The Slanted Worlds

16

With Moll gone, I confess I feel somewhat low. So I have decided to attempt one last great exploit. I have no bracelet, and accept I may never return. But if I succeed I will see what no man living has seen.

Because, since I have spoken with Oberon Venn, only the mysteries of the future interest me.

Diary of John Harcourt Symmes

HE OPENED THE garage quickly, dragged the rickety doors wide.

A green tarpaulin covered the motorbike; he had tugged it off and was pulling the black helmet over his head when Rebecca’s voice came sharp behind him.

“Jake. Where are you going?”

He barely looked around. “The village.”

“Now? But Venn . . .”

“Stuff Venn.” He felt the bracelet safely inside his sleeve. Now he had to find them, those three replicants. He had to confront them. Before he left. Before he went for his father. He was in no mood to talk.

“I’m coming with you.” She was already tucking her long red hair into the other helmet, fastening the chin strap.

“No way.”

She sat astride Piers’s bike and looked at him. “Get on.”

“Look . . .”

“Have you got any sort of license? Because I have.”

He glared at her. “I thought you were busy helping Maskelyne.”

“He doesn’t need me.” Her voice was never this harsh. As she took the keys from him, found one and started the bike engine, he watched her, unmoving. Then, through the roaring revs he said quietly, “Are you really jealous of a mirror?”

Rebecca clicked down her visor so that he saw only his warped black reflection.

“Get on,” she said. “And shut up.”

Wharton heard the roar of the bike; he ran to a window and saw the dark machine slither down the flooded drive.

“Jake!” he yelled stupidly. “Jake!”

What the hell was happening to everyone? Had they all gone mad? He turned and cannoned into Piers. The little man was almost in tears, his small hands clasped together, clutching at his scarlet waistcoat.

“George! Venn’s going in after her! Do something!”

“After Sarah? But . . .”

“He’ll take me with him, I know he will! To the Summerland! Oh, I can’t tell you how much I hate it in there! Last time they almost tore me to shreds! I’m a homebody, George, a brownie, a cook, a pwca that lives under the stairs! I’m not for the big adventures. You have to talk to him!”

“Wait. Let me think.” Wharton turned, anxious. “First I have to open the gates. Jake’s gone out on the bike.”

“MY bike!”

“Will you stop thinking about yourself, Piers, for just one tiny second! Open the gates! Please!”

Piers huffed and turned. He stalked down the kitchen corridor and into the scullery with its rows of surveillance cameras and bells, and flicked a switch.

The gate camera lit. Rain trickled relentlessly across its screen.

“There they are,” Wharton muttered.

Blurred and dim, the bike approached slowly, skidding around fallen branches.

“Who’s with him?” Piers said. Then: “That girl! Didn’t expect that, did you?”

Wharton hadn’t, but he made no sign. “Let them out.”

“But why . . .”

“The replicants. He’s going to find the replicants. He needs to know what they mean.”

Silent with surprise, Piers reached out and pressed the button for the gates. Together they watched the metal barrier jerk open, water dripping from the wrought-iron arabesques; watched the grainy image of the motorcycle flash through, speeding up.

Faintly, Wharton thought he heard a yell of acknowledgment.

As the gates closed, Piers said somberly, “I wish I could escape that easily. I wish I could just fly out of the window, like Peter bloody Pan.”

“Well, you can’t.” Venn’s voice was arctic.

They turned, and saw he was standing in the doorway, his dark coat on, wearing boots, a small pack on his back. “You’re coming with me. We have to find Sarah before she gets to that coin.”

Piers clutched his hands together. “Excellency, I beg . . .”

Venn’s face was white. He lifted his hand, pushing up his dark sleeve. “Don’t you see?”

Piers groaned. For a bewildered second Wharton didn’t understand; then Venn said, “She stole the bracelet when I was asleep. It must have been her.” He was strangely calm, as if the betrayal was too terrible even to think about now. “You’re coming, Piers. I need you.”

To his own surprise Wharton stepped forward; Piers ducked behind him instantly.

Wharton said, “You need him here. You can’t leave Maskelyne alone with the mirror. And the manuscript—it has to be deciphered.”

Venn gave him a ferocious stare. “Who asked you, teacher?”

“Take me instead.”

Piers gasped.

Venn’s eyes narrowed. “What? You’re a mortal.”

Afterward Wharton never knew if he had said it for her sake or his own.

“So is Sarah. If you’re going after her, I want to be there. I don’t want anything to happen to her. So take me.”

Of course I had to cancel the séance.

I hastily drew the curtain on the mirror, pretended illness, had all lights lit, the astonished and chattering clients ushered out. I was so flustered I could barely speak, so my discomfort at least would have been convincing to them.

Because all the time, even with the black silk veil flung over the glass, I knew he was still there.

The new disturbing apparition.

Watching me.

Finally, when I was alone among the scattered chairs and the discarded handkerchiefs, I locked the door and stood staring at the shrouded surface.

“And who is Janus?” I whispered.

No answer.

So I reached out and removed the veil.

He was sitting in a dark room, sideways to me. A slight man, not old, not young, wearing some neat uniform like a Hungarian hussar. Small round lenses covered his eyes. His hair was lank, just a little too long.

He said, “I have wondered about you. About Symmes. There was a young girl he took to live with him, did you know that? Her name was Moll. . . .”

I drew myself up, indignant. “She was just some urchin of the streets. I am Symmes’s daughter.”

“So you don’t know what happened to her?”

“She probably ran away.”

He smiled, infuriatingly calm. “I could tell you. It would astonish you.”

“I don’t have the least interest.”

“Really?” He raised both hands and joined the tips of his fingers together. “Do you know where I am, Miss Symmes? I am so far in your future that I am almost another species. I am no ghost, no vision. I am the ruler of the world.”

Such a peculiar apparition. Whatever he was, I found him most unappealing.

He leaned forward. “I calculate that you will already have received a message from David Wilde. This is known to be the year he spoke to you. What I want to know is where he is and what message he has asked you to pass to his son. A simple request.”

I smoothed a stray hair from my brow and managed a vinegary smile. “I am not in the habit, sir, of breaking the confidences of my . . . spiritual friends. Or of obeying the orders of strangers. Certainly not gentlemen who claim to be tyrants in some future realm.” I thought that quite a neat turn of phrase, and maybe my complaisance showed, because he seemed to gather himself, drawing back slightly, like a snake before it strikes.

“Where is David Wilde? In what era is he hiding from me?”

I sighed, and turned. “I will cover this glass, sir. As a ghost I find you tiresome, and you frighten my clients away. I trust you will have the goodness to disappear before I return to it.”

I reached up and took the dark cloth and it was then, as I laid it deliberately upon the obsidian mirror, that I knew I was lost.

Because his hand came out of the glass and caught my wrist.

“I think not, madam,” he whispered.

At first it was just ordinary woodland.

Bare trees under a gray sky, the undergrowth of brambles and bracken, the tiny green points of early spring bulbs hiding at the foot of white willow trunks. Sarah followed Gideon silently, her ears alert for every snapped twig, every fleeting bird.

Overhead the sky was a leaden lid, windblown showers gusting from the moors.

Her boots crunched a frozen puddle; then the bare trees were around her and she ducked under their branches.

Gideon walked warily. The path led downwards, as if the Wood followed some deep hidden combe; gradually she saw banks of exposed earth, hollowed with rabbit holes.

At a turn in the path darkened by a thicket of holly, Gideon stopped.

“What?” she whispered.

He glanced around; she saw his anxiety. “I don’t understand this. We should be inside by now.”

“Inside?”

“The Summerland.”

She remembered the other time she had stepped fleetingly into the Shee dimension, the strange instant transition from winter to a world where the summer never ended. She stared into the trees. “Does it change? Does the border move?”

“Not unless they want it to.” He frowned. “Are you wearing anything magical? Anything enchanted?”

She shrugged. “No.”

“Leave the pack.”

“No! It has food and water in it. If I eat anything Shee, you know they’ve got me forever.”

He hissed in frustration. Then he said, “Let’s try this way.”

As the Wood deepened, the trees seemed taller, their branches meshing far above the combe. The sunken lane became a knee-deep trough of dead leaves, as if oak and elm and rowan shed thousands here each winter and they never rotted, accumulating through centuries. Sarah felt herself sink into their wet softness, deep, up to her waist, and for a moment before Gideon grabbed her she was afraid that she would fall and be suffocated under them all, like some lost wanderer in a fairy tale. And then the leaves thinned, and the path was a slippery incline of cobbles, rainwater gushing down it.

Gideon’s hair was soaked; he turned up the collar of his green coat in silent misery.

“What’s the matter with the world?” he whispered.

“Might she know we’re here?” Sarah caught his arm, stopped him.

The thought turned him sick. “I don’t know. It could be just that the Summerland has reconfigured—it’s always changing, just like she is. Always changing but always the same. And since she got so angry with Venn, the rain has dripped and soaked the whole Wood. As if she wants to drown all mortals.”

Sarah frowned. “Come on. We have to keep going.”

By the bottom of the combe the path was a streambed they waded through. It trickled into a green clearing, the grass lush and long, soaked with floodwater.

In the very center stood a circular well, the empty bucket tipped by its side.

Sarah stopped. “Seen that before?”

“No.” Gideon considered. “So that must mean something.”

They squelched across. The grass was emerald, shimmering with raindrops. In each drop was a rainbow. Sarah could smell mint, as if it grew tiny among the roots and was crushed underfoot.

At the well coping, Gideon leaned over and looked down. A small stone stairway spiraled inside, into the dark. Beside him, Sarah stared at the smooth wet slabs, the tiny fronds sprouting from their cracks.

“Down there?” she murmured.

The well took her words and whispered them, around and around.

Jackdaws rose and cawed in the Wood, far off.

Gideon glanced up nervously. “It seems so.”

Halfway to the village the motorbike shuddered. The engine coughed, spluttered, and then died.

Rebecca cursed.

“What?” Jake yelled.

“Petrol. No petrol!”

Inside the dark helmet, he heard the rain pattering in the sudden quiet. “Piers,” he said. “He probably magicked it all away.” Lifting the visor, he looked around.

They were at the crossroads where three lanes met, at the finger-post that leaned in the hedge and said: Wintercombe 1. Druid’s Acre 2. Marley 5.

Opposite, roofed with corrugated iron sheets, an ancient stone barn gleamed under the gray rain.

“What now?” Rebecca turned. “We could go back.”

“Not yet.” Jake took the helmet off; she saw how he was alert, his whole body listening. “Do you hear that?”

She undid the chin-strap and lifted the helmet; immediately the rain gusted cold on her hair. Nothing but its pattering on the leaves came to her.

But Jake had already dumped his helmet and was moving, swift and stealthy, toward the derelict barn.

As she followed him, she heard it too.

A soft giggle, a whisper. And then chanting, the high thin voices of kids, meaningless words, a screech of laughter.

“Jake . . .”

“Keep quiet. It’s them.”

She crouched beside him. “Who? The Shee?”

He shook his head, impatient. “The replicants. Janus.”

Then he was gone, up against the ivy-dark of the barn, a shadow slipping along the wall.

When she got to him, she was breathless. Rain dripped from her fingers. Jake reached the door. It was ajar, the wood warped and ill-fitting; he eased it a fraction wider. They saw inside.

Three small children were sitting around a fire. They had dragged some kindling together and lit it on the cleared floor, and it crackled and spat, as if the wood was wet. The boys were identical, so that as Rebecca looked from one to another it was impossible to tell them apart. Their school clothes were grubby and frayed; they wore small black wellington boots and duffel coats with broken toggles. One had his cap on backward.

Another was stirring something in a propped tin can among the charred sticks; to Rebecca it smelled fishy, like some rancid stew. He was singing:

Round and round the garden

like a teddy bear . . .

Then he looked up. Straight toward the door. “Why not come in, Jake?” he said.

“Out of the rain,” the third added, cleaning steam from his small specs.

Jake swore under his breath.

He stepped out, into the barn.

Rebecca stayed where she was. Maybe they didn’t know she was there. Seeing them now, she understood that these children were all replicants of Janus. Even at this age they had the calm menace she remembered, the considering stare through the round lenses, the unbreakable certainty of the small thin man who ruled Sarah’s far future world.

Jake stood there boldly. He folded his arms. “I’ve been looking for you. I want to tell you that I won’t betray Sarah to you and that I’ll find my father myself. I don’t need you.”

They gazed at him with a detached interest.

“He’s crazy.”

“He believes it.”

“He has no idea.”

Jake stepped closer. He was much taller than them; he crouched, bringing his face down to their level, close up. He saw himself reflected in three pairs of round glasses.

“And you have no idea about me. Who I am. What I can do.”

They smiled. Secret, closed-up smiles.

“Pride, Jake.”

“Comes before a fall, Jake.”

The last boy tasted the brew in the tin can and made a face. “Always your Achilles’ heel, Jake. Maybe you’ve managed to find out where your father is. But maybe he’s too far back for you to reach. That’s a problem for you. Not for me, though. I can reach anyone in all of time, Jake, because I’m not afraid to use the mirror. Already I’ve made myself many. I will make myself immortal.”

“You’re the one who’s crazy.”

“As for Sarah, all she wants is to destroy the mirror. She’s not worried about your father.”

“Of course she is. Besides, she . . .”

“She’s already gone to get the coin.”

Jake froze. His mind groped after the sentence with a dread that chilled him. “Gone . . . ? What do you mean, the coin? She doesn’t know.”

“Yes she does.”

“You told her, Jake.”

“She overheard you telling Wharton.”

He gasped. Behind him, he heard Rebecca stand and hurry forward. But the barn was already empty, the fire cold ashes, the tin cup a tipped and congealed mess.

And the children were only three shadows of himself, crouching on hands and knees, across the floor.