Skippy Dies: A Novel

Back at the foot of the crumbling steps. In the leafless trees the things that have replaced the birds. The door swings open with a creak and you step inside the Great Hall. Make your way through the whispering stone, through shafts of grey light trapped in the spiderwebs. Weave past the zombies that burst from the library clock, clamber into the dumb waiter. You’ve done this part so many times it’s stopped being scary, become just a pattern that you follow without thinking.

Once upon a time the Realm was ruled by a beautiful princess. You’ll see her on the title screen, Hopeland written above her in medieval-type writing: blue eyes, hair the colour of honey, frost making her sparkle like a far-off star. In her frozen hands she holds a little harp – that’s the one she would play each morning from the Palace ramparts to bring up the sun. But then Mindelore stole it, and used it to summon three ancient Demons, who have laid waste to the Realm and imprisoned the princess in ice! The elders have chosen you, Djed, an ordinary elf from the forest, to find the magical weapons, save the princess and free the Realm from the Demons’ grip. You’ve got the Sword of Songs and the Arrows of Light – all you need now is the Cloak of Invisibility, then you’ll be ready to fight the Demons. But you keep getting stuck here, in the House of the Dead –

‘Are you still playing that thing?’ The door flies open and Ruprecht comes bustling into the room. Without waiting for a reply he sits down at his computer, drumming his fingers anticipatorily on his thigh as it wakes itself up. ‘Father Green was looking for you,’ he says over his shoulder.

‘I know.’

‘What did he want?’

‘Just to see if I was feeling better.’

‘Oh.’ Ruprecht’s stopped listening – frowns into the screen as his inbox loads.

Earlier this month, Ruprecht wrote the following e-mail, which was transmitted by satellite into space:

Greetings, fellow intelligent life-forms! I am Ruprecht Van Doren, a fourteen-year-old human boy from planet Earth. My favourite food is pizza. My favourite large animal is the hippo. Hippos are excellent swimmers despite their bulk. However, they can be more aggressive than their sleepy demeanour might suggest. Approach with caution!!! When I finish school, I intend to do my PhD at Stanford University. A keen sportsman, my hobbies include programming my computer and Yahtzee, a game of skill and chance played with dice.

By logging on to the METI website, you can chart the message’s progress. It hasn’t even got as far as Mars yet; still, every night Ruprecht checks his computer to see if any extraterrestrials have mailed him back.

‘Who the hell’s going to want to reply to that? It’s the gayest e-mail I ever heard,’ Dennis says. ‘And furthermore, that’s a total lie about you being a keen sportsman, unless you count eating doughnuts as a sport.’

‘It’s quite possible that doughnut-eating is considered a sport in distant galaxies,’ Ruprecht says.

‘Yeah, well, even if it is, and even if there are a bunch of fat lame Yahtzee-playing aliens out there, they’re still not going to get your gay message for like a hundred years. So you’ll totally be dead by the time they get back to you.’

‘Maybe I will, and maybe I won’t,’ is Ruprecht’s somewhat mysterious response to this.

METI stands for Message to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, and is an offshoot of SETI, the Search for same. This Search, a collaborative effort involving nerds from all over the world, concentrates primarily on the random transmissions that bombard the Earth from space every day. These transmissions are picked up by the SETI radio observatory in Puerto Rico, divided up into little parcels of data and sent out to the PCs of Ruprecht and others like him, which will trawl through them with the aim of finding, amid the mass of unintelligible static thrown out by the stars, a sequence or pattern or repetition that might intimate the presence of intelligent communicating life.

Behind the emergence of METI is none other than Professor Hideo Tamashi, the celebrated string theorist and cosmologist. It was he who organized the space-mail; on another occasion, he and a group of schoolchildren broadcast a performance of Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major. According to Professor Tamashi, the existence of extraterrestrial life is, statistically, more likely than not; moreover, the future of humanity could depend on making contact. ‘In the next thirty or forty years, ecological collapse may well make Earth unliveable,’ Ruprecht explains. ‘If that happens, the only way we’ll survive is by colonizing a new planet, which realistically we could only do by travelling through hyperspace.’ Travelling through hyperspace requires unlocking the secrets of the Big Bang; however, the ten-dimensional theory the Prof maintains holds the key is itself so fiendishly difficult that he believes the only way to solve it in time is if some kindly superior alien civilization takes us under its wing.

Tonight, though, the ETs are keeping their counsel. Ruprecht, with a little sigh, shuts down the computer and rises from his chair.

‘Nothing?’

‘No.’

‘But you think they will come someday? Like to Earth?’

‘They have to,’ Ruprecht responds grimly. ‘It’s as simple as that.’

He makes a couple of adjustments to his Global UFO Sightings Map, then fishes his toothbrush from his washbag and pads out to the bathroom.

Outside, the laurels swoosh in the cold air, and the darkness is tinged with the pink glow of the neon Doughnut House sign, like sugar on the night. Alone in the room, Skippy runs for cover as zombies crash through the floorboards and stretch after him with sinewy arms and splintered nails. Once upon a time they were people, maybe a family even, and when you look into their decaying faces it’s like you can still see a sad spark of who they were…

Later, with the lights out: ‘Hey, Ruprecht.’

‘Yes?’

‘Say if you could travel in time –’

The sound of Ruprecht propping himself on his elbows in the opposite bed. ‘It’s quite consistent with Professor Tamashi’s theories,’ he says. ‘Merely a case of sufficient energy, really.’

‘Okay, well – does that mean you could stop the future?’

‘Stop the future?’

‘Well, like, say if we started going back in time tonight, could we just keep going back for as long as we wanted? So we’d never actually get to tomorrow?’

‘I imagine so,’ Ruprecht says, pondering this. ‘Or if you travelled at the speed of light, time would stop, so it would always be today.’

‘Huh,’ Skippy says thoughtfully.

‘The problem in either case is energy. Travelling in time would require gaining access to hyperspace, which costs an enormous amount of power. And the closer you approach the speed of light, the more your weight increases and prevents you from reaching it.’

‘Wow, sort of like the universe is holding on to you?’

‘You might put it that way, yes. But anyway, you hardly want to stop time now, not with mid-term coming up!’

‘Ha ha, right…’

Silence resettles like a fresh snowfall that covers the room. Soon Ruprecht’s breathing turns into murmurous snores and little chomping noises; he’s having the dream where he’s being given the Nobel Prize, which he imagines as a large silver trophy filled with fudge… Ghostly grey-black moonlight creeps through the window; Skippy watches it gleam on his swimming trophy, the photo of Mum and Dad.

And once they’re sure he is asleep, they file into the room and gather round his bed, their long wasting limbs hanging limp by their sides, their rotting breath breathing WE ARE THE DEAD as they grab his hand and pull him up the stairs to a room and a Shape in a bed that lifts its head and draws aside the covers to reveal its body to him, skin faded to the same colour as the bedsheets it rises out of, reaching for him with hands that turn into hands that grip him freezing tight, and its mouth closes on his so he can’t scream or even breathe or wake up Ruprecht, he stretches under the pillow for the pills but they are gone! someone must have come in and taken them! and now the room fills with water and he starts drowning, the hands pulling him down below the surface –

He pulls his eyes open. There is no water, no one in the room except him and Ruprecht. The pills are where they always are. The ghostly almost-light hangs in the room like somebody there. He turns away from it, his hand wrapped around the little amber tube.