Now that his dad was gone, this was Thomas’s place.
He made for a nearby desk with two radio sets on it—or at least what appeared to be radio sets. One was normal enough: a short, squat thing made of wood, which Thomas always had tuned to the BBC Overseas Service. The other machine was the interesting one. It had a large round face with a single delicate hand, long and tapered. The hand bobbed back and forth, measuring what sounded like tiny variations in the sea of static that poured from the machine’s speaker. It was always on too, but it had never picked up a single radio broadcast and it never would. His parents had always called it an Oscillometer and so Thomas did too.
On this occasion Thomas ignored both machines, instead pulling out the top drawer of his desk and taking out his logbook. Thin and hardbacked and bound in black leather, this book contained every detail of Thomas’s life. What he ate, who he saw, whether he had any contact with Mackintosh, how often he took a bath—and most importantly whether there was ever any change in the signal put forth by the Oscillometer. Monitoring its output was the only interesting thing he ever wrote about in his logbook—at least until today.
He opened the logbook and flipped to the correct page, which had been prepared with boxes drawn carefully with a ruler and his precious, rationed ink.
May 20, 1941, he wrote in the box marked Date before checking his wristwatch. 10:04 a.m. approx., he recorded in the next box, marked Time. Then it came to filling in the largest box: Event. He tapped his pencil on his chin for a moment or two, trying to gather his thoughts. Finally he began to write.
Spent the morning (08:40 onward) reading downstairs. With no warning at 10:00 approx. a circle appeared in midair, about the size of a shaving mirror. In it, a girl—11/12? Dark hair, curly; spectacles; dark eyes; overall complexion dark; name: Tess (?). Visual contact only. No sound. Communication via written notes, miming. Had not heard of War. Had no connection (as far as can be discovered) with M and D.
Thomas paused for a moment, tightening his lips and swallowing hard. He had never stopped looking for his mum and dad, and he knew he never would. There had to be something out there that could tell him where they were—and perhaps this girl was it. He clenched his fist and continued. Girl (Tess) did not seem to know what was happening and seemed to have no control over contact. Thomas grimaced at his own words, the tiny flare of hope that had been lit inside his chest already fading.
“Thomas!” came a shout, loud and guttural, from outside. “Thomas! I know you’re in there, you pest!” Mackintosh, Thomas thought, his stomach churning. He slid the logbook away and closed the drawer silently. Then he lowered himself to the floor and folded up tight, his knees against his chest, and waited.
“I’m not calling you again, lad! I’ve made breakfast. You can come in and eat with me, or you can do what you normally do and sneak in like a thief once my back’s turned.” Thomas, listening upstairs, grinned to nobody but himself.
“Have it your way,” the man outside continued, sounding weary. “But why you want to eat terrible food cold is beyond me.”
“Because it’s better than eating with you,” Thomas whispered.
After a few minutes of silence, he guessed Mackintosh had started making his way back to the house—but still Thomas moved carefully. He reached his provisions cupboard and took out a small silver-wrapped square—the last of his chocolate. He undid the foil and broke off a single piece, letting it melt on his tongue, but not before snapping off a corner of it to give to Moose. Together the boy and the mouse enjoyed their bounty and wondered whether their luck was about to turn.
* * *
Tess sat rooted to the spot on the chapel pew.
“What on earth was that, Violet?” she asked the spider, but all she got in return was a long look from Violet’s shining eternal eyes. “Yes, of course,” Tess said, as though Violet had answered. “You’re right. It was another reality. I looked through and it was another reality. One with a war in it, apparently.” She blinked. “Excuse me for a minute.”
She bent forward and kept her head low, having once read that it helped you not to faint. Violet made her way along Tess’s leg to sit, confused, on her owner’s knee.
“I’m all right, girl,” Tess whispered, her eyes shut tight. “Or at least I will be. I hope.”
Tess’s heart finally calmed and she sat up. Slowly she settled back into the pew. Then she picked up her experiments notebook and pulled her pencil out of her hair.
It was like a circle of fast-moving water with light shining through it, she wrote, the words tumbling out in such a rush that her handwriting became like a shorthand only she could read. It was like looking through a waterfall only without getting wet. It was silent. It didn’t smell of anything and it didn’t give off heat or cold, at least that I could feel. The place I could see when I looked through seemed almost exactly the same as here, but the differences were: chapel looked newer and instead of me there was a boy. And a mouse. The boy (Thomas) didn’t seem afraid or upset, even though I must have looked like someone peering through a circle in the air…Tess’s pencil stilled on the page. Her mouth fell open and her heart began to race again.
“It’s what Miss Ackerbee was talking about,” she said. “The circle in the air!” She put the pencil and paper down and picked up the object again. Her fingers were shaking. “That was what she saw, the night my dad—” She stopped, not quite able to finish her sentence out loud. The night my dad left me, she continued, inside her mind. She saw him looking through this thing, just like I was doing. Miss Ackerbee even said the circle shimmered. It has to be the same.
“So she wasn’t being poetic, or dramatic, or making it up,” Tess said, and Violet gave her a look. Tess pulled a face. “I know, I know, Miss Ackerbee wouldn’t do that and I should have trusted her from the start—all right, Vi. Stop going on about it, won’t you?” She heaved a sigh. “And as for my dad…,” she continued, stroking the device and running her fingertips along each marker, “he touched this, same as I’m doing now.” She smiled, but it was a sad and fleeting thing. “So this is almost like holding his hand.” But why did he leave it with me? Tess shuddered, thinking about the power of the device she’d just wielded. It could see between worlds—and now it was hers without even a note to explain why, or how it worked.
“Well, one thing’s for sure—it has to stay away from Mr. Cleat,” Tess whispered to herself, tightening her grip on it. “Whatever my dad was trying to do, he must have meant this for me alone. And if he wanted me to be safe”—she paused, sucking hard on her top lip—“if he wanted me to be safe, he wanted this to be safe too.”
Eventually she came back to herself with a shiver. She’d forgotten her watch and so had no idea of the time; it felt like a millennium had passed.
“We’d better be heading back, girl. They’ll be wondering where we are,” she said to Violet, gently settling her onto her head-top perch. Then Tess got to her feet, slid the object back into her cardigan pocket and hurried down the aisle. The area around the chapel was deserted and Tess was soon safely on the garden’s gravel path. She glanced at the bower seat as she straightened her clothes—there was no sign of Mrs. Thistleton and she was glad to see Mr. Cleat’s book was still there. With luck, nobody had even noticed she’d been gone.
She picked up the book as she passed and tucked it beneath her arm as she hurried toward the house trying to look like nothing was amiss—but the device in her pocket had never felt more conspicuous than it did now. She felt like she was carrying around a hive of sleeping bees, or a ticking bomb. Sooner or later it was going to explode and she had no idea what would happen once it did.
Tess sat on her bed, her nightie-clad knees a snowy peak in miniature. In her hands she held the device. She’d barely put it down in the hours since she’d gone to bed and she’d thought so hard—about Mr. Cleat and his Society, about what she’d seen that day, abou
t Thomas and her father and how it could possibly all fit together—that she knew she’d never be able to sleep. Violet sat on top of Tess’s thick nighttime braid, but could offer no advice on what to do next. She thrummed gently, patiently, waiting for Tess to decide.
“It’s like a jewelry box, isn’t it?” Tess whispered to Violet. “Only there’s something in it better than jewels. It looked like starlight, didn’t it, girl? Starlight, captured somehow.” Tess chewed her lip as she thought. She slid her experiments notebook off the table that stood beside her bed and flipped to a fresh page, and then she thought for a moment, tapping the end of her pencil against her chin.
Solid starlight, she wrote. Does it exist? It had felt like the void at the heart of the viewer had been filled with something, not just light, when she’d managed to open it earlier that day. Tess had the sense that she couldn’t have stuck a finger through the void, for instance; there would be a barrier in the way. So the light has to be solid, somehow. She frowned. Like glass. But how is that possible? She thought for so long that she found herself doodling stars on the page, but nothing useful occurred to her. Violet grew so bored she began to crawl down Tess’s arm and away, determined to explore the crocheted jungle of the blanket.
Tess shook herself out of her thoughts, skipped a few lines on her page and began again under a new heading: Markings. She underlined the word three times, a sure sign she was about to draw some conclusions.
Equally spaced, she noted, and equal in size. They look precisely measured and cut. She picked up the viewer again and held it to the light, angling it so that the markers were illuminated one by one. Three metal, she continued, holding the viewer in one hand and writing awkwardly with the other. Three stone. And two precious stone—sparkling, faceted. One red-tinged, one green.
Tess nodded, satisfied with her progress. She placed the viewer back in her lap again. It was a warm weight, like something alive.
One has a tarnish—not quite like rust. More like dirt? She’d tried scrubbing the discolored marker with a wet handkerchief, rubbing it with a licked fingertip and scratching at it with her thumbnail, but none of these had made the slightest difference. Perhaps not significant. Might be a property of the metal? It didn’t look like anything Tess had ever seen, but she had to remind herself that this device wasn’t like anything she’d ever held in her hand before. For all I know, she thought, that metal might have come from another world.
The realization hit her in the gut like a swallowed-down mouthful of cold porridge. “But that’s exactly it,” she whispered to herself. Violet, busily attacking a rose made of knotted yarn, paused to look up at her. “They come from a different world.” She picked up her pencil again and began to write, faster and faster with every word.
Not just one different world—many? Perhaps a different world for every marker? They might be like…Her pencil hovered over the page as she tried to find the right word. Keys? She continued. Each marker is a setting—she underlined the word so hard her pencil nib almost snapped—that can bring the person using it to the particular world the marker comes from.
She sat back and stared at the words she’d just written. They made no sense whatsoever and yet Tess knew—felt—that they were right. Violet began the slow journey up the bed and Tess picked her up as she drew near. “But feelings are no good,” she whispered to the spider. “I need to do some experiments, don’t I? I’ve got to test this theory. Facts are what I need, not feelings.” Violet kept her thoughts to herself, but her gentle thrum was enough to let Tess know that, as always, she and her beloved friend were in agreement.
Taking in a deep breath, Tess ran her thumb over the surface of the device; did she dare to open the void here, in a house where there was nobody she could trust? Well, she thought with a shrug, there’s Millie. But nobody else. She dug her teeth into her lower lip, and before she quite realized what she was doing, she’d raised her thumb, ready to place it over the metallic whorls—
The floorboards creaked outside her bedroom door and there was a gentle but insistent rap. Tess jumped, scrambling to shove the viewer underneath her pillow. “Miss de Sousa,” came Mrs. Thistleton’s voice from outside the door. “It’s almost eleven o’clock and long past your bedtime. I’ll thank you to douse your light now, please, and get some rest.”
Tess didn’t trust her voice to reply. She simply leaped for the lamp and switched it off with quivering fingers. Luckily for her, it seemed the housekeeper was content to assume Tess would do as she was told.
“My thanks,” Mrs. Thistleton replied. “Pleasant dreams,” she added in a tone that suggested she felt disgusted by the very notion.
Tess lay back against her pillows and tried to catch her breath. She had to continue her experiments; that much was clear. But I can’t do them here, she told herself. Her thoughts turned to the chapel. It’s just what I need, she thought mournfully, but how am I going to get there?
Just then a gust of night air puffed her curtain out into the room. Behind the billowing curtain, there was an open window.
* * *
Thomas yawned. He lay on his sleeping mat on the workroom floor, reading a newspaper by torchlight. The news was almost two weeks old, but Thomas had to rely on what he could swipe from under his guardian’s nose and Mackintosh usually kept the papers in his bedroom for days after he’d finished reading them.
“My parents’ bedroom, I mean. Not his,” Thomas muttered to Moose, who gave him a sympathetic look.
Thomas flipped the paper closed. Its headline screamed about the still-ongoing Liverpool Blitz, and the photo beneath it was chilling. Dublin felt safer than anywhere in Britain, but only just. Thomas hoped the enemy wouldn’t think of dropping bombs here, too.
“But I suppose it might be exciting, eh?” he said to Moose, who perched on his hand to take a better look at the picture of the destroyed city across the narrow sea, his nose twitching all the time. “The whine and the waiting, then the boom.” Thomas tried to grin, but fear quickly suffocated his enthusiasm. The radio broadcasts and the newspaper reports made it sound like the war was a great adventure, but Thomas knew better than that. He knew how death felt, up close.
He threw the paper on top of the pile he’d scavenged. There were a lot of uses for newspaper, Thomas had discovered, particularly when you were trying to sleep in an abandoned observatory in the middle of winter. He guarded them like they were treasure.
Finally he flicked off his torch—and blinked, confused.
“Do you see that, Moosie?” he asked the mouse. Moose’s nose quivered and he scampered to Thomas’s shoulder. There was a bluish light coming from downstairs, shining up through the trapdoor.
Carefully, but as quickly as he could, he peered down through the trapdoor. At the bottom of the ladder, he could see an eerie but welcome sight and he couldn’t help but laugh. It was the girl he’d seen earlier, floating in her shining circle, peering at him across the gap between worlds.
“You’re back!” he said, clattering down the ladder. He could see his own wide smile reflected on her face and she gave him a wave. Moose ran up onto his head and the girl laughed. It made no sound.
She held up a finger as if to ask him to wait and the next second she lifted her hand again—and there was a spider as big as her palm.
“Aargh!” Thomas said, recoiling a little, but the girl raised her eyebrows at him. She brought the spider closer to the surface and Thomas and Moose leaned in. The spider’s eyes shone with a friendly light and Thomas found himself smiling at her.
“She’s very lovely,” he said, speaking slowly so that his words were clear. The girl—Tess, Thomas suddenly remembered—grinned widely and nodded.
Then the girl was speaking. Thomas watched her lips, frowning in concentration. “Where are you?” she said.
“Dublin,” he replied. “Ireland.” He spelled out the words, but the girl’s co
nfusion remained. “Where are you?” he asked, and she turned away to scribble a note. When she held it up, all Thomas could do was blink.
“Hurdleford?” he said, frowning. “In the Briternian Isles? I’ve never heard of it.” He looked at her and noticed she was chewing on her lip, just as he did when he was thinking hard.
Tess turned away to scribble another note. This time it read: I want to go where you are. No idea how! Help me?
Thomas barely had time to say “Yes!” before the light in the void faded and Tess once again vanished from view.
Tess woke in the cold, empty chapel and pulled herself up into a sitting position, looking at the viewer. She’d tried to open it again after speaking to Thomas but it hadn’t worked and she must have fallen asleep out here all alone.
Checking her wristwatch, she saw that it was almost five o’clock in the morning—which meant she didn’t have long before the staff back in the house would be awake and beginning their day. She’d have to hurry. As much as she hated the thought of climbing back up the ivy she’d used to make her escape the previous night, she knew she had little choice.
Tess made her way out of the chapel and across the dew-sodden field as quickly as she could. Within minutes her nightgown was sticking to her wet legs, and when she reached the gate, her fingers were so numb she could barely climb it. She stumbled past the bower seat, crunched across the gravel past the kitchen door and was making for the front of the house when, suddenly enough to make her gasp, the kitchen door opened.
Inside stood Millie, who gaped out at Tess. In the dim light of morning, in her sodden nightclothes, Tess could only imagine what she looked like.
“Miss? What on earth are you doing out here?” said Millie. “Get in before you catch your death!”
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