The Hidden World (7 page)

She walked to old Mrs Crawford's house, which was a quarter of a mile nearer to town. It stood behind a broken-down picket fence, surrounded by the wildest of gardens: a small single-story building with a sagging roof and a verandah cluttered with broken chairs, bunches of dried flowers and a rusting barbecue. Jessica went up to the front door and knocked. The tarnished brass knocker was cast in the shape of a snarling wolf, and Jessica often wondered why Mrs Crawford had chosen something so scary.

Mrs Crawford came to the door, her golden Labrador Sebastian almost choking himself with his leash. She was a small woman with steel-gray hair cut into a bob, and although her face was wrinkled Jessica could tell by her wide green eyes and her distinctive cheekbones that once upon a time she must have been strikingly beautiful. A purple shawl was knotted untidily around her shoulders, and she wore a shapeless black woolen dress and extraordinary black high-heeled shoes. ‘Ah, Jessica, thank goodness. I only have to say, “Jessica's coming” and Sebastian goes hysterical, don't you, Sebastian, you over-excitable idiot?'

‘I'll take him round Boardman's Farm,' said Jessica.

‘That would be wonderful. Don't fall into a snowdrift, that's all I ask. I don't want to have to come looking for you with a team of huskies and a shovel.'

Jessica took Sebastian's leash and wound it around her hand. Sebastian barked and jumped and his tail slapped furiously against the door-frame. ‘How are you feeling?' said Mrs Crawford. ‘Still have headaches?'

‘I'm better, thanks. I should be able to go back to school next week.'

Mrs Crawford was about to close the door when she frowned and said, ‘Something's disturbing you, Jessica.'

‘I'm fine, really. Down, Sebastian! There's a good boy.'

‘No, I can feel it. You're worried about something, I don't know what.'

‘Honestly, I'm not worried about anything at all.'

‘You can't fool me, Jessica. I can see your aura as plain as the nose on your face. And your aura's muddy.'

Jessica tilted her head in bewilderment.

‘Everybody has an aura, Jessica. At your age, it should sparkle like the stars. But yours is definitely muddy.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘It means that you're troubled. It means that you're worried about something and you don't know how to resolve it. Am I speaking the truth?'

‘Well, yes, I guess so, in a way.'

‘Why don't you take Sebastian for his walk, and then when you come back I can find out what it is that's bothering you.'

‘All right.'

Mrs Crawford laid a hand on her arm. ‘I promise you, Jessica, whatever it is, there's always a way.'

Jessica crossed the glassy white road and forced open the five-bar gate that would take her to the south-east meadow of Boardman's Farm. All the cattle were kept in the cowshed in this weather, and so she was able to unclip Sebastian's leash and let him run madly from one end of the field to the other, bounding over frozen tussocks and leaping explosively through snow-covered bushes.

On the far side of the field the naked trees stuck up like witches' broomsticks, and behind them the sun was nothing but a wan yellow disk.

Jessica was crossing toward the woods when she heard somebody calling her. She turned around and saw Epiphany running toward her, waving.

‘I called at your house,' Epiphany panted. ‘Your granny said you might be here.'

‘Oh … I'm only taking Mrs Crawford's dog for a walk.'

‘Can I come too?'

‘All right. If you don't mind walking with a mad person.'

‘You're not mad.'

‘The Sheriff seems to think I am. So does everybody else.'

‘The Sheriff is a typical patronizing male authority figure who has as much imagination as a pretzel.'

‘Where'd you learn that?'

‘I read it in a book called
The Self-Respecting Woman
by Sherma Katzenbaum.'

‘You read books like that?'

‘Of course. The trouble with most women is that they only read romances about swooning heroines who fall in love with disreputable rogues, or books about neurotic thirty-somethings who keep worrying about their weight and can't find boyfriends. They don't understand that you can only get power over men by treating yourself with unwavering respect.'

‘I was still reading fairy stories when I was your age. Well, I still do now.'

‘Fairy stories are all right. They're a celebration of the essential mysticism of the female psyche.'

‘Oh.'

They entered the woods, with Sebastian tearing away from them, and then tearing back again, his pink tongue steaming. Frozen twigs crackled under their boots, and four or five loons flurried up from the pond beyond the trees.

Epiphany swung a stick. ‘Did you really see a face under the ice?'

‘About as clearly as I can see you now.'

‘Do you think somebody's trying to get through to you?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Well, you talked about another world, like Fairyland, right next to this world. It seems like somebody from that world wants to talk to you. You've heard voices, haven't you? And you've seen a golf bag that looked like a dog and a lamp that looked like a man.'

‘I don't know. I'm beginning to think it's all in my head.'

They circled the pond and walked back along the track that led to the main farm gate. Epiphany sang, ‘I like bread and butter … I like toast and jam … that's what my baby feeds me … 'cause he's my loving man' in such a shrill, high-pitched voice that Jessica had to clamp her gloves over her ears. When they arrived at Mrs Crawford's house, Mrs Crawford said, ‘You're coming in, aren't you? I can put some brownies in the microwave.'

‘Oh yes please,' said Jessica immediately. She always liked going into Mrs Crawford's house, not because of her microwaved brownies, which were invariably gooey, but because of all the arcane clutter that filled the hallway and the living-room: cuckoo clocks and totem poles and statuettes of naked dancers, umbrellas and stuffed cockatoos and strange pictures of people in evening dress, floating through the air.

‘This is Epiphany,' said Jessica. ‘I call her Piff. She's a feminist.'

‘Well, that's wonderful,' said Mrs Crawford. ‘I always think that all of us ought to have some kind of cause, even if it's nothing more than free walking-sticks for the elderly. Here –' she picked a heap of women's magazines from the worn-out brown corduroy couch, and dropped them onto the worn-out carpet – ‘do sit down, and I'll put the brownies on to ping.'

Jessica and Epiphany took off their coats and sat side by side on the couch. It was warm in Mrs Crawford's house, almost uncomfortably warm. A log fire was burning fiercely in the cast-iron grate, and it wasn't long before Sebastian came trotting in from the kitchen and flopped himself down in front of it. He smelled strongly of steaming dog.

‘Poor Sebastian,' said Mrs Crawford, as she came back in. ‘I think you've exhausted him.'

Epiphany looked around at the tall vases filled with dyed-gold pampas grass, the boxes of jigsaws and the porcelain busts of inanely smiling girls. Over the fireplace hung a large dark oil painting which depicted a woman in a black cloak emerging from a solid oak door, as if she had walked right through it, like a ghost.

‘That's called “The Appearance of Eve”,' said Mrs Crawford. ‘It was painted by a Dutchman who went mad shortly afterward, Jan van der Hoeven. He always swore that it was painted from life.'

‘I'm not surprised he went mad,' said Jessica.

‘But you're not mad,' Epiphany reassured her.

‘I'm beginning to wonder.'

‘Why should you think you're mad?' asked Mrs Crawford.

Jessica shrugged and said nothing, but Epiphany said, ‘She's been hearing voices, and seeing the flowers on her wallpaper move.'

‘Piff!' Jessica protested. ‘You promised you wouldn't tell anybody!'

‘Never mind,' Mrs Crawford reassured her. ‘I'm not just anybody, am I? Where do these voices come from? What do they sound like?'

‘They sound like children. They keep saying, “help us, help us, it's coming to get us, we're all going to be taken.” At first I thought they were coming from another bedroom, and then I thought they were coming down the chimney. I looked up in the attic, everywhere, but I couldn't find them. It's almost as if—'

‘Yes? It's almost as if what?'

Jessica didn't want to say, but Epiphany nudged her. ‘Go on, Jessica. Tell her.'

Jessica hesitated for a moment, but at last she blurted out, ‘It's stupid. It sounds like they're coming from the wall.'

‘I see,' said Mrs Crawford, and she looked quite serious. ‘Can you tell how many children there are?'

‘No, they all talk together.'

Mrs Crawford thought about that for a while, and then she said, ‘You say you have wallpaper … what kind of a pattern is it?'

‘Flowers … roses and irises and thistles.'

‘Well, I want to show you something, and then I think you'll realize that you're not stupid and you're certainly not mad.'

She went over to a desk with a glass-fronted bookcase on top of it, crammed higgledy-piggledy with all kinds of books and papers and folded-up newspapers. She rummaged in one of the drawers for a while, then came back with a sheet of cardboard in her hand.

‘I thought something was worrying you, didn't I? I can always tell. My mother used to say that I had gipsy blood in me. I don't know why: my father ran a radio-repair business, and my grandfather was a dentist – hardly what you'd call Romany stock. ‘Here,' she said, squashing herself onto the couch right next to Jessica. ‘What do you see on this piece of cardboard?'

Jessica frowned at it. All she could see was a pattern like interwoven string, fastened at intervals with decorative knots.

‘It's like some kind of weaving,' she suggested.

‘Yes, that's right. But keep staring at it, and see if it turns into anything else.'

Jessica stared at it and stared at it, but the pattern didn't change. It began to shift slightly in front of her eyes, but that was only because she was staring at it so intently.

‘Do you see the knot in the middle?' asked Mrs Crawford. ‘What I want you to do is hook your finger around it.'

‘I don't know what you mean.'

‘Hook your finger around it, all the way around it, and pull it.'

‘But I can't. It's only a picture.'

‘Try.'

Jessica hesitated, but then she stuck out her right index finger and moved it nearer and nearer to the pattern, until it was almost touching the cardboard.

‘Go on,' Mrs Crawford encouraged her.

She pushed her finger forward, and to her astonishment she was able to push it right into the pattern, as if the piece of cardboard wasn't flat at all but a three-dimensional box criss-crossed with knotted string. She curled her finger around the knot in the middle, and she was able to pull it outward. She could actually feel its tension, as if it were real string.

‘There now,' said Mrs Crawford. Jessica withdrew her finger, and Mrs Crawford turned the pattern over to show her that it was still mounted on nothing more than a flat piece of cardboard.

‘How do you do that?' asked Jessica. ‘Piff – did you see that?'

‘I saw it all right,' said Piff, in an awed voice. ‘That's some conjuring trick, right?'

‘Ah, but it isn't a conjuring trick,' said Mrs Crawford. ‘What I'm trying to prove to you is that you were quite right to wonder if the voices came from the wall.'

She stood up; and put the pattern down on the table. ‘There is another world, a world of patterns, where what you see is what there is. It's no more complicated than that. If a pattern looks as if you can hook your finger round it, you can. Do you ever see faces in your wallpaper?'

‘In the roses sometimes.'

‘I thought you might. Roses are always rather face-like, aren't they? But in the world inside your wallpaper, they actually do have faces. In the world inside your wallpaper, or your curtains, or your carpets, everything is exactly what you perceive it to be.'

‘There's really a world there? Really?'

‘Some people say that it's the world we originally came from. They say that we decorate our homes and our clothes with patterns because they remind us of the world we once lived in.'

‘You mean we can get through, from one world into the other?'

‘Within limits. You hooked your finger round the knot, didn't you? Where do you think your finger actually was, when you stuck it into that pattern? It didn't come out of the back of the cardboard, did it? It wasn't here, in this room. It was there, Jessica, in the world of patterns. Look.'

Mrs Crawford knelt down on the green-and-yellow carpet, which was patterned with stylized waterlilies and curly leaves. She stared at it for almost a minute, and then she scooped her hand into it, actually into it, and lifted it up again, with one of the waterlilies in the palm of her hand.

‘Whoa, that has to be a trick,' said Epiphany. ‘No way you can do that for real.'

‘Feel it,' said Mrs Crawford, and handed her the woven-wool waterlily. Epiphany turned it over and over, then shook her head in perplexity and handed it back.

‘How do you know about this?' asked Jessica.

Mrs Crawford replaced the waterlily, smoothed it over, and seamlessly it became part of the carpet again.

‘If that's not a conjuring trick, that must be real magic,' said Epiphany.

Mrs Crawford smiled. ‘No – I don't believe in magic. But I do believe in other worlds – worlds that exist on the other side of mirrors, or reflected in ponds, or in wallpaper patterns.'

She stood up and went to the window. The wintry light made her look very pale, as if she were a ghost of herself. ‘In fact, I
know
there are other worlds. I've known it since I was seven years old. They had a science conference in San Diego about five years ago and all of these eminent physicists said that there must be alternative realities, alongside “our” reality. And that was such a relief, because all of my life I had thought that I must have been imagining what happened to me, even though I was convinced that I wasn't.'