembling a gigantic golf ball half buried in the earth.

High in a plush office in one of the buildings, working late for the fourth night in a row, Julia Goosefoot, the general manager of Sanderling Ridge (formerly Cherrycroft Mount, formerly Lark
Meadows, formerly Dandelion Grove) sat at a desk and stared lovingly at a framed photograph of a handsome man and two extremely cute kids. The man wasn’t her husband and the kids
weren’t hers – in fact it was a photograph she had cut out of an advert for biscuits in the magazine that came with her Sunday paper. But she loved the photograph anyway because it made
visitors to her office think she was normal. And when people thought she was normal that gave her an advantage over them – because in reality there was very little that was normal about Julia
Goosefoot. She was, to pick just three things at random, abnormally cruel, abnormally single-minded and abnormally ambitious.

At the age of four, Julia had attached roller skates to her sleeping grandmother’s garden chair and sent the old woman trundling down a hill towards a busy road, just so she could steal
her grandmother’s last slice of toast. Fortunately, a neighbour had managed to intercept the runaway chair seconds before it entered traffic and returned it safely to the Goosefoot
family’s garden before the old woman had even woken up.

When she was seven, she climbed into an enclosure at Chester Zoo and threw a baby porcupine at a teacher who had told her off for speaking with her mouth full.

When she was twelve, she filled a friend’s aquarium with coffee to make the fish swim faster – they had, apparently, been swimming far too slowly for her liking. Her parents had to
buy replacements for all the fish she poisoned.

When she was twenty, she was banned from her local library for hollowing out a set of encyclopaedias and filling them with worms as a practical joke. The first person to open one of these
doctored encyclopaedias – a retired hat salesman from Stockport – had fainted clean away when he had tried to look up the capital of Peru and found a mass of wriggling worms inside the
book.

A year later, serving a six-month stretch in prison for spraying milkshake at the guards outside Buckingham Palace, she came to the attention of the owners of a new nuclear power plant called
Dandelion Grove near the small north-west town of Blue Hills. There had recently been a series of radiation leaks at the plant which had resulted in an awful lot of bad publicity, the changing of
the plant’s name several times to distract the public, and the sacking of the plant’s general manager. The owners were now looking for someone to take over. The only qualification
necessary was that the new manager be as nasty and horrible a human being as they could possibly find – in order to scare the workforce into working harder and more safely, and to scare the
press into not asking too many probing questions about the plant. When they read in the newspaper about Julia Goosefoot and her history of appalling wrongdoing, they offered her the job immediately
on her leaving prison, and were delighted to find that she was very good at it indeed.

Julia adjusted the photograph on her desk so that she could see the bland smiling faces a little better. Had these people actually been her family, she thought, they would be proud of her.

About a mile from the plant, on a bleak stretch of moorland, Chas and Gabby re-entered our universe. Gabby reeled, open-mouthed, afraid she was about to lose her balance.
Seeing the layers of soft bracken and spongy moss beneath her feet, she let herself fall to the ground, giggling. She stared up at the darkening sky and the few evening stars that were emerging
tentatively from it.

‘The word “wow”,’ she said, ‘is so small, so useless, so totally incapable of expressing how absolutely
woooooooooowwww
I feel right now. I may need some
time to think of another word for the job.’ She giggled again.

‘What you’ve experienced so far,’ said Chas, ‘is tiny. An infinitesimally small area of hyperspace. Merely the bit of my universe that touches yours. Once I’m able
to move freely in the fourth dimension again, then we can
really
go places.’

‘Just looking at ordinary stuff from your world – a leaf, a stone, the sunset . . . So much beauty in the must mundane things! I don’t think my head’s big enough to fit
all this wonderfulness in,’ Gabby said.

Chas smirked. ‘Your head’s pretty big already, I reckon.’

‘Hey!’ She sat up and thumped him playfully. As she did she caught sight of the fusion plant in the distance, its bold geometric shapes resembling an oversized version of a
toddler’s building blocks. ‘We’re here! What do we do?’

‘We wait a moment.’

‘What for?’

‘There! Watch!’

‘Where?’

Chas shrugged. ‘Everywhere, pretty much,’

‘Huh?’

Gabby got to her feet and looked around – and then she saw. All over the moor, in every direction, in hundreds and hundreds of separate locations, boys were appearing – hands, noses,
knees forming in mid-air, then thickening into arms, torsos, heads and legs. Chases – hundreds of copies of Chas wearing school uniforms of all colours – were creating themselves out of
nothing.

Once fully formed, they turned as one and marched towards Chas and Gabby, a silent army. Gabby squeaked in alarm.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Chas. ‘It’s only me.’

‘I know,’ said Gabby. ‘But there’s an awful lot of you.’

‘To break through completely into the fourth dimension I’ll need to concentrate all the energy of the reactor into a single space.’

‘What does that mean?

In reply, Chas merely smiled enigmatically and stood with his arms outstretched. A white ghostlike glow appeared around him.

The first of the duplicates arrived. It winked at Gabby and touched Chas’s outstretched hand. The duplicate vanished and the white light around Chas pulsed and grew stronger. Soon, more
duplicates drew near, touching Chas’s hands in turn and disappearing, causing Chas’s aura to grow and pulsate further. Gabby sensed the duplicates were somehow merging with him. In the
space of a minute, all the duplicates had made contact with Chas and evaporated. The glow around him was now a strong silvery gleam that lit up the desolate landscape around them.

Five hundred kilometres above, a satellite’s camera whirred silently.

Chas looked at Gabby and grinned. His bright silvery aura gave him the look of some restless Greek god come down to Earth to cause mischief. ‘We need to get inside the reactor now.
It’s time.’

‘How do we do that? Another shortcut through the fourth dimension?’

Chas nodded. ‘This will be the last one for a little while. In this somewhat energetic state I’m in at the moment –’ he flapped his arms a couple of times, leaving
feathery streams of white energy billowing in their wake, ‘– it’s too risky to keep hopping from one universe to another. With all the power of the duplicates concentrated within
me, my molecules are all a bit unstable.’

Gabby’s eyes widened. ‘You’re not in any danger though, are you?’

‘No. I’ll be fine.’ He held out a hand to her. His long fingers left little vapour trails like comets.

Gabby took it.

‘There! That light! Did you see that? Head for it!’ Barney pointed a decisive finger into the distance as the old Cortina rattled along the narrow road.

Beside him at the wheel, Gill nodded. ‘Same kind of light we saw when Fleur disappeared. Well, a weaker version, anyway.’ She slammed her foot on the accelerator and Daisy sped
forwards through the darkness.

‘Harland radiation,’ said Barney.

‘What’s that?’ came Dave’s voice from the back of the car. Minutes after setting off he had been struck down with a headache and decided to have a lie down. The back seat
was not the most comfortable of beds and he was rattling about like a dried pea in a maraca.

‘I fished a bunch of documents out of the recycling bin,’ said Barney, holding up a sheaf of papers. ‘One of them’s about the angel lockets. Thought it might be useful.
This one says the bright flashes of light that accompany the opening of doorways to higher dimensions are caused by Harland radiation.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Dave. ‘The hole between dimensions sends out ripples of gravity that our eyes interpret as white light.’