Coldbrook (Hammer)(152)

A head appeared below them, and she gasped. It’ll look up and see me, and know me, and then it’ll hoot and they’ll know where we are, and—

‘Is it clear?’ Sean asked.

‘Is now,’ the man said, looking up. It was Thomas, the guy they’d picked up at the roadblock.

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah. One of them, hanging on to the ladder. And . . .’

‘And?’ Sean asked. ‘For f*ck’s sake, and?’

‘And there are people down here with bows and arrows.’

Bows and arrows, Jayne thought. She closed her eyes and rested her head against Sean’s damp back.

‘We’re not out of the woods yet.’ He started climbing down again, and she could feel him shaking.





13


The pressure of memories was just as great, but none of them were Jonah’s own. He saw people he had never known, places he had never been, and the images gave the impression of being from some forgotten film discovered in an attic fifty years after it had been shot – scratchy, distant. Everyone he was looking at was dead, that was the only certainty. These were memories from other people and different worlds, and he wondered whether his visions would grow stranger and more remote the further he journeyed from home.

This string of universes, Jonah thought. It was a phrase that Bill Coldbrook had used to use. He’d imagined an endless thread tied in complex knots and wrapped in infinitely tight balls, each universe at a point along the string, every one overlapping every other. But perhaps there was a more regimented structure to reality, an order to the multiverse that could be called geography, one which followed that string. If I went on, and on, and on for ever, what worlds might I find?

He wondered if the Inquisitors would go on for ever. He shivered. And then he emerged from the breach, and what he saw was beautiful.

The landscape reminded him so much of the valleys and mountains around his own Coldbrook. The black breach behind him was nestled at the junction of two ridges on a shallow hillside. Beyond that, everywhere was wooded. The heart of the Appalachians was like this, a wild place, home to hard people and to animals that had never laid eyes on a human being. Jonah drew a deep breath and wondered what kind of life dwelled here.

There was no sign of anything man-made – no buildings, aircraft contrails, or straight lines – and it struck him that the breaches on each Earth were in remote places, beyond where humanity might have been aware of them even if those Earths had still been thriving. Breaches were evidence of a radical, daring science that the scientists had been keen to hide from view.

He started to walk, aiming downhill because that route was simpler, and soon he was swallowed by the forest.

I have almost seen enough, Jonah thought. Almost.

The trees were tall and healthy, mostly spruce and balsam fir mixed in with larger hardwoods, and the forest floor was home to swathes of bramble, blueberry and rhododendron shrubs. A heavier yellow fruit that he did not recognise hung in bunches from a broad-leafed plant, and for a moment he worried about trying it. Then he laughed and plucked one, popping it between his teeth and sighing at the warm sweetness.

Small blue birds flashed between tree boles, and from somewhere higher up Jonah could hear the cry of a hawk. Sugg could tell me if that was a goshawk or a red-tail, he thought. But Coldbrook’s chef was an incomprehensible distance from him now, and probably dead.

There might be wolves and bears, coyotes and cougars, moose and caribou, and perhaps animals that he had never seen or even dreamed of. And perhaps he would see some of them if he walked far and long enough.

Something down through the trees caught his eye, a shadow that he recognised, visible against a wall of deep blue flowers. Jonah approached at his own pace. The time had to come soon, he knew. And he had a sudden, panicked thought that for every second he stalled, another world fell to the fury infection.

‘I can’t know that,’ he said. Birds quietened around him, and something rustled through the undergrowth. How ironic it would be to die here, taken down by a wildcat or bitten by a snake, stung by a spider or mauled by a mountain bear. Ironic and tragic, because no one would ever know, in this universe or any other.

He rolled the soft trigger between his fingers, still in his pocket. It remained warm to the touch.

‘Accept,’ the Inquisitor told him. His voice came from beside Jonah, even though the shape he could see was at least two hundred feet away, visible past tree trunks and through the light camouflage of bushes and heavy ferns.