The Slanted Worlds

9

Jake has charm if he cares to use it. He can be most persuasive. His academic ability is not in doubt. He has spectacular confidence in his own judgment—which is often at fault.

He seems to trust no one but himself. Frankly, I think he’d make a good politician.

Or a spy.

End of term confidential report; Compton’s School; G. Wharton

London!

I had never imagined a place so frantic. My soul thrilled to the motor cars, trains, horses and carriages! The thronged pavements of people—beggars, thieves, duchesses, bankers—all strolling among a bedlam of street vendors who cried every ware from violets to soap to ointment that would remedy hair loss for the modern gentleman.

But when I finally walked under the ancient archway of Staple Inn, I found myself in a sudden haven of quiet; an old stone courtyard surrounding great trees, their leaves just budding in the spring sunshine.

I was ushered into the offices of Messrs. Queenhythe and Carbury, Solicitors at Law, to find a very tall young man with a walrus mustache who introduced himself as Marcus Queenhythe. I must have looked terribly tired from my bewildering journey, because he instantly poured me tea from a brown china pot.

“And you walked all the way from Euston? My dear Miss Symmes . . .”

“I had no idea which omnibus to take.” I drank the tea thirstily. “There were so many.”

“Of course. Well, we will have a cab to your house. That is if you wish me to attend you.”

“Oh please. I would so like it.”

Your house.

My heart beat with quiet pride. I sat up straight and tried to look like a woman of property. But I could not help but be aware that Mr. Queenhythe seemed unaccountably nervous. He stroked his mustache with inky fingers. “There is a little . . . that is . . . you may be a little disturbed by the . . . er, state of the property.”

“In what way?” I tried to sound confident, but my heart sank, as if at some hidden dread.

“It has been unoccupied for many years. And your late father was a noted eccentric. There are heaps of books and papers . . .”

I was relieved. “Oh, papers. I can deal with those.”

“And . . . um, machinery. There seems to be some sort of peculiar invention. In the study. Wiring and such. It fills the room.”

I waved a hand. “It can be dismantled and sold. Shall we go now?” Because I was burning with impatience.

He sent the clerk for the keys, and sat at the desk. He did not meet my eye. “I think . . . If I may be so bold as to advise you, Miss Symmes, perhaps a hotel would be better. Until . . .”

“No hotel.” I rose, so he had to scramble up, startled. I kept my voice firm. “I intend to sleep in my own house. Mr. Queenhythe, may I ask what it is that you are not telling me?”

I detected a certain panic in his voice. He stood, turning his back and arranging his cravat in the mirror. Finally he said, “In point of fact, Miss Symmes, though I consider them foolish, there are rumors about the house. We have found it impossible to keep a servant there. They all leave very quickly. They say . . .”

His hand shook a little on the tie. “. . . that the house is haunted.”

He watched me anxiously in the glass.

I must admit to a certain cold shiver around the heart.

But I drew myself up. “Ghosts, sir, do not trouble me.”

However, when the cab arrived before the dilapidated frontage, I admit to being a little daunted. The house was a fine Georgian building in a grand square, but trees had been allowed to grow and overshadow it, and the shutters were closed and dark, like blind eyes. Ivy obscured the upstairs, and strange scorch marks starred from what must have been the study window. As I climbed the steps and waited for Mr. Queenhythe to undo the padlocks, I felt as if my mysterious father was still here, gazing down at me curiously from some attic. When I glanced up, the panes were dark.

We entered the hall. A peculiar smell of charred metal seemed to hang there, even after so many years.

“This was the drawing room. The dining room is in here. The morning room. And this was Mr. Symmes’s study, I believe.”

He opened a door onto a room crowded with dark masses of sheeted furniture. I put a hand out and touched an armchair. My fingers came away covered with a film of brown dust. “Does no one clean?”

“As I said, we have had problems. The last cleaner refused to return. She spoke of footsteps. Movements where no one was.”

I opened the shutters. Pale daylight fell on my father’s desk, his chair, and revealed by it, suddenly, there in the corner, I saw her. A gangly awkward young woman, drably dressed, her face thin and pale, her glance startled. I moved, and so did she. And then I realized this was no ghost but myself, reflected, and I put a hand to my cheek in dismay, because for a moment I had seen myself as a stranger sees me, a lost girl, away from all the certainties and fixtures of my life.

I recovered myself because Mr. Queenhythe was observing me, and stepping forward, removed the rest of the sheets.

To reveal the mirror.

It was tall and made of some curious glossy black glass.

It reflected the room as a slanting, warped space, the walls distorted, the windows bulging outward. Coils of wiring led from it into the heaped and piled corners of the room. I picked one up, and it curled in my hand with a strange friction that made me drop it, quickly. Behind me, the mirror showed Mr. Queenhythe laying a pile of documents on the desk.

“These are your father’s will, his diaries and letters. If you would care to sign here, and . . . just here, our business is concluded.”

He wanted to be out of the place. I could sense his nervousness. I crossed the room and signed the papers with what I hoped was a defiant flourish. He put the keys down on the desk, gathered his effects, and hurried into the hall. I trailed after him.

“If there is anything you need,” he said, his look suddenly intent and urgent. “Anything at all, Miss Symmes, please don’t hesitate to contact us. At any hour.”

Rather unnerved, I put out my hand and he shook it.

At that moment a soft sound startled us.

Knock.

Knock.

Knock.

It echoed through the empty hall and dusty stairwell.

We looked at each other. “Now who can that be?” he said. He marched to the front door and flung it open.

There was no one there.

Mr. Queenhythe stepped out and looked up and down the street. The pavements were empty. But I thought I heard, as if from somewhere far, the giggle of children.

“Some scoundrel playing tricks,” he said. “Well. I wish you the best of luck, Miss Symmes. The very best of luck.”

It was only when I had closed the door on his hurried departure, and turned to face the dark stair and the silent house, that I allowed myself a secret smile.

Ghosts were just what I needed.

I was my father’s daughter, after all.

Allenby took another pull at the cigarette and stared at Jake through the coil of blue smoke. “Let me get this straight. You want me to take you—a prisoner on remand—out of here, across the bomb craters of London, to a smashed-up house in a street that no longer exists?”

Jake nodded.

“You really have a nerve, Wilde.”

Jake leaned back. “It’s the only way. If you want Alicia’s spy network, you have to take me to her house.”

“Her house is in smithereens!”

“Not all of it.” Jake leaned forward. “Come on. Your men must have been digging about in there. They’ve found it, haven’t they. You know they have. The mirror. The machine.”

He made his voice as confident and enticing as he could, but in truth he felt sick and desperate. He had barely eaten for days—the muck they gave him was inedible—and his brain was weary and fuzzy from broken sleep, because at night the cells were crammed with drunks and infuriatingly noisy women. But at least they were keeping him here. There was no sign of the military. Allenby wanted the credit for this for himself.

Allenby crunched the cigarette in the ashtray. The door opened; the sergeant came in with two mugs on a tray. As he set them down, he gave Jake a particularly filthy look.

Jake grabbed the tea with both handcuffed hands and drank it gratefully. The hot sweetness was a glorious comfort.

Allenby watched. His calm, alert face was hard to read.

“What is this machine?”

“I told you. Alicia used a very strange device. It won’t have been destroyed. It looks . . . appears . . . to be made of glass. Black glass.”

A flicker. Hardly anything, in those steady eyes. But Jake was sure.

He put the mug down. “You have found it.”

After a moment Allenby said, “Let’s say we’ve recovered . . . something. Something we don’t understand. But . . .”

“Take me there. I’ll get it working for you.”

Their eyes met across the table. It was a game of chess, Jake thought, with London the board and himself as one of the pawns, the smallest of pieces. But it had to work, because if Gideon failed him, he certainly wasn’t going to be stuck here for the rest of his life.

Allenby sighed. Abruptly, he scraped the chair back and stood. “I must be a bloody fool,” he said.

Sarah said, “You can’t do it, can you?”

Piers, sitting on the floor among a pile of wiring as big as he was, looked at Venn.

“It’s not that I can’t do it exactly,” he said warily. “I mean, given time, given a bit of leeway, I could. But to be honest, I’d rather work on that page you brought.”

“Jake needs us now!” She scrambled up and walked angrily to the mirror, staring into its enigmatic curves.

The mirror slanted her own gaze back at her. She knew Piers and Venn had been up all night re-aligning it. Once, they had tried to activate it. At four o’clock a shudder of noise and energy had rippled terrifyingly through the house, waking her and sending her racing out into the dark corridor and crashing into Wharton’s startled panic.

“What the hell was that?” he’d yelled.

Now he lay in an armchair dozing, his maroon dressing gown tied tight over a pair of ridiculous pajamas with little anchors all over them.

She looked at the film canister. “Can we see this?”

“I’ll have to find the old projector,” Piers said, not looking up.

She frowned. Then she touched the bracelet. Gideon had told her about the Blitzed world. And Jake was there, locked up in some cell, fuming with restlessness and fear. She knew how that felt.

“Where’s Gideon?”

“Gone back to the Shee.” Wharton yawned. “Everything needs to seem normal. If Summer knew . . . Really, sometimes I fear for that poor boy’s sanity.”

Venn had said nothing for ages. He watched Sarah, his glance sharp and cold.

She said, “Listen to me. We can’t just work in the dark. We don’t have any more time to experiment and get things wrong over and over. If we make a mistake, we could miss him by years. We could be too late.” She turned to face him. “You know what to do, and you don’t have any choice about it. There’s only one man who can possibly help us now, and that man is Maskelyne.”

Venn, leaning on the filing cabinet, stood upright. He walked slowly into the very heart of the labyrinth and stood beside her, and the dark glass showed her his face, subtly warped. He said quietly, “How can I trust you, Sarah? How can I ever be sure of you? What we want is so different.”

“What we want is the same.” She turned on him. “Jake back. David found. Leah saved.”

“And then?”

“Then you give me the mirror.”

He smiled, remote. “You make it all sound so easy.” He gazed at the dark reflection of the room, the mess of machinery, Piers sitting exhausted and cross-legged among the tangle. “You! What do you say?”

“I think she’s right, Excellency.”

Venn took the bracelet from Sarah’s hand and held it up in his frostbitten fingers. She saw how its silver enigma angered him, how frustration and despair were eating him away. Without looking at her, his voice a low snarl, he said, “Do it.”

She turned fast, grabbed Wharton, and shook him awake. “George. Get dressed. Get the car. Quick.”

High on the moors, the air was frosty in the dawn. The sun was barely up, struggling through a great bank of cloud in the east, and as the car rocked and bounced along the frozen track, she had to grab the map to keep it open on her lap. “Be careful!”

Wharton drove grimly. “What about my suspension! Are you sure it’s up here?”

“So Piers says.”

How Piers had found out where the scarred man was living, she had no idea. But the rutted track led to a gate tied with rope, and as she jumped out to open it, she saw the stunted trees of a small pine copse, and beyond, far on the horizon, pale as a diamond, the sea.

She stopped, astonished.

“Sarah?”

She had never seen a sea so beautiful. She stared at it in utter delight. Wharton got out of the car and came up behind her. He said quietly, “So how is the sea different at the End of the world?”

“It just is.”

“You could tell me.” He sounded fascinated. “You should tell us, Sarah, about how it is there. About what Janus has . . . will do to the world. Maybe the mistakes need never be made . . .”

She glanced at him then, at his wide-eyed curiosity, thinking again how naïve these people were, in their green world with their clean water and ancient buildings and comfortable, convenient lives. How to them the future was something that they would never see. A story, nothing more.

For a fierce, angry moment she just wanted to shock him violently out of his complacency. But she made herself shake her head. “Not now, George. I couldn’t even begin.”

Before he could answer, she had unlooped the rope and pulled the gate open, lifting its heavy metal bars out of the stiff mud. “Leave the car. This track’s too narrow.”

He took the keys and let the door slam, loud and alien in the silent morning. The track was lined with gorse bushes, their furzy branches already green, and small sturdy bluebells lurked in the bottom of the scrappy, sheep-gnawed hedge. Walking down, Sarah felt the soft rustle and brush of the rough grass against her legs calming her, the wind whipping her coat wide.

Wharton came behind, watching her. He knew she had almost told him something then, had been on the edge of some revelation, and drawn back. The girl who could become invisible still held so many secrets. Now she was pointing into the wind. “That must be it.”

A small Devon long-house of whitened stone, its lichened roof below them in a fold of the hills.

“It looks quiet.”

“Not empty. The chimney.”

A thin wisp of smoke dissipated as he looked.

They hurried down the steep track. Opening the gate, Sarah walked up to the door and raised her hand, but before she could knock, it was opened.

Maskelyne stood there, winding a scarf around his neck. He wore a dark coat. She saw the livid scar that disfigured his face, and behind him, in the gloom of the interior, a table set with scattered pieces like an abandoned board game.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said, his voice choked with eagerness. “Let’s go.”