Chronic Fatigue

Chapter Five

Holi woke. Blinked. Wet, blurry. Soft green light. Everything green. Yellow-green. Hazy forms moved like fish in murky water. Bright murky water. Green.

A fish form swam slowly forward. A shadow in emerald depths. Closer - not a fish. A darkness moving closer. A man, not fish. Face of a man looming from green sea. Close - peering. Holi blinked. The face smiled.

Holi blinked again, tried to clear the blurriness. She thought that she should be afraid, but all she felt was quiescent. Not afraid, not moving. She became aware that she wasn't able to move and yet still she wasn't afraid. Maybe she had been drugged.

Her eyes, she could move her eyes. She looked to her right, blinked and found a moment of clarity. A room of clinical modernity. A huge upright tube - that midget in it. Suspended in a big tube of green liquid. The thing just floated there, weightless.

At the periphery of her vision, another tube. Plastic or metallic, with a glass panel curving across the front, full of yellow-green fluid. This tube was between the one with the midget and... Realisation cut through the veil of her stupor like the spasm of an electric jolt. She too floated weightless - body and mind suspended in a capsule of deepest yellow-green. 'Cry o-chamber' letters said on the midget's tube. She was floating in one too. Should she be crying? Panicking? Yet she experienced only serenity. How was she breathing? She was breathing? Her attention was captured then by an odd sight: running across the room before her was a duck. It was pursued by a flustered man in a white coat.

                                                                                          *****

Rat-Elmo had been keeping out of the way, hiding in the shadows of what no longer felt quite like his own home. The place appeared huge to his rodent senses with all sorts of new spaces that had meant nothing to him as a human. Now, he found himself lurking under furniture, slinking along the skirting boards and lingering in dark places and corners. He had a good idea that the frightful ear-thing knew he was there. It had slunk out of the bedroom not long after materialising from the ear of the Elmo that belonged in this time. Rat-Elmo had followed it around for a while as it seemed to explore the house.
It seemed capable of fading into nothingness even better than himself. Like himself, it was remaining here, anticipating something, waiting. Rat-Elmo gradually formulated a plan of action: wait it out, keep an eye on it, follow it wherever it went, along with his past self and Holi, all the way to Yorkshire.

Then go through the events that day once more and then maybe he'd find some answers. At least he'd meet up with his idiotic future self again and sort him out - or would it be a different version of his future self?

Time passed and the day came when the trip to Yorkshire was due to happen. He watched his past self and his past self's Holi get themselves ready and leave the house to get in some last-minute shopping before their intended vacation began. Little did they know what was to come. He almost felt sorry for his alter-ego; wondered if perhaps he should warn him, spare him the pain of being where he now found himself. But did it work that way? Wasn't the future inevitable once it had happened? He wondered whether there would always be two versions of himself now. No, not two, three - there had been a version of himself from five minutes before his own time. There were future versions too! How many was that? Five? Six? This was terrible - he was losing count. A sickening wave of anxiety swept through him as he
pictured himself lost in time, forever trapped in the body of a rat. No - he had to get back, undo all of this tangle. He must. Rat-Elmo took the opportunity to venture down into the vacant kitchen and was about to try scavenging around the cupboards for gnawables when an unexpected event sent him scampering into the cover of a doorway.

From nowhere, with no warning, a figure emerged from thin air and stood looking about himself. It was Elmo; an Elmo, at least, dressed in a sleek black coat with a textured, black body-suit beneath. The rodent brain of the lurking Rat-Elmo grasped that this was surely Future-Elmo. The new arrival looked smug as he established his whereabouts; he took a chair at the kitchen table, placed a familiar, metallic, egg-shaped object before him and pulled his mobile phone from his pocket. The time traveler pressed some keys, got a connection and began a brief conversation with Roan, saying something about 'being compromised' and someone coming to get him. What was going on here? Was his future self messing about with time and causality? Had this interference with the thread of time happened previously - had it always been there? An eternal loop that could never be untied once initiated? Back in the car someone had said that he had called! Rat-Elmo was determined to find out. He darted from his hiding place, leapt onto a vacant chair and thence onto the kitchen table just as the phone conversation ended. This sudden appearance startled Future-Elmo, as did the simultaneous sound of voices from beyond the front door.