The Impossible Boy (9 page)

Charles shrugged. ‘OK. I’m a hyperbeing from the fourth dimension.’

Gabby opened her mouth but nothing came out. She tried a second time but her jaw just wobbled like a newborn foal taking its first steps. ‘You’re . . . whhhhaaaaat?’ she
managed eventually.

‘Close your mouth, Gabby,’ whispered Chas. ‘Standing there with it hanging open is not a good look. You’ll get drool on your parka.’

‘What? Oh, sorry.’ Gabby blinked and shook herself. Her face was pale. ‘You just told me something very extraordinary, didn’t you? And I don’t mean about the
mouth-open look not being a good one for me. I knew that already. People say it to me all the time. You’d think I’d have learned by now. Now I’m gabbling. Gabbling Gabby,
that’s me. Sorry. I’ll stop talking in a second. I think I’m in shock. I feel a little bit sick. Do you mind if we sit down on this bench?’

‘Sure. Let’s sit.’

They sat down. Gabby smiled weakly. She was aching and tingling all over. Her palms felt cold and clammy. ‘I’m not actually handling this all that well, am I?’ she admitted.
‘I’m struggling to get my head around what you’ve just told me. Can you explain it again in slightly simpler terms? I can deal with it, I promise. It might just take a few moments
for all the cogs in my brain to mesh successfully.’

Chas took a deep breath. He placed his hands behind his head and stretched his long legs comfortably. ‘I come from a different universe, a place you would call the fourth dimension. All
the different copies of me around Britain are actually all parts of the same being. Do you understand?’

‘Umm . . . not really. Parts of the same being? But how?’

Chas considered for a moment. ‘Look down at the canal.’

Gabby leaned forward and stared at the smooth glassy surface of the water. ‘I’m looking. Go on.’

‘Imagine you’re a fish living in the canal – a stickleback, say.’

‘OK,’ said Gabby. ‘Stickleback. Good.’

‘To you, Mrs Stickleback, the canal is your entire universe. You have no idea that there is a whole world above the surface of the water. You don’t even think of the water as
having
a surface, an edge. To you it’s just all there is.’

‘Right. With you so far.’

‘Now,’ said Chas, ‘a person comes along – me, for instance. I stick my fingers through the surface of the water – into the stickleback’s world. What do you
see, Mrs Stickleback?’

‘Your hand?’

Chas held up a hand. ‘No. What a stickleback would see would be
five worms
.’ He wriggled his long fingers, wormlike. ‘The stickleback doesn’t know the five
fingers are all connected to the same hand. It just sees five worms entering its world at five different places.’

Gabby nodded slowly. ‘Gotcha.’

‘So it’s the same with me. All the different copies of me are like the fingers of an enormous hand poking into your world from a higher dimension. All the Chases are really parts of
the same large creature.’

‘So you’re just a finger?’

Chas laughed. ‘Yes, I suppose I am.’

‘So, why do you look like a person?’

‘If you wanted a stickleback to think your finger really was a worm you might paint your finger to look more like one. Same kind of thing with me. I’m in disguise.’

‘You’re a painted worm? Is that what you’re telling me?’

He laughed again.

‘So, if all those hundreds and hundreds of copies of you are just parts of the same organism, your true self – how big are you really?’

Chas whistled. ‘Pretty darn big, actually. It might seriously blow your mind if I told you.’

Gabby snorted. ‘Like it could get much more blown. Go on, tell me.’

He smiled. ‘My actual four-dimensional body is roughly twice the size of your solar system.’

Gabby swore. Loudly. She clapped a hand over her mouth and shut her eyes. ‘Sorry!’ she mumbled through her hand.

Chas chuckled. ‘No problem. I think you’re coping pretty well, all things considered. Is the truth starting to sink in yet?’

Gabby shrugged. ‘I think so. I guess this would explain the tricks you can do. You reach through this fourth dimension and invisibly grab stuff or put stuff into it to make it
disappear.’ She rubbed her eyes. ‘Cor. I think my brain needs an oil change.’

‘There’s no such thing as a locked door to me,’ said Chas. ‘I can see inside everything, reach inside anything. Because your human senses can’t detect the fourth
dimension, you don’t realise that even a locked safe is open to me.’ He stood up and plucked a conker from a horse chestnut tree overhanging the bench. He showed its spiky case to
Gabby, holding it delicately between thumb and forefinger.

‘Watch.’

In a single swift movement, he tapped the conker case with the forefinger of his other hand. A shiny brown conker dropped out. Gabby caught it. Chas handed her the case. It was completely
unbroken. ‘Open it,’ he said.

Taking care not to spike herself, Gabby prised open the conker case. Its soft white interior was completely empty. ‘Wowsers,’ she muttered softly. ‘Is there anything you
can’t do?’

Chas nodded grimly. ‘Yes. I can’t go home. You see, I’m stuck in your world. Trapped, like a man with his hand caught in some railings.’

‘But you’re as big as a solar system,’ said Gabby. ‘How can a solar system get its hand trapped in some railings?’

‘There was an accident,’ said Chas. ‘I was studying your universe – you three-dimensional beings are fascinating – and part of me, the part you humans now interpret
as two thousand copies of the same boy, got . . . well –
wedged
is the best word. I got wedged into your universe. And now I can’t get out. It’s kind of embarrassing.
Bits of me can dip in and out of the fourth dimension to do silly tricks, but some part of me must always remain in your world.’

‘But what about your friends, your family, in your universe? Can’t they help?’

Chas shook his head. ‘No one knows I’m here. And it could be a long time before anyone notices I’m missing. Time works differently in the fourth dimension. It goes in all kinds
of weird directions, not just forward like it does here. Your whole universe might end before I’m rescued. I hate to think what might happen to me then.’

‘Is there anything you can do?’

‘There is,’ he said, looking away. He ran a hand through his hair. ‘But I’d need some help and it might be dangerous. Could be
very
danger—’

‘I’ll help.’ Gabby spoke automatically. ‘Of course I’ll help. Why wouldn’t I?’Her head was suddenly spinning with delight, her mind racing with
countless wild ideas, her heart thudding with joy.
This boy
, she thought,
is capable of anything. Literally anything!

‘You will?’ Chas’s big blue eyes were wide. ‘Really?’

‘Really. It’s not every day you get to help a boy from another universe, is it? What do I have to do?’

Chas laughed with relief and pleasure. ‘Oh, Gabby! You don’t know how happy that makes me! You’re saving my life. I’ll explain the plan later. I have an escape plan, you
see, as every self-respecting prisoner ought to. But first . . .’ He grinned wickedly.

‘What?’

‘Have you ever been to the fourth dimension?’

Gabby laughed. ‘Oh, yeah. All the time. Mum and I have a holiday cottage there. What do you think, you lunatic? Of course not.’

‘Fancy a little trip? You’d be the first being from your entire universe to enter it. But it might be a
little
overwhelming at first.’

Gabby squealed. ‘Oh wow! That would be incredible!’

They stood up. Chas took Gabby’s hand. ‘For a three-dimensional girl, you’re pretty cool, you know that?’

Before Gabby could reply there was a flash of brilliant white light and they were gone.

When Barney went to room U13 the next day for Geek Inc., there was no sign of Gabby. He waited patiently for the whole of lunch break, his stomach rumbling fiercely, but still
she failed to appear. He guessed she must be ill and made a mental note to text her that night when he got home after football practice. With just a couple of minutes to go before afternoon
registration, he dashed to the tuck shop and bought an apple, taking huge wet bites from it as he hurried to his form room.

Pulling open the door at the school’s main entrance, he was almost knocked to the ground by the tall, bustling figure of the chemistry teacher, Miss Roberts, who was bursting out of the
building in a state of some distress, her high-heeled boots making loud clumping sounds and her dark hair streaming behind her in messy tangles.

‘Why don’t you look where you’re going, you little fool?’ she called to him over her shoulder in her sing-song Welsh accent and strode towards the car park.

Barney blinked at her in surprise and went inside.

Clomp-clomp-clomp
went Miss Roberts’s boots on the tarmac.
What a morning!
she thought. It had all been too much. She needed to go home and unwind on
the sofa with box of chocolates and her cat, Captain Fluffmeister, on her lap – and had just informed the headmaster that that was precisely what she was going to do. The headmaster, Mr
Siskin, could only nod dumbly – like everyone else in the school he was a bit afraid of Miss Roberts and didn’t like disagreeing with her.

She hadn’t been looking forward to this morning. She was due to teach a Year Ten class that included that insufferable know-it-all, Gabrielle Grayling. It was obvious that the Grayling
girl knew just as much about chemistry as she did herself – if not more – but the thing that really got up Miss Roberts’s nose was that Gabby was so unfailingly
nice
the
whole time. When a pupil was as bright and gifted as Gabrielle Grayling, you wanted them to have a horrible personality so you didn’t feel so bad about hating them. But Gabby was just so
quiet and patient and thoughtful that it made her want to scream. On several occasions she had made fun of Gabby in front of the class, banged her metre-long wooden ruler on the desk to startle
her, and deliberately given her poorer marks than she deserved, just to see if she could provoke Gabby into some angry reaction, but all her attempts had failed. When Gabby had been absent from
this morning’s lesson, Miss Roberts had felt a wave of relief.

But as it turned out the lesson had been the most troubling one she had ever taken.

She had been about to demonstrate to the class how mixing zinc with hydrochloric acid produces hydrogen gas, and had the necessary apparatus set up on her desk. In her handbag under the table,
her mobile phone suddenly emitted an electronic bleep. She was meant to have her phone switched off in class but she had been waiting all day for a text from her best friend about whether
she’d been able to buy tickets to a concert by their favourite boyband. Eagerly, she ducked under her desk. A strange acrid smell greeted her. It was coming from her handbag. She scooped it
up and laid it on the desk. Thick, stinking fumes were rising from its interior. Someone had poured acid into it! Everything inside was churning and dissolving as the hissing acid devoured it. She
watched, goggle-eyed, as her mobile phone disintegrated into a pool of bubbling plastic and metal.

‘WHO DID THIS?’ she demanded in a voice that sent icicles of terror through the hearts of her class. ‘WHO. IS. RESPONSIBLE?’

The horror-struck Year Ten class stared back, mute with fear. Miss Roberts met their gaze, her eyes narrowing with suspicion. She could normally sniff out a culprit easily, few children being
able to withstand her ferocious stare, but today all the kids in her chemistry lesson looked equally shocked and alarmed by what had happened.

Very well
, she thought.
Time to turn up the pressure
. She’d have the guilty party tearfully confessing in no time. She reached for her metre ruler, which leaned in its
usual position against her whiteboard. One swift slap of the ruler on the desk produced a clap as loud as thunder and was usually excellent for inspiring terror in wayward children. But as she
raised the ruler to strike it on her desk, its wooden length crumbled to dust in her hands, spraying her with tiny splinters. Someone had dipped it in acid! The fragments of wood clattered softly
on to her desk. The class gasped in unison. It was then that Miss Roberts gave up and decided she’d rather be elsewhere. She snatched her coat off the back off her chair. Its collar came away
in her hand – the rest of the coat, she saw with horror, reduced to acid-ravaged scraps of cloth. She let out a grunt of frustration and stormed from the class and up the corridor towards the
staffroom, where she was pretty sure Mr Osborn kept a bottle of whisky hidden in the umbrella stand.

This was not the only odd event to happen in Blue Hills High that day. At morning break, a Year Eleven girl named Maisy Quench had been demanding to be given the lunch money of two Year Eight
girls. Maisy was explaining that if the two girls didn’t hand over their cash, she would push both of their heads down a toilet and flush it, much as she had done to some speccy Year Ten girl
called Gabby something the previous week. The two girls exchanged a frightened glance and reached in their schoolbags for their money. But when they looked up, much to their astonishment and
relief, Maisy had vanished. She was discovered later that afternoon by a bemused Year Nine girl, her head wedged in a toilet bowl and with no memory of how she had got there. A plumber had to be
called to release her.