The Slanted Worlds

18

The east face is the most deadly and has only been scaled once. This was during the tragic expedition of 2005, with Carl Morris, Edwin James, Heinrich Svensson, Oberon Venn, and Fillipo Montaigne. The mountain is now considered too dangerous to attempt and the Chinese government have, despite international protests, forbidden further expeditions.

“Katra Simba, Deadly Mountain”;

Article in National Geographic, 2013

THEY WAITED BEFORE the mirror. Like guardians.

The black glass reflected them. Seven cats, some curled snoozing, some washing, one on its back fighting a tangled battle with a piece of the sticky malachite green webbing.

The house was silent, with only its drips and damp, the subdued rumble of the flooded river below its cellars, the trees on the steep ravine dripping on its tiles.

Then the front door slammed, was bolted.

The cats listened.

Arguing voices came down the Monk’s Walk; the cats sat up, attentive, their green eyes wide with curiosity.

Jake burst into the room. “It’s a total waste of time even talking about it. I have to go back there because I already did. Don’t you see?”

Rebecca blinked. “What are you talking about?”

“Alicia! She knew my name! She knew me.” He realized he was shouting. He lowered his voice and tried to keep it even and calm. He was aware of Maskelyne’s eyes, as if the scarred man was somehow weighing him up, making some secret judgment.

“When I spoke to her, there in the rubble of her house, she said ‘Only waited to give you this.’ So it’s clear we had met before. It’s in my future, but it was in her past.”

“Oh God,” Piers muttered. “My head hurts.”

Rebecca shook her head. “But why . . .”

“To speak to my father.” He glanced at Maskelyne. “It’s the only way, because we can’t reach him, can we, in 1347?”

“I think he’s too far for our resources yet.” Maskelyne shrugged. “But it may be possible to make a relay. To pull him forward, even a few centuries.”

Jake stared. “Could we do that?”

“We could try to make a chain. Using our bracelet and the one he is wearing, it might be possible to get him back in controlled stages.”

For a moment it almost made Jake too happy to breathe. Then Piers sat on a carved chair and said, “You know that Venn thinks Sarah, not you, has the bracelet?”

“What?” He was astonished. “Why?”

“Because he trusts her less than you, I suppose.”

“I can’t help that.” Bewildered, Jake looked up as the marmoset swung down from the door with a screech of welcome and flung its tiny arms around his neck. “And where’s George?”

Piers coughed. “Gone to the Summerland with Venn. He volunteered.”

Rebecca whistled. “He must care a lot about Sarah.”

For a moment Jake felt a sliver of some emotion he could barely register. Was it envy? Jealousy? He snarled, “We need him here! What’s he thinking of!”

“Fool has no idea what he’s facing.” But Piers’s scorn was muted, almost admiring.

Jake turned to Maskelyne. “This chain. Let’s do it. Now.”

The scarred man glanced at him. He went and walked to the mirror, both hands gripping its silver frame. Beside him, Jake saw how Rebecca watched, nervous, chewing the end of her hair.

“Prepare yourself,” Maskelyne said. “Both of you.”

What happened next remains something of a blank in my memory. There was certainly a tremendous implosion—a whoosh of blackness like a vacuum, so that I had to hold on to the table with both hands, and even then the heavy chenille cloth was dragged away, and a stuffed cockatoo under a glass dome fell and was smashed.

All my breath was snatched. For a moment I understood only that the time was stretched like elastic; that the mirror was sucking in the world, and that I would be sucked in with it, to that grim gray future.

The crash was so loud that I fainted.

I came around to a sweet smell. Someone was holding a handkerchief soaked with drops of eau de cologne clumsily to my nose. I spluttered, gasped, struggled upright.

“Father? Is it you?”

He sat back. “Dear girl. Who else.”

I could not believe it. For a start he looked no older than the last photograph I owned of him, which must have been taken only weeks before the tragic accident. “You died,” I gasped.

“No! Not at all.” He helped me up and we stood face-to-face and there he was, John Harcourt Symmes, the fearless inventor of my dreams. Well . . . perhaps a little smaller and plumper. But he made no attempt to embrace me; he seemed more bewildered than I. “I did not die. I made a very great attempt to use the mirror. Moll, you see, had betrayed me with her devious little scheme . . . and so I still did not have the bracelet.” He stood, moved to the mantelpiece and stood there, one arm on the marble sill, the other smoothing his mustache. His voice took on the formality of a public lecture. “I attempted a great feat, and failed. I seemed to float for whole hours in a terrible, black place of no light or time or gravity. Then somehow that man, the tyrant Janus, snatched me from it. I have no idea how.” He shook his head. “I emerged from the mirror into his gray room, and what I saw there . . . That was mere days ago, of course. But . . .”

Doubt crept into his eyes. He looked around the room, at the mirror, the new curtains, the recently installed electric light. “Good heavens. I have traveled . . . no, journeyed . . . I have actually journeyed into my own future! How many years!”

“Thirty-one,” I whispered.

His eyes widened, and he almost ran to the window. There was a silence as he took in the changed vista of the street. I thought of the motor cars out there. The buses. I watched his back. His voice, when it came, was strangely subdued. “Good Lord. So the old Queen is dead? And this is the future!”

“A possible one.” I thought of what Janus had said. Then I patted the sofa. “Come and talk to me, Papa. Tell me about this urchin Moll.”

Wharton crawled on hands and knees in the dripping muddy tunnel.

The pack on his back scraped the brick roof. Water ran down his hair and behind his ears.

He sneezed. The sound rang like an explosion. He groped for a handkerchief. “For God’s sake. How much farther?”

Venn was a dark mass ahead. His voice came back like an angry rumble. “Will you stop asking that?”

He obviously had no idea.

Gritting his teeth, Wharton slopped on. After all, it was no worse than the army assault courses he had sweated through in training. They had come in useful years later, when he had needed to invent a fiendish exercise regime for the boys at the school. Wharton’s Workouts had soon sorted the wimps from the . . . er well, boys. Legendary in the staff room. He snorted a laugh.

As if it was some signal, light blinded him. He raised his head and realized Venn had emerged ahead; a bright blue glow was emanating from the end of the tunnel. A cold, oddly silent glow.

He pulled himself along, squelching and cursing, but even as he reached the end, he knew that the mud under his palms was hardening, becoming ridges of ice, and when he crawled to the end and staggered to his feet he stared around with a mixture of dismay and delight.

“My God. Where is this!”

It was a high arctic plateau. The snow plain stretched down before them, blinding in the full sun. Beyond, range upon range of mountains needled the sky, their brilliant tops dusting faint cloud into the pure blue air.

He breathed deep, and the cold entered him like energy. “It’s fantastic! Even better than the Alps. But we must be so high . . . Is this really the Summerland?”

Venn was a dark shadow on the snow. He stood looking out, intent, his blue eyes cold as the ice.

When he answered, it was not Wharton he spoke to.

“What are you doing?” he whispered. “What games are you playing, Summer?”

Wharton said, “You know this place?”

Venn flicked a freezing glare. “This is the Summerland. It’s also Katra Simba.”

As if the word was a signal far off in the mountain heights above them, something rumbled. Wharton whipped around, startled. “What was that?”

Under his feet, the mountain vibrated. “Is that an avalanche?”

Venn looked at him, his face white and weary. “Let’s hope not.”

“But we can’t really be there.” He knew all about the mythical mountain. Deep in the lost lands of Tibet, it had never been climbed by Westerners until Venn’s own hubristic expedition. And that had gone so disastrously wrong. He couldn’t remember the details now, but surely only Venn had gotten out alive.

“We’re not.” Venn seemed to rouse himself. “We’re barely half a mile from Winterbourne. And I will not be played with, Summer!”

His yell of fury made Wharton cringe; above them the snow seemed to shudder; he fought the desire to crouch and cover his head, and said, “Surely noise doesn’t help. Wherever we are, Sarah must have been here first. If we can find . . .”

Venn pointed. “Those?”

The footsteps were deep, and there were two sets. They led down and Wharton could see them as blue smudges far below, tending toward a ridge of exposed rock.

Without a word, Venn set off after them.

Wharton adjusted his pack, pulled out a woolly hat, and tugged it down over his ears.

Then he trudged into the deep snow, floundering down the slope.

“Is Sarah in the same landscape? Or do they see it differently?”

But Venn gave no answer.

Sarah could not believe the cold. It was like breathing in arrows or nails, it hurt her throat and lungs. She had already lost feeling in her feet, her hands were throbbing with pain.

Frostbite!

You could lose fingers like that. She thought of Venn’s own left hand maimed by frostbite. Had that happened in a place like this?

Gideon had slithered a little ahead; he waited for her, and when she reached him, she wondered why he was standing there grinning, in this white landscape.

“What?” she gasped.

“Look at it. It’s amazing!” He seemed exhilarated, set free. “I’ve never seen a place like this. As if the world goes on forever. As if you could just travel and climb and walk and run forever. With no wall around you. No one watching you. Free!”

She stared at him, his thin clothes, his lit face. Here his skin was as pale as any Shee’s, one hand braced against the rock with its crystal veins. She had a sudden desire to bring him crashing down; she said harshly, “It’s an illusion, Gideon. It’s just the Summerland. She still has you prisoner.”

His face held its brightness for a second more. Then she saw the light go out of it, and he looked down.

She was sorry. She said, “Look there. What’s that?”

Below them, on the slope of the mountain, was a dark cube. It looked like a building poking up out of the deep drifts. Some ancient construction, roofless, its doorway an empty arch.

“I don’t know.” His voice was dulled. “Does it even matter?”

She pushed past him. “As you said, at least it’s there. Nothing else is.”

This time she led. As they descended the long flank of the mountain, the snow thickened; it was waist-high now and she was forcing her body through it, and she knew they were leaving a great scar down the white slope that anyone might see.

The building waited for them. Its empty windows watched them come. It was small, no more than a stone sheepfold, she thought, something like the ones you found up on the moor, centuries old, rebuilt and mended over the generations.

It was certainly not the palace of the Queen of the Shee.

When they reached it, something made her stop.

A vibration trembled deep in the earth; Gideon glanced back in alarm. “The snow’s moving!”

Still she didn’t move.

“Go inside.” He shoved her on. “At least there’ll be some shelter.”

“Is it safe?”

“Safer than out here, surely.” He glanced back again, screwing his eyes up against the brilliant light, the reflective snow. “Sarah, someone’s up there. Following us. I can hear their breathing.”

She turned, and stepped between the black stones of the empty doorway, and vanished.

Gideon stared in dismay. “Sarah?”

The doorway yawned, empty. He could see the snow through it.

But he dared not follow her.

Jake and Rebecca stood together at the mirror. He was wearing the same dark suit as before, now with a cloth cap. Rebecca’s hair was caught up in a swirly chignon; she wore a long skirt, a white blouse with a brooch at the neck, a coat with fur trim. She fidgeted with the hat. “Do I have to wear this?”

“Totally necessary.” Piers stood back. “Every respectable girl wore a hat. Suits you.”

Jake checked the clasp on the silver bracelet.

“Nervous?” he muttered.

“Absolutely terrified.” She glanced at Maskelyne, who was adjusting the small monitor he had made. “Why me? I mean, I have no desire to go traveling in time.”

“He may need you.” It was Maskelyne who answered, but he didn’t look up at her, so she left Jake and walked over there, and grabbed his fingers. “Don’t you need me?”

Piers rolled his eyes at Jake.

Maskelyne looked up. He seemed startled, his dark eyes wide. He said, “Rebecca, you know . . .”

“I don’t know anything about you. I thought I did, because you’ve been here all my life, but for you it’s different, isn’t it. For you it was just a few seconds here and there, a flickering into existence, seconds and then minutes that were really years apart. This is all you care about. The mirror. The wretched mirror.”

Maskelyne held her gaze. The scar that marked his face stood out against the whiteness of his skin. He said, “That’s not true. You are . . . very special to me.”

“Special.”

“Yes. But I am older than you, Rebecca, centuries older, and more different than you could know. Don’t trust me, don’t rest your life on me. Because one day you might wake up and find me gone.”

She stared at him, bleak.

Jake said, “We need to go. Becky?”

She didn’t look at him or answer. But she turned and walked to the mirror and looked in, at the early twentieth-century girl that stared back at her. He thought there were tears in her eyes, but her voice was clear and steady. “Well then, let’s go. What’s keeping us.”

Jake glanced at Maskelyne. “What will be the date?”

“We’ll try for 1910. Around the time she films David.”

He nodded, grim. “Okay. Do it now.”

The mirror hummed.

The labyrinth whipped tight.

The mirror opened, and he saw again the vacancy at its heart, the terrible emptiness that snatched him and devoured him, and for a moment he knew all the anguish that was in it, that it had swallowed his father and would swallow him, and that there was no escape from that.

The mirror howled.

Its cry made Piers crouch and clap his hands over his ears, and gasp; it made the cats flee like seven streaks of darkness.

Only Maskelyne was unmoved, his hands steady on the monitor until the blackness collapsed with a snap and the glass was whole and Rebecca and Jake were gone.

Piers lowered his hands and breathed out. He shook his head and hauled himself up.

“That thing is getting worse. And are you sure you can control it?”

Maskelyne looked up. “No one controls the mirror. Not even Janus. But at least I can monitor it now I’ve sorted out Symmes’s dial.”

Piers wiped his hands on his apron. “I don’t know how you sleep at night. If ghosts sleep.”

He stopped.

Maskelyne was staring at the monitor with a fixed fear.

Piers hurried over. “What’s wrong?” He looked at the numbers on the dial, flicking back and back and back. 1900.

1800

1700

1600

He put both hands over his eyes. “Stop it. Stop it!”

“I can’t.”

1500

1400

“Hell,” Piers whispered.