Friends and Enemies (Book 2 of White Rabbit)

Friends and Enemies

By Stuart Oldfield

Copyright 2022 Stuart Oldfield

Smashwords Edition

The four books of the White Rabbit series

1. The One Who Is Two

2. Friends and Enemies

3. Red Tape

4. The Woman Who Looks Both Ways

Table of Contents

Preface—the story so far...

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Preface—the story so far...

With his life in complete meltdown in this world, following an encounter with a mysterious girl on a bridge across the M25 Simon Cadwallader finds himself unexpectedly transported into an alternative reality. Hallucinogenic dream or a parallel universe? Either way, he arrives completely disorientated and with no memory of his previous life—not even his own name.

As he gradually gets his bearings, it becomes apparent that Loofah—as our amnesiac hero now calls himself—is an unwitting pawn in a game about which he knows nothing. He is quickly co-opted by one of the most prominent players, namely the sinister Company, run by Mr Stobart, its shadowy Chief Executive, with the unstinting support of Miss Leggett, his loyal subordinate and the Under Manager for the Sector. But who is the fat little man in the bowler who repeatedly attempts to make contact with Loofah and divert him from following Miss Leggett's directives? And what of the plethora of strange beings and people—apparently including the girl from the bridge—who seem to be representatives of the government? Referring to him as 'The Seeker', the moniker that for some reason is printed across his tee-shirt, these officials are distinguished by their incessant exhorting of him to search for an enigmatic female Janus, The Woman Who Looks Both Ways.

The final player in the game is certainly the most disturbing. This creature, who seems to be Loofah's doppelgänger, at least physically, is also responsible for a string of terrible crimes and is working on behalf of the forces of darkness—according to Miss Leggett, that is, who is clearly intent on this individual's capture. Most unsettling for Loofah is that not only is he at risk of being blamed for his doppelgänger's crimes, but also that their relationship may be closer than mere physical resemblance, that there may be some existential link between them—'two sides of the same coin', as Miss Leggett says, 'two halves of the same whole'. Is it this uncomfortable sense of closeness that explains the intense loathing and dread that Loofah feels every time this creature is mentioned, a feeling that Miss Leggett is able to exploit when trying to persuade Loofah that capture of his evil twin is his duty, and his alone?

In the last stages of The One Who Is Two (the first book of the series), Miss Leggett and her cohorts have finally managed to manoeuvre Loofah into a face-to-face confrontation with the doppelgänger. But as he charges in for the attack, something causes him to hesitate—a strange feeling that momentarily neutralises his pulsing black hatred for his look-alike foe. And in that moment of hesitation, the girl from the bridge appears and embraces one of them. When Loofah realises that is the other, and not himself, who is the object of her affections, he hurls himself at the couple with a roar of injured rage—but they disappear suddenly in an impenetrable, sweet-scented fog. As recovers his senses, Loofah becomes conscious of how close to his own destruction he has just come.

Indeed, this is a watershed moment—it is now clear that Loofah will no longer be such a biddable pawn in Miss Leggett's side of the game. But what are his alternatives? Perhaps he should start heeding the counsel of the various government officials he has encountered and search for mysterious The Woman Who Looks Both Ways. If so, his search could begin in the village of Synge Green, towards which several officials and their minions have been trying to direct him and where he will apparently discover 'emergent propensities' that are salient to his quest.

Chapter 1

Whiteness, blank and liquid, it was like swimming in milk. Trees loomed out of the whiteness like dark ghosts and unseen roots snagged at his feet, trying to trip him. His mind as blank as the fog, he stumbled forward aimlessly, not even trying to think.

Almost imperceptibly the milk began to thin; he could just make out the ground under his feet and the trees coalesced at feet, rather than inches, from his face. He walked faster now, though still with no purpose. A sharp memory of a girl kissing someone who wasn't him stabbed into his chest—he winced, changed direction to escape the thought, and stumbled on.

Voices drifted out of the now watered milk: a woman, loud and angry, and a man. They were coming his way—Loofah stopped and held his breath.

'What's with all this bloody fog?' said the whiteness, in the Under Manager's voice, 'I can't see a damned thing.'

Truscott said something he didn't catch.

'Of course he did, you fool. He wouldn't dare cross me again.'

She was closer now, he could sense her presence just the other side of a thin blanket of opacity. Loofah tensed, holding himself as still as possible. Dry leaves crunched closer and a vague shadow appeared on the screen of mist directly in front of him. If he could see her, then she could see…

'It's thinner over here.' This was a third voice—Meadows—further away down the slope. 'You can see what you're doing.'

'This is utterly hopeless!' muttered Miss Leggett, almost in Loofah's ear. The shadow paused, as if she were listening, and for a long moment there was dead silence.

'Come on, Truscott, let's go!' she shouted, then heavy footsteps crunched in the leaves, moving away. The shadow thinned, then vanished. A branch broke and somebody stumbled with a curse.

'What exactly are we looking for?' asked Truscott, his voice small now, being swallowed by the fog.

'How the hell should I know?' snapped Miss Leggett, 'A hole or something. Maybe some trees knocked over and…' Her voice trailed away into the mist and he missed the rest.

At last Loofah could breathe out and stretch his stiffened limbs. No, he hadn't done what he was supposed to do, he thought, correcting the Under Manager's assumption. He had failed, yet again—he could almost hear her hectoring tones as she informed him of the fact. This time, however, her baleful reprimand bounced off the leather of his jacket and echoed away into the whiteness, leaving him strangely unaffected.

He waited until the voices were little more than distant mutterings and then set off in the opposite direction, taking care to tread lightly. The fog was thinning rapidly now and he wanted to be away while it still gave him some cover.

He had gone no more than fifty yards, however, when a pale shape on the ground in front caught his eye. It was a shoe, a left shoe, a fawn slip-on with a silly side-zip. Loofah recognised it, of course—it was his own shoe. He reached to pick it up but then stopped. No, it wasn't his shoe, for he was wearing both of his. Cold seawater flooded his veins and he shivered. Leave it, it's not yours, said a voice, let's get going. But he didn't get going, he stayed staring at the lost shoe while strange submarine creatures slithered over his flesh. Then, moving with the slow deliberation of an automaton, he crouched down and cupped it carefully in both hands.

He held the shoe gingerly, like an unexploded bomb, and pored over it, soaking up every tiny detail as if it were a religious artefact: the pattern of mud and grass scuffs on the pale leather, the smoothed ridging of the sole, the lining frayed at the heel with the 'St Michael' sticker that was half loose, the adhesive weakened by months of wear. The thinning fog began to resonate quietly with a single deep note, as from a bass organ pipe. He leaned against a tree and, standing on one leg, pulled off his own left shoe and held it beside the other one. There was no difference, they were identical: the worn lining, the loose sticker, every single scuff and stain, all exactly the same.

Loofah looked from one to the other, mesmerised by their weird significance, forgetting which was his and which was not. Indeed, it was no longer relevant which was his and which was not, for they were the same shoe, equal in every way. But this was absurd, it was impossible; how could there be two of one thing? There should be one—the organ note swelled to an ominous crescendo—he must make them one. He pushed the shoes together.

A vacuum opened up in front of him; colour, sound, even space itself, collapsed suddenly into the void between his hands—and a split nanosecond later exploded in a blaze of light and noise. The atomic blast hammered into Loofah's chest, hurling him backwards in a mad whirl of colour and a howling as of tearing metal, and then the world crashed in on him with a sickening crunch.

Flickering blue light held together by a spinning black latticework—and silence.

Then, very gradually, trickling into the silence came the rustle of wind in the high leaves and the electronic echo of birdsong. Loofah blinked and the latticework stopped spinning. He was lying on his back flat out on the soft earth, gazing up in to the trees.

He struggled painfully to his feet, pausing halfway up until a wave of dizziness passed. A thick bank of mist was drifting away down the slope, with now only a few tendrils curling across the ground where he stood. Loofah bent down to brush dry leaves and moss from his jeans, but as he went to give a sympathetic rub to a bruised left thigh, he stopped suddenly. There was something in front of him, something that wasn't right, something that—just wasn't. A space in the air, it was somehow less that a space. He winced, and tried to focus on the ground beyond the space, but he couldn't—the earth was there, he could almost see it, but at the same time it wasn't. He rubbed his eyes and concentrated on a single dry leaf, but as he did so it seemed to evade him, blending in with the background, becoming nothing. With his brain crawling like a nest of baby spiders from the effort, he clutched his jacket to his chest and with great relief turned away from the terrible none-ness.

A few feet behind the un-space was a young birch. Loofah saw now that there was a hole in its trunk, where the wood itself was only half-existent. Above this the branches twisted and writhed, not with the usual gentle undulations but in agony, like tortured snakes. And all about on the ground, and on the trunks of other nearby trees, were little fragments of the hideous unreality, as if splattered out from the epicentre of an explosion.

In a sudden rush of panic Loofah held up his hands and then carefully scanned over his jacket and tee-shirt, and down over his jeans. Over his skin and the material of his clothes colours flowed freely and patterns of delectable intricacy formed and reformed themselves in an everlasting dance of shape and light. Everything was normal, thank God—whatever it was, he had somehow escaped damage.

Now all he wanted was to be away from this place of violation as quickly as possible. But as he set off he felt the damp earth under his bare foot. He stopped and hunted around for his lost shoe, but there was no sign of it, it had vanished without trace.

Loofah hobbled down the slope as fast as his unshod foot would allow. The bank of fog was now gone and the last wisps of the magic mist swirled around his hurrying feet. He stopped and turned: the pit of emptiness was out of sight, lost among the trees and the undulations of the ground. He listened: nothing but languid birdsong echoing through the syrupy air and the quiet rustle of the breeze in the high canopy.

At last he breathed freely, and the tight bands around his chest began to loosen and fall away. For the first time since the encounter he felt the loveliness of the woods, with the gentle cadence of the birdsong, the swaying solidness of the tree trunks and the shining fluorescent green of the foliage far above, and the sun-dappled moss at his feet like tiny hill-scapes of fluffy emerald.

Then he noticed a new sound trickling around his ears, the fragile melody of a distant flute. And there was laughter too, drifting towards him through the trees, bubbling out through the birdsong and turning the air into mirthful fizzy-pop. Loofah started towards the sound, forgetting his naked foot and breaking into an easy run.

Soon he was standing on the upper rim of a large shallow hollow scooped into the side of the gently sloping woodland. In the centre was a clearing where the open ground shone with emerald grass, brilliant in the sunshine and colour-splashed with woodland flowers, and where butterflies with shining metallic wings flitted among the sunbeams.

But it wasn't the butterflies that held his attention. For scattered throughout the hollow was a profusion of girls, woodland dryads in flowing white gowns with bare feet and flowers and ivy braided into their hair. There was all manner of girls here: dark ones with black almond eyes and pale ones with ivory limbs, short ones with generous curves undulating in lingering waves under the fabric of their gowns and tall slim ones like thoroughbred fillies. There were girls lounging on the grass, the sun caressing their upturned faces, there were girls chasing each other around the trees, laughing and giggling, and there were girls sitting quietly on the moss carpeted earth just contemplating their own loveliness. Everywhere he looked there were girls, each more delightful than the one before—somehow he had stumbled into paradise.

A twig snapped close by—a girl with golden hair was half-hiding behind a nearby tree, peeping out at him. When she saw that he had seen her, she blushed and giggled, and then skipped away to join her companions. Loofah laughed and followed her into the hollow, drawing sidelong glances and shy smiles as he passed.

It was then that he noticed the golden youth sitting among the girls on the sunlit grass of the central clearing; it was he that was the source of the music, stroking the delightful swirling melody from a silver flute pressed to his lips. He looked up as Loofah approached and, smiling a brilliant smile and laying aside his flute, rose to greet him.

Dressed in a tunic of the purest white with hems embroidered with gold, he was a truly magnificent creature, with tight yellow curls clustered about his sculptured head and long tanned limbs,