The House Next Door, Chapter One

“Ready, Jen?” 4-H-N asked.

The tall schoolgirl with swirling fair hair looked back over her shoulder and nodded, resolute.

“Ready, Flashsatsumas?”

“Ready,” said the boy in vest and pants who hung a foot or so above the deck, his wrists and ankles clamped in heavy power-siphon manacles.

“Right,” muttered 4-H-N, and looked to her equipment as the charge began to build.

When Joe had refused Mini-Flash Juniper permission to experiment with the Nottingham portal, on the grounds it would be too dangerous, 4-H-N had jumped at the chance to help her friend. She couldn’t see how what Jen had planned was any more dangerous than letting her stay within a light-year of Joe just now. Replicating the portal here in a disused storage-bay seven levels below Flash Club Headquarters hadn’t been a problem, since Jenny only had to look at technical schematics once. As for the enormous volume of energy required to keep such apparatus up and running, which would surely have given the game away had the girls relied on the reactor, that was where Flashsatsumas came in.

A long low rumble steadily mounted from the jury-rigged framework, and static electricity cracked, striking sparks from Juniper’s stockings and flicking little glimpses of her nylon-tinted Luttertons. It was akin to the onset of a storm, and three steeled themselves, whether at the controls or suspended aloft or facing down the portal’s maw. From that station Mini-Flash Juniper heard 4-H-N shout out:

“We’re nearing tolerance, Jenny! So if this is going to work at all, I guess it’ll – ”

Then Mini-Flash Juniper was blinking at her own reflection, and everything else had stopped.

Mini-Flash Juniper?

Yes.

That was who she was, and she could also see from the mirror she was still wearing the blue school sweater and skirt that belonged to reality.

She’d managed to hold on to her identity and memories. Maybe because this time she’d induced the vision, and had been ready for it.

So far so good.

This was precisely how the last one had begun, with her surveying herself in the hallway of The Four Heroes’ house. It wasn’t a bright summer morning though, as it had been then. To Mini-Flash Juniper’s immediate left was the front door, surrounded by frosted panes, and what light these admitted was that of a day at its end.

No hour for a cycle-ride, in other words. Juniper looked around. On her right-hand side was a flight of stairs, with a square window looking out at the top.

The angle of the house next door loomed in this frame before the gathering dark.

Juniper quailed at it. Her strong thigh-muscles turned to water – she felt them quivering slackly in the encirclement of her stockings. All very well, to joke about waging war and shoot that house little dares from the top of the road. A lot of things were all very well when you didn’t remember Limb Four. Or when you hadn’t yet set foot on the studio’s filming-stage. Now Mini-Flash Juniper felt as she’d done in her final moments there, or rather worse, because this time she was able to make a heap of Neetra and Robin and Flashshadow and Splitsville and everyone and everything in Nottingham she loved, yet even so what choice did she have but The Foretold One, when otherwise he would only make it happen again?

From somewhere deep within, Juniper mustered a mighty effort to pull herself together.

It wasn’t like a house could come jumping in at her through that tiny window.

Nor was it possible for anyone inside that house to see her right now. The window was too high up for that. Any nasty little spies peering in at it from their own first floor would behold The Four Heroes’ upstairs landing, but nothing else.

Juniper was reasonably confident the boy next door didn’t have a periscope.

She let out her breath very slowly.

As long as she stayed where she was, she was safe.

“Mini-Flash Juniper?” said a voice.

It wasn’t any of the ones Mini-Flash Juniper had been either expecting or dreading. Once she was over her initial start, she realised in addition she knew whose it was.

“Flashsatsumas?” Juniper queried softly up the stairs, whence the words had issued.

There was no reply, and it wasn’t like Flashsatsumas to be rude.

“I didn’t know you were coming here with me,” Mini-Flash Juniper hinted further.

Now she was the one who sounded rude. Oh, the first gender were an impossible lot. How had they lasted so many eons in the galaxy, with such easily-wounded feelings?

“I’m here and I’m not here,” came back at last from Flashsatsumas. “It’s got something to do with how we’re using my powers, but it’s not very easy to explain.”

“Then, are you speaking for Intelligentsor?” inquired Mini-Flash Juniper.

All at once she felt too silly, conducting a conversation this way.

“You need to come downstairs, so we can speak to each other properly,” Juniper commanded.

It wasn’t that her accustomed Special Program imperiousness wasn’t there. Yet her voice had quavered, audibly, when her eyes flicked to the window.

“Intelligentsor wants you to come to me,” was the edict from on high.

And Mini-Flash Juniper felt what had given in her before threaten to give again.

She refused to think about that. There was a little bench close by, atop which sat a primitive Earth-communication device identical to the one Neetra insisted on having on her desk at the Town Hall, and alongside this a cushioned seat to sit on while you were using it. Forcibly Juniper smoothed her pleats under her and threw herself down with a considerable bump.

Just that moment she was in the mood to subject Flashsatsumas to a knock of like magnitude.

What was he doing here anyway? Boying-up the works when she had important voyages of self-discovery to undertake.

“Mini-Flash Juniper?” said the voice.

That one felt it a pity there was no-one around to watch her do nothing in response.

“Mini-Flash Juniper?” the voice tried again.

“Maybe when this is over you’ll have learned how to read girls a little better, Flashsatsumas,” rang from Mini-Flash Juniper haughtily. “When you interpolate them thus and receive no acknowledgement, it means they don’t wish to talk to you.”

“I’m not the one who has reading to do,” the patient tones returned. “You are, and you’ll have to come to me. The books are up here.”

“Reading?” repeated Juniper. “Books? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Remember what this is,” Flashsatsumas prompted, still not unkindly. “And remember why you came. You knew there’d be some task to it. That’s how these things are done.”

Mini-Flash Juniper sighed. It wasn’t as if she could deny any of that. So she made herself stand and corrected her stockings, but even then glanced fitfully aloft, apparently fearing the periscope after all.

It was no good. She couldn’t.

“Flashsatsumas, I appreciate it’s not possible for you to bring the books down here,” Juniper conciliated. “But can you at least come yourself and fetch me?”

If the rest of the Special Program could have heard her. Begging a boy. Mini-Flash Juniper was choking on it, as she was the tears which were all but about to gush forth. She might as well have told Flashsatsumas in plain pathetic language she was frightened. Because she was. She was terrified of having to walk past that window.

“Daylight’s nearly gone,” Flashsatsumas said. “Soon it’ll be night, and whatever the books might have had to teach you won’t be of any use then. Intelligentsor understands that this is a journey you have to make on your own.”

Mini-Flash Juniper felt like saying Intelligentsor’s symbolism had been a lot less obvious when Flashsatsumas wasn’t in charge. But since that wouldn’t have made any difference, and since it was plain enough there wasn’t anything else for it, she daintily lifted her skirts instead and planted one school shoe flat upon the first step.

TO BE CONTINUED