Catherine Fisher - The Slanted Worlds

“Yes she does.”

“You told her, Jake.”

“She overheard you telling Wharton.”

He gasped. Behind him, he heard Rebecca stand and hurry forward. But the barn was already empty, the fire cold ashes, the tin cup a tipped and congealed mess.

And the children were only three shadows of himself, crouching on hands and knees, across the floor.

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.