by Susan Cooper
Westerly considered it. “No handle, no door-knocker. No way in. Just a big chunk of slate saying Go Away.”
Cally stared at the door, disappointed. “Maybe I was wrong about the tower. Maybe we aren’t supposed to go inside.”
In the same moment there was a deep rumbling, grating sound, and the tall slate door began to move sideways. They could feel it grinding against the rock beneath their feet. Caught in amazement they stood watching, until it stopped, leaving a gaping doorway with only darkness visible inside.
Nervously Cally took hold of Westerly’s sleeve; but it was she who stepped forward. He said swiftly, “No!”
“Why not?” She was at the edge of the doorway, peering in; then she let go of his sleeve and said gaily, “Oh look—” and she was inside. At once the grinding rumble of rock began again, and the door started to slide back.
Westerly said in horror, “Cally!” For a paralysed instant he paused, staring at the moving door; then he dived after her and slipped inside. With an echoing crash the door shut behind them.
“Where are you?”
Then he saw that the tower was not dark. They stood in a square, high-ceilinged room walled with the same rough granite blocks, and in the middle of the room hung a strange white sphere, glowing with cold light. It hovered, shifting gently, like a great white ball held up by an invisible stream of air. But it was not hanging, and it was not held up. It was simply there.
Westerly gazed at it, fascinated; then moved slowly forward.
“Don’t touch it!” It was Cally’s turn to hold back. But before he was close, the ball seemed silently to explode, and the curious white light was all around them in the room like mist. They heard a new rumbling of stone, and before them on the far wall two tall stone slabs slid sideways, revealing two staircases. One led upward, the other down.
The slabs quivered and were still, and the room was silent again. The white mist all round them hovered about the gap in the wall, lapping at its edges.
Westerly peered into the blackness beyond. “Well, do we go up, or down?”
“Up sounds better.” Cally peered past him at the ascending stone steps; they disappeared round a bend. “Only—it’s so dark.”
But as they stepped through the opening onto the stairs, the white mist poured after them, following, transforming the slanting stairway into a tunnel of white light. The stairs rose steeply; then suddenly the inner wall ended and they were in an open space like a kind of landing. The mist-light flowed out around them, and at either end of the landing wall they saw a heavy wooden door.
Westerly groaned. “Always doors. It’s like one of those puzzles —a box in a box in a box.”
He looked for a handle on the nearest door, but again there was nothing; no sign anywhere of handle or keyhole or latch. Leaning his shoulder against it, he pushed hard, but the door did not budge. Baffled, he ran his fingers over the heavy time-rutted wood.
“It’s ancient—look at those cracks. And cobwebs on the hinges . . . nobody’s been through here for years and years.”
Cally was silent. He glanced at her; she was starring upward, her face tight and pale. She said huskily, “Look at that!”
Above the door, carved into the stone wall, dusty and worn with age, he saw the word: CALLIOPE.
Cally said, in the same strange husky voice, “I think I know how to get in.”
She held up both hands and put her palms against the surface of the wood, and instantly at her touch the heavy door swung quietly open.
The room was full of sunlight, pouring in through broad windows. One window was open, and white curtains shifted gently in the breeze. On three sides, smooth plastered walls were painted from floor to ceiling with a single unbroken picture: green water, white waves, a golden shore and a blue sky.
The fourth wall, in which the door was set, was full of books: the shelves too ran from floor to ceiling, and a neat white ladder was set beside them to put the highest books within reach. The floor was carpeted in soft gold wool, and beside the open window was a bed covered with a quilt patterned in bright flowers. A white chair stood at a desk made of light bleached wood, and in the mirror of a small dressing-table Westerly could see the reflection of the blue sky. He was not sure whether it was the sky outside the tower, or the sky painted on the walls.
He looked again at Cally’s tense face. “Are you all right?”
Cally stood in the middle of the room. She said shakily, “When I was little, I always wanted my bedroom walls to be white, so that I could paint a mural all over them. A picture of the sea and the sky, with a sandy beach. I’ve never seen the sea—only pictures. . . . And I wanted a wall full of shelves for all my books, and a desk like that one, and a mirror like—” She swallowed. “Is the frame of that mirror carved? “
Westerly crossed to look. “Yes,” he said, wondering. “Carved all round the edge, with little fishes, and flowers and leaves.”
Cally nodded. “And over here there’s a closet, with a door you can’t see.” With the slow, abstracted certainty of a sleepwalker she moved to the painted wall beside the bed, reached to a white curling wave and pulled at a ring her fingers found there, and a section of the mural swung out as a door. Inside, Westerly saw a closet filled with bright dresses, hanging in a row, and shelves of neatly folded blouses and scarves, with a rack of shoes underneath.
Cally reached up for a dress on a hanger. “There’s the prettiest, the blue silk one, with the ribbon belt.” She looked at it for a moment, expressionless, then put it back.
Westerly said, “Is it a copy of your room at home?”
Cally stared at him. “Of course not. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s the room I dreamed about having. And everything in it. All the things I hoped I might have one day . . . some day. . . . There’s my own bathroom too, behind another secret door in that wall.” She pointed, but did not move.
Westerly looked at her for a long moment. Then he went out of the room, back to the landing. The white light-mist had retreated down the stairs, as if driven back by the sunlight; it lay in a pool, five or six steps down.
With Cally slowly following, Westerly crossed to the second of the two tall wooden doors. He looked up, and saw written over the lintel in the same worn, carved letters: WESTERLY. Glancing at Cally, he set his palms against the surface of the door and pushed.
The door did not open.
Cally said hesitantly, “That worked for me—but I think maybe you have to do something that’s specially yours.”
“Hum,” Westerly said. He thought for a moment. Then he swung down the pack from his back, and took out a long knife. Cally recoiled a little as he pulled it from its sheath. As she watched, Westerly flicked the knife sharply forward so that the blade hung quivering in the age-worn wood of the door, and he said, low and fast, some words that she did not hear.
The door swung open and Westerly stepped through it—and disappeared.
CHAPTER 8
Cally stood staring at the open door. She could see nothing beyond it but a grey haze. There was no sign of a room; no outline of walls or ceiling or floor. No floor. . . .
Anxiously she lunged forward, reaching for the door-jamb, with a sudden terrible image of Westerly stepping into space, falling the height of the tower to stone beneath. But a barrier met her, throwing her backward. It was as if she had come up against a glass wall; yet she had touched nothing solid, there was nothing there. Again she tried to move to the doorway, and again she was held back, powerless. She remembered how the Lady had been held, trying in vain to break through the force that kept her from Ryan’s protected house, and she thought miserably: but I don’t mean any harm. . . .
There was no sound in the tower; the silence pressed in on Cally as if it had weight. Fear came trickling cold into her mind; she thought of the immense slate door below, shutting out the world, and of the dark stair they had not taken, winding down into unknown depths. Would she dare go down there alone?
She called
out desperately to the open door and the grey space, “Oh Westerly, come back!” There was only the silence swallowing her voice, and the light slanting out from the door of the room at the other end of the landing: the room with her name written over its door.
All at once that room seemed a refuge, beckoning her with its familiar dream-images. Cally turned and made her way slowly back to the other door, hearing her steps echo round the rough stone walls. She came into the glow of the sunlight beaming out from the room, and just as she was about to go in, she heard Westerly’s voice behind her.
“Cally? You all right?”
She spun round, relief and fury tumbling over one another in her mind. “Where were you?”
Westerly came towards her, his pack slung over one shoulder. His dark hair was falling over his forehead; his brown face was unsmiling, preoccupied, as if part of him were a long way away. He said again, “You all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“How long was I gone?”
“Just a few minutes, I suppose. It seemed like a month. What happened?”
Westerly pushed his hair out of his eyes, and the look of preoccupation left his face as if he had pushed that away too. He said suddenly, irrelevantly, “I’m hungry.”
Cally remembered the bag Ryan had given her. “I’ve got some food.”
Westerly followed her into the sunlit room and stood in the middle of the floor, looking round at the sea-painted walls. He said slowly, as if he were feeling for words, “These rooms are dreams, I think. This one—you said it was everything you’d always wanted.”
Cally had found two thick sandwiches of meat and bread at the top of the pack; she held one out to him. “Yes. And nobody had ever known those things but me.”
Westerly sat down beside her on the broad window-seat and bit into his sandwich. “But where you came from, you did have a room of your own?”
Cally nodded, her mouth full.
“I didn’t,” Westerly said. He looked at the wall again. “My mother and I lived in two rooms, in a house with five other families. One room was for cooking and living, the other was for sleeping—we had a curtain down the middle of it, to separate the beds and make believe each of them was alone. But they weren’t—no one was ever alone. Only in summer, outdoors, when we went out of the city to the river, and I could fish or just roam about.”
He took another huge bite and sat chewing reflectively. Cally watched him, curious. There was something in his face that made it unlike any she had ever seen: the high cheekbones clear under the tanned skin, perhaps, or the jet-black pupils of the eyes.
Westerly said, “I wanted that more than anything—to be alone sometimes. Private—in a place where nobody else in the world could come.” He glanced at Cally with a quick apologetic grin. “And I went through that door into my dream, and that was what I found.”
“Were you in that room?”
“Of course. It was wonderful. But most of all I was . . . separate.”
“You sure were,” Cally said ruefully. She looked at her sandwich, then let her hand drop in her lap. “Westerly—where are we?”
He chewed. “Don’t know about you, but I’m travelling.”
Cally stared at him. “How can you just say that? It’s a different world we’re in, it’s . . . it doesn’t make any sense. I mean one moment I was in—”
“Stop!” Westerly said.
Cally blinked at him, startled.
“I don’t want to know where you come from,” he said. The black eyes were distanced, wary. “And where I come from . . . doesn’t matter. Let’s just leave that out of it.”
“I wasn’t bringing it in,” Cally said frostily.
“Don’t be upset,” he said. “I have to be careful, that’s all. There’s someone—something—following me. And everything here is so . . . there are some things you mustn’t even say. Until you know what the place is —and I don’t know, any more than you do.” He looked at her wide eyes, and felt repentant. “Tell me how you got here.”
“I came through a mirror,” Cally said.
There was a pause.
Westerly said, “Why?”
“It’s crazy!” Cally said desperately. “People can’t walk through mirrors.”
“Of course they can’t,” he said. “But why did you?”
“I was . . . I was trying to get away.” She pulled herself very upright and sat still, remembering. “My father was dying. He had a muscle disease they can’t cure, he’d been ill for months. He went away to a special hospital, by the sea somewhere, and my mother sort of . . . faded, and she went after him. I think she was ill too but wouldn’t tell me. They never liked talking about bad things. Now I think maybe they’re both dead.”
She was silent for a moment. Westerly said quietly, “I’m sorry.”
“I was on my own in the house,” Cally said, “and I heard this . . . music. Like Ma singing. Only it wasn’t her.” She paused again, and Westerly saw her hands clench in her lap. “I’m sure it wasn’t her. It was awful, I was terrified. And I was standing near her mirror and I reached my hands out to it, and it—let me through. And I was here. In a wood.”
She stopped, and sat silent again. Then she said, “I’m going to the sea, to find them. If they’re alive. I know that’s where they must be, different world or not.”
Westerly pulled a flask of water out of his pack, and gave it to her. “I don’t remember my father,” he said. “Maybe he’s alive, somewhere. My mother said they kept him on an island. They took him away when I was a baby.”
Cally stared. “They?”
“The army,” Westerly said. “They run things, where I come from. My mother got away, with me. The city’s like an ant-hill, you can just live like ants and not be noticed. She always said they’d catch up with us one day though—and they did. It took them sixteen years. They wanted me, my mother said.”
“Why would they want you?” Cally said.
Westerly looked at her gravely. “Thanks a lot,” he said.
Cally flushed. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
He was grinning. “Why would the army want an ant? I don’t know. Maybe they thought I’d go into politics, like my father.” The grin faded, as though it had never been really there, and Cally saw lines round his eyes and mouth that did not belong on the face of a boy. “So they came after me,” he said. “But it was her they killed.”
The room was very quiet.
“There were three black cars out in the street one day,” Westerly said. “And a hammering at the door. My mother made me push a table against the door, and when I turned round again she’d pulled down an old rug that had always hung on the wall, and there was another little door behind it that I’d never seen before. She said, ‘Don’t ask questions, do what I tell you. You must close your eyes and open that door, go through it, count to three and open your eyes. Then pick up what you will find waiting, and wherever you may find yourself, however strange or terrible things may seem, go on, as far and as fast as you can. Travelling. Seaward, to your father.’
“I couldn’t understand what it was all about. I said, ‘I’m not going anywhere without you.’ She wasn’t listening, she said, ‘Tell no one where you come from, and trust only three—’ ” He broke off; his face was closed, inturned. He took the flask from Cally and began turning it in his hands.
“They were still hammering at the door,” he said, “and they yelled that they’d shoot if we didn’t open up. I was scared. I grabbed at her to pull her out of the way. But I was too late. They fired a burst through the door and it hit her full on. Slantwise across her chest. Knocked her back against the wall. She was dead before she knew anything. I’ve seen people dead before, but—but it was her—”
Cally stared at him in horrified silence. He was looking straight ahead at the wall. She reached out a hand to him and then let it drop again; the inadequacy seemed too great.
Westerly’s voice was calm, empty. “I think I screamed,” he said.
“I went out of my head for a minute. I wanted to kill them, I picked up a chair because it was the only thing I could see, and then I remembered my knife and I pulled that out. They had something heavy now, they were hitting the lock where they’d shot at it. I looked at my mother lying there with her eyes open and blood all over her, and although she was dead I swear I heard her voice from somewhere, very loud, very strong, filling the room, filling my whole head. Do what I tell you . . . however strange or terrible things may seem, do what I tell you. . . . So I did. I put down the chair and I closed my eyes and went through the little door in the wall. I could hear the crashing as they broke the other door in. I closed my door and counted three, and there was no sound at all from the other side then, just birds singing, and a wind blowing. And when I opened my eyes I was standing somewhere I’d never seen, high up on open moorland with a track leading away down the slope. This pack was on the ground beside me, so I picked it up. And when I looked back, there was no door and no house, nothing but moorland and sky all around. So I started off along the track, because that was what she’d told me to do. And because sooner or later I knew they’d find a way to follow.”
He stopped. “And here I am,” he said.
“Oh West,” Cally said in a whisper. “That’s terrible. That’s —”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “It seems like a long time ago now. Yes, it was the most terrible thing in the world. But it happened. And all I can do now is what she told me to do. Look for my father. Go to the sea.”
Cally said, “How did she know about the door?”
Westerly shrugged. “My mother’s . . . different. Was different. She’d always known things. She taught me some of them—words, rhymes, things to do with my knife. Sometimes I’d walk into the room and she’d be talking to herself as if there were somebody else there. I was a bit scared of her, to tell you the truth. But she knew things. She even knew about you.”
“Me?”
He hesitated. “About your hands.”
Cally’s hands on her lap curled into fists, covering the deformed palms. Westerly reached over and took one hand, opening it gently to show the thick scaly skin. She made a face, pulling back, but he held on. He said, “I didn’t tell you the last thing my mother said. It was that I could trust three that I would meet. A man with eyes like an owl, a girl with selkie hands, and a creature in a high place.”
