Parking Space Read online



  Parking Space

  Parking Space

  Copyright 2016 Edgar Million

  23rd June 2025

  The wind swirls outside the window blowing grey poisonous gas against the surface and although I can't hear the noise through the thick vacuum sealed glass, I sometimes imagine I can, imagine that the chemical storm buffets and blows me. I know I'd die in a second if I ever did stand out on the surface of the grey empty planet which I can see through my window, but the sense is hard to shake off.

  I'm not quite over the novelty of my window, which looks out of my new garage, this miraculous space bolted by a technician onto the front of my three storey town-house, but something about the bleakness of the alien planet outside grips me whenever I enter the room and colours the experience.

  Alien planet outside the window? In Islington? What is this nonsense?

  Of course, it's not an actual alien planet.

  It's Earth. Dead and ravaged.

  Yet despite the fact that this bleak realm is definitely Earth it is still entirely alien. An artist's impression of everything which might have gone wrong but didn't. A stark illustration of how miraculous it is that life exists here in this Earth at all.

  I stand in my Room, stare out my window and consider what could have been if this universe had not decided to be so kind to us.

  1st October 2025

  It's been six months since they installed my Room and still the dog won’t come in.

  Stupid mutt.

  He drops to the floor at the sound of the summons, ears flat to his face as though I'd called him for a bath; begging me to free him from the responsibility to obey his master, so I leave him be and he slopes back into the hallway glancing back fearfully at me as I re-enter the garage myself.

  ***

  There is, I admit, an atmosphere in my Room.

  In ghost stories they sometimes describe a haunted space, forever cold because of the spirits which stalk the floorboards and hide in the cupboards, and regardless of what the thermostat on the wall says, this area is never warm. But as I peer through the thick muddied window of the Room (my Super Garage Model Deluxe) I know it can’t be that.

  There are no ghosts in this Room; in this place.

  Nothing ever lived in this realm, so nothing ever died. I never believed in ghosts in my world, a rationalist to the end, so why on earth would I believe in them here in this other dead planet.

  14th February 2026

  I can hear Sandy, my little one, in the street shrieking at her big sister Kel because of some perceived slight, but my attention is drawn away from this, as it so often is, back to the bleak emptiness outside my window.

  I don't even know why they put a window in, so little light makes it through the grime and the dust, but whenever I'm parking or stashing my tools I become caught up in it.

  A whole world.

  Empty.

  Dead.

  An unshaded replica of our own planet. It's amazing. Sometimes I wonder how I drag myself away.

  12th May 2026

  Despite the extra heaters I've employed, my garage still never gets any warmer. The warm air blowing in from the street forms a misty haze on the doorway as it meets the icy cold of the Room.

  Outside the front entrance I noticed Old Henry, one of the neighbours, leaning against the entrance to the garage and watching me, a look of grim fascination on his face, as he interrogates the space which one year ago had not existed.

  Or had existed forever, but somewhere else.

  “What a ridiculous thing to do," Old Henry told me when I announced we'd purchased a Room, "to discover something as miraculous as multiple universes and turn it into real estate. We are capable of such big things yet we make them so small.”

  I laughed, but felt a little affronted.

  Old people just don't get it sometimes.

  What was that thing Douglas Adams said? Something about all inventions made in one's formative years being miraculous and very much in the expected run of things, but everything over the age of forty being voodoo. Something like that, but on a busy street like Mackenzie Road, parking was at a premium, and the option to acquire three additional parking spaces was not to be sniffed at.

  Okay for an old codger who hadn't driven in his whole life to make such judgements - where did he ever walk except to the Little Prince pub on the Cally. Besides, I needed somewhere to park my Lexus where it couldn't be scratched by envious locals, and Earth No. 2 would suit me just fine.

  ‘Dead Nowhere’ the papers nicknamed it, although the boffins called it ‘Terra’.

  Fifty years ago Old Henry’s equivalent would’ve have been moaning about the Internet or Walkmans. A hundred years ago telly would have been the end of the world. Before that the Novel would have been the death of civilisation.

  Time for Old Henry to enter the Twenty-Twenties, I reckon.

  I admit when I first heard the boffins had found a way to break through into an alternative reality I too had more exciting visions, of other worlds, of quantum possibilities.

  Like in that old TV programme, Sliders; they show it on SciFy Classic all the time: I dreamt of a billion world's in which I lived as a rock-star or a junkie, a scientist or a priest, but when they discovered the only world they had access to was barren and empty, these dreams quickly passed.

  There were two earths; two Earths they could find anyway. One dead and one alive.

  So. And. What.

  After the first was prised open there was speculation millions more might also turn up, but the boffins have so far failed to open any others. Mostly they say this is it. We've gone as far as we can go.

  ***

  Two Earths then.

  Ours, fragrant and full of life, and the other, ammonia streaked and seedless, as lifeless and useless as the moon. A black shadow imprint of the Earth.

  Initial excitement at the prospect of multiple world's and endless possibility was quickly superseded by news articles decrying the enormous wedge of money spunked away by the team down in Oxford; just to break open the shell of a coconut containing nothing, worse than nothing, since a number of researchers died as the atmosphere flooded in from Dead Nowhere into the lab and stripped the skin from their bones.

  Learning and discovery for its own sake were mentioned in some more reputable news outlets, but since the other earth appeared more or less untouched in 7 billion years and was deadly and inhospitable, but mostly people just griped about it.

  Quiet desperation might once have been the English way, but these days low level grumbling was the first order of the day. Bloody waste of time.

  Except. Except.

  Everything is useful to the imaginative mind.

  The moon was barren and empty but as a result of our visits there everything from CAT scanners to cordless drills had been invented, so the waste was only there to those of limited imagination.

  A young Silicon Valley researcher, I think she was called Kelly Abramovich, had spotted, then patented, an angle no one else had thought of. I remember listening to her plummy London accent on some American public radio broadcast, talking about how the idea had come to her whilst visiting one of her father's factories.

  She'd watched this high-vis coated crowd of workmen loading boxes up near Newcastle and, about to justify her very, very expensive education, began designing concrete blocks to connect our two planets.

  “Little pockets of our Earth sewn into the lining of that dead world,” she told some American guy, maybe Ira Glass, “the purpose of which, will be real estate, to serve the mundane purpose of car and property storage.”

  I often stand outside and look at it; still in wonder.

  A doorway big enough to drive a car through, like an
oversized version of the doors from Monsters Inc, but thin enough to fit across the front of any average sized house.

  The doorway sat in my front garden and the Room sat in Dead Nowhere. Deadsville UK. Both a million miles off and still a wafers breadth away.

  Initially the start-up proposed the new world as vacuum sealed living space, real estate in the New World, but this was quickly ruled out.

  The coldness which seeped through the supposedly impermeable breeze blocks made prospective owners shudder and reject them, despite their relative cheapness and convenience compared to normal London property prices.

  People who'd previously lived in one-room windowless basements in Barking said ‘no thank you very much’ to five room mansions in Fulham.

  “Sorry,” they'd tell the estate agent, “it just don't feel right.”

  So the vision was reappraised and refined, reduced, down to furniture storage and car parking.

  Loads of storage companies went bust at the beginning. Why stick your stuff in big yellow when you can add a football pitch sized cupboard to your bedroom?

  8th November 2026

  When I first stood in my new garage I reckoned at first that the dislike I'd heard about stemmed from the view; the swirling deadly mass of grey and the dead acidic landscape which reminded me of a late Turner painting gone terribly wrong, but I don’t know anymore. Because even if you close your eyes and ignore the dead vista of Terra in front of you, there remains a sense the other world is observing you, hostile and malevolent, and even after all this time this sense has not passed.

  It’s as though the garage were a splinter under the skin of the dead Earth; which the other planet knows instinctively shouldn't be there. While you’re in its view you feel a deep sense of rejection. Of being rejected by a planet; being rejected by a universe.

  Silly, since the other world is so obviously barren, but so many people report discomfort; well, you have to wonder.

  I've listened to so many theories about what led the other planet to be such a bleak, terrible, lifeless place, and our Earth so rich, full and lush, but no one really knows. At some point millions of years ago something happened which meant the spark of life which flourished in our world was extinguished there.

  God might not play dice with the universe, so maybe he flips coins instead.

  There's this fella who stands on the corner of Chapel Market, outside the Mark'ses and, Bible aloft, tells anyone who will listen that Dead Nowhere is hell, waiting for all us sinners if we fail to repent.

  Unusually, for I rarely have sympathy for religious types, I can see where he's coming from. I'm glad it's safely sealed on the other side of that thick glass.

  ***

  The two Earths are siblings: one a professor of neuroscience, seeking to do only good in the world, the other an estate agent, his mind set only upon despair.

  I should stop.

  These musings are stupid, I know, yet each day after I drive my car into the other world I find I lose a block of time observing the massing clouds of swelling grey gas outside, gas which would strip the skin from your bones, I'm told, thankful for the thick wide window which protects me.

  1st January 2027

  Happy New Year.

  I'm in a strange mood today. New years blues no doubt. I should go up to be with the family but more and more I find myself drawn to this view, the wind swirling and blasting my window with dust. I don't know why.

  Sometimes I think I see movement in the dead world.

  I imagine I see figures in the distance, although when I grab my daughter's National Geographic telescope to interrogate the landscape there's never anything there - of course. It's the movement of the dust, I'm sure, making shapes which through the haze make me think of languorous figures, muscular, stretching and standing upright under a dying sun.

  Each time I do this I shake my head at my foolishness.

  The world is dead. My imaginings change nothing.

  2nd January 2027

  The dust is up again today.

  Swirling, roaring clouds of grey particles which belie the sunny North London Street upon which my children currently play.

  Skating back and forth upon pink thin roller blades which rattle and scrape along the pavement whilst Old Harry chats to their mum on the stoop.

  I turn to join them, but think I hear a rap of some particle clipping the window behind me. It sounded hard and sharp and I turn back in surprise, unsure what I expect to see, but only find the usual howling winds, and nothing more, how could there be anything, but still I stupidly press my face to the glass and peer this way then that, trying to see ... What do I think I'll see?

  The ghost of Xmas never-was?

  I told the missus about the noise but she told me to shut up, and that the whole bloody place gives her the creeps, never mind my daft tales of ghosts tapping on the window.

  I understand how much she hates the Room.

  She doesn't need to tell me.

  She virtually runs in and out when she has to get some of the gardening tools, and point-blank refused my offer to buy her a new car on the grounds she'd have to park it in there.

  "I'd rather get the tube," she told me.

  30th March 2027

  Today I definitely saw something move.

  I’m sure of it. As I commenced my daily commune with the mist I watched the unending terrain visibly bubble and shift, the hard rock surface momentarily liquid before my eyes so I reached for the phone, misdialling twice because my hands were shaking.

  "No sir," the helpful India-based call centre operative told me. "There were no seismic activities in that part of the world. Broadly speaking the continental shapes and seismic seasons of that planet mirror our own.”

  “But,” I hesitated, “I thought I saw a face, in the stone ground. I know it makes no sense, but...”

  The operator chose to ignore this statement. His tone reminds me of my own in Mum's last days, as I tried to convince her the nice nurses weren't trying to steal her shoes.

  “I'm assuming there were no earthquakes in Islington today, Sir?"

  I confirmed the assumption.

  "Then I would suggest not worrying Sir," the operator paused, "Sir, do you look out of the window much, Sir? We hear from a number of our customers that if they stare out at the world then they see things which aren't there. Hallucinations, Sir. We've been advising our customers not to look."

  "But the Window is there," I tell him, expressing a truth I hadn't realised. "How can I not look?"

  "We've arranged for the installation of a number of LCD windows to be fitted over the old, real windows in an effort to make the atmosphere in the Room more conducive to relaxation, I can arrange it as part of your current contract, no charge sir.”

  23rd July 2027

  Today when I stand in front of the window in my garage it peeks into my small courtyard garden, onto kids’ toys and a broken garden table which I really do need to fix soon.

  They installed it last week, and although I can no longer see the Dead Nowhere in the frame, I'm still drawn to the same spot. I know it's still there.

  I can chose any view, but whatever I go for I still think constantly about the ghost world behind it.

  I don't miss seeing it exactly, but a black rose of paranoia has blossomed in my heart as it occurs to me this black dead planet still watches me, but now, away from our returning gaze, who watches it?

  31st July 2027

  I changed the view on my Window again today, to show a rolling, flower filled meadow, but the illusion fools no one.

  I know the scene which truly lies beyond and I’m more troubled than I could have dreamt at its absence.

  22nd October 2027

  I don’t know why I did it.

  It seems so, irrational; so unlike me.

  The Window lies in tatters at my feet the glass shattered and scattered across the white concrete floor. Ripped from the wall, the grey world there again in all
its sombre glory.

  There's a broom just over by the wall, but I'll clear up later. I need to look out there.

  It’s crazy, I know, but as I looked at the representation of a million bluebells I thought I’d heard the glass behind cracking, and just knew the acrid empty world behind was about to pour through and kill us all. Yet when I crowbarred the Window down from the wall I saw the same empty broken world grinning back at me.

  Maybe I should just cancel my contract and get rid of this dead space. This thought is stillborn.

  Cancellation isn't a serious option.

  Besides, there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of these rooms all over London now, maybe a hundred thousand across the globe, and the thought they would be there but unwatched by my eyes seems unbearable.

  I'd rather get rid of the car than the Room. I need to see it.

  ***

  Last night the earth bubbled and shifted again. I saw it.

  I didn't call it in though; they wouldn't believe me, but for a moment, there in the liquid rock I thought I saw a thousand faces staring back up at me. Cruel black eyes watching me, and then gone.

  I knew they couldn't be real. The world was dead, all the scientific surveys were clear on this and if there were any ghosts then they would have been lost strays from this world who'd wandered in by mistake.

  I would have phoned it in, but who would believe me? In a moment they'd gone and even I began to doubt what I had seen.

  27th December 2027

  There was a story on the news last night, about how loads of people were getting rid of their Rooms and the missus asked if we could get shot of ours, but I just shook my head.

  I virtually live in there now.

  I told her I'm working on a project, a surprise for her birthday, but each time I feed her this lie I see a frown of scepticism. A slight shake of the head.

  "And you know how much I love that car," I plead, then breezily, "come on love, don't be a wimp, it just a door into nowhere. Bit like getting the train to your aunts in South London. Only less dangerous."

  3rd February 2028 (Today)

  I slept in my Room last night. In an my Dad’s old armchair, swaddled in blankets, keeping guard over the window and when I awoke knocked over a half drunk can of Fosters all over the floor, spreading out across the cold concrete.