And in the schoolyard the lisp of a last fallen leaf skating around the tarmac is the only sound, everywhere else is totally silent, even when people are talking, it’s like someone’s thrown a switch and reversed the polarity of everything so that being alive now is like being dead, like zombies, grey bodies shuffling loose-limbed through the perpetual gloaming, or like universes, same difference, matter or energy adrift in nothingness, descending, like veils, through the darkness. Classes rebegin but it doesn’t make any difference, there is still that empty seat, and in Maths class, calling the roll, Lurch goes, ‘Daniel Ju– oh no, of course not,’ and scratches his name out, right there in front of you. Farts go unpunished, clear jinx situations unheeded, Pokémon cards unswapped; the Junior Rec Room is deserted, the table-tennis table folded up and tidied into a corner, the pool balls lined up in their perspex womb, the television, unprecedentedly, switched off. You don’t talk about It, and you don’t talk about not talking about It, and soon the not-talking-about-It has become something real and tangible existing among you, a hideous replacement-Skippy like an evil twin, a dark blastula that presses evermore insistently against your lives. The dormitory corridor presents only closed doors, behind which are closed faces, secreted beneath headphones or locked into mute dialogues with illuminated screens. Geoff hasn’t done his zombie voice after the night in the Ref it escaped without thinking, My roast beef needs more GRAVEy, and sounded different from how it had before – louder than he meant it to be, and not funny, and even sort of frightening, like it knew something you didn’t.
And then one morning you go to your locker and find a note there from Ruprecht, calling you to an urgent meeting in his room, and even though it’s probably bullshit you find yourself climbing the Tower stairs to his dorm.
The others are there already, scrunched up on Ruprecht’s bed because no one wants to sit on Skippy’s, even though his duvet is gone as well as his other stuff. Ruprecht looks feverish and drawn. Ever since that night, in the middle of all this weird nothingness, he’s been rushing about back and forth from his laboratory, one pen in his mouth and another behind his ear, stacks of paper and star maps and set squares bundled in his arms. He waits for everyone to sit down, and then he unscrolls a chart with a familiar shape drawn on it.
‘The Van Doren Portal, Mark Two,’ he says. ‘Let me say at the outset that the science of this is far from being stable. This operation, if it works at all, will be highly dangerous. But by rebuilding the pod, and recalibrating it to a monotemporal matrix, I have calculated that it might just be possible to travel backwards to a nodal point in time, e.g. the Hallowe’en Hop, and bring Skippy, as he was then, forward to the present. If we adjust the figures of the original teleportation for a temporal “drag” of –’
‘Aaaaugh!’ cries Dennis.
Everyone turns to look at him. He is ice-pale, breathing rapidly, and directing at Ruprecht a stare of unaccountable vehemence.
‘What?’ Ruprecht says.
‘Are you serious?’ Dennis says.
‘I know it sounds far-fetched, but there is a small but real chance we could use the pod to rescue Skippy. In effect we’re doing the same thing we did with Optimus Prime, only with minor tweaks in order to –’
‘Aaaaugh!’ Dennis goes again.
Ruprecht looks nonplussed; Dennis, in a single strange and complicated motion, throws his arms over his head as if shielding it from a bomb-blast, or as if it itself is about to explode, and then, springing up, marches out of the room. The others look around in bemusement, but before anyone has a chance to say anything, Dennis has marched back in and thrusts something into Ruprecht’s hands. ‘Here!’ he shouts. ‘Special delivery from the eleventh dimension!’
‘Optimus…?’ Ruprecht turns the plastic robot over in wonderment; then his gaze jabs upwards to Dennis. ‘But… how? I mean… where was he?’
‘In my laundry basket, underneath some Y-fronts,’ Dennis recites.
Ruprecht is baffled. ‘Some kind of wormhole…?’
Dennis slaps a hand to his face, leaving a bright red mark. ‘Oh my god – I put him there, Ruprecht! I put him there!’
‘You…’ Ruprecht trails off, his mouth becoming an anxious O, like a baby that has lost its soother.
‘Don’t you understand what I’m saying to you? Your pod doesn’t work! It doesn’t work! I took the robot! Your invention didn’t do anything! Your inventions never do anything!’
‘But –’ Ruprecht increasingly distressed ‘– the Mound? And the music?’
‘I made that up, moron! I made it all up! I thought it would be funny! And it was! It was really, really funny!’
The others wince sympathetically; Ruprecht very slowly doubles over, an expression of intense concentration on his face, as if he’s drunk weedkiller and is making a study of the effects. The sight of this makes Dennis only more ruthless.
‘You know what your problem is, Blowjob? You’re sure you’re right. You’re so sure you’re right, you’d believe anything. You remind me of my crazy God-bothering stepmother. All day long she casts her little spells, Jesus this, Virgin that, Sacred whatever, say nine of these, sprinkle some of this on that, hey presto. She’s so busy that she doesn’t even notice that none of the things she prays for ever actually happens. She doesn’t care whether they happen, because all she wants really is something to let her walk around with her head in the clouds. And you’re no different, except with you it’s maths instead of prayers, and gay universes, and oh yes, in case we forget, the aliens who are going to come down and build us a spaceship before the Earth goes pop!’