Chapter Three
Three
Good Science
Aoife walked on the nothingness. She was floating, a spiral of stars above her, below her, and yet gravity held her feet to the nothingness, allowing her to move forward. Or backward. There was no direction, there was only the stars. Sparkling. Smiling. Seeing.
Was this what a drug trip was like? Aoife hadn’t done drugs. Except for that accidental brownie in secondary school.
One star shot past her, a cool breeze hitting her cheek as it passed. She was weightless, and yet had never felt so alive in her body. Every movement, every breath, it felt like she had never moved, never breathed before this, and was only now finding its true wonder.
Aoife was in the Gates. Or had gone mad and was in a mental institution, delusional from anti-psychotics. Of the two options, Aoife preferred to be dealing with the former. Eimear had said the Gates would bring her to her dream lad.
What if that was true? What would he be like?
Aoife met him in her mind’s eye. A rugged, daring man. Strong, yet sweet. Brave, but not reckless. And, of course, deliciously sexy. The kind of man she could swoon into his arms, but also—
Don’t be daft. Aoife tried to shake her head in the floating nothingness, to erase those thoughts. Those forbidden thoughts. The world spun, but she wasn’t sure if her head was spinning, or if all of her was. Or if the world was twisting and twirling while she stood still.
A rose-tinted light appeared in the distance, dancing like a flame as the world slowed and the spinning eased.
The willowy light banished all thoughts of “what if,” of what could be, of what should be.
There was only what was. There was the light, and from that light, someone whispered Aoife’s name. She had to get to the light.
She had to get to him.
~*~
Aoife tried to blink the world away.
It didn’t work.
The world she stood in did not float or spin or pulse. She was no longer on what felt like a drug trip. No. This was far too present. Far too here. Far too real.
She stood with her back to a squat stone building with a thatched roof on the edge of what looked like a town square.
The square of what town? Aoife couldn’t say.
No town in Ireland. No town in the twenty-first century even.
Aoife hadn’t seen a single car or hint of electricity in the ten minutes she’d been here.
Staring. Speechless. Torches and lanterns lit the square as people rode past on horses, sometimes dragging along donkeys, the clop-clop-clip of the animals’ hooves setting a lazy underbeat to the noise of the town.
People talked. Laughed. Babies cried. There were bakers selling bread and ironworkers selling their wares.
And flowers. There were a lot of people selling flowers, but not so many people buying them.
It was all very lively for what seemed to be dusk.
The sky above was dark. Moonless. Bloody.
Crimson stars speckled the night as if the sky itself were bleeding, casting an eerie tint of red over the town.
Aoife watched the red shimmer in the early hours of evening.
Watching. Listening. Afraid to move. She feared if she moved, if she breathed, the whole illusion would shatter.
Because this had to be an illusion. Didn’t it?
She had been in her bedroom fifteen minutes ago.
Now, she was here. Wherever “here” was. She had, naturally, done all the obligatory checks to make sure she wasn’t dreaming, such as pinching herself and trying to lucid dream by skipping from place to place.
The pinch had hurt and she couldn’t mould the dream to her will no matter how much she tried.
Of course, that didn’t rule out her being in a coma.
Surely, coma dreams were different than normal dreams. Or maybe it wasn’t a coma.
Maybe there had been too much carbon dioxide in the air or she’d been otherwise drugged.
Maybe she’d imagined the Gates, and the void that had followed, and she was imagining this town and the vaguely medieval dress and cloak she was wearing.
How had this cloak and dress appeared on her anyway?
She had been wearing jeans. This wasn’t reality, surely, and she needed to get back to her bedroom.
So … why was she so afraid to break the illusion?
The heel of Aoife’s worn boot scraped against the cobblestone street as a crowd gathered in the town centre amidst buildings of wood and stone.
Aoife paused. There, in the stone beneath her feet was …
something. It expanded to the stones all across the area.
A mural? Perhaps. At least, it had been once.
Now, it was faded from time. Its edges were dulled and the picture obscured, the deep grooves now half-filled with dirt.
Aoife tried to step back, to see what it might have been, but it was too big, too faded. Everyone else trampled it.
A breeze came cold and harsh against Aoife’s skin and she pulled her ratty cloak tighter to shield her from the chill. But as Aoife looked into the inky darkness of the night, she realised there was more than the cold to be shielded from. Her hands jittered, her breath falling shallow.
The darkness. Was it moving?
Aoife stepped back, pressing herself into a brick wall as the blotches of thick blackness wriggled in the night air.
Some of the darkness seemed wispy and light while some of it looked so heavy Aoife couldn’t understand how it floated.
The darkness moved under, over, through the crowd like an uninvited guest, sometimes coming together to create a great darkness and sometimes separating into smaller strands. No one else seemed to notice it.
Did they not see the darkness? Or, was it so normal here that it didn’t matter? Was it dangerous?
Of course it isn’t dangerous. It’s not real. But then again … what if it was? What if Eimear had been right? What if the Gates really had taken her to another world to meet her soulmate?
A man bumped into Aoife as he jockeyed for a spot at the centre of the crowd. Shoulder-to-shoulder they touched. Was he her dream lad? Was he the one?
Whoever he was, he disappeared before Aoife could get a look at him. Of course it wasn’t him. This wasn’t real and her soulmate wasn’t here. Aoife dug her fingers into the wall behind her. The scratch against her fingers, the specks of dirt wheedling beneath her nails …
Why did it feel so real?
A hush fell over the crowd. Even the slithering darkness went still.
One patch of darkness hovered by Aoife’s head and she stepped to the side to avoid it.
A woman with eyes like fog stood in the centre of the people, robes of deathly white draping her wafer-thin body. Aoife went up on tip-toes to see her.
The woman stepped forward and the crowd parted for her, but only enough for her to take a couple more steps.
She paused, looking around with unblinking eyes.
She walked. Stopped. Looked. Walked. Stopped.
Looked. This went on as she made her way through the people, taking each of them in as if she were seeing their souls.
Aoife pulled her arms under her cloak and drew the opening closed.
As if that would hide her soul.
“You,” the woman said. Her voice was light and airy yet filled with dread. “You.”
Aoife looked to see who the woman had meant. Oh. She’d meant Aoife. Was that a good thing? The woman’s foggy eyes were trained on her, the crowd staring, the air itself holding its breath.
“Wait,” someone in the crowd whispered, “that’s not who’s supposed to—”
“Aoife Donmaire,” the woman said.
“No …” Aoife avoided the woman’s unearthly stare, looking down. “I’m Aoife O’Donoghue.”
“You.” The woman pointed this time, her hand rising like a puppet on a string.
“But I’m not—” Aoife stepped sideways, hoping to get around the building so she could run. Something silky and solid hit her calf, freezing her in place. She looked down.
A cat as black as the floating darkness stood beside her, its yellow eyes bright like fireflies, the end of its crooked tail pointing at its own head.
There was a collective gasp from the crowd. Not wanting to be left out, Aoife gasped, too.
“Follow.” The woman gestured to the small creature.
The cat leapt forward, then waited, looking back at Aoife.
“W-why?” Aoife whispered.
A murmur wafted through the crowd, along with a chuckle or two.
“Follow,” the woman said. Impatient now.
But Aoife didn’t want to follow the cat. She didn’t know what was happening. Probably nothing was happening. Not in the real world anyway.
Maybe this is the real world. Maybe he’s waiting for you.
No, stop, this couldn’t possible. And then, unexpectedly, another voice invaded Aoife’s thoughts, drowning out her own: how do you know it’s impossible? Have you tested it? What’s your experiment set-up? Are you just afraid you might be proven wrong?
The voice was unmistakable. Unforgiving.
Mum. She had made a career of destroying other scientists’ lives and credibility by being more thorough, more rigorous, and more open to the truth than they had been.
Mum was a scientist to her core. She wouldn’t have disregarded this world simply because she’d assumed it couldn’t be real.
Aoife was being a bad scientist.
“Are you going or not?” someone shouted from the crowd.
Yes. She supposed she was going. It looked like she had stumbled upon an exploratory study.
All the variables were yet to be defined, but Aoife did have her research questions: firstly, was this place real?
Of course, a good researcher would first have to define what “real” meant, but Aoife wasn’t that good of a researcher.
Real was … real. Secondly, if this place was real, was its purpose to connect her to her soulmate, like Eimear had said?
The only way to find out was to gather evidence.
She couldn’t gather evidence standing here doing nothing.
Aoife took one step towards the cat, her heart hammering in her chest. Where would this lead? What answers would she find? She took one more step towards the cat, her pulse thrashing in her ears. Then another step, and another. One foot in front of the other.
For the sake of science.
The cat led her through the streets of a large, tightly packed city.
Some streets were cobblestone, some dirt, but the stars shone red on all of them the same.
There were houses of stone, of wood, of clay, the darkness clinging to the outer walls like a leech.
Then there were the shops, the bakers, the tradesmen, the specialty items. There was more than one building that purported to teach the “Selatian arts.” Based on the signs, it seemed to have something to do with swords and combat.
Then there were the garment makers, one in particular that advertised themselves as making the finest “Xana robes dignity can buy.”
There were also advertisements. So many paper advertisements.
They were posted on the sides of shops, of houses.
One promised to “save you from your Shadows” while another declared “The God is not God. The Shadows are God.” That one had a rather cult-like symbol of a red eye painted in the middle, and Aoife decided she would not be “contacting Brother Yesip to learn the truth” as the poster suggested.
Yet another sign offered remedies for something called the “Shadow Sickness.” Aoife passed through a particularly thick swathe of darkness.
Was the darkness what these signs were referring to as “Shadows?” For a society who ignored them when they were standing right next to the Shadows, they seemed to spend a lot of time obsessing about them.
Aoife slowed. She had come to a new place.
A more terrifying place. Poverty clung to the air like the stench of rotted eggs.
Tents of tattered cloth had been erected to give some of the homeless shelter.
Others lay prostrate on the street, barely clothed.
The cold bit into the streets, the buildings, the people, leaving behind frost. An old man with torn clothes lay on the footpath, the life drained from his dark eyes as he stared into a merciless sky.
The black cat meowed up ahead and suspicious eyes turned to Aoife.
Eyes that could, would, kill if given the chance.
The cat stepped into the despair. Aoife hesitated.
Here was not safe. Of all the places she had been in her short time here, this was by far the most dangerous.
The cat flicked its tail, pointing the way forward. Aoife looked back. She could go back.
Back where? She hadn’t been keeping track of the twists and turns.
Only the cat seemed to know the way. Swallowing the lump of dread in her throat, Aoife followed the cat, her eyes down, body shivering from the cold.
Her steps were quick, her body tense, ready for a fight.
Ready for anything. No one spoke to her.
Instead, they fell silent and still as she passed.
Aoife wasn’t sure if that was a good or bad thing.
After winding down a steep staircase, the cat stopped, its tail pointing at a lopsided stone building with a door that didn’t close properly.
The windows on either side were glossed over with a smear of white, blocking the view inside.
To the right of the door was a wooden sign. It read, “the Knitting Widow.”