Episode XCIX - Advent Horizon, Part III

Jen’s friend Maria had a small office in the most run-down building the University of Derby had at its disposal and she seemed to share it without at least three other PhD students, so Sarah was unsurprised when, after they had been introduced, she suggested they head to the nearest café.

“You have no idea how exciting this is to me,” Maria said in her thick Polish accent once they had sat down with their lattes, “my research deals with the multiverse theory and , theoretical though my work usually is, I’ve been working with a few of the more practical quantum physicists here to attempt a sort of practical demonstration of my ideas.  I believe that not only are there other universes out there, but that it is possible to pass from one to another, so your situation with your boyfriend-”

“Ex.”

“Sorry.  Well his situation and the thing with these monsters-”

“You believe that?”

“Jen may be a crazy God-squadder, but I trust her.  If she says she’s seen monsters and gives me exotic matter as proof – I’ve had it tested you know, it’s completely alien – then I’m going to believe her.”

“Oh, so you’re not church-goer yourself, then?”

“Only for Christmas and family things.  When I left Poland that was one of the things I was trying to escape.  Jen’s alright though, even if she does keep trying to drag me to church stuff.”

“Not all my friends are Christian, Sarah,” Jen added with a smile.

“Anyway,” Maria continued, “with the exotic matter you took from the remains of that monster, I think we might have a chance to do something no one has managed before.”

“And what is that?”

“We could make a bridge between worlds.”

“How?”

“Well, it’s kind of like quantum entanglement – the idea that quantum particles within an atom are so intimately related to one another that you can separate them by huge distances and they will still behave as if they were connected.  The difference here is that we don’t have an interconnected system.  The particles of your matter are only connected to each other.  My theory, however, is that all matter within a universe has a kind of weak quantum connection.  If that’s true then we could use matter from another world to connect with that world and maybe, just maybe, send something through.”

“So we might be able to find Ellis?”

“It’s a possibility.  I don’t want to get your hopes up too much, but I am really excited about this.  It’s the best chance to test my theories I’ve ever received and I’m going to be working very hard on it over the next few weeks.”

They agreed to keep in touch, with Maria promising to send regular updates, before Jen gave Sarah a lift back to Larksborough where she had just enough time to eat and change before heading to the St. Stephens for the first instalment of the course Thomas wanted her to try.

The church was decorated for Christmas and there was a sort of Christmas theme to the course as well.  The speaker announced at the start that the intention was to use the weeks of Advent to approach the Christian faith from a number of angles and to see how they all pointed to Christmas Day, the birth of Jesus, and to the day in the future when they believed he would return.  Sarah enjoyed it more than she had expected and she left with a great many questions floating around in her head.

Back at home her mother asked about her evening and for a moment, just briefly, she had considered telling her the truth; that she hadn’t been round at a friend’s planning a Christmas party, but learning about the faith her mother had always steered her carefully away from.  She chickened out at the last moment, however and told her mother that it had gone very well and that Jessica thought they could start buying things for the party right away.  It was with a pang of guilt that she went to bed that night.

The weeks leading to Christmas seemed as busy as they always did and with all the trips to meet people, to buy presents, to actually plan that party she had lied to her mother about and to attend the course at St. Stephen’s, she quickly began to forget about the problems of late November.  She found she was able to walk around town without carrying a kitchen knife with her and, as there was no sign of the other monster at all, she began to treat the whole thing like it had been some kind of hallucination.  The lack of contact from Maria didn’t help either.

At the Advent Explored course Sarah found herself getting more and more interested in Christianity.  She still couldn’t believe any of it – she was starting to doubt her own personal experiences, so how could she trust in something that all just seemed to be written down in an ancient book? – but she was beginning to understand why it made Thomas and Jen and even Rupert behave the way they did and why they seemed so attached to it.  Certainly their Jesus was a very different figure to the one that her mother and popular culture had portrayed.

She stayed later than most after each session, asking questions.  Thomas tried not to be the one to answer them all, preferring to keep his distance.  She wondered if he was doing so because he didn't want her to see him as the enemy, or if there was another, more worrying reason.  Did he think she might only be doing this because of wanting to be with him?  In truth she didn't want to ask herself that question in case the answer turned out to be 'yes'.  Besides, she wasn't there to examine her own motives, was she?  She was there to try and understand more about the faith of her new friends and if that helped her relationship with Thomas then so much the better.

Of course keeping all this from her mother proved to be impossible.  She could only avoid the questions for so long and so, when on the week before Christmas her mother confronted her with the words, ‘we really need to talk, love’, she decided she would tell her everything - not about the Slatewings, of course, but pretty much everything else.  She talked about the impact of Ellis’ disappearance, the night she first went to St. Stephens - she claimed that a gang of thugs had chased her there – the new friends she had made there, quite by accident, her growing relationship with Thomas and the course she had been attending.

Her mother listened patiently, without saying anything for the whole of the explanation, but her expression changed throughout, from concern, through fear and worry right on into anger and frustration by the very end.

“Well,” she said, “I’m glad you’ve told me all of this now, and I can understand you’ve been through some trying times recently, but really, did you really feel you had to resort to the irrational types at some spaghetti monster church to confide in before your own mother?”

There was hurt there, behind the anger. Sarah saw it and part of her wanted to respond with loving kindness, but that part was drowned out by the rest of her, thrumming with anger, still too confused to be sure of anything and yet certain that something her mother had just said was very, very wrong.

“They are not irrational!  I’m not saying I believe in their God any more than you do, but they are not the fools and idiots you have always led me to believe they are.”

“But they’re brainwashed!  They believe in all sorts of supernatural nonsense they can’t explain.  They ignore all the science and insist on keeping the rest of us back with their regressive drivel!  I can’t believe you’d let them get to you like this, Sarah.  I thought better of you.”

And that was like a slap in the face.  If Sarah had been prepared to make any concessions of kindness before that they were gone after her mother had unleashed such poorly chosen words.

“They’ve spoke a great deal more sense to me in the last few weeks than any you have.  They actually believe that life means something!  They care and show love and kindness.  Who cares if it’s because of something untrue – there’s a truth deeper in there which they seem to have tapped into and I want to know more.  Besides they don’t flaunt science at all.  Jen is an evolutionary biologist, for goodness sakes!”

“She’s just in denial!”

“She has a better idea of who she is and what she’s doing than I ever did, just sticking to what I could see and touch.  And who’s to say there isn’t something more out there.  The things I’ve seen recently…”

“This is all just because of that boy, isn’t it?”

“Leave Thomas out of this!”

They argued round in circles for what seemed like hours, though it was probably less than twenty minutes, and it ended the only way it could have, with slammed doors and Sarah alone in her room, refusing to cry.

That last week before Christmas seemed to be interminable and though that could be normal before one of the most exciting days of the year, it was an especially long week for Sarah.  She and her mother did their best to ignore each other for the next few days, forcing Sarah out of the house more often than not.  When there was no avoiding each other the atmosphere seemed even chillier than it did out in the snow.  Occasionally one or other would try to say something, something to soften the hurt perhaps, or just to re-establish communication, but the words would never come.

Sarah saw Thomas a few times that week, seeking solace in his presence.  She tried to explain to him why the argument had happened in the first place, but the words never seemed to order themselves right.  “She’ll c-come round,” Thomas had replied and, just for then, that had been enough.

On Christmas Eve she received a text message from Maria, ‘Cracked it! Can u come today?’  It was ridiculously short notice and she wasn’t sure how she would get to Derby, but a quick text to Jen revealed that she was already planning on stopping by to see if she wanted to go.  ‘I wouldn’t miss this 4 the world!’, she explained.

Sarah was trying to get ready to leave when her motherly rapped gently on her bedroom door.

“Sarah?  Are you in there?”

It was a stupid question and Sarah nearly said so, but she stopped herself just in time and managed a reluctant “yes” instead.

“Can I come in?”

Sarah looked around at her room.  There were clothes everywhere and it as obvious she was about to get changed to go out, but there was no point hiding any of that now.

“I guess so.”

The door opened very slightly and her mother gazed in.

“Oh,” she said, “you’re going out?”

“Yes,” Sarah replied, holding a top up before the mirror and pretending to be greatly interested in it.

“To that church?”

“No.  To Derby.”

“What on earth for?  Oh, it doesn’t matter.  Do you have time to talk?”

Sarah turned away from the mirror and saw her mother’s pained expression for the first time.

“Yes, mum,” she said, “I think I can make time.”

This time they really did talk.  Her mother tried to apologise, admitted that she had been a little cruel and that the church people were probably not all that bad, but that she was genuinely disappointed that Sarah had felt she couldn’t talk about these things.

“I would rather you wouldn’t go there,” she said, “but I don’t want it to get between us, either way.  I love you Sarah and it’s Christmas.  I want to spend it with my daughter.”

There was time for Sarah to say her piece, to admit that she wasn’t sure what she believed anymore, that the course Thomas had been taking her too had opened her eyes to ideas she had never really understood before and that, maybe, just maybe there was something in it.  She admitted that Thomas was a big incentive, however, and that she probably wouldn’t have gone if not for him.  “He’s so sweet to me and kind: a real gentleman.  They aren’t easy to find.”

“Promise me you’ll be careful, then sweetheart.  Promise me that, and that you will think hard about any decisions you might make.”

“I’m your daughter,” Sarah said with a smile, “I’ll never walk into anything blindly.”

“That’s my girl.”

So, it was in a much better mood that Sarah waved goodbye to her mother and climbed into the passenger seat of Jen’s tiny car before making the journey into Derby to see Maria.  Thomas was already sitting in the back seat.  He hadn’t warned her he would be there and it made her blush to see him smiling at her in the rear view mirror.

“I d-d-didn’t w-want to b-be left out,” he managed through a stammer that seemed even worse than usual.

Jen watched them both out of the corner of her eye and smiled, but said nothing.

When they arrived at the University they had no trouble finding a place to park since it was almost entirely closed up for the Christmas holidays.  Maria had apparently been able to wrangle a key to her building so that she could keep on working.

“I couldn’t get home for Christmas anyway,” she admitted when Sarah asked her about it, “so I thought I’d keep on at this instead.  I’m glad I did.”

She led them into a lab where all manner of strange scientific equipment was lined up.

“I’ll admit was difficult to get all of this stuff, but no one else was using it over the holidays so it was the ideal time to give my ideas a try.  I got one of the practical physicists to set it up for me and show me how to work everything.  I might get out of theoretical stuff one day, eh?”

She showed them what each machine was designed to do and how they were all connected, via some computer software, to a kind of imaging microscope in which the sample of monster ashes was kept.

“The software is designed to turn the sub atomic makeup of the ashes into a kind of equation linking our world to wherever these came from.  The other machines… well they kind of use that formula to manipulate the particles in that glass chamber over there to forge the bridge and, hopefully, manufacture a kind of tame wormhole.”

“This all sounds very dangerous!” Sarah remarked.

“It could be, but I’ve taken every precaution I can and that glass is reinforced to deal with a vacuum, so it ought to be fine… I think.  Anyway, as long as nothing crosses the event horizon of the wormhole, I don’t foresee any major problems.”

She turned to her computer and started inputting a string of data whilst the others watched in mute incomprehension.  Eventually Maria hit the last key and then spun her chair around to face them.

“That’s the last bit of preparation.  Are you ready for this?”

Sarah glanced sideways at Thomas to see his perfect eyes reflecting her own.

“Are you s-s-sure?” he asked.

“Yes,” she replied, taking his hand and squeezing it, “it probably wont work, but if it does… maybe it’ll bring some closure.”

“Okay!” Maria said as she spun back around to her computer, “Here goes nothing.”

For a moment there was nothing happening, then the machines whirred into life, but apart from some statistics showing up on Maria’s screen there still seemed to be no real activity.

“Is it working?” asked Jen.

“I think so,” Maria replied, scanning the room and then staring at the glass chamber opposite.  “Maybe I need to-”

Without warning there was a sound like paper tearing, only ten thousand times louder, as if an entire library were being shredded at once.  It was accompanied by a flash of light and when the light faded and everyone’s eyes were bale to adjust it became clear that something strange had formed in the glass chamber, all black and blue and yet radiant with light like something out of a bad 80s dance club.

“A wormhole,” Maria said in awe, “a real, honest-to-goodness wormhole!”

“And that… that leads to wherever those ashes are from?” Sarah asked in a quiet voice.

“In theory.”

“Is there a way to tell what’s beyond?”

“Without some kind of robotic probe… not really, sorry.  But this is a start, a major breakthrough.  We’ve just made his-”

Maria’s sentence was cut short by a sound like the sudden cawing of a gigantic crow, but before anyone could look to see where it had come from the monstrous beast smashed through the windows to land, tumbling across the floor, its stony wingtip slicing through the wall of the glass chamber like it was mud.

Maria screamed, Jen fell backwards off her seat and Thomas grabbed Sarah’s hand before standing up between her and the monster.

“The breakthrough!” the creature shrieked as it regained its feet and made for Sarah, “We can go home now, but only one of us can go.  We must have revenge!”

It charged towards them and Sarah realised that this time it wasn’t her it was after, but Thomas.  She rolled of her chair, pulling him with her so that the creature collided with the chairs instead, then she picked herself up, checked that Thomas was okay and ran for the wormhole.

“S-s-sarah, w-what are you d-doing?” Thomas called out, but by then the growing sound of the wormhole, a continuous paper-shredding sound like the universe was being slowly torn open, made it hard for her to hear.  She wasn’t even sure if what she was about to do was going to work, but she tried anyway.

“It’s me you want,” she shouted, “I killed your friend!”

The creature rose from the debris of moulded plastic and metal legs and turned towards her.

“This is all your fault,” it hissed, “you and the construct!”

And then it charged.

The plan was simple, wait for it to approach then roll out of the way again like a matador teasing a bull.  It was simple, and yet the wormhole was growing behind her and the noise was getting louder and louder and suddenly she found herself feeling light-headed and dizzy.  She saw the creature charging towards her as if in slow motion and it seemed the easiest thing to move aside, but she wobbled with each motion and her legs felt mired in clay and then the beast was upon her, sweeping her up in its wings even as the wormhole swallowed them both.

FIRST EPISODE

PREVIOUS EPISODE

NEXT EPISODE

FULL ARCHIVE