The Hipster Who Leapt Through Time (The Hipster Trilogy Book 2) (26 page)

He nodded her on and she pressed the button. The doors shut behind them and the lift cranked into life. It zoomed them upwards, much faster than a standard elevator. Modern technology at its finest. She reminded herself that she’d taken her IBS medication. She should be fine.

They both looked away from each other. Her feet ached. Normally at this time she’d fill her foot spa with hot water and some smellies, put the kettle on, set the TV to
Coronation Street
, and would melt into the sofa as Donald snoozed away. Afterwards, she’d massage her varicose veins and fall asleep herself. It was a comfortable sort of life. And it seemed a million miles away at that moment. Far from this gloomy, cloudy day in the capital. Still, though, as far away as Donald was, she sensed she could still hear his snoring. It had only gotten worse with age.
 

She looked to David who appeared to be lost in his own thoughts too.

“Are you married?” she asked.
 

He shook his head to say no.

“Not yet, but … I have my plans. Wife, kids, home in the countryside, a couple of dogs. Maybe a cat. Haven’t decided about them yet,” he said.
 

“Sounds lovely,” she said.
 

“It will be.”

The lift stopped its ascent and the doors opened. A draft of wind hit them immediately. Broken glass marked the floor where the partitions on either side of the viewing plaza had smashed.

They took a step forward and looked up and around them. Definitely not a rain cloud. The black had engulfed the top of the Shard completely. They were standing inside it. They looked up and around the cloud. Odd sparks of electricity crackled static as the tiniest parts of the cloud moved. Standing this close, the fabric of the cloud appeared to be liquid in nature. They were standing on the inside of a giant wave of black that was so high Liz couldn’t see the ceiling.

“Well, this is interesting,” she said.
 

Moomamu The Thinker

“Get your claws off me!” Moomamu screamed.

Wait—

What—

Where was he?

Who was …

He looked around the room. No, not his room. Not his prison cell. No thump-sticks. No guards. Snuckems’s purr rung in his ears but he was certain it was only in his mind. A cat taking pleasure in his work. He shuddered.

Sweat fell from Moomamu’s chin and landed on his bare stomach.
 

His heart raced. His pulse thumped. And the tips of his toes were light and fizzy. He groaned as he climbed up to his feet, accidentally pushing the chair to the floor behind him. The metal frame clanged against the rock. In front on the table were an empty bottle of water and the empty tin of pineapple slices from the night before.

He shook his bare foot in the air, kicking out the remaining fizz. His back ached. His neck was sore. Every movement produced a popping and a clicking from the air pockets between his bones. He walked over to the stash of water bottles in the corner and grabbed a fresh one.

When he’d first woken as a human his body was well nourished with strong, supple muscles, but when he looked down at his chest, stomach, and his legs, he could see the bones within. His skin was stretched over the curved ridges of his ribs. His kneecaps protruded further out than ever before and the sacks of muscles around his legs and arms were all but gone. He’d done a shitty job at being a human. He’d had the vessel for only a few months and he’d run the thing into the ground.

He hadn’t noticed the night before, but there was another room. Only half as tall as the cave. Cut away like an afterthought. The edges smoothed over.
 

He stretched his arms into the air with a pop and a crack and peered inside. A wooden cross made from driftwood leaned against the end. Ornaments and bones, a box made from animal skin. Pictures of humans taken from all different corners of time. A fat religious book. Moomamu wasn’t sure which religion it belonged to and it didn’t matter. They were mostly the same anyway. A name was etched into the fabric of the cover, though, under a fine coating of dust. A lighter shade of brown scratched into the leather: ‘My dear husband, Felix Barraclough’.

He drank from the water and flushed it around his mouth before swallowing. His throat and tongue still felt dry. He took another mouthful and headed outside.

The heat was in full force again. The pyramid now too far away to see, lost somewhere between the blue and the yellow. Just hills of sand and sun. It went on for miles. In his condition he’d cook before he made it anywhere.
 

He thought back to the water and the food. There was around eight more bottles of water and twenty or so tins of food. He pushed back the worries of running out of supplies and held the bottle in front of his face. He looked through the clear liquid and out to the sand. A droplet travelled down the side of the bottle and fell downwards. He caught the drop in his hand and shoved it in his mouth. All he could taste was the sand and dirt from his fingertips.

His eyes ached in the light and he turned to go back inside. He needed to sit down anyway. He needed to eat. He walked past the fabric chair, which was pushed upright and against the table, and bent down to look through the tins of food. The labels were written in a Middle Eastern language and had pictures of smiling humans on them. Little idiots surrounded by groceries. More pineapple, orange segments, mushy peas, baked beans. Lots of beans, actually. Stacked on top of one another—

Hang on—
 

He turned back to look at the fabric chair. It was upright and pushed up against the table. An indentation in the sand on the floor showed where the chair had been pulled across. He didn’t remember picking it up. He didn’t remember pushing it across the floor. Suddenly a smell of damp rags filled the cave.
 

“Hello?” he said, looking around the room. “Is anybody there?”

A cloaked figure appeared in the corner of the room from nowhere.

“Who are you?” he said through his hands, falling onto his ass.

The figure stepped forward and pulled back the hood, revealing his face.

“Oh God? Are you okay?” Moomamu said. The face looked like it should come with a smell. “You look really sick—”
 

A second later and the smell arrived.
 

“Hehehe,” the man laughed, revealing his charcoal-blackened teeth. His cheeks lifted upwards and the skin around his mouth split. Dry and peeling away in flakes. His long dirty grey hair tumbled over his shoulders, where it joined his beard in grey matted locks that rested on his chest. “I don’t really get sick anymore.”

“Okay then,” Moomamu said, as he picked up a tin of beans — the closest thing to a weapon he could find. Just in case. “Is this your place?”
 

“It’s a home of sorts, but not the real home. This is temporary. Eventually I’ll get back home, though. Eventually I’ll make my way back to Eden.” The man’s voice was as horrible as his face. But Moomamu knew it. He’d heard it before.

“You’re the voice in my head,” Moomamu said. “You helped me, sort of.”

“No, Thinker, I didn’t help you. I hoped you would help me. Y’see, I’m like you, but I’ve been at this for a long time. You could say I’m your future.”

“God, I hope not,” Moomamu said as he held his nose.

“There was a time I was like you, y’see … stupid, I mean.”

“Hey!”

“Closed. Blind. Ignorant of the powers of a Thinker made flesh. Why is it that a parasite requires Thinkers’ flesh out of anything else in the universe?” he said.

Moomamu shrugged.

“Tastes good, I guess.”

“Not quite,” the man said as he sat down on a ridge on the far side of the cave. “Pass me one of those waters, will you?”

Moomamu grabbed one of the plastic bottles of water and threw it. Not very well. It rolled across the floor, bounced upwards into his cloak and then hit the floor.
 

“Thanks,” he said as he picked it up. “I’m knackered.”
 

Moomamu watched as the man unscrewed the lid and gulped on the bottle. He finished the entire thing in one sitting and wiped his mouth with his dirty sleeve.

“So,” he said. “Questions?”
 

“Lots,” Moomamu said.

“Well, don’t worry. No rush really. We’ve got time. About two months, by my calculations.”
 

The man’s accent was hard to place. There were moments when it sounded foreign to the planet, but he could still hear the old Englishman in him. Not the well-to-do types from the south of the island. One from further up. A northerner.

“Are you a Thinker?” Moomamu said.
 

“I was once something very similar to you. Very similar indeed, but that was a long time ago now. A long, long time ago. Oh boy, so long. I’m an old git, to tell you the truth. Old and haggard.”

“And you smell too.”
 

The man nodded and acquiesced.
 

“Yeah, I guess that’s true. I haven’t been taking care of my vessel. Not since it died, anyway. The thing is little more than a puppet now, but having a physical entity like this allows one to do glorious work.”

Moomamu shook his head.

“Who are you?”

“I’ve had many names, but one’s stuck with me for the last few centuries. They call me The Light,” he said with reverence. That ugly, old smile finding its way back to his face.

“Who calls you The Light?” Moomamu said.

“People. People call me The Light.”

“What people?”

“Look, I really don’t fancy going into it right now.”

“Okay, just because, I dunno. Seems egotistical to call yourself The Light. I wanted to know what kind of man I was dealing with here. I’ve had enough to do with nut jobs over the past few months with the cats, broken humans, and smelly old parasites.” He looked down to the beans in his hand.

“Ah yes, the cats. Time in places like that can seem strange and wrong and backwards. It kind of all morphs together. Do you know how long you were on that sorry little moon for?”

Moomamu shook his head.

“Three months, my boy. Three whole months. Three months of torture, scraps of nourishment, living in the dark of the cell, and then made to fight.”
 

“I had company, it seems,” Moomamu said.

The Light smiled again.
 

“I guess you did.”
 

“How did you do that? How did you talk to me when you weren’t there?”
 

“You’re as inconsistent as myself, Thinker. There are many things that you can do if you act with intention. If you act for reasons greater than yourself.”

Moomamu looked around the room. Unsure what could possibly be greater than himself. It was quiet. Dark. Dust suspended in the air in the rays of light.

“And what’s going to happen in two months?”
 

“You’ll see … you’ll see. For now get some rest. Eat. Recover. Regrow your muscles. We’ve got to get you ready for what’s to come. I don’t want you dying on me.”
 

Dr Liz Thompson

The wind howled as it pushed itself around the inside of the black cloud. The force of it was enough to push Liz forward. It willed her onwards. David held his hand out for her to hold onto. He walked forward with her. His gaze was on the cloud, though. His cool and confident exterior had given way to a childlike curiosity.
 

And not just David. Liz too lost herself to the wonder around her. The cloud had a calming effect. A river at night. Its gentle waves forever moving but never crashing into any coast or bank.

“What do you think it is, David?” she said, squeezing his hand.
 

“I have no idea …” he said, raising his voice over the wind. “But I can promise you that there’s some form of intelligence to it.”
 

“What makes you say that?”
 

She turned her head when he didn’t answer and found him pointing upwards. Her bottom jaw loosened as a black stairway made of the cloud itself reached down from the cloud. It connected at the point where the Shard’s viewing platform ended. Liz looked back to David and chuckled.
 

They walked towards the edge and looked at the stairway. The steps themselves never settled in their movements. Unstable. Illusions. As though they were there to lure them off the edge, to their deaths. A closer look and it didn’t look like any sort of liquid or cloud that Liz had ever seen before. Nor was it made of any solid substance. It was a fine, black gunpowder substance constantly shifting and switching its positions.

“Comms are down,” David said, his voice muffled by his mask and the wind and his hand on the circle on his ear. He pulled a phone out of his pocket to check and tutted before putting it back.

“Hold on,” he said as he bent down and touched his hand to the surface of the stairs. The sand recoiled against his touch but appeared to regroup and solidify. He tapped it again and it
clinked
.

He stood back up and lifted his foot, carefully placing his leather brogue on the step. The step solidified around the shape of his foot. He lifted his other foot and was now standing off the edge of the Shard. His weight supported by the cloud.

“Well?” he said, as he turned to Liz.

She smiled, held his hand, and then pulled herself up onto the step. They took their time. One step, and then the second, and then the third. With each step, their confidence grew. The higher up and into the cloud they went, the angrier the wind became. A cold reminder of how high they actually were. She pushed the thoughts of the city to the back of her mind.

Ten meters up and into the cloud the stairs turned back on themselves and led them deep into the cloud. Holes opened in its sides, allowing the London daylight to enter. Inside there was nothing. No supercomputers or control panels. No little green men. No monsters. The ceiling of the cloud was so high up they couldn’t see where the walls ended and the ceiling began.

Liz looked at David. He gave her the no-idea smile. It was just as plain on the inside as it was on the outside. Hollow, and slightly disappointing.