The Impossible Boy by Mark Griffiths

being
useful
to someone – and you’re not going to stop me!’
    ‘But Dave, you can’t—’
    ‘No, Gill. We gave up the Society of Highly Unusual Things because we were afraid of causing harm. But here’s an opportunity to use that knowledge to do some good!’
    ‘Dave, you’re shouting at me . . .’
    ‘I FEEL like shouting!’ bellowed Dave. ‘For the first time in ages I feel like shouting and running about and using my brain! Anything except mouldering away in this kitchen
eating ruddy apples! Are we going to help the boy or what?’
    Gill stared at her husband for a long time. ‘Yes,’ she said finally, in a quiet voice. ‘Yes, you’re right, darling. We’ve got to help Barney. Of course we
have.’
    ‘Thank you,’ said Barney, feeling relieved to have someone on his side. ‘So. What do we do? You mentioned this fusion plant, Dave?’
    Dave nodded. ‘Produces huge quantities of energy. It’s what this 4-D beast will be after. Could be very dangerous if that energy is released suddenly.’
    ‘How dangerous?’
    ‘You ever hear of a couple of places called Hiroshima and Nagasaki?’
    Barney nodded grimly. ‘Pretty dangerous, then. Great. Is there anything we can do?’
    ‘There is, as it happens,’ said Gill. ‘A few weeks before Fleur vanished, back in nineteen seventy-six, Dave and I had been researching reports of inter-dimensional rifts
throughout history. It seems that in various places and various times, pathways have opened up between our world and different universes. There’s a famous story from seventeen seventy-four
about the chemist Joseph Priestley seeing a coach and horses vanish in a flash of light along Oxford Street in London. And lots of people have reported seeing things that can’t really be
there, which might be the same phenomenon. From what we could tell, a lot of these pathways were opened up by special objects – boxes, bits of furniture, books sometimes, but more often than
not they were in lockets that people wore around the neck.’
    ‘We found information on several of these lockets,’ said Dave, hauling himself from his chair and picking up the chunks of broken pottery. Barney went to help him. ‘They were
called angel lockets because people thought they opened up doors to heaven. Needless to say, they were extremely rare. But the idea sort of took hold of us. We became obsessed with finding
one.’
    ‘We’d buy any old lockets from junk shops,’ said Gill. ‘Bought dozens of them. But of course they were just old lockets. Nothing more. The last one I found I
couldn’t open. It drove me mad because I could tell there was some simple knack to the clasp that held the two halves together. I fiddled with that damn locket for two solid days. Then when I
did open it—’
    ‘It was at the park, wasn’t it?’ Barney cut in. ‘When the mayor was unveiling that statue?’
    Gill nodded. ‘The locket opened. There was a white light. And Fleur vanished.’
    ‘And that was when the statue got reversed, wasn’t it?’
    ‘Some force from the fourth dimension nudged the statue,’ said Dave, ‘rotating it about a 4-D axis, turning it into its own mirror image.’
    ‘But how could it do that?’ asked Barney.
    Dave held up a plate, one of the few on the draining board that was still in one piece. Painted on it was a picture of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. ‘See this plate? See the
picture on it?’
    ‘Yup.’
    Dave turned the plate over in his hands. ‘Well, I can rotate the plate two ways – forwards and backwards, and from side to side. When it’s upside down it looks different,
doesn’t it? But it’s still the same plate.’
    ‘Obviously.’
    ‘Obviously. But there’s another way I could rotate the plate if I were able to. Through the fourth dimension. It’s not a direction we humans have access to normally, but if I
did, I would be able to rotate the plate so that when we looked at it we saw it as a mirror image of itself. Do