Beyond Between

By David Viner

20 Journeys through the Multiverse.

 

What might happen if the barriers between the worlds within the multiverse break down? What might come through from those worlds into our own, or leak out of our world to others?

 

What possibilities might we encounter if we discover the technology or the power within ourselves to break down those barriers?

 

What strange beings might we encounter when we explore those worlds? Could we adapt to these worlds, evolving into new forms no longer compatible with our home world? Might we even forget our own Earthly origins?

 

After hundreds or even thousands of years, could Earth become nothing more than a forgotten memory?

 

Explore the multiverse through these nineteen short stories and one novella from the author of Time Portals of Norwich, Time's Revenge and Splinters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Viner
• Release date: Feb 26, 2024
• ISBN: 9781913873202

Book preview

BEYOND BETWEEN

David Viner

Viva Djinn (Horde) Publishing

Published by Viva Djinn (Horde) Publishing, Norwich, UK

www.vivadjinn.com

ISBN: 978-1-913873-20-2

Copyright © 2023 David Viner.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

This ebook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form other than that supplied by the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.

Design and layout: David Viner

Original cover art: Jan Lindberg

Cover photographs: Unsplash

Introduction

The multiverse is the concept which postulates that there are could be alternative dimensions or universes. There is speculation that these might contain worlds similar to our own, or even worlds that were identical to our own until a specific event occurred.

If such alternative universes exist, what might happen should the barriers between them break down? What might come through from other worlds into our own? What might leak from our world in the opposite direction?

If we discovered the appearance in our world of beings from beyond it, then what might we do?

What happens when we discover the technology or power within ourselves to break down those barriers under our own control? What strange beings might we find on those not-quite-familiar alternatives? Would mankind spread into these worlds, evolving into new forms no longer compatible with our home world?

Could we eventually lose contact with the planet of our origin such that, after hundreds or even thousands of years, Earth will become nothing more than a forgotten memory?

This collection of nineteen short stories and one novella-length piece explores some of these possibilities.

The Bone Garden

Kirsty was gardening. She hurled the fork into the ground and followed through with a hefty kick that buried the tines deep into the mixture of topsoil and bone. As she wrenched some of the hard earth free, it wriggled with pale pink worms and grey maggots. They plopped down into the small hole, trying to escape this sudden miniature earthquake. The hole exposed several shattered tibiae, a piece of jawbone and other more unidentifiable remains. Kirsty tipped the clod of bone and earth back into the hole, smashing the fork into it to break it up further before proceeding to the next piece.

As the rain fell, her lips uttered expletive after expletive, each one cursing Mr Welland, the bastard.

It was Mr Welland, the bastard, who had made her dig the garden and, as always, he managed to prescribe the most inappropriate tasks for the state of the weather. Like last week when he made her clean out the drain. Some of the blue snakes had taken up refuge there again after the recent heat wave and, of course, it had been steaming hot and stinking down there in the cesspit. She really cursed him that day. Not only that, but one of the snakes bit her on the nose and the blood dripped for two days afterwards.

Kirsty turned some more of the ground over and stood up to observe her progress. Rain poured over her head, down her shoulders and, after soaking her ragged t-shirt and shorts, accumulated in her loose-fitting boots along with the mud that had already taken up residence there. The ground she had dug represented no more than a hundredth of the total area of the haphazard area known as the garden. And the rain was already beginning to pool in the dips.

She put her back into the next clod and immediately embedded the fork into an intact skull. It stuck and she had to stomp down hard onto the cranium to get it to let go of her fork. The bone shattered and bits flew in all directions. She cursed even louder, this time hoping that the skull belonged to Mr Welland, the bastard’s, mother or some other close relative.

Have you washed the dishes? Mr Welland, the bastard, asked Kirsty.

Licked ’em completely clean, she spat back. Even used me own wee to sterilise ’em.

Good, good, he said. He glanced out the window for a moment – yesterday’s downpour had been replaced by the return of the scorching sun. It burned down upon the brown earth and bones, baking them in situ. He nodded and stroked a non-existent goatee beard. He seemed to come to a conclusion. You can re-tar the roof this afternoon, he said.

Fuck you, Kirsty shouted.

Yes, if necessary, he replied, but only after you’ve re-tarred the roof.

While Kirsty re-tarred the roof, using the large bedraggled brush to slop great gobs of the turgid material onto the incline, she planned more ways in which she would kill Mr Welland, the bastard. Ways that would work – unlike all the others she had tried.

Mr Welland, the bastard, was big and therefore should have made a good target. But he wasn’t as slow as he appeared, as he had demonstrated when he picked the flying garden fork out of the air as it hurtled towards his cranium. Another plan foiled.

The sun blistered her exposed shoulders and arms, not that Mr Welland, the bastard, would allow her to wear protective clothing or anything. She just had the t-shirt, shorts and boots – all she had ever worn – there weren’t any others. Her lithe, brown limbs were a mass of work-related scars and cuts. Blood still trickled from a wound on her leg where, near the end of yesterday’s garden digging, a shattering bone had embedded a splinter into her calf. She really cursed Mr Welland, the bastard, at that point. He examined her leg afterwards and wrenched the splinter out with some rusty tweezers but refused to let her clean or bandage it. It was then that she hurled the fork at him.

Bit of infection or gangrene never did anyone any harm, he commented, returning the fork to her. Kirsty never became infected.

After re-tarring the roof she was made to clean the brush in turpentine. It dried the skin of her hands and made her fingers tingle as it seeped into the cuts.

I need a bath, she said after throwing the brush into the cupboard. It bounced off the pot of tar and then the bottle of turpentine before burying itself amongst all the other tools and materials that littered the cupboard floor.

Use the turps, said Mr Welland, the bastard. There are plenty of maggots to make more.

She screamed and leapt at him, her thin, claw-like fingers aimed at his face. He batted her away and then reached over, picked her up by one arm and slapped her arse hard before dropping her down again.

Tea’s ready. Bone soup for you – steak for me, he announced, strolling off towards the dining room.

Bastard, she screamed after him, rubbing her arse.

During tea, she watched as Mr Welland, the bastard, consumed his steak whilst she sucked on the bones in her watery soup. The steak smelt worth killing him for – even though it wasn’t real. It came from the food synthesizer and was made from the worms she was made to harvest daily. Three times she tried to lunge across the table for a small piece of meat but Mr Welland, the bastard, smacked her away effortlessly every time. She planned more ways in which to kill him.

A few days later Mr Welland, the bastard, said, I remember now. We need some colour in the garden.

He stared out at the parched ground where bones poked through the recently tilled soil. An almost complete hand and arm, the gristle still holding the bones together, waved in the breeze. It was the only thing that did – there were no plants, neither close by nor as far as the eye could see.

Standing beside him, Kirsty thought about running away again. But she knew there was nowhere to run to. Outside the garden, there were only blue, red and yellow snakes, pink worms, grey maggots and brown earth.

Where we gonna get colour? she asked.

He looked down at her, at her stained and ragged t-shirt. Once white, it was now just shades of grey and her shorts, formerly blue, were merely darker grey.

I’m not workin’ naked, she said.

Mr Welland, the bastard, raised an eyebrow.

There are seeds in the cupboard, he said. Then he paused and, as if recollecting something, added. There’s also paint.

You want me to paint the ground?

Mr Welland, the bastard, nodded.

You’re mad, she said, shaking her head.

Paint it yellow over there, he pointed, red here and blue near the edge of the garden. And plant the seeds in the middle.

They never come up. We tried twice before.

Yes, without the paint. Plant the seeds in the middle.

You moron. I’m really going to kill you.

All in good time, agreed Mr Welland, the bastard.

Painting the garden took nearly three days, mainly because Mr Welland, the bastard, insisted that she do most of it at night or during the rainstorms and with a small brush. He also disapproved of where she’d painted some of the skulls red and put them in the blue area. He made her dig them back into the ground and then repaint the ground where she had dug.

She had thrown one skull at him saying it had been his father’s. He had caught it, examined it, and said, No.

Afterwards, she planted the seeds in the small, unpainted plot left in between the painted areas. Each seed was the size of her palm. They were gnarled and dead looking but she planted them anyway.

Water them, said Mr Welland, the bastard.

Wait till it rains, said Kirsty.

No, you water them.

She sighed and dropped her shorts, and watered the seeds. He then did likewise.

The next day she was too occupied freeing the yellow snakes that were stuck in some bubbling roof tar to notice that the seeds were beginning to sprout. The following day, after Mr Welland, the bastard, finished his tea of steak and Kirsty finished her bone and mud sandwich, he took her outside and they bent over the small seedlings.

Prick out all but these three, he said, pointing at those with the strongest growth. This one will grow more seeds, and those two will be the children. Don’t forget to water them again.

The plants grew tall and strong over the next few days, their grey stems branching into grey feathery leaves. They looked familiar to Kirsty even though she couldn’t recall ever seeing plants before. After sixteen days each produced a single pod and Mr Welland, the bastard, declared the first one ripe. The day was bright and hot, and the paint covering the rest of the garden was already cracking up. Kirsty thought he was about to ask her to repaint it all over again. However, he told her to go and get the fork.

The bastard, she thought, he’s going to make me dig it all up instead.

But when she returned with the fork he asked her to hand it over to him and said, Goodbye Kirsty. He then plunged the fork into her skull. She fell to the ground, lifeless. He removed the fork from her skull and examined her to make sure she was dead. After removing her clothes and boots, he carried them into the house and dumped them on the floor. Returning to the ripe plant pod, he harvested the seeds, examining each one meticulously, and carefully placed them into the seed bag in the cupboard. He then retrieved a whistle from the cupboard and went back into the garden to stand next to the plants.

The plant that had supplied the seeds was already beginning to wilt while the other two stood strong. He placed the whistle in his mouth and blew into it. The shrill note travelled for several miles across the barren land.

Mr Welland, the bastard, waited until he could see hundreds of snakes of all three colours heading towards him. They halted at the edge of the garden, defining its borders where nothing else did, apart from the crumbling paint. He walked into the house and placed the whistle back in the cupboard. He also removed his own clothes leaving them in a pile next to Kirsty’s and returned to the garden.

The snakes watched him. He took the fork and hurled it high into the air above his head and waited with eyes closed as it twisted before falling back to the ground. Except that, of course, his head was in the way.

The snakes ate the flesh off the bodies of Kirsty and Mr Welland, the bastard. The worms and maggots churned the bones into the earth. The snakes then mated, produced young and died. The young snakes wriggled off in all directions.

Several weeks later, the two remaining plant pods hatched. A new pink and clean Mr Welland, the bastard, stepped from the larger pod. A few minutes later he helped a new and pink Kirsty from hers.

I am Mr Welland, the bastard, he told her. You are Kirsty, my slave.

The new pink and clean Kirsty looked around. The ground was covered in dead snakes that were decomposing and leaking colour. All this was new and yet familiar to her.

Mr Welland, the bastard, turned her around and pointed at a nearby ramshackle building.

Go into the house – fetch the clothes you will find there. After that, I have other work for you.

Kirsty, though not without a slight niggle in the back of her mind, did as she was told.

The Onslaught

Eric gazed across the land and squinted. The gloaming restricted his vision as he waited for the onslaught. When would it start?

By his leg, tongue lolling and panting, was a hound. A pet and watchdog of sorts; barely removed from wolf ancestry it hunted where it could, though it always returned to him. Like Eric, it, too, gazed southward.

From far away came sounds.

Before he had run from the village the day before, the pilgrim had warned of such noises.

But the villagers had not believed until they had seen the pilgrim’s eyes. The man, who had come from the south only hours before, had been more than just scared. The elders had decreed that advanced guards should be posted and Eric and several of his kinsmen and kinswomen had complied.

The sounds came closer. People, possibly. Not a march, nor anything so organised. Not a rabble either. This was more casual, more like a band of strollers, minstrels maybe, though here without recognisable music of any kind – shadows on the horizon ambling haphazardly northwards towards Eric and his hound. As they grew closer, the hound began to whine. Eric placed a hand on its shoulder and the whine subsided a little. The dog picked up the fear of its master and vice-versa.

Eric could make out voices now, but not the words they spoke. Just like the noises a human throat can make but these were strung together without meaning. The pilgrim had warned of that, too. Eric considered for a moment that they might be foreign but he could determine no pattern to the utterances.

From a small distance to the west, there came another sound. One of his kinsmen, staked out as he was, raised his head above the bracken and stared at the oncoming mass. He seemed unaware that his exposure could lose them this battle. But the kinsman just ogled the writhing approach of…

And that was the problem. Eric could now see what his kinsman saw. This was no advancing army of men. Instead, it oozed towards them – a tide of flesh and sound that would envelop them all.

A shriek to the west and a kinsman bolted back towards the village. He was followed by several others, amongst them a woman from whom Eric had sought favours only a week previously. Then she had titivated him and finally taken him to her bed. This night, Eric realised, could end such alliances forever.

The hound had had enough and, like the kinsman, slunk away back towards the village. Eric wanted to wait until he could see what the invaders truly were. While the growing darkness still revealed little more than shadows, the moon, appearing momentarily from between scudding clouds, illuminated the occasional feature. Here a distorted face, there an arm clad in tattered rags, a soup of bodies packed so close they were often on top of each other one moment, trodden underfoot the next.

And each of them resembled something that may once have been human. And now? Just what in creation were they now?

When they were no more than ten yards distant Eric turned and followed the hound and the kinsmen. A flash of moonlight through the clouds showed several heads moving through the wilds ahead of him. The sound from behind him grew quieter as he put more yards between himself and their mewling and wailing. He dodged along paths of recumbent plants squashed flat by those fleeing ahead of him. The village was mere minutes away and, beyond that, the cliffs and the drop to the sea.

By the time he had reached the village, it was already in turmoil. Friends, companions, women and children, laden with what little they could carry, ran towards the cliffs. The treacherous paths that led down the steep side were hardly navigable in daylight. Eric knew there would be casualties but could think of no other option as he followed them. At one point he hoisted a small child onto his shoulders. She had fallen and her mother, engulfed in the panic, had failed to notice.

At the cliff edge, the villagers huddled around the tops of the downward paths. There were several screams as someone loosed some rocks and Eric heard the sounds as both they and the rocks tumbled. A scream was cut short with a splash – the tide, he knew, would be in. There was no escape that way.

Eric drew his sword as the volume of noise behind him grew. The mass was coming closer. It had passed through the village and advanced directly towards them.

The clouds chose that moment to part and the moon shone down upon ghastliness. Around him, there came more shrieking accompanied by the dull zing of swords being extracted from scabbards.

When they came they put up no resistance other than the solidity of their bodies. He cut down ten, twenty, a hundred but their places were taken by others. He stood on a pile of butchered bodies. Other kinsmen sliced as well as they could but many were taken over the cliffs by the waves of the onslaught.

Then, miraculously, the tide of bodies thinned and Eric hacked his way out of the rear. A few stragglers he sliced at easily though some refused to die and inched their battered bodies up to and over the edge.

As dawn broke, Eric sat on the battered cliff top watching a sea that was stained red. Few of his kinsmen remained – less than a dozen. They gathered together in the growing light – eight men, three women. As they clasped at each other Eric saw that their eyes were consumed by the same fear as that which had infected the pilgrim.

After a while, Eric heard another sound behind him. His fingers reached for his sword but he replaced it on the churned grass as the hound ran up to him and nuzzled his face.

Tears ran from Eric’s eyes.

The Thing from the Crypt

The thing in the crypt moved without purpose. It was conscious that it had only just arrived in this place and wondered where it had come from. If it once had memories of any previous experience, then they had been purged as a side-effect of its arrival. It wondered where it was. The crypt was large and the thing explored its surroundings and achieved flickerings of comprehension, building up a mental map of what enclosed it – the width, the height and the shapes within. But it felt empty, as if there should be more for it to experience.

A sliver of sunlight hit the gap underneath the door that led down to the crypt. The creature experienced it as a new sensation – one that differed from the touch it had used up until then. First, it ambled towards the beam but, initially afraid of the weak rays, it reversed and retreated to contemplate this new event before plucking up the courage to investigate further. Extruding an extension that wasn't a paw, it pawed at the tiny opening, exploring the difference of sensations between the wood on the upper side of the gap and the gritty stone that made up the lower part. Discovering that neither the faint light nor the feel of the materials surrounding the gap caused it any pain, it pawed with renewed vigour.

Clarence whistled as he busied himself tidying up after the service. He glanced at his watch – half-past three – about an hour left before sunset. He was looking forward to getting home and putting his feet up.

He was about to finish up when he remembered the organ. The organist had reported one of the middle white notes on the upper keyboard had been sticking and Clarence, as the church's odd-job man, had promised to investigate. The organ was a bulky, electronic model from the seventies. Without a doubt, it had seen better days. The plastic of one of the bass note pedals had shattered last year and the organ now sported a crude piece of wood in its place – one of Clarence's quick-fix innovations. He sat down on the built-in wooden seat, worn from years of use and switched the instrument on, waiting a few moments while it warmed up.

The thing in the crypt learned something new about itself. It was large but it could make itself small in certain directions if it wanted. It made itself long and thin, small enough to pass through the opening from which the light shone. For a while, it hesitated wondering if it would find within the light that which it sought, even though it had no idea what it was seeking.

Once it had squeezed itself through, it resumed its previous shape, finding itself coming to rest upon a stone floor that was warmer than