The Slanted Worlds (15 page)

His eyes were fixed on her in disbelief. In hope.

She took a breath and said,
“In that future there are no Shee.”

Before he could take that in, she changed, stood, walked briskly. “So. The coin. Do you know where it is?”

Astonished, Gideon watched her. “No Shee? That's impossible. How . . . ?”

“First, the coin.”

He shook his head. “Summer keeps all her treasure in her House.”

“House?”

“Deep in the Summerland. It changes shape and size and appearance. I'm not allowed there.”

She came back and stood over him. “A real house?”

“Sarah, nothing is real in there, not as you know it. It's a place. The Shee talk about it. They say that sometimes it looks like a cottage thatched with the wings of birds. Sometimes an underwater palace. Sometimes a castle. It is not easy to find and harder still to enter. In its heart is a box. They say the box is red as blood, and she keeps her most precious things there, locked tight with spells. The coin, if she values it, will be in that box.”

Sarah pondered. Could she even believe him? “Wouldn't she be wearing it?”

“She has more gold and silver than you could dream. She wears none of it. She hoards it like a dragon. Some of it's real, mortal-made, but other things are from far dimensions, mined deep in the otherworld. Some jewels are faery-forged from leaves or toadstools.” He pulled his shirt and coat back on, wincing.

Sarah said, “Then you have to take me there. We have to steal the coin.”

Gideon laughed, a sour, low humorless laugh. Then he looked at her. Hard.

“Don't tell me you're serious,” he said.

Rebecca, outside the attic door, stood and listened, her back against the wall.

“So let's see who's fooling who, Sarah,” she whispered.

In the pub Wharton took a long draft of the malty brown beer and set the glass down with a sigh. Froth slid down the sides.

“Fantastic.” He glanced over at Jake, then opened a packet of salt and vinegar chips. “Feeling better?”

“I'm fine.”

Wharton frowned. He knew that abstracted air, that closed-up, scarily intent concentration. “You're not planning anything crazy, are you, Jake?”

“Of course not.”

Now he was seriously worried. But before he could ask, Jake sat bolt upright and said, “Look! Out there, in the street. Can you see them?”

Wharton turned his head. He wiped steam from the small panes of the pub window. The village street was a rainy darkness, the single lamppost a nimbus of orange. “What?”

“The children!”

Jake was staring at the patch of lit street under the lamp. Wharton said, “There's nothing . . . I can't see anything.”

Jake was silent. Because there they were, the three replicants of Janus, identical, their school blazers soaked, their gray socks around their ankles, their hair plastered to their small round scalps.

They waved at him, then turned and ran into the night.

Remember, Jake,
their small mouths whispered.
Remember us.

Venn has a remarkable physique. He has never been known to be ill and has great endurance. Once, when deep-sea diving off Indonesia for his series on volcanoes, there was a problem and he was underwater too long. Everyone was worried, medics stood by. But when he climbed aboard he was fine.

Later I saw a technician looking at the oxygen equipment, clearly puzzled. “What's wrong?” I asked.

“Oh . . . Nothing . . . must be some glitch.” The gauge read
Empty
. “Unless he can live without air.” The man laughed.

I did not know how to answer that.

Jean Lamartine,
The Strange Life of Oberon Venn

P
IERS LAY ON
his stomach amid a mountain range of crumpled paper.

He had a pen in his mouth, another in each hand, one behind his ear, and more sticking out of every pocket. He was scribbling numbers with startling speed, referring over and over to the Dee manuscript in its plastic protective cover.

Wharton said, “There was nothing there. But I'm sure Jake saw something. What do you think? Who are these weird children and what do they want with us?”

Thunder rumbled outside. Piers raised his head briefly, then went back to the figures. “Replicants almost certainly. Janus has many, according to Sarah. Why not ask her?”

Wharton nodded. “I will. But I'm worried, Piers. I know Jake. There's something he's not telling me.”

“Eureka,” Piers said.

“What?”

The small man sat up. “Eureka. Furthermore, hallelujah. Even furthermore: hip, hip bloody hooray with knobs on.” He was quivering with a sudden suppressed exuberance. Then he threw a pencil high into the vaulted ceiling, where it stuck in the damp plaster like a small yellow stalactite. “Yes!”

Wharton jumped up from the bench in the inglenook. “You've got something?”

“Words. A few words . . .
mirror . . . a dark wood . . . eye . . .
But it's a start!”

He looked so delighted Wharton felt his own shiver of disappointment as rather a betrayal. And when the small man grabbed the papers and said, “Come with me,” and ran, he blew out his cheeks and hurried after him, wondering sourly when he would get any answers in this place.

In the tiled corridor, he glanced out of the window.

It was still raining. Now the lawns were more than saturated; great pools of brown water had spread across them, and the Wood beyond lowered, its dark branches tossing and broken under the drenching downpour.

And from deep below the house he became aware of a sound he realized he had heard all night under his pillow, in his dreams; the roar of the swollen river Wintercombe, in its deep ravine beneath the very cellars.

Hurrying after Piers, he noted rain dripping into more buckets here and there, damp green moldy patches forming on the ceilings. The whole Abbey was leaking and running with water.

In the Monk's Walk, the stonework was wet under his hand, the gargoyles of lost medieval monsters vomiting rain through their open mouths. He sensed all at once the soft timbers, the creaking gutters, the saturated soil under the foundations, had a sudden nightmarish terror of the great building collapsing, toppling, washing away, becoming the ruin that Sarah had hinted at.

Like the houses in that street in the past.

He shook his head, and hurried on.

In the great cellar that was the labyrinth, things had changed. Coming in, he stood, staring.

Maskelyne had brought the mirror into the center of the room, tethering it to ceiling and floor. The maze of green mesh, Piers's crazy invention to stop watchers being sucked into the mirror, had been re-aligned, so now it made a strange long funnel, rather like the concoction of some vast spider, leading straight to the glass.

Symmes's old wiring lay on the floor; Maskelyne stood knee-deep in it, meticulously stripping it down. His head turned, the scar a livid weal in a sudden flicker of lightning.

Seeing Piers's smug grin, he came quickly over. “What?”

“Only started to make progress on the code.” Piers laid the papers on the table and stood back, ridiculously proud.

“What code?” It was Rebecca, dusty, with her coat and wellies still on. So she was living here as well, Wharton thought. It was getting quite the commune.

Maskelyne ran his delicate fingers over the manuscript, its clotted figures and drawings. For a moment he seemed almost in pain. He said, “Where did you get it?”

Piers tapped his nose. “You're not the only one with secrets.” His malicious glee against the scarred man made Wharton step in.

“We're supposed to be working together.”

“You tell him that”—Piers turned, snatching the manuscript back and shoving it into his pocket—“next time he magics me into a china pot.”

“For God's sake . . . listen, Piers, what about the river? It's roaring like a wild beast down there. Has this place ever flooded?”

Piers shrugged, uninterested. “Not sure. Probably.”

As he bustled off, Wharton breathed out with exasperation. Maskelyne turned away, the wiring tangled in his hands.

What was it between those two? Were they some sort of enemies? It worried him, but then Rebecca caught his arm and drew him aside.

“Forget the weather,” she said in a low voice. “You've got worse things to worry about.”

He frowned at her. “What now?”

“Sarah. She's got this crazy plan to steal something from Summer. The changeling's in it with her.”

His heart went to ice. “Steal? Steal what?”

She shrugged. “Some coin.”

Sarah was invisible.

The itch in her skin was getting worse; every time she did this she felt as if she was putting herself back in Janus's power; in some way going back to the Lab, obeying him, becoming his creature.

Now, as she pulled on boots and coat and slipped out of the bedroom, she let herself remember the day she had woken from the anesthetic in the terrible white clinic and felt it within her, that new, alien coldness lurking in one corner of her mind. How terrified she had been of it spreading, blanking her mind like snow, flooding her own self, her own memories.

She shook her head.

That would never happen.

She would die first.

The Abbey dripped. No one was in the corridors; as she crept along the Long Gallery she heard faint voices down in the Monk's Walk. The boards creaked as she walked quickly past Jake's door and then Wharton's, past the locked room where Venn brooded under the laughing portrait on the wall.

She came down the stairs.

Two of the cats sat at the bottom like silent, disapproving guards. Their green-slit eyes watched her.

Her heart thumped in surprise.
They could see her.

Inside the front door she checked the pack on her back. Food, water. A small steel knife.

She undid the bolts, tugged the warped wood open, looked out into the rain.

Then she was gone. Like a whisper.

Like a ghost.

“Behold,” I whispered.

Around the table, a susurration of surprise. The ring of hands clasped tighter.

Within the silver frame, the mirror stood, an enigma of darkness. Figures blurred through it, a voice spoke a phrase and then faded away. Peculiar rooms showed themselves and were gone.

“Is there anyone there?” I murmured, my voice a quaver of fear. “Is there any spirit that wishes to speak?”

The mirror rippled with shadows.

I convulsed. My whole body jerked. I was good at that; I had practiced it a lot. My eyes snapped open; I saw the assembled ring of ladies and a few gentlemen in dark frock coats gazing at me in fascinated awe.

“I am here.” My voice was quite changed. A high piping voice, a child's voice. “Mother?”

At least half the women cried out. Of course, I knew they had all lost someone. And yes, you might think me cruel, to exploit them in this way. But my justification was that I felt, quite sincerely, that it helped them. That it was a comfort.

“Mother,” I lisped. “This is your own sweet one. I am happy. I watch over you.”

Tears. Sobs of astonishment.

I stared into the darkness of the mirror. I had planned the session to perfection; already I had become a husband lost in the Crimea and the great-great-grandmother whose descendant—a very spendthrift woman—had wanted to ask about a lost diamond necklace. My next spirit would be the recently deceased aunt of a nervous young man who, my maid had discovered, was deeply in debt. Her will had not yet been found.

I opened my mouth to whisper in an old lady's voice.

And the mirror laughed.

I confess a shudder ran through me.

It was a sound so sinister, so truly dark that it made my imitations sound quite pale and weak.

My clients were utterly still. In the dark room the tiny flames of the candles seemed to dim. In the black glass a shadow moved.

I said, “Who is that? David? Is that you?”

My heart thudded. The fire crackled.

Then he said, quite calmly, “My dear madam. I don't believe we've ever met. My name is Janus.”

Jake paused in the tiny dressing room. It lay between his father's old room and the locked connecting door to Venn's. For a moment he had thought he had heard a footstep out there in the corridor, but now as he waited, one hand on the cold marble washstand, there was nothing.

Just the drip of the leaking roof.

He straightened, took another key from the bunch of keys and tried that. He had stolen the keys from the kitchen half an hour ago, when Piers was far too absorbed in his papers to notice.

This one turned, softly.

He gave a grin of satisfaction, turned the handle, and very softly inched the door open.

The bedroom was as spartan as ever.

Venn lay on the bed. He was fully dressed, wrapped in his dark coat, his boots leaving muddy clots on the black-and-white quilt. He slept as if exhausted, a complete sleep, curled up, his breathing regular and shallow.

For a moment Jake watched him. He knew so little about Venn, about who he really was. All the stories of the explorer, the legendary TV series, the terrible solitary descent of Katra Simba . . . all that was the public face, the famous personality.

But who was this, lying here? This worn, changeable, guilty man? Was he mortal? Or was he Shee? Was he some strange forbidden mixture of the two? Because the Shee certainly felt no sorrow. And Jake wasn't sure if they ever slept.

Venn stirred, murmured. He curled up tighter, rolled over.

Jake forgot everything.
Because he could see the bracelet.
It was fastened around Venn's right wrist, and his sleeve had ridden up to expose its amber gleam.

Jake took a tentative step forward. The carpet in the room was thick; it muffled his steps. He reached the side of the bed, then leaned forward carefully.