Page 19 of Never Tear Us Apart
‘What do you mean by that?’ I ask after a pause, taken aback.
‘Not here – we must get to safety,’ he insists, sharper now, with increased urgency. ‘Then I will tell you everything I can.’
We stop outside what was once a four-storey house in an elegant street that wouldn’t look out of place in Paris or Prague. The top storey has gone completely, and the first and second floors are exposed to the air like a kind of obscene doll’s house. Someone’s once-beautiful home and precious belongings are on display for every passer-by to pore over. A pink kimono hangs from a splintered floorboard that juts into mid-air, fluttering in the breeze like a flag.
‘Through here,’ the professor tells me. He opens the solid-looking front door onto a hallway that leads through to a surreal landscape of rubble bathed in bright midday sun. I look up again at the ruin balanced over our heads. As I look, an air-raid siren wails outside, and already I can hear the droning hum of planes. I can see waves of aircraft, steadily making their way closer, so many that they seem to fill the sky.
‘Hurry,’ he urges. ‘There’s a private shelter off the courtyard through here. Follow me.’
I step into the torn-open hallway, where the stairs ascend to daylight. A clock stands against the wall, still ticking. I wonder vaguely who continues to wind it.
He leads me past a room that once would have been a comfortably appointed parlour. I glimpse shelves lined with books, a family photograph in a heavy mahogany frame over a mantelpiece. The professor isn’t in it.
‘Here.’ He opens a gate, revealing a set of steps leading down. Biting my lip, I peer into the close darkness.
‘I told you I won’t hurt you, Maia,’ he tells me, as the drone of the planes grows louder. ‘You need not be afraid of me. I’m trying to keep you safe.’
Still, I hesitate.
‘I know there is more you need to know. Why I came to help you when you and I have never met and do not know one another,’ he tells me. ‘Whether any of this is even real.’
‘Is it?’
The thunder of falling bombs sounds very close, and finally, I run down the steps and into the dark, the professor just behind me.
He lights a candle, revealing a sparsely furnished room.
‘You are not dreaming, Maia,’ he tells me. ‘You exist in this time, just as you exist in the time you have come from. Here you will grow old, as I have grown old. Here you burn under the hot sun, as your skin has burnt today. Here you live as best you can; here you may very well die at any hour or on any day. I do not know if death in one reality means death in all. I do not have that answer.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I ask. ‘How do you know my name?’
‘I read about you – in a time that is very far into the future for both of us.’
‘What do you mean?’ I ask as the explosions grow louder and the walls shake.
‘It’s hard to explain,’ he says. ‘I’ve found myself in so many times or realities. I’m not sure if they are within this universeor linked to others but . . . for now I should start at the beginning – my beginning, anyway.
‘You see, I woke up in 1909, thirty-three years ago,’ he says. ‘Which was surprising because I fell asleep in 1992.’
The world trembles in fear.
Chapter Thirteen
Sunday 22ndJune 2025, 12.30 p.m.
I’m in a coffin. There’s no air. I can’t see anything. All I can hear is this loud, booming clanking. Its volume is so great that it fills the air, suffocating me. The building must have collapsed on me. I am buried alive.
The din is so all-consuming that when I scream, I can’t hear my own voice. I can only feel the words vibrate and grate in my bone-dry throat: ‘Get me out, get me out, get me out!’
‘Maia.’ Dr Gresch’s voice crackles in my ears, shocking my eyes open in the dark. There’s light somewhere out of reach.
‘Can you get me out?’ I plead. ‘Can you dig me out? Am I dead?’
‘Don’t worry – we are bringing you out now. Take a deep breath. It will just be a moment or two. You are safe. You are in an MRI scanner at the hospital. You are safe and well.’
I can’t move my arms to touch my face, but I realise I have an eye mask on and, if this is the same as my last scan, a sort of cage over my face. Tears roll down my cheeks, falling onto my earlobes and neck: I am back.
Dr Gresch takes my hand as soon as I am out of the machine.
