Catherine Fisher: The Slanted Worlds

“Is he crazy!”

“Probably. But she—Summer, that beautiful, deadly, faery creature—she’ll say yes, Sarah, you know she will, just to trap him, and God knows what he’ll have to promise her in return. I’ve reasoned with him, Piers has argued with him, but he won’t be swayed. The man is so bloody stubborn!” He rapped on the table with a teaspoon. “As hard as that. But he might listen to you. You’re like him. Part of him.”

She said, “Venn goes his own way.”

“Maybe. But also . . .” He laughed, awkward. “ I need you, Sarah. I need you to help me, because none of them are human, none of them really care, not like we do. Venn is obsessed with Leah, Piers is some hobgoblin, Gideon is half Shee. Flesh and blood, Sarah! That’s what I need at Wintercombe. Another human being. Or I’m alone in a world of creatures and machines.”

She shrugged. “A girl from the future . . .”

“Is better than no girl at all!”

“You don’t have to stay.”

“And leave Jake? The truth is, I suppose I’ve started to care about him. I think you have too. And I’m in loco parentis, remember? I feel responsible. Help me get Jake back, Sarah. Please.”

For a moment they both sat silent among the echoing chatter of the tourists and the shrieking of children.

Then she laughed a short, bitter laugh and he knew he had won.

“George,” she said, “you’re too much for me. What time’s our train?”

He grinned, modest. “Actually, I have a car.”

3

I paced all night, as I believe one is supposed to, up and down the corridor of the infirmary, smoking cigars until the air was a fog of blue. Even Moll’s antics, even the search for the snake bracelet, faded from my mind.

Then, just as the sky brightened and the gas-lamps were put out, there came a great eerie cry, as if the whole world wailed.

The nurse came out, wiping her hands. “It’s a girl,” she said.

And I found myself the most astonished of fathers.

Journal of John Harcourt Symmes

THERE WAS SOMETHING sinister about the three children. They didn’t smile. The lenses of their glasses were shiny and hid their eyes. Even in this terrible time of fear and sudden death, their faces were too pale under the dirt.

Jake said, “How the hell does everyone here know my name?”

“Not everyone, just us.” The boy to the right, his small face serious.

“Remember us. Remember what we say.” Was it the left-hand one now? Their voices were as identical as their faces.

The middle boy took a worn wooden yo-yo out of his pocket and let it run expertly down and up its grubby string. “We’ll be back. Soon.”

“Just hang on.” Jake took a hasty step toward them. “What do you mean? What black fox? What box? Are you Shee? Do you know Summer? Do you know Venn?”

They turned away. Linking hands, they walked into the crowd on the platform.

“Listen to me!” Jake dived after them, but tripped over a man wrapped in blankets, curled in sleep. A storm of swearing emerged; Jake backed, staggered against a pram; a baby screamed. A women yelled, “Watch what you’re doing, stupid!”

“Sorry. Sorry.” He scrambled away, trying to edge his way along the platform. Where were they? For a moment he thought he saw them, a little farther on, near the tunnel entrance, but when he climbed over the crowded refugees to get there, the only children were sleeping ones, their weary mothers gazing suspiciously at him.

He stopped, staring around.

Had they vanished? Or had he just lost them in the hundreds, maybe thousands, of people camped down here? Had they been Shee? Those cold faces. That dead stare. It was possible. For the Shee, all times were alike.

Suddenly he was too tired to think anymore.

He had to get some rest.

It took half an hour to find a corner of space against a damp wall. As he lay curled there on the hard platform, his head pillowed on borrowed newspapers, his coat for a blanket, he worried about his predicament. He was in the wrong time, and the only way back was through the mirror. He had to find it. However long it took. He quashed the secret fear that it might take him weeks. Months. The newspaper under his ear was dated June 1940. The height of the London Blitz. He’d studied it last year in the module on the Second World War, but he had no idea how long the bombardment lasted.

If he was killed . . .

But he couldn’t be, because then . . .

Paradoxes swam wearily through his brain.

And those children . . . those weird kids . . .

Thinking of them, he fell asleep.

He must have slept for several hours, despite the distant crashes of anti-aircraft guns, the heavy thuds that shook dust from the ceiling. Because when he woke, things had changed. There were a lot less people; those left were packing up, folding blankets, heaving bags and small children onto their backs.

Jake groaned. He was so stiff his joints cracked as he stretched; one arm was numb from his weight on it.

He mumbled, “What time is it?”

“Eight o’clock, love. The all-clear has sounded.” The woman next to him swept a blanket into a suitcase quickly.

“Where’s everyone going?”

She stared. “Work, mostly. Or to see if their houses are still standing.”

He thought of the collapsed street, the weak whisper of a voice in the wreckage. That woman . . . Alicia. She was dead now.

He sat up slowly, pushed back his hair and rubbed his face with both dirty hands. He should find the mirror.

Then he reached into his pocket, pulled out the luggage ticket, and looked at it.

He had promised her, and she was dead now.

Above ground, London lowered in a dark, rainy dawn.

He walked on the streaming pavements, collar up, soaked. Workers and women, cars, buses, and army trucks hurried past. The past was a place of strange illusions; at one corner he could almost believe he had never even journeyed, because the doorways and alleyways were so ordinary and familiar. And then a huge advertisement board for Pond’s Cream, or Bovril Meat Extract confronted him like a stark reminder of some alternative reality. Gradually, street by street, he saw how the shops were different—smaller, their fronts shaded by dripping awnings, their windows crisscrossed with protective tape. Sandbags were heaped in great walls down the road. Barriers—were they tank traps?—blocked every junction. There were no traffic lights, no automatic crossings, none of the normal paraphernalia of the city he knew. And then he turned a corner and muttered in surprise, because a whole landscape of rubble lay cold under the rain, and in the middle of it, completely undamaged, one small barber shop flaunted its striped red-and-white pole defiantly, and a few men queued to be shaved in makeshift seats in the debris.

There were other queues. Even this early, patient lines of people had formed outside nearly all the shops. At a baker’s, the smell of hot fresh bread made his hunger painful. He had a purse full of pre-decimal coins—part of Piers’s safety protocol—heavy in his pocket. He joined the queue.

Ten minutes later he reached the counter.

“Ration book?”

Jake said, “Sorry?”

“Your ration book, son.”

“I . . . forgot it.”

The baker stared at him in disbelief. “You what?”

“I just want . . .”

“Whatever you want, there’s no chance. Go home and get it. Next, please.”

Jake stalked out in cold fury, but there was nothing he could do. This was a different world to his, a world where he barely existed, and he had to get used to it. A few streets on, he managed to buy a small dried-up apple from a street stall, and chewed it sourly as he hurried on through the rainy dawn.