She remembered the local police, the hospital staff, all those earnest faces. Of course we’ll find your friend, miss, just tell us everything you remember. The words boiled up inside and choked her, because she couldn’t tell them. They’d think she was mad, that she was guilty of something. She talked about the Roberts farm and the moors. She talked about snow, because that on its own seemed just the right side of Crazy Town, even though it was July. She talked about getting lost. Somehow her mouth stitched together a consistent tarpaulin of fabrication that could be draped over what she actually remembered, so the result had the same general shape but concealed all of the details. She discovered a gift for mendacity that she’d never known she possessed.
She wondered, lying alone in her hospital bed, if she’d doomed Mal somehow by lying. But if Mal had been anywhere they could have found her, then Lee’s story might as well have been the real one.
They interviewed Lee three times, three different earnest, comforting police staff going through variants of the same questions, with her trotting out her true-enough answers—and she was bone-tired, shaking and upset. She could tell they were all Poor girl, losing her friend, and not one of them guessed she’d lost her lover, her heart, her whole life. She made herself stay awake, desperate to see Mal come through the hospital room door, unscathed, even if she blamed Lee for leaving, even if she hated her, even if she never wanted to see her again.
At about seven the next morning, Lee was exhausted enough that she’d started seeing Birdmen, ragged and warlike, in the corners of her eyes. And in came a policeman who looked no older than she was, asking questions with an embarrassed little smile. Sorry, miss, be done in just a moment. And Lee realized he wasn’t here about Mal; he was asking about Cador Roberts, also missing. He didn’t seem to quite know who she was, just asked about Roberts—how Lee knew him and when she’d last seen him. She didn’t and hadn’t, so couldn’t help him.
Something broke then. Some vital rubber band of discretion snapped and flew off. She told him everything: the video, the sheep, the Birdmen, the impossible fucking vista of the snow-swept moor and the thundering, feathery reptilian beasts. She saw him write her off as stark raving mad quite early on, but he’d been well brought up—and she was the goddamn Ancient Mariner and wouldn’t let him make his excuses and leave. She talked at him for twenty minutes straight, and out of force of habit he scribbled it all down in his notebook, although she’d bet it went in the station bin the moment he got back. After that, when Lee had finally vomited up all those words her lies had corralled within her, he actually gave her a smile, a top-of-the-range placate-the-madwoman model, and told her he’d be in touch. Thankfully he never was.
The search went on for two weeks. They found Mal’s pack by the three stones of the Six Brothers. They didn’t find her, of course. She’d gone in a direction not picked out on the compass rose, off all maps. Lee remembered Mal’s dad, pitching up hot and angry after driving for hours. She remembered the look of absolute loathing he’d turned on her because Lee had been found and his daughter had not. She remembered looking at her own reflection the same way for many, many mornings. Mal had been the centre of her life, the object of her desire, the light that made all the petty, grim darknesses of the world bearable. As the days went on and the search became an exercise in public relations, Lee remembered looking into the future and seeing… nothing. A life without Mal, something she’d never planned for. Stupid teenage lovelorn girl, but she had loved, and then she’d lost, and right then she didn’t think the former made the latter in any way better.
They never found Mal. That made it worse for her family, because to them she was lying out on the moors somewhere like a stray sheep, vanished impossibly into that little knee joint of wilderness at the southern tip of the British Isles. But Lee knew she was elsewhere—could even console herself with the thought It’s what she would have wanted. A bespoke fate for Elsinore Mallory, to which no other human being had ever been consigned.
*
As the years went by and Lee—by her own estimation—miraculously didn’t open her wrists in the bath or chug the contents of her parents’ medicine cabinet, she mythologized the disappearance. It made things easier. She was The Girl Who Stayed, Mal was The Girl Who Left, like they were immortalized in Doctor Who episodes. She used to dream of Mal as though she was still out there somehow, as though she’d come back.
And Lee never gave up on the cryptids and the Forteana. Though neither did she go mad for it, like some Birdman-hunting Van Helsing. She kept on as she had been, wrote articles for local papers, then some national papers; contributed top-ten lists of weird shit to websites; was paid enough to make the rent and buy a sandwich. And every so often she imagined Mal reading those pieces and laughing at her. It made her feel close still, even when the fourth anniversary of her disappearance had come and gone.
Until Mal called.
Or someone called who sounded like Mal used to sound, a voice indelibly engraved in Lee’s memory. She wanted to meet, with no time for catch-ups and pleasantries and Lee’s What the fuck do you mean by this? Who is this? Why are you… What are you—Wait! Just a place, a time—pedestrian, ridiculously mundane. And a choice: to go, or not to go.
Lee went.
Interlude: The Wanderers
Excerpt from Other Edens: Speculative Evolution and Intelligence by Professor Ruth Emerson of the University of California
Over time, the tranquillity of the Ediacaran period’s sessile, quilted forms met its end. The low-energy biology of those supine species was replaced by an acceleration into the world of tooth and claw, competition and predation. This was the death knell of the Ediacaran epoch, when one species discovered that harvesting material from its defenceless neighbours was vastly more efficient than filtering detritus for a living.
There was an explosion of biological disparity. No more were quilts the fashionable things to be seen in. Whilst some creatures still sat and sieved, the world was moulded by new pressures. Life had an urgent need to move—towards, for predators; away, for prey—to hide, ambush, devour and protect.
Welcome to the Cambrian period.
Some species became swift, flexible, muscular: slender ribbons of life eeling through the water. Some burrowed into the sediment. Still more used a strategy borne of desperation: let the predators break their teeth and blunt their claws on their hard shells. Unwanted trace elements and compounds that had been building up within organic bodies like all-over kidney stones were secreted on the outside as armour. These creatures would be first on land, first in the air, in any timeline. For this is just one timeline.
In our world, those ribbons of flesh inherited something greater. The internal rod they attached their muscles to became, eventually, part of the spine. They became us, over the course of half a billion years. But not in this world.
Why? There is never a definitive moment when a finger is on the scales, tilting them away from the course our own history took. Perhaps it is only chance that dictates which seed of time will grow and which will not.
The great predators of this Cambrian seascape are the anomalocarids. They too have a carapace. Their bodies are pen-shaped, like squid, flanked by rippling waves of flattened fin-legs that propel them swiftly through the water. They have huge stalked eyes for spotting their prey, which in this world is most things that move. In this timeline, perhaps they are a little faster, their eyes more acute, their arms swifter to grasp than in others. Our putative ancestors, little boneless eel-things, never do well here. They cling on as sessile sea squirts and similar atavisms, but no fish develop in these seas; there are no jaws, no dorsal fins to scare the swimmers, no slow coelacanth cousin hauling itself onto land, modified swim bladder pressed into service as a makeshift lung. No tyrannosaurs, no mammoths. No us. This is not our world; this is not our story.