The Starspun Web

by Sinéad O'Hart

  “Are you—are you all right?” he said, but Tess couldn’t answer for a long confusing moment. She couldn’t find her mouth, couldn’t feel her tongue, didn’t know how to breathe. She coughed, spluttering like a landed fish, until she gradually got her wind back. Her heart slowed to a normal pace. Her brain refocused, and she could finally see where she was.

  The tiles on the floor. The wooden pew a few feet from her nose. The ceiling above her head a delicate shade of blue, dotted here and there with bright golden stars. She blinked and sat up and Thomas backed away, watching her with wide, careful eyes.

  “I did it,” Tess said, looking at him. She felt heavy, like every molecule of her body had gained a core of stone. A crushing sense of loss filled her mind, but with every passing second she found it harder and harder to remember…What had she seen?

  “You most certainly did,” Thomas replied, shaking his head in admiration and disbelief.

  Tess looked at the Star-spinner, still in her hands. It glowed happily, the viewfinder clear. She glanced through it, but all she could see was night. She turned back to Thomas and saw herself reflected in the lenses of his glasses.

  Then she lurched forward, reaching out for him, and they met in a tight, fierce hug on the tiled floor of the chapel, holding one another for a long moment.

  “It’s all right,” he whispered. Moose scampered onto his owner’s head and Tess caught a glimpse of him out of the corner of her eye. It made her laugh and finally the children let one another go.

  “Thank you,” Tess said as she and Thomas sat back on the floor, close enough that their knees were touching. She looked around the chapel again. The windows were shuttered and candles burned in several wall sconces. The door was locked and tightly barred against the night. She let her gaze linger on the painted golden stars and how the wooden boards met in the middle, dovetailing perfectly into the shape of an eight-pointed star. Another one, she thought. That’s one too many coincidences for my liking.

  “Who built this place?” she asked, still staring at the ceiling.

  “My father,” Thomas answered, looking up. “I remember him painting this ceiling when I was knee-high.”

  “It’s wonderful.” She dropped her gaze from it and after a second Thomas did the same. “It’s almost exactly like the pattern at the heart of my Star-spinner. And it looks—well, it looks a little bit like what I saw on my way here.”

  Thomas blinked at her. “Really?”

  Tess nodded. “Your dad was a clever one.”

  Thomas shrugged. “Not just him. My mum was the one with the real training—she studied astrophysics, only they wouldn’t give her full credit for her work because she was a woman.” He grimaced. “So Dad became interested too and it was something they loved to work on together. Until the accident.”

  Tess blinked hard. “I’m so sorry,” she said. Thomas just nodded, not looking at her.

  “What about your parents?” he asked.

  Tess frowned. “I’m a foundling,” she said. “Nobody knows where they are, or who they are, or if they’re alive.”

  Thomas’s eyes were sympathetic as he turned to her. “That’s awful,” he said.

  Tess sucked her lips tight. “So, your mum and dad. They worked on Interdimensional Harmonics then?” she asked after a moment, hoping to change the subject.

  Thomas frowned. “No. Well, they didn’t call it that. What does it mean?”

  Tess tried her best to explain. “Trying to send messages between the worlds, basically. With radiogram waves, Mr. Cleat said.”

  Thomas nodded, his eyebrows shooting up. “Yes! Well, my parents called it Oscillation Theory. They built a machine, the Oscillometer, to listen for interference from other worlds.” Tess listened to this dumbfounded, yet also somehow unsurprised, and let her gaze drift back to the ceiling.

  “The same house,” she breathed. “The same place. The same work being done, the same research, but in two different worlds. It’s all very strange.”

  “Well, my parents were de Sousas,” Thomas said. “It stands to reason.”

  Tess sat rooted to the spot. She looked away from the ceiling and stared at him. “What did you say?”

  “My parents,” Thomas repeated, looking uncomfortable. “They were de Sousas.” He licked his lips nervously. “Have—have I said something wrong?”

  “I thought your name was Molyneaux,” Tess said, and then she remembered the notebook she’d seen when she’d made her not-quite trip to Thomas’s world. Helena Molyneaux de Sousa. “So that was your mother’s notebook I saw. Helena Molyneaux de Sousa!”

  “Mum’s married name,” Thomas said with a half grin. “She didn’t always use it.”

  In the midst of Tess’s excited confusion, she remembered something else Thomas had said. “What do you mean, it stands to reason? What does—that your parents would be scientists, researchers, interested in this sort of thing?”

  “Because de Sousas always are,” Thomas said with a nod. “At least as far as Mum and Dad knew. They’d made contact with, I think, two or three other realities, and that name kept coming up. The family has some connection with Tunguska—probably, Mum and Dad thought, with the original blast site, the biggest one.” He gave her a nervous frown. “But I suppose you put a bit of a spanner in the works with that theory, eh?” He laughed, but there was nothing in it except anxiety. “Unless you’re going to tell me you’re a de Sousa too?”

  Tess took a deep breath and stuck out her hand. “Teresita Mariana de Sousa,” she told him. “But everyone calls me Tess.”

  “So this is a lot to take in, all at once,” Thomas said. “You’re a de Sousa?”

  “It can’t be that much of a surprise,” Tess replied. “I mean, look at us.”

  Thomas did and he straightaway saw what Tess meant. “I suppose we are a little bit alike,” he admitted.

  Tess snorted. “Alike? We could be identical twins. If boys and girls could be identical twins, I mean. We even have the same glasses.”

  Thomas leaned closer, peering at her. “Ah. Yes.” Then he sat back. “They look better on me, though,” he said in an undertone, and Tess gave him a halfhearted kick.

  “What’s more, whoever lived in my house—Mr. Cleat’s house, I mean—before him was a de Sousa too,” she said. “I don’t know who exactly. There’s lots I don’t know yet.”

  “That makes sense,” Thomas said. “In the worlds my parents knew of, this house was always owned by a de Sousa. It’s like a fixed point, they said.”

  “Like a pin driven through several sheets of paper. Sticking the worlds together.”

  Thomas nodded thoughtfully. “Something like that, I suppose.”

  Tess chewed on her lip for a moment. “I just wish I knew why he brought me here. Or there. You know what I mean.”

  “Probably not for anything good,” Thomas said. “But he might have done you a favor. I bet he’d kick himself if he knew.”

  “What’s that?” Tess gave a curious frown.

  “My parents always said there had to be a reason why our family is at the heart of all this, in all the worlds they knew of. They always felt we had the potential to travel between realities, just waiting to be uncovered, and I’m pretty sure it’s something to do with the house. Maybe our natural ability is strongest here. Who knows?”

  Tess frowned. “But I used to be able to do it by myself, as a baby.” She paused, looking at him. “At least, that’s what Miss Ackerbee believed. I forgot how as I got older and more attached to Violet.”

  Thomas blinked. He didn’t speak for a moment or two. “Well then, you’ve got a gift my parents would’ve marveled at.” He took a long breath before continuing. “They used to hope that one day one of us would do what you’ve just done. I wish they’d been here to see this. To meet you.”

  Tess smiled. “Me too.�
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  Thomas’s chin wobbled. “Anyway. They’re not.”

  “So who looks after you?” Tess said. “You don’t live out here, do you?”

  Thomas brightened. “More or less. Do you want to see?” He sprang up from the ground and extended a hand to help Tess to her feet. “Come on,” he said. “Up here.”

  He hurried to the ladder at the back of the chapel and Tess followed him as he climbed to the workroom. His sleeping mat and blankets were on the floor, his radio burbled softly into the empty air and the Oscillometer hissed. Moose poked his head out of Thomas’s pocket and looked around, his nose trembling. Thomas pushed a crumb of cheese into his pocket and Moose nibbled on it, content.

  “There isn’t a window,” Tess observed. “I’d really like to see out if I could.”

  “Look up,” Thomas said, walking to the wall. He began to crank a handle and Tess heard the smooth running of gears—and then, like an eye awakening, a segment of the domed roof overhead opened. She watched as the night sky began to appear and she was so entranced by the sight that she barely noticed Thomas coming to stand beside her again.

  “It’s so different,” she said, her eyes full of stars.

  “What is?” Thomas frowned and looked up.

  “Your sky,” she said, pulling her gaze away from it and focusing on him. “Even the air smells different here.”

  Thomas surreptitiously tried to sniff his own armpit. “I haven’t had a bath in a while,” he admitted. “It’s probably—”

  “No!” Tess laughed. “I don’t mean that. It’s not you. It’s everything.”

  “Come up here then,” Thomas said, moving past her. “Get a proper look.” He climbed on a desk and then hauled himself up a short iron ladder to the gap in the roof. Very soon he had his head and shoulders out through the dome. “Come on!” he called, turning back to Tess. “You’re missing it.”

  He moved over to make room for her as she joined him on the topmost rung, and they looked out together over the city. Its lights shone, but dully, as though they were muted, and beyond it mountains rolled against the sky.

  “This is Dublin. My city. There’s the sea,” Thomas told her, pointing to where the darkness took a mouthful out of the land. A black ribbon flowed into it, cutting through the heart of the city. “And that’s the Liffey running into it.”

  “We call it the Plura,” Tess said with a smile. “I used to live right by it. I miss seeing it every day.”

  “Where did you live?”

  “Near Carlisle Bridge. On Shelmalier’s Quay. We could see the Victoria and Albert Memorial at the bottom of Sackville Street from the common room window.” Tess smiled at the memory.

  “Sackville Street,” Thomas muttered, gazing out over the city again. “I wonder. I think I know where you mean, even though all those places have different names here. That quay? What did you call it?”

  “Shelmalier’s Quay. Don’t you have that?”

  Thomas shook his head. “But I think you might be talking about O’Connell Street,” he said. “It’s not far if we had my bike. I could get it if you like.”

  Tess’s heart thumped. “Do you really think we could?”

  Thomas sighed. “Well. Technically there’s a war on, so we probably shouldn’t. We’re supposedly neutral”—he waved at the city—“which is why you can still see our lights. Across the water they’re under a total blackout. Trying to confuse the Jerries, you see.”

  Tess frowned politely. “The Jerries?”

  “The Germans. They use city lights to navigate at night, for bombing raids. Poor Liverpool just got pummeled. London’s been flattened—they’ve been at it since last year. We’re not supposed to be helping either side, but sometimes I really do wish they’d just turn the lights out.” Tess couldn’t miss the fear in his voice.

  She looked out at the shining city. “This really is a different place.”

  Thomas turned to her. “And you really don’t have the war? It’s all anyone talks about here, even if we have to call it the Emergency.”

  Tess shook her head. “The last war we had was a hundred years ago, over the price of grain or some such nonsense.”

  Thomas nodded sagely. “This one’s a bad one. Nearly as bad as the last one.” He looked grim.

  “The last one? When was that?”

  “Oh, about twenty-five years ago,” Thomas replied. “I don’t remember it, of course. But my parents did. It kicked off a lot of interest in the theories about other worlds, too. The Great War, they called it. Nothing great about it if you ask me, though,” he added in a mutter.

  “What did a war have to do with any of this?”

  Thomas thought about how to reply for a moment or two. “Well, I can only tell you what my mum and dad told me. They always said big world-changing things—like the Tunguska bang in 1908, for instance, or the Great War, or even the Spanish flu, which happened around the same time—caused distortions in reality. And that sometimes little rifts can happen, like rips in a piece of cloth if it’s stretched too far.”

  He paused to gather his next sentences. “And so things can get lost in the rips. Things like people, and time, and objects. In the chaos, nobody really notices it happening; it’s only afterward, when things have calmed down, that you hear about the battalion of men who just vanished off the battlefield, or the lady whose house was bombed and who swears she fell into another world before somehow being shoved back into her own horrible reality again.”

  He pushed his glasses up his nose. “People like to pretend it’s because folk are making things up, but really it’s because the worlds get closer at times like these, when the realities go off-kilter a bit and things start to get mixed up. Tunguska was the first time it really happened, and study into other realities started then. By the time the Great War began five or six years later, there was already a network of underground scientists and enthusiasts invested in it.”

  “That’s sort of what Mr. Cleat said too,” Tess replied. “It began with the big explosion—the Tunguska thing. He said it became fashionable after that.”

  Thomas let out a mirthless chuckle. “I wouldn’t say ‘fashionable.’ But each to their own.” He looked back at the house and his expression turned cold. Tess followed his gaze, but all she could make out was a light burning in a turret window. As she watched, the light was turned off. Thomas cleared his throat. “Come on, let’s go. It gets cold up here.”

  They climbed back down the ladder and Thomas closed the roof. His room was surprisingly warm and cozy and Tess wanted so badly to curl up on his sleeping mat and close her eyes—but something was pulling at her. She kept expecting to feel the tap of Violet’s feet on her skin and she missed the spider’s gentle weight on the back of her hand.

  “Who was that?” she asked, trying to keep her focus. “In the window of your house. Who turned out the light?”

  “Mackintosh,” Thomas said, his voice low and dark. “My guardian.” The word oozed unpleasantly. Tess remembered the stocking-clad man and shuddered.

  “I think I met him, yesterday. Is he the reason you live out here?”

  Thomas tightened his lips in a joyless grin and looked at her. “We don’t get on. It’s easier if we stay out of one another’s way. Plus I like this old place.”

  Tess gave a knowing nod. “He and my governess, Mrs. Thistleton, should probably have afternoon tea. It sounds like they’d be best friends.”

  Thomas grinned properly, but only for a second. Then he crossed the room and dropped to his knees to pull open a cupboard. Tess glimpsed rows of tinned food, packets and cans and a biscuit drum. “So what’ll you have? I’ve got sardines and corned beef and cheese and—”

  “I should be getting back,” Tess said softly. “I don’t think I can stay much longer.”

  Thomas turned to her. His eyes were lost in the gleam o
n his glasses. “But—I thought you’d stay. For a bit, at least.” Moose peeped out over Thomas’s shirt pocket, his shining eyes fixed on Tess and his nose quivering like a plucked string.

  “I have to get home to Violet,” Tess said, looking at Moose with a painful tug in her chest. “She’s in danger without me. But you’ll see me again soon. I promise.”

  Thomas got to his feet. “I hope so,” he said. “Moose and I get lonely out here sometimes.”

  Tess gave him a knowing, sympathetic look as she pulled up the trapdoor and began to climb down the ladder. Thomas followed. When they were both standing in the chapel, Tess took the Star-spinner out of her pocket and Thomas’s eyes went wide.

  “Do you want to see it?” she asked, holding it out.

  Thomas backed away. “No thank you. Too much power for me, I reckon.”

  Tess cradled the Star-spinner to her chest, feeling awkward. “Until tomorrow then.”

  “Until then,” Thomas said. “Take care.”

  “And you,” she replied, turning the Star-spinner back until the markings clicked into their original positions.

  She just had time to meet Thomas’s eye before the void sucked her through and she was gone.

  In a small, plainly furnished room, a woman lay sleeping. Her bed was simple, the frames on her wall containing nothing but sprays of dried flowers. Her hair was in a long tight braid and her sharp-featured face was, in sleep, as relaxed as it ever became. The grayish light of early morning soaked through the net curtains, making everything seem dull.

  On the woman’s bedside table lay her locket, empty where there should have been a portrait of someone dear, and beside it she had placed the thin gold band she wore on her ring finger.

  Another table sat beneath her window. It held a tall, narrow box that its owner liked to pass off as her sewing machine, but the mechanism this box contained was no such thing. A steady gentle hiss emanated from it and an urgent scritch-scritch noise could barely be heard beneath it, like a counterpoint melody.