A Shift In The Space-Time Continuum (Part One)

© 2013 David Jasmin-Green

Irene and Alice had lived together for almost eighteen years. They had sold their homes in the Black Country, pooled their resources and bought a house a short distance from the seafront in Lytham Saint Annes after losing their husbands to the Big C, as they preferred to call it. The women met in the cancer ward of the Manor hospital in Walsall in the nineties when their spouses were being treated, and it didn't take them long to discover how much they had in common. It was strange, they often mused, to live for so many years just a few streets apart without knowing one another until fate decided to bring them together.

“That's about it, dear,” Irene said. “We've worked non-stop cleaning this house from top to bottom over the last two days, between us we've even mowed the lawns and weeded the flower beds front and back. We've eaten lunch, washed up and prepared dinner, and the day is still young. What shall we do with ourselves now?”

“I think we deserve a bit of leisure time,” Alice replied. “I would suggest that we sit in the garden and enjoy the sun for a while, but it's a bit too nippy for sitting around. How about a nice walk on the beach? We haven't been for ages, largely because of the appalling weather we've been having – it's been a long, bitter winter. It's not exactly sunbathing weather and I don't expect there'll be many people around, but at least it's not raining. We could take Mrs. James's collie, Bryn, the poor thing doesn't get much exercise since she had her operation.”

“That's a splendid idea, Alice. I'll make us a flask of tea and pack some biscuits, because you know what we're like when we start walking – we may be old and crochety, but there's life in us yet, and we may be out quite some time.”

Alice collected the dog from next door while Irene made the tea, and before long they were making their way through the sand dunes to the beach. Irene was seventy four and Alice was two years older, but they were both well-preserved and it would have been easy to mistake them for women in their early sixties.

The beach at Lytham Saint Annes spreads out like a vast, uncharted desert when the tide is out. Even during the height of Summer it's rarely overcrowded, but on that Friday afternoon in the middle of April it was completely deserted apart from a tiny figure walking a dog in the distance. Irene and Alice loved the beach, it was squeaky clean compared to many British beaches and it was rare to stumble across litter. Bryn loved it too, he trotted along a good hundred yards in front of the women because he couldn't wait to play in the surf.

“It's a beautiful day,” Irene said. “There's still a nip in the air, though, I can't wait until it's warm enough to sit in the garden.”

“Me neither. They're our happiest days, aren't they? It's when we feel really lucky to be alive. Let's just hope that we don't have another Summer like last year, two or three weeks of sunshine followed by an eternity of torrential rain. We had our grand-kids here for a couple of weeks during the school holidays, remember? The poor mites were bored to tears because the weather confined them to the house the bulk of the time.”

The women walked until they reached the sea lapping gently at the beach, and the promenade and the dwellings behind it looked miles away. They spent half an hour or so taking turns to sling Bryn's luminous orange tennis ball into the surf, though neither of them could throw it very far, then they began their gentle walk north towards Blackpool, which was just over two miles away. Sometimes they walked all the way to Blackpool or beyond and caught a bus or a tram back, but today they didn't intend going that far. The dog busied himself running in and out of the sea snapping at the waves and dragging pieces of driftwood and long strings of seaweed onto the beach, but he kept looking expectantly at Irene because he knew she had his ball in the pocket of her windcheater. “I'm sorry, Bryn,” she told him, “but I really can't throw it any more, it's making my old bones ache.”

“Goodness, what's that?” Alice said.

“What's what? Hang on, let me put my specs on. It's a school of porpoises, I think, I can't really tell, they're a long way off.”

“I don't mean the porpoises, look behind them.”

“I can't see whatever you can see, Alice, your eyes are better than mine – there aren't many folk of your age with twenty-twenty vision, you know.”

“I think it's a bank of fog, and it's moving in fast. It doesn't make sense, it seems to be travelling against the wind, but winds can be deceptive.”

“Oh dear, we'd better make our way back. You don't normally see a sea fog at this time of the year or this time of the day, it's usually an early morning thing and generally it only happens in the Winter. Come on, Bryn, we have to go back now. Sorry, boy.....”

The two women started making their way back. “Head to the right a little, Irene,” Alice said, quickening her step. “And hurry, I want to hit the line of footprints we made on our way here, because if that fog catches up with us we'll be better off following our own trail so that we don't get lost.”

“Oh, there's no need to panic, I'm sure, we only have a few hundred yards to go, then we're home and dry.”

“I've just thought of something I haven't thought about for years. As you know, Irene, Tom and I used to holiday in Wales every summer until he was too ill – I might have told you this story before, but it's topical so it won't hurt to tell it again. One year we were in Harlech. It was August, I think, and it was a scorching day. A fog just like that started rolling in, so we turned around and headed straight back towards the car because it's easy to get disoriented in fog even in a small bay, especially when you're walking across featureless sand. There were two young boys nearby playing football. Tom told them that it was wise to go straight back to their parents, but they ignored our advice and carried on playing.

We rushed back to the car, barely beating the fog, it was a real pea-souper by the look of it, but it seemed to hang on the beach without moving inland. We had some fish and chips and went back to our bed and breakfast and thought nothing more of it, but the next day it was all over the news that two boys had gone missing. I told Tom that we should go to the police station and tell them that we may have seen them, but he said there was nothing we could do to help. The emergency services scoured the coast for the next few days, but no trace of those poor kids was ever found.”

“And the moral of the story is?”

“The moral of the story is hurry up, madam, for goodness sake - I really don't want to get lost!”

The fog moved in at an alarming rate, and by the time the first thick, unnaturally warm wisps started to curl around the women's ankles it was clear that it was no ordinary fog. “Are my weary old eyes deceiving me, Irene, or is this fog a funny colour?”

“It looks like it's a dirty yellowish brown to me, like nicotine stains on net curtains,” Alice replied as the dark cloud enveloped them, and it was so dense that they had to hold hands. “Maybe it's pollution that the wind has brought in from somewhere, I'm sure I can detect an odd smell. Bryn! Come here, we don't want to lose you. Something else is odd too. The wind has dropped, there's not a whisper – even during the height of summer it's rare for there to be no wind at all on this stretch of coast.”

Above the natural odour of the seaside, which always carries a hint of rotting seaweed and other decaying marine life, Irene thought she could smell something else, something that took her back to her school days a long, long time back. In her mind's eye she could see Mr. Haines, her science teacher, as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. He was heating flowers of sulphur in a glass flask over the flame of a Bunsen burner and the pale yellow powder was liquidising, turning purple and giving off an acrid smell. She chose to keep her mouth shut, though, because she didn't want to alarm Alice with the unwelcome thoughts of brimstone and damnation that were floating through her head. “Thank God,” she said a moment later. “There are our footprints, along with Bryn's, all we have to do is follow them and we'll be back in no time.”