Multiversum (12 page)

But there was someone sitting in it.

‘Young lady, would you be so kind as to tell us who you are?' asked the teacher, a skinny old woman who had to be at least seventy. She was standing with some difficulty, leaning on a cane.

‘What happened to the French teacher?' asked Jenny, certain that she'd get an answer from one of her classmates. Then she looked around. This wasn't her class.

‘Oh, sorry, I'm in the wrong room!' Jenny exclaimed. The teacher looked at her, shaking her head as Jenny hurried out. Once she was back in the corridor, she turned to look at the sign on the door.

‘But this
is
my classroom,' she whispered to herself as she looked wildly around her. She felt a wave of fear surging inside her.

Her school. The corridors where she'd spent the last few years of her life. Her classroom. But inside it, there were different students and a teacher she'd never seen before.

Where am I?
she thought as she turned to the window overlooking the courtyard. There was no one playing soccer. Not that it would've been possible: there was a fountain in the middle of the courtyard.

Outside Mary Thompson's house, Alex selected Marco's phone number from the address book in his phone. Dark, threatening clouds were gathering in the sky. In the distance, he heard the rumble of thunder. The wind had begun to pick up and was blowing more strongly now, tossing the branches of the trees in the roundabout at the end of the street and shaking the mailboxes outside the rows of houses.

‘Hey, Alex!' his friend exclaimed happily. ‘So fill me in!'

‘Jenny's dead,' he began. On the other end of the line there were a few seconds of silence, covered by the rushing wind that gusted into his phone.

‘Are you trying to tell me that …'

‘I found Jenny's house,' Alex told him, speaking a little louder. ‘It's at 21 Blyth Street, not far from the pier. An older lady lives there, an astrologer who says that she was Jenny's nanny. She worked for the Gravers, but they moved away and left her the house many years ago, after … the little girl died, in 2004.'

‘Fantastic,' Marco exclaimed.

That wasn't quite the reaction that Alex had expected. ‘Fantastic?'

‘Of course it's fantastic, Alex, don't you get it? If Jenny's dead, that can only mean one thing. Either you're talking to a ghost, a possibility that I'd rule out, or else you and Jenny …'

Marco suddenly stopped talking. The excitement was overwhelming: Jenny's death was the event that proved everything he'd been researching all these years. His eyes wandered over the piles of books heaped on the shelves to the left of his desk. A mass of books and pamphlets he knew by heart. He had pored over those pages, underlining and highlighting passages, filling the margins with notes and dog-earing the corners, during years and years of intense study.

‘Marco, do you mind telling me what I'm supposed to understand here?' Alex said, jolting him back into the present.

‘You're communicating with another Jenny …' his friend went on, ‘with a Jenny from another dimension of the Multiverse. A dimension where she's obviously alive and well.'

‘It's absurd.'

‘This still surprises you? Alex, your Jenny exists and she's part of a different reality.'

Alex felt a raindrop land on his right arm. He looked up at the sky and realised that it would start pouring any minute now. ‘No, Marco, it's just too absurd. Maybe what I'm doing is … talking to the dead.'

‘That doesn't strike me as being all that plausible either — you realise that, don't you? Still, I'm considering it. But I assure you …' Marco paused briefly, then coughed and cleared his throat. ‘I'd put it in the realm of being highly unlikely, at least scientifically.'

‘But on the other hand the idea that I'm chatting to someone from another dimension would be perfectly normal!'

Alex turned to look at the front of Mary Thompson's house, and he saw the woman standing motionless at a window. She was staring at him, as if she were trying to figure out who he might be talking to on the phone.

‘Marco, I'm losing my mind. And this lady doesn't strike me as completely sane, either.'

‘Ask her to tell you everything she remembers about Jenny as a little girl. There might be a particular episode in her past and your past that shaped future events and led to the development of your parallel selves.'

A bolt of lightning split the sky. The thunderstorm was getting closer and closer.

Alex put his phone back in his pocket and took a look around. There wasn't a living soul to be seen on Blyth Street, and it had started to rain. He looked at the house again. The front door was wide open, and Mary Thompson was standing at the threshold. This was his only chance of getting a little more information about Jenny.

He slowly approached the house. The woman seemed certain that he would return.

‘What do you want from me, boy?' she asked.

‘Just to see a picture of Jenny. That's all I ask.'

Mary sighed. It was impossible to tell what thoughts were running through her mind, and for a moment Alex was afraid that she was about to slam the door in his face. Instead, she turned on her heel and went inside.

‘Come with me,' she said, without turning around. Alex didn't make her say it twice.

Mary walked across the room to an antique dresser made of inlaid wood. She opened a door and pulled out a cardboard box, which she set on the coffee table in front of the sofa. Alex sat down and the woman took a seat next to him.

She started pulling sheets of paper and photographs out of the box. ‘This was Jenny on the day of her fourth birthday.'

In the picture, a little girl was smiling and looking into the camera, sitting on the same sofa where Alex was at that very moment.

The gaze was the exact same one Alex already knew.

Her eyes were large and deep, their expression intense, their colour the same as her chestnut hair, which was pulled back and tied up with a purple scrunchie. She was looking into the lens, but at that instant she seemed to be looking straight at him.

‘That's definitely her,' he said under his breath, but Mary was careful not to show the slightest reaction.

‘She would be sixteen years old now,' said the woman, closing her eyes.

‘What did she die of?' he asked, aware that he'd touched on a dangerous topic.

‘No one really knows,' Mary said, choking back a surge of emotion. ‘There were no signs of cardiac arrest, nothing, nothing at all … it was just a sudden death.'

‘I understand.'

‘I was with my little Jenny. Right until the last moment. I wish I could hold her in my arms right now … look, here's one of her drawings.'

Alex took the sheet of paper and looked at the painting.

His eye went immediately to the signature in the bottom right-hand corner. He saw
JENNIFER
,
written in capital letters, and below that, the date:
2004
.

‘This was one of the last ones she did,' Mary added. The painting depicted a number of awkwardly drawn horses, surrounded by green strokes that must have been meant as grass. The sun was shining in the top left-hand corner: two eyes and a smile gave the yellow sphere a happy, human appearance.

Another picture showed Jenny riding a pony. A happy little girl with an infectious smile and the typical carefree expression of a child her age.

‘You talk to her?' Mary asked all of a sudden, and he couldn't tell whether there was more mistrust or curiosity in her voice.

‘I'm afraid so …'

‘That means you talk to … the dead. Can you hear what they say?' Her voice had turned hoarse and deep.

‘No, I don't think I can talk with the dead, but … I'm not sure of anything anymore.'

Alex looked at the material that she was pulling out of the box. There were also various cards and notes, often addressed by the little girl to her
sweet Mary
.

As he leafed through these drawings by little Jenny, Alex happened upon one that took his breath away. It was a picture of a girl and a boy, hand in hand. The boy had a blond fringe and a speech bubble next to his head, in which was written
My secret friend
. A shiver ran down his spine. Alex sat there in silence, and then he placed the sheet of paper at the bottom of the stack.

‘And this was her necklace,' said Mary as she pulled a chain out of the box. ‘She like to say that it was magic: with this she could close her eyes and wake up in other world. Triskelion, this is the name of symbol that hangs from chain. You see, three crescent moons … this is Celtic.'

‘Do you mind?' Alex extended a hand towards the necklace, and Mary slid it onto his palm. It seemed somehow familiar to him. Three shapes similar to three Cs. The woman had called them ‘crescent moons' because they resembled the shape of a first-quarter moon. They fit together, creating a spiral.

‘It's very beautiful. Did you give it to her?'

‘She never let go of necklace,' Mary said pensively, ignoring Alex's question. Then she shook her head. She seemed to wake from a brief dream, because when she started talking again, her tone was harsh and determined once more. ‘I have nothing else to tell you, boy. So now it's best if we each go our own way. Are you listening?'

Alex was still leaning forward, the necklace in his right hand, his left hand braced against the sofa. His gaze was lost in the distance, completely vacant.

‘Alex, are you listening to me?' said Mary, raising her voice as she waved a hand in front of his face.

At that exact instant, Jennifer Graver, the six-year-old child who died in 2004, was right in front of Alex's eyes, in the living room.

The blurry outlines of the little girl were hard to distinguish from the background of the living room. A long nightgown trailed on the floor, covering her feet and making it look as if Jenny was hovering in midair. They stared at each other for several seconds that seemed to go on forever. Suddenly, everything around them — the furniture, the walls, the people, the city — was gone … as if they were floating in a limbo beyond the boundaries of the space-time continuum, as if they were standing face to face in the middle of absolutely nothing. Her eyes were wide open and Alex could feel them staring at him. Her eyes were capable of delving into the darkest corners of his soul.

Our mind is the key
, said the little girl, her eyes staring into Alex's. She wore a neutral expression; she showed no emotion. In his eyes, the figure of her silhouette appeared to be growing translucent and even transparent, as if he could look right through her.

Remember, Alex? If we wanted to travel, we stared at the belt
.

The vision suddenly vanished. He dropped the necklace onto the floor, stood up, and ran towards the door.

As the thunderstorm lashed the city of Melbourne and the rain drummed incessantly on the asphalt, Alex Loria slammed the door of Mary Thompson's house behind him, sprinted out the gate, and started running down the middle of the road, trying to get as far away as he could from the little box with souvenirs of Jenny's childhood, a treasure chest that had opened up to release the phantoms of the past.

16

When Jenny opened her eyes again, she was on the floor, right in front of the sinks. The white walls of the girls' toilets surrounded her. Chilly, silent, anonymous. The perfect place to lose one's identity without being able to distinguish delirium from reality. Jenny put a hand on her forehead, convinced she had a fever. Then she looked up and found herself in front of her classmate Olivia Stamford. Olivia was leaning forward, an athletic headband holding back her thick, curly hair. The frames of her glasses were slightly off-kilter.

‘The teacher was starting to wonder whether you'd jumped out the window because of the French test,' her friend said, jokingly.

Jenny felt completely winded and couldn't think of how to respond. It didn't even occur to her to smile at Olivia's sarcasm. She lowered her eyes.

‘Hey, what's the matter?' asked her friend as she helped Jenny to her feet and put her hands on her shoulders. ‘Everything okay? You're as white as a sheet.'

‘Yes … yes, I'm fine. Don't worry. Let's go back to class.'

When she returned to the classroom, all her fellow students were sitting in their usual spots. Their faces were the same ones she saw every day. Behind her desk, the French teacher threw her an inquiring glance.

Jenny sat down at her desk in a fog. For the rest of the class, she kept thinking about that vortex of emotions, shapes, and sounds. She felt as if she'd passed right through it.

In the few minutes before the bell rang, Jenny thought back to the portrait in the living room. Her dead father. The classroom with the unfamiliar classmates. The fountain in the courtyard that she'd never seen before.

What's happening to me?