Loop (4 page)

Then, as she wipes some moisture from the corner of her eye with the tip of her index finger, the screen goes suddenly blank.

Stay calm. All you have to do is stay inside and he can't get you.

For the fiftieth time, Julie checks the window locks. The deadlocks are on, the alarm is primed, she has the security monitor on. A cockroach couldn't get inside without setting off the alarm.

Did you ever try?

Heidi's words come back to her. Why can't she change things? Why can't the news report be avoided?

What was it she said once?

Half the things in the world are impossible, if you try to analyse them.

So, she gives up trying.

If he can't get in, he can't take me out. Anyway, he's probably lying drunk somewhere – or waiting for me on my way to school. But he can't grab me, because I'm not going …

She finds herself giggling and swallows down hard on the rising hysteria.

He can't get in.

She checks the switch on the alarm's panic-button. It is activated.

Okay, Dad, let's see you get me now.

‘Come, Julie. It's time.'

The voice behind her chills her blood. Slowly she turns.

The man is a stranger, impeccably dressed and holding in his left hand an old-fashioned gold pocket-watch. He glances at it, returns it to his pocket and takes a step towards her.

She swings around and punches the panic-button as hard as she can. But the alarm remains silent.

The man shakes his head sadly.

‘Don't fight it, my dear. It really won't do you any good.'

Finally she finds her voice.

‘Who are you? Where did you come from?'

The man studies his fingernails for a moment before replying.

‘The “who” is … irrelevant. You don't know my name, so it wouldn't help you come to terms with your situation even if I told you. As for the “where” …' He inclines his head towards the TV which is visible through the open doors of the sitting-room.

‘You mean you came out of … there?'

Again he shakes his head, tutting quietly to himself and indulging in a small smile.

‘My dear, this is not a Vincent Price movie. Allow us a little more … finesse than that! But I am from “the Channel”. And as I said when I arrived, it is, indeed, time.'

‘For what?'

For a moment a look of pity drifts across his face, like a cloud across the sun. Then it is gone.

‘Some people understand so much more quickly than others. I will try to explain as briefly as I can.

‘We offer a rather unique and very new service, and like any new media venture we have to build our business one viewer at a time. Think of us as a kind of … pay-TV. You have used our services.' He looks around appraisingly. ‘And to excellent effect, if I may say so. Now it is time to pay.'

‘But I didn't … I never …' The words wither on her parched tongue.

‘You made your own choices, Julie. No one made them for you. Everyone is free to choose. Everyone. Come …'

As he reaches out and takes hold of her arm, she can no longer resist. Her will has evaporated. She feels a numbing sense of inevitability as he turns and leads her away through the wall, which suddenly seems as insubstantial as air.

Aldo

Cramming the last handful of corn chips into his mouth, Aldo Salinas reaches for the remote and kills the power on the TV.

The clock on the VCR reads 1:39.

With difficulty, he bends down to pick up the bowl from the floor at his feet, and the voice takes him by surprise.

‘And now, Aldo, here is tomorrow's news.'

Damned remote must be acting up …

He looks up at the screen. The girl looks very young to be a newsreader, though she isn't bad-looking. Except for the fact that her teeth are a tiny bit crooked, and she has a strange little birthmark on her left cheek which looks like a piece of dried fruit.

Focusing as he is on the girl's face, he doesn't notice that the digits on the video recorder have suddenly frozen.

It is 1:40 precisely.

ELLIE

Half to forget the wandering and the pain,
Half to remember days that have gone by,
And dream and dream that I am home again.

James Elroy Flecker

…
and with a single, short glance over her shoulder, Ellie says goodbye.

Then she steps forward into the blinding light and through it into the Shadow. And the concrete sidewalk, the red-brick wall that borders the nearby school yard, and the solid, ancient paperbark which shades the eastern corner of the Stephensons' home, all seem to melt and run together like plastic in a fire. Their darkening colours merge and their shapes become distorted, then grotesque, then unrecognisable, and within the space of a few moments they are gone. Everything is gone.

She is alone in a dimension of absolute black; blacker than night, without sensation. She can feel nothing, as if her body has ceased to exist along with the rest of the physical world, and only her mind remains, adrift in a universe of silence.

As lives go, it has not been a bad one.

It has been comfortable, considering the limited technology of the period, and peaceful, in comparison to most other lives. And it has been interesting to see the birth of the Revolution, the beginning of an era that will forever change the world.

But it is over
–
with little warning, as usual. And, as usual, it hurts more than a little to be unable to bid a proper farewell to friends and family'. To the home of half a dozen years. Another chapter. Another dead-end …

Even though we knew it had to come – and probably soon – we never really expected it to happen. And if that sounds strange, I guess it's fitting. The whole situation with Ellie was strange from the start.

But we wouldn't have changed a thing. She was such a blessing. She added something to both our lives that can never be taken away. Or replaced. And even though she was only ‘on loan', as she once put it, she was ours for a while, and that made all the difference. To both of us.

I remember her sitting right there in the rocking-chair with her feet curled up underneath her, fidgeting with the ring we gave her on her fourteenth birthday and staring into the fire with those strange violet eyes of hers. She always felt the cold more than most, and we usually had a fire on all but the hottest summer days. Still do. I guess you get acclimatised.

Anyway, she was talking, watching the flames dance and letting the words flow. That was something you had to get used to – the way she'd talk to you, filling in the gaps, telling you about herself, her feelings, but almost never looking at you, as if she was really talking to herself.

‘Every life I live is borrowed time,' she said, and she brushed her hair from her forehead with her left hand. ‘When I get back …
if
I get back … it'll be at the exact moment that I left. I won't have aged a day, except that I'll have all these centuries of memories, all these lives …' Then she smiled and actually looked across at me. ‘I guess it solves the problem of what I'll do with my future. With all this
hands on
experience, I'll have to become a historian.'

I had to smile at that. Ellie, a historian. Ellie, who even at ten or eleven had known so much more maths and physics and chemistry than any of the teachers at school, but had hidden her talents with such care in order to, as she put it, ‘blend in'. Ellie, a historian.

She must have read my mind – or my expression. ‘I was never really good at maths and stuff, not in my own time. Don't forget, we're talking about nearly three hundred years in the future. Just because I can cope with a little elementary number-crunching —'

‘You do a little more than cope!' I interrupted, recalling some of the demonstrations she'd given us in private.

‘Yes, but it's all so primitive.' I remember she paused, gathering her thoughts. Then she slid from the rocker and moved across to the sofa where I was sitting. ‘Look. You …
We
are living in one of the most exciting, mind-blowingly progressive times in history. In the last half-century there has been an explosion of –' she searched for the right word – ‘knowing. But it isn't all just going to stop. How clever would you look if you went back three hundred years, or even fifty? Back home, I'd be considered about average, but I never considered a future in anything mathematical. Besides, I quite like the idea of being a historian. It would make a change from being
history
.'

At times like that I felt a little guilty wishing that we could hold on to her. She sounded so weary. And though I knew she loved us – in her way – we were only a way-station; an old couple, sharing one of her endless sequence of lives, caring for her and feeding our own loneliness with hers.

She did love us, I'm sure. But you have to understand that it was a reserved kind of love. How could she give herself totally when she knew that one day, any day, it might be over. This life. This brief span of five or six years. That she might have to start again, to give herself again. And each time, hoping that maybe this time would be the last, that she might emerge from the Shadow and find herself home. Truly home …

Home
…
The thought drifts through her. Not through her mind, but through her. For within the Shadow there is no difference. Herself, her mind. There is nothing else. Absolutely nothing …

A moment, an eternity. In the Black, the thoughts come and then they are gone.

So many thoughts, so many memories. So many lives. But always, through it all, she dreams of home, and prays into the silence, into the emptiness of the Shadow, that this time, when the transition is complete, it will finally be over.

She prays. And she believes. Even after all the disappointments; the endless, empty string of lives lived waiting for the blinding light to come again and claim her, for the Shadow to take her. Off again, in Time.

One time, one day, it must return her home.

So every leaving is a hope, and each transition is a prayer. And every prayer an act of desperate faith.

In the distance the light appears, a pinpoint of intense white, swelling against the fabric of the Black. And she senses it. The current in the darkness that carries her towards the Light …

She holds a breath she cannot feel, and tries to close her eyes against the growing brilliance. She never can, but every time she tries. The moment, the eternity has past and it is time again.

Silently, she prays. Perhaps this time.

Iris misses her terribly. In the week since Ellie … disappeared, she's hardly said a word. We both knew it had to happen, but it doesn't make it any easier. I only hope that this time the poor kid gets her wish.

I always thought that it would be great to be young again, to throw off the years and be a kid knowing what I know now. But not any more.

She was only ten years old when it started. Exactly the age she was when she ‘adopted' us. Ten years old. Just a kid. But she was born into a very different world. And she'd been through so much.

Do you have any idea what it will be like three hundred years from now? I do. Ellie told me. But I won't tell you. I promised I wouldn't, and besides, I don't think you'd really want to know.

So, she wasn't a kid the way we think of kids. I mean, I have grandkids around ten years of age and they are real kids – TV, X-Boxes, football, dolls, radio-controlled everything, and the occasional bit of schoolwork when it can't be avoided.

But not Ellie. Controlled, she was. Never a thoughtless action, always serious yet caring. But never emotional. In all the time she was with us, I never once saw her cry. Even when Sandy died – Sandy was our dog, and Ellie loved that animal – she never shed a tear. Never even mentioned him again. At first I thought she was hard, but Iris, as usual, knew better.

‘How else can she hope to survive?' she said. ‘How much has she lost already? How much more will she lose before it ends? She can't afford to become attached.'

But I think she was wrong there. Ellie controlled her emotions ruthlessly, but she cared. Through all those hundreds of lives in all those times and places, caring was what kept her going. And the dream that one day it would be over.

Until then, she was trapped in an endless cycle.

We talked about it often. I remember I asked once how it had all started. She stared for a moment at the fire, then began speaking in a whisper.

‘The Light,' she said. ‘It began with the Light. I was on my way home, after school it was, when it appeared right there in front of me, hanging in the air, like a … doorway, I guess. And I just walked into it and into the Shadow behind it. I had no choice. I just couldn't resist …'

And so it began. Shuttled around from century to century, continent to continent, life to life, for no purpose that she has any chance of discovering. Forever young, yet old beyond her years. Each life a life that starts at ten and ends before her sixteenth birthday.

‘I have tasted immortality,' she said once, ‘and it is bitter …

But she never ceased to hope. Or care.

Yes, I miss her. And I wish she could have stayed. But mostly I just hope that she remembers us.

Something is wrong. She is trapped inside the Light instead of passing through, and it is tearing at her soul. It holds her fast and sears her mind. Blinding, painful, but she cannot close her eyes.

As every memory, every moment of every short lifetime is torn like living flesh from the core of her mind…

She screams but no sound comes. She bites her lip but feels no pain. Only the pain of remembering. A hundred lifetimes in an instant, the love, the pain, the empty longing. The whole history of humankind, lived one bite at a time, remembered in a moment, then drawn, somehow, into the Light and gone.

She screams again and falls into the darkness.

Of escape.

Of peace.

Of …

… home.

Slowly she opens her eyes. Above her, her father's face is worried.

‘Ellie? Are you all right? You blacked out on the way home from school and they brought you here, but the scanner could find nothing wrong with you. Your mother and I have been frantic. What happened?'

She looks at him but no words come. Her mind is numb. Sitting up, she looks around.

Home …

Her hair is in her eyes and she raises her hand to brush it away, but freezes as she catches sight of the unfamiliar ring on her little finger.

Then she remembers. An old woman holding out the tiny box, carefully wrapped in pink paper and ribbons. An old man, smiling.

A birthday present.

She remembers …

Vaguely she can hear her father's voice, still worried. ‘Ellie, are you crying?'

She can taste the tears.

She is.