"A school friend, sir, Allan Gentile. He and I were in the Somme cockup together. He got a Blighty."
"A what?” Exeter said.
Smedley and the surgeon exchanged shocked glances.
"A wound. Brought him Home to Blighty—England."
"Ah."
Where had the man been for the last three years not to have heard that expression? Still, Allan Gentile had died of scarlet fever in 1913, and Exeter must remember that, so he would know this was all drip.
Stringer seemed satisfied. “Good. Now, how do you propose to get him off the premises?"
"He can go as me, sir.” Smedley fished out his pay book and flourished it. “I've got a chit for the bus to Canterbury, a chit for a railway ticket to Chichester.” He turned to Exeter and leaned a foot on his instep. “The window in your WC is directly above the washing shed roof. Sneak out just before dawn on Friday."
Exeter waited inscrutably. He still looked like the peach-faced boy of 1914, but something inside him must be a hundred years old.
Smedley ad-libbed some more. “There's a derelict summer house about halfway down the drive, on the left. Meet me there. My pay book will get you through the gate."
"It will be a very close run thing,” Exeter said impassively. “They'll miss me when they do the morning rounds."
"They'll search the house first,” Smedley snapped. It was a wet rag of a plan. It would not convince the present audience if Exeter himself started picking holes in it.
Stringer frowned, tapping ash from his cigarette with a surgeon's thick finger. “I'll try and get down here again tomorrow evening and stay over. If I'm around in the morning I may be able to muddy the waters a little."
Now that was definitely going too far! The surgeon had just strayed right out of bounds. Smedley felt a shiver of joy as if the spotters had reported he had found the range. He nudged Exeter's foot.
"I'll look like a scarecrow in your togs,” Exeter complained.
"You look like a scarecrow already. I'll try and filch something better from the laundry. If you've got a better idea, spit it out."
"I haven't. But what happens to you?"
"I shall be discovered eventually, bound and gagged in my underwear. How could you do such a thing to a cripple, you rotter?"
"You'll freeze!” Stringer protested. He eyed Smedley suspiciously. “You may be there for hours. Can you really take that in your condition, Captain?"
It would drive him utterly gaga in ten minutes. But it wasn't going to happen. “I'll manage."
"Good show!” Stringer said approvingly. “Now we know how you collected all those medals. It's audacious! And ingenious! You agree, Exeter?"
"I'm very grateful to both of you."
"Just a small recompense for some of the finest cricket I ever saw. Now, where does he find Gentile?"
Smedley almost said, “Who?"
Again the man was showing too much curiosity. Chichester itself would sound a little too convenient. Somewhere handy? “Bognor Regis. Seventeen Kitchener Street, behind the station."
Stringer glanced at his watch and reached for the cigarette box. “Excellent! Now, Exeter, I have a small favor to ask."
"Sir?"
"I want to hear where you've been these last three years—how you escaped from Greyfriars, how you turned up in Flanders. Just to satisfy my own curiosity."
For the first time, Exeter's stony calm seemed to crack a little. “Sir, if I even hint at my story, you will lock me up in a straitjacket and a padded cell!"
"No. I accept that there are things going on around you that have no obvious rational explanation. You can't spout any tale taller than the things I have already tried to imagine to account for your appearances and disappearances.” The surgeon was brandishing his full authority now. “I don't expect I shall ever see you again after you walk out of this room. So I want the story. The truth, however mad it may be.” The smile did not hide the threat: no story, no escape.
Exeter bit his lip and glanced at Smedley.
"Don't mind me, old chap!” Smedley said. “I'm already round the bend, as the sailors say."
Exeter sighed. “There are other worlds."
Stringer nodded. “Sort of astral planes, you mean?"
"Sort of, but not this world at all. Another planet. Sir, won't you let me leave it at that?"
"No. I can see that there must be some paranormal explanation for the way you come and go, and I won't go to my grave wondering. Talk on."
Exeter sighed again and crossed his legs. “I was on another world, which we call Nextdoor. It's a sort of reflection of Earth—very like in some ways, very different in others. The animal life's different, the geography's different, but the sun's the same, the stars are the same. The people are indistinguishable from Europeans, everything from Italians to Swedes."
He paused to study Stringer's reaction. “See? You can't possibly believe I'm not raving or spinning a cuffer."
"It sounds like Jules Verne,” the surgeon admitted. “How did you get to Elfinland?"
"I went to Stonehenge, took all my clothes off, and performed a sacred dance.” Exeter pulled a shamefaced smile. “You sure you want to hear any more?"
"Oh, absolutely! Why Stonehenge?"
"It's what we—what they call a node. They're sort of naturally holy places. There are lots of them, and they often have churches or old ruins on them or standing stones. You know that creepy feeling you get in old buildings? That's what they call virtuality, and it means you're sensing a node. If you know a suitable key—that's the dance and chant—then a node can act as a portal. Somehow the nodes on this world connect with nodes on Nextdoor or one of the other worlds. People have been going and coming for hundreds ... probably thousands, of years. You have to know the ritual, though."
Smedley wondered how Exeter had managed to dance with a broken leg, but Stringer did not seem to have thought of that. He was nodding as if he could almost believe—or was he just humoring the maniac?
"How do they work, though?"
"I don't know, sir, I really haven't the foggiest. The best explanation I ever got was from a man named Rawlinson, but it was mostly just wordplay. Let's see if I can remember how he put it. It was about a year ago.... I'd been on Nextdoor for two years by then, and I'd finally met up with ... call them strangers—other visitors, like me—people who understand all this. Some of them have been back and forth lots of times. They call themselves the Service.
"The Service have a station—much like a Government station in the colonies somewhere. In fact, it's not unlike Nyagatha, where I was born, in Kenya. Prof Rawlinson's made a study of the crossing-over business and come up with some theories...."
Exeter had always carried conviction. As he continued to talk, Smedley found himself caught up in what had to be the strangest story he had ever heard, and somehow he found himself slipping into unwilling belief.
7
"WHAT RAWLINSON SAID WAS, ‘IT'S A MATTER OF DIMENSIONS. WE live in a three-dimensional world. Can you imagine a two-dimensional world?'
"Of course I had to tell him that maths had never been my long suit. Then he produced a pack of cards...."
That wasn't quite true, Edward recalled. The cards had been lying on the other table at the far end of the veranda, at least twenty feet away, so Rawlinson had not fetched them himself. He had shouted for a Carrot, and the Carrot had come and brought over the cards to him. That was how the tyikank did things in Olympus. But how could anyone ever explain Olympus to these two—the surgeon, as smug in his chair as a Persian cat, almost purring with self-satisfaction ... or Smedley, poor sod, with the skin of his face stretched so tight over the bone that it looked ready to split open, with glimmers of hellfire inside his eyeballs and little nervous ticks of smiles jerking the corner of his mouth every few seconds as he listened to poor crazy old Exeter talking himself into a lifetime padded cell.