Chapter 4 #4
Connor rolls his eyes. “I’ve just finished telling you that souls are reincarnated. When would they go to hell if they’re cycling through lives here on Earth?”
“Say what?” Daniel asks. Thankfully, Ewan elbows him.
“We’ll get caught up later,” he whispers.
“Anyway,” Connor continues, “gateways can come into existence in a variety of ways. Occasionally they appear spontaneously, the result of some unknown stress on the fabric of existence. Those ones are usually pretty small and uneven, but they can’t be closed.
They ripped open for a reason, even if we don’t know what it is. ”
Please don’t let that be what ours is. Pleasepleaseplease.
“When I say occasionally, I mean hardly ever. To our knowledge, there are only seven of those in the world.”
“I know that’s not a lot, but it seems like a lot,” Josh says, and Connor smiles. Surprisingly, it’s a genuine one, not a sneer.
“Right? Seven doesn’t seem like many when you’re talking about M&Ms, but when it comes to holes in the fabric of the universe, one’s too many.
But when you consider that it’s only seven since time began, that one of those gateways opened when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and two others predate them, it’s really not that many. ”
“Dinosaurs?” Johnny asks. “Did any of them go through to the other side? I wants to see them.”
The look Josh turns on him has him clamping his mouth shut.
“Another way a gateway can open,” Connor says, a thread of laughter in his voice, “is due to a cataclysmic event—a natural disaster that causes a massive amount of upheaval or an incident that results in a huge number of deaths. They open fairly regularly in conflict zones and along tectonic plate fault lines.”
“Do they close again when the chaos settles?” I can’t resist asking. Maybe the one we have opened because the woman who summoned the soul-eater demon was killed by it. But one death wouldn’t be enough, would it?
“No, they have to be closed. Some gateways will close by themselves, but it takes hundreds of years.”
A dispirited sigh goes around the room. I guess we were all harboring a secret hope it would just go away one day.
“And the final way to get a gateway is for someone to open one, like I did earlier when I got rid of the body-hopper.”
“There’s a lot they need to catch us up on,” Daniel murmurs to Ewan, who makes a noise of agreement.
Okay. So it looks like Emma, who summoned a demon in the Garden Suite back in the 1970s so she could sic it on her ex-boyfriend who betrayed her in some way we don’t know about, also opened a gateway to another dimension. Because why the hell not?
“Can anyone open gateways?” Skye asks, clearly having similar thoughts to mine.
Connor shakes his head. “No. Some mediums can, but most don’t have enough strength. Ordinary people, definitely not.”
Was Emma a medium? Surely she’d have written about it in her diary if she’d been able to see and speak with ghosts?
Josh has talked a little about what life is like for him off the estate, and it doesn’t seem to be something she could have just ignored.
Unless she didn’t have as much medium ability as Josh…
like she only saw glimpses occasionally and could write them off as imagination?
But then she wouldn’t be strong enough to open a gateway, would she?
It’s looking more and more like we have no choice but to show Connor the gateway and tell him the whole story if we want to get some answers.
“How do you close them?” Josh asks. “I’m guessing if ordinary people and most mediums can’t open them, they can’t close them either?”
Connor points at him. “Bingo. And not all gateways can be closed. It depends how much they’ve worn away at…
” He trails off. “Okay, analogy. You pick at a spot on your shirt.” He indicates a random patch of his T-shirt.
“Just keep picking away until a tiny hole opens. And then you keep wearing the shirt. You wash it and wear it just like you normally would. And if you ignore the hole, it’ll slowly get bigger over time.
Maybe it’ll even snag on something and rip wide open. ”
“The hole is the gateway?” I ask, and he nods.
“Yes. If you put a stitch or two in it immediately, you repair the hole, maybe can’t even see where it was. The longer it’s left, and the more use it sees, the harder it becomes to repair, until it reaches a stage where it can’t be fixed.”
“What’s the snag?” Hattie asks, face pale. “The snag that might rip it.”
Connor spreads his hands. “It could be anything. I’ve heard of some that were because of a drought or a mice plague. Violent death is another cause. Basically, anything that upsets balance in the area around the gateway.”
I mentally cross my fingers and toes. The estate was closed up and basically abandoned for thirty years after the gateway opened, so hopefully it will close smoothly.
Gathering my nerve, I put the question out there. “Can you close ours?”
The moment before he answers seems to last an eternity. The whole room holds its breath in anticipation.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I have to see it first.”
Anticipation crashes and burns. What a letdown.
I look at my watch. “Let’s find out, then.”