The Slanted Worlds

17

Confidential report

Department of Covert Operations

Scotland Yard.

Ref2238198/453

Subject: SYMMES, Alicia

An anonymous phone call was received by a local

station on Weds 6th June 1940 suggesting subject

involved in alleged spy ring.

Status: ONGOING

Priority: A1

Assigned Officer: Michael Allenby

He stood up and still he held my arm.

It was quite terrifying.

And yet after a second I sensed that he would not come through, perhaps could not enter my room.

His grip was cold and painful. I said, “I insist you release me, sir.”

He smiled. He let me go, and to my relief, stepped back. He said, “You know, you remind me so much of your father, Alicia. A man full of grand ideas of himself, a naively inquisitive man. He pried into the secrets of time and the universe and thought them no more than parlor tricks. You are very like him.”

A sound like a murmured objection came from somewhere behind him.

“I never knew my father. But I am proud of what he did.” I withdrew to the safety of the mantelpiece and stared at the apparition. He was in some very large space, a cavernous chamber. It seemed to be lit by a cold white light, and there were no windows to see out of. No furniture was visible but a bare gray desk, on which his hand rested. He wore thin gray gloves.

“Is that the future?” I whispered.

He looked around. “This? It may be. I am beginning to think that there are many possible futures. Perhaps I am just one of them.” He smiled. “Maybe I will interfere in your future, Alicia. Maybe I will make you a spy in a war not yet even begun. That would be so easy.”

He took his glasses off and polished them on his sleeve, but turned his face away from me, so that I should not see his eyes. When he turned back, the lenses were blank blue circles.

“David Wilde,” I said. “What’s so important about him?”

“Nothing. Wilde is no one. It’s Venn.”

I remembered that David had said this was his friend. “Oberon Venn?”

“And Sarah Venn. Sarah, my little invisible girl. My star pupil. She escaped from me, you know, Miss Symmes. She escaped through my mirror, and she is dangerous. I don’t know what she’s planning.”

It was as if he was talking to himself. I had no idea what it meant. And then a noise rose, from somewhere very close in his world, a terrible noise such I could never have imagined, as if the whole fabric of the universe groaned and shook.

My own mirror rippled. I saw the very glass melt and re-form.

A potpourri jar juddered on my mantelshelf; I grabbed it just before it slid down into the fire.

Then all was still, but for my pounding heart.

“What WAS that?”

He sat unmoving. “That is the universe unmaking itself. That is the black hole crying out .”

“It sounds quite dreadful.”

He laughed, dry. “You have no idea. It will suck everything in. The world, the people, the planet, the galaxy. In time it will suck in heaven and hell, every speck of light. Even Time itself . . .” He turned gracefully. “Tell me where David Wilde is, Alicia. And in return I will send you your father.”

It was so unexpected. Such a shock! I had no idea what to believe. But then he stood and went aside and drew a man before me, a large, plump man in a blue quilted smoking jacket stained with soot, a balding, mustachioed man I had only ever seen from sepia photographs.

My heart leaped. I clasped my hands together.

“Father?” I said.

My father looked out at me. He seemed hardly to understand what was happening. “Are you Alicia? Good Lord. How you’ve grown.”

“Are you . . . alive? Where are you?”

“Not sure, my dear. Such a strange place. In fact, I’m not sure I’m really here at all.”

Janus led my father close to what, I suppose, in his world, was the other side of the mirror. “There he is, Alicia. Mr. John Harcourt Symmes. Safe. Alive. I can send him back to you. This instant. Just tell me where David Wilde is.”

Reader of this journal, I suppose you would not have been tempted. I suppose you would have been brave and silent and suffered remorse all your life. I was neither brave nor silent. I said, “He’s is Florence. The year is 1347. The time of the Black Death.”

After all, what was David Wilde to me?

My father frowned. “Well! Is he really? He certainly gets around.”

Janus’s smile was slow, of pure pleasure. “The Black Death! How very convenient.” He pushed my father toward me. “Thank you so much, Alicia,” he said.

The steps were treacherous with slime; it slicked the walls of the well too, and Sarah’s hands slid away as she tried to hold on. Below, Gideon was a shadow.

“What’s down there?”

“Nothing yet.” His voice boomed in the hollow space. “Just be careful.”

She spiraled down, step by step, faltering into darkness. The well shaft was black, as if it pierced deep into the earth. Once or twice she glanced up; the sky was a diminishing gray disc rimmed with ferns, and then there was something perching up there, a bird, perhaps a starling. As its silhouette flew off, small particles of stone dislodged and fell past her.

Something plopped far below.

Her father had told her a story, when she was small, about a country at the bottom of a well. She tried to remember it now, as the black walls swallowed her; there was some witch, and two girls who each went there to be her servant. The good girl, when she came back, had had gold coins fall from her mouth every time she spoke. The bad girl had had toads. Sarah grimaced. That was the part of the story she had always hated.

The toads.

Something soft grabbed her foot; she almost yelled.

“Don’t stand on me! We’re at the bottom.”

As she jumped down into a squelch of thick mud, Gideon was already feeling the walls around them. His green frock coat was streaked with slime; his fingers lichened with emerald.

Sarah stared up. “There was a bird. Watching us. Did you see it?”

“Yes.” He stopped. “Here. Look.”

Her fingers groped. It felt like an arch, so low she had to crouch down to peer in. A tunnel sloped away, its floor a mash of mud and leaves. She frowned. “Are you sure?”

Gideon was sharp with listening; he held his face to the air that came out of the darkness and said, “I can smell the Summerland. It’s down there somewhere. I can smell the grass and the gorse flowers. I can hear bees.” He flicked her a glance from his eyes; green in the dark. “Believe me?”

“I don’t think I have any choice.”

He nodded, crouched down, and crawled into the tunnel.

She gave one last look back up at the leaden sky of the world, and followed.

Maskelyne saw them go from a high window.

He saw Venn leap down the front steps of the house and race into the Wood. Behind, someone else came running; to his surprise it was the big man, the teacher, hastily pulling a pack on his shoulders, wrapping a striped scarf around his neck.

They disappeared into the trees.

“So now it’s just you and me.”

Maskelyne turned.

Piers stood at the far end of the Long Gallery, a cat sitting upright on each side of him, black as Egyptian sculptures. He said, “Just you and me, scarred man. But I’ll be watching you. You may fool Venn, but I know you got back in here by some sneaking sorcery, and I don’t trust the hairs on your head or the nails on your fingers. Everywhere you go, everything you do, I’ll be watching.”

Maskelyne smiled, a little weary. “Quite the three-headed dog, aren’t you, Master Piers. But you needn’t worry. I’m not here to steal the mirror. At least not yet.”

Piers’s red waistcoat was striped with black. He scowled. “Just so we understand each other.” Then he turned his head, startled. “Is that roar the motorbike? Are they back?”

Maskelyne went to the window, opened it and leaned out. “All I can hear is the river.”

Piers turned pale. “Maybe I’d better check the cellars.”

“You do that.”

When the little man had gone, Maskelyne stayed at the window. The river must be in high spate, under the house. The floodwaters were rising. And there out over the clustered trees of the Wood, what was that? A gray cloud, rising and settling, splitting and re-forming. Rain? Or birds?

He watched them with a distinct unease.

The Shee were flocking. Something was happening, out there in that tangled wildwood. Something was disturbing the faery people.

Time and the world were drowning, the currents of the earth were streaming with strange energies; he could feel them in his very bones and veins. And deep below the house the black mirror pulsed like a pinpoint of dark silence, commanding him to come.

“All right,” he whispered. “I hear you.”

But still he stared out at the darkening sky.

Where was Rebecca? What was going on out there?

There was nothing wrong with the bike.

Rebecca stared at the dial in bewilderment. “It said empty. It was empty.”

Jake shook his head. “Let’s get back. I’ve done what I came for and now I’m going after my father.”

He grabbed the handlebars and as his sleeve lifted she saw a flash of silver; glimpsed the staring metal eye of the snake. “My God!” she stared. “How did you get that?”

He climbed on and kick-started the engine. “Get on.”

“Jake! To bring it out here! Are you crazy?”

But she had to jump to get on as the bike roared down the lane, and as she gripped her arms tight around him, she knew he was as scared as she was, that the disappearance of the children had knocked all confidence out of him.

They rode fast, down the lanes, under the deep banks of red earth, under tangled boles of hawthorn and ash, past branches that snagged and reached out for them.

Wintercombe seemed strangely distant, as if they had come farther than they’d thought; every time the lane twisted, Rebecca expected the ford, the pair of gates with their lion guardians, but there were only the endless hedges, until Jake stopped the bike abruptly, breathless.

“We’re lost. You’ve taken the wrong turn.” She wanted to scream at him.

He said, “No. I think the land is wrong. Summer has done something to it.”

They went on, more slowly. She saw that the fields were planes of red water; that trees and gates stood isolated. Sheep had been moved to high ground; cattle were missing. And in the west the sun was already wrapped in great piling clouds.

The gates, when they came suddenly upon them, were still open. Jake turned in and rode cautiously up the drive. He was more worried than he wanted to show because yes, it had been stupid to bring the bracelet out here. If Summer got her hands on it . . .

Even as he thought the thought, the engine died.

The silence was terrible.

They slid to a halt under a great oak that sprawled its boughs over the track. Jake dumped the bike, just as a starling landed on a branch with a bounce. Its beady black eyes fixed on him.

“Move,” he muttered. “Quick!”

Rebecca was already running. He flung the helmet at the bird and raced after her, but now the host were coming down like the rain, wings fluttering, beaks shrieking.

He leaped a fallen log, crunched through leaves, glanced back. And then he heard the beat of the drum, deep in the Wood, and his heart went icy with fear.

“Jake.” Rebecca had stopped. He crashed against her. She grabbed his hand.

The Shee were all around. They stood silent, an army of curious eyes. Of heads tipped sideways with sharp attention. Of intent greed.

Every bit of it was focused on Jake.

Could they sense the bracelet? Could they smell the silver, taste the amber? Did the snake speak to them in some secret hissing syllables?

“Keep walking,” he breathed. “Don’t look at them. Don’t stop.”

“I can’t.” Rebecca seemed frozen with terror. “What are they?”

He pulled her forward. They walked side by side down the track, between the clustering creatures with their silver hair, their beautiful faces. The Shee were assembling, leaping down from the trees, their wings becoming arms, their claws feet, their feathers fine clothes of dark glossy purples and green. As she walked, Rebecca saw them transform, a male with one wing still, a female face shivering from beak to sweet smiling mouth. Behind, in the thickets, shapes moved, slithered.

“Where’s Summer?” she gasped.

“Don’t ask.” If she came now, they were lost. “Hurry!”

But his feet stumbled; Rebecca slowed. The baneful silence of the Shee was working on them; they felt tired suddenly, so tired, that all they wanted to do was stop, lie down, sleep, be covered in leaves by the birds.

“Rebecca. Keep moving.” The words were blurred in his mouth. He slipped; almost fell.

Beside him, she crouched, her head bent.

“Can’t,” she whispered. “Too tired.”

They would fall. They would fall here and the Shee would flock down on them, beak and claw, snatching for the bracelet, for the prize their queen would scream with delight to own.

Jake knew it and he didn’t care. He slid to his knees.

It was over.

Until, like a pinprick of light, the voice stabbed him.

“Rebecca. Jake. Get up.”

It was calm, but the shock of it jerked his eyes open. He saw Maskelyne standing alone on the flooded drive before the Abbey. He saw Piers fidgeting with fear and anxiety on the steps behind.

“Rebecca! Do you hear me?”

She looked up. Dazed, as if he had woken her from death.

Jake grabbed her hand, dragged her up.

And as they stumbled past them, the Shee stepped back, drew away from Maskelyne’s voice and Maskelyne’s very shadow, and from their angry ranks a terrifying and eerie sound arose, a hiss that made the hackles on Jake’s neck prickle with raw fear.

And then they were at the steps, and Piers had run down and was hustling them up, staring over his shoulder at the bird army that rose in dark swirling flocks above the Wood.

They fell into the hall.

Maskelyne came last, and slammed and bolted the door.

Jake turned. “What the hell did you do? We were . . . Why were they so scared of you?”

Maskelyne shrugged. “Perhaps the scar frightened them. They hate ugliness.”

Rebecca stared at him. “It was amazing!”

“Lucky.” Piers seemed torn between relief and fury. “You were just lucky. Because if Summer had been there . . .”

“But she wasn’t there.” Maskelyne looked at Jake. “And that’s what worries me.”

“A well?” Wharton stared down at the black interior, appalled. “You expect me to climb down a bloody well?”

Venn was bending over the shaft. Now he looked up, his face pale with cold, his eyes hard and blue. “You were the one who asked to come. You can see the tracks. They went down here.” His gaze strayed anxiously to the Wood beyond. “Make up your mind. The Shee might not let you back now anyway. They’re hunting.”

Wharton growled in his throat. Then he knotted the school scarf tight, swung himself over, and spread a hand on the slimy bricks. “I thought the Summerland was some paradise of a place.”

Already far below in the dark, Venn laughed. “You thought wrong.”

The sound echoed, hollow. Wharton frowned. No need to be scared. Whatever he was getting into, it was certainly no worse than a Chaucer lesson with the Lower Sixth last thing on a Friday afternoon. After all, he told himself firmly, what worse horrors could the Universe hold?

So he descended into the pit.