The Slanted Worlds Read online

  She nodded as she fixed on the label. The words Oxford and Professor were certainly enormously effective. The fact that she had made the appointment herself, faked the ID, and invented the professor, even more so.

  She crossed the room and sat in a chair by the window.

  It looked down into the vast interior courtyard of the British Museum, the transparent latticed roof high above pure blue in the cold spring sunlight. She had never been here in her own time—the time she was starting to think of as the End Time, the days at the end of the world. Back then, London was—would be—Janus’s territory, and this place part of his vast, forbidden Halls of Lore.

  She took off her coat and unwound her scarf. Below, tourists browsed the bookstalls, munched on sandwiches at the tea stalls. Their children ran and screeched in the echoing space.

  She couldn’t get used to it.

  The freedom.

  The way they lived as if nothing would ever happen to them.

  And yet within a generation or two, all this would be totally . . .

  “Here we are.”

  She looked up, startled.

  The young man was back, with a gray cardboard box file. He laid it carefully on the desk; she gazed at it in intense satisfaction. A peeling label on its surface, obviously years old, read:

  11145/6/09 DEE, MORTIMER.

  “Who was he?” The curator sounded curious.

  She licked her dry lips, suddenly nervous. “A medieval scholar.”

  “Is it for a thesis?”

  For a moment she had no idea what he meant. Then she said, “Oh . . . yes. Yes. My thesis.”

  He nodded and moved off, but not very far; he spread a sheaf of papers at a nearby table and began to work on them, giving her a quick, watchful look.

  Nothing she could do about that.

  Eagerly she pulled on the white gloves.

  She took out a notebook and pencil. Then, her fingers trembling, she opened the file.

  It contained a yellowing manuscript.

  She was almost afraid to start. It had taken so long to get here. Weeks of research in stuffy libraries, hours of lying awake in her damp room in the hostel, worrying, thinking, planning.

  It had become an obsession, more important than eating, sleeping, even surviving in this busy, dangerous city; the obsession of finding out everything possible about the obsidian mirror.

  She was thin and worn out with it.

  But she was a Venn, and they were an obsessive family.

  She took out the manuscript; it was a single page, light and crisp at the edges, some sort of thin skin, terribly fragile, smelling faintly of mildew. On top was a more recent note on blue paper. She already knew what that was, and smiled at the familiar handwriting of John Harcourt Symmes, the stout, rather pompous Victorian seeker after magic whom Jake and Venn had met in the past, whom she had once seen burst through time into Wintercombe Abbey.

  On the covering page he had written:

  This Page is the only surviving fragment of the work of the legendary Mortimer Dee. His book, The Scrutiny of Secrets, is of course, lost, known only in brief quotations by other writers. But this small scrap seems to be in his own hand. My attempt at transcriptions is below. Dee’s work is in some fiendishly difficult code, which I confess baffles me. I can only guess at its meaning, and find it endlessly frustrating. . . . But the man certainly had some secret knowledge of the dark mirror I have obtained and which he names the Chronoptika.

  If only I could find out what it was!

  She flicked her eyes sideways. The curator was absorbed in his work.

  She lifted her bag onto the table, took out a handkerchief, and blew her nose.

  He took no notice.

  So she slid the tiny camera from her palm and quickly photographed the single tightly written fragment. The camera made the softest of clicks, but in the hushed silence they sounded huge.

  She coughed, cleared her throat, had it hidden away before he glanced up, eyes glazed with words, not even seeing her. Then he looked down again.

  A desk magnifier stood nearby; she moved it closer and clicked the light on, aligning it over the piece of brittle parchment. Looking in, she gave a great sigh of dismay.

  Fiendishly difficult code was something of an understatement.

  How could she ever read this? The page was covered with Dee’s tiny, black, indecipherable writing. In places it seemed written backward; in others it ran up and down in random diagonals, or curved into the margins. Everywhere, there were diagrams in strange spindly lines, sigils of lost meaning, alchemical signs, formulae, scraps of what might be Latin and certainly Greek. And all over it, as if the man had doodled and drawn and daydreamed his visions too fast to write, was a interwoven web of drawings, of strange landscapes, towers against the moon, edges of castles and corners of rooms, and trees, many trees, tangled and hollow and gaunt as the ancient oaks in Wintercombe Wood.

  She stared, fascinated. The confusing perspectives, the slanted worlds, reminded her of something . . .

  And then she remembered, with a sudden chill of fear.

  The Summerland.

  The kingdom of the Shee, in the heart of the haunted Wood.

  She frowned, brought the magnifier closer.

  In the curved surface she saw her own blue eye, made huge. As sunlight slanted through the window, one of Dee’s smallest, darkest drawings held her attention.

  Ruined buildings, black and smoking, silhouetted against a lurid sky. Searchlights swiveling like pale cones in the darkness.

  Sarah’s heart thudded.

  Had Dee managed to journey into the future? Had he seen what Janus’s tyranny had done? That place where her parents were chained, where the black mirror pulsed with uncontrollable power, collapsing endlessly inward to a black hole that was devouring the world?

  She blinked, pulling back.

  She had to decipher this. This single page might give her the information she needed. It might solve her problem, her obsession, her mission.

  It might teach her how to destroy the mirror.

  Too agitated to keep still, she turned and gazed down at the crowded court below. More tourists were queueing for coffee.

  And, outside the bookshop, she saw a man. A big, stocky man, his hair neatly combed, his coat an old no-nonsense ex-army parka, his scarf the colors of Compton’s School.

  Her eyes widened. “No! It can’t be!”

  He was talking to an attendant and she breathed his name in a whisper of dismay.

  “George Wharton!”

  Jake’s tutor was unmistakable. But what was he doing here?

  The attendant nodded, as if in answer to a question, and pointed up at the window. Wharton turned and looked. Before she could move, he saw her.

  Their eyes met; a second of startled recognition.

  Instantly he was running for the stairs.

  Sarah jumped up so quickly the magnifier slid over with a thud. She snatched her bag, grabbed her coat, and raced for the door.

  “I’m so sorry! Emergency! Just realized. Have to go!”

  “What about the papers!”

  “I’ll be back!”

  Shrugging into the coat she ran out, turned left in the corridor and then right, found the stairs and raced down them, praying desperately Wharton wasn’t thundering up. She had to get out. How on earth had he known where she was?

  Since leaving Wintercombe on Christmas night, she had kept herself hidden in London. There was no way they could have found her . . . it must be sheer coincidence . . .

  Unless he had been looking for Mortimer Dee’s papers too.

  She stopped. Far down the stairwell heavy footsteps were thundering up. She glanced over the rail.

  “Sarah!”

  He was a flight down. His face was lit with satisfaction. �
��I knew it was you!”

  She turned, hit a door marked Fire Exit and crashed it open, bursting into a huge echoing space packed with people. Colossal Egyptian statues frowned down at her; she ran between gods with crocodile heads and jackal faces into a gallery so jammed with excited and chattering schoolchildren she had to fight her way between their small warm bodies.

  She glanced back.

  Wharton was at the door. Over the heads of a class in green blazers he yelled, “Wait! Sarah! Wait!”

  She twisted away, shoved on, muttering “Sorry . . . Excuse me . . . Sorry . . .” getting caught in photos, bumping into tourists deafened with audio guides.

  Plate glass stopped her, a wall of it. She almost slammed against it, spread her hands and saw, beyond it, the mummies.

  They lay on their backs in gaudily painted cases, blind eyes staring upward, their shrunken desiccated bodies wrapped in tight bands of ancient linen. For a fatal second she stopped, staring in awe, because these were travelers from a time so distant she had no words for it, fragile journeymen her father would have loved to have seen, treasures that, despite their dreams, had never made it to the world’s end.

  Then, over their painted stillness, Wharton faced her.

  The crowd hemmed her in; there was nowhere to run.

  He yelled something, his breath misted the glass.

  Furious, she shook her head. “Leave me alone!”

  He found space; he shoved people aside, powering his way around the mummy case toward her. She stepped on someone’s foot, wriggled out, found a wall, a fire alarm. Her hand shot out to the small glass disc.

  She hit his fleshy palm instead.

  “That would be a really foolish thing to do, Sarah,” he gasped. “And not at all like you.”

  She was sweating. Her hair was in her eyes. She felt as if some long wearying effort, some exile had come to an end.

  “No,” she said. And then, “You know, George, I’m really tired.”

  He could see that. As she sat in the café drinking the tea he had insisted on buying her, he thought she looked thin and worn, her eyes red-rimmed, her blond hair lank. Hungry too, if the way she demolished the egg mayo sandwiches meant anything.

  For a while he let her eat. Then he said, “Where have you been living?”

  “A hostel.”

  “Student?”

  “Homeless.”

  He stared. “Sarah, why . . .”

  She swallowed a mouthful. “I’m stuck here now. In this time. I have to find a way to destroy the mirror, and that’s the last thing Venn wants. How can I go back to Wintercombe . . .”

  “He wants you back. He’s been searching for you.”

  That was an understatement. As he watched her sip hot tea, Wharton thought of the night, four months ago nearly, when she had slipped, invisible, from the window at Wintercombe Abbey and walked off into the night, leaving behind only her footprints in the snow and those last, astonishing words.

  Now he said, “Did you think Venn wouldn’t move heaven and earth to find you? You told him you were . . . would be . . . his granddaughter. Even though his wife is dead and he has no children. You tell him that not only is it possible for him to change the past, but that in your time he’s already done it! And then you disappear!” He shrugged, and sipped his coffee. “Come on, Sarah. Even for a normal man that would be unbearable. For Oberon Venn, it was like the descent into madness.”

  She nodded. He realized he didn’t have to tell her that Venn had had his strange servant, Piers, virtually chained to the computer, spending every waking second combing every missing persons database, every police record he could hack into, phoning every hospital for miles around for news of her. She was far too intelligent. Nor could he, Wharton, even begin to express the utter relief he had felt seeing her pale astonished face up at the window. Because there was no way they could let her destroy the mirror.

  Not now.

  “You have to come back with me,” he said.

  She stirred her tea, put the spoon down with a clink, stared at him over it. “No, I don’t. And you can’t make me. Nothing you can say will make me.”

  “Sarah . . .”

  “I have work to do here! All Venn thinks about is getting Leah back from the dead. I can’t help him with that. That’s his problem. I suppose he’s been working at the mirror . . .”

  “Nonstop. And Jake . . .”

  “Yes, well, Jake needs to find his father. They both want opposite things to me. Selfish things! I have to destroy the mirror, and that means destroying their hopes. Destroying my own existence. We’re on opposite sides, George . . .”

  “There are no sides. We need you.”

  “You don’t. Just leave me alone.”

  She gathered her coat and stood, but he put one firm hand out across the table and grabbed her wrist in an iron grip.

  “Listen to me. Venn is desperate to recover Leah, but he dare not try yet. To be honest, I don’t think he could cope with failure. He needs to be ready. He needs Jake’s father, David. So Jake persuaded him to go after David first. Three weeks ago Jake entered the mirror. It was all planned. Piers was sure it would be safe. I was totally against it, but none of them listen to me, least of all my arrogant little brat of a so-called pupil. He insisted on being sent to the 1960s, because David had been there—remember the photograph? But the mirror, Sarah, it’s so unpredictable. The damn thing seems to work by emotion as much as anything . . .” He shook his head.

  Slowly, she sat down again, seeing all at once the sickening worry in his eyes.

  “What? What happened?”

  “You’ve guessed. He hasn’t come back. He’s lost, just as his father was lost. And the bracelet with him.”

  “But . . .”

  “It’s worse than that. Venn is desperate. So desperate that he’s going to do the unthinkable. He’s going to ask Summer for help.”

  “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.