I could see Rupert at the far end of the table trying to look as if this had nothing to do with him. Nick looked alarmed. His parents never shout. But the six kids went on chatting at the tops of their voices. I could see they were quite used to it. Venetia grinned at me and yelled in my ear, “You should see them when they throw eggs! It’s really funny. We get under the table then.”
The row passed. Rupert eventually stood up and said we’d got to get back to the hotel. I made some comment that it would be polite to help with the washing-up. Rupert gave me one of his stony glares. So did Nick. Dishwashers were invented for people like Nick, but I could see Carina and Will didn’t have one. Will said, in his most expansive, benevolent way, that the dishes were his chore – and then contrived to look gentle and tragic so that I knew he was being saintly.
Will, and Carina too, were both covering up for the way Rupert was still so obviously furious with us. Carina said she’d really enjoyed meeting us. So we were all three able to go up the garden, where the various fowls were all in or under bushes, roosting for the night, and out through the gate, seeming as if we’d taken part in a normal social visit. But nothing really disguised the fact that Rupert was utterly pissed off with the pair of us.
Out in the road the last of the daylight seemed to reflect up from the white surface. Rupert glowered at us in the gloaming. He said, in his clipped, stone-chipping, furious voice, “Don’t expect to be able to babble about this jaunt to everyone at the convention.”
“We wouldn’t dream of it!” I said.
He turned his white-reflecting spectacles on me. It was worse than seeing his eyes. “You’re right,” he said. “You won’t be able even to dream of it. Now, in order to make sure you get back less stupidly dangerously than you came, you’d better hang on to each other and to me.” He held out his hand to Nick. Somehow he made it plain that he could bear to touch Nick – just about – but not me.
We meekly took hold. I think we both felt he was justified. After all, we had intruded on his private, family life, even if we hadn’t meant to. He towed us up the bank opposite – not in exactly the same place as we arrived: I saw a luminous-looking clump of primroses that I had not seen when we came – and out on to the hillside with the fuzzy places. It was incredibly hard work, climbing the grassy banks in between the fuzz. Nick and I were both puffing and scrambling and using my free hand to help us up, though Rupert marched on ahead, dragging the pair of us as if there was nothing to it. And it was somehow nothing like as alarming as when we came. The sliding misty spaces between bank and bank were hardly there: we could step over easily from one slope to the next. I couldn’t help seeing that there was something Nick and I had not done quite right on the way out, and I tried as I clambered to work out what Rupert was doing that we hadn’t. I think I see.
It wasn’t straight climbing, just as it wasn’t straight rushing downhill when we came. We had been doing something, Nick and I, that moved us from world to world, and though I couldn’t possibly describe it, I would know how to do it again. It’s like the way you never forget how to whistle or ride a bicycle once you learn how it should feel. And I’m afraid I’m determined to do it again. Nick hasn’t said anything to me, but I know he’s just as determined, in spite of what Rupert said. It’s like being hooked.
Quite soon and quite suddenly, we came off the hillside into the corridor of dim mirrors. I nearly stopped as a realisation struck me. “Oh!” I said. “The Thornlady wasn’t here this time. What a relief!”
“Don’t stop! Don’t let go!” Rupert snapped. “You’re still somewhere quite different. At the very least, you’d be stranded for life. You don’t seem to realise what a stupid, dangerous thing you went and did!”
“But we got here,” Nick panted. He hates being told off.
“Because you were following me,” Rupert retorted. “It was rank idiocy. Don’t dare do it again!”
“Why was it idiocy?” Nick said.
“Because you could have thrown several worlds out of kilter, as well as getting yourselves killed,” Rupert snapped. “If you’d happened to have stopped between world and world, you would have fallen in two halves. If you’d got the transit wrong, you could have weakened the wall between universes. All sorts of things. And I’m not telling you any more. Just take my word.”
“Mysteries. Secrets,” Nick muttered disgustedly.
We suddenly popped into the hotel corridor, as he muttered it. Rupert let go of him and rounded on him. “Be thankful there are mysteries!” he said. “They keep you safe in your silly ignorant little life!”
That got me mad. I could feel my finger pushing at my glasses. I said, “Oh yes? And who keeps everyone ignorant? Rupert Venables, the secret ruler of the world!”
I think it was the unforgivable thing to say – well, I knew it might be, or I wouldn’t have said it. Rupert sort of drew himself up. He didn’t even pin me with his lens. He just stood. Icily. “I don’t know exactly what Will said to you,” he said, “but you couldn’t have misunderstood it more!” Then he swung round and went stalking away down the corridor.
The heavy, scented indoors air of the hotel seemed to close round me as if it was trying to drown me. I stared after his angrily marching back, wishing I hadn’t said that. I wish it even more now.
Heigh-ho. I think the only thing I really mind about is my little fat dad having cancer. I don’t even mind about Robbie any more. I just wish I wasn’t me. That’s all.
Rupert Venables, for the
Iforion archive
Looking back on things, I see I was more concerned about what those two had managed to do, almost unaided and wholly untaught, than I was about the failure of my attempt to find a new Magid. Even when I think about it now, months later, my scalp rises. They broke all the rules for mobile workings, they used no safeguards, they had no idea what they were doing, they simply went. And to make it worse, I had a strong feeling, both coming and going, that somebody had set traps out round the power-node for them. But they seem simply to have avoided those.
I hoped I had said enough, savagely enough, to stop them trying again. But in my heart of hearts, I suspected I had overdone it. The trouble with pretending outrage and anger is that your body responds to the gestures you make and your fake emotions start becoming real. I was quite angry even before we waded in among Will’s chickens. When, during tea, Will told me – looking his smuggest – that he had seen no reason not to tell them all about Magids, I almost hit the beams in his ceiling. Thule is not Earth. I was glad Carina agreed w
ith me. I was so furious with Will that I wished I had not already arranged for him to take over from me at the hotel while I went to see Knarros. I would have asked someone else. Gladly.
What I should have done is to have sat carefully down and let my precognition work on why I was so furious and alarmed. But I was quivering all over and angry with Will too, and I confused those feelings with my exasperation about Fisk and Thurless. Possibly I confused Stan too. But his precognition was never as acute as mine.
I didn’t get to talk to Stan, anyway, until the Saturday morning. Every time I looked out into the staff car park, there seemed to be at least four of the hotel employees out there, wandering from car to car. They appeared to be looking for something. Since I had no wish to draw attention to my illegally parked car, I went indoors again. But Saturday morning, when I tried once more, there must have been a good twenty people out there, including the hotel manager.
I heard him say, “No, I don’t know where the devil it’s coming from either, but I know it’s Scarlatti.”
Oops! I thought and dived indoors again.
It took me twenty minutes, sitting unobtrusively on an old tubular chair outside the kitchens, to persuade them to stop their search for the source of the music and go back to work. They were convinced the staff car park was haunted. And, being natives of Naywards old Earth, they were not going to leave until they had found a rational explanation instead. I put the explanation before them. I dandled it. I waved it enticingly. And they still rightly suspected a ghost.