The Hidden World Read online

  Two or three more men gathered around. ‘What’s going on, Daniel?’

  ‘Girl here says that somebody’s gotten themselves trapped under the ice.’

  ‘I saw his face! I heard him calling for help!’

  The bearded man knelt on the ice next to her and started to clear it with the side of his glove. ‘Can’t see nothing.’

  ‘He coulda floated further in.’

  ‘There’s no current, though. He couldn’t have floated far.’

  ‘He’ll be drowned by now, won’t he?’

  ‘Not if there’s air between the ice and the water. That sometimes happens. He couldn’t have called out for help otherwise.’

  ‘Where’d he fall in? There’s no holes in the ice anywhere.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter, we’ll have to get him out. Jay – there’s an ax in the back of my truck.’

  ‘I’ve got a snow shovel.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘We’ll have to clear everybody off the pond.’

  Five or six men ran off to their vehicles to bring shovels, tire irons and anything else they could use to break the ice, while several others shepherded everybody else up onto the banks.

  Jessica stood back while the bearded man swung his ax and chipped into the ice. He swung again and again, grunting with every swing. At last the ice let out a squeaking crack, and a large triangular lump was broken away. Now all of the men started banging and hacking at it, and within a few minutes a large jagged hole had been made, where there was nothing but chilly black water.

  The bearded man knelt at the edge of the ice and peered downward, shading his eyes. He even swished his arm in the water, to see if he could feel anything.

  ‘Nothing so far. Let’s chop her back a bit … he could have floated toward the center.’

  They hacked away at the ice for almost twenty minutes, until cracks began to spread all across the pond and they had to retreat to the edge.

  ‘I couldn’t see nothing at all,’ said the bearded man, sweating and shivering at the same time. ‘Are you sure there was somebody there?’

  ‘I think we ought to call the Sheriff,’ said one of the men. ‘They need to send a diver down there.’

  ‘I saw him,’ said Jessica. ‘I promise you, I saw him. He was calling out, “Help me, help me.”’

  Dianna’s mother came over; Epiphany had called her on her cellphone: ‘Jessica, are you all right?’

  ‘I saw somebody under the ice, I promise.’

  ‘That’s OK. Listen, come and sit in the car, you’re freezing.’

  ‘You won’t take her away, ma’am, will you?’ said the bearded man. ‘The Sheriff’ll be wanting to talk to her.’

  The Sheriff called just before supper that evening. He was so tall that he had to duck his head when he came into the kitchen. He had a big blue chin and a large nose but tiny, glittering eyes like a raccoon.

  ‘We dragged the pond from one end to the other, and all we found was a ’seventy-six Chevy pick-up and a whole tangle of lumber. I’m pleased to say that there was nobody trapped under the ice, but I don’t think the skaters were too happy about it.’

  Jessica was sitting at the far end of the kitchen table, with Grandpa Willy beside her. ‘Jessica says she saw somebody’s face and heard them calling out for help and I for one believe her.’

  ‘I’m not saying she’s lying, Mr Williams, but I think it’s pretty obvious that she was mistaken. Maybe it was your own face you saw, Jessica, reflected in the ice? It was a pretty bright morning, after all.’

  ‘It was a boy. I heard his voice. He was calling for help.’

  ‘I understand you had a pretty bad knock on the head last week.’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with that. I saw him with my own eyes. I heard him.’

  ‘Well,’ said the Sheriff, ‘there’s really nothing else I can do, except file a report.’

  ‘Thank you, Sheriff,’ said Grannie. ‘You’re sure you don’t want some coconut cookies to take home?’

  ‘No, thanks all the same. I just hope Jessica makes a rapid recovery, that’s all.’

  ‘Good-night, Sheriff.’

  That evening, as they sat in the dining-room over a candlelit supper, Jessica took a deep breath and said, ‘Grandpa?’

  Grandpa Willy looked up from his ham and greens. ‘What is it, honey?’

  ‘Grandpa, I went up into the attic.’

  He chewed and swallowed and then he said, ‘You did, huh? Didn’t I tell you, you really shouldn’t go up there? The floor’s only half boarded over, and it’s not too safe. Wouldn’t like you falling through the ceiling and ending up in bed with us!’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I thought I heard a noise.’

  ‘What kind of a noise?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe it was nothing. But it sounded like voices.’

  Grandpa Willy looked across at Grannie. It was difficult for Jessica to see Grannie’s face because of the candles that were shining in the middle of the table.

  Grannie said, ‘Is that the reason you asked me if there were any children in the house?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Jessica didn’t know if she was making a serious mistake, asking Grannie and Grandpa Willy about what she had heard. Supposing there were children trapped in the house somewhere, and supposing Grannie and Grandpa Willy were keeping them captive? But when she really thought about it, it was too much like ‘Hansel and Gretel’ to be true.

  Grandpa Willy forked himself another boiled potato out of the tureen. ‘These old houses, they always make noises. It’s the wind, mostly, blowing down the chimneys, and under the floorboards. The plumbing, too.’

  Jessica said, ‘I went right down to the end of the attic and I found some masks.’

  Grandpa Willy nodded. ‘I see. You didn’t disturb them or nothing?’

  ‘Oh, no. I just looked at them. They scared me when I first saw them. I thought they were real children.’

  ‘We never quite knew what to do about those,’ said Grannie. ‘We thought about taking them to the New Milford Historical Society Museum, but somehow we thought it was more fitting if we left them where we found them.’

  ‘Do you know who they are?’

  ‘Oh, yes. They were the Pennington children. The Penningtons used to live in this house before my father bought it. What all the children’s names were, I can’t remember, but they’re written down someplace.’

  ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘They went down with the Rocky Mountain spotted fever. There was kind of an epidemic of it in this part of the country just before World War Two. Usually kids get over it, but this was a real bad strain, and they never did. The oldest child was fifteen and the youngest was four and all five of them died within a week.’

  ‘That’s terrible.’

  ‘Yes, it was,’ said Grandpa Willy. ‘The children’s parents were spared, but of course they were grief-struck, and they never got over it. They had a death mask made of every child, so that they could remember what they looked like. But from what I was told the mother disappeared and the father just stayed in bed all day drinking and the house went to rack and ruin, and that’s why my father was able to buy it so cheap. My father couldn’t really afford it, and neither can your grandmother and me, but it’s our home, and we plan on spending the rest of our days here. But I guess in a way it’s those children’s home, too, and that’s why we left those masks where they were.’

  ‘That face I saw under the ice, at Millard’s Pond … that looked like one of the death masks.’

  Grandpa Willy reached across the tablecloth and held her hand. ‘I’m not saying for one moment that you didn’t see what you thought you saw. I told the Sheriff that I believed you were telling the God’s-honest truth, and I believe you were. But, more often than not, things aren’t what they appear to be.’

  Grannie said, ‘Do you want some more greens, sweetie-pie?’

  Jessica lay awake staring at the ceiling. Supposing the knock on her head had ma
de her go peculiar? After all, she had never heard the voices before she was concussed, and she had never seen the wallpaper move. Yet she was certain that she had felt somebody stroking her hair, and that she had seen a flower on the wallpaper flutter. And she was just as sure that she had seen the boy beneath the ice, his mouth opening and closing as he desperately struggled to breathe.

  In the middle of the night, it started snowing again, thick and silent. Jessica slept with one hand against the wall, her fingers half open. She dreamed that a pale yellowish hand came sliding out of the wallpaper. It stroked her palm, then intertwined its fingers with hers, and gently started to tug her toward the wall.

  She suddenly woke up, and she could actually feel the fingers tugging her, and she cried out, ‘No!’ and whipped her hand away from the wall. She sat up for a long time, breathing shallow and fast, massaging her hand and staring at the wallpaper.

  It had been a dream, hadn’t it? It must have been a dream. But all the same, she climbed out of bed and curled up instead on her basketwork chair. She woke up very early the next morning with pins-and-needles in her feet and a creaking neck.

  Diamonds and Wolves

  Grannie made her a breakfast of hot waffles with maple syrup and blueberry jelly, and a big mug of hot chocolate with three spoonfuls of sugar in. ‘Are you all right, sweetie-pie?’ she asked. ‘You look a mite tired.’

  ‘I didn’t sleep so well, that’s all.’

  ‘You didn’t hear any more voices?’

  ‘No. But I couldn’t stop thinking about those Pennington children.’

  ‘I know. It’s so sad, isn’t it? But things were a whole lot different in those days. Lots of children died of all kinds of quite ordinary illnesses like measles and chicken-pox. When I was a young girl there wasn’t any such thing as antibiotics.’

  Jessica washed her plate and her mug. Then she went into the hallway and put on her long black hooded overcoat, her long black scarf and her bright red Wellingtons. She called out, ‘Goodbye, Grannie, see you later!’ and went out of the house into the snow. It was always quiet out here on the road to Allen’s Corners, but today the hills were so silent that Jessica felt she was deaf.

  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.’