In a dark, twisting, tunnel beneath a huge Yorkshire oak tree, a version of Roan that we might think of as Roan of ten minutes past, reached for his phone and started dialling, the glow from his handset casting long shadows on the stairs spiralling away below. Gum leaned in and asked, "What are you doing?"

"Ringing Mistletoe, she'll be wondering where I am." Roan, frustrated and worried, groaned then as his phone confirmed what he expected: "No reception!" There was a long silence as the five paused to think about what to say or do. Holi peered downward, trying to make out the shape of her fallen Elmo who was flexing his elbow for sympathy, it clearly wasn't broken and he seemed intent on continuing down the tunnel. Gum was running his hand back and forth through his hair trying to decide whether to bodily lug Elmo back out of this claustrophobic place or to try reasoning with him. Heather craned her neck, straining to follow the twisting curve of the wall, wondering how far down the old steps went.

"Where you going Roan?" said Heather as he moved back up the stone stairway toward the opening.

"Seeing if I can get reception outside," he said, climbing carefully back up. He stopped, fumbling about ahead of him, looking up and down at where they had entered only moments earlier. The staircase terminated in a tangle of thick roots, barely illuminated by his torch app. A flash from behind came as Heather photographed the place.

"We did come from here, didn't we? Can't find any sign of an entrance. It seems rock solid now.

What happened? Has it closed behind us?" He was speaking partly to himself in bewilderment and partly to the others who were slowly making their way up behind him.

Gum came up to join Roan and began thumping at the surface aggressively before commenting, "There's nothing here. No doorway I mean, and we definitely came in this way. I can't even hear the rain outside. That's all I need - trapped in a hidden bunker with rat boy here."

"Trapped! Oh, I should’ve called Mist ages ago," Roan moaned, "Now she's really going to worry."

"She's not the only one!" Gum grumbled darkly.

"When I left her happily dreaming this morning…"

"Dreaming?" came a distant echo from Elmo, who had managed to pick himself up off the floor, elbow now clasped tenderly in his hand.

"Yes! Mistletoe's been having dreams... like yours." Roan found himself irritated by this deviation from his concern. "She was telling me earlier, but I didn’t pay enough attention. Wish I had told her where I was going, I thought we’d be on the way back by now." Roan looked down in regret. "The sooner I can get hold of her, the better."

"What was she dreaming about?" Elmo pressed.

"What does it matter right now?" Roan snapped. "They're dreams! That’s all they are! Dreams!"

"Are they?" questioned Elmo coming up behind the others, his hands outspread to indicate their surroundings, "I think this place says otherwise."

About then, in his search for a way out, Gum noticed a shiny object glinting at his feet.

"What's this? A pin?" he said as he picked it up and held it to his eyes for closer inspection.

"Pin?" said Elmo abruptly. "Gum, did you say pin?"

"Well, it looks like a pin.”

You know, thin and pointy."

"It can't be. Let me see! someone has been here!" exclaimed Elmo. Scampering up and down in agitation, he ran his hands over the walls of the tunnel whilst the others gathered at the top of the steps sharing their distress over the lack of a way out. Elmo muttered about pins, dreams. His rambling and the tone of his voice caused them to wonder at the lunacy that seemed to be driving him. He paused for a moment, explaining, "See, for weeks I've been having strange dreams about somebody trying to stick me with... a pin, mark me in some way I think. Fortunately, I wake up each time before it happens. I know I've had lots of dreams but this was different."

Roan stood, looking perplexed before saying, "They were just dreams. How can they have anything to do with this random pin. Look, you need to calm down.”

"Calm down!” ranted Elmo, before gesturing at Holi, "I told you to lock the door and not come outside Holi, but you didn't listen. This is a dropped pin! A dropped pin!"

Holi interjected defensively, "When I followed you into the woods there was nobody with a pin, only those, those creatures with their strange device."

“My device, thank you very much. Which they stole from me! I told you to lock the door. But no, you had to follow! Look, I see a mechanical device in my dreams, I draw it, then I find it! I dream about dark portals and secret passages and I find one! There’s someone in my dreams that looks like me, going about with a pin! So when we find a pin, forgive me for thinking that it’s not just any pin!”Elmo, his voice reaching a crecendo, paused, relieved that Holi finally knew the truth - or at least, some of it.

“But why did you go out?" Hol i pressed in a low, level tone, ”We were supposed to be leaving all this behind.”

“I wanted to leave it all behind too. But when we got here... I felt trapped. Listen, we’re all getting distracted. The midgets disappeared quickly after taking the device and I'm sure they didn't have time to come down here. Or did they?" Elmo paused considering the possibilities.

"Do you hear what you sound like?" Gum growled.

Holi interjected, "No, they went pretty quickly - almost vanished. They didn't have time."

"That's what I think too,” Elmo said excitedly.

“So how did that pin get down here? Maybe the person in my dreams that looks like me is here!”

"So, now you think this is a pin from a dream?" said Gum, sounding like a prosecuting lawyer.

Elmo paused for a moment, thinking silently. "That's true. Maybe it isn't the same pin. What do you do with pins? You don’t keep them just for jabbing things... You pin things up with them... You mark things with them... Help me out Gum, you’ve got the thing, what does it look like to you?”

*****

"Has that ever happened before?" Gum asked as Roan took a rather unsteady sip of his coffee.

"No. Never. The whole experience was dream-like. Felt like the moon was talking to me. The man in the moon." Roan laughed wryly at that last thought.

"And you think Elmo is lost in imagination!" Gum said, emphasising the irony.

At that point, Heather came in with a bag of something she'd found in the shop and began showing it to Gum. Roan tried phoning Elmo, but just got his voice mail. He didn't leave a message. Heather decided to treat herself to a hot chocolate in celebration of her find and so they all moved to a more convenient table with three chairs.

"So now what?" she asked expectantly before she sat down, "Have you both decided what you want to do?"

Roan and Gum looked at each other uncertainly as Heather continued, "You mean you've been in here all that time and you still haven't decided?"

"Well, I don't think going all the way to Yorkshire is wise at this juncture," Gum said, "besides, Holi and Elmo probably need the break, let them forget about all this. It'll do them good."

Roan sighed, "I guess you're right. It is a long way to go."

"Might as well come over to our place if you've nothing better to do," Gum offered. "We've just got a couple of things to pick up on the way. I can show you my latest dahlia of the day and my fine lettuce crop. That is, if the squirrels haven't wrecked them all."

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

On the way across London, Gum stopped at a service station for petrol and came out of the shop turning a box over in his hands. "Free virtual reality headset!" he said, waving the package triumphantly. "Cheap one I should imagine. But free with the petrol!"

Soon they were at Gum’s home where Gum provided a proud tour of the current blooms of his urban garden, then they knocked up a sandwich and settled down in the sitting room. Gum sat on the floor and unpacked his new gadget, "I wonder if this'll connect with our health and safety project from work. Clear View are putting together a virtual training package." He put the bulky gear over his head, his face optimistically buried within the viewer.

Roan lounged back into the sofa watching with interest, he always liked a good gadget.

Gum huffed and grimaced; the gear clearly didn't do what it was supposed to do. "Argh!" he wailed, "It's wrecked my Bluetooth!" He dragged the headset off in frustration and began poking at the screen of his mobile phone, "Look at that! I can't even access my settings now. Cheap junk! Should've known."

Roan picked up the plastic viewer, "There's not much to it, you wouldn't think it could do much damage."

As Gum fiddled about with his mobile, Roan tried the headset on, "You're not going to like this," he laughed, "It seems fine with mine."

"Typical," Gum muttered, trying different approaches to resetting his mobile.

Roan managed to get a demonstration playing on the VR set. "You been watching Time Drift?" he asked as he absorbed the impressive graphics of a journey through the solar system. "Sci-fi series. Not bad; the usual weekly escapades bound up in a time-travel scenario. Did you ever read the sequel to The Time Machine? Not written by H. G. Wells of course."

"Time travel isn't like you read in books you know," Gum commented.

"No?"

"Not at all. It's not the way you see it in films." It sounded like Gum had been reading up.

As the planets swung by in large, lazy arcs, Roan found Gum's voice taking on something of the dual, remote-yet-close-up nature that it had done earlier in the coffee shop. But the imagery was hypnotic, heavenly bodies so detailed you could almost touch them. Gum went on, his thoughts on time and the implications of time travel running into something of a diatribe. "You know that philosophical theorem of monkeys and their typewriters?"

"I can see why people spending time in these things end up struggling with detachment when they come out," Roan commented. He wondered if he should offer Gum a turn, but Gum just ignored him and continued his rant.

The viewpoint of the virtual camera swung around Mars, red Mars, heading for earth, the moon silvery and bright to one side, half of its form hidden in shadow. The man in the moon... Gum's words almost made a fitting voice-over, but as Roan let them wash over him he thought he could hear a second voice, more than one thought at a time. Sometimes it shared the same words, sometimes different.

Roan strained to hear the lower voice, although it wasn't really so much a second voice as a reverberation of the first, something uttered beneath the rambling about time travel.

"... tangled up... ...you might tr... ... never get back..." The moon heaved past, huge and desolate before Roan's eyes.

"... get... ... out of there... ...I'll set it right if..." Fractured words. Roan was sorry to see the moon pass and begin to recede, he felt like he should hold onto it somehow, like it was important. "...worry... ...get you ou..."

Suddenly bright light again. Not another faint! Roan blinked. Gum had pulled the headset off him. That was all.

"Stay where you are. Might have fixed it this time," Gum mumbled. "If I can just use the device..."

"Cybersickness," Roan observed, "you do get a little light-headed after a few minutes in there."

"Few minutes! You were in there for about an hour, that's why I took the thing off you. I've sorted my Bluetooth issue and been out in the garden, stupid squirrels have had my lettuces. Raging vandals!”

“Oh!” Roan’s heart skipped, he had no sense of so much time passing. “But I could hear you talking though. What time is it? Oh no, Mistletoe’ll be home before I get back. Can we get going? Sorry.”

*****

Rat-Elmo was beginning to get his new body to do what he wanted, but it was a struggle to think with such a limited brain. Not only that, it was a real nuisance finding somewhere suitable to sleep, and the things he had to eat! He shuddered at the memory and instinctively gave his whiskers a quick clean. "Stop it," he thought, "Concentrate, concentrate."

The night felt long and lonely and so he had made his way into what had previously been his bedroom to watch his past-self and Holi peacefully sleeping. How long was it now before he would go to Yorkshire to ‘get away from it all’? What a joke - get away from it all! Yorkshire was where ‘it all’ was waiting for him. Something dark and unfamiliar scrawled on the wall above the bed caught his eye.

“I didn’t draw that in my timeline,” thought Rat-Elmo. Past-Elmo groaned in his sleep, “Dreaming, poor guy.” Then, Rat-Elmo jumped as his inert counterpart gave an involuntary jerk, moaning loudly. Holi seemed used to it - she just turned over and carried on sleeping.

Clambering onto a bedside chair for a better view, Rat-Elmo saw the walls were covered with huge, scribbly, mandala-like charcoal and ink sketches of the device. From his new vantage point, he also noticed the device, his device, there beside the bed, a faint, ominous glow playing around the red ring on its side. Elmo gave another sleepy jerk and suddenly the spot on the device lit up brightly. Then, with no warning, a jagged, effulgent arc of pink light zig-zagged out like miniature lightning toward the slumbering Elmo’s head. Rat-Elmo started instinctively forward to help himself despite the conflicting desire to scuttle away - what could he do? The light seemed to snag on Elmo’s ear and began to coruscate there on the lobe, fizzing softly. What happened next set his scuttling reflexes into overdrive, he flew backward, knocking against the arm of the chair and dived, scampering for the cover of the dressing-table, his claws scrabbling on the pile of the carpet.

A dark form was emerging, unfurling in stuttering pulses from Elmo’s ear. It began as a smudge of incoherent static, a flickering distortion in the air, expanding and increasing in resolution into something vaguely humanoid. It rapidly stretched outward, feet forming, stretching toward the floor, crooked hands rendering, like brittle blossoms of soot, suggestion of a face dark and sombre. It crouched, bent over the prone couple in their bed, breathing down on them. Rat-Elmo had no doubt that this thing was a killer, a brooding, spectral, grim thing with an equally grim purpose for sure.

He slunk further under the furniture into the safety of the darkness, feeling a natural skittishness coming over him. The thing flickered momentarily like a bad video signal. Then it was Elmo. An exact replica of himself, still hunched over, watching, panting. Rat-Elmo suppressed a gasp as he saw something glint in the creature’s fingers - a pin! As his mind wrestled the implications of this observation another flicker rippled through the form. What had been Elmo was now Holi, still bent over, raising the pin as if uncertain where to poke it, a frown on the otherwise expressionless face. Another change, now an anonymous male, as close as you could get to a blank human canvas, the kind that could be almost anyone and yet no-one, someone to lose in a crowd, grey and shady. It was wrong, the edges fractured, like a blurred memory. Would that happen to him too? Was the rat becoming him? The posture of the thing lapsed into slumped resignation - had it given up.

“It’s the same thing!” thought Rat Elmo. “I’ve dreamt this thing. But I found a pin in Yorkshire. Was it this pin? Does that mean it followed me there from..." The thought turned to darkness as realisation dawned "This must have happened to me! A couple of days ago, lying in my bed, this happened. This is my past. But this creature ended up in Yorkshire in my time. It followed us! Does this mean there's more than one? One in each time?”

He thought about attacking the thing. Bite it, go for the throat like the cornered rat he was. Or maybe warn his past self. But he was just a rat skittering in the shadows. They'd hate him. He hesitated, “Wait, it doesn’t harm us, or we never would have got to the cottage. I found its pin there near the tree. What’s it up to? What's it doing with that pin? Did the device call it out of me? Why?”

*****

Mistletoe's day was pretty ordinary, except she hadn't received her usual texts from Roan. She had gone to work, dealt with irate passengers at the airport, checked her emails and driven home. She was a little surprised that Roan hadn't answered the phone earlier, but reasoned that he was probably busy or had his phone on silent again knowing him. It had been a very normal, but tiring day and she was looking forward to getting home and putting her feet up for a while. Stepping inside, she looked around before muttering, “He hasn't washed up again! What's his excuse this time?”

Heading into the bedroom, she hung her jacket and sat on the edge of the bed. She pulled out her phone and was about to check her messages when a faint sound caught her attention. A small cupboard door was open. That wasn’t unusual, but the sound? She glanced involuntarily at the wardrobe. It was shut. Just the small cupboard at the foot of the bed, barely large enough to support the small portable TV. Had the sound come from there? She waited a few moments, wondering if she had left it open earlier, but then jumped as she heard a faint shuffling sound inside. Unsure what to do, she paused, worried what might be in there. She stood, eyes fixed on the opening as she considered the possibilities. “Don’t be a mouse.

Or a rat! Or… or… Oh, Roan! Where are you?”

Those few moments seemed to last a lifetime. She wondered what to do. Kneeling, cautiously, she leaned toward the open door. The faint sound grew louder as she inched ever-so-slightly closer. She knew in her heart that she couldn’t really leave it alone or wait for Roan to come home, because whatever it was could escape by then and end up under her bed or in her uniform or anywhere! No, the risk was too great, she would have to take a look - at least she would know what it was - then she would know what she was dealing with. She peered into the shadow of the cupboard and stretched her hand out, ready to slam the door shut at the first sign of anything furry, or anything with more legs than is decent.

Mist let out a shriek. Was it a spider? A huge, shiny spider! She leapt back shuddering, onto the bed. The freakish, giant arachnid, having been detected, scurried across the room and under the bed. It was truly frightening, the biggest orb spider Mistletoe had ever seen. Spiders were worse than mice!

She paused, motionless, trying to hear where it was going, but it was silent. “Ball-shaped and shiny,” said a rational voice in Mistletoe’s mind. “It’s surely mechanical, not real. Some new toy of Roan’s?” She glanced at the bedroom door, saw it was open, knew that if she could somehow leap across and out of the room, she could escape. She heard the brisk, jagged movement of skeletal limbs scampering up onto the bed. Letting out another shriek, she sprang and hopped to the door. She was out in a flash and looked back on the room to see what was happening. The spider-thing was dashing scissor-like across the pillows and duvet. As she stared, she noticed a raised, rounded button pointed in her direction, red, hideous-looking. Was it looking at her? No, this was some gadget, some malfunctioning mechanism.