The Slanted Worlds

24

Come with us! Join us, all you men and women who have courage in your hearts. For what is life without freedom?

Illegal ZEUS transmission

MASKELYNE HURRIED PIERS through the corridors of Wintercombe.

The crashing from outside was enormous, as if all the trees of the Wood were marching down on them. At the front door Piers hung back. “Why me? Why me? I can’t . . .”

“You will. You must.” Maskelyne grabbed the little man and turned him, pulling the white lab coat off him quickly. “Piers, we’re all depending on you.”

Piers laughed, a horribly nervous cackle. His red waistcoat darkened to brown, his clothes faded to the drabbest of tweeds. “Got to blend in, then. Camouflage.” He pulled a coat from the rack and huddled into it.

“Now listen to me.” Maskelyne already had both hands on the door bolts. “Get out there and find Venn. You have to tell him what Sarah is up to. You have to protect the Zeus coin. If Summer gets her claws on it . . .” He shook his head, anxious, the scar livid against his dark hair. “You’re the hero now, Piers. Not the servant anymore. You’re the warrior, the lonely defender against the dark. If you do this, Venn will never be able to thank you enough.”

“You think so? Really?” The little man swelled a little. “Well . . . right.”

“Ready?”

“No . . . Look. I don’t . . .”

Maskelyne hauled the bolts back. The door crashed open. The gale hurtled horizontal rain across the hall.

Piers’s objections were snatched away. He took a great breath, clutched the coat around him and was gone, as if he were a small brown leaf the wind had sucked up and blown far away.

Maskelyne instantly slammed and locked the door. Leaning his back on it, he stood there a moment like a shadow in the hall, his eyes on the rain patterns, the damp tiled floor, the stairs going up into the deserted corridors and attics of the Abbey.

Finally he allowed himself a small weary smile.

Because now, at last, he was alone. With the mirror.

Ignoring the darkness he ran swiftly along the Long Gallery and into the Monk’s Walk. Down through the ancient arches the river foamed in its ravine below; the air was saturated with water, the walls running with damp.

The mirror called to him. He could hear its voice, that strange toneless whine that was always somewhere deep in his mind, modulating and searching, tormenting him with its anxiety, as if somewhere it had lost the language it had once spoken and yearned only to find it again.

“Hush,” he whispered. “Hush now. I’m coming.”

The lab was silent. He came in and stood there, listening. Then he approached down the tunnel of the malachite webbing.

The mirror waited in its silver frame. He knew those words; he knew their meanings. He reached out to touch them, and his fingers caressed the archaic spell that he had seen forged and placed here centuries before.

He said, “I’m back. I’m here. It’s only us now. Forget the others, forget Venn. They’re lost. Only we exist.” He reached out for the new controls. “And now they never need come back.”

His fingers closed on the switch.

Then, behind him in the darkness, a sound made him freeze. The most peculiar mew, a gurgle. A message from a mind before speech, without language.

He turned in terror.

“So don’t I exist?” A girl’s voice, hard with bitterness. “Or am I forgotten too?” She came forward out of the shadows, wrapped in some dirty robe, and his breath choked him because for a moment he had thought she came from a past so distant that he had buried all traces of it.

“Rebecca? When did you . . .” He stopped, staring.

The baby moved in her arms. He came and looked down at it, the round grizzling face, the tiny clenched waving fists. “What happened back there?”

Her face was scorched with contempt. “Not what you think. This is David’s son. His mother died of the plague . . .”

Maskelyne licked dry lips. “Look, Rebecca . . .”

“What were you going to do?” She came forward, her head on one side. “Leave them there? Venn, Jake, David? Close the mirror against them? You know how to do that, don’t you.”

He did not speak, but she had her answer.

She felt the baby squirm against her. She said, “There is no way in the world I will ever let you do that. I thought I knew you, Maskelyne. I thought I loved you. But maybe I haven’t a clue about who you are. Who you really are.”

This time I was a little more prepared. When the mirror opened, I held my skirts down and stared boldly into the black vortex. How shall I describe it? Like seeing for a second into the very depths of space, into the terrible emptiness beyond the remotest galaxy and the final ashes of the last star.

And when it ended, my room felt tiny and crowded.

A boy stood there, a tall thin lad in a dark suit. I saw at once that he was bleeding from a cut in the shoulder; he all but collapsed onto my hearthrug. And behind him, dropping a strange bird-face mask and hurrying to his side, was—at last!—David.

“Jake!” He looked up. “Venn! Get some . . .”

His voice stopped. He looked around. At Janus, standing calmly in the bars of my father’s cage.

“What . . . ?” His eyes took in the details of my room rapidly.

“A little detour, I’m afraid,” Janus said. His smile was a mockery.

I poured out some wine from the decanter and hurried over to hold it to the boy’s lips. Instead he took it from me and drank a sip. He stared at me with dawning astonishment.

David stood slowly. “Alicia?”

“That’s right, dear.” I became very businesslike. “How wonderful that you’ve finally made it! Now, this must be Jake, I presume, and really, what a nasty gash he has. Come and sit down, child.”

They were amazed. David said, “Why here?” and Jake replied in a murmur, “I don’t know.” Neither of them could take their eyes from Janus.

“You mustn’t worry about that wicked man from the future.” I fussed Jake into a chair. “My father and I were quite prepared. As you see, he can never get out of that cage.”

They looked at me as if I was a child. Jake—quite a handsome boy really—said, “Don’t you understand? He’s a replicant. He can walk through that anytime.”

“Nonsense. Only a ghost could.” I stood upright and looked at Janus. “Can you?”

He smiled. “My dear lady, I would never be so impolite.”

It was then I truly understood the evil that was in him, as if for a second something dark and cruel flickered in my shabby room. I turned quickly. “He wants your bracelet. Go! Hurry!”

Janus was quicker. He reached out and pushed me aside so that I stumbled over the footstool and fell rather awkwardly on the rug. Jake leaped up.

“Move!”

Catching hold of his father’s hand, he stepped back against the mirror.

I flinched from the terrible implosion.

But nothing happened!

Janus seemed as surprised as the rest of us. The he laughed; a short, amused laugh. “Well. That is surprising. It seems you’ve been betrayed.”

“Betrayed?” David was frantically adjusting the silver ring.

“By Venn perhaps. Or by the scarred man.” Janus frowned, as if at an irritating memory. I gathered my skirts around me and stayed on the mat. I was rather shaken, but David’s anxiety was acute.

The mirror remained black, and solid.

Jake snarled, “You’ll never get the bracelet. We’ll throw it in the fire first.”

“Then you will have done what I want.” The tyrant had a flat, unpleasant smirk. It became annoying really quickly.

There was silence. But in the stillness I realized that the traffic in the street seemed to have stopped. There was distant shouting, a running of feet on the pavement outside.

I saw Jake’s eyes fix in what I can only say was utter alarm.

He was staring at my calendar; a sweet thing, free with the Daily Mirror, decorated with pictures of kittens and puppies. It was open on the date, 14th January 1941.

“Oh my God,” he breathed. He looked at me, hard, as if seeing for the first time my gray hair, my sadly advanced age.

Then he turned on his father. “It’s now!”

“What is?”

“The raid . . . the bombing raid! This is the date I came here. The day she dies. It’s today. It’s now!”

As if to answer him, up from the depths of the city rose a sound they started at, but which I had grown only too used to. The wail of the sirens, the eerie early warning of the coming waves of planes.

And far off, with the soft thudding of rain on a roof, the first bombs burst open on the East End, like murderous red flowers.

“Don’t do this.” Rebecca came toward him. “They need you. Venn and Jake and Sarah. You made an agreement with them.”

“That girl will destroy the mirror! I can’t let that happen. Without them . . .”

“You can’t leave Jake to die in some plague-ridden past. I won’t let you.”

Maskelyne stood like a shadow between her and the obsidian glass. As ever, it showed no image of him, as if he had never existed, as if he were only the product of her dreams, unseen by anyone else. Sometimes she felt she had invented him, created him, but now she realized that he was some mystery beyond anything she could make.

He smiled his dragging smile. “Don’t hate me, Becky.”

“Then don’t make me. You can help them, work with them. You can wait. The threat to the mirror comes first. From Summer. And from Janus.” She stepped forward, almost touching him. “Because who can save us from Janus if not you? I don’t know who you are, but I know you’re more powerful than any of us, maybe even than Summer herself. And I trust you.”

A gurgle behind them. She turned and saw the marmoset, Horatio, and the baby face-to-face, staring at each other in mutual fascination.

When she turned back, Maskelyne was watching her, his eyes dark as the glass.

“I think only you keep me human, Becky,” he murmured.

Sarah and Wharton scrambled through the Wood, torn by thorns.

“Can you see it?” she screamed.

He couldn’t. The bird was lost in the misty cloud that hung low over the treetops. And the Shee were coming now, swooping down from the rain, a dark birdfall onto the gnarled and lichened branches.

“Be careful!”

Her yell warned him just in time. The Wood fell away at his feet into a deep ravine; in its depths the river roared over stones hurtling toward the gray shimmer of the Abbey through the trees.

He skidded to a stop, sending soil and pebbles rattling down. Ancient gravestones rose from the saturated soil; leaning crosses and a languid angel with folded wings.

“Where is this?” he gasped.

“The green chapel. Some ancient part of the Abbey.” Sarah stared up hopelessly at the gray sky. The bird had fled, but Summer would surely find it, fall on it, tear it to bits with her fierce beak and talons.

And take the coin.

She wanted to howl with fury and despair. Instead she said icily, “I suppose you’re pleased.”

Wharton backed from the crumbling edge. He said, “Of course not. Not if Summer knows the power of the coin. What a weapon against Venn.”

They looked at each other, while the Shee fluttered down around them in a glittering flock. As each starling alighted, the trees were weighed with wings, rows of bright eyes, beaks pecking and squawking and fighting each other.

“And now you know it too,” he said. “Who told you? That changeling?”

“You did, George. I . . . overheard you and Jake talking.”

He grimaced. “Oh great.”

The soil slid. She turned, to cover her odd feeling of shame, then stared. “The whole hillside is moving.”

The graveyard shuddered. It slipped down toward the Abbey as if the weighted trees would crush the building, as if it would scatter stones and bones into the raging river.

Sarah gave a yell of fear. With a flicker of green coattails Gideon had risen up from the water and was being hurtled along down there, slammed against boulders and snagged timbers, then up again, gasping.

“We have to get to him!” A tiny trail running with rainwater led over the edge; without hesitation she was slithering down, grabbing brambles and gorse, ignoring the stings and scratches.

“Wait! Sarah!” Wharton scrambled after her, desperate at being so clumsy and breathless. As his feet slipped he looked up. And saw Venn. The man’s blond hair was slicked by the current; he was swimming strongly. As Sarah reached the shore and raced along it, leaping flood debris, he slid under the brown waters and dived for Gideon.

For a moment there was nothing but foam.

Wharton crashed down beside her. “Where are they?”

“I don’t know. Can’t see . . . There!”

Venn surfaced and he had Gideon with him. In a tangle of limbs they hit a half-drowned tree and hung on. In moments Sarah was there; she grabbed Gideon and hauled at him and he scrambled quickly out, collapsing on hands and knees on the bank, spitting water.

Sarah turned back to Venn. Their hands gripped, his eyes, blue as ice, met hers. But he was heavy, the current dragging at him, and she knew as his hand slid from hers she didn’t have the strength to hold him. She screamed.

Instantly Wharton was there, pushing her aside, solid as a rock in the water; Venn grabbed him and Wharton dragged, and through the terrible suck of the water hauled him out, sleek and soaked as an otter, and quite abruptly she knew he was safe, and sat down, weak with relief.

Beside her came a bitter, soft laughter. Gideon was pushing his long hair from his face.

“What?” she whispered.

“Did he think They would let me die? No chance.”

“Maybe for a moment she forgot about you,” Sarah snapped. “Maybe other things are more important.” She watched Venn and Wharton climbing up the rocks. All at once her failure came and crushed her; all her energy seemed gone, all her hopes lost.

Gideon stared at her. “What’s wrong?”

Her voice was numb. “I didn’t get the coin. And Summer knows. It’s all over.” The words seemed too weak for the weight of her despair; judging by his silence, Gideon was appalled too.

“At least you still have your dreams,” he muttered.

Before she could say any more Venn was there, water dripping from his hands and clothes. She saw at once that something had changed in him. His skin was pale, his hair held a strange new silvery shimmer.

He stood and turned and yelled in an explosion of fury that shook the Wood. “Go! All of you! Leave my house alone!”

The starlings screeched. They rose in a mighty flock, so many of them, thousands upon thousands, that they darkened the sky, and Sarah felt the relief of the trees, the weight lifted from them, the slow, sliding arrest of their descent.

Janus watched as plaster crashed from my ceiling. Then, as if deliberately enjoying my obvious terror, he walked straight through the bars of the cage!!

He stood face-to-face with David.

“Give me the bracelet,” he said calmly. “Only I can save you now.”

“Dad! No!” Through the ache of the stab wound, Jake watched his father anxiously.

David stared Janus down. But I saw he was quite defeated. He said, “We have no choice, son. None at all.”

His fingers unclicked the silver snake.

But in that second the mirror pulsed, and out of it stepped a stranger, a dark scarred man. He too wore a bracelet, and carried a most peculiar weapon, made of glass. He leveled it straight at Janus.

“Yes you do,” he said quietly.

All down the street, the bombs began to fall, one by one. And now I knew that under one of them, I would die.