The Gates (2009) Page 4

  “I am Nurd!” he cried. “You will bow down before me!”

  Light appeared. It was disturbingly regular, forming a huge rectangle, the outline of a door larger than Nurd had ever seen, even in the depths of Hell itself. Then the door opened, flooding Nurd’s new world with illumination. A giant being towered above him, a colossus in a pink skirt and white blouse. It had something in its hands, a squat, eyeless creature with a long nose and square jaws.

  “Oh, for cry—,” began Nurd, all he got to say before Mrs. Johnson’s vacuum cleaner dropped on him, and everything went dark again.

  Back in the Wasteland, Wormwood was still trying to work out what, precisely, had happened to his unloved master. He poked the space on the throne that Nurd usually occupied, wondering if Nurd had been hiding the art of invisibility for all this time, and had only now decided to use it in order to break the monotony, but there was nothing there.

  Nurd, it appeared, was gone.

  And if Nurd was gone, then he, Wormwood, was now ruler of all he surveyed.

  Wormwood picked up the Scepter of Terrible and Awesome Might from the foot of the throne. With his other hand, he grasped the Crown of Misdeeds, which had fallen from Nurd’s head as he slipped out of existence. He stared at them both, then faced the Wasteland and raised the scepter and the crown above his head.

  “I am Wormwood!” he cried. “I am—”

  There was a sound behind him, as though a Nurd-shaped object were being forced through a decidedly small hole, and wasn’t feeling terribly happy about the process.

  “—very happy to see you again, Master,” concluded Wormwood, as he turned and saw Nurd, seated, once again, on his throne, and looking like an enormous Thing of Some Kind had fallen on him. He seemed bewildered, and somewhat broken in places.

  “Wormwood,” said Nurd. “I feel ill.”

  And he sneezed a single, dusty sneeze.

  VI

  In Which We Encounter Stephanie, Who Is Not a Demon but Is Still Not Terribly Nice

  THE FRONT DOOR OPENED while Samuel was fumbling for his key. He had only recently been entrusted with his own house key, and he was so terrified of losing it that he kept it around his neck on a piece of string. Unfortunately it was proving rather difficult to find it while dressed as a ghost and holding on to a small, worried dog, so he was still searching beneath various layers of sheet, sweater, and shirt when Stephanie the babysitter appeared in his line of sight.

  “Where have you been?” she said. “You should have been back half an hour ago.” The expression on her face changed. “And why are you dressed like a ghost?”

  Samuel shuffled past her, but didn’t answer immediately. First of all, he set Boswell free of his leash, and divested himself of his sheet.

  “I thought I’d get an early start for Halloween,” he said, gasping, “but that doesn’t matter now. I’ve seen something—”

  “Forget it,” said Stephanie.

  “But—”

  “Not interested.”

  “It’s important.”

  “Go to bed.”

  “What?” Samuel was momentarily distracted from what he had witnessed in the Abernathys’ basement by the injustice of this magnitude. “It’s half term. I don’t have to go to school tomorrow. Mum said—”

  “’Mum said, Mum said,’” mimicked Stephanie. “Well, your mum isn’t here now. I’m in charge, and I say that you have to go to bed.”

  “But the Abernathys. Their basement. Monsters. Gates. You don’t understand.”

  Stephanie leaned in very close to Samuel’s face, and Samuel recognized that there were things even more terrifying than what he had seen at the Abernathys’ house, if only because they were very close and their anger was directed entirely at him. Stephanie’s face was going red, her nostrils were flaring, and her eyes had grown narrow, like the slits in a castle wall before someone begins firing flaming arrows out of them. She spoke very precisely, through gritted teeth.

  “Go. To. Bed!”

  The final word was delivered at such ear-splittingly high volume that Samuel felt certain his glasses were about to crack. Even Boswell, who was used to Stephanie by now, looked disturbed.

  With no other option, Samuel stomped up the stairs to bed, closely followed by Boswell. He was about to slam his door behind him when he heard Stephanie shout, “And don’t you dare slam that door!”

  Although sorely tempted to disobey, Samuel decided to err on the side of discretion. There was not a great deal that Stephanie could do to him, although he sometimes wondered what she might have done if she thought that she could get away with it, like burying him in the back garden after drowning him in the bathtub.12 Still, Stephanie was a tattletale and when Samuel had crossed her in the past he had found himself dealing with his mother the following morning. Unlike Stephanie, there were many things his mum could do to make his life uncomfortable, such as denying him television, or his allowance, or, as on one particularly grim occasion after he had dropped a plastic snake down Stephanie’s back, both of the above. How was he to know that Stephanie was afraid of snakes, he had argued, even though he had been fully aware of how much she disliked them, and that had been half the fun. He still treasured the memory of her leaping from the couch in shock, and the strange noise that had come from deep within her, a sound that was barely human, as if someone were playing a violin inside her very, very badly. In fact, he could trace the serious deterioration of his relationship with Stephanie to that particular occasion. Not only had his mother punished him, but the odious Garth had threatened to stick his head down the toilet and flush him to China if he ever pulled a stunt like that again. Samuel, having no great desire to be flushed to China, had not pulled a stunt like that again.13

  Samuel changed into his pajamas, brushed his teeth, and got into bed. Boswell curled up in his basket at the foot of the bed. Usually, Samuel would read before turning off the light and going to sleep, but not tonight. He was determined to stay up until his mother returned home, and then he would confront her with what he had learned.

  Samuel managed to stay awake for two and a half hours before sleep eventually took him. He thought of all that he had seen and heard in the Abernathys’ basement. He wondered if he should go to the police, but he was not an unintelligent boy and he knew that the police would take a dim view of an eleven-year-old with a dachshund who claimed that his neighbors had been transformed into demons intent upon opening the gates of Hell. So it was that Samuel did not hear his mother come in, nor did he hear Stephanie leave, after first informing Samuel’s mother that Samuel had broken curfew.

  Nor did he see, after the lights were turned off and his mother was, like him, asleep in bed, the figure of a woman standing at the garden gate, staring intently at his bedroom window, her eyes burning with a cold blue fire.

  VII

  In Which the Scientists Wonder What the Bit Was, and Where It Might Have Gone

  WHILE SAMUEL SLEPT, A group of scientists huddled over a series of screens and printouts. Behind them, an uncompleted game of Battleships lay forgotten. “But there’s no record of anything unusual occurring,” said one. His name was Professor Hilbert, and he had become a scientist for two reasons. The first was that he had always been fascinated by science, particularly physics, which is science for people who like numbers more than—well, more than people, probably. The other reason Professor Hilbert had become a scientist was that he had always looked like a scientist. Even as a small boy he had worn glasses, been unable to comb his hair properly, and had a fondness for storing pens in his shirt pockets. He was also very interested in taking things apart to find out how they worked, although he had never discovered how to put any of them back together again in quite the same way. Instead, he was always trying to find some means to improve them, even if they had worked perfectly well to begin with. Thus it was that, when he “improved” his parents’ toaster, the toaster had incinerated the bread, and then burst into flames so hot they had melted the kitchen counte
r. The kitchen had always smelled funny after that, and he was required to eat his bread untoasted unless supervised. After he spent an hour with their radio, it had begun picking up signals from passing military aircraft, leading to a visit from a couple of stern men in uniforms who were under the impression that the Hilberts were Russian spies. Finally, young Hilbert was sent to a special school for very bright people where, to his heart’s content, he was allowed to take things apart and put them together again in odd combinations. He had started only one or two fires at the special school, but they were small, and easily extinguished.

  Now Professor Hilbert was trying to make sense of what Ed and Victor were telling him. The collider had been shut down as a precaution, which annoyed Professor Hilbert greatly. Turning the collider on and off wasn’t like flipping a light switch. It was a complicated and expensive business. Furthermore, it generated bad publicity for everyone involved in the experiment, especially as there were still people who were convinced that the collider would be responsible for the end of the world.

  “You say that a particle of some kind separated itself from the beams in the collider?”

  “That’s right,” said Ed.

  “Then passed through the walls of the collider itself, and the solid rock around it, before disappearing.”

  “Right again,” said Ed.

  “Then the system began rewriting itself to eliminate any evidence of this occurrence?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fascinating,” said Professor Hilbert.

  What was strange about this conversation was that at no point did Professor Hilbert doubt the truth of what Ed and Victor were telling him. Nothing about the Large Hadron Collider and what it was revealing about the nature of the universe was surprising to Professor Hilbert. Delightful, yes. Troubling, sometimes. But never surprising. He was not a man who was easily surprised, and he suspected that the universe was a much stranger place than anyone imagined, which made him anxious to prove just how extraordinary it really was.

  “What do you think it might be?” asked Ed.

  “Evidence,” said Professor Hilbert.

  “Of what?”

  “I don’t know,” said Professor Hilbert, and rambled off sucking his pencil.

  Hours later Professor Hilbert was still at his desk, surrounded by pieces of paper on which he had constructed diagrams, created complex equations, and drawn little stick men fighting one another with swords. He had also gone over the system records for the past few hours and had discovered something curious. The system had overwritten itself, as Ed and Victor had suggested, but it had not done so perfectly. Like someone rubbing out a couple of lines written in pencil, the shadow of what had been there before still remained. Slowly, Professor Hilbert had begun reconstructing it. While he was not able to re-create it completely, he found that, at the precise moment Ed and Victor had witnessed what was now being termed “the Event,” a batch of strange code had found its way into the system. It was this code that Professor Hilbert was now attempting to reconstruct.

  The problem was that the code was not in any known computer language. In fact, it didn’t appear to be in any recognizable language at all.

  Professor Hilbert’s particular area of interest was dimensions. Specifically, he was fascinated by the possibility that there might be a great many universes out there, of which ours was only one. He was part of a group of scientists who believed that our universe might exist in an ocean of other universes, some being born, some already in existence, and others about to come to an end. Instead of a universe, he believed in the possibility of a multiverse.

  His life’s work had been devoted to this belief, which he hoped the collider might help him to prove. If a mini black hole, one that did not swallow up the earth, say 1,000 times the mass of an electron and existing for only 10-23 seconds, were created in the collider, Professor Hilbert believed that it would provide evidence for the existence of parallel universes.

  Now, as he sat at his desk, he looked at the strange code, written in symbols that seemed at once modern yet very, very old and wondered: Is this the proof that I have been seeking? Is this a message from another universe, another dimension?

  And if it is, then what does it mean?

  • • •

  some of you may know who Albert Einstein was. For those who don’t, here is a picture of him:

  Einstein was a very famous scientist, the kind of scientist even people who know nothing about science can probably name. He is most famous for his General Theory of Relativity, which concluded that mass is a form of energy, and goes e = mc2 (or energy = mass by the speed of light squared), but he also had a sense of humor. He once said that we were all ignorant, but each of us was ignorant in a different way, which is very wise when you think about it.14

  It was Einstein who predicted the existence of black holes (there is one at the heart of our Milky Way, but it’s obscured by dust clouds; otherwise, it would be visible every night as a fireball in the constellation of Sagittarius), but Einstein’s black holes came with their own in-built problem. They had, at their center, a singularity (there’s that word again: remember footnote 1?), a point at which time came to an end and all known rules of physics broke down. You can’t make a rule that breaks all the rules. Science just doesn’t work that way.

  Einstein wasn’t happy about this at all. He liked things to work according to the rules. In fact, the whole point of his life’s work was to prove that there were rules governing the known universe, and he couldn’t very well leave things like singularities hanging about making the place look untidy.

  So, like any good scientist, Einstein went back over his work and tried to find a way to prove the singularities didn’t exist or, if they did, that they played by the rules. So, after a bit of fiddling with his sums, he came to the conclusion that the singularities might in fact be bridges between two different universes. This solved the problem of the singularities as far as Einstein was concerned, but nobody really believed that this bridge, known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge, could actually be used to travel between the universes, mainly because, if it existed at all, it would be very unstable, like building a bridge made from chewing gum and bits of chocolate over a very long drop, then suggesting that someone in a big truck might like to give it a try. The bridge would also be very small—10-34 meters, or so small that it would hardly be there at all—and it would exist for only an instant, so driving a truck across it (a space truck, obviously) would be both difficult and, frankly, fatal.

  Mathematicians have also suggested the possibility of what are known as “multiply-connected spaces,” or wormholes— literally tunnels between universes—that exist at the center of black holes.15 In 1963 a New Zealand mathematician named Roy Kerr suggested that a spinning black hole would collapse into a stable ring of neutrons because the centrifugal force pushing out would cancel the inward force of gravity. The black hole wouldn’t fall in on itself, and you wouldn’t be crushed to death, but it would be a one-way trip, as the gravity would be sufficient to prevent you from returning the way you had come.

  Nevertheless, the whole debate was another stage in the great discussion about wormholes, and black holes, and parallel universes, places where the rules of physics might not be quite the same as ours but might work perfectly well in that universe.

  Now Professor Hilbert was wondering if something in a universe other than our own might have found a way of breaking through, using a hole or a bridge as yet unthought of in our science, and tried to make contact. If that was the case, then, if the bridge still existed, there would be an opening in its world, and another opening in ours.

  The questions that followed from this were: where was that opening, and what exactly was going to emerge from it?

  • • •

  Back in the basement of 666 Crowley Road, four figures stood staring at where there had been, until recently, a spinning circle of blue. Mrs. Abernathy had returned from her visit to Samuel Johnson’s house to find her thr
ee companions in a state of some distress.

  “The portal has closed,” said Mr. Renfield, who no longer looked or sounded quite like the Mr. Renfield of old. His voice emerged from his throat in a series of hoarse clicks, and his skin had already taken on the wrinkled, unhealthy appearance of a rotting apple. The change in his appearance had begun almost as soon as the blue light had disappeared, and a similar decay could be seen in Mrs. Renfield and Mr. Abernathy. Only Mrs. Abernathy remained unaffected.

  “They have shut down the collider,” said Mrs. Abernathy, but there was a strange expression on her face as she spoke, which she hid from the Renfields, “as the Great One predicted that they would. But now we know that travel between this world and ours is possible. Even now, our master is assembling his great army, and when he is ready the portal will open once again, and he will cross over and claim this place as his own.”

  “But we grow weak,” said Mrs. Renfield. Her breath smelled bad, as if something inside her was festering.

  “You grow weak,” said Mrs. Abernathy. “You are here only to serve my needs. Your energy will fuel me, and when the portal opens once more, you will be renewed.”

  This was not entirely true. Mrs. Abernathy was a more extraordinary demon than her three companions, older and wiser and more powerful than ever they could have imagined. The portal had not closed, not entirely. Mrs. Abernathy’s great will and strength were keeping it open just a crack. Nevertheless, she was content to suck energy from the others as required, and to use the portal only when necessary. She would be the one to explore this new world in advance of her master’s coming, and it was important that she blend in without attracting attention. After so long in the darkness, she wanted to experience something of the Earth before it was turned to ash and fire.

  VIII

  In Which Samuel Learns That Someone Trying to Open the Gates of Hell Is Not of Particular Concern to His Mum