In The Closet

6. Don't Talk, Don't Question, Just Listen

I wake up later in an unfamiliar room on a patchwork couch, with a patchwork blanket on top of me. I try to sit up, but my head hurts too much.

"Careful," a voice says. "You hit it quite hard."

I don't question where I am, or who they are. Sure, I'd like to know why this hippie's kidnapped me, but I decide to at least wait until my head's stopped pulsing when I try to move.

The room is dark. It smells a little musty, though in a nice way. I'm sort of propped up against the arm of the couch, so I can see ahead of me. There's a completely blank pale peach wall directly ahead of me and a window a little to my left. By the looks of things, I'm in some high up flat, staring out over a grey world. Annoyingly, I don't recognise any of the buildings. Where the hell am I?!

I don't know if the source of the voice is still nearby or not, but if they are, they don't say anything. I'm not really sure what to do. I want to try and run away, but my head hurts and I'm somewhere I've never seen before. Time seems to go snail speed. I doze on and off for a while. When I'm awake, I try to work out what to do, or where I might be, or why I'm here, but I can't find a single logical answer.

After I don't know how long, I hear footsteps approaching. A young woman with pale skin, dark hair and blue eyes sits on the end of the couch, holding a steaming bowl of something.

"Sit up," she says. I shuffle so I'm kind of sat up, and she hands me a bowl of a creamy substance that looks like vomit. I look at it for a second, then sniff it. It might not look very appetising, but it smells good. I pick up the spoon and try a bit. It's sort of like custard, if you ignore the texture, so I eat it all without question.

I open my mouth to say something, but the woman cuts in before I have chance.

"Don't talk, don't question. Just listen. That was a sort of medicine for your head. You should be completely better in about an hour or so. The current time in the area you came from is about nine PM, so you'll be staying here for the night."

I blink. I have a lot of questions, but I keep my mouth shut. The woman nods, as if in some appreciation.

"You're currently in the Inter Dimension. You stumbled upon a portal. We were going to let you go completely through, then we realized you were injured. You're not a Traveller as it is, so the journey would've been dangerous and confusing for us and for you. So we took you here. Well, I say we, but I'm not running anything. I just live here. They asked me to take care of you, so I am. You'll be going back to a standard timeline tomorrow – or your tomorrow, at least. There's one issue," She pauses. "You can't go back to where you're from. A version of you from a different timeline found a portal at the exact same moment as you, only she was completely unharmed. She was allowed through to your timeline, and we can't have two versions of one person in the same timeline at the same time; it's too dangerous."

I can't hold another question in. "Then where are you sending me?"

"To her timeline. Don't worry, they're very similar places, other than one difference that will probably affect you quite a bit." The woman smiles at me.

"And what is this difference?" I press.

"I'm not allowed to know. I've just been told that that's what I've to tell you."

"By who?" I want to kick myself by this point. I ask way too many questions as it is.

"The DTG. The people who run the entire multiverse; they have control over everything that happens," she tells me.

It rings a familiar bell in my brain. "Like a God?"

"That what your timeline call it? Yeah, like a god. They only let us know so much."

She smiles at me again, and I realize the pulsing in my head has long since gone.

"How many timelines are there?" I blurt out. "Sorry, never mind."

"I've said all I need to by now, questions are fine. At the birth of the multiverse, there were five dimensions. They were completely different. Completely. With every decision, anyone in each of the dimensions made would create a new branch - a timeline - and any decision in the timelines would create another timeline in the timeline, and so on. So, since the multiverse is billions of years old, there are a hell of a lot of timelines. They all have an individual name, too. I was born in B9973265, a short one thankfully. Yours is incredibly long, but apparently, we're both from B dimensions and the first six digits are identical."

"This is kinda confusing," I tell her.

"It's a good job we aren't going any deeper. I've been in the Inter Dimension for going on thirty years and I still don't get it," she says. I'm surprised when she says thirty. My age estimate was about twenty-five. She must notice the look on my face. "Travellers don't age. For as long as they aren't in their home timeline, they're immortal."

"What's your name?" I ask.

"Jemima Stone," she replies. "And yourself?"

"Catherine White. Pleased to meet you, Jemima." I nod with a smile.

"I don't think I've seen a kid your age since I was last home. What sort of things do you lot do these days? And in your timeline, of course."

So I open my mouth and everything that's happened in my life so far spills out. I can't stop it; it's as if some filter for my mouth disappeared there and then. Jemima listens, just listens. I can't tell if she's really paying attention or not, but she seems interested at least. I'm glad she doesn't interrupt and change the subject, and then not let me go back to what I was talking about. It really pisses me off when people do that. After all, it was her who asked.

Eventually, she looks at her wrist. There's no visible watch, but maybe these Traveller people have some strange way of checking things.

"You should sleep. We'll be sending you off at half seven tomorrow morning your time," she tells me. She gets up and stands at a wall behind me doing something I can't see for a few seconds or so. There's a sound of a click, and the room goes completely black. A door opens, letting a little light in, then shuts again, leaving me in alien darkness.