Labyrinth Through The Mirror of Time Chapter 13

  

Chapter 13: Freeze

The image of the white cat suddenly froze on the screen of the phone Remi had left at Anemo’s house. Fleur and the fur-babies waited in complete silence for exactly five seconds, hoping the connection hadn't cut out for good, before they all started fidgeting, asking questions, and talking at the same time, without anyone really listening to anyone else.

“What is that, ma belle? Remi?” Mistral began, followed instantly by Aeolus.

“The connection’s dropped!” said Sirocco.

“Why isn't she moving? Aeolus, do you think something’s happened to Miss Remi?” Fleur asked.

“Should we try calling again?”

The girl picked up the phone, closed the frozen call, and dialled again, but... nothing.

It was only seven in the morning, just a few minutes past. They had barely managed to swap a few words with the crew in Cairo, and the sudden cut-off had turned the warm, relaxing atmosphere of a quiet Saturday morning into its complete opposite. The drumming of the rain outside and the howling of the wind only deepened the sense of dread that took hold of them all.

“Try calling again, Fleur!” Aeolus said. “If it works, it works, and if it doesn't, we’ll wait for them to call us. Come on... I don’t think it’s anything serious, just a regular network failure.”

Fleur tried again, but this time she called Anemo’s number directly as an audio call.

“How strange! Look at this, it seems we have no signal at all. Could it be because of the storm?”

“Le-let’s watch a movie, cartoons, anything... I can’t bear the sound of the weather out there anymore!” suggested Mistral, uncharacteristically jittery for an elegant cat who usually minded his manners. “Was that thunder, or did I imagine it?”

“At this time of year? A summer storm? It doesn't smell right to me,” grumbled Aeolus, picking his coffee bean up from the fluffy carpet.

Fleur picked up the remote, ready to look for a cartoon movie, but... surprise. The electricity had gone off too.

“I’m getting scared,” she whispered, and the fur-babies chimed in one after the other:

“Me too!”

“Me too!”

“Me too, ma chérie! Do you think that cat from three thousand years ago... Mehyt, was me in another life?”

The others stared at Mistral, but only Aeolus thought out loud:

“What do you mean, travelled through time? Does such technology even exist? Is there a real time machine out there, not just in sci-fi books? How on earth did I, of all people—who read constantly and look things up all the time—never find out about this sort of technology until now?”

A clap of thunder exploded, seemingly right next to them, making the four of them huddle even closer together.

“Fleur, pull my tail or my ears! I want to wake up! I don’t like scary movies, and... and I don’t like scary dreams either!” whined Sirocco. “I am super-duper tellified!”

Mistral, with a protective paw, pulled the ginger kitten closer to him and didn't even bother to correct his pronunciation this time. They were all terrified.

“But I did find it!” Aeolus corrected his own statement, suddenly raising the index finger of his right paw, his whiskers twitching with indignation. “I found it in books, of course I did! But it was sci-fi literature, everyone! Wells, Asimov, Philip K. Dick! I thought they were just the fantasies of brilliant minds trying to entertain the public! How could I have been so naive? All those writers weren't inventing anything... they were just downloading bits of a reality into their pages that we, scientists—well, and library mice—proudly wrote off as fiction!”

Fleur stared at him with wide eyes, still clutching the useless remote in her hand. Despite the gloom in the room and the thunder shaking the windows, the little rodent’s logic brought a strange ray of hope.

“So, Aeolus... you mean the time machine isn't made of iron and screws?” she asked in a low voice.

“I don’t know what it’s made of, Fleur, but Remi barely managed to tell us she was in Egypt three thousand years ago! She said it was the adventure of her life and bam! Everything froze! We don’t know what she’s doing there, we don’t know why she was sent into the past, or who this cat Mehyt she mentioned really is. But the fact that the screen went dead the exact moment she uttered that name cannot be a coincidence!”

Mistral’s amber pupils widened in the dark, his ears twitching nervously at the sound of the ancient name. A strange sensation, like a cold electric shock, ran through his black fur.

Sirocco let out a long sigh, burying his ginger nose into Mistral’s neck. Even though it all sounded far too complicated for a kitten, one thing was clear to him: beyond the pages of any book, somewhere in Egypt, Remi-Bise needed help, and they were left almost in the dark, scared of the storm, staring at a dead screen.

Another clap of thunder, longer and heavier, rattled the walls of the House of the Winds. The rain lashed furiously against the windows as if it wanted to burst in on them like a vengeful entity, just like those creatures they said used to come out of the Cave of the Cats.

The storm at the end of September, unleashed just a few days after the equinox, had turned the light at seven in the morning into a heavy, leaden gloom, as if the clouds were unravelling shreds of night over Dublin.

“What do we do now?” whispered Fleur, tucking her legs up to her chest in the middle of the shadowy living room. “Since we can’t go anywhere, a seven-year-old girl and three fur-babies... how else can we find out what’s happening to Remi if we can’t talk to Cairo anymore?”

Aeolus tucked his coffee bean under his arm like a talisman of knowledge and looked determinedly toward the huge shelves of Anemo’s bookcase, which were now lost in the shadows.

“We don't do anything, Fleur! We read and wait for better conditions. Let’s not be fatalists!”

“Is a fa-fatalist something bad?” Sirocco asked with his usual innocence. “Is it a family man who stands by dads?”