From the previous part:

“Is there a problem?” she asked, in a low voice.

Honey nodded. “Oh, Trixie, I don’t know how it happened, but we thought we had the right Brian, and he’d said all the right things, but it wasn’t and we can’t find the right Brian and we’re afraid that the wrong Brian has done something wrong to him and now we’ve got the wrong Brian in the clubhouse and we can’t let him go, but he won’t tell us where the right Brian is!”

Part Four

“I can’t find the right Jim, either. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t him, but he didn’t seem quite the same as usual, either. I can’t quite put my finger on why, though.” Trixie frowned once more. “I’m getting a really bad feeling about this.”

“So am I.” Honey was wringing her hands together. “Brian – the one that we’ve got, I mean – is just so uncooperative. He could’ve done anything and he’d never tell us what it was. Your Mart and our Dan are out searching right now, but I don’t think it’s going to be enough.”

“Well, we’ll just have to make the most of the situation,” Trixie answered. “Let’s go and talk to the wrong Brian and see if he’ll give us any clues.”

The two walked to the clubhouse together, finding Di standing just outside the door. “All quiet,” she told them, without being asked. “I think you can go in.”

“Thanks,” Honey answered, gingerly opening the door.

“Come in, Honey,” Mart’s voice said from inside. “He’s quiet for the moment.”

“I’ve brought Trixie, too,” she told those inside.

Trixie entered, finding that Brian was bound and chained to a chair and looked as if he might explode with anger. “Hello, alternate-brother dear,” she greeted, cheerfully. “What have you been up to lately?”

“None of your damn’ business, Trixie, so you’d better let me out of here!”

She gave a shrug and perched on the back edge of the sofa. “Well, where is your other self? We haven’t seen him for a while and we’re worried – or, do we need to search for him. I have a few ideas of where you might have put him. In the attic, for example, behind the wall. Or, maybe we should be looking for those electronic things you’ve been working on lately?”

Her brother told her to go away, though not in such polite language. Seeing that they needed to think this through a little, she beckoned the other Trixie, both Honeys and the one present Diana to join her in the bathroom, while one of the Marts and one of the Dans kept watch over Brian.

“I think we need to make him more compliant,” she whispered. “Have you tried to influence him, yet, Di?”

Her friend shrugged. “I’m not the Di from here and I haven’t had enough practice. I’ve tried, though, and I can’t seem to do it.”

“We need the other Di to keep people away,” one of the Honeys explained.

The two Trixies shared a look. “I think we’re going to need her help,” the regular one decided. “Honey, could you change places with her for a few minutes, please?”

“Of course,” they both answered, at once. After a short debate between themselves, the alternate one went outside.

“You wanted me?” Diana asked, only a few moments later.

In a few words, the two Trixies explained what they wanted done, taking it in turns to talk, but hurrying each other along as they did so. Frowning a little at this treatment, Diana nodded and stepped out into the main room. The others waited and watched from the doorway.

“Brian?” Di asked, speaking in a strange, but soothing voice. “Could you please tell me where you’ve put your other self?”

The man in the chair looked as if he would answer for a few moments, but then shook his head and repeated the phrase he had used on Trixie earlier. Di’s face reflected the shock she felt at being addressed in such a manner, but she did not otherwise respond. Trixie beckoned her back into the bathroom.

“I’ve got an idea,” she breathed, pulling the rest of them closer. “How about if both Dianas try at once? Do you think that might work?”

The alternate Diana drew a sharp breath. “We’ve never tried that. I don’t know what might happen – it might be dangerous. What if we do something that – well, that damages him somehow?”

The regular Trixie shrugged. “Seems to me that he’s already damaged – he doesn’t seem to have any conscience, for one thing, and he’s seriously lacking in common sense. And I’ve never heard him use that kind of language before. Something’s gone really wrong with him already. He’s not the Brian that I know.”

Alternate Diana sighed. “He’s not the Brian we used to know, either – not even right after it happened and he and Jim went all strange. What does everyone else think? Is it worth a try?”

Both Trixies agreed at once. After a pause, Honey nodded, too. The two Dianas looked at each other unhappily.

“I think we should consult all the others first,” regular Diana announced. “I’ll go and talk to the other Honey. One of you can ask the rest of the Bob-Whites that are here, then one of us can go and find the others to ask them.”

“I don’t think we have that much time,” regular Trixie warned. “Just ask Honey, okay?”

Quickly, the other Trixie scrawled a message on a scrap of paper and took it into the main room, holding it out for the others to see, but in such a way that Brian could not. Each of them nodded at once. Diana came back inside, looking unhappy. The girls all met in the bathroom once more.

“Did she say yes?” regular Trixie demanded of Di.

Diana nodded.

“Then, it’s unanimous,” Trixie announced. “You’d better get started.”

“I’m really not happy about this,” alternate Diana told the others. “I don’t think I want anyone watching when we do it. It might be dangerous – and besides, it makes Diana nervous and then she can’t help me.”

The others shared a look, but it was alternate Trixie who spoke. “Then, we’ll tie him down even more securely first. And, if you haven’t come out and told us what’s happening in ten minutes, we’ll come in and get you. Let’s move!”

A few minutes later, a group of Bob-Whites hid in the area close to the clubhouse while the two Dianas worked on Brian. Both Trixies felt inclined to pace, but the others told them firmly to keep out of sight, just in case someone came by. For a long time, no sound came from the little building and as they waited, several of the watchers began to talk.

“Shh! Someone’s coming!” The message passed from one end of the line to the other.

Honey squared her shoulders and set out in the direction of the sound. A moment later, the waiting Bob-Whites heaved a collective sigh of relief as she was heard to say, “Oh, it’s you two. Have you found anything?”

“Nothing,” Dan replied. “We haven’t seen any sign of any of the Bob-Whites since we left here.”

In a few words, and the lowest of voices, those who had remained filled in Mart and Dan on events at the clubhouse.

“What’s keeping them?” regular Trixie whispered to one of the Honeys, who was beside her. “Shouldn’t they have finished by now?”

Her friend shrugged. “I can’t hear a thing. I guess they’re having to experiment a bit. You did say we’d give her ten minutes, and it’s only been five.”

“That wasn’t me, that was the other Trixie,” she complained.

“Sorry.” Honey put a calming hand on her friend’s arm, drawing her back into the undergrowth. “I keep getting you two confused.”

For five more minutes, the group waited with varying amounts of patience. Still, nothing seemed to be happening. Alternate Trixie looked at her watch and stood up.

“Who’s coming with me?” she asked.

Both Marts and regular Dan came forward, as did the other Trixie. One of the Honeys kept look-out as the five approached the clubhouse and eased open the door. Inside, they saw Brian, still chained to his chair, with a Diana leaning towards him on either side. Brian let out a hoarse cry, then drooped against his restraints. At almost the same time, both Dianas seemed to grow faint. The two Marts ran forward, somehow managing to each choose a different Diana and catch her before she hit the floor.

“Are they okay?” regular Trixie asked, running forward to where a Mart held a Diana.

At the same time, the other Trixie ran to the other pair and Dan went to examine Brian.

“Brian’s coming around,” Dan noted. “How are the girls?”

“Oh, my head!” one Diana moaned, while the other echoed, “Mine, too.”

“What happened?” alternate Trixie demanded, but received no answer.

Dan went to the clubhouse door and beckoned the two Honeys over. One of them remained outside to keep watch, while the other joined the group inside.

“Did it work?” the Honey who entered asked, a worried look on her face.

“Doesn’t look like it,” Dan answered. “They all collapsed as we got here.”

Honey’s shoulders sagged. “I don’t know what we’re going to do now. We really needed him to tell us what he’d done with them.”

“Oh!” Regular Diana scrambled to her feet and swayed as she spoke. “But, he did tell us! Someone needs to go and rescue Brian and Jim right away – I mean, the old Brian and the new Jim. Brian – this Brian – has locked them in the trunk of his car! He said it’s parked in the driveway of Ten Acres.”

“Wait!” regular Trixie cried, as everyone started talking at once. “I saw the new Jim outside just before I got here, which was after you brought this Brian here, so that can’t be right. It could be a trap.”

Alternate Diana shrugged helplessly from her place on the floor. “It’s what he said.”

“Well, maybe it’s half right,” alternate Honey suggested. “Maybe even he didn’t know which Jim he had.”

“’S right,” Brian slurred, his eyes only half-opened. “Got confused.”

Regular Trixie nodded. “I think we should at least go and see. All in favour? Against? That’s carried. Okay, gang, let’s move!”

At once, the confusion increased. Alternate Trixie gave a shrill whistle and everyone turned in her direction. “We can’t all go – we’ll be seen and then we’ll be in trouble. Only one of each person can go on the rescue mission, okay? The others will have to stay here. Trixie – you’re in charge of the rescue. I’ll be staying here with Brian.” She gave her brother a calculating look. “I think we might have a few things to talk about while he’s in this state of mind.”

“Okay, then!” Regular Trixie took the lead, checking her brother’s pockets and finding his car keys. “One of each of you, come with me.”

They quickly sorted themselves out, some following after Trixie as she exited the clubhouse. Their pace remained fast and conversation minimal as they headed along the familiar path to Jim’s property. Trixie pushed her way through the hedge, seeing the vehicle parked in the shadows of some overgrown bushes nearby. She bypassed the trunk lock, knowing it to be broken.

“Wait!” Mart called, as she was just about to put the key into the lock of the driver’s side door to get to the release lever. “What are those wires?”

Trixie froze. Without moving her head, she looked down as far as she could, seeing red and black wires emerge from the underside of the vehicle and run right between her feet. Her hand, holding the keys, hovered in mid-air for a few moments before she remembered to lower it.

“If I take a step back, will I touch them?” she asked, in a low voice.

Mart crouched at her feet and checked. “You’re already standing on one. Lift your left foot slowly and put it down a little further to the left. Okay, now you’re off. They go straight behind you.”

Taking care not to touch them any further, she moved back from the car to think. Her natural instinct was to pace as she thought, but in light of what she had just seen, she felt that would be unwise. She cupped her hands over her face and let out a noisy breath.

“Okay, so what could it be?” she asked the others. “He couldn’t have made a bomb, could he?”

“It might just be booby-trapped,” Mart suggested. “It might electrocute anyone who tried to unlock it, or something of that sort.”

“How will we be able to tell?” Honey asked, worry creasing her brow. “I really want to get them out of there, but what if trying to get them out will kill them, or us?”

“If I could only see through it, I’d be able to tell what it was,” Mart muttered, rubbing his brow and scowling at the solid metal. “I’m pretty sure there’s someone in the trunk, but other than that I can’t get proper resolution. Everything’s cloudy and indistinct – and it’s getting worse by the minute.”

Honey nodded. “If I could just hear a little better, maybe I could hear them talk. They might be able to tell us.”

Di’s shoulders visibly sagged. “This is all my fault. If I’d been a bit better at the mind-control thing, we could have gotten better information from him, but Diana just couldn’t explain it to me well enough to know what to do. Maybe I should just go back and try again.”

The others shared a look. “I’m not sure that we have time for that,” Trixie answered. “I’m getting a feeling that we need to just make a decision and act on it quickly. Mart, you follow those wires and see where they go. Di, have you got a mirror with you, by any chance?”

“Of course,” her friend answered, pulling one out of the purse which hung, a little incongruously, from her shoulder. “I never leave home without one if I can help it – you know that.”

“Dan, can you use the mirror to get a view under the car and see if you can see anything suspicious there?” She paused, sizing up the others. “Honey, how about if you move over the other side of the car and listen really carefully.”

“Hey, Trix,” Mart interrupted. “Come and take a look at this!”

All those not otherwise occupied went in the direction of Mart’s voice. They found him kneeling next to something that looked suspiciously like the Reality Displacement Device MKII – but not the one that Jim had altered. The two wires from the car were connected to the device. Leaning closer, Trixie could see that some kind of instrument was also connected, its needle fluctuating, but on a general upward trend.

“I’m wondering whether this is why our powers are dwindling,” Mart suggested. “Though what it’s got to do with the car, I’m not sure.”

Dan joined them at that moment. “I can’t see anything at all,” he told them. “The wires just go up inside the door. I’m guessing that they’ll complete a circuit when the door is opened, but I can’t be sure.”

“I’m guessing, from the look of that dial, that the circuit is already partly open. There must be a small amount of current flowing through something – part of the car body, say – and giving that thing the power to start working.” Mart ran a hand through his hair. “Time’s running out. We need to figure out what to do.”

A long silence ensued, as all the gathered Bob-Whites tried to come up with a solution to the problem. Trixie closed her eyes and concentrated with all her might on the threads of the mystery. Without quite knowing what she was doing, her eyes snapped open, she bent down and grabbed the wires, yanking on them hard so that they were disconnected altogether.

“What are you doing?” Mart demanded, in a hoarse whisper. “You could get us all killed.”

“It’s the right thing to do; I just know it.” She closed her eyes once more, finding the threads so much easier to find than they had been just moments before. “It’s better. Try it.”

Mart turned his head, the look of disbelief vanishing as his eyes widened. “We’ve got to get them out right now!”

At almost the same time, Honey let out a scream. “Quick! Help!”

They ran pell-mell towards the car, half of them arriving before Trixie and having to wait for her to catch up as she still held the keys.

“Oh, please, Trixie – be quick,” Honey begged. “They’re hardly breathing in there. There’s not enough air left.”

Trixie’s fingers trembled as she tried to fit the key into the lock. It stuck a little, sending her heart shuddering in her chest, but after an awful few moments turned. She pulled on the lever and the trunk opened. The two men within were only partly conscious and it was a difficult job to lift them out into the fresh air. The group worked feverishly for some time, getting the two back to full consciousness.

“What was he thinking?” Honey almost sobbed, as she hugged her brother tightly. “He’s sealed up the trunk with all that black, rubbery stuff. Why did he leave them in there? If the two Dianas hadn’t made him tell, they would have died before we found them.”

Trixie’s face was grim. “He’s just got to be stopped. And we’ll need to destroy that other device – but how will we do it without doing more damage? Isn’t the destruction of the first one what made this reality in the first place?”

“We can’t really be sure,” Mart pointed out. “I think we should take it apart carefully, though, and not just drop it in the washing machine, like Bobby did with the first one.”

A wicked grin settled on Dan’s face. “I think we should make sure Brian is a long way from it when we do it. Maybe, if we’re lucky, his powers won’t be as strong if he’s not close by.”

Trixie grinned, too. “That sounds like a great idea. Maybe it’ll help his brains come back at the same time. He could use all the extra brains he could–”

She stopped. Someone was running towards them from just out of sight. In a moment, her double came into view, puffing hard with the exertion.

“What are you doing here, Trixie?” regular Trixie asked. “Aren’t you supposed to be keeping out of sight?”

“I had to come and warn you,” she replied, holding out a strange object. “We found it strapped to my Brian’s chest and he was still compliant enough to tell us what it is – actually, did you do something? Because just before I left it suddenly got easier to work.”

All talking at once, the others tried to explain what had happened. The other Trixie did not seem fazed, nodding her head in understanding. “I kind of guessed it must have been something like that.” She gazed down at the electronics on the ground. “Brian says that this little thing is his own personal amplifier for the main device. Whatever it’s doing, this thing concentrates it just for him – which meant that his powers were on the increase as ours were fading. That’s why Trixie and I couldn’t get a fix on what he was doing – it made his actions invisible to us when he was wearing it. We could only find the threads that he let us find – to the fake plans and fake parts he’d made up – or the ones he let slip when he was asleep. And the whole time, his power was increasing.”

Dan frowned. “I think you’d better put it down, Trix. You may have noticed that his craziness was increasing, too.”

She eyed it for a moment, before tossing it onto the grass. “There’s one other thing: Trixie, you mentioned seeing the Jim from this world just before you came into the clubhouse. What was he doing?”

Regular Trixie shrugged. “I don’t know. I tried to get him to go up the old schoolhouse and be out of the way, but he said he had something he needed to do and might go in an hour or two. After that, he just walked off into the Preserve. Why do you ask?”

Their eyes met. “We’re wondering whether he’s a threat to us. We haven’t seen him since and there’s always a chance that the two of them were working together.”

The group exchanged glances, but Dan was the first to speak. “We’d better start searching for him.”

“We don’t need to – I know where he is,” regular Trixie asserted. “And what Brian wanted with spades and pruning saws.”

Her alternate closed her eyes. “So do I. Let’s get going – the other Jim needs rescuing, too.”

Continue to part five.

Author’s notes: Almost there, now! A huge thank you to Mary N. (Dianafan) who did a very speedy edit for me. This story will be CWP Anniversary 7. An element list will appear at the end of the story.

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