The Hidden World Read online

  ‘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.’

  The Sapphire Ring

  ‘It was in the winter of 1937. In those days, believe it or not, I used to live in your grandparents’ house. My mother was working as cook and housekeeper for George and Martha Pennington, and so she and I had rooms upstairs. In November I went down with a fever and I had to stay in bed for nearly three days. My bedroom had wallpaper with diamond shapes on it, and the more I stared at it, the more it looked like dozens and dozens of diamond-shaped faces.

  ‘On the second night, just as I was going to sleep, I heard somebody talking to me, a woman. She called me by name, “Edwina! Edwina!” I was frightened at first, but then I heard singing. Sweet, sweet singing, so sweet that it would make you cry. And still this woman’s voice calling, “Edwina!”

  ‘I switched on my light and all around the room the pattern on the wallpaper was faces – still diamond shapes, but faces too – and the faces were singing to me. I sat up in bed and I could feel a wind blowing through my hair. It felt so cool, and it was strong enough to ruffle the pages of the magazine beside my bed.

  ‘I climbed out of bed and I walked toward the wall on the opposite side of my bedroom. The singing didn’t stop, and when I was close to the diamond shapes I could see the little purple squares that looked like eyes and the red circles that looked like mouths, and the eyes were looking at me and the mouths were moving.

  ‘Then the space between the diamonds became a kind of crooked arm, and the arm reached out of the wallpaper and took my hand. It drew me gently toward the
wall, closer and closer, and then before I knew it I had passed right through the wallpaper and into the world that lay beyond it.’

  ‘You really walked into the wall?’ asked Jessica. She didn’t know if Mrs Crawford was making it all up, but even if she was, she still wanted to know what had happened.

  ‘I really walked into the wall,’ said Mrs Crawford, crossing her heart with her finger.

  ‘What did it feel like?’

  ‘It felt like … I don’t know. It felt like walking through very soft tissue paper, that’s all. I found myself standing in an empty room, and it was so bright in there that I could hardly see. The walls were the same color as the wallpaper in my own bedroom, except that here, on the other side of the wallpaper, the diamond shapes actually floated in the air, all around me. The singing went on and on, and for some reason it made me feel very happy.’

  ‘You don’t think you were dreaming?’

  ‘Oh, no. This wasn’t like a dream at all. I could still feel the wind and I could still hear the woman calling, “Edwina!” The diamond shapes flew all round my head like clouds of butterflies, and they guided me across the room toward the door.

  ‘I opened the door. Outside there was a flat white desert that looked as if it stretched for miles and miles. I could see diamond-shaped mountains on the horizon, and bushes with diamond-shaped leaves. I went through the door, and I started to walk, and all the time the diamond patterns kept fluttering all around me.

  ‘The singing died away, and after that the desert was completely silent. I felt as if I was walking for hours and hours, although I couldn’t have been. After a while I saw a small figure walking toward me. It was a woman, wearing a dark rusty-colored cloak. She came up to me and laid her hands on my shoulders. Her cloak had a big floppy hood, so that most of her face was hidden, but I could see that she was smiling, in a sad sort of way.

  ‘She said, “I’ve been waiting for you, Edwina. I’ve been waiting for somebody for so many years. I want you to tell Mrs Pennington that I’m still here.” I asked her who she was, but all she did was take a small sapphire ring off her finger and give it to me. “She’ll know,” she said. But then she said, “You should hurry away now, it can be very dangerous here.” She turned and pointed toward the horizon. I could just see dozens of black shapes, running toward us. They looked like a pack of wolves.

  ‘The woman took hold of my hand and led me back to the door. We seemed to get there in no time at all. It was so strange: the door stood in the desert with nothing around it at all, just a door. But when she opened it, we stepped back into the empty room. The old lady said, “God bless,” and she kissed her fingertips and touched me on the forehead, I’ll never forget that. Then I went back through the wallpaper and there I was, standing in my bedroom again. It was seven o’clock in the morning and it was just beginning to grow light.

  ‘I felt very tired and weak, but my fever had broken, and I was over the worst.’

  ‘Did you tell Mrs Pennington? Did you give her the ring?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Was she pleased?’

  ‘Not … at all. For some reason she was very angry with me. She said that I was making up cruel stories and that I must have stolen the ring from her jewelry box. She said I was never to talk about it again, or else she’d have me arrested for being a thief and a liar.’

  ‘Did you never find out why?’

  Mrs Crawford shook her head.

  ‘Did you try to do it again?’ asked Epiphany. ‘Go through the wallpaper, I mean?’

  ‘I did it once more, but I had been moved to another bedroom then, with green wallpaper that looked like thorn bushes. When I went through it was very dark and there were some horrible prickly shapes in the darkness, and believe me they gave me a very bad fright. I couldn’t get out of there quickly enough.’

  ‘And you’ve never tried to do it again since then?’

  ‘Some things are best left as memories, or puzzles. In any case, a short time after that, all of the Pennington children got sick and died and Mrs Pennington let my mother go. We moved to live with my aunt in Darien and I never went back to that house again.’

  ‘That’s sad.’

  ‘Yes, it was. They were such lovely children. But it was a long time ago now.’

  ‘Do you think I could walk into my wallpaper?’

  ‘As far as I know, anybody can do it, given the right amount of belief, and the right kind of wallpaper pattern. But I wouldn’t recommend that you try it. The usual rules of nature obviously don’t apply, and who knows what scary things you might find there? Those prickly things, for instance, or those creatures that looked like wolves.’

  ‘So what do you think I ought to do?’

  ‘About your voices, you mean? I don’t think you should do anything. Whoever they are, whatever they are, I don’t see how you can possibly help them. If they’re facing some kind of danger, you’d have to face it too.’

  The Leaves of Memory

  On Tuesday morning, Grandpa Willy drove her to Dr Leeming’s clinic in his old green Pontiac. Dr Leeming was bald but very handsome, with sharp blue eyes and minty-smelling breath. He removed the stitches very carefully, but Jessica still heard a noise inside her head like wool being pulled through cardboard.

  When he had finished he swabbed her cut and stuck a clean dressing on it. Then he gave her an eye test and made her place differently shaped bricks into a pattern, to test her co-ordination.

  ‘Well, young lady, I think you’re ready to go back on active service,’ he told her. ‘You haven’t been having any headaches, have you? How about your memory? Can you remember the day when you fell downstairs?’

  ‘Mostly. I can’t remember actually falling, but I can remember everything else.’

  ‘Have you had any unusual reactions? For instance, have you seen things that you don’t normally see?’

  Jessica felt herself blushing. ‘No … nothing like that.’

  ‘Sometimes, when they’ve suffered a concussion, people see shadows out of the corner of their eye. Or flashes of light. Sometimes they even think they hear voices. You haven’t experienced anything like that?’

  ‘No,’ said Jessica, even though she felt guilty about lying. But Renko had heard the voices too, so they couldn’t be anything to do with her knocking her head.

  ‘Okey-dokey,’ said Dr Leeming. ‘But if you have any more headaches, or you feel nauseous, or if you experience any other symptoms, you come see me pronto, all right?’

  As they left the clinic Grandpa Willy said, ‘How about a cheeseburger with everything on it?’

  ‘I didn’t think Grannie let you eat cheeseburgers. What about your blood pressure?’

  Grandpa Willy gave her hand an affectionate squeeze. ‘One cheeseburger isn’t going to kill me. Besides, we all have to go to the Great Beyond one day, so what’s the point of denying yourself an occasional unhealthy treat?’

  When they were sitting next to the steamed-up window in Clark’s Burger Bar, eating cheeseburgers and sharing a basket of French fries, Jessica said, ‘Do you believe in heaven, Grandpa?’

  ‘What, with cherubs and clouds and all that caboodle?’

  ‘I don’t actually mean angels and harps and stuff. I mean an actual place that we go to, when we die.’

  ‘Well, yes, I think I do. Some folks say that because you don’t remember nothing before you was born, that proves for a fact that you don’t experience nothing when you turn your toes up. But that’s like saying that just because there wasn’t any picture of fairies before you drew it, it stops existing after you’ve crumpled it up and thrown it in the fire. It still exists in here, in your head, doesn’t it?, and it still exists in the heads of anybody who might have seen it. So long as there are people who remember you, then I believe that you’re still alive. Maybe you pass into infinity once there’s nobody left alive who knew you, and maybe that’s the way God makes sure that heaven doesn’t get too crowded.

  ‘But I believe th
at your mom and dad are in heaven, because you think about them still, don’t you? They’re still in your heart, and what sweeter place could there be than that?’

  Jessica carefully extricated the pickle from her cheeseburger.

  ‘I’ll have that,’ said Grandpa Willy. ‘They give me the force-ten wind, but what the heck.’

  ‘Do you think dead people can talk to us?’ asked Jessica.

  ‘What’s brought this on? You’re talking mighty existential today.’

  ‘It’s these voices I keep hearing.’

  Grandpa Willy laid his hand on top of hers. His skin was like crumpled tissue paper. ‘Sometimes our minds play some rare tricks on us, sweetheart. I used to have an old black-and-white spotty dog called Captain when I was a boy, and Captain died of distemper. But I swear to you that when I was walking along the road one morning, I saw him trotting ahead of me, as plain as day. I’ve never told anybody that before, in case they thought I was screwy. But whether he was really there or not, I saw him all right.’

  He sat back and smiled at her. ‘If you hear these voices again, you call me, and then we’ll find out if I can hear them too. Now, how about one of those giant ice-cream sundaes with all the sprinkle-sprankles on top?’

  That night, Jessica stayed awake so late that she heard the grandfather clock chiming one o’clock in the hall below. She had bought a small blue plastic flashlight of her own, and every now and then she shone it on the wallpaper to see if it was moving. But the roses, irises and blessed thistles didn’t stir, and she heard nobody calling for help.

  At half past one she turned over, pulled the comforter up over her shoulders, and fell asleep. She dreamed that her mother was downstairs, in the kitchen. She could hear her singing, but all she could see was her back, with her apron strings dangling down. It must have been early fall: even though the sun was shining through the open kitchen door, the first dried-up beech leaves were rattling across the yard outside.

  She tried to say, ‘Mom?’ but for some reason her mouth wouldn’t work, and she couldn’t make her legs carry her into the kitchen. The sun died away, and it grew chilly and dark The wind rose, and the beech leaves started to blow into the kitchen, scattering across the floor.