The Slanted Worlds

1

If the past becomes a land to voyage unto, how carefulle the journeyman must be. Will he not tread in a nightmare of uncertaynties? Be enmeshed in histories of which he knows nothing?

Like a man coming suddenly to a foreign land, and speking not the language . . .

From The Scrutiny of Secrets by Mortimer Dee

THE BOMB FELL in a split second of silence.

Racing down the street, Jake felt the unbearable pressure in his teeth and nerves; he grabbed at the unlit lamppost and threw himself to the ground.

The explosion was terrifying, a white starburst on his retina. It blew out every window. Bricks and dust roared down, glass shattered on his back and head and arms. Lumps of rubble thudded on him.

For a moment he was blind and deaf in a fog of ash and pulverized brick, afraid of broken legs and arms. Then he coughed, dragged himself up onto hands and knees, and turned his head.

The street was gone.

What had just been a square of Georgian houses was now a vast crater spouting flames, lurid in clouds of smoke. Fires erupted like volcanoes; as he staggered to his feet he felt sudden heat scorch his face.

It was hard to breathe. His eyes were gritty with dust, his hands black with soot that fell like rain.

A hand grabbed him. Noise buzzed in his ear.

“What?” he mumbled.

The blur became a man in a dark uniform, the letters ARP painted in white on his helmet.

With a crack Jake’s hearing came back.

“. . . said get to the shelter! Bloody bloody stupid kid!”

He shoved Jake fiercely away from the twisted lamppost.

Searchlights stabbed the sky. Jake glimpsed his own hand, bleeding.

Dazed, he said, “Where is it?”

“The Underground! God in heaven, where did you come from? I had this street cleared!”

Jake managed a short bitter laugh. “This isn’t the 1960s, is it.”

The air-raid warden stared at him, taking in his carefully anonymous dark clothes, the narrow band of worked silver clasped around his wrist. Suspicion came down on his face like a shutter.

“What’s your name? Where are your papers?”

“Jake Wilde.” He stared at the ruined houses in sudden despair. The black mirror must have been in one of those houses, the glass Chronoptika that had transported him here from his own time. It had to be nearby, and it couldn’t be destroyed by any German bomb, so was it there, under all that rubble? Before the dread of not getting back could grip him he said, “What’s that noise?”

A faint, screeching sound. For a moment of sheer terror he thought it was another bomb, then the warden turned quickly. “Someone’s trapped.”

He ran into the smoke.

Jake wiped dirt from his face. Quickly he took out a small elegant square box from his pocket and touched its tiny screen.

“Piers? Piers! Can you hear me? Listen! It’s all gone wrong. I’m in the Second World War, Piers!”

Nothing.

He had left them just seconds ago, gathered around the control desk. Now Piers would be fiddling and muttering over the controls, Venn—Jake’s godfather—probably storming up and down the lab and lashing over furniture in his frustration. And Gideon, the changeling, would be watching with his sharp green eyes.

What a team. The blind leading the blind.

“Piers! It’s Jake! Get me back. NOW!”

Already he knew they couldn’t even hear him. Of course they couldn’t. They were eighty years in the future, because this had to be the London Blitz of what? . . . 1939? 1940? His knowledge of World War II was sketchy, but obviously the mirror was at least twenty years out. The cell phone, even fitted with Piers’s hopeful refinements, was useless.

“Hey you! Boy! Come and help! There’s a woman still alive down here. Quickly!”

Jake thrust the phone in his pocket and scrambled over the debris. Roving searchlights made triple shadows of himself flit and stretch and vanish over the stacks of rubble. The ruined house slid and clattered under him, a mess of tiles and curtains and furniture and ragged bedding and the fluttering pages of books, hundreds of white fragments, a snowstorm of paper.

How could anyone be alive under this?

The man was crouched by a slab of roof tilted at a crazy angle. He was saying: “I can’t dig you out . . . I’ll have to get help. The second wave will be over any minute.”

“Don’t worry, dear. I’ll be fine.” The whisper was muffled through layers of debris.

The warden stood, blew three sharp blasts on a whistle, but no one came, so he threw himself on the bricks, hurling them away, feverishly working. Jake scrambled up next to him. They toiled together under the eerie lights, tearing at the stacked layers of the collapsed house, but it was useless, Jake already knew—there was too much rubble, the buildings smashed to chaotic twists of metal.

And he could smell gas.

The ARP man glanced at the sky, his eyes white in a face black with dust. “They’re coming back. We have to go.”

“And leave her?” Jake stared, appalled.

“No choice.”

Far in the distance, a wave of planes droned.

“It’s very dark down here,” the woman whispered. “Can we go now?”

Jake grabbed a floorboard, hauled it away. “Here,” he said.

A small hole. The stench of gas rose from it, choking in his throat. He stopped. Fear was a slippery sweat in his chest. The whole thing could explode.

He should run. Find the mirror. Go home and try again. This wasn’t his problem. This wasn’t his time. How could he find his father, lost in the wastelands of the past, if he was blown to bits here, and the silver bracelet with him? It would be over, for him, Venn, all of them. He took a step backward.

The ARP man lay full length. “This gap might be enough.”

Debris fell inward. The woman down there made a moan of terror. “Hurry!”

It held Jake in mid-step. As if in that landscape of smoke and flames and the hiss of escaping gas, it was the loudest sound.

He knew that terror.

He had been six. Maybe seven.

A beach of wide sand, great dunes against the hot sky. His mother in sunglasses and a blue bikini, on a striped lounger.

The heat. The obsession of digging.

He remembered the growing dampness of the sand. The spade slicing into its deep neatness. The tangled roots of dune grass above him.

“Help me!” the ARP man gasped.

Sudden abrupt weight. Sand falling in on him. The utter complete darkness of the world lying on him, on his chest, in his eyes, in his mouth and nose.

The terrible, stifled, silent scream.

“I can see her!” The man glanced around. “Not far down, but I can’t reach. You’re thinner. You could get down there.”

He couldn’t. He’d had nightmares for years about those moments of death, before his father’s huge hand, his face in the sudden hole, his “Jake! Jake are you all right!”

They had told him it was only seconds, but it had been years.

And now Dad was trapped too, and he couldn’t even find him.

He turned. He saw the black hole.

“I’ll hold your legs.” The man’s face glistened with sweat. “For God’s sake, hurry!”

Jake swore in despair, flung himself down, wriggled to the edge, over. He squirmed down into vacancy, a blackness that hissed and spurted, so thick with dust he couldn’t see his own hands.

Reaching out.

Groping.

His fingers stubbed on softness; he yelled, “I’ve got something.”

He could breathe only gas. And then . . .

Warmth.

Her fingers were knobbly and arthritic. Foolishly soft, they clasped his, the bones beneath the skin bird-thin and brittle.

Her breath wheezed in the darkness.

“It’s okay,” he gasped. “I can get you up.”

But he knew it was impossible.

“What’s your name?”

His whisper was warped in the womb of wreckage. There was a rattle and the darkness shifted.

The hand held him tight.

“Alicia, dear. You don’t have to worry. We’re both fine.”

An old woman. Her voice was frail but obstinate.

He said, “But we can . . .”

“Like I said, we’ll be right behind you.”

The drone of planes. He said, “Are you scared?”

“Not now. Not now you’re safely here, Jake.”

Astonishment almost made him let her go; he grabbed again, her fingers already colder.

“How do you know my name?”

Did she laugh? Could someone in that darkness laugh?

“They said I was a fraud. A charlatan. But we showed them, Jake, didn’t we? We showed them all that Madam Alicia really spoke to the spirits. David says—”

“David!”

“He says ‘See you soon.’”

She was delirious. She had to be. He said, “Listen! After the planes I’ll come back and . . .”

“Too late. Only waited for you.” Her fingers pushed something small into his. It crackled like paper.

“Take it,” she whispered. “Time’s up. Time’s run out . . .”

Streets away, faint as a gnat’s whine, he heard the bombs begin to fall.

“Find it, Jake. Promise me.”

“Did you say David? My father, David?”

“I’m going now. Promise me!”

“All right. Yes!”

He was upside down, dizzy. Lost. No dad with huge hands was there to dig him out. With a crash, he felt the sand come down on him. He slid forward; yelled.

Then there was a tight grip on his belt; he was hauled back, earth in his nose and mouth; he spat it out and gasped, “Wait . . . No . . . Listen!” Blood in his veins thudded like explosions. “We can’t leave her.”

“Run!” the man yelled. “Now!”

For a second, on his back below the air raid, Jake felt time stop. As if her death happened then, and he felt it. He lost belief in where he was. He looked up and saw the bombers overhead and they were beautiful, a deadly chevron of diamonds; saw a plane picked out by a sweeping searchlight, the whirl of its propellers flashing segments of light.

Then he was on his feet and running, past the heaped houses, the rubble-strewn road.

It stretched like a dark runway. As he fled, his shadow elongated; the chasing planes came low and he saw London lit to the horizon by a flash of red, a nightmare of tilted buildings caught in stillness.

The entrance to the Underground gaped ahead like the mouth of a cavern among flames. As he reached it and leaped the sandbags, the explosions arrived, one after another on his heels in regular formation, the last a great roar that crashed him face-down into the filthy entrance hall.

He picked himself up, sore and numb.

The ARP man was already racing down the stairs.

Jake limped after him.

This was crazy. He felt as if he were in some inverted world, a speeded-up film where nothing was real. He’d been on the London Underground. In his time it was a bright, graffitied, glossy place. Not this endless descent into the dark and damp, his breath smoking, between walls of shattered dusty tiles, filthy with plastered posters.

He slowed, breathless, a stitch in his side.

A soft sound rustled below him; the murmur of darkness. As he descended, it grew to a hum, a rumble, then became the voices of people, hundreds of them, and as he reached a passageway and emerged under the arch, he found himself on a long platform crowded with refugees.

The railway line led into circles of drafty blackness. The platform was a dormitory. A music hall. An anteroom to hell.

Thousands of people were crammed there. They lay sleeping, eating, singing, talking in huddles. Campsites of makeshift beds divided the space. Dogs roamed the crowd. The air was warm with the stink of humanity, its sweat, its ordure, its cooking filling the circular echoing tunnels.

Jake leaned one hand against the clammy wall and bent over. He was breathless and so sore it made him feel sick, and his back ached from hanging in the hole.

He could still feel her bony fingers in his.

She was dead now. He felt sickened and empty and angry for an old woman he had never even seen.

Had known only for seconds.

But she had known his name.

His father’s name.

Something crinkled in his filthy fingers; he unclenched them and saw the scrap of paper she had given him, smudged and torn. Suddenly overwhelmed, he slid down to a crouch.

This was a disaster. The mirror could be anywhere under the ruins of London.

He was in the wrong time, and he might never see his father again. Or Venn. And for a moment his godfather’s arctic blue stare turned him cold, the despair on that haggard face. All their plans, ruined forever.

The paper was a small cardboard ticket. It was pale blue, had one corner torn off. It said:

St. Pancras Station

Left Luggage Office

No. 615

For a moment he just stared at it. Then three pairs of sandaled feet came out of the crowd and waited in a line in front of him.

He looked up.

Among the crowded sleepers of the Blitz, three children were standing.

They looked about ten, maybe younger. Boys. They wore school uniforms—gray blazers, red-and-gray striped ties, grubby shorts, socks about their ankles.

“Get lost!” Jake snapped.

They were identical. Triplets. Their faces were podgily pale, their small arms folded. They each wore cheap round spectacles, and stared at him, calm in the chaos.

The first one said, “The Black Fox will release you, Jake.”

The second nodded. “Speak to the Man with the Eyes of a Crow.”

“And the Broken Emperor lies,” the third one said, “in the Box of Red Brocade.”

He stared at them in astonishment.

“What the hell are you talking about?” he snarled.