The Realms Thereunder

CHAPTER FIVE
A Leaf from Another Forest
1

Now . . .

Freya trudged through the wet streets, walking so fast that her shins hurt. As she approached St. Michael and All Angels, she saw Daniel, looking agitated, leave the church and run down the path. He looked up, recognised her, and raised his arm-in warning?

He opened his mouth, as if to shout, and at the same time put a hand on the low wooden gate that led out into the street. He pushed it open and, with his foot raised to take a step forward, seemed to stumble, and disappeared into thin air.

Freya yelped and jumped backwards. Danger was the only thought in her mind. She wanted to run, but didn’t know where. Daniel had been taken from the open air, underneath the rickety wooden arch of the lych-gate-she didn’t think that was possible. What was to say that she wouldn’t be as well? She became paralysed. Any step in any direction could be a step across a threshold that might send her into peril. In full panic, Freya’s mind closed up and terror filled her. She fell into a crouch and buried her head in her arms.

She was aware of a sound growing around her, which built and trickled down her spine. It was laughter. Raising her head, she found herself looking up at the vicious figures of two yfelgopes, their lips curled in a sneer around their needle-like teeth. Freya, now more terrified than ever, flinched instinctively away from them, sprawling on the pavement. She closed her eyes and covered her face.

“Back!” she heard someone shout. “Back, you devils!” There were the sounds of a scuffle, a roar of pain, and then nothing.

Freya felt a hand on her shoulder and her heart chilled.

“Freya? Is that you?”

She fought to control her breathing and opened her eyes. It was Professor Stowe.

“Freya, good heavens! Are you mixed up in this?”

She opened her mouth and tried to speak.

“You’re in bad shape,” Professor Stowe said. “Come with me.

Stand close.”

She realised it was raining. Stowe shook out an umbrella and held it above her. Clinging to his arm, she huddled close and they walked away from the church.

He led her back down Banbury Road to his rooms in Norham Gardens. “We’re not staying here,” he said. “I just need to check on something first. Here, take this and dry yourself off.”

He handed Freya a towel and left the hallway. Freya pushed the towel through her hair-when had it become wet?-and looked around the small hallway. There was an engraving on the wall behind the door of a large tree, intricately detailed, its smallest leaves described. It spread its branches into the heavens, as if it were holding the sky in place or pushing it away from the ground.

Professor Stowe came back and led her out of the room and down the staircase. But instead of leaving through the front door, they descended another short set of stairs and exited through a back door. This placed them in a narrow, overgrown garden.

“Where are we going?” Freya asked.

“To a special place-the Old Observatory. I stay in this house by design, not chance. This house contains one of only a few routes into a forgotten building, which is now an important meeting place for an important group of individuals.”

“I-I just want to go back home,” Freya said, and meant it. She wanted nothing more than to crawl into her own bed and not to come out again, ever.

“I’m afraid it’s not as simple as that.”

“Why?”

“Like your friend Daniel, you are just on the cusp of falling out of this world. I tried to reach him, but I was too late. There are forces that want to push you out of this world. Have you ever . . . experienced . . . anything like that before?” He shot her a sideways look.

Freya kept her eyes on the pavement in front of her.

“Freya? I’m talking about the feeling that you may have fallen through into another world?”

She wanted to tell him-had wanted to tell someone for so long, but all this time she’d stayed silent . . . she couldn’t.

“I suspected as much. Please do come with me. We can help you.”

Freya swallowed and ducked through the wild foliage that grew in their path. They came to a thin wooden door, warped with age, which hung in a narrow gap between two crumbling brick walls. Stowe took a key from his pocket and unlocked a padlock that hung from a shiny latch. Then he went through.

Freya paused instinctively, took a breath, and moved through the doorway-then back out again, and in and out several more times after that. This didn’t make her feel much more comfortable in the circumstances, but it didn’t make her feel worse.

She found herself in a small courtyard where tall hedges blocked nearly everything out of sight except for a small swatch of the sky above them. Professor Stowe had disappeared.

“Here we-Freya?” his voice called. His stepped back into view from between two of the hedges. “It’s just over here.”

She followed him down a red-bricked path that was almost completely grown over with moss and ivy and then was confronted by a squat door, stained black, set into a low arch. Professor Stowe searched his pockets for a dead bolt key and unlocked it. He stepped through and waited for Freya.

Freya stood rooted to the spot. She fought to keep the flood of panic from overwhelming her again.

“Freya? It’s okay,” Professor Stowe said, holding out his hand.

“Come on through.”

With a visible effort, Freya lifted her leaden feet and stepped through the doorway. Stowe was just about to close the door behind her when she hissed, “Wait!” and tugged at his sleeve. This was too important, she felt, to be embarrassed about.

She ducked out of the doorway, looked up at the sky, and crossed back in. She repeated this three more times and stood uncertainly inside the doorway.

“Okay,” she said.

“Are you alright?” Stowe asked her, less concerned than amused.

“Yes,” Freya replied, feeling calmer.

“Good. Come on upstairs, then.”

They walked down a short hallway with a claustrophobically low ceiling and came to a cold, square room that contained an iron spiral staircase. Freya felt a chill and looked up-the room rose several stories and finished in darkness. There were narrow, dirty windows in the walls that let in the last light of the evening.

“Not far now,” Professor Stowe said, mounting the staircase with Freya behind him.

“This is the Old Observatory?”

“Yes. This is a private place. That is, the university owns it, but I’d think the administrators have completely forgotten about its existence. It was appropriated many years ago by people of . . . our cause as a secret meeting room where we could discuss action against those who wish to invade this sphere.”

Freya’s hand tightened on the rail and she stopped. “I can’t do this,” she said. “I won’t be of any help. I’m sorry. You don’t want me.”

Professor Stowe turned and said in a low, comforting voice, “Don’t worry-it’s unlikely that you will be asked to join our group. I only asked you here so that you can further help us with what we know-perhaps fill in some blanks-and most of all to keep you safe. We can keep you safe.”

Freya started up the stairs again, reluctantly. They rose three storeys to a door that stood open, letting out a warm, electricyellow glow.

Stepping through the doorway, Freya was met with a warm blast of air and the rich, heady aroma of something burning in a fireplace. From the front hall, she could hear a soft susurrus of people talking in the front room.

“There is a meeting already in progress, so come through here,” Stowe said, and led Freya into the kitchen. “Put the kettle on while I tell them who you are. I shall return shortly,” Stowe said, leaving.

Freya filled the kettle at the sink and then replaced it in its holder and turned it on. The front room, adjoining the kitchen, was silent. From where she stood, she couldn’t see into it and didn’t want to. She was already feeling very self-conscious.

When the kettle boiled, she filled the mug and stirred it with a teaspoon from the dish drainer. There was a small refrigerator below the counter and she opened it to find that it contained a single bottle of milk in an old-fashioned glass bottle. She sniffed it-it seemed fine-and poured a little into her tea.

Professor Stowe returned. “Are you ready to meet the Society?”

“You’re a society?”

“Yes-the Society of Concerned Individuals. It’s a deliberately vague and eccentric title. This way, if you will . . .”

Steeling herself, Freya followed Stowe and stepped into a large octagonal drawing room. It was fairly well furnished-a large Turkish rug lay on the floor and thick drapes hung on the windows.

Where there weren’t windows on the walls, there were framed prints.

On one side of the room there was a wide, shallow fireplace that was cheerfully burning coal and warming the room nicely. There was a circle of mismatched armchairs clustered around a low coffee table.

Four of the chairs were occupied by three men and one woman who stared intently at Freya as she entered. She smiled sheepishly.

“Please, take a seat,” Professor Stowe said, indicating the one closest to Freya. She lowered herself into it and huddled over her mug of tea.

“Let me make introductions, first of all,” said Stowe, settling into his own chair. “The gentleman on my right,” he said, indicating an elderly gent in his seventies who wore a full head of white hair and a tweed suit, “is First Lieutenant Gerrard Cross, retired, a former lecturer in British Mythology-and a specialist in Scottish ballads.

“Sitting next to him is Ms. Leigh Sinton.” A thin, dark-haired woman in her forties wearing a dark-green jumper gave a small wave and then very primly and unnecessarily straightened her tan skirt. “She’s something of an all-rounder with an enthusiasm for archaeology and is a tireless mountain trekker.

“Next is Mr. Wood, though I’m sure that he’ll insist that you call him Brent.”

“S’right,” grunted a well-built, heavy-set man in a dark jacket and grey waistcoat. His face was stern and his lips gave the impression of being buttoned in the centre, but his cheeks glowed attractively.

“There’s nobody who knows the university like him. He’s currently a porter at Jesus College. And finally, there is the Reverend Borough. He is fully ordained, but attached to the college-not the church.”

A man in his late thirties, nearly bald with traces of red hair above his ears, gave an awkward bow to Freya. “Peter, please.”

“And finally, there’s me, your good professor.” He gave her a warm smile. “Although while you are here, you may address me as Felix.”

Everyone was looking at her expectantly so Freya gave a small wave and introduced herself. “Freya Reynolds, hi.”

“Freya is a childhood friend of Daniel Tully, the boy I was following and who, I regret to inform you now, has been taken.”

The room reacted to this news in dismay. The elderly Mr. Cross pursed his lips and clucked his tongue; Ms. Sinton wrung her hands and exclaimed, “Oh dear!” Brent Wood slowly shook his head side to side, and the reverend closed his eyes and soundlessly moved his lips.

“In fact, she was with him when it happened,” continued Stowe. “I say she was with him, though it would be more accurate to say that she was near him. He was coming to see her when he stepped across a lych-gate and just . . . vanished. Do I have that right?”

This last sentence was directed at Freya. She nodded in agreement.

Ms. Sinton leaned forward. “This is no doubt cause for concern- and Felix will give us specific details later-but he told us just now that he believed you had been, for want of a better word, ‘taken’ when you were younger. Is this true?”

Freya’s eyes dropped to her tea and looked into the steam swirling up from it. Then she started to retell, in a halting voice, the lies and half-truths that she had told the police and all the psychiatrists over the years. She made sure to include all of the rehearsed halts, pauses, and stutters she had tailored into it.

“When we were younger,” she said, “Daniel and I, we found a tunnel that we explored. When we tried to leave, we couldn’t find our way out again. We were missing for almost a month. We wandered through tunnels underground, we licked water that dripped from rocks, we ate insects sometimes, and then we were found- up north somewhere. I don’t remember where.”

The group looked at her with blank faces.

“And that’s it,” Freya said.

“You’ll forgive me, my dear,” said the stout porter, Wood, “but I believe that is far from ‘it,’ as you say!”

Freya was shocked by this outright attack. She automatically started replaying another side of the story she usually held in reserve to make people think that they had earned her trust.

“There were people, I think, and they helped us, maybe, but-but I don’t remember much about them.”

“And I say it was nothing of the sort!”

“Please, Brent,” said Rev. Borough. “Don’t antagonize the girl.

I’m sure I would not wish to open up to a group of strangers about events that most would think me mad for relating. She simply doesn’t know to trust us yet. Perhaps we should let her rest and she can explain more when she’s recovered.”

“Thank you,” Freya said, spying an out. “I’m just-there’s a lot that’s happened recently, with Daniel, and I don’t think I can talk about it yet. Please, tell me, what do you-I mean, the Society-do?”

“Lt. Cross,” said Professor Stowe, rising, “perhaps you’d like to give our guest a short-very short, mind-account of our history.

I have a matter I must attend to. Excuse me.” He left the room.

“Well,” Lt. Cross began, “the Society was formed in April of

1917, when Elsie Wright and Frances Mitchell began meeting regularly with Sir Wilfred Rewlbury, the head of the Royal Society of Biology, and, in May of that year, Nils Ogred, a Swiss botanist. Initially they met in a small tearoom in Bradford, which was convenient for charting incidents in the area. They were, over time, joined by Robert Trebor, the historian and lecturer, and Arthur Rutherford, Lord Sansweete. In August of 1919, Nils Ogred moved to Holland, and the group relocated, meeting in the chapter house of Westbury Cathedral. They were joined by Rodney Woodrue and Nassar Rassan in October 1921, after Lord Sansweete left in June of 1920. In September 1926, the group was on hiatus following Sir Rewlbury’s son’s disappearance. Once that situation was resolved they started meeting again, but this time in the Bury St. Edmunds Town Hall. They were joined by gentleman scientist Rian Buford, Clark Sassoon, and Lady Gail Nyman. It was at this time that rifts began to form, and in July 1928, the group first split, with Wright, Woodrue, Rassan, and Sassoon meeting on Thursdays of alternating weeks, and the rest meeting, from November of that year, on the first and third Mondays of every week at the private library of Joseph-”

Freya wasn’t following any of this. She was so desperately tired that for a few moments she couldn’t decide if it was more polite to excuse herself or just fall quietly asleep. “I’m sorry, I’m not really-I think it would be best if I left,” she blurted, but made no effort to move, or even lift her head.

“-Wimbourne, twenty-eighth Earl of Winton. The following year, February to be specific, was when Mitchell’s faction began their private royal presentations, at that time before George V. He allowed Mitchell’s group use of the Royal Gallery’s Eastern Rooms, which, in March of 1931, was abandoned for the Gallery Room of the Royal Gardens’ Eastern Offices. Meanwhile, the Wright Society-”

Freya thought that she protested once more at this point, but she didn’t have time to recall what she’d said because the next instant she was asleep.