What’s new in the Mall is a matter of perspective, but the Girl’s fairly certain that the only perspective that really matters is hers. And to her, the door is new. She remembers coming down the corridor, not ten minutes ago, on her way to the roof, running her fingers along the glossy white walls and counting the number of times they click-clacked over the door frames. Twenty-four. So, twelve doors. There have always been twelve doors.
But here, undeniably, is a thirteenth.
Man Man peers at it from her shoulder, little painted-on eyes whipping back and forth like blue lasers. His muscles are vast and shiny and he’s wearing nothing but a red thong and a blue chestplate and a scabbard on his back that’s bigger, almost, than his whole body. His hair is frizzy and green and elongated, like the foliage atop a carrot. He turns to the Girl and strikes a pose – one arm up, left leg folded over right knee, his other hand on his hip.
‘I know,’ says the Girl. ‘And thirteen’s an unlucky number.’
She scans around her for any sign of pranking or mischief. Dizzy Dinosaur was skulking around earlier and isn’t above something like this. Him, or the Gutter Fairy. But there’s no one there, and in any case the Ball That’s Really A Lemur is next to her with his big fluffy tail looped over his head and she can see from the grimness of his expression that the door is, indubitably, there.
‘This is real,’ he says.
The Girl stares at the door. It’s small and white and here and there paint’s flecked away to reveal pale pressboard beneath. After a few seconds she snorts and kicks it and storms off back the way she came. Past empty shops full of spices whispering stories in languages they didn’t understand and a sauna with a bunch of umbrella spirits sitting in a steaming bath talking about the stock market. Then, out onto the flat concrete province of the Mall’s roof. It’s a blazing summer’s afternoon and the sun’s so ripe and vivid that the Girl wants to reach out and squeeze the juice out of it. The palm trees dotted between the car park and the highway to the left sway like green-haired models and on the beach to the left are people in neon lycra sunbathing, and others skateboarding, and still others running towards the madly glinting sea. The Girl watches it all and the flame that usually ignites in her when she takes in her little kingdom fails to fire. Instead she feels a clump settle in her stomach. Something black and messy and bitter. Something she can’t stand to look at straight.
Man Man strikes another pose, sword aloft, muscles bright in the sunlight. He’s so small, thinks the Girl. So easy to break, and plastic doesn’t heal.
‘I know,’ she says. ‘Maybe it is.’
‘It isn’t,’ says the Lemur.
‘Stop being a downer, you.’
‘I merely tell the truth, m’lady.’
‘No, it’s not true. Maybe it’s a door to somewhere else.’
‘Like where?’
She glances at him, piercing and resentful, and says nothing.
A plane flies overhead leaving a white trail spreading behind as if it was a boat and the sky was the ocean and they were all far, far above it. Maybe that’s one way of thinking about it, thinks the Girl. Everything’s a matter of perspective, after all.
Her hair grows out of her head in a spectacular black torrent and forms a soft cocoon around her and she sinks into it.
‘I’m not going to worry about it,’ she whispers. ‘It doesn’t bother me.’
Man Man and the Lemur look at each other. They both know when the Girl’s lying to herself. But, they also know better than to say anything about it.
*
The Girl wakes with a headache. This is strange because, strictly speaking, she doesn’t have a head. But still the dull throb is undeniably there and won’t go away no matter how hard she wills it. Then orders it. Then, finally, gets up and screams at it as loud as she can.
Man Man appears at the door, sword drawn and Warcat pads up behind him and peeks up at the Girl, big-eyed and alarmed, between his chicken drumstick legs.
‘I have a headache,’ says the Girl.
Man Man strikes a pose.
‘Yes I know, but I still have a headache. Where’s the Lemur?’
He leads the Girl down to the main body of the Mall. The great foyer is spotless and runs in marble splendour from a fountain rising like a crystal tree beneath a stained-glass dome at one end to the entrance at the other. The Girl can’t help but stop on the mezzanine and stare. Down in the shine and glimmer a teenager will buy those shoes they’ve saved money for all summer long. A man in overlarge trousers and ratty sneakers will sneak into a jewelry shop and buy a slim gold-and-white band for the woman he loves, thinking, I can’t wait to see her face. Parents will put their squabbling aside to watch their young boy run around the fountain with ice cream on his face and think, for one brief moment, maybe we can work. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
Outside it’s a flawless Sunday morning and the sky is like a great blue canvas waiting for the day to be written on it. A few scattered cars are already dozing in the warm morning sun like great metal dogs. The Girl follows Man Man who follows Warcat around the back of the Mall to where the great grumpy bins are snoring with their lids wide open. Their breath smells like rotting banana peels and rancid oil and ash. The Girl grows some of her hair and covers her mouth until they find the Lemur squatting in a corner near some chain-link fence, looking at something between some boxes.
‘What’re you doing?’ she demands. ‘I have a headache.’
The Lemur looks up.
‘But you don’t have – ‘
‘I know! So how do I have a headache?’
‘It’s the door.’
The Girl crosses her arms and pouts.
‘No.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘No it isn’t. Stop saying that. What’re you doing here, anyway?’
The Lemur points between the bins and the Girl sees a troll peering up at her – a tiny thing, stubby-armed and fat-fingered, with great herbivore eyes and a belly as bottom-heavy as a pear. It retreats in behind one of the boxes as soon as they make eye contact.
The Girl squats.
‘Who’s that?’ she says.
‘He’s from the Arcade.’
‘Well what’s he doing here?’
‘He says the Arcade’s closed.’
The Girl frowns.
‘What does he mean, the Arcade’s closed?’
The Lemur leans forward onto all fours.
‘This is the Mall, friend,’ he says. ‘She can help you. Tell them what you told me.’
The troll peers around the corner at them for a good long time. They can see now there’s little bits of it missing, from its upper arm and its hair and the side of its abdomen, speckled and uneven expanses as if gnats had been nibbling at it for days. In Japanese, uneven is dekoboko, thinks the Girl. She likes that word. She also likes the words nexus and fresh.
‘Yes. Come.’ She extends a tentacle of her long black hair. The troll hesitates, and then lets itself be taken by the waist and pulled out. The Girl holds it up to her face.
‘What happened?’ she says.
The troll whispers in her ear.
‘That’s not true!’ The Girl puts the troll on her shoulder, next to Man Man. The two small figures behold each other with great seriousness. ‘The Arcade’s right there! Come on.’
They head back towards the car park but now there’s a procession of some sort working its way across the tarmac. Long lines of glum figures are moving in dusty and downtrodden convoy across the asphalt and towards the highway – five fat astronauts carrying some sort of giant worm; a woman in tiny shorts and bra holding two huge rifles; a small troupe of monkeys wearing labcoats. All of them are silent, dead silent, the sort of silence that only comes from things that have just realized they no longer exist. The Girl follows the river of refugees back the way it’s coming, around the access road and past the dying Drive-In and the big empty lot where the Video Rental place used to be. The arcade’s next to this and should we awake, neon-bright and cacophonous, doors open and ready for another day. But its doors are closed and its insides are dark and quiet. The only movement is the refugees climbing out of its windows and slipping under its doors and lolling about outside like the survivors of an all-night rave.
‘What happened?’ says the Girl. Her headache’s worse, and now her stomach hurts a bit too.
The troll blinks, tearful.
The Girl, the Lemur, and Man Man stare at the dead Arcade. Then they look over at the Mall beyond next to it, bright and clean and alive, like a plump apple resting next to a rotten one. The Girl doesn’t like the word rotten, or aghast, or kusami. She blinks, a hundred times in two seconds, so rapidly her eyelids burn red-hot.
‘Well!’ she says. ‘Man Man! Lemur! Tell everyone the Mall is open to everyone from the Arcade! You, Troll – you come with me. Let’s find your friends somewhere to stay!’
They scatter. None of the humans nearby – on the road or on the beach or in the car park – notice anything. Not the speeding Lemur. Not Man Man racing along on Warcat, sword aloft. And certainly not a girl with hair like fireworks, running up and down the car park with a little troll on her shoulder, completely oblivious to her headache.
*
At night the humans all leave and turn off most of the lights and lock the front doors as if these were the only way in. In their absence the Mall subsides into a twilit dreamtime of fleeting fragrances and wayward echoes. The dragon in the mosaic over the west exit slithers down and clacks along the marble floor on the red balls he holds in his feet. The characters in choose-your-own-adventure books drink and joke about killing each other over and over again. And the Lady in the Fountain hosts her dinners, where everyone walks on water and sits at tables made of the sweet clear stuff moulded into something as smooth and steady as glass but always cool, and always a bit damp.
The Girl loves the evenings but today she doesn’t feel right. She’s spent the day settling the refugees and feeling gradually worse. After yelling at a bunch of bowling balls for bullying some bowling pins she sneaks off to the toilet and vomits. Man Man holds her hair back and pats her shoulder and when she’s finished he stands on his head doing the splits and bending his left leg up and down at the knee.
The Girl shakes her head.
‘No,’ she says, and keeps going.
Their work isn’t done until the fat summer moon is high in the sky. Then the Girl heads down to the fountain with her hands trailing on the walls and listening to the Ediacaran stories whispered by the fossils in the stone. The dragon bows low as she passes and his two fluffy dogs sniff her feet. She touches one of them with the tips of her fingers and that’s enough to set it running around in mad circles with its tongue streaming from its mouth like a red ribbon.
When she gets to the fountain, though, there’s nobody there. No lights, no music. No party.
‘Hello?’ she says.
The Ball Who’s Really A Lemur scurries off. Man Man bends over backwards with one leg straight up in the air and three fingers extended on his left hand. They twiddle.
‘No, that can’t be right,’ says the Girl. ‘She wouldn’t do that.’
The Lemur comes bouncing back.
‘Man Man’s right,’ he says. ‘She’s going.’
‘Going?’ The Girl’s eyes widen. ‘Going?!’
Her hair erupts in black tentacles. She races back the way she came like some great spider, up onto the mezzanine and through a service door and past a janitor who looks up and sniffs and wonders why it suddenly smells of camphor and cinnamon and sweat. She catches up with the Lady – tall and thin and silver-haired, her black face as peaceful as an old Yoruba statue – by the new door.
‘Wait!’ shouts the Girl.
The Lady turns with her hands crossed at her hips, and bows. Her hair is like icicles, thinks the Girl. Like icicles, or spun moonlight.
‘M’lady,’ she says.
‘Where are you going?’
‘The door’s appeared, m’lady. I must establish a new holding.’
‘I forbid it.’
The Lady smiles, infinitely kind, infinitely beautiful. ‘Alas, m’lady, there are laws higher than yours. We have had this conversation many times.’
‘This time I mean it.’
‘It’s in your nature to mean everything you say. But it’s in my nature to move to new places when they’re there, and a new place is available.’
The Girl closes the door.
‘What’s wrong with the Mall? Is it the walkmans and the ICBMs and the home gaming systems? I hate them. They killed the arcades and now my floor’s full of homeless characters from fighting games who just want to beat each other up.’
Man Man nods, grave.
‘The home systems are alright,’ says the Lady. ‘And so will be whatever comes after the walkmans. Can’t you smell the air, m’lady? Summer’s ending. We must move to warmer climes.’
The Girl shakes her head.
‘No,’ she says. ‘I forbid it.’
The Lady opens the door and steps through and this time the Girl can’t close it. She peers at the swirling chaos beyond and sees people speaking into little black rectangles and transparent boxes that look like computers but are surely too small and a girl with a tight black necklace on her throat, sitting cross-legged and painting her eyelids black.
The Girl closes her eyes.
‘I don’t want to go,’ she says.
‘You will.’ The Lady reaches through the door and kisses the Girl’s hand. ‘Go and speak to your father.’
‘I hate him. Never, never, never will I speak to him.’
The Lady shakes her head again, serene and fond and patient.
‘Oh, m’lady. That’s not true. You love him dearly. Go and speak to him, and then come through this door. There are places we must all go, on pain of being forgotten – which you know for us is death. And it is not in your nature to be forgotten, even if it is in your nature to forget.’
The black thing in the Girl’s gut stirs. As if saying, yes, yes, the Lady speaks the truth. But the Girl hates it, and also hates what the Lady said. So she kicks the door so hard it hurts her foot. Then she outruns the echoes down the corridor.
*
Had anyone been standing nearby they’d have seen the door open right after the last of the janitor’s footsteps faded away. Then they’d have seen a black ball roll out, and change direction, and head off down the corridor. Afterwards they’d have puzzled over whether it was a ball or a lemur or some spherical mix of the two, but thinking of such things would’ve given them a headache. So, as humans do, they’d have invented some sense for it, and gone about their business certain they knew what they’d seen.
The Lemur unrolls himself at a junction in the corridor. He sniffs the air and then heads down to the left. Down past blinking fire-lights and a red box with an axe behind a glass and a poster of a fat man in a bright vest saying Safety First. Up ahead are some windows and they’re are too high for him to look through on his tiptoes but he’s a lemur and climbing up is no problem. Outside is a car park glowing in the light of a moon low and bulbous and rock-salt pink in the cobalt sky.
He heads down and into the mall. The great central hall is bigger than the one back home and overhead is an arching ceiling covered in black ribbing like a work of vast arachnid geometry. The walls are warm sandstone and the floors are rubbery and brown-flecked beneath and warm also. He searches the ceiling for stained glass or mosaics but there’s none and he realizes that the dragon will be one of those they’ll have to leave behind. There’s still a fountain though, and the Lady’s already laying places for dinner. She waves at him and he waves back. Then he window shops awhile. He sees palm-sized CD players you can squeeze into your pocket and things that look like a typewriter had a baby with a computer and a whole shop full of nothing but fingernails of every colour and length on rack upon rack of disembodied hands.
He heads up the roof. Where the Arcade used to be is now a great crescent of park with ponds and scattered benches. Across the highway a collection of towers blot out the view of the sea and a couple of people are leaning on their balconies in the silky chill of dawn with steaming cups. There’s a huge man in tight shorts running on the beach and a woman in a hoodie sipping something and talking on a tiny, tiny phone. A few cars slip along the highway and they all move with the quiet deftness of the sort of thing the Lemur avoided in the jungles he evolved in.
The Lemur heads back to the door, strangely glum. It doesn’t make any sense, he thinks. What he’s seen is beautiful, so why should it make him sad? He pauses at the entrance, and takes it all in, and wishes Man Man was there with him. He’d have made sense of it. He had something interesting to say, always, about everything.
*
The First God lives down a long corridor with green carpets and huge paintings on the wall. Some are of places that once existed and some of places that still exist and some are just big rectangles that look like images of swirling mist. If you stand close to one and listen very carefully you can hear distant winds and a sound like thousands of voices singing and arguing and laughing very far away. They’re the only thing about going to see her father that the Girl likes.
All the worse, then, that she’s in no condition to appreciate them. Her little joints ache and her skin glows red hot with a fever and her hair clings to her face like running ink. She smells like rotting food and Man Man and the Lemur have to help her open doors because her hands are shaking so much.
‘It wasn’t so bad,’ says the Lemur. ‘It’s just like now.’
The Girl pouts and looks away and then stops because moving her head makes her dizzy.
‘I can’t believe you went,’ she says. ‘I can’t I can’t I can’t.’
‘You’ll have to go sometime, my lady.’
‘No. Never.’
The Lemur looks at Man Man. Man Man looks back at him.
‘I can feel you looking at each other,’ hisses the Girl. ‘You’re both awful.’
The antechamber outside the First God’s room is sometimes made of marble like a Cordoban arcade and sometimes looks like the top of an Aztec temple, with a great stone fan and the blazing sun directly overhead. Today it has flawless tatami and a screen emblazoned with a black twig and a red flower and for some reason the Girl feels better just looking at it. Man Man and the Lemur open the sliding door on the far side and the Girl walks into the office beyond where her father is kneeling behind a low table. He’s dark and serious-looking and thin-limbed but it’s the lean thinness of the scimitared horn of an oryx. He’s writing something in tiny letters on an endless scroll that slips up the table from a great tangle to one side and slides along under his hands and then off the other side. He doesn’t stop writing, even when he looks up at the Girl and smiles. Not once. Not for a second.
‘Of all my children,’ he says in a voice as vast as an eon, ‘You are the only one who never knocks.’
Man Man and the Lemur close the door behind the Girl. She crosses her arms and advances on the First God. Her hair is so heavy she wills some back into her scalp but it just curls around her skull like a fat black snake.
‘What’re you writing?’ she says.
‘What I always write.’ The First God’s smile flickers. ‘Everything.’
‘That’s not true. You don’t write everything.’
‘In other worlds, in other start conditions, there are others. But here, there is only me.’ The First God pouts, and when he does he looks an awful lot like the Girl. ‘Do you not believe me?’
The Girl glares at him. Then, without warning, she bursts into tears. She buries her face in her hands but her tears come so hard they spray through her fingers and all over the floor. Her little shoulders heave and her breath comes in jagged gasps. All across the land little children wake bawling from nightmares and old folk remember times they disappointed their parents as if it had just happened.
‘Oh, little one,’ says the First God. ‘You came here to shout at me, didn’t you?’
The Girl nods.
‘Why do you do it?’ she sobs
‘If I didn’t, none of us would exist.’
‘But – you exist. Nobody made you grow older.’
‘Of course they did. The Great Architect did for all things what I’m doing for us now.’ The First God conjures a cloth like no other that’s ever existed or will ever exist, infinitely soft and infinitely comforting. He hands it to the Girl and she buries her face in it.
‘Why won’t he explain himself, then?’
‘She. And she can’t explain herself. Time has no voice, little one. Time is only the passage of itself. Without it nothing can happen. But with it.’ He gestures to his scroll. ‘Comes everything.’
‘But what about beautiful things? What about when they grow old and break and disappear forever?’
‘May I tell you a story?’
‘No.’ Silence. The First God waits. Then: ‘Fine.’
‘When humans first left their homeland, a warm and shady valley, they had a thing – genuine ignorance. All the humans who’d ever existed had been born and raised and lived and died with the same air in their lungs and the same water in their stomachs. Grandfathers saw the same beasts as their grandchildren; ancestors’ spirits lived next to the birthing-nests of their descendants. Then, one day, one argued with another, took his family, and moved north. They were the first to head that way. After three days, in a mountainous valley, one – a little girl – looked up and saw the silhouette of a creature. I don’t remember what it was – a goat, perhaps. The girl looked up and her eyes widened – and there it was. The very first time a human saw something that no one had seen before.’
The Girl frowns.
‘So?’
‘So? It was astonishing! It was the instant the first human realized that things existed that they hadn’t thought of. And then, they asked the greatest question they’ve ever asked – the question at the heart of all they do. What else? What else can I make? What else can I have? What else can I learn?’ The First God closes his eyes. ‘After that creature on the mountain-top came mammoths and moas and strange little monkey-men who lived on an island half a world away. Then ploughs and cities and satellites. But that moment never happened again. It couldn’t. It was there, and wonderful, and then it was gone. Now, only I remember it.’
The First God reaches across the table with his free hand and touches the Girl’s face. His palm is warm, like ancient sunlight.
‘We are the Great Architect’s her elder children. We must guard the younger ones, and we go where they go. And they move into the future, always, always, because they’re looking for what else. If we don’t follow them, we’ll be nothing. If they don’t have us, they’ll forget everything.’
For a few moments the Girl’s silent and the First God thinks maybe she understands. But then she jerks her head away, and stands.
‘I hate them, then,’ she says.
She walks to the door. It slides open and the Lemur and Man Man, eyes averted, close it behind her.
The First God sits back and smiles. His little sun, he thinks, as fierce as the instant she came tumbling out of that girl’s gaze a hundred thousand years ago. The room is so quiet with her gone. He enjoys writing her story more than any other. And so, he turns back to the scroll, and finds out what happens next.
*
The Lemur and Man Man try everything they can to get the Girl to leave. They try talking to her and they try not talking to her. They try coaxing her to follow them and they try pushing her through the door. They point out that everyone else in the mall is leaving – the books and the hats and the glittering shoes – but the Girl just points to everyone who’s stayed behind. One night they lead her down a dark corridor and tell her the door they’ve opened is the door to her bedroom. But the Girl takes one sniff of the air and screams and turns the Ball That’s Really A Lemur into a Cube. Then she leaves him there, rocking back and forth and utterly unable to move, and Man Man refuses to talk to her until she turns him back.
The sun sets and rises slower the next day and even slower the second and then doesn’t rise at all on the third. The mall lights turn off one final time and the janitor chains the doors shut and leaves.
Then comes the snow. The Walkmans and the disposable flashes and the water games gawp at the fluffy whiteness that falls like flecks of the disintegrating sky. They go out in the evernight and play and for a little bit they forget that the world is ending. But the Girl doesn’t. She watches from a window in her room, tiny now, her skin shrivelled like bark and her face like an old woman’s. Her hair’s thinned and fallen out and her movements are as slow as a dozing tortoise.
‘It’s snowing,’ she mumbles.
Man Man and the Lemur look at each other. The Lemur blinks. Now the moment’s finally here he realizes it’s so sad he can barely stand it. He hugs Man Man and feels the little plastic figure’s bulging arms around his neck and can scarcely recall a time he couldn’t have them there on demand. Then he takes the Girl’s hand.
‘My lady,’ he says. ‘Come. There’s nothing more you can do here.’
‘But there’s hope,’ she says. ‘The world doesn’t die in snow.’
‘It does, so that it can be born again.’ He tugs, softly. ‘But it won’t without you.’
‘It’s too cold to move.’
‘It’ll only get colder.’
The Girl sighs. Then she stretches out her twig legs and totters on them towards the door. Little wet dribs and drabs of her fall off as she goes and Man Man cleans them up with a little mop and bucket so that nobody can ever steal what belongs only to her and should never belong to anyone else. They head in slow convoy towards the door and the refugees who see them sob and fall to the ground because they know what it means. Still, not one of them steps forward to stop her. Not one of them speaks out.
The Lemur and Man Man don’t look at them. They don’t even look at each other.
They reach the door and the Lemur opens it. Beyond is the other Mall and it’s full of dim lights and filled with the same sounds of distant life that haunt the First God’s paintings. The Girl crosses and the instant the last of her hairs is across the threshold sun brightens in the windows and the lights blaze awake and the front doors fling open. Children swarm a shop that makes ice cream and dips it into melted chocolate. A group of young men flick long licks of hair over their foreheads in the windows of a computer games shop. An old man scowls at a pair of shoes and then walks away and comes back and scowls at them some more.
The Girl watches and feels life seep back into her. Her hair thickens and grows as wild as jungle vines. Her skin turns plump and smooth and lively. Her eyes resume their twinkle, the same twinkle they had when she was first made, the twinkle she’s carried for her seven-billion-strong flock since they were only a few dozen in one small valley in one small part of the world.
She yawns.
‘It’s like waking up from a bad sleep,’ she says.
The Lemur smiles. Then he turns back to the door and sees Man Man standing in the gathering darkness beyond. The Girl looks too.
‘Come on,’ she says.
Man Man shakes his head.
‘What do you mean, no?’ Then the Girl’s eyes widen. ‘No! Man Man! You have to come!’
‘He can’t come, m’lady,’ says the Lemur quietly. ‘This time isn’t for him.’
‘No! You have to come! Please!’
Man Man shakes his head again, and starts closing the door. The Girl dives for it but he’s too quick. The door closes and an instant later there’s nothing there but a shiny new wall and a single fire alarm, as red and bright as a freeze-dried cherry.
On the other side of the door, the Mall plunges into darkness. For a while Man Man can hear the Girl’s screaming and crying on the beyond the wall but then the future drifts away from the past and its noises fade too. He wanders down to a window and sits on the sill with Warcat dozing beside him and watches his world fade away. The Girl was wrong, he thinks. It does die in snow. But Man Man’s happy, because he can’t think of a more beautiful death.
*
Of course the Girl loves the new mall. Beneath the new sky and the new sun are new delights and these she revels in as she did with the delights of old. She has a weekly seminar for the MP3 players and the CDs and the CCDs to teach them about where they came from. She has a game she plays with the flip phones where she folds over like them and races them down the halls. She even adopts the Troll They Found Behind The Dumpster. At first he follows them around, silent and waddling and big-eyed, and the Girl rushes him to keep up. Then one day she puts him up on her shoulder, the shoulder Man Man used to ride on. Doing so feels wrong for a little bit it doesn’t for long. Presently she can’t imagine what it would be like not to have one or two errant hairs from the Troll’s head tickling her ear as she goes.
The Lemur watches all this and feels old in his bones. His joints ache and his eyes take longer to adjust and sometimes the new toys speak so fast that their words melt into one rolling jumble like a distant aircraft taking off. He spends ages on his own watching the sunsets – are they dimmer now? he wonders, are the skies somehow denser? – and thinks of Man Man. But the Girl invariably finds him and sits with him, holding his hand, and after a while it’s like the old days. As if not a second had passed since they first met.
Then, the door reappears.
This time they see it, unfolding out of nothing on the glossy whiteness of one of the service corridors, clattering and metallic and huge. This door is reddish-brown and stencilled on it in military script is the word DISAGGREGATE and the handle is warm to the touch. The Girl looks at the Lemur and with a shock the Lemur realizes she looks older, her face longer and her eyes smaller and nose less of a nub than it used to be. Still, she sounds the same.
‘Already?’ she says. ‘We barely got here!’
‘I think the same amount of time passed, m’lady,’ says the Lemur. ‘I think time feels like it’s moving faster, but it really isn’t.’
‘Why, though? Why would time feel like it’s moving faster?’
The Troll whispers in her ear. She listens with her head tilted.
‘I know that an hour is more of a percentage of your life when you’re one year old than when you’re ten or twenty, but I’m older than that. I’m a lot older.’ She wipes her faces as if removing invisible cobwebs. ‘I don’t like it.’
She heads off down the corridor, hair flailing like an anemone’s tentacles about her head.
The Lemur lingers. When she’s gone he approaches the door and opens it and sniffs the air. It smells of dust and jet fuel and pollen. He peers into the darkness and sees stranger things than he’s ever seen. A rocket flying backwards down to the earth. A whole book slipping down a pipe and springing out into someone’s lap at the other end. A bird flying around with a tiny bag of grey dust he knows is not of this world. He tries to step through to get a better look at it all, but he can’t. He tries again and it’s like there’s a pane of glass between him and the other side. Now the images have resolved themselves into something more tangible: another mall, square-roofed and glittering, full of ghostly folk who don’t yet exist living lives that haven’t yet begun.
The Lemur steps back and looks at the future he’ll never reach. He now his time is also here he doesn’t resent it. He’s seen enough tomorrows, and they’re all the same, in the end, as yesterday.
He closes the door, and runs after the Girl. After all – he still has today.