The Universes Inside the Lighthouse Page 16

  “How did she find it?” asked Ben.

  “The day before, she’d been at a beach. She used to like to go to the beach to think. She’d walk for hours, up and down the shoreline, gathering rocks and tossing them into the ocean as her mind worked on whatever problem she was trying to solve. That day, she was thinking intensely about universes and travel, and the fact that most Leroians have never been to Napori. We’ve all lost touch with our ancestors and the relatives who stayed behind, because travel to Napori is just impractical for many, impossible for most. She was born long ago enough that when she was a child, the elders in the community still talked about Napori a lot. She had it in her mind that she wanted to go there, to somehow create a bridge between Lero and Napori. Anyway, while she was at the beach, she picked up one rock—I’m sure you can guess, it was a wishing rock. People make wishes on them here, too. She was about to toss it into the ocean, but then something made her keep it. She tucked it into her jacket pocket and went on with her day.

  “She forgot all about the rock. The next day, she was out here in this field when it started raining, just a complete downpour. She saw this door and slipped inside to wait it out.” Eve opened the door on the hill and ducked inside, motioning for Ben and Parallel Charlie to follow her. Once inside, Eve led them to the other end of the room.

  “Oh, cool! I can feel it,” said Parallel Charlie. “The air is vibrating.” He held up the wishing rock that hung on the cord around his neck. “Nice job, rock!”

  “I can feel it, too,” said Ben. “That is such a weird feeling. I can imagine your great aunt would have been intrigued when she first felt this.” He held out his arms, moving them in the air to test the vibrations, as though feeling around for a force field.

  Holding the wishing rock pendant in her hand, Eve took one more step toward the wall. The elevator appeared before them, a large sliding door within a solid stone frame, where before there had been nothing but a wall. “You’re right. She felt that vibration, and investigated around the room. She saw this.”

  Eve stepped up to the elevator door. It slid open before her. She peered warily through the doorway, fearful of what she might find, but all appeared in order. “It’s self-healing,” she explained, forgetting Dr. Waldo had already explained this. “It seems to be okay …” She stepped inside and motioned once again at Ben and Parallel Charlie to follow her. They obediently obliged, joining her in the small but seemingly intact space.

  The door slid shut behind them. By habit, Eve’s hand reached for the light switch, and she turned on the light.

  “Let us into the Hub, please, elevator?” she implored, looking at the back wall and hoping for it to open up into the space beyond, where everything was possible.

  Nothing happened.

  “Please?” Eve said weakly.

  The wall stood intact and unmoving, guarding the Hub, or whatever was left of it.

  Eve sighed.

  “Okay, well, we’ve at least got to get one of you home,” she said quietly. “Let’s start with you, Ben. We’ll go to your Earth and find Dad. Maybe he’ll have an idea.” She didn’t mention that she had no idea what universe Parallel Charlie came from, and therefore no idea how to get him home.

  Before leaving the police station, Eve had contacted some of Dr. Waldo’s colleagues on Lero. Not wanting to land herself and her friends on the wrong planet again, she had asked them to confirm the correct coordinates of Ben’s Earth, which they had done. Eve now plugged those coordinates into the panel on the wall of the elevator.

  With a chug and a sputter and a start, like the elevator was stiff from sitting too long, it started up. Smoke, metal, honey. The dizziness.

  The door opened. Before them stood the familiar lobby of the Balky Point lighthouse, looking as plain and undisturbed as if they’d never left.

  “Home,” said Ben. “Well, that was anticlimactic, relatively speaking. But maybe we’ve had enough adventure for a while. Good job, Eve.”

  “Looks like home, anyway,” said Parallel Charlie. “Yours or mine. But probably yours.”

  “I hope so,” said Eve. She wasn’t ready to celebrate just yet.

  Feeling dejected, they began the long trek back to Ed’s cabin. They walked in silence, dreading the moment they would have to tell Emma and Charlie’s parents they’d come home without the twins.

  About a mile into the route, Parallel Charlie spoke. “You know,” he said, “so far, you couldn’t tell which Earth it is. Looks just the same as my Earth. Or probably a million other Earths. This route looks exactly like it does on the island I came from.”

  Eve shot him a withering look.

  “I am, however,” Parallel Charlie continued, “one hundred percent confident you brought us to the right place.” And he didn’t speak again.

  Gauging by the position of the sun and the heat of the day, it was late in the afternoon. When they’d first left Earth, it had been late morning. Eve had tried to get them back on the day they’d left, but with the state of the elevator there was no way to know yet whether they were there on the same day or even the same century. Ben, the only one with intimate knowledge of the island, didn’t travel this particular road enough nor pay enough attention to the height of the trees or other potentially telling clues to have any idea whether they’d returned to their own time.

  “Looks right,” he shrugged, his uncertainty clear.

  And so a few minutes later, when they heard a car coming up the road, they hesitated. If they were in the wrong decade—or century—they might arouse suspicion. Should they duck behind a tree? Run back to the lighthouse? Before they could decide, the car came into view.

  “That’s Ed’s truck!” said Ben, squinting to see the white pickup more clearly in the distance. Ed was driving, Milo sat in the passenger seat, and it looked like there was someone else in the back of the extended cab …

  Seeing the teens, Ed brought the truck to an abrupt stop, stirring up a choking cloud of dirt. Eve ran through the dust to the passenger side of the pickup, reaching it just as her father opened the door. She fell into his arms.

  “Dad!” she cried. “Oh, Dad! We found you! Dad, it’s all wrong! It’s all gone wrong!”

  Milo hugged Eve tightly. Ed looked at Ben and Parallel Charlie (not knowing it was not the real Charlie), and his face grew puzzled with concern. “Dr. Waldo told us you’d lost Ben. But Ben’s here. Where’s Emma? What happened to Emma?” he asked. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the answer.

  Ben and Parallel Charlie looked at each other, wondering who would speak. Parallel Charlie realized that although this was not his Earth and the missing Emma was not his sister, the task was his.

  “Lost. We lost her. We need to find Dr. Waldo, or we’re hoping maybe Milo—”

  As he spoke, the shadow from the back of Ed’s truck stepped out of the vehicle.

  Eve caught the movement out of the corner of her eye. “Dr. Waldo!” she cried. “You’re alive!” She released her father from his tight hold and ran over to give the older man a hug of his own.

  “Oof!” Dr. Waldo grunted, with pleasure, as Eve’s forceful hug knocked the wind out of him. “Yes, yes, yes, I’ve survived, and what’s more, you have too! Children, I was so worried about you! Didn’t know what we’d done to you, sending you off with that Dark MATTER, no, shouldn’t have done that but didn’t have a choice did we? And here you are, you’re all okay, a relief, I tell you, a relief!” His eyes glistened in the sun.

  Eve pulled away from Dr. Waldo. “It’s not okay, Dr. Waldo. We lost Emma in the ghost universe, and this is still the wrong Charlie,” she said.

  Milo looked at Parallel Charlie, standing there in Charlie’s clothes, looking very much like the Charlie he’d met. “The wrong Charlie?” he said.

  “Yes, parallel Earth, wrong Charlie, haven’t had time to explain it all,” mumbled Dr. Waldo, assessing the situation, taking notes and making calculations in his mind. “Ghost universe. Very very bad.” He looked at Ben. “You f
ound this one, good, well done. Lost the other. Not good. It happens, not to blame. Well, then, we must find Emma, and we must find the other Charlie and return this Charlie. That’s all there is to it, get everyone back in their places, that’s what we’ll do.” His brain whirred and clicked.

  “And we still have no idea where to find Vik,” said Eve, deflated. Her mission was not just not a success; it was a complete failure.

  “Dr. Waldo, what happened in the Hub? How did you survive? We thought you were a goner for sure,” said Parallel Charlie. “And we can’t get into the Hub at all anymore. Totally locked itself up. Is it okay? Rupert’s okay?”

  Dr. Waldo looked at Parallel Charlie, studying him as though seeing him for the first time, or perhaps as though he couldn’t see him at all. “The Hub,” he said, “the Hub, yes, the Hub, the key, a new key…” his voice trailed off, lost in thought. He hopped back to the car and into the back seat.

  Milo stepped in to help explain. “We haven’t been able to get back in to the Hub yet, either,” he said. “Dr. Waldo has been off finding what he thinks will be a key to let us in. He just got back, met us at Ed’s cabin. We were just on our way to the lighthouse with the new key.”

  “He’s been off where? A key to let us into the Hub?” repeated Eve. “Something other than the wishing rocks?”

  “The wishing rocks don’t seem to be working anymore,” said Milo. “Dr. Waldo isn’t sure why, but he has a theory.”

  Dr. Waldo returned to the group, tucking something into his lab coat pocket. “Yes, a theory, I have a theory, a new key,” he said. “You see, children, when you left, Vik was still inside the Hub with us. We all—all the scientists in the Hub—we all had personalized pigeons, to take us home, to our individual homes. You know the pigeons—devices that will take you from wherever you are to just one place—”

  “Yes, the pigeons,” said Parallel Charlie. “We are all very familiar with the pigeons!”

  Dr. Waldo looked surprised and a bit alarmed. “Tell me you didn’t use your pigeons?” he said in a low, worried tone.

  “Um, well, we did,” said Eve. “Ben used his accidentally, and Charlie and I didn’t have much choice once we were in the ghost universe. The Dark MATTER broke after we used it, and we had no idea how to find an elevator. Why, what’s wrong with the pigeons? Didn’t you give us good ones?”

  “Oh, well, nothing, nothing, I suppose, if you didn’t get spread out over the universe then they are fine, apparently, or were,” Dr. Waldo said. “I’ve just discovered a flaw in the pigeons, a bug if you will, a ruffled pigeon feather, might have gone wrong but looks like you’re all in one piece, each of you, no worries, but before you use those again I might suggest we get you new versions. Updated, yes, can’t have you obliterated, wouldn’t be good at all.”

  “Sorry, Dr. Waldo,” said Parallel Charlie, relieved in retrospect that he had not been obliterated but trying to get the older man back on track with his story, “I interrupted you. You were telling us what happened in the Hub?”

  “Right, indeed, right. Well, yes, you all left with the Dark MATTER—I must get a report from you on how that worked, at a later date, must record the findings, wasn’t sure it was going to work, to be honest, but we didn’t have much choice did we?—and we were there with Vik in the Hub. The Hub has a mind of its own, you see. I don’t believe it would have let Vik kill us in there. We don’t know for sure, as we all got out of Dodge, as you people say, fast as we could. Each of us scientists has a pigeon of our own, so as fast as you can say ‘how do you do’ we all activated our emergency pigeons and flew home to Lero. I immediately tried the elevator again but it didn’t work right away, took it an hour or so, so I knew not all was lost, but I couldn’t get into the Hub. I decided the best course of action would be to come here and gather up Milo, and I assumed we’d all convene here again at some point, right, indeed, and so we have, so we have.”

  “But we just came from the elevator on Lero,” said Eve. “It didn’t look like anyone had been there for a long time.”

  “Yes, yes, true, well, I’ve had to do some time travel to get everything back in the right order, couldn’t say when I was there, maybe I was there in the future, or perhaps you were there in the past, hard to say, didn’t stick around for long, hard to say.”

  Eve knew enough about the rather impossible task of trying to figure out timelines that she didn’t pursue it any further. “Dad mentioned a key?” she said. “The wishing rocks don’t work anymore?”

  “Right, yes, a key. As you say, the wishing rocks don’t work anymore, something’s gone wrong. I have a hypothesis, yes, an idea, the entry needs to be reset, like a computer sometimes needs to be reset.” He held up a small black box. “I believe,” he giggled, “I may have the key! I traveled to Australia to get it, oldest one I could find. A cyanobacteria fossil, from a stromatolite, out at the Hamelin Pool Marine Nature Reserve, had to go quite a distance to get this one! This is where more time travel came in, we haven’t mapped the Australia lighthouses yet to find the elevators, apologies to Australia, lovely country, must go back there, have you been? The Cape Inscription lighthouse is not an elevator, tried Babbage Island next, I was certain there would be an elevator there, but no, not so. Point Quobba, that’s where I found it, lovely red-topped lighthouse with an elevator inside, beauty it is, had to charm my way a bit with the lighthouse keeper! By then I’d used up all sorts of time, wasn’t meant to map the elevators while I was there, was I? But I couldn’t help myself, couldn’t help myself! A little time travel, then, to give myself enough extra hours to go back to pick up the fossil at the nature reserve and get back here on a regular old aer-o-plane by today! What a journey! Took me two days! Give me travel by elevators any day. These cyanobacteria, they date back to about 2.5 billion years ago, a full 200 million years before the Great Oxygenation Event, of course. Stromatolites date back to 3.5 billion years ago. I found a stromatolite with a cyanobacteria fossil. Oldest things I could think of. My hypothesis is that this rock, while not as old as this universe, of course, will be sufficient to reboot the door to the Hub, and let us in. Ancient memory. Speaking to the Hub’s ancient mind. Taking it back to its factory settings, if you will.” He laughed at his own joke, but his demeanor held an undercurrent of concern.

  “We were on our way to the lighthouse to try it out,” said Milo, “when we came across you all.”

  “Let’s go, then!” said Parallel Charlie. “What are we waiting for?”

  The group piled into Ed’s truck, squishing the teens in the back with Milo; Dr. Waldo sat up front with Ed.

  “Hold on to each other back there,” said Ed. “That back seat isn’t made for four!”

  “We’ve survived pigeons and Dark MATTER and a ghost universe,” said Parallel Charlie. “I think we can survive a mile without seat belts!”

  They bumped along the dirt road, Ed driving as slowly as he could to help lessen the impact of the potholes on his passengers in the back, but all of them willing the pickup to move as fast as it safely could.

  As they pulled into the parking lot at the lighthouse, they saw two figures on the short flight of steps leading up to the door.

  Sitting at the top of the stairs was Charlie, anguish and fear etched on his face and body, holding a limp and lifeless Emma in his arms.

  chapter thirteen

  The sneeze that caused Emma to lose her grip with Parallel Charlie, combined with the act of watching him and Eve disappear before her eyes, jolted Emma wide awake and out of her ghost-planet-induced stupor.

  “NOOOO!” she cried at the empty space where Parallel Charlie and Eve had stood just moments before. “No, come back!” They can’t be gone. They can’t be! But they were.

  A few ghosts wandering by turned, slowly, to see what the disruption was. On seeing nothing of interest, they went on with their business, whatever that business might be.

  Emma had been talking with her grandfather before Parallel Charlie had pulled her away. She loo
ked around to find him again, but he was gone, a wisp in the wind. Eve’s Great Aunt Doethine, however, was still there, watching Emma with her amused, knowing smile.

  “They left without you,” said Doethine, when Emma’s eyes met hers.

  “They didn’t mean to,” said Emma. “I sneezed. I let go.” How could I have let go? I’m such an idiot. I’m here forever. I’m stuck on this planet forever, all because I sneezed.

  “So you did,” said Doethine. Her speech, her movements, everything about her was slow and measured, as though time meant nothing to her. Perhaps, thought Emma, it didn’t anymore. Once a person is dead, what is time?

  “Come sit with me,” said Doethine.

  Not knowing what else to do, Emma went and sat. Now that she was thinking a little more clearly than before, she studied this ghost next to her more carefully. Doethine was perched on a bench that stood perpendicular to another bench, with a low table between them at the corner. However, Emma now realized, Doethine was not so much sitting on the bench as she was occupying the space above the bench, in the same way that the ghosts didn’t so much walk on the ground as glide over it. It was as though they were going through the motions of life as they remembered it, but those motions weren’t really necessary. Emma wondered, could these ghosts go through things? Were they solid? Were they even real? Was this whole place merely a figment of her imagination? Was she dreaming—or, worse, was she dead?

  “Am I dead?” she asked.

  “No.” Great Aunt Doethine, like the man at the desk, was succinct. She offered up nothing more, but instead sat, patiently awaiting Emma’s questions.

  So she wasn’t dead … yet. At least there’s that, Emma thought. “Can you help me get home?” she asked.