Already far below in the dark, Venn laughed. “You thought wrong.”
The sound echoed, hollow. Wharton frowned. No need to be scared. Whatever he was getting into, it was certainly no worse than a Chaucer lesson with the Lower Sixth last thing on a Friday afternoon. After all, he told himself firmly, what worse horrors could the Universe hold?
So he descended into the pit.
18
The east face is the most deadly and has only been scaled once. This was during the tragic expedition of 2005, with Carl Morris, Edwin James, Heinrich Svensson, Oberon Venn, and Fillipo Montaigne. The mountain is now considered too dangerous to attempt and the Chinese government have, despite international protests, forbidden further expeditions.
“Katra Simba, Deadly Mountain”;
Article in National Geographic, 2013
THEY WAITED BEFORE the mirror. Like guardians.
The black glass reflected them. Seven cats, some curled snoozing, some washing, one on its back fighting a tangled battle with a piece of the sticky malachite green webbing.
The house was silent, with only its drips and damp, the subdued rumble of the flooded river below its cellars, the trees on the steep ravine dripping on its tiles.
Then the front door slammed, was bolted.
The cats listened.
Arguing voices came down the Monk’s Walk; the cats sat up, attentive, their green eyes wide with curiosity.
Jake burst into the room. “It’s a total waste of time even talking about it. I have to go back there because I already did. Don’t you see?”
Rebecca blinked. “What are you talking about?”
“Alicia! She knew my name! She knew me.” He realized he was shouting. He lowered his voice and tried to keep it even and calm. He was aware of Maskelyne’s eyes, as if the scarred man was somehow weighing him up, making some secret judgment.
“When I spoke to her, there in the rubble of her house, she said ‘Only waited to give you this.’ So it’s clear we had met before. It’s in my future, but it was in her past.”
“Oh God,” Piers muttered. “My head hurts.”
Rebecca shook her head. “But why . . .”
“To speak to my father.” He glanced at Maskelyne. “It’s the only way, because we can’t reach him, can we, in 1347?”
“I think he’s too far for our resources yet.” Maskelyne shrugged. “But it may be possible to make a relay. To pull him forward, even a few centuries.”
Jake stared. “Could we do that?”
“We could try to make a chain. Using our bracelet and the one he is wearing, it might be possible to get him back in controlled stages.”
For a moment it almost made Jake too happy to breathe. Then Piers sat on a carved chair and said, “You know that Venn thinks Sarah, not you, has the bracelet?”
“What?” He was astonished. “Why?”
“Because he trusts her less than you, I suppose.”
“I can’t help that.” Bewildered, Jake looked up as the marmoset swung down from the door with a screech of welcome and flung its tiny arms around his neck. “And where’s George?”
Piers coughed. “Gone to the Summerland with Venn. He volunteered.”
Rebecca whistled. “He must care a lot about Sarah.”
For a moment Jake felt a sliver of some emotion he could barely register. Was it envy? Jealousy? He snarled, “We need him here! What’s he thinking of!”
“Fool has no idea what he’s facing.” But Piers’s scorn was muted, almost admiring.
Jake turned to Maskelyne. “This chain. Let’s do it. Now.”
The scarred man glanced at him. He went and walked to the mirror, both hands gripping its silver frame. Beside him, Jake saw how Rebecca watched, nervous, chewing the end of her hair.
“Prepare yourself,” Maskelyne said. “Both of you.”
What happened next remains something of a blank in my memory. There was certainly a tremendous implosion—a whoosh of blackness like a vacuum, so that I had to hold on to the table with both hands, and even then the heavy chenille cloth was dragged away, and a stuffed cockatoo under a glass dome fell and was smashed.
All my breath was snatched. For a moment I understood only that the time was stretched like elastic; that the mirror was sucking in the world, and that I would be sucked in with it, to that grim gray future.
The crash was so loud that I fainted.
I came around to a sweet smell. Someone was holding a handkerchief soaked with drops of eau de cologne clumsily to my nose. I spluttered, gasped, struggled upright.
“Father? Is it you?”
He sat back. “Dear girl. Who else.”
I could not believe it. For a start he looked no older than the last photograph I owned of him, which must have been taken only weeks before the tragic accident. “You died,” I gasped.
“No! Not at all.” He helped me up and we stood face-to-face and there he was, John Harcourt Symmes, the fearless inventor of my dreams. Well . . . perhaps a little smaller and plumper. But he made no attempt to embrace me; he seemed more bewildered than I. “I did not die. I made a very great attempt to use the mirror. Moll, you see, had betrayed me with her devious little scheme . . . and so I still did not have the bracelet.” He stood, moved to the mantelpiece and stood there, one arm on the marble sill, the other smoothing his mustache. His voice took on the formality of a public lecture. “I attempted a great feat, and failed. I seemed to float for whole hours in a terrible, black place of no light or time or gravity. Then somehow that man, the tyrant Janus, snatched me from it. I have no idea how.” He shook his head. “I emerged from the mirror into his gray room, and what I saw there . . . That was mere days ago, of course. But . . .”
Doubt crept into his eyes. He looked around the room, at the mirror, the new curtains, the recently installed electric light. “Good heavens. I have traveled . . . no, journeyed . . . I have actually journeyed into my own future! How many years!”
“Thirty-one,” I whispered.
His eyes widened, and he almost ran to the window. There was a silence as he took in the changed vista of the street. I thought of the motor cars out there. The buses. I watched his back. His voice, when it came, was strangely subdued. “Good Lord. So the old Queen is dead? And this is the future!”
“A possible one.” I thought of what Janus had said. Then I patted the sofa. “Come and talk to me, Papa. Tell me about this urchin Moll.”
Wharton crawled on hands and knees in the dripping muddy tunnel.
The pack on his back scraped the brick roof. Water ran down his hair and behind his ears.
He sneezed. The sound rang like an explosion. He groped for a handkerchief. “For God’s sake. How much farther?”
Venn was a dark mass ahead. His voice came back like an angry rumble. “Will you stop asking that?”
He obviously had no idea.
Gritting his teeth, Wharton slopped on. After all, it was no worse than the army assault courses he had sweated through in training. They had come in useful years later, when he had needed to invent a fiendish exercise regime for the boys at the school. Wharton’s Workouts had soon sorted the wimps from the . . . er well, boys. Legendary in the staff room. He snorted a laugh.
As if it was some signal, light blinded him. He raised his head and realized Venn had emerged ahead; a bright blue glow was emanating from the end of the tunnel. A cold, oddly silent glow.