The Aperture

Chapter 1

The Interrogation

“Would someone mind explaining to me what is going on here?” Professor Gerald Layton asked his captors. “Who are you people?”

“I am special agent Connie Bain, and this is my partner, William MacGregor. We work for the CIA. We have a few questions we want to ask you.”

“You mean you broke down the door to my house just to ask me a few questions? Are you guys nuts?”

“Sorry about the door, Professor, but I think we have good reason to be here,” she said, not quite answering the question. “We’ve been keeping tabs on you for a few years now. Some of your actions have aroused the suspicions of my colleagues and me. Now, before I begin, I want you to know that we have evidence that one of your colleagues, a certain Dr. Kahlil, has been cooperating with Arab terrorists since he disappeared from sight two years ago. Our intelligence sources indicate that an Arab country, specifically one that I am not at liberty to mention at this stage, is in the process of constructing a nuclear device, conceivably to be used against Israel and other U.S.-friendly nations.”

“So what does this have to do with me? I haven’t seen the man in years. I have no idea where he is.”

“But you were friends. Right? Both of you graduated in the same year from M.I.T.”

“Yes, but what does that have to do with anything?”

Agent Bain opened the thick file on the table between them and pulled out a printed document.

“Did you not accept a collect call from Dr. Kahlil at 2:40 a.m. on June 23 of this year, originating from the country of Jordan?”

“Yes.”

“Who was it that you called?”

“Dr. Kahlil.”

“What did you talk about?”

“It was a social call. He was just calling to see how I was. Somehow, he received word of what happened to my wife. He was concerned for me.”

“He was, huh? What else did you two talk about?”

The professor shrugged. “Nothing much. He mentioned doing contract work on some hydroelectric plant in Syria.”

“My ass, he’s working on a hydroelectric plant. Tell me what else you talked about.”

The professor thought for a moment. “I can’t remember.”

“What do you mean you can’t remember?”

“The man called me out of the blue at two in the morning,” Professor Layton said. “I was asleep. He woke me up. I barely remembered that he called until you reminded me.”

“I think he’s lying,” MacGregor said.

“Why are you asking me these questions?” the professor asked. “If you had my line bugged, then you know all the details of our conversation. So tell me: What did we talk about?”

Agent Bain sighed. She seemed somewhat vexed by this statement. She tapped on the file folder on the desk. “This is your file, Professor. We have proof that you have removed controlled materials from the science labs at the university where you teach. Some of these items are rather exotic, or even bizarre, to be used in a home environment.”

“Which items are you talking about?”

She thumbed through the folder and flipped it open to a page. “Well, it says here that you have taken vast quantities of hydrochloric acid, silver nitrate, molybdenum, electric generating equipment, a quantity of radium, methane, and most peculiarly, several tanks of chlorine. And this is just the beginning of the list.” Agent Bain thumbed through three more pages of listed items. “So what are you doing with these items on the premises of your home? Baking a cake? Inventing a new kind of light bulb?” The agent paused for effect. “Or perhaps, creating chemical weapons? Maybe a nice little bomb to help out your terrorist friend?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the professor said.

Agent Bain eyed the professor like a cat that had cornered a mouse. “Then you have some explaining to do. We have confiscated the equipment in your basement lab. Even as we speak, our boys are analyzing your equipment to find out what you’ve been doing down there.”

Professor Layton sat up, alarmed. “Stop them! You can’t let them touch anything!”

“Why not? Do you have something to hide?”

“You just can’t. I have a critical experiment in process, the pinnacle of over two years of work. It will all be ruined. And someone could be hurt.”

Agent Bain cocked an eyebrow. “Who will be hurt? Our boys? Do you have explosives down there, Professor?”

“No, I don’t, but they may harm my experiment. The alignment of the equipment is very precise. It must not be disturbed.”

“But you just said someone could be hurt. Tell me. Who will be hurt?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You did. Tell me—who will be hurt?”

“I can’t say.”

“Don’t play games with us, Professor Layton. You’d better tell us. If anyone is harmed, you will be held responsible.”

At those words, the professor drew a long sigh. He gazed up at his interrogator. She stared down at him with her steely blue eyes. “I can tell you, but you won’t believe me.”

“Try us,” she said, looking over at her partner. “We have all night. Don’t we, Will?”

The professor bit his lip. “Okay. You wanted to know. Her name is Alyndia.”

“Alyndia?” Agent Bain repeated. She looked up at MacGregor. “Do we have record of Professor Layton contacting an Alyndia?”

MacGregor shook his head. She returned her attention to the professor.

“Who is she?”

Professor Layton looked away from the red-headed agent. “I told you, you are not going to believe me when I tell you who, or rather, what she is. You are going to think I am crazy.”

“Just tell me, Professor. Who is Alyndia?”

“She is a sorceress.”

“A sorceress? Oh, really?” A smile began at the corners of Agent Bain’s lips. “Where is this sorceress? Is she here?”

“No, she lives in a world different from ours.”

Agent Bain frowned upon hearing this. “Like, in another dimension?”

“Yes,” the professor replied. “Something like that.”

She sighed. “Okay. Tell me more.”

“Gladly. You see, in her world, the atmosphere is mostly chlorine and hydrogen instead of oxygen and nitrogen, as it is here. There, hydrochloric acid occurs naturally, as water does here. Her world even has vast oceans of hydrochloric acid, just as we have oceans of saltwater. Needless to say, their entire physiology is quite different from ours.”

“Professor, this sounds like something from a B-movie of the fifties. We are not playing games here. Now tell us the truth.”

“I am telling you the truth,” he said.

Agent Bain glanced up at MacGregor. He expressed neither amusement nor surprise. She turned back to Professor Layton.

“Let’s say this Alyndia in the other dimension really exists. How did you contact her?”

Professor Layton drew a heavy sigh. “Where do I begin?”

“At the beginning. Where else?”

“It all started three years ago when my wife was involved in a car accident on Route 14, a week before her birthday.”

“The night of August, the twentieth of—” began Agent Bain.

“I know, I know,” the professor said, interrupting. “You don’t need to remind me.”

“Just get to the part where you are using the controlled substances.”

“Okay. As you know, she went into a coma from her head injuries. They explained at the hospital that her head had gone through the windshield of the car and that she had suffered a skull fracture. Intracranial bleeding had left her brain-damaged. I verified their findings. Looking at her EEG, it was true.” The professor’s voice cracked with emotion. “That’s when I realized my beloved wife was never going to wake up.”

“Go on.”

“I was distraught from the accident. I could no longer sleep at night. I canceled the classes I taught at the university and began drinking—a little too much, I’m afraid. While she lay there hooked up to the life support equipment, more dead than alive, I felt bitter. I knew her soul had departed, but I could not let go of her. I threw myself into my work. Late one afternoon, I was working with powerful electromagnetic fields that I thought could be used to destroy cancerous cells in organs when, inadvertently, I created an aperture, if you would call it that. A portal to places unknown.”

“That’s when you first saw Alyndia,” the agent said.

“Yes. And I saw her quite clearly. She saw me, too.” He smiled slightly. “She had the most amused look on her face.”

“This sorceress: was she human?”

“That is a difficult question to answer,” Professor Layton said. “I can say with certainty that she has human form, but her race is human only in the relative sense. Their physiology is drastically different from ours.” The professor’s face waxed into a smile as he visualized his beloved. “But even in our world, she would be considered beautiful. She has long, black hair and a lovely face with these exquisite cheekbones. Her complexion has a greenish tinge, too, but this only adds to her beauty.”

“How did she run across you? Did she just turn on her television to watch a rerun of Lost in Space and, poof, there you were?”

Professor Layton scowled at Agent Bain for her patronizing remark. “You’re not taking me seriously.”

“You’re right—I’m not,” she said. “But I’m doing my patient best to hear you out. Tell me how you two met. Did she build a contraption, too?”

“No. Alyndia doesn’t have any equipment that I’m aware of. Hers is a magic-based society. Her people rely on magic the same way we rely on technology, even for commonplace things. Using machines as we do is a foreign concept to them.” The professor rested his hand on his chin as he thought. “As a matter of fact, I don’t think I was even able to describe a television to her. Her Box of Tongues seemed to malfunction whenever I used technical terminology or whenever I named an object found in our world for which her language has no equivalent. Anyway, it was quite by accident that we encountered each other. She was trying out a special spell she had been researching when her image appeared within the solar-modulated magnetic field of my invention.”

“You mentioned she has a Box of Tongues. What’s that?”

“It’s a kind of real-time language translator, of sorts.”

“Really, now? What does it look like?”

“It’s an ornate-looking box about this big.” The professor gave its approximate dimensions with his hands; it was about four inches square. “She would set the box between us on the floor of the chamber. A fan-shaped curtain of rainbow-colored light projected from the box into the air. As our voices passed through the light, the box changed the sound of our words so that we could understand each other. We had many conversations this way. You know, Agent Bain, it’s fascinating to hear Alyndia describe her world. It’s nothing like ours, and yet our cultures have striking similarities.”

Agent Bain sighed wearily. “Professor, so far, I don’t believe a word of what you’ve told me.”

“But it’s the truth! I swear it!”

“Talk about the chlorine. Why are you storing chlorine gas in your basement?”

“I needed it for the chamber. After we widened the aperture enough so that she could physically pass into our world, I created a large, airtight glass chamber for her. In the early days, I filled the glass chamber with chlorine so that she could visit me in my lab. Later, I devised a chlorine gas recirculator and filled the chamber with argon, an inert gas I knew would not react with either of our tissues. We wore face masks in the chamber to allow us to exist together in the chamber while breathing the atmosphere of our own worlds.”

“And she wears jewelry too?” Agent Bain asked.

Professor Layton knotted his brow, suspicious and perplexed by her statement. “Well, yes. Why are you asking?”

Agent Bain reached into a plastic envelope and pulled out a shiny, heptagonal metal bracelet. Inscriptions of runes covered the flat outer sides of the bracelet.

“Have you seen this before, Professor?”

“You took that from my lab! Give me that!”

Professor Layton reached for the bracelet. She deftly moved it out of his reach.

“Nope, you’re not getting this back.”

She turned the bracelet over in her hands to examine it and then let it hang from her index fingertip to gauge its weight.

“It’s heavy. Feels like it’s made of nickel or maybe platinum.”

“Specifically, it’s made of iridium.”

She raised her eyebrows at the professor. “Iridium, you say? That’s a rare, expensive metal, and it looks like it took a lot of it to make this thing. Where did you get it?”

“Alyndia gave it to me in the argon chamber. It was her mother’s bracelet.” Professor Layton reached for the bracelet again. “Give that to me. You don’t know what you have.”

At that moment, a burn on the professor’s hand caught Agent Bain’s attention. “Where did you get that burn on your hand?”

The professor immediately withdrew his hand and self-consciously covered it with the other. “I was exposed to her atmosphere.”

“You what?”

“Once, I reached through the aperture to hold her hand. For a moment, the atmospheres of our worlds mingled. The high concentration of chlorine in her atmosphere burned my skin.” The professor cleared his throat. “If you will recall, chlorine is corrosive to human skin and highly poisonous. The Germans used chlorine as a chemical weapon during the First World War.”

“Yes, I know that. What about her?”

“She became ill when she breathed some of our nitrogen- and oxygen-rich atmosphere. Oxygen is bad for her, but not as much as chlorine is for us. I analyzed the samples of air from her world. Actually, she does have some oxygen and nitrogen in her atmosphere, but the percentages of both are far lower. Her atmosphere is also several times denser than ours.”

“Professor, I have to admit that I’m having trouble believing any of this.”

“Every word is the truth. I swear it.”

Agent Bain sighed. “Okay. What happened next?”

He grinned sheepishly. “I wasn’t expecting it at all, but I suppose I was vulnerable to it.”

“Just tell me what happened,” she ordered.

“We fell in love.”

Agent Bain looked up at MacGregor. He shook his head. She looked back at Professor Layton. “You mean to tell me you fell in love with this—this space girl from another dimension?”

“Yes, I did. And I didn’t say anything about a space girl,” he retorted. “I said she was a sorceress.”

“Whatever you say,” she said.

The professor continued. “She is coming to this world to be with me.”

“How could she come here if our atmosphere is poisonous to her?”

“She will detach her spirit from her body and inhabit the body in this world, a spiritless vessel of someone who was very dear to me.”

“Your comatose wife?”

The professor nodded once.

“How could that be?”

“She said it was understood in her world that all living creatures in the universe have souls. These souls are almost as old as the universe itself. From what I understand, they are pure energy with self-awareness, not much more than that.”

“I follow you. Go on.”

“All right. At the time that life evolved on Earth, these souls wanted to manifest in the physical world, but there weren’t enough living vessels. So, they put their energies together and created an alternative world where they could live in the physical state. But this world was different from ours in that it was bound together with cosmic energy, something we here on Earth call ‘magic’. This proto-world never evolved past the primordial stage and still has its early atmosphere.”

“That’s where the chlorine comes in, right?”

“Yes. And that’s where Alyndia lives now. Alyndia has offered to join me in our world so that we can be together in the physical sense, but her physical form cannot survive here. To get around that, our plan is to transfer her soul energy into the vacated body of my beloved Elise.”

“And what about Elise? What if she wakes up and finds this Alyndia character inside of her?”

“She’ll never wake up. Alyndia assures me that my wife’s soul has vacated her body.”

“This is an outrageous story, Professor,” Agent Bain said. “You don’t really expect us to believe any of this, do you?”

“The key, Agent Bain, is the iridium bracelet you took. Alyndia has a psychic fixation on it. Give it back to me so that I may slip it on to the wrist of my wife.”

Agent Bain shook her head. “I’m afraid I can’t do that. The bracelet is evidence.”

“Evidence of what? I didn’t steal it from anywhere. It was given to me by Alyndia to guide her spirit into the right body.”

“Professor Layton, in all the years I’ve been an agent with the CIA, I have heard some nutty stories, but this takes the cake as the nuttiest ever. Give me the real story now. Let’s talk about Dr. Khalil. How do you transport the materials to him?”

“To hell with Dr. Khalil! And if you don’t believe what I told you is true, then you put the bracelet on my wife at the hospital so Alyndia can be with me.”

Agent Bain clutched the shiny metal ring tightly in her hand as she held it out in plain view of the professor, taunting him with the sight of it. “So what if I put the bracelet on your wife’s wrist at the hospital, and she doesn’t wake up from her coma? Will you then tell me the real story about the chemicals and the stolen lab equipment?”

“I maintain that I have told you the real story,” Professor Layton said. Then he gave her a wry smile. “Yes, Agent Bain. Put the bracelet on my wife, and then you may call me a liar, if you wish. Afterward, when you discover that I have been telling the truth, you will bring her back here to me. Okay?”

Agent Bain glanced at Agent MacGregor. They nodded to each other and quietly exited the room.

“What do you think, Connie?” Agent MacGregor asked her in the hallway.

“I was going to ask you the same.”

“I think he’s a kook.”

“He seems convinced of his own story.”

“Like I said, he’s a kook.”

“Well, we’re not getting anywhere with him. Suppose we go along with his fantasy for a while, take it to its logical conclusion, where it is disproved. Then he won’t have any basis for continuing with his story.”

“You really intend to put that bracelet on his wife?”

She gazed down at the bracelet in her hand. “What the hell?”

Agents Bain and MacGregor reentered the room. She stood looking down at the professor for a moment, then she clucked her tongue.

“All right. It’s a deal. But remember, if your story does not check out, you have some serious explaining to do.”

* * *

Agent Connie Bain followed the triage nurse down the hospital corridor and into the room on the sixth floor where Elise Layton lay in state, connected to an array of life support machinery.

“Here she is, Ms. Bain,” the nurse said. “Don’t expect a reaction from her. She’s been this way for the last few years.”

“Thank you, nurse.”

The nurse smiled sweetly and left the room. Connie stood alone for a moment to take in her surroundings. In the subdued light, she noticed the room was filled with flowers sent there regularly by Professor Layton. In contrast to the cold, aseptic scent of the hospital, the air in this room smelled sweet with their nectar. Agent Bain walked over to the bedside and stared at the comatose woman. The room was silent save for the hiss from the respirator forcing air into the woman’s lungs and the slow, steady beep of the heart rate monitor. She gazed at Elise Layton’s sunken, ashen, pale face and shook her head.

Connie pulled Elise Layton’s emaciated arm from the side of the bed and let it hang over the edge. Feeling foolish about the whole affair, she reached into her coat pocket and withdrew the envelope containing the iridium bracelet with the strange runes. She turned the handsome, seven-angled bracelet over in her hands. She thought it would look wonderful on her. Its size was perfect. On a whim, she slipped the bracelet onto her wrist. She held it up to the light to get a better look at it. It was a lovely thing as it shone silvery, cheerful, and bright in the dreary hospital light. Because of the strange runes and its unusual shape, she had to admit the bracelet really did have an unearthly quality about it. After admiring it for a few moments, she decided to take it off and slip it on Elise Layton’s limp arm, which was still hung over the hospital bed rail.

As Connie grasped the shiny iridium bracelet to remove it, she thought she felt an electric tingle where the bracelet touched the skin on her wrist. Out of curiosity and to ascertain that her mind was not playing tricks on her, she allowed the bracelet to remain. The tingle quickly subsided to be replaced by a gentle, unmistakable warmth that began at the bracelet and spread through her body. She felt as if someone was pouring a large vat of warm honey over her body, starting at her wrist. The feeling was profoundly pleasurable, almost orgasmic. She closed her eyes and let the soft warmth slowly spread. It filled her body to the ends of her fingers and toes, then it rose upward past her shoulders and through her neck. The spreading warmth stopped suddenly at the base of her skull, as if some sort of barrier had been reached. The warmth in that area quickly escalated into a burning, intense pressure.

“Oh!”

Now the cool metal of the bracelet became abruptly hot. Connie felt an acute burning in her chest that seared up her throat like a hot poker. She clutched her throat and gasped for air, but found she couldn’t breathe. In desperation, she reached for the bracelet to remove it. Her body wouldn’t respond. Her body suddenly convulsed as though she’d received an electric shock. She collapsed to the floor.

Then she heard a slow ripping sound, like tearing cloth, that seemed to emanate from within her head. As the ripping sound continued, a strange sense of vertigo swept over her, followed by a creeping sensory numbness. Her vision began to blur, and spots appeared before her eyes. She realized she was losing consciousness. She fought off the lightheadedness with all her might. The ripping sound ceased, and the feeling of vertigo subsided somewhat. She found she could breathe again, but only with great effort. Her ribcage felt as if it were being squeezed in a giant vice. She cried out for help, but her throat issued only a feeble choking sound.

Again, her body convulsed, this time stronger than before. The room spun freely around her. The ripping sound resumed. The stench of burning flesh assaulted her nostrils. Now, she writhed on the floor helplessly, as though immolated, desperately struggling to regain control of her body. In her struggle, she inadvertently kicked over a small folding table. It fell to the floor with an enormous crash. And then she lost consciousness.

A nurse in the hallway heard the racket and came running into the room. The red-headed woman she had led into the room earlier was now sprawled near the foot of Annelise Layton’s bed. The nurse quickly checked the woman’s vital signs. She no longer breathed and had gone into cardiac arrest. The nurse quickly pressed the alarm button on the wall and began CPR on the woman as the acrid odor of chlorine overtook the sweet scent of the flowers in the room.