Problematic Revelations

"There is a moment when a portal stops being a wonder and starts being a responsibility. And in my experience it arrives with somebody else's name attached to it."

The sundae had given up entirely by then.

It sat at the edge of the tray with the chocolate and the vanilla collapsed into one another and holding no shape at all, and it had stopped being food some time earlier and had become a small monument to a reprieve that I had claimed and had already had taken back off me.

Across the table my brother had not moved in what felt like a very long while. He had a hand round my Sprite, which he had commandeered at some point without either of us noticing him do it, and he was not drinking it. He was simply holding on to it. The condensation had run down over his fingers and had begun to pool on the laminate, and he had not registered that either.

And between us on the scratched tabletop lay a Portal Key. Small, and grey, and doing absolutely nothing whatsoever, and sitting in the middle of that table like a stone that somebody had dropped into the middle of a conversation.

The strip light hummed. The fryer hissed. A child laughed somewhere over near the counter, high and delighted about something.

And I could not hear one word of any of it, because I could still hear him.

We have a big problem.

He had said that, and then he had said nothing at all, for what had begun to feel like a considerable stretch of my life. He had simply sat there with his eyes fixed on a point about four inches to the left of my own, as though not looking directly at me might buy him a little more time to find whatever it was he was hunting for.

"Josh," I said, and it came out sharper than I had intended it to. "You can't drop a statement like that and then just sit there in silence like you've swallowed a confession and don't know how to chew it. What kind of problem? What are we actually dealing with here?"

He blew a long breath out through his nose and shifted about in the chair, and his fingers went straight back to tapping the side of the cup—steady, rhythmic, and absolutely maddening, and I have never once in thirty-three years been able to get him to stop doing it.

"I'm trying to figure out how to say it," he muttered, and he said it to the table rather than to me.

"Try starting with the truth."

I was doing everything I had to stay calm, and I was not doing it well, and my patience had begun to go at the edges the way old rope goes.

And then he looked up at me. And he looked at me properly, which he had not done once since he sat down, and something went the whole length of my spine.

His eyes were bloodshot, and it was not tiredness, and I have seen my brother tired. There was something dimmed in them. Something had been switched off in there and had not been switched back on again.

"They're in Saint Phillis," he said.

He said it very quietly, and it went off in the middle of my chest.

I blinked at him. "Who?"

And he hesitated. Just a fraction too long, and I noticed it, and I have thought about that fraction a great deal since.

"Mason. Ella. Diesel."

The names came down one on top of the other like bricks being stacked, and I sat in that booth and could not do one single thing except look at him.

"Mason," I said slowly, and my brain was scrabbling about for footing. "Your mate Mason. And Ella's his daughter." I was assembling it out loud, and badly, and putting the pieces in the wrong order. "And Diesel is—Christ, Josh. Diesel is his dog."

He nodded once, and did not elaborate, and did not look up.

"What do you mean they're in Saint Phillis?" The words came out of me stiff and unwieldy. "As in they're there? Now? This minute?"

"Yeah," he said. "Right now."

And I went back into the vinyl and it stuck to me, and my head set about trying to process an image that it did not have the equipment for: Mason, and a little girl, and a dog with its ears up, standing about on a plain of red dust where I had barely been able to keep my own feet underneath me.

"But—how?" I said. "How would they even get in? They haven't got Portal Keys."

And the muscle went under his ear. That small involuntary tightening he has never once in his life managed to control, and which I have been reading since I was old enough to read anything.

"No," he said. "They haven't."

"Then how—"

"They went in with me."

And he said it in a way that left no room anywhere at all for me to put a question into.

"That first time," he added. Quieter.

And the pause that came after it had a great deal of weight in it, and neither of us went near it.

"You took them?"

"It wasn't like that." It came out of him fast, and he ran both hands down over his face, slowly, in the way he does when he has run out of road and knows it. "I didn't plan to. It wasn't some—some group expedition. It just… happened."

And I sat there and stared at my brother across a plastic table with my heart going hard enough that I could feel it in my throat.

"Josh, what does that even mean? How does someone just happen to take a child and a dog through a hole in the world?"

And he looked at me. And what was in his face was something I had not seen there in a very long time, and which I could not put a name to at first, and then could.

It was not embarrassment, and it was not even guilt, and both of those I would have recognised in a moment.

It was regret. The hollow, ordinary kind of it, that arrives when a decision has got away from somebody and gone somewhere they cannot follow it and will not be coming back.

"I didn't mean for any of it," he said. "But they followed me in. And I didn't stop them."

And then he looked down at the table and stayed looking at it.

"I should have. I should have stopped them."

"What actually happened," I said.

And he leaned forward and put both forearms down on the sticky laminate, and when he started talking again his voice had gone flat and low and had something resigned in it that I had never heard out of my brother in the whole of my life.

"I'd just opened it. First time. And Mason and Ella were there—just by chance, mate, that's all it was. Diesel too. The parcel had turned up that morning and Mason was already hanging about the place like he does, working on his truck out in the shed. Ella was in there with him, pestering the dog and drinking all my Milo." He put one shoulder up and let it fall again. "You know how it is."

I nodded, and I said nothing whatever, because he was talking, and because I have learned over thirty-three years that the single fastest way to stop my brother telling me something is to say something myself.

"So I told them about the parcel," he said. "Stupid. I showed them the thing. I told them everything you'd told me—about Clivilius, about the portal, all of it." He stopped and took a short breath. "And we had a bloody good laugh about it, Nathan. Mason took the absolute piss. Reckoned you'd finally lost the plot completely. And I—"

He stopped again.

"I more or less agreed with him."

And there it was, sitting on the table between us with everything else.

And I let it go past. I did not say one word about it and I did not so much as change my expression, and it went into me somewhere underneath the ribs and settled there and it has not moved since.

"But something about it felt off," he said. "Not wrong. Just—off. It didn't feel like a prank. So I tried it. I pointed the thing at the wall, exactly like you said." He turned the Sprite cup a quarter-turn on the table without appearing to know that he was doing it. "And the bloody thing lit up like it had been waiting for me. A whole wall of colour. It was—"

He hunted about for a word, and did not find one that satisfied him, and used two.

"Beautiful. Terrifying."

And I could see the whole of it in him while he said it. It was still in there behind his eyes, exactly where mine is, and it always will be.

"They were stunned," he said. "Ella reckoned it was magic. Straight away, no question about it, magic. Mason decided I'd wired up some sort of light show and started going round the skirting boards looking for the cable. And Diesel went completely off his head. Barking at it. Barking at the wall, like the wall had done something to him."

"And you all stepped through," I said.

It was not a question and I did not put it as one, because I had known where the whole thing was going from the moment he said her name.

He nodded, and it cost him a good deal to do it.

"Ella asked first. Can we go in." And he said the words the way she must have said them, which is a thing I have never been able to get out of my head. "And I—I didn't know how to say no to her. Mason said it'd be a laugh. I told them we'd stay together and just have a bit of a poke about for a few minutes."

And the silence that came down over that table then was one of the worst I have ever had to sit inside. There was nothing in it at all but the murmur of the restaurant and the mechanical shudder of the ice cream machine refilling itself somewhere behind the counter, and my brother staring past my shoulder at nothing with his jaw locked shut.

"It felt empty," he said eventually. "But not dead. Not abandoned. It felt like it was waiting for something. No wind. No sound at all. Just dust, and rock coming up through it."

And I nodded at that, because I have stood on that plain and I have felt precisely that, and because every word of it was true.

"And the voice," he said.

And his own voice went right down.

And my stomach turned over, because I knew what was coming and I did not want to hear it.

"What did it say?"

He did not lift his eyes off the device.

"It welcomed me," he said. "By name. It said I was recognised." And then, in a completely flat register, with an accuracy that stood the hair up on my forearms: "Welcome to Clivilius, Joshua Cowdrey."

I swallowed, and it was difficult, and it took me two goes.

Because I have heard that. The same words, more or less, in the same nothing of a voice, arriving inside my own skull from no direction at all and with no sound in front of it.

"Did Mason and Ella hear it too?"

Josh shook his head slowly. "No. I don't think so." And then, after a moment: "I didn't actually ask them."

And I let a long breath out, and did not say what I was thinking about that.

"And then what?"

"We stayed near the portal. I didn't want to go wandering. After about ten minutes I said we should head back."

He exhaled, and it was not steady.

"I stepped through first. Came out in the living room. Everything exactly where I'd left it." He stopped. "And I turned round, expecting them to come through behind me."

And the pause after that went on for a very long time, and I sat there and let it, and I did not fill it, and that was the single hardest thing I did all day.

"They didn't."

And my chest closed up.

"You mean they couldn't come back through."

He gave a small shake of the head, and it was a painful thing to watch him do.

"They tried. God, they tried. Over and over. I went back through and stood beside them and tried to bring them out by holding on to them—physically holding on to them, Nathan, with both hands—and it made no difference at all. The portal just—" and his hands opened up uselessly on the table in front of him—"it wouldn't have them."

"How?" My pulse had come up, and I could hear it. "How did it stop them?"

"It didn't stop them. It didn't push them back or knock them over or hurt them. It just refused them." He looked away, out towards the window and the carpark and the heat. "Ella went first. She ran straight at it—little kid, no fear at all, straight at it—and at the last second it was like she'd run into a wall of air. No impact. Nothing to see. She just… didn't go through. And Mason put his shoulder into it and shoved with everything he had, and it was the same. Nothing."

"Was she hurt?"

"No." That one came out fast. "Not physically. Not one mark on her."

And then he stopped, and for a moment I thought he had finished.

"But she kept asking me why the portal didn't like her."

And I sat in a plastic booth in a McDonald's in Elizabeth with both hands flat on the table and could not produce one single word in response to that, and I have not managed to produce one since.

"How long did you try for?"

"Felt like a bloody eternity." He rubbed at his eyes with the heels of both hands. "We tried everything we could think of. Different angles. Different distances. Me going in and out and in and out again to show them it still worked, which in hindsight was probably the cruellest thing I could possibly have done. At one point Mason picked her up in his arms and ran at it flat out." He shook his head slowly. "Nothing. It was like shoving a kid into a pane of glass that isn't there."

And I went cold. Properly cold, in a heated restaurant, with the sweat still drying on my back.

"So what did you do?"

"I stayed with them, obviously. I wasn't going to leave them standing out there on their own." He turned the cup another quarter-turn. "We sat down. Tried to work out what to do. And there's no phone signal, there's no landmark, there's nothing out there to work with. There's just Saint Phillis going away in every direction as far as you can see."

"And you're certain there's no way back for them."

"I've tried to bring Mason through with me twice since," he said. "Both times it wouldn't have him. Same with Ella. Same with the bloody dog."

And I looked down at that small grey object lying on the table between the two of us, which had not moved, and which had not done anything, and which had never once looked like anything at all.

"It's the Portal Key," I said. "It's bound to you. It will only ever take you."

He nodded.

"Yeah. That's about the size of it."

And we sat there together for a long while, and neither of us said anything, and I looked at a thing the size of my thumb that had put three living creatures on the far side of the world and could not bring one of them home again.

"They're trapped," I said.

"Yeah," said Josh.

And I put my head back against the vinyl and dragged a hand all the way down my face.

"Bloody hell."