“I’m calling security,” I replied, moving towards thetelephone on the wall beside the door.
“No, don’t do that,” he protested, and began to move to cutme off. That was all the provocation I needed. Issuing a silent prayer ofthanks for the recently improved security measures, I headed for the panicbutton on the wall behind the bed instead, reaching it just before he was ableto stop me.
His attempt to block my path had been more than a littleunsettling. I really hoped that whoever was on security was paying attentionand not snoozing on the job.
Doctor Gardner, if that was his real name, backed off oncehe saw the flashing red button on the wall.
“Since when have hospitals had panic buttons?” he asked,looking unsettled.
He was on the back foot all of a sudden which gave me achance to seize the initiative. I had no intention of showing him any weaknessso, keeping my voice as level as I could, I spelled out the situation in blackand white.
“Since last year when a patient assaulted a nurse on thisvery ward,” I replied. “Do you have any idea how much abuse we get from thedrunks that get hauled in here every weekend? Now you’ve got less than twominutes until security arrives from downstairs to escort you from the premises– and that won’t be pleasant. They don’t take too kindly to women beingthreatened and can get quite heavy-handed. If I were you, I would scarper now,while you still can.”
This was a blatant lie. The aging head of security, Barry,spent the vast majority of his time sitting in his office drinking tea andeating biscuits. He hadn’t seen any action since his Army days, decades in thepast. Most of his colleagues were no better. But this stranger wasn’t to knowthat.
“Fine,” he said, “but I’ll be back and you won’t even knowabout it.”
I assumed that meant he was going to leave, but he didn’tshow any signs of departing by the traditional method, i.e. through the door.Instead he pointed his weird device in front of him and started pressingbuttons on it. It was the first time I had seen it and it looked like somethingout of Doctor Who.
“What are you doing?” I asked, becoming increasinglyconvinced that he was some sort of nutter.
“Nothing for you to worry about,” was his reply.
This man had seriously lost the plot. What did he think hewas going to do – teleport out of there with his home-made remote control TVaerial?
Ironically, outlandish as that idea had seemed at the time,given what happened next I may not have been far off the mark. Because this wasthe moment when the weird sci-fi shit started happening, leading me to realisethat he was more than just a weirdo after all. Of course, it was too late to doanything about it by then. I was caught up in whatever was going on and it wastoo late to avoid it. I was well and truly over my event horizon.
What happened was all over very quickly. Suddenly thereseemed to be two of him in the room, the second one seemingly appearing out ofnowhere. He hadn’t come through the door, that’s for sure, as I would have seenhim from where I was standing.
This other version looked exactly the same, right down tothe white coat. Could they be twins or was it some kind of visual trickery?There was no time to figure it out as something else was already happening.
They had both been pointing their wands across the room,close to Thomas’s bed. Then I heard a long-drawn-out cry of “Nooooo!” from oneor possibly both of the men, in the style of some overly dramatic movie scene.I might have found this amusing if I had been watching from afar, rather thanbeing an unwilling participant.
Then everything descended into a kaleidoscopic, whirlingmaelstrom of colour and noise. As multiple mirror images of myself, thestranger and the body on the bed swirled all around me, I felt myself beingsucked by a hugely powerful force towards the centre of the room.
Like a spider in a bathtub being drawn towards the plughole,I flailed my arms helplessly, completely powerless to escape. It was the lastthing I remembered before I blacked out.
And that is how all of this began.
Chapter Three
2023
When I woke up the first time after it happened I wasdisorientated, panicky and confused. It was similar to that feeling you getwhen waking up from a very vivid dream or nightmare.
Just as with one of those dreams, for the first few secondsof consciousness everything that had happened seemed absolutely real. Then, asfamiliar surroundings reasserted themselves, reality began to kick back in.
The sense of relief that it had all been just a dream washedover me. That feeling was to be only temporary. The events of the next hour orso would see to that.
The reassuringly safe place I found myself in was my bedroomin my flat in Headington, an area to the north of Oxford. It was purpose-builtaccommodation for nurses, less than half a mile from the John RadcliffeHospital.
I shared the flat with two other girls and it had been myhome for nearly four years, since shortly after my pig of an ex had done thedirty on me. This had left me needing to find somewhere else to live in ahurry.
The ultimate result was that I found myself going the wrongway on the property ladder, from being a homeowner back to renting. This wasreally not something you wanted to be doing in a place like Oxford where houseprices marched relentlessly upwards, regardless of the state of the economy.
Fortunately for me, at least in the short term, I was not toend up homeless. A new government, determined to tackle the inequality insociety created by the runaway housing market, had decided to take decisiveaction. In addition to building a million new council homes over four years,they had pledged millions of pounds towards an enhanced key worker scheme.
This was designed to help nurses, teachers and otherprofessionals to have somewhere to live in areas where they were priced out ofthe housing market.
