Above the Vaulted Sky - Page 265

Chapter Thirty-Six

            I look at the words on the screen. The words stare back at me with glib defiance. Despite our very best efforts, we have returned home, but to a home none of us ever dreamed of visiting.

            For a moment none of us speak. We all stare at the screen, all keeping our lips sewn shut. The first thing that strikes me is that, at first glance, not a lot has changed in the world. There are no flying cars or spaceships. No aliens or desolate nuclear landscapes like some doombringers might have us believe. The world has continued spinning, and all that appears to have taken hold is digital media.

            ‘How is this possible?’ Yates asks.

            ‘What’s wrong?’ Sandra adds and her eyebrows lean to meet in the middle. 

            I turn to her. I feel breathless. I’m part afraid and part excited. We’ve essentially travelled to the future. I don’t know if that was by intention, if we’re the first or we’ll be the last, but somehow, by skipping between worlds we’ve become travellers in time. I dare not say the words out loud in case they sound far to inexplicable to support. ‘We weren’t from this year,’ I say. ‘The last time I checked it was 2015. I think anyway, it’s not like we keep calendars.’

            ‘It was,’ Yates replies. ‘I keep a diary,’ he adds as though the admission of that fact was embarrassing.

            I consider the image of a diary floating in the air with a feverish fountain pen skipping across the pages. It’s no wonder that people used to think Yates’s house was haunted.

            ‘But this is unbelievable,’ Sandra exclaims. ‘People always said they used to think they were in the desert for weeks, I remember one poor man said a month. But of course only minutes go by.’

            ‘Maybe time behaves differently between the plains?’ Yates suggests.

            ‘Plains, I like that,’ Elle says. ‘So much better than worlds.’

            ‘But sixty years?’ I reply.

            Elle takes on a peculiar expression. I know what she’s thinking, I’m thinking the exact same thing. If sixty years have passed, then, in lieu of extreme old age, our parents might have joined us among the dead. It’s strange that only a year ago, or apparently sixty now, the dead conjured such a frightening image in my mind. It was the unknown and the unknown must be quashed and rarely spoken about. Now, death is just another stage of life.