Game Boy froze at the foot of the stairs leading back up to the same level as reality. “Oh shit, if the cops caught her and followed her back to the house we could be stuck here—”
Doc dumped his armful of stuff and held out his arms: “Hugs?” The weirdest things could trigger Game Boy, and it looked like he’d just discovered a new one. “Here?” Game Boy grabbed him and burrowed his face against Doc’s shoulder, panting. “Slow down.” Doc rubbed his back. “Hyperventilating will make it worse. Let me in? I can help.” He reached for calm, then pushed at Game Boy, hosing down his fiery anxiety with a spray of tranquility.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God…” Game Boy’s breathing slowly returned to normal. “We’re doomed. They’ll send me back to my parents, or, or, the door with the air raid sirens, or—”
“There are other ways out,” Doc told him. “Different periods, don’t you get it? The laundry room on this level has a staircase, too. Other doors leading to other times.”
“But look, look—” Game Boy let him go so he could point at the pile of clothes—“don’t you know anything about history?” His voice rose, almost to a wail: “History is shit! You can die from an infected hangnail! History is a place where there are no computers, no games, no burgers, no television, no central heating—where they put people like me in lunatic asylums because they don’t understand or, or—”
“None of that is going to happen to you,” Doc said firmly, determined to head off the next panic attack before it could build up a full head of steam and pull out of the station. “We’re going downstairs—carefully, just in case—and Imp will shout at us for not being around for a read-through of his revised script, and Del will be bitchy, and—”
“Something is wrong,” Game Boy insisted weakly. He reached up and pulled his dusty top hat down, concealing his crimson crop. “Something bad is coming, I know it is, don’t ask me how.”
“C’mon.” Doc picked up the bundle of clothes, squished it tight, and offered Game Boy his free hand as he turned back towards the corridor leading to their top floor roost. “If it’s coming that means it isn’t here now, and that’s the main thing.”
When he was a child, Imp—then Jerm—had a family.
There was Imp, who of course the world revolved around: tousle-headed with a devilish dimpled grin for which he’d earned his nickname (before it stretched to encompass the bulky resario suffix, before he’d realized what he was in this world to accomplish). Jerm had a dog, a big dumb Alsatian called Nono: it wasn’t her real name, but what everybody screamed at her when she did something wrong, which was all the time. Jerm also had a big sister, Evie, who was blonde and curly-haired and just a bit chubby, five years older and conscientious about keeping him out of trouble and wiping his nose when he needed it. Evie cared, too much for her own good. She cared when their next door neighbor’s cat was hit by a car, she cared for Grandma when they visited her in the home, she cared when Jerm fell out of the apple tree in the garden and hurt his arm (a greenstick fracture, it turned out), and she memorized and cared deeply about everything Mum told her she needed to care about in order to be a good little girl. Evie was eager to please everyone, and Jerm took advantage of this trait at every opportunity, because Jerm was a whiny little shit, and more than a little bit spoiled when he was small.
All that changed later.
Dad was an accountant, dignified in his suit and tie when he left for the office every weekday morning. He wasn’t dull, though. He read to Jerm before bed in the evenings, at least until Jerm mastered the skill for himself, and even after that for a while. Dad read through all the childhood classics, from Dr. Seuss to The Wind in the Willows, The Hobbit, and Peter and Wendy, this latter one slightly out of sequence and with certain omissions that Imp only spotted when he read it for himself as an adult. Dad was a voracious consumer of fiction, escaping from reality whenever he could: their house had bookcases the way the other kids at school’s parents had cabinets full of video cassettes. Their television was small and dull and didn’t have a VCR, and their home computer was the word processing kind, with a green screen and a printer but no games, a leftover from the 1980s. Dad said they couldn’t afford to replace it, and indeed they didn’t until Jerm needed one for secondary school. Even though Dad was an accountant, they weren’t rich.
Partly this was because they lived in a cramped semi near Croydon, with all the drawbacks of London house prices and none of the perks of actually being in the capital. Partly it was because Mum didn’t go out to work: she was a homemaker, she said, with an odd, tight-lipped expression when Jerm asked her. She’d been programming minicomputers when she met his father in the late seventies. (Dad had wanted to have at least three kids, Imp later learned. Mum made sure that didn’t happen—they’d have been destitute—but later became melancholy, finding her consolation in religion.) One income, two children, London house prices, and Grandma in a nursing home: Dad in a suit and a Ford Granada (later upgraded to a BMW 315), Mum driving a ten-year-old Ford Escort.
Not rich, Imp eventually realized, was not the same thing as poor. But he’d grown up in the shadow of wealth. Before the walls of dementia closed in completely and left nothing behind but a terrified wailing shell, Grandma told Evie and Jerm stories about life in the old days. Tales of living in a big town house round the corner from a park with a royal
