Conrad's Fate (16 page)

We tiptoed speedily and cautiously toward the center of the attics. In the distance, floors creaked and someone banged a door, but no one came near. I think we both gasped with nervous relief when we passed the line painted on the wall. Then we sprinted to the wide space with the row of windows.

“Here—it
is
here, the center of things!” Christopher said. He turned slowly around, looking up, looking down. “And I still don't understand it,” he said.

There really did seem to be nothing but flaking plaster ceiling above and wide old floorboards underfoot. In front of us, the rather dirty row of windows looked out over the distant blue mountains above Stallchester, and behind us was just wall, flaking like the ceiling. The dark passage on the other side that led to the women's side was identical to one we had come along.

I pointed to it. “What about Millie? Is she along there?”

Christopher shook his head impatiently. “No. Here.
Here
is the only place she feels anywhere near at the moment. It looks as if these changes are somehow connected to the way she's not here, but that's all I know.”

“Under the floor, then?” I suggested. “We could take one of the floorboards up.”

Christopher said, in an unconvinced way, “I suppose we could
try
,” and we had, both of us, knelt down near the windows to look at the boards, when another sideways jolt happened. It was lucky we were kneeling. Up here the shift was savage. We were both thrown over by it. My head cracked against the wall under the windows. I swore.

Christopher reached out and hauled me up. “I see the reason for these painted lines now,” he said, rather soberly. “If you'd been standing up, Grant, you'd have gone straight through the window. I shudder to think how far it is to the ground from here.”

He was pale and upset. I was annoyed. I looked around while I was rubbing my head, and it was all exactly the same, wide floorboards, distant mountains through the windows, flaky plaster, and the feeling of something strange here as strong as ever. “What
does
it?” I said. “And
why
?”

Christopher shrugged. “So much for my clever ideas,” he said. “If I have a fault, Grant, it's being too clever. Let's go down and check the nursery floor. Nothing seems to have changed at all this time.”

Famous last words, my sister Anthea used to say. Christopher strode away down the passage, and there was a door blocking his way, a peeling red-brown door.

“Oh!” he said. “This is new!” He rattled at it until he found the way it opened.

It blew inward out of his hands. We both went backward.

Wind howled around us, crashing the door into the wall and flapping our neckcloths into our faces. We both knew at once we were somewhere different and rickety and very, very high up. We could feel the floor shaking under our feet. We clutched at each other and edged cautiously forward into the stormy daylight beyond the door.

There Christopher said, “Oooh!” and added airily, “Not afraid of heights, I hope, Grant?”

I could hardly hear him for the wind and the creaking of wood. “No,” I said. “I like them.” The door led out onto a small wooden balcony thing with a low, flimsy-looking rail around it. Almost at our feet, a square hole led into a crazy old wooden stairway down the side of what seemed to be a tall wooden tower. Our heads both bent to look through the hole. And we could see the stairway zigzagging giddily away, down and down, getting smaller and smaller, outside what was definitely the tallest and most unsafe-looking wooden building I had ever seen. It could have been a lighthouse—except that it had slants of roof sticking out every so often, like a pagoda. It swayed and creaked and thrummed in the wind. Far, far below, something seemed to be channeling the gale into a melancholy howling.

I tore my eyes from that tottering stairway and looked outward. Where the park should have been, the ground was all gray-green heathery moor, but beyond that—this was the creepy part to me—there were the hills around Stallery, the exact same craggy shapes that surrounded Stallchester. I could see Stall Crag over there, plain as plain.

After that I stood by the railing and looked upward. There was a very small slanting roof above us, made of warped wooden tiles, with a sort of spire on top that ended in a broken weathercock. It was all so old that it was groaning and fluttering in the wind. Behind and around us, the moor just went on. There was no sign of Stallery at all.

Christopher was white, nearly as white as the neckcloth that kept fluttering across his face. “Grant,” he said, “I've got to go down. Millie feels quite near now.”

“We'll both go,” I said. I didn't want to be up at the top of this building when Christopher's weight brought the whole thing down, and besides, it was a challenge.

I don't think Christopher saw it as a challenge. It took him an obvious effort to unclench his hand from the doorjamb, and when he had, he turned around
very
quickly and clenched the same hand even harder on the rail beside the stairs. The whole balcony swayed. He kept making remarks—nervous, joky remarks—as he went carefully down out of sight, but the wind roared too hard for me to hear them.

As soon as Christopher was far enough down that I wouldn't kick his face, I scrambled onto the stairs, too. A mistake. Everywhere groaned, and the staircase, together with the balcony, swayed outward away from the building. I had to wait until Christopher was farther down and putting weight on a different part of it. Then I had to go slowly because he was. I could tell he was scared silly.

I was quite scared, too. I'd rather climb Stall Crag any day. It stays still. This place swayed every time one of us moved, and I kept wondering what lunatic had built the thing, and why. As far as I could tell, nobody lived in it. It was all cracked and weathered and twisted. There were windows without glass in the wooden walls. When Christopher was being particularly slow, I leaned over with the wind thundering around me and peered into the nearest window, but they were always just empty wooden rooms inside. There was a door on each balcony we came to, but when I looked down past my own legs—not a clever thing to do: I went quite giddy—I saw that Christopher was not trying to open any of the doors, so I left them alone, too. I just went on to the next flight, slanting the opposite way.

About halfway down, the sticking-out roofs were much wider. The stairs went out over the roofs there, to mad little spidery balconies hanging on the very edge, and then there would be another stair going down under that roof to the next one. When Christopher came to the first of these balconies, he just stopped. I had to hang on to the ladder and wait. I thought he must have found Millie, and that the howling sound I could still hear was being made by an injured girl in mortal agony. But Christopher went on in the end. And when I got to that balcony, I knew why he had stopped. You could see through the floor of it, down and down, and it was rocking. And the howling was still going on, below somewhere.

I got off that balcony as quick as I could. So did Christopher after that. We had to climb over three more of the horrible things before we came to a longer, thicker stair, where there was actually a handrail. I caught up there. We were only one floor up by then.

“Nearly there,” Christopher said. He looked ghastly.

“Millie?” I asked.

“I can't feel her at all now,” he said. “I hope I don't understand.”

As we clattered down the last few steps, the howling became a sort of squeaking. At the bottom, a great brown shape hurled itself at us, slavering. Christopher sat down, hard. I was so scared that I went up half the flight again without even noticing. “They left a wild beast on guard!” I said.

“No, they didn't,” Christopher said. He was sitting on the bottom step with his arms around the creature, and the creature was licking his face. Both of them seemed to be enjoying it. “This is the guard dog that went missing today. Its name is”—he reached around the great tongue and found the name tag on the dog's collar—“Champ. I think it's short for Champion and not a description of its habits.”

I went down the stairs again, and the dog seemed glad to see me, too. I suppose it had thought it was permanently lost. It put great paws on my shoulders and squeaked its joy. Its massive tail thumped dust out of the ground, which whirled in the wind, stingingly. “No, you've got it wrong,” I told it. “We're lost, too. We are, aren't we?” I asked Christopher.

“For the moment,” he said. “Yes. Stallery seems to have been built on a probability fault, I
think
—a place where a lot of possible universes are close together and the walls between them are fairly weak. So when whoever—or
whatever
—keeps shifting to another line of possible events, it shifts the whole mansion across a
bit
, and that bit at the top of the house gets moved a
lot
. The top gets jerked somewhere else for a while. At least, I'm hoping it's just for a while. Now we know why those painted lines are
really
there.”

“Do you think it's the Countess doing it?” I said. “Or the Count?”

“It may be no one,” Christopher said. “It could just happen, like an earthquake.”

I didn't believe that, but there was no point arguing until I met the person causing my Evil Fate and
knew
. Come to think of it, my Fate must have landed us here anyway. In order not to feel too bad about it, I said to Christopher, “You worked out what had happened on the way down?”

“In order not to think of dry rot and planks snapping,” he said, “or the distance to the ground. And I realized that Millie must be stuck in one of the other probabilities, just beyond this one. Maybe she hasn't noticed which part of the mansion moves—Oh dear!”

We both understood the same thing at the same moment. In order to get ourselves back to the Stallery we knew, we had to be at the top of the tower when another sideways shift happened. We looked at each other. We got up, towing the dog, and backed away to where we could see the whole unpainted wooden height of the thing, moving and quivering in the wind, and the crazy stairway zigzagging up it. It looked worse from the ground even than from at the top.

“I don't think,” Christopher admitted, “I can bring myself to climb that again.”

“And we'd never get the dog up it anyway—Hang on!” I said. “The dog
can't
have been in the attics when it got here. It lives in the grounds.”

“Oh,
what
a relief!” Christopher said. “Grant, you're a genius! Let's sit on the right line and wait, then.”

So we did that. Christopher very carefully paced from side to side, and then back and outward, until he found the spot where the strangeness felt strongest. He decided that a lump of rock about forty feet from the tower was the place. We sat leaning against it—with the dog between us for warmth and the wind hurling our hair and neckcloths sideways—staring at the derelict front door of the tower and waiting. Gray clouds scudded overhead. An age passed.

“It's funny,” Christopher said. “I have no desire at all to explore that building. Do you, Grant?”

I shuddered. The wind sort of moaned in the twisted timber, and I could hear doors opening and slamming shut somewhere inside. I
hoped
it was only the wind doing it. “No,” I said.

Later on, Christopher said, “My stockings have turned into ladders held together by loops. If they take them out of our wages, how much do the things cost?”

“They're silk,” I said. “You've probably worked all last week for nothing.”

“Bother,” he said.

“So have I,” I said, “only I've ruined two pairs now. How long have we sat here?”

Christopher looked at his watch. It was nearly five-thirty. We were going to be late back on duty if another shift didn't happen soon. A whole set of doors slammed inside the tower, making us jump.

“I suppose I deserve this,” I said.

“Why?” Christopher demanded.

“Because …” I sighed and supposed I might as well confess. “This is all probably my fault. I have this bad karma, you see.”

“
What
bad karma?” he said.

“There's something I didn't do in my last life,” I said, “and now I'm not doing it in this life either—”

“You're talking perfect codswallop,” Christopher said.

“Maybe it's something you don't have in your world,” I said.

“Yes, we do. I was studying it, as it happens, just before I came away, and I assure you, my dear Grant—”

“If you're only in the middle of learning—” I started to say when we both realized that the wooden tower was now a dark stone building. Without any kind of warning, or blurring, or any sort of sideways jerk, it had become twice as wide, though no less derelict. It seemed to be built of long blocks of dark slate, sloping inward slightly, so that it tapered up to a square top, high, high above us. Its square stone doorway gaped in front of us, breathing out a dank and rather rotten smell. There were no stairs anymore.

“That's odd,” said Christopher. “I didn't feel it change, did you? What do you say, Grant? Do we risk looking inside?”