It would have been funny if it were not so perverse.
So he slowed to a walk, always conscious of the gentle tug drawing him forward, the stronger force pushing him from behind. If he veered aside from the invisible path the sensation would tell him, and he could easily correct his course. He had always been one to take his own route through life, but things were different now. He felt the spike of the alien object nestled against his heart, and the warm flexible globule in his pocket. In many ways he no longer belonged to himself.
Jonah absorbed the experience and relished every sight and sound, though many of them were bad. This world had once been wondrous. It was dead now, haunted by shadows, inhabited by slow-moving things that were easy to outrun. His heart thudded, stumbling frequently, palpitations taking his breath away. He considered the irony of dying now of a heart attack, and thought of the science that the Inquisitors must have to enable them to change him so thoroughly. You will never die, he had been told. If that was the literal truth, then the knowledge and technologies involved were incredible.
And I’m going to kill them all, he thought. But he couldn’t let any craving for understanding distract him now. It was all so tragic.
He allowed himself to be steered, passing those strange shell-like structures, until he found the breach that must have broken through into this world. It rested in a natural dip in the land, and a stream flowed directly into it. Jonah did not even break his step.
The pull that Jonah felt was subtle, the repelling pressure from the world he left huge. Memories struck him as soon as he entered. In many of them, Wendy seemed to exist in other people’s snapshots – walking in the background of a holiday photo, passing a group of people playing frisbee in a park, sitting five tables away in a restaurant as romance blossomed between a couple she would never recall seeing. His heart warmed at the sight of her, and yet the memory of her seemed more remote than ever. And as he emerged into raging snow, he already felt cold and distant.
Jonah had always loved the snow. When he’d been a child it had been something that transformed the South Wales valleys into a kids’ playground, and as an adult it had always reminded him of those times, giving him a glimpse and a memory of home. But emerging into this other Earth, the shock of dislocation was almost enough to stop his ailing heart and kill him.
He gasped and sat down hard. Flakes settled in his thinning hair and clung to his stubble, dancing in front of his eyes, landing on his tongue. When they melted there they tasted of distances he could never imagine. I’m leaving a part of myself everywhere I go, he thought, and it was a strangely comforting idea for someone so rooted in science and reason. Much of this new world might well resemble the one he had left behind, but an understanding was slowly dawning – the more breaches he found and fled through, the further away he was from home.
Then he lifted his head and really looked, and wonder overcame his trauma for a time.
This dark breach was set atop a pedestal in a wide room. The roof was holed in several places, the whole structure charred and warped as if by some huge fire, and the snow swirled through the gaps. Surrounding the breach was a circle of solid desks, half buried by snow but their purpose obvious and thus reminiscent of Coldbrook. Some were barely damaged, others had been melted into grotesque shapes by the fire that must have ruined this place long ago.
The little stream passed around Jonah’s feet and added its contributions of ice to the frozen sculptures that hung from the pedestal.
There were five other pedestals, leading off from his in a broad curve around the room. Two of them were empty, but the other three supported obsidian globes, depthless black orbs that swallowed the snow and gave back nothing.