Parallel Loop
12 Stories concerning beings and other entities
More than, less than or other than human
Mike Crowson
Copyright Mike Crowson 1990 – 2005
Some of these stories have appeared in small press magazines or other collections
Contents:
Sealed Entrance
Neighbourhood Watch
Something on Account
Cat Burglar
Other Than Human
Trespassers Will Be Persecuted
The Godmother
Parallel Loop
The Price of Success
El Quinto Sol
Word of God
Last Words
Sealed Entrance
I pulled into the kerb, switched off the engine and looked around. There was no sign of anyone who could be Mr. and Mrs. Norris, nor of anything that could be their vehicle. I grabbed my handbag off the front seat, got out of my car and locked up, glancing at my wristwatch as I did so. Five minutes late. It was unlikely our clients had left already so I assumed they were later than I was and studied the outside of the property.
I have never liked showing prospective buyers around anywhere that I haven't seen myself first: on this occasion it was unavoidable, since this was my first day at Harold Grainger Associates and Mr. Grainger had phoned in on his mobile to say he was running late and would I keep the appointment for him.
The 'For Sale' sign stood beside the double gate of a detached house with built on garage. It didn't appear to be anything grand, but looked newish, fairly pleasant and worth considerably more than the asking price. I wondered what the catch was. The place looked empty, the hedge needed trimming but was not wildly overgrown and ditto the lawn. There was a dead bird by the hedge but I hastily kicked it out of sight.
I glanced at my wristwatch again and opened one of the double gates. The latch worked and the gate swung easily on oiled hinges. I wandered up to the garage. It was roomy, but you wouldn't get two cars in. I looked back at the road: still no sign of any vehicle pulling up nearby. In fact, it was pretty quiet. This was the dead end approach road to a small middle-class estate built, I would guess, ten or twelve years ago. I took the bunch of keys and the description of the property from my handbag and opened the front door to take a quick look around.
I passed through a fairly typical hall with a downstairs toilet and stairs leading upwards to the first floor, and went through a door on the right, into a large lounge. There were windows overlooking the front garden and at the end of the room. To the rear there were no windows, but a doorway at the far side of a fireplace led into a conservatory. There was a serving hatch into the kitchen, let into the wall next to the door by which I had entered. In the back wall, balancing the doorway into the conservatory, was a bricked up doorway with a wooden rail over it that suggested curtains, though there were none in evidence.
I could see that it was the wrong place for a door: right where you'd want a dining table, if you were going to make use of the serving hatch. Having the bare blocks plastered over, the rail removed and redecoration done would make the house more saleable, but why not a window, though? And why leave un-plastered breeze-blocks? I went out into the conservatory.
The place was quite empty, dry and dusty but stuffy and rather too hot. I looked at the outside wall to see how the doorway had been bricked up and was surprised that there was no trace of it. The doorway had been so well filled that I couldn't see where it had been. The brown brickwork looked continuous and original. My mobile phone rang.
"It's Jane from the office," A voice said when I answered.
"Yes?"
"Mr. Norris just rang in. He and Mrs. Norris won't be coming because they've decided to buy another property."
"Pity they didn't phone half an hour ago," I said.
"That's what I thought," said Jane. "What's to stop a person ringing in quarter an hour before and appointment time, instead of a quarter of an hour ... "
The phone went dead on me. When I glanced at the display there was a signal but no power and while I watched it went off completely.
I was unreasonably irritated and jammed the thing away and went back into the through lounge. I wondered why the bricked up entrance bothered me. It did, though. I felt really uncomfortable in that room. I don't think I'd have bought the place, even with the plastering and redecoration done, and I thought there'd be trouble selling it. Possibly that was the reason for the low asking price.
I went out into the garden, locking the front door behind me. A little cloud of green midges hovered like a wisp of green smoke over the pond. I closed the gate behind me and glanced at my watch. It had stopped.
" Damn!" I muttered. The auguries for my first day at Harold Grainger Associates seemed to be turning a thumb down rather distinctly.
I drove straight back to the office, put my mobile on charge and was immediately immersed in all the 'first day' activities that go with starting a new job, in this case as a junior partner in the firm. At lunch I went out to a jeweller's to get my watch battery replaced and then to eat. I remembered the property in Timegate Close and the sealed entrance over soup and a roll in a café in the Market Square. As I was back in the office a minute or two early, I took the time to bring up the file on my computer and scroll through the details.
The instructions had come via a solicitor and we were selling the property on the instructions of the executors of the late Brian Winter.
Brian Winter. The name rang faint bells and I struggled to recall the context. It seemed to me, though I wasn't quite sure, that he'd disappeared suddenly and without trace a few years ago. I couldn't remember any details, but I thought Sally might know. Sally Newsome is deputy editor, chief reporter and general dogsbody for the local weekly paper. She has a prodigious memory for local affairs and if she doesn't know something herself, generally knows someone who does. My hand hovered over the phone for an indecisive moment, and then I rang the Gazette and asked for Sally.
"Sally? It's Angie Morgan here," I said. "Do you by any chance recall Brian Winters?"
"Vaguely," Sally answered. "Didn't he just disappear in moderately mysterious circumstances about eight years ago?"
"I think so," I said. "It's only idle curiosity, but I'm trying to sell his house and I wondered about the story."
"I don't really remember much about it."
"I just wanted a few fairly general details."
"I'll dig out the old archive stories for you. Are you still at Greengates?"
I told her I'd moved to Howard Grainger Associates and she promised to send photocopies of the archive there.
"If you're wanting more detailed information," she continued, "You could try Detective Inspector Scott. He dealt with the search. About the last case he had before he retired. He still lives around here. The local nick could probably give you his address.
I thanked Sally and rang off. I had a valuation to do next, but I could probably find the former DI Scott on Grainger's electoral roll CD-ROM, without having to bother the police station at all.
II
The retired detective was expecting me because I'd phoned first, and he seemed quite happy to talk about the case. He led me into a very comfortable living room.
"So you're selling Brian Winter's house,' he said.
There had seemed no point whatever in pretence of any kind, so I had told him of my curiosity and my strange feelings about the place.
"It was a strange case," he said. "We went through that house with a fine tooth comb."
"Including the sealed doorway?"
"Especially the sealed doorway," he said. "We had that out block by block. We even poked some of the outer brickwork away, to make sure there was no cavi
ty. I mean, we could see there wasn't but we were being really thorough."
"Was Winters married?"
"There was a wife and a small child," Scott said. "We never found a trace of them either."
"Was the house furnished when he disappeared?"
"Furnished and all or most of their clothes and personal possessions were still in the place. I can't say for sure that there weren't enough clothes and things missing for a few days away, but everything looked to be there."
"Who raised the alarm?" I asked.
"Sister," Scott said. "Geraldine. Now what was her married name? Stone I think. Anyway she reported them missing. I couldn't rule out foul play and I had her watched for a while and questioned her, but there was no evidence of anything. We fingerprinted the house and never found any trace of anyone but the three of them and the sister, and not many of hers."
"What did Winters do for a living?" I asked.
"Good question," said the detective. " He lectured and researched in Quantum Physics at the University and he'd written a couple of books on the subject, one of them a best seller."
"A best seller? What was it called?"
"Don't ask me. I suppose must have seen it but I've forgotten."
"What was it about?"
Scott shrugged disinterestedly. "If I ever knew I've forgotten," he said.
There was a rail over the sealed doorway," I said, changing the subject. "Did you find any curtains?"
"There were heavy velvet curtains hanging there," he said. "I had them taken down and sent to forensics." He paused and I waited. "They gave them a pretty thorough going over. The front was clean but the back was covered in dust from the blocks and cement and there even splashes of the stuff on the fabric."
'The back of the curtains," I repeated, puzzled. "What's the significance of that?"
"It suggests that the curtains were closed when the doorway was bricked up from the other side."
"But you can't get at it from the other side," I protested.
"Exactly," the retired detective agreed. "The whole thing was puzzling and I ended my career with an unsolved mystery."
"What do you think happened?"
Scott scratched his thinning hair. "I think somebody murdered him, but there was no sign of a crime and we never found a body."
"Was his car in the garage?"
"He didn't drive but his wife's car was there."
I felt as nonplussed as before, but more curious, and decided to try and locate Brian Winter's sister.
III
I was on uncertain ground professionally about what I did next. I used the little information on our file plus our CD-ROM of the electoral roll plus the photocopies of the Gazette's archive material Sally Newsome sent me to trace Geraldine Stone and made contact with her.
Mrs. Stone was willing enough to meet me - and she could very justifiably have resented my curiosity and refused to see me - but I had a distinct impression she was holding back. Considering what she did say, I can't imagine what she didn't say. Yes, she had been in the house while Winter was alive and well. I knew that already from talking to DI Scott of course, but I didn't mention seeing the detective.
I told her I was selling the house and that I found the story intriguing which sounded somewhat 'thin', though it was true enough.
"My brother is what you might call a lateral thinking genius," Geraldine Stone remarked, a per pro of nothing.
I thought any genius was a person who could see the opportunities that others missed - in short, a lateral thinker. I also noticed the 'is' rather than 'was'. Did Ms. Stone really think her brother was still alive?
"Did you ever see the doorway behind the curtains before it was sealed?" I asked her, expecting a negative.
"Oh yes," she said. "Brian used it a lot."
I was surprised. "Where did it lead?" I asked.
"To the conservatory. I sat in there a few times myself."
"But it's very well sealed up at the rear," I said, puzzled.
"You've never seen the rear," Geraldine said. I started to say that I had, but she continued, "If you went through the right hand entrance, the view from the conservatory was over the hedge to the woods at the back of the estate, and the outside door lead into the garden. The left hand door, with the curtains across, led into the same conservatory, but the view was different and Brian never let us go out."
My head buzzed. "How was the view different?" I asked, for want of more sensible question.
"There were quite a few different views. The one I liked best was a sort of grassy plain leading towards low hills," she said.
Do you know where you were?"
"I was in the conservatory," she said. "Brian said it was in the same place, but it wasn't. I don't know where it was."
I couldn't take that in and tried orientate myself.
"Did you see any buildings or any other people?" I asked. Geraldine shook her head and I wondered whether that was true.
"Did you see any animals or birds?" I asked, still looking for clues to the reality.
"No."
"Why wouldn't Brian let you go out?"
Geraldine didn't answer. It was not a blank refusal, so much as an obvious consideration of how much to tell me. At last she said, "On the Grassy Plain one he said there were some insects like large green mosquitoes. Brian didn't want Judith or me or little Naomi to get bitten by them."
In that case, why had he apparently taken his wife and daughter there permanently, I wondered. Perhaps they'd gone somewhere else where the mosquitoes were not a problem, but it rather looked as if he'd gone precipitately. While I digested the information she continued, "Mosquitoes in this world carry all sorts of germs like malaria, many of them fatal. I suppose he didn't want us catching anything nasty."
Or bringing it into our world, where nobody would have developed immunity, I thought. I wondered how much Brian Winter had actually said and how much she had thought out herself.
"I understand he was a writer," I said.
Geraldine seemed relieved to change the subject. "One of his books was a best seller," she said, "It still brings in royalties."
"What was it called?"
"Same Places - Other Worlds."
It sounded like it could be an explanation of the science behind the sealed entrance. "What was it about?"
"Parallel universes."
"Did you mention parallel universes to the police?" I asked.
Geraldine smiled a little, but not very humorously. "Not likely," she said. "I just reported the family missing. I think they suspected I'd done them all in or something."
"Did you know your brother was going to seal up the entrance?"
"No. It was a complete surprise. He destroyed the equipment he'd built as well, so nobody could follow him. That was all gone too."
"Do you know why he did it?"
"Not really," she said.
I thought she both looked and sounded as if she might have a very good idea, and that made the more determined to read Winter's book and try and figure it out for myself.
Since I split up with Keith I often find myself at a loose end in bed and either surf the net and turn in far too late or I read in bed. I went online and traced the book through an online second hand bookshop and sent off for it. 'Same Places - Other Worlds ' was neither light nor easy reading, but it was surprisingly interesting, and provided the evening's entertainment several nights in a row.
I was good at science subjects at school, but I have always been able to dowse and do other similar things that science says are impossible. That makes me much more open-minded than most scientists are, and I didn't fancy denying my own skills for three or more years at university, which is why I drifted into selling houses.
In spite of school science, I hadn't known much about how a hologram is produced and that was vital to the rest of it, but I could make sense of it. If you drop two pebbles simultaneously into a still pond, the ripples spread outwards in two circles that eventually meet i
n a complex of waves and troughs. The scientific term for that is 'interference', and laser light works in the same way.
To form a hologram you split a beam of laser light: half falls directly on the light sensitive plate and the other half bounces off the subject and onto the plate. What is recorded is the interference between the two halves of the beam. Shine a light through the negative at the same angle as the original beam and you get the hologram. I could follow that, and Winter explained that a lot of quantum physicists think the whole universe is holographic: what you might call a projection from a higher level.
According to Brian Winter, an interesting feature of a hologram is that if you change the angle of the beam ever so slightly, you can store another hologram in the same space. Potentially, Winter argues, if the universe is holographic, you could store an infinite number of parallel universes in the same space. Obviously Brian Winter had put his theories to the test. But why had he suspended the test so abruptly?
IV
I parked my car on the driveway in front of the garage and sat looking around. It was a pleasant evening and quite warm. There was still no one about and the midges hovered over the pond as before. I glanced at my watch and checked it against the dashboard clock. I was not sure why I'd come back to Timegate Close, but I wanted to think about the problem in appropriate surroundings.
I got out of the car, locked up and went first to the garage. When I opened the door I was disappointed to find it completely empty. I've no idea what I expected to find, but it wasn't there: somebody, probably Geraldine or perhaps the police had cleared it out. I noticed another dead swallow on the lawn - dead birds would not help the house to sell and I thought I'd suggest a gardener dropping for an hour.
I locked the garage door and went into the house by the front door. I went through the hall and into the lounge. I walked across and stood in the centre of the room, facing the fireplace. What had been Geraldine's exact words? "If you went through the right hand entrance, the view from the conservatory was over the hedge to the woods at the back of the estate, and the outside door lead into the garden. The left hand door, with the curtains across, led into the same conservatory, but the view was different and Brian never let us go out."
Having an open door to another universe in the same space as this one seems to me rather like having a permanently open connection to the internet. Unless you have a firewall and anti-virus software you stand a significant chance of letting all sorts of nasties into your computer. It seems to me that any one or any thing can pass either way through an open door. I looked at the bricked up left hand doorway. Brian Winters had taken all his gizmos, gone through and bricked it up from the other side: Finality?
He'd taken Judith and Naomi when he apparently didn't even think it safe for them to go outside in some, perhaps all the worlds: Desperation?
According to DI. Scott nothing much was missing from the house, possibly nothing at all, other than the people. Winter must have thought they wouldn't need anything much.
There was a slight feeling similar to that when you walk across a nylon carpet in bare feet in very dry weather - a sort of static electricity that makes your skin tingle and the tiny hairs on your arms stand up. I don't suppose Brian Winter's equipment could be causing static after eight years, but something was doing.
I turned and walked out through the hall. On the spur of the moment I turned again and mounted the stairs. Every room, every cupboard was completely empty. I returned down the stairs and went out of the front door, closing it behind me.
I glanced at my watch. The time was exactly as it had been when I stepped out of the car. With an unnamed and unfocussed suspicion I took out my mobile phone. The display was completely blank. The hair on the nape of my neck rippled and a chill gripped my spine.
A second later common sense took over. What could be responsible for discharging batteries? I had been all over the house and seen nothing. The entrance was sealed and, according to Geraldine Stone, all of Brian Winter's electronic equipment was gone. The doorway was closed and nothing could get through. Except that all the equipment was now on the other side. Had Winter himself or some other intelligence opened the door again?
I got into the car. Either a piece of equipment or something live was responsible for the flat batteries. There had been nothing at all in the house, so it couldn't really be equipment, at least not this side of the sealed entrance. If it was something live it lived on pure energy and I'd not seen it. You can't have something with no mass and no dimensions, surely? I shrugged off the flat batteries as a remarkable and very irritating coincidence. It did cross my mind to wonder whether Geraldine Stone's use 'is' rather than 'was' meant that the Winter family were still alive and using the doorway, but that seemed unlikely.
The tingling of static electricity was present again in the car and I had a vague impression of something present. It was a mildly irritating and somewhat disturbing feeling and I was taken by an urge to get away from Timegate Close. It occurred to me that there might be difference in the sciences of our world and ones parallel to it: moving the laser beam might change the level of vibrations or something. Living things might vibrate at a higher level and be invisible to the human eye or even live on pure energy. I locked the central locking doors, the more logical half of me laughing at the unease of my more emotional side - I'd seen nothing to lock out of the car.
I slipped the key in the ignition and turned it. There was the click of the solenoid. The car battery was too flat to turn the starter motor. I attempted to unlock the central locking doors. There was no response. The electric window winders wouldn't work, presumably because the battery was flat.
The ignition light went out.