The Painting Read online

  “Donny, dear,” Alice interrupted, a wide smile still crinkling her greying eyes. “Can you look to your right and tell me what you see?”

  Donny shook his head and looked at Yelp. Yelp the Alsatian looked back at him, his tail wagging between his open legs. He wouldn’t look out of place with a newspaper on his lap and a pipe in his mouth.

  “Well, I see a very bizarrely mannered Alsatian dog.”

  Alice giggled and shook her head. “Of course, of course. Can you tell me how you know it’s an Alsatian dog?”

  The confusion welled up in Donny’s head. Where was this getting anybody? “Oh, come on! Just tell—”

  “Please,” Alice said. “Just tell me how you know it’s an Alsatian dog. Humour me.”

  Donny shook his head and rubbed his eyes. “I know it’s an Alsatian dog because I’ve seen a fucking million Alsatian dogs in my life before and I know what they look like.” He moved his hands from his face. “There. That good enough? Are we done here?”

  Alice looked at Reginald and smiled. “You see, I’m glad you told me it’s an Alsatian dog, because I didn’t know that.”

  Donny shrugged his shoulders. Great—he was stuck in a house with an absolutely mad duo. Just as if his luck could get any worse… “Well, I’m glad I could be of help. Now ca—”

  “The reason I didn’t know it was an Alsatian dog is because there’s no such thing as an Alsatian dog where we are.”

  Donny looked at Yelp and back at Alice and Reginald. The fireplace crackled behind Alice, a bout of smoke working its way up the chimney. Somewhere outside, the wind rattled against the foundations of the house, making the floorboards above creak.

  “Three years ago, when I lived elsewhere, I started hearing things in the night,” Alice said. “Weird noises—a yelping, I suppose. A few days later, I came downstairs to make my breakfast and I find this thing shouting at me in my living room. Of course, I nearly had a heart attack, but we grew to love one another.” She crinkled her nose at Yelp, who panted and wagged his tail.

  “Did you not think to phone the RSPCA?” Donny asked, shaking his head.

  Alice’s eyebrow twitched in bewilderment.

  Reginald leaned forward from his chair and waved at Yelp as more strings of saliva dribbled from its chin. “Donny, what Alice is trying to tell you is that we didn’t know what a dog was because there’s no such thing as dogs in this place.”

  The tension mounted in Donny’s stomach as he looked between the three of them, the last log of wood burning out in the fireplace and the orange glow receding. “What do you… what do you mean?”

  Reginald sighed and shook his head. “You’ve fallen through a gap, Donny. Two years ago, the government claimed they closed the final gap. People like me have been trying to work out a way of… a way of proving that this is a lie ever since. A way of—”

  “What do you mean I’ve fallen through a gap?” Donny asked, his voice shouting. Everything was beginning to feel gradually more surreal. He looked at the back of his hands—they were supposed to look different in a dream, but they were exactly the same. He looked away and then back at them—nothing.

  “Your… your world. Everything that existed in your world—your family, your friends, your life—none of that exists here. You’ve slipped through a gap and you’ve left it all behind.”

  Donny shook his head. His skin flushed as the confusion mounted in his stomach.

  The boys, the painting, the explosion.

  “But how… how can I get back? How can I—”

  Alice looked down at the carpet and rested her hands on her knees. Reginald reached under his chair and pulled out a bunch of papers. He walked over to Donny and tossed them on his knee, Yelp’s panting face swinging round in curiosity.

  Donny looked down at the newspapers, unable to speak.

  Fallout Appears in West Brookshire.

  CLOSE THE GAPS: How You Can Protect Yourself.

  Donny flicked through them all, each with their pictures of person after person with fear on their face. “How—how…?”

  “Once you fall through the gap, you rarely get back. Your life—everything that was before—you need to be prepared to let that go.”

  Donny shook his head as the room spun around him. Yelp’s saliva dribbled down and formed a patch on the weathered red of the sofa. The final log in the fireplace sizzled out.

  “I need to get out,” Donny said. His heart raced and his head spun in circles. “I need to—I need to get out and—”

  “I’m sorry,” Reginald said. He pulled a cloth out of his pocket and stuffed it into Donny’s face. “I’m sorry I have to do this again but it’s for your own safety. We’ll—we’ll talk more tomorrow. Just—just keep still.”

  Donny tried to protest, tried to kick up a fuss, but his arms and legs turned to stone and he was sinking back into the sofa, sinking down into the warmth below and…

  He opened his eyes. The light from the window burned his skin. Where was he? He looked around the room: dark wooden wardrobe, photos on the wall, all of them of Reginald and a woman in various different locations.

  Reginald.

  The things he’d said. You’ve fallen through a gap. It all came back to him, his head aching with the revelations. Things were getting progressively more surreal by the day. He just wanted to get back. He just wanted to finish his novel and get back to Sara.

  He sat upright in his bed and rubbed his eyes with clenched fists. “Wake up,” he muttered. “Wake up, you fuck. Just—just wake up.”

  When he opened his eyes, he was still in the room. The bed was real, the photos were real—it was all real.

  “Hate to break it to you but rubbin’ your eyes ain’t gonna do you any good.”

  Donny swung to his side and noticed Reginald slumped in a chair to the left of the bed, twiddling an unlit pipe in his mouth and staring at him. “Sleep well?”

  Donny sniffed and wiped his sweaty head. “Yeah, I… yeah.”

  “I’m sorry about… I’m sorry about how we had to break things to you yesterday. Yelp—Yelp and Alice—I had to think of a way to help you understand. To show… to show it’s different here, y’know? I can imagine it must’ve been quite a surprise.”

  Donny rolled his eyes. “Can you?”

  Reginald shuffled in his chair and narrowed his glare. “You’ve no idea.” He stood up and lifted a brown envelope of papers from the desk at his side, throwing them onto the foot of Donny’s bed. “These are all the articles you’ll need to make you realise that I’m not just a madman, and neither are you.”

  Donny stared at the package at the foot of his bed, reluctant to reach for it. “What makes you think I think I’m mad?”

  Reginald opened the bedroom door and stopped, turning back to face him. He twiddled his pipe between his fingers. “I know if I’d just been told I’d fallen through a gap into another version of the truth, the first thing I’d be doing is trying to wake myself up. Read the papers, and then come down for breakfast. We’ve got a lot of talking to do, and I s’pose if you’re gonna be my guest here for a bit then you’re gonna have to sample my beans on toast.” He disappeared out of the room and left Donny with the envelope full of papers.

  There have been unconfirmed reports of a new gap on the Malvern Highway between Peeks and Broadchester. The man—a fifty-five year old who claims to be a physician—appears disoriented and unresponsive to any formal tests. It’s safe to conclude that the traumatic events have seen him slip into a state of near-psychosis.

  Article after article, story after story. Donny shook his head as he read each one, the reality of it all welling up inside him. Deep down, the niggling in his stomach wanted him to believe that this was all still just some sort of joke; a trick by some greater force. But it was as he progressed through the articles that he realised it was exactly that—some unfortunate aspect of fate messing with him. He didn’t have to retreat to Manny Bates’ derelict house in the middle of nowhere for novel inspiration, not
really. And he could’ve walked out the second he’d first seen those boys; seen the painting and the growing figures.

  Tap tap tap. He preferred it when things were purely supernatural.

  He climbed out of bed and left the room, his stomach tender after what was probably a combination of malnutrition and chloroform overdose. Walking into the upstairs hallway, he examined the area—normal enough. Low ceilings, very standard of a cottage. He scratched the back of his neck and descended the creaking wooden stairs, the tapping of cutlery audible from the back of the cottage.

  Reginald was closing the fridge door when Donny walked in. His eyebrows rose and he gestured towards the food on the table—stacks of toast coated in beans. “Good timing,” he said. “Do you take H.P. Sauce?”

  Donny laughed and shook his head. “Yeah, yeah.”

  “What’s so funny?”

  He sat down at the table and stared at the food. It wasn’t much but the succulent bean juice and firm, buttery slices of toast… It had been a while since he’d eaten a proper meal. His taste buds exploded at the very thought. “I just find it funny that there are no dogs in this world but there’s still H.P. Sauce.”

  Reginald chuckled and squirted the thick sauce over Donny’s food. “The world’s a funny old place. From my research, our worlds generally follow the same path, aside from a few… a few discontinuities.”

  “Like H.P. Sauce?”

  Reginald stuffed a forkful of beans into his mouth, tomato juice running down his chin. “Clearly our god and your god felt that H.P. Sauce was more of a necessary companion to man than a certain four-legged creature. Now, would you like some toilet water with your meal?”

  Donny crinkled his forehead. “I, er—”

  “I’m kidding, I’m kidding. We’re hardly savages. No, fresh orange juice will do it.” He poured the glass right to the brim. Donny’s salivary glands were having an absolute party. “Now, eat. Then we’ll talk.”

  The breakfast was one of the best meals Donny could remember eating in years. It might only have consisted of beans, toast, and orange juice, but that didn’t matter. He wolfed it down with no attention to manner or courtesy, the flavours dancing in his mouth and the warmth of the meal filling the void of hunger in his body.

  Reginald eyed up Donny’s empty plate as he swilled his final piece of toast down with a helping of orange juice. “Good?” he asked.

  Donny shook his head. “You’ve no idea.”

  Reginald smiled and leaned back in his chair, combing his hair behind his ears. “I’m guessing you read the, er…?”

  “Yeah,” Donny said, nodding. He still wasn’t sure what to make of it—whether to believe it, what it meant for him—but he had to accept it, for now. He had no choice but to do so. “I just… I don’t know.”

  Reginald leaned forward. “I know it seems a rather flat thing to suggest but I do understand how it must feel. I’ve seen it several times. The whole, ‘why was I there?’ feeling. ‘Why didn’t I just’…”

  “…stay at home and finish my goddamn novel.”

  Reginald’s eyebrows twitched. “You’re a creative man? Thought you looked more of a man of stable career myself.”

  “I was,” Donny said. “Used to work in a standard office job. I always enjoyed writing though. Submitted a few books to publishers and was on the verge of giving in. Never wanted to admit defeat but I could tell the people around me thought it was best if I just settled down.”

  “And then along comes a glimmer of hope?”

  “Something like that,” Donny said. “Published my first book back in ‘08: The Iron Magnet. Quit the job to focus on it. Sara totally supported me and I failed her. The book flopped. Things… things weren’t so great for a couple of years following. Almost gave in again but what d’you know—new publisher in town, interested in a series of short novels. For the first time in my life, I get what I want, and then I get writer’s block and… and yeah. Now I’m sat eating beans on toast in another fucking dimension.”

  Reginald laughed. “Your anecdotes are always the same. It’s always such a ‘what if I hadn’t?’ question. Y’know, as kids, we dream of transporting to other worlds—of exploring and stumbling upon something truly amazing. And when that something truly amazing comes along, we want nothing more than to go back home and watch some inane TV with a pipe in our hand.”

  “A cigarette,” Donny interrupted.

  Reginald stuck his bottom lip out and lifted his shoulders.

  “You’ve got H.P. Sauce but you don’t have cigarettes? Jesus, Sara and I would have no trouble starting up a business round here.”

  “Sara’s your wife?”

  “Girlfriend,” Donny said, a lump in his throat. “I was… I was going to propose to her when all this novel stuff was sorted. She’s always pestering me to straighten the cushions and tidy up so I was going to get this nice little place and mess everything up… let her be angry but have a ring stuffed underneath one of the cushions. But, yeah. I guess I’ve got other priorities right now.”

  Reginald shook his head and poured another glass of orange juice for them both. Outside, Donny could hear the birds singing songs they’d never had the chance to learn in his world. So much inspiration—a creative dream.

  “When am… when am I?”

  Reginald flicked his eyebrows upwards as he washed his mouth with orange juice. “You’re whenever you were when you fell through the gap. Time, it… time’s one of the things that doesn’t change. At least, not that we know about.”

  Donny rubbed his temples. When am I? In what world had he ever envisioned himself asking that question? Evidently not this one. “How do I get back?”

  Reginald took a sip of the orange juice and exhaled. His eyes didn’t meet Donny’s for longer than a brief moment.

  “You might as well be honest with—”

  “It’s not quite as simple as just getting back,” Reginald said. “There is a way to get back through the gaps, but the papers I showed you, they were from before.”

  Donny shuffled in his chair. “Before what?”

  Reginald sighed and flattened his palms on the table. “Before the men in green suits came through a gap. What they did to our people—massacre, torture. Daniel Crawford—our, um, prime minister—he was already looking for an excuse to take action against them. He started getting people paranoid; accusing the fallout—ah, you, you’re the fallout—of waging war against our people.”

  “A witch hunt,” Donny muttered.

  Reginald disregarded his comment. “After that, it wasn’t as easy as just ‘going back’. I mean, it’s never been easy. It relies on… on remembering certain aspects of the gap on the other side. Pinpointing key discrepancies and… and discontinuities in everyday reality in order to attempt to locate the gap. A lot of the people who come through, they forget things. They’re always linked to a gap—there’s always some sort of way back—but they forget things. Remembering… that wasn’t a common occurrence.”

  The painting, the boys. Tap tap tap.

  “So what happened to the ones who stayed?”

  “Oh, well most of them took some time to adjust themselves to a new life and started from scratch. It’s not easy, of course it’s not, but it was easier in the early days, before the prison camps and… and the cleansing.”

  Donny’s insides rumbled, a combination of the seemingly unnatural amount of food he’d been eating and the things he was hearing. “But why? I mean… they’re just people. We’re just people.”

  Reginald leaned further back in the chair. “Try telling Daniel Crawford that. No, he wanted blood. He… he blamed the gaps on your world. Said it was some sort of construction so they could steal our people for experimentation. Until the last gap was closed, people followed his word, but there’s still the occasional scaremongering headline from time to time.”

  Donny shook his head. “But what happened to the ones who were in the camps?”

  Reginald sipped the last of his orange ju
ice. “The last fallout died two years ago. Since then, there have been no concrete reports of new fallout. But I—we kept on believing. You’re just lucky I found you and nobody else did. If the gap had opened in the city centre, you’d be front page news right now, and for all the wrong reasons.” He slipped his sleeve up and revealed a small, metallic square on the inside of his arm. “You’re risking as it is without being chipped. If you’re thinking about running away, don’t bother. You’re in the safest place you can possibly be right now.”

  “Chipped?”

  Reginald tutted as if chipping was common knowledge. “Chips. In the arm.” He pointed again to the tiny grey patch above his wrist. “A way of keeping people safe—or a way of segregating you from our people, depending on your standpoint.”

  Donny’s head spun as the information echoed in his skull. “What do I… what do I do? About getting back?”

  Reginald intertwined his fingers. “What do you remember about the time before you fell through the gap? Any weird happenings? You—you mentioned a house before. You mentioned a woman. What happened?”

  Donny shook his head. The painting, the figures, tap tap tap. “There was a painting. It… and there were six silhouetted figures on it and they were gradually getting closer—bigger—in the painting.’

  “What was in the painting?”

  “Erm, trees. Trees with autumn leaves. And there were boys in the house—boys, tapping the air. There… was a dead mouse, and some weird noises.”

  “What about a woman? Was there a woman?” Reginald was tensing his fist, his jaw muscles sticking out at the sides.

  “I…” He looked at Reginald. His eyes were bloodshot, flicking up to a photograph on the wall. Reginald and a woman, smiling on the top of a hill. “How do you know I came through the gap?”

  Reginald blinked his watery eyes and scoffed. “Well, because you… you said about a house and—and weird events. You said about—”

  “No, I didn’t say anything like that. I could easily have just been a mad person roaming the streets. You… you knew I was from the gap because… Manny Bates. You knew her, didn’t you?”