The Slanted Worlds

8

. . . It is told that there was once a man of that district named Oisin Venn. And that late one night of February he rode home from the wars, and wandered from the path, and long was he lured and mired by feylights and willows o’ the wisp in the marshy places of the moor. And he came to a deep wooded Combe and though he sensed somewhat of the danger, he entered that place.

And he became aware of the eyes of dark birds upon him, and of the malice of laughter.

Chronicle of Wintercombe

REBECCA DROVE CAREFULLY up the rutted lane.

Where it met the edge of the copse of firs, she parked and climbed out.

The wind from the sea was cold; she pulled her coat tighter, then hauled out her wellies. Pulling them on, she turned and trudged up the narrow track, the bag of groceries slung on her back.

Why he had to live out here, she had no idea.

There were cottages in the village for rent. Even on the Wintercombe estate. But then, he was working feverishly on this spell-thing, and he needed quiet.

As she came to the top of the track and opened the bleached wooden gate, she thought of Venn, down there in the ancient house, working equally obsessively with the obsidian mirror. The mirror that was Maskelyne’s. Had they gotten it to work? Had Venn already changed time to bring back a dead woman? Had Jake found his father? She hadn’t heard from Jake for weeks. The silence was unnerving.

A lapwing called and flew up, out of the gorse. The bushes were just starting to come into their mustard-yellow flowers, but something had frosted them hard. Term was half over. And she had so much work to do!

Trying to ignore the familiar guilt, she walked up and rapped on the back door. The cottage was a low, lopsided building, a Devon longhouse, once maybe the home of some medieval yeoman and his few animals. In the summer it was a holiday home for artists and romantic couples.

Now Maskelyne was camping out here.

“Come in, Becky.”

She ducked under the lintel.

“Brought you the food. And . . .”

She stopped. “So you’ve finished, then.”

Maskelyne was sitting at the oak table wearing an old overcoat, his chin propped on one hand, staring down at the peculiar pattern of discs before him. As he looked up at her, she caught that abstracted darkness in his eyes that seemed to be there more and more lately, since he had come so close to the mirror again. And the scar that disfigured his left cheek seemed deeper and more raw.

“I didn’t hear you come up,” he said.

She took off her coat and squeezed the rain from her long plait of red hair. “Too wrapped up in the spell.”

“I told you, Becky, it’s not a spell.” He gestured at the discs. “It’s not anything, yet.”

She could tell by his barely hidden despair that it wasn’t working. After a lifetime of watching him flicker like a ghost into her life, she knew the degrees of his anguish. She pulled a chair over. “What else would you call it?”

“A configuration. Have you finished your assignment?”

She shrugged. “Almost. The Wars of the Roses seem a long way off.”

Maskelyne sighed. “If my problems affect your degree, I will never forgive myself.”

She glanced around the room. “That’s my business. I told you, it’s fine.”

The room was almost cozy today. He had drawn the curtains against the rain, and a small bright fire of furzewood crackled and spat in the open grate. From the rafters hung great bunches of grasses and herbs she had no names for; their pungent dusty leaves desiccating into dusty scatters on the floorboards. The room smelled of charred wood and damp.

On the table were the discs. He had spent every hour since Christmas working on them, and now, finally, twenty-four were laid out in a pattern of six by four.

They were a few centimeters across, and each was of a different material. Some were stone—she recognized granite, limestone, basalt brought from the moor, some greenish shale from the river. Others, like the white discs of chalk and the black one of coal he had had to search farther afield for, in Wiltshire and Wales, sometimes staying away for days. A flint disc lay roughly chipped in the center. She touched it lightly. Beside it lay circles of wood, brass, silver, steel and copper, of glass and paper, cork and cotton, various plastics cut from a credit card, labels, a shiny CD. Others that disturbed her more were cut from skin, fur, fleece. Some were materials she couldn’t even identify, but certainly the central disc was of solid gold, resting in the center like a coin. It had cost a lot of money, some of it from her savings. This was the one he touched now, renewing a slow, silent process of moving the pieces, as if in some secret checkers game with himself, played endlessly, day and night.

“What will it do?” she murmured.

“It will bring them.” His husky voice was patient. “It will bring Venn.”

He moved a piece, sliding it with the softest of touches.

She went and put the kettle on, then came back, leaning closer.

Each of the discs was marked with a symbol. Some she recognized—the zodiac signs of Scorpio, Gemini, and so on. Others looked like warped letters.

She reached out to touch one.

“Don’t!” he said quickly.

“What does that one mean?”

“Mercury. The planet of speed and quicksilver. The thieves’ planet. This is Mars. This, Venus.”

She nodded. The disc made of silver had a moon-crescent; the central gold one a rayed circle that must mean the sun. “Astrology? Alchemy?”

He smiled, even as he moved the discs. “Both and neither. A science so ancient only ghosts remember it.”

She frowned. He rarely spoke about his life before he had leaped into the mirror. Jake had told her about Symmes’s diary—how Symmes had stolen the mirror from Maskelyne in some dingy opium den, sometime in the 1840s. But before that, who had he been? How had he come to possess the mirror? She wanted to ask. Instead she said, “You should have something to eat. I’ve brought some stuff.”

“Not yet.” His nervous fingers touched a clay disc, then slid a copper one, lightly. She went to the kettle, lifted it off the stove, and was pouring the hot water when she stopped.

She looked up. “Something’s happening,” she whispered.

The room had changed. There was a new dimness in the corners, a delicate sparkling haze. She put down the kettle and turned.

Shadows.

They were drifting, flickering over the walls and ceiling. Like the flicker of the faintest black-and-white film, people barely there, ripples of silhouettes.

“What is it?”

He didn’t answer. She crossed quickly to the table, scared by his silence. “What?”

The discs were moving.

With a sigh of satisfaction Maskelyne drew his fingers away, and still they moved. Their pattern was rapid, hard to see, a swift, silent rearrangement as if the elements themselves had taken up the dance, moving with purposeful gravity.

“How is that . . .”

“Hush. Watch.”

As the colors formed and re-formed, Rebecca wondered if they were making themselves into galaxies, into a set of concentric circles like some ancient diagram of the cosmos, some drifting clockwise, others counterclockwise, around the golden coin of the sun.

Maskelyne watched, tense.

The room darkened. The discs seemed to glow, marble and plastic and metal.

Then they stopped.

Breath held, she stared at the new configuration. Through the gently shimmering smoke she said, “Have you done it? What does it mean?”

Maskelyne sat back in the chair. For a moment he seemed too exhausted to speak. He said, “It means they’ll come, Becky. They’ll need me.”

Then to her surprise, he picked up the central disc and rapped it gently three times on the tabletop.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

“Oh hell and damnation!”

Piers flung down the pen in irritation and jumped up. Whisking off his apron, he struggled into his dark tailcoat, buttoning it hurriedly over his scarlet waistcoat as he half ran down the corridor.

The tiled hall was quiet. Wharton and Sarah were up with the mirror, probably.

But who could have gotten through the locked gates and up the drive?

He flitted across the hall, reached the front door, threw it open, and looked out.

The steps were empty.

Beyond them the overgrown drive was blurred with rain, the tall grass of the lawns rippled with broken tulips in the cold breeze.

No one.

Piers put his hands together, flexed them till the knuckles cracked, stepped back, and closed the door.

Inside, he stared at its dark wood, thinking hard.

Because he had definitely heard them.

Three soft knocks.

Gideon ducked under oak boughs, breathless. The very air kept changing. He was lost in the tilted, angled, colliding worlds of the Summerland.

He stopped for breath, fighting down panic.

Here was an empty piazza, a dry fountain at its center. The air shimmered with heat.

He crouched down, wiping sweat from his face. He knew better than to trust his eyes, because only a few paces away, the sunlit square had a shadow slanting into it, rising at a bizarre angle to a glass skyscraper.

A pigeon fluttered down; his whole body jumped.

Any bird could be Shee.

Any snake, any lizard, any cat.

Any narrow face at a window could be Shee.

In this Otherworld, the very stones and trees might be spying on him. And with a surge of panic he realized the bracelet would draw them. With his Shee-sharp sight he saw how it glowed on his wrist, heard how it sang. It pulsed with power, it smelled of pollen and honey, and the Shee would swarm to it like wasps.

He had to get out!

Taking a breath, he raced through the piazza into a meadow. Beyond it a blue ocean stretched, with tiny islands green as jewels. Crashing down the hill, he saw dryads twist into olive trees, a kraken dive into the waves. Gideon ran onto the beach, up the gangplank of a moored quinquereme, its slaves oiled with sweat, then leaped an oar and landed swaying in the sudden roar of a train corridor rattling through streets and factories. Grabbing the window rail, he edged down the aisle, unseen by passengers, opened a carriage door, and walked into a golden field of barley.

Gritting his teeth, he waded through the waist-high crop.

These were the secret ways of the Shee, their unseen paths through the world, barely glimpsed by mortals, except in certain, potent intersections—a fairy ring, a haunted room, a crossroads at twilight, notorious for generations as places of danger. He was deep in the Otherworld, and any moment the whole scene would reset as if someone had shaken the pieces of a kaleidoscope. It was a place of madness, and he knew every time he traveled in it, it contorted his very reason.

He felt a tickle on his wrist and looked down. A tangle of white bindweed had slid around the bracelet. The green stem explored, curious.

He shook it off quickly.

Out! Where was out!

In the center of the field, as if it had crash-landed from space and been half buried by the impact, tilted at a crazy angle, was a castle.

He climbed through the ruined barbican and came to a great wooden gate. It was locked, but in it was a smaller postern, cut so tiny he had to kneel to open it.

He squeezed his head and shoulders through.

Instantly, as if they had been waiting for him, bees swarmed down.

Gideon beat the buzzing things away, scrambled through, and ran. Through an orchard, ducking under apple trees, into a silent and deserted school where the classrooms slept in summer heat, out through a rabbit hutch, where three identical rabbits watched him with huge eyes.

Then a corridor, stark, gray, one fluorescent light strip buzzing overhead. As he looked up the strip came apart, and became the swarm again, bright electric bees that clustered around him, stung him, so that he ducked and twisted with increasing panic, flung a door open, threw himself through.

Venn grabbed him. “Down!”

Gideon collapsed, gasping for breath. Venn gave one ferocious yell at the bright buzzing swarm. “Leave him! NOW!”

His voice was savage with wrath.

Instantly there was nothing there to shout at.

Gideon slid to the grass and sat there, stunned. When he could look around, he saw a small glade of bluebells. Above, oak trees, just coming into tiny new leaf.

He was at the edge of the Wood.

He was back.

“Listen,” he gasped. “Jake . . .”

“Not here!” Venn hauled him up, then noticed the bracelet on his wrist. With a cry of joy, he slid it off and gripped it tight. Then he ran out of the Wood, up the path and through the small metal gate to the cloister, its threshold protected with an iron strip, its bars hung with charms.

Gideon followed, limping and sore. Passing over the iron made him shiver, but he felt nothing of the peculiar jagged pain it seemed to give the Shee.

“Venn, wait.”

He was irritable with stings and scratches. Venn dragged him to a bench, flung him down, and stood over him. “Right. Tell me. Is Jake alive?”

Sarah burst out through the cloister door, a glass of water in her hand. She pushed it into Gideon’s trembling fingers. “Take your time.”

The cold water was blissful. He gulped it down so fast it almost choked him. Then, looking up, he saw Wharton was there, behind her, looking as if he had aged ten years.

“Where’s Jake? Where is he?”

“Don’t blame me.” Gideon put the glass down. “I tried to get him back, but he’s so . . . stubborn. And then the bars in the window . . .” He stopped, trying to get his thoughts together because the Summerland did that to you, shattered your mind, left you in pieces.

Deliberately he said, “Jake is in a city where a war is happening. Metal is falling from the sky and smashing the houses. He said to give you this.”

He put down the black velvet bag and out of it took the steel film canister.

Sarah picked it up. “Film? Of what?”

“And is Jake all right?” Wharton demanded.

Gideon drank the last drop of water. “He’s fine. Except that he’s in a dungeon. And likely to be hanged.”