The Starspun Web

by Sinéad O'Hart

  Wilf took a deep breath, trying not to think about what might have happened to Tess—and to Violet. Focus on getting them back, she told herself in as fierce a voice as she could muster. “You’ve told Miss Ackerbee and Rebecca all of this?”

  Millie nodded. “Tess had wanted to call for help but she had something she needed to do first. I never asked her what; that was her business. But after tonight, her message couldn’t wait anymore.”

  “And what did Miss Ackerbee say she was going to do?” Wilf’s large green eyes were narrowed and her whole body seemed pointed, like a nocked arrow.

  Millie tried to think. “She mentioned something about a lawyer. She’s going to telephone in the morning and—”

  “No,” Wilf said, dropping the word into Millie’s sentence like a guillotine. “No more lawyers. They take too long. This is up to us. We’ve got to get her back, right now.”

  “We can’t go now, ninny,” said Prissy. “How are we going to get there? How are we going to get in? It’s not like you can just walk into Fairwater Park.”

  “Well, actually, I think I can get us all in,” said Millie, straightening up. “And in a way where we won’t be noticed. Do you all have a black skirt? And a white blouse?”

  “Do we have what?” said Prossy, looking faintly disgusted.

  “Something that would pass for a maid’s uniform,” said Millie. “There’ll be loads of extra staff on Friday for this event Mr. Cleat’s planning. Nobody will pay the slightest bit of attention to a few new faces. We’ll blend right in.” Millie’s bright expression faded a little. “Or at least, you will. I hope nobody at the Lodge spots me.”

  “I’m sure we can manage to beg, borrow or steal the right clothes,” said Prissy, shrugging. “And we’ll hide you somehow, Millie.”

  “I’m sure I’ll think of something,” Millie said distractedly. She slumped a little, tiredness overwhelming her. “All I know is Tess didn’t want anything to do with whatever Mr. Cleat’s planning. I want to be there to help her stop him and maybe to get her away, if we can.”

  “So do we,” said Eunice in a determined tone. Then she yawned and rubbed her eyes. A wave of yawns traveled around the group.

  Millie yawned so widely her ears popped and she realized the truth of the matter: there was nothing to be done for Tess now. If what she’d gleaned from Mrs. Thistleton was accurate, Tess was important for whatever was to happen on Friday. They had to hope she’d be as safe as she could be in that horrible place until then.

  “At least we’ve got a plan,” said Wilf, looking at them each in turn. “We have a way out of here, thanks to Eunice, and now thanks to Millie we have a way into the park. It’s better than nothing. And though I wish we could go sooner, we’ll make our move at the right time.”

  “Friday it is,” said Prissy, crawling onto her own bed. “Sleep well, everyone.”

  “Sweet dreams,” added Prossy, already pulling the covers over her head.

  Wilf blew out the candle and soft darkness filled the room. “Millie?” she said after a moment or two, just as Millie’s eyes were adjusting to the dark. “Thank you.”

  A sleepy chorus of thanks came from the other beds, all except Prossy’s—soft, contented snoring had already begun from her corner of the dorm.

  “It’s what friends do,” whispered Millie into the night.

  Thomas had waited in the chapel as long as he could, but he’d eventually crawled upstairs, his mind heavy with worry. The radio was whispering something about the sinking of the Bismarck, which had happened a couple of days before; the Oscillometer was hissing steadily. Still Tess did not come. Moose ran from one of Thomas’s hands to the other, the movement soothing like a metronome, and just as Thomas realized he was being lulled to sleep, he pulled himself to his feet, gently placed Moose on the top of his head and began to climb down the ladder.

  He found his torch, ignoring his own worried mind. Something’s happened. She wouldn’t have missed this, not for anything. Maybe she was sick, or something had gone wrong with the Star-spinner, or—worst of all—she’d been prevented from coming. Thomas was filled with a sense of dread. Stuck here, he could do nothing to help Tess.

  But maybe Mackintosh knew something that would shed some light.

  Thomas slipped Moose into his coat pocket as he hurried to the vestry. He dropped into the tunnel and, for the first time doing this journey, felt afraid—afraid of the shadows, of Mackintosh’s pasty face leering out of the earthen walls around him, or that a uniformed soldier with a rifle leveled at his heart would come charging toward the light of his torch…

  Thomas flattened himself against the tunnel wall, trying to calm his breathing. Come on, you dolt, he told himself. You’ve done this journey a thousand times. And you’re going back to your house. It’s Mackintosh who should be running scared, not you! He squashed his eyes shut, remembering the reading of his parents’ will, and their inexplicable decision to name Mackintosh, their distant acquaintance, as Thomas’s guardian. There was no one else who could take him and Mackintosh was willing to move into Thomas’s home, so things were smoothed over quickly, and before he knew it, Thomas had lost his family but gained a disinterested caretaker—someone who seemed to care more about his parents’ work than looking after their son.

  He has no right to anything they owned, Thomas reminded himself. And Tess is the only family you have. This is up to you now. Moose popped out of his coat pocket, as if he could hear Thomas’s thoughts, and the boy smiled as he stroked the mouse’s head. “I mean, it’s up to us, Moose. Right?”

  Moose sniffed the air, his ears twitching, and Thomas took heart. He made his silent way into the scullery of his home, creeping out of the kitchen and across the lobby. The house was bathed in silent darkness but with every step he expected the lights to be thrown on and Mackintosh’s voice to shatter the night.

  He’d made it to the bottom of the stairs before he fully realized how far he’d come.

  Thomas looked up. The stairs were the same as he remembered, their richly patterned carpet balding near the edges, and he hoped he could remember all the creaky spots. The first landing held a glowing lamp. Thomas was thankful for it as he began to climb, holding his unlit torch like a sword so firmly his knuckles paled around its grip.

  He has my dad’s Oscillometer, Thomas thought. The big one. The machine in the observatory was merely a working copy; Thomas’s father had built a full-scale machine in the house and it had been kept in his workroom upstairs. It wasn’t something that could be easily moved, so Thomas knew Mackintosh had to be using the same room. Maybe it could tell him something useful. Maybe he’d be able to send Tess a message, though he wasn’t sure how to work the machine. Maybe he’d even find Mackintosh himself and force him to rescue Tess, somehow…

  Thomas shook those thoughts away as the door to his father’s old workroom loomed before him. The door at the end of the hall had been his parents’ bedroom; Thomas assumed Mackintosh was in there and so trod as quietly as he could on the floorboards until finally his hand was on the doorknob.

  A huge snore from the bedroom made Thomas jump. His heart raced as he heard Mackintosh turning over in bed and he tried to twist the knob while Mackintosh himself was making noise in the hope one sound would mask the other.

  And finally he’d made it. He clicked on his torch and swept it around, swallowing back against his suddenly tight throat. Everything looked different now; for a start there were no framed photographs of his mother or of Thomas himself, and the Oscillometer—so large it took up most of the room—looked like it wasn’t being maintained as well as it had been when his parents were alive.

  Similar to its smaller cousin in the observatory, the large Oscillometer hummed and hissed placidly, its needle bobbing gently in the main dial. A stack of paper beside the machine was slowly growing, being quietly churned out as every twitch of the needle
was recorded by a narrow pen scratching across the surface of the paper; Thomas carefully picked up a handful of this record, trying to spot a pattern or any sort of recent activity, but he was eventually forced to replace it, having learned nothing.

  There wasn’t anything here he could use. The disappointment was crushing. He just didn’t know enough about how the machine worked to send a message—and even if he could, how would he guarantee Tess would get it? Just as Thomas convinced himself to go back to the observatory and get some sleep, the torch beam fell on a nearby table with some open books on it.

  He made for it, keeping the light focused on the books all the time, and realized as he drew near that he was looking at Mackintosh’s logbook. Excited, he bent to examine it. Nothing much had happened for the past few weeks, besides that he’d been in touch with a person named Sharpthorn—whoever he was. Or she, I suppose, Thomas reminded himself, running his finger down the page.

  Under the date, there was a message from Sharpthorn. Be ready, it said. Thirtieth. Protocol S.

  Thomas didn’t know what this meant, but something about it made him nervous. Could thirtieth be a reference to Friday’s date? He supposed it had to be.

  But what on earth could Protocol S mean? He cast about for something that might help—a dictionary, a book helpfully labeled Codes, anything at all—but came up short. There were lots more logbooks and a few dusty old textbooks, which Thomas didn’t think would be of any use. As an afterthought, he put down his torch and struggled to heave out the bottom logbook in the pile, on which a golden figure 1 was embossed. He flipped the book open and after a moment saw that he’d hit the jackpot. There was a loose sheet taped inside the front cover—a legend, or a key, which Mackintosh must have needed when he was new to the study of Oscillation Theory. Thomas scanned it as quickly as he could.

  “Protocol S,” he whispered, finding it almost three-quarters down the page. “Destruction of Device and/or Elimination of Wielder.”

  It took him a long moment, blinking into the dark, to realize what this meant. The device is the Star-spinner, he thought, his panic rising. And the wielder—that must be Tess.

  * * *

  The clattering of a key turning in the lock made Tess jerk awake. She’d dozed off sitting on the floor of her bedroom, Mr. Cleat’s copy of The Secret Garden on her lap. Despite what she now knew about it, something in the pages gave her comfort. It felt as close as she could come now to leaving her own world.

  “Lunchtime,” Mrs. Thistleton announced, striding across the room with a tray in her hands. She placed it on Tess’s dressing table beside her untouched breakfast tray, the porridge long congealed and the cup of tea as cold as stone. “You’ll have to start eating soon, you know,” Mrs. Thistleton said, sweeping up one tray and replacing it with another. “Starving yourself won’t get your spider back.”

  Tess ignored her, focusing all her attention on the thick iron nails that had been hammered into the frame of her window, keeping it closed tight. The nails had split the paintwork and driven long cracks into the wood, but Mrs. Thistleton hadn’t cared about that. All she’d cared about was keeping Tess under lock and key until Mr. Cleat decided what to do with her.

  And all Tess had done was sit on the floor pulling strips off the wallpaper, dreaming up ways to get out of here.

  “I’ll take your convenience, while I’m at it,” Mrs. Thistleton muttered, picking up Tess’s chamber pot. “We can’t have the room smelling foul when Mr. Cleat comes calling, can we?”

  Tess stiffened and blinked at the sound of his name but made no reply.

  “Yes, he’ll be here to speak to you this afternoon. So you’d best eat your lunch or he’ll be asking you why.” Tess maintained her silence, glaring out at a bird that had the cheek to perch on a branch outside her window, singing to its heart’s content as though nothing in the world had turned upside down or rotten or wrong. “All right, you stubborn little mule. Have it your way,” Mrs. Thistleton sighed before leaving the room. The key clanked home in the lock and Tess was alone once more.

  Eventually she pushed herself up off the floor, her body sore from sitting so uncomfortably. She tossed Mr. Cleat’s book onto the coverlet and perched on the side of the bed to uncover her lunch: an unappetizing-looking stew piled high with boiled potatoes and complete with a layer of grease on top. Despite everything, her stomach growled at the sight of the food and so she picked up her cutlery and made the best of it.

  She was just draining the last of her lukewarm milk when the key was once more shoved into the lock and turned. This time there was a polite knock on the door before it was opened but there was no pause to allow Tess to speak before the person entered.

  “Ah, Tess. There you are,” said Mr. Cleat, as if there were any possibility Tess could be anywhere else.

  “I want to see Violet,” Tess said, wiping her mouth on a napkin and throwing it onto the tray. “And I want to get out of here.”

  “Of course you do! Of course,” Mr. Cleat said, closing and locking the door behind him. He pocketed the key and then stood in the middle of the room, his hands clasped behind his back. Then he noticed the book lying on the bed. “Ah. You’re still enjoying my old tome, I see,” he said with a grin.

  “Not really,” Tess said as rudely as she could. “It’s terrible. I just like throwing it against the wall every now and then, wishing it was you.”

  Mr. Cleat shook his head, wagging his finger playfully at Tess. “Now, now. No need for that. It’s hardly my fault you chose it out of the hundreds of books in my library and proved that you were everything I hoped you’d be,” he said. “It resonated with you. You answered its call—and all without even knowing why or what it meant. It was almost poetic.”

  He knows, Tess thought. She clenched her teeth as a further realization washed over her. He’s known since before he ever met me, and there’s no point pretending anymore. “If it’s really from another reality, how do you even have it?” she asked, forcing herself to sound calm. “How do I know anything you tell me is the truth?”

  “Well now, that’s a good question,” Mr. Cleat said, settling into a nearby chair entirely without invitation. “My father bought it for me from a dealer in cross-world objects, Tess—a person who buys and sells things that get lost between the worlds. They’re rare, and expensive, and they don’t always stay where they’re put, which is a risk you take when you buy them. But this one, for whatever reason, has stuck around.” He deftly crossed his neatly trousered legs before continuing. “I believed my father when he told me where he got it. And the fact that he died a short time later from a disease contracted in another world proved to me he was telling the truth.” Mr. Cleat’s expression hardened.

  “What?” Tess said, frowning as she tried to understand.

  Mr. Cleat sighed, seeming to think about what to say next. “My father died from a strain of flu that killed millions of people in an adjoining world between the years 1918 and 1920. It didn’t strike here, yet my father and several others lost their lives to it. All the deaths I’ve been able to examine from this particular cluster have one thing in common: they were all traceable to a cross-world object. That book,” he said, looking at it, “was my last gift from a dearly loved father. It also killed him.”

  “And you think killing people on another earth is going to make you feel better for losing your father?” Tess said, her disbelieving anger sharpening her words. “I never knew my father. It doesn’t mean I want to take other people’s fathers away.”

  “Perhaps you’re a better person than me then. Who’s to say?” Mr. Cleat uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, his fingers interlaced, and stared at Tess. “But what would you do to see your father again, Tess? If it were possible, that is. Tell me, what would you do?”

  “What are you talking about?” Tess said. “I can’t see my father again. It doesn’t matter what I do.”
<
br />   Mr. Cleat rubbed his chin, giving her the smug smile of a person who thinks they know best. “The thing about multiple realities, Tess,” he began, “particularly multiple realities between which people have learned how to travel, is that things can get lost. However, they can also be found. Again and again if need be.” He held out his hand, fingers outstretched as though he were holding up an invisible plate. “Imagine each fingertip is a world,” he said. “In each world is a version of you. Of me. Of our good friend Mrs. Pauline Thistleton. And of your father, your mother, everyone you’ve ever known. Theoretically, at least.”

  “Theoretically,” Tess said. “You love that word.”

  “But isn’t it worth finding out?” Mr. Cleat said, staring at her incredulously. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this from you, Tess, the most promising scientist of your years I’ve ever met. You don’t even want to think about what I’m saying?”

  Tess drilled into Mr. Cleat with her stare. “I had one father,” she said. “And one mother. Other versions of them aren’t them. And other versions of your father aren’t him.”

  Mr. Cleat dropped his hand, giving her a cool look. “I think that’s my decision to make,” he told her.

  “I am not going to help you,” Tess said, her words slow and deliberate. “I’m not going to help you bring across the worlds things that can drop bombs or cause pain. I will never do that. It doesn’t matter what you offer me, it’s not going to change my mind. So you’d better just give up. You’re wasting your time.”

  Mr. Cleat chuckled mirthlessly, shaking his head. “Even if I could help you find your home, Tess? And I don’t mean that silly house by the river. I mean the place you were born.” Mr. Cleat’s icy blue stare was enough to rob Tess of her breath. “Because the world in which you were born, Tess, is the one where all of this began. The world that experienced the Tunguska blast in all its ferocity, where in 1908 a meteorite hit the ground with so much force that it threw up an ash cloud thick enough to block out the sun. All other known worlds, including this one and our war-torn neighbor, suffered but an echo of that cataclysmic event, Tess, but your world is dying, gradually going dark and turning to a lump of blackened stone.” Tess blinked and her mind flashed to the Star-spinner. The tarnished marker, she thought. Is that—is that the key that leads to my home? Mr. Cleat spoke again and it broke her concentration. “If you want to see it before it’s too late, now is the time to act.”