John Wright - Orphans of Chaos

I heard the noises of something crawling after me in the tunnels. I dared not call out to discover if it was Vanity, in case it was not. In the fear and stale air and utter darkness of the blind labyrinth, however, I said my prayers to the Archangel Gabriel, and told him that I wanted to meet him some day, but not yet.

I could see, in the distance, the square of moonlight indicating that the little secret panel was open. I could see a bit of the girls’ dorm, and could hear someone at the door. The key was scraping in the lock.

I won the world’s women’s championship for the hundred-meter crawl in the next two seconds, as well as the women’s across-the-bedroom broad jump. I yanked off my cap and pulled the covers up to my nose just as the door swung open, and an angle of lamplight fell across my bed.

Here was Mrs. Wren, blinking and looking as irritable as her kindly face was capable of looking. I could see the thin, tall silhouette of Dr. Fell behind her. The lamplight caught his round, rimless spectacles, turning them opaque, and gleamed against the short brush of his white hair, against his pallid skin, so as to make him look like a thing made of metal, with lenses instead of eyes.

I tried to impersonate a yawn, but it came out so fake and forced, that I was sure Mrs. Wren was going to break out laughing on the spot. I was sure that Dr. Fell was going to smile at how foolish my attempts to trick them were, and he would no doubt make a small gesture with his hand; then Mr. Glum would come in, and stave in my skull with a shovel, and have my bloody corpse stuffed in a bag and taken out with the morning rubbish.

None of that happened. Instead, Mrs. Wren said, “Sorry to wake you, my ducklings.”

I tried to impersonate a sleepy voice, and, again, failed miserably. “Wha—” (fake yawn) “—wha’sa’matter Mrrs. Wen?”

Dr. Fell, whose night vision was apparently better than most, said, “I do not detect that Miss Fair is in her bed.”

I said, “She’s curled up with me, on account of it is so cold. Her head is just under the cover. Should I wake her? It is so hard for us to fall asleep in this terrible cold. Can’t we have a fire in our room?”

Mrs. Wren said in her bleary, unsteady voice, “Now, now. You just quiet down, my gosling. Dr. Fell just has a bit of constipation or something, and maybe is imagining too much. Come away, Doctor, we’ll wake up Cook and get something for your bowels, there’s a nice whippet!”

Dr. Fell stepped forward with a stiff-legged stride. “I sense a magnetic anomaly in the chamber. If you will permit me to enter for an inspection…?”

He was at the doorway when Mrs. Wren said, “Halt! You may not pass my wards without permission!”

I heard, very dimly, the notes of a violin in the distance. It was Miss Daw, the music teacher, in the conservatory. But why would she be playing now, at this hour of the night? The music was haunting and dim, as if it had come from very far away, and I could not shake the feeling that Mrs. Wren had summoned it.

Dr. Fell now stood in the door, his face blank (well, blanker than usual, anyway), making tiny motions with his shoulders and knees. It was very odd, as if he were pinned in place against a glass wall across the door frame.

Mrs. Wren said, “The care of the young girls was given to poor Mrs. Wren, long after my darling Robin never came for me again. Year by year, the Headmaster has taken my prerogatives from me, till little enough remains this day. Yet I still have this privilege; no man may step into the girls’ dormitory, not without my say.”

“There is something odd in the room, my dear Jenny. Further investigation is warranted.”

“My head is a whirl of aches, Doctor. Surely it will wait till morning.”

“But if there is something amiss, it is our duty to examine…”

“Those who set those duties on us are long gone, as you well know. Life is hard, and there is little enough joy in it for anyone, Dr. Fell. Let us let the wee children sleep and dream of fine things, true loves, handsome princes. It is a joy I no longer have, since I lost the key to my dreaming. Come away, come away.”

And the door closed, and the lock turned.

Vanity came out of the secret door a moment later and closed it silently behind her.

We climbed back into bed together, and lay there discussing the night’s events.

I said to her, “That secret passage made two left turns and dropped about six feet. It came out, however, at the Main Hall, in the West Wing, about three stories below us. How was that possible?”

Vanity said, “The turns may not have been right angles; the floor may not be level. What if it sloped slightly all the way to the West?”

“That wall is not thick enough to have that crawl space inside it. Look. There are windows above the gargoyle heads. Those casements are not six feet thick.”

Vanity yawned; a real, sincere-sounding yawn, and said, “I think things like feet and measurement and all right angles being equal are not real unless you pay attention to them. If you don’t know for sure what shape the walls are, they could be any shape, couldn’t they?”

“You are saying this mansion is multidimensional?”

“I don’t even know what that word means,” she said.

I lay in bed trying to calculate what degree of curvature in the fourth dimension a plane figure with two right angles would need to have in order to have lines built on those angles also be at right angles with each other. It occurred to me that two lines could be drawn on the surface of a sphere, intersecting at right angles at the North and South poles, and still be parallel at the equator. A third line following the equator also would intersect at right angles. If the mansion stood on a hypersphere slightly greater in diameter than the mansion grounds, a person could move from any point to any other with what, in three-space, would seem to be right angles.

How many equal three-dimensional spaces would a hypersphere be cut into by hyperplanes at right angles to each other? A circle can be cut into four pie quadrants; a globe into eight round-bottomed pyramids… Was it sixteen…?

I was trying to visualize how to construct a tesseract around a four-dimensional sphere when I drifted away to sleep.

The next morning they were watching us like hawks.

Dr. Fell sat at the head of the table, looking more severe and supercilious than usual. Mrs. Wren, for once, seemed not to have a hangover, and her hair was tied more neatly into her bun than was her wont. She was in a good humor, commenting happily on the flavor of the marmalade, the cool crispness of the air, the beauty of the weather. I found her cheer disquieting.

It seemed even the smallest exercise of arbitrary authority could go to one’s head like wine. I told myself to remember this when I was older.

Even Miss Daw, the music teacher, was there, wearing her dress of blue chiffon set with ribbons of white and pale pink. Miss Daw, as I have said, is graceful and delicate, a creature of impeccable manners, with a voice as soft as the coo of a dove.

She sat at the chair which was reserved for her, but which she almost never used, between Victor and Colin, and both the boys had subdued manners in her presence. She was eating a cold French soup, using a silver spoon so small it might have come from the place setting for a doll. She wore gloves at breakfast.

We were not allowed to speak, except when spoken to, or to ask someone to pass us something. I was burning to ask the boys what had happened last night.

From Quentin’s subdued posture, and Colin’s expression, which was a mix of sleepy annoyance and an I-told-you-so smirk, I assumed failure surrounded last night’s expedition. But whether they had made it to the Barrows, or been caught along the way, was not something I could ask them with our simple pass-the-whathaveyou code.