Argleton, Chapter 13: The Centre
Matt reaches the Centre and stumbles into a surprising discovery.
Read Chapter 12 first or start at the beginning.
The field was a field just like all the others. A tiny brook meandered along one side, giving it a wavy edge. Matt and Charlie stood in the middle, checking their position by GPS.
“This is it.” Matt held his phone up. On the map, the blue dot of his location sat directly on top of the pin he’d set before they’d left the house. “The dead centre of The Argleton Triangle.”
Charlie looked at the ground beneath their feet and saw nothing but, by now, very familiar grass.
“Well, if there’s something here, it’s well buried.”
“Should have brought a spade.”
“Yeah, perhaps we should have. Masquerade was the hunt for a golden hare pendant, buried in a hare-shaped ceramic container to protect it from metal detectorists.”
“They can’t seriously expect us to dig. Haven’t geo-games moved on since then?”
They looked around. The field was completely empty, except for them. No sheep. No cows. No horses. Not even any evidence of previous sheep or cows or horses.
“We’ve found three phantom towns, mapped them, found the centre, and now there’s nothing here,” Charlie said, trying to hide her disappointment.
Matt switched on his phone’s wifi sniffer and searched for a hotspot. “Maybe the thing we’re looking for isn’t physical. We didn’t find anything physical at the other places.”
“Is there wifi?”
Matt paused, waiting for the app to finish its scan. A message popped up on his screen:
> Welcome to the Centre.
The phone went black for a moment, then showed a full-screen image of a field. Matt looked up at Charlie, confused.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I have no idea. This isn’t anything I’ve done.” He hit the home button on the phone, but nothing changed. On the screen, all he could see was grass. It shifted as he moved the phone.
“The camera’s on,” Charlie said, peering over his shoulder. “Look.” She pushed the phone down a little and Matt’s feet came into view.
“It’s not the camera app, though. There are no controls.” He held the phone up and the image panned on the screen as he swept it in an arc before him. Another pop-up appeared.
> Initialising.
As they watched, a wireframe began to build on the screen. Lines grew out of the ground, turned corners and joined together. Then, brick by brick, walls went up, windows formed, doors and tarmac beneath their feet. They both looked down at the grass, glanced at the screen and saw grey paving slabs with a hint of green behind them. The screen was a three dimensional architectural overlay on the pastoral scene behind it.
“This is bonkers,” Matt said.
“It’s an alternate reality,” said Charlie.
The world on the screen had filled in completely now, a semi-transparent layer revealing enough of the real world behind that they wouldn’t accidentally fall in the stream. In this alternate world they were standing in a wide, open piazza surrounded by two- and three-storey buildings. Some were all-glass, reflecting the sun in their floor-to-ceiling windows. Others were ornate limestone façades that would blend into any 16th century capital city. These stood between sleek metal frontings like something out of a 50s imagining of a 90s that never quite came to pass, with bulging pods perched on a smooth, narrow stalks.
Matt slowly turned around, riveted to the tiny screen in his hand, Charlie shuffled round with him, staring over his shoulder. There was a perfectly manicured pair of trees framing steps up to a Georgian townhouse. A road leading to the north. A shop front with an awning shading a window that seemed unglazed. And a small, half-timbered building with an incongruously modern sign above the door which said Visitor Centre.
Matt started walking towards the building. As he walked through the field, so he walked through the simulation on his phone.
“This is amazing,” he said. “It responds to every movement in real time, no lag at all.”
“Bet it’s thrashing your poor phone’s processor. But it’s a bit strange how there are no people. It’s like a ghost town… A ghost town built by a 3D animator who has only just discovered surface textures, that is.”
“Yeah, it is rather lacking thematic coherence.”
They reached the Visitor Centre and Matt stretched out a hand. In his phone, he saw it push the door open. They stepped through. Faintly, they heard the sound of a tinkling bell emanate from the phone’s speakers.
Matt did another 360 degree turn, revealing racks of leaflets, shelves of books, and displays of souvenirs. It was like any other visitor centre anywhere in the real world. When he reached his starting position, Matt was so surprised to see a man behind the counter that he dropped his phone.
Charlie laughed as Matt, embarrassed, picked up the handset and reoriented himself to face the man. A little taller than Matt, the man had smooth black hair swept back into a ponytail, sharp cheekbones and pale green eyes that looked slightly out of place against the golden tan of his skin. He wore a tight-fitting t-shirt which covered a well-muscled torso. Matt couldn’t see much below mid-chest and didn’t really want to be caught dipping the phone downwards.
Somewhere in the back of his head, Matt remembered the not-quite-right avatars in 3D virtual worlds. This was a little slicker, but still not quite all there.
“Hi Matt!” the avatar said, a very real-sounding voice coming from the phone’s speakers.
Matt started with surprise.
“What?”
“I’m glad you finally made it to the Centre.”
“Did he just say your name?” asked Charlie, incredulous.
“Who are you?” asked Matt.
“Please,” said the avatar, ignoring the question, “do take a look around the town. Who knows what you will find.”
The figure on the screen picked up what looked like a phone from the counter, tapped something into it and said, “There. I think you’ll find that useful.”
Matt’s phone screen flipped into a map view of the phantom town, their location a pulsating blue dot. The sound of a door closing was just audible from the phone speakers. They looked back up towards the counter to find themselves alone in the visitor centre.
“Wow,” said Charlie. “Someone put a lot of effort into this.”
“There has to be a set of webcams around here somewhere,” Matt said, his eyes seeking telltale signs of technology hidden in hedges or trees. “I bet they’re tracking our location and when we reach a certain point it triggers a particular sequence. Very clever!”
“Ah, so some of my geeking has rubbed off on you then,” Charlie laughed. “But, if this is Masquerade II, perhaps the golden hare is hidden somewhere in this visualisation?” Charlie suggested. “Wait, what’s the date?”
“Erm, 29th, I think.”
“Bah, not an equinox then. That was when the original clues to the hare’s whereabouts would point to its location precisely.”
“You think we have to come back next month?”
“No, that would be ridiculous, given the furore online.”
“Well, let’s just see what we can find.”
The pair spent a while wandering around the town, their only window into it a tiny phone screen. Occasionally, they glimpsed other avatars in the distance, but their paths never crossed. Matt at one point tried to walk through a wall and, whilst there was nothing physical to stop him, his phone screen went blank until he had backed out of the building.
“This isn’t going to get us anywhere,” Charlie said. “Think for a moment. We’re at the centre of an equilateral triangle, so are there any triangles on the map that might help?”
Matt pulled up the map and they stared at it. It was devoid of roads at 60 degrees to each other, or any other obvious sign of triangleness.
“We started here,” Charlie said, pointing at the Visitor Centre in the bottom left of the screen. “What if that’s one apex?”
“Where’s the second? If it’s another equilateral triangle then we can work out the third when we know the second, but there’s nothing to tell us where the second is.”
They stared at the screen again, then Charlie took Matt’s hand and guided it to tilt the phone to one side.
“There!” she said. “If you look at those two crescent-shaped roads that are facing each other, if you take that to be a bisected edge, then the second point has to be about there, in this… what is that? A park?”
“Which means the third apex must be about there-ish,” Matt pointed.
“So the centre is about here. Except that looks like it’s in the middle of a building of some sort.”
“Let’s go see!”
They set off through the 3D-scape, heading first along a narrow road before reaching what looked like a series of switchbacks that would normally be found going up a steep hill.
“Have you noticed that every step we take in the real world is quite a bit bigger in this alternate reality?” Matt asked.
“Yes, I have. But then, this field isn’t exactly enormous.”
“I wish we’d been able to travel three steps for every one in the walk over here from the car.”
They slowly navigated their way around the alternate world, reluctant to just walk as-the-crow-flies to the centre. It seemed wrong to just charge through a reality that someone else had so carefully constructed. They walked through another piazza, this one with a beautiful fountain in the centre, arcs of water glinting in the sunshine. It was easy to forget that they were walking through two worlds, not just the virtual one.
Finally, they reached the area where they guessed the centre to be. The building occupying the spot was an octagonal colonnade of Ionic pillars. Holding the phone up, they could see a huge golden dome. Atop that was a golden hare.
“This has to be it,” Charlie said.
Matt started towards it, climbing the steps towards the pillars. He felt as if he were almost climbing in real life. He glanced down at his feet through the lens of the phone. Instead of seeing his trainers, in all their photorealistic glory, he saw an animated approximation of his trainers, as if they had become a part of this virtual world.
“Matt?” Charlie said, a concerned tint to her voice.
“What?” He didn’t look back, but instead stared up at the man from the Visitor Centre who had emerged from inside the building. He took another step. He almost didn’t need to look through the phone anymore. The vision was there, inside his head. He could see the ornate capitals on the pillars with their intricately carved volutes.
“Matt?” Charlie called again. There was something unnatural in the stiff way he was standing. “Hey!” He didn’t respond. Charlie reached out towards him, to shake him into reaction.
“Charlie!” came a woman’s yell. Charlie froze for a second, her arm outstretched, fingertips not an inch away from Matt’s arm.
§
Unaware of what was unfolding around him in the real world, Matt reached the last step in his alternate reality.
“Welcome to the Temple,” the man said. Matt heard the voice somewhere in his head, as if it had bypassed his ears entirely. He reached out to Matt, inviting. Matt went to shake the man’s hand and saw his arm in front of him, smooth and avatar-like.
“What is the Temple?” Matt asked, his own voice sounding strange, flattened, as if it had been put through an equaliser that stripped out all the highest and lowest frequencies. In comparison, the man’s voice had sounded like someone had set its EQ to Bass Booster.
“You will see,” the man said, as he clasped Matt’s hand. Matt felt the stranger’s fingers wrap around his, but the sensation was rooted deep in his brain rather than originating from his skin. It all felt so real, yet so unreal.
He stepped through the row of columns into the building itself and felt a lightness, almost a giddiness, as if he had stood up too fast. Somewhere in the distance he heard a familiar voice, but his brain was reluctant to listen, hearing just a noise that sounded bells of recognition but no comprehension.
He looked around the Temple, the sun streaming through the pillars, casting bold shadows on the limestone floor. For a moment, something felt wrong. He tried to look through the walls, searching for hints of green underneath, but there was nothing. He wondered why he had thought there should be.
§
Charlie turned towards the strange voice in time to see a small, grey-haired woman hurtling towards her. Despite her size, the woman tackled Charlie like a seasoned rugby pro, flooring her. Winded, Charlie gasped for breath as she struggled to push the woman off, but her attacker was both younger and stronger than she at first looked. She pinned Charlie to the ground by her shoulders.
“I told you! I warned you!” the woman said.
“Get off me!” Charlie shouted. She wriggled one arm free and shoved the woman in the chest.
“You didn’t listen, did you? Well, you should be glad that I was here to save you!”
“Save me from what?” gasped Charlie as she finally pushed the woman aside. They eyed each other warily.
“From them!” the woman hissed, her hand waving to encompass the entire world.
“What them? What are you talking about?”
“They’ll steal your mind if you let them, you stupid girl. Didn’t you realise you were in over your head?”
Charlie looked up at Matt, who stood statuesque. She leapt to her feet, grabbed him by the shoulders, and shook him hard. His eyes were glazed, unresponsive.
“What’s happened to him?” Charlie rounded on the woman. “What’s happened?”
§
Matt took another step forward into his new reality. The phone in his hand, he saw, looked like his phone, but with crisper, sleeker lines. He went to put it away and, as his hand neared his hip, the phone seemed to just transfer itself automatically to his pocket. The benefits of nonphysicality, Matt thought.
He looked at his arms, his legs, and noticed how much more detailed the textures were now than they had been on his phone. He gazed up at the domed ceiling above and saw a richness of colour that he had missed before. Glancing back outside he realised why they hadn’t bumped into anyone on the ground: above him people were flying through the air, no jetpacks or personal gyrocopters needed, just the will to fly. He smiled.
“Welcome, Matt,” said the man. “Let me show you show to customise yourself.”
§
Charlie shook him again. She half expected him to stay rigid and staring, but his body relaxed, almost collapsing. Charlie staggered under his deadweight, trying to let him down gently onto the grass. The grey-haired stranger watched impassively, her mouth agape.
“But it’s you they’re after,” the woman mumbled. “You. You solved the puzzle. How could they…”
“Who they hell are ‘they’?” Charlie checked Matt’s breathing and pulse. He still had both, but his breath was shallow and his pulse weak. She rolled him over into the recovery position, then pulled her phone out and dialled 999. The stranger lunged for her handset, trying to bat it away. “What are you doing?” Charlie shouted.
“It’s too late. He’ll be dead like the rest of them. Like my Edward.”
“He’s not dead!”
The emergency services operator answered and Charlie gave their position as best she could.
The woman backed away, staring horrified at Matt’s prone form.
“I warned you. I didn’t know you had someone else…”
“Who are you?” Charlie looked apprehensively at Matt, unsure if there was something else she should be doing, then back at her assailant.
“I’m Maggie. I…”
“Tell me what you know,” Charlie said, the shock distancing her from the situation. She felt cold and calm and rational and dislocated from the world.
“It’s too late. Too late. If you’d stopped when I told you, I wouldn’t have had to… But you ignored me, you didn’t give me any choice. I had to stop you!”
“That was you?” Anger was starting to dispel the calm.
“You had to be taught a lesson!”
“You threatened us? Broke into our home? Derailed a train? God, you could have killed someone!”
“What? What train?”
“What happened to Matt?” Charlie demanded.
“It’s too late. He’s gone.”
The sound of the emergency helicopter approaching made the pair of them look up. Maggie threw Charlie a terrified look and fled.
Charlie stared after her for a moment, then turned to Matt, shielding him from the wind of the helicopter’s landing, brushing his hair out of his face, stroking his cheek, hoping that it wasn’t too late.
If you want to read Argleton all in one go, download the free ebook now. And why not try The Gates of Balawat or The Lacemaker as well!