The Four-Fingered Man (9 page)

Amelia gulped, and nodded.

The cottage trembled again, and Miss Ardman was abrupt. ‘I’m going.’

She swept past them all, her robes a ripple of colour, her tail so heavily spiked
that none of them tried to follow the eggs again. She looked back over her shoulder
at Tom and said, ‘Get your house in order, Gateway Man. Control will have an official
complaint from me within an hour of my return home.’

‘Please don’t!’ Tom said. ‘Just –’

Miss Ardman turned and stared at him flatly. ‘Just what?’

Tom was silent.

‘Tell me this, then. If you can’t even control yourself around aliens, if you can’t
provide decent security for an ordinary guest –’ Amelia goggled to think Miss Ardman
might be ‘ordinary’ on any planet, ‘– how would you possibly cope with a visit from
a time shifter? Or a band of plague smugglers? Or
Krskn?
’

The floor vibrated threateningly. Amelia’s gaze flashed to the floorboards – then
over to Charlie, who looked as dazed and overwhelmed as she was – then up at Tom.
But before her brain could even formulate a question, Miss Ardman strode on to the
back room.

‘The front door is over –’ Amelia started, but then saw Miss Ardman knew exactly
where she was going. Even if it didn’t make any sense. She was walking deeper into
the cottage, across its bare floorboards, now gritty with sand, and over to a dark
shadow in the corner. She stepped into the puddle of gloom, and Amelia saw that it
was a hole – no, a set of stone steps, leading down into the ground under Tom’s cottage.

‘Come here,’ said Tom urgently. ‘Now! Away from that room.’

They heard Miss Ardman’s footsteps growing fainter and more distant, then, as Tom
bustled them into the kitchen, the sound of a door being opened and banging closed
again. Another great tremor shook the house, and Tom sighed. ‘She’s gone.’

Amelia waited to see what might happen next. After a few deep breaths, when it looked
as though things might stay normal for at least another five minutes, she turned
to Tom.

Tom glared back. ‘You wretched, nosy, pushy, disobedient –’ He seemed too angry to
finish what he was going to say, and instead stomped to the sink and filled the kettle.

‘Well?’ Charlie demanded, his hands on his hips.

‘What?’ Tom kept his back to them both.

Amelia snorted. ‘Erm, let’s see …’ She pretended to think hard. ‘How about: eggs
that make you crazy-drunk just to look at them, people looking like people but really
being aliens, aliens living under your house, and you getting busted because you
can’t cope with someone called Kristen?’

‘Krskn,’ said Tom, flinching.

‘What?’

‘The person I can’t cope with,’ said Tom more clearly, ‘is called Krskn. Also,’ he
smiled slightly, ‘there are no aliens living under my house.’

‘But,’ Charlie began.

Tom held up a weary hand. The half-mangled one, but Amelia was by now so far beyond
missing fingers, she didn’t notice.

‘Let’s get it all over with at once,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you back up to the hotel
and let your parents explain it all to you.’

Amelia staggered. It was the final blow. After all the impossible, unbelievable things
she’d just had crammed into her head, this was the worst. All her doubts had been
confirmed.

‘My
parents
know about this?’

Everyone was in the common room for Tom’s emergency meeting. Mum and Dad sitting
rather rigidly together, Mary looking almost despairing, and Tom …

Amelia couldn’t erase the image of Tom blubbering over Miss Ardman’s eggs. She’d
thought there was nothing more uncomfortable than seeing an adult angry and threatening
like Miss Ardman, but it had been excruciating to see one helpless and pitiful like
Tom.

Tom didn’t seem too happy about being seen like that either. He’d avoided eye contact
with any of them for the whole meeting, and had been twice as grumpy as usual.

James wasn’t sitting at the table with the rest of them. There was an old chest freezer
along one wall of the common room and he was sitting on that, a disbelieving sneer
on his face.

‘Aliens?’ he snorted. ‘Really?’

Dad smiled broadly. ‘Isn’t it incredible?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ said James with mock enthusiasm. ‘Totally! As in: totally
not
credible.
As in: a great big pile of bull.’

Dad frowned, puzzled. ‘But you heard what Amelia and Charlie said. You heard Tom
backing them up. Why would we say any of that unless –’

James held up a hand. ‘I have no idea. I mean, obviously, dragging us all out here
to this dead-end loser town, you must be trying to destroy our lives. Maybe trying
to derange us with made-up stories is part of that. Maybe we’re all part of a new
experiment of yours now?’

‘Hey, Jamo,’ said Dad. ‘Hang on now –’

But James had already hopped off the freezer and stalked out of the room. ‘Not interested,’
he called back.

Dad got up to go after him, but Mum caught his hand. ‘No, leave him, Scott. Let him
have some time to think it through by himself.’

Dad sighed and shook his head. ‘Not exactly what I was expecting from him.’

‘Expecting, Scott? But you weren’t
expecting
the kids to find anything out, right?’
said Mum. ‘That was the deal, wasn’t it? We keep them separate from it for as long
as possible?’

‘Yeah, well.’ Dad glanced bashfully at Tom. ‘Top-secret. But I thought that if they
ever did find out, they’d think it was, you know …’

‘Totally awesome!’ Charlie finished for him.

Dad grinned. ‘Exactly.’

Mary shook her head and looked anxiously at her son. ‘Charlie, do you understand
just how important it is to keep this quiet? We all know the truth now, but you can’t
tell anyone else about what you’ve seen.
No one
. Not even in hints, or as a joke,
or pretending it’s a make-believe game. No-one can know anything about Miss Ardman
or what goes on in Tom’s cottage.’

‘But what
does
go on there?’ Charlie interrupted her. ‘Miss Ardman has gone, but
gone where?’

Dad looked even more excited and leant in to speak. Mum laid a hand on his arm again.

‘Are you sure, Scott?’ she said. ‘Once you tell them, you can’t take it back. What
if Control …?’

Dad shrugged. ‘Miss Ardman’s complaint is more than enough to bring Control down
on us, and the kids already know the main points. All I’m going to do is fill in
the … mechanics a little. Better they understand properly from us than try to figure
it out on their own, don’t you think?’

Mum looked at Amelia and Charlie, and then over at Mary. The two mothers sighed at
each other, and Dad took that as agreement. He grinned.

‘Now, Amelia, you know that my research has been into the possibility of the existence
of wormholes – giant deformities that could theoretically join two distant points
in space together?’

Amelia nodded.

‘So …’ Dad coaxed her. ‘What do you think could be in the caves under Tom’s house?’

‘A wormhole,’ Amelia breathed.

‘No!’ Dad crowed. ‘Not
a
wormhole – hundreds of them! Perhaps thousands! A whole
spaghetti bowl of wormholes, all shifting and jostling each other, taking it in turns
to line up with the gateway under Tom’s house.’

Amelia gazed at him, trying to fathom it.

‘Isn’t it amazing?’ Dad gushed. ‘All my life, I’ve been trying just to prove the
maths works, never even hoping to find a single shred of physical evidence, and now
– forget evidence! Any time I want, I can go down to Tom’s and actually
hear
the
wormholes come and go. I can
smell
the air of other planets in other galaxies …’

Tom grunted and stared at his hands. He didn’t seem to share Dad’s wonder. Amelia
suspected that living on top of all those wormholes might have turned out to be less
fun for Tom than Dad supposed.

‘So,’ Charlie grinned at Amelia’s dad. ‘Miss Ardman wasn’t a one-off? There will
be other aliens coming to stay here?’

‘Yeah,’ said Dad. ‘From all over. Turns out,’ he said proudly, ‘that we have the
most active wormhole hub in the whole Milky Way! Can you believe it? In Forgotten
Bay!’

‘But,’ Mum broke in, ‘we’re going to have some human guests too. They’re bound to
show up once we open for business – and we can’t very well turn them away without
raising suspicion.’

‘But,’ said Amelia, ‘the … uh … gateway hasn’t just opened, has it? Hasn’t Tom been
looking after it all this time? So what’s changed? What are we here for?’

Tom grunted again. This time it sounded like he approved of Amelia’s questions.

Mum looked pained. ‘Everything’s changed. Tom’s handled this whole place on his own
for years, and he’s done brilliantly,’ she added. Tom sniffed, but turned pink. ‘But
things are different now.’

‘How?’

‘The wormholes are becoming more unpredictable for one thing,’ said Dad. ‘It could
be something to do with the natural acceleration of the expansion of the universe,
or it could be a new instability –’ He stopped, realising he’d lost Amelia. ‘Well,
to put it simply, Tom’s old charts and timetables are getting less and less useful
in predicting when the wormholes will arrive, and the wormhole connections themselves
are getting less reliable. So there’s a lot of work here for me just on the physics.’

‘And,’ said Mum, ‘Gateway Control – who oversee and regulate all the gateways in
use – are getting nervous about letting this gateway stay in our hands. They’d much
rather have their own people running it, and we’re kind of on probation to see if
we’re up to the job. Miss Ardman’s complaint isn’t going to help.’

‘But that would never work,’ said Charlie. ‘If aliens are supposed to be a big secret,
how could they run it?’

‘You saw Miss Ardman,’ said Dad. ‘Did she look like an alien?’

Amelia shuddered. ‘I’ll say!’

‘No, I mean when you first met her. She looked human, didn’t she? All our alien guests
– and any Gateway Control officials who come here to check on us – will all be cloaked
by holo-emitters. Tom, do you have one to show them?’

Tom scowled more deeply still. ‘Nope.’

‘Ah, well,’ Dad went on. ‘They’re amazing, basically clockwork with a crystal core.
They’re these tube things that you stick on your neck …’

Amelia and Charlie looked at each other in startled recognition. Charlie swallowed
a grin.

‘… and you not only look like another person, you are physically wearing that form,
too. I mean, you could have touched Miss Ardman and felt human skin, not scales.
It’s brilliant.’

‘It’s dangerous,’ Tom spoke up.

‘Tom,’ Mum started.

But Tom retorted angrily. ‘No. If you want them to know the truth, then they should
know the whole truth. The gateway is
dangerous
. Not just because it’s speeding up
or unstable. Not just because Control wants to interfere. It’s dangerous because
we are standing in the middle of an intergalactic superhighway – just standing in
the middle of the traffic, totally unprotected, and
hoping
that we don’t get hit
by anything.’