Prologue

He held up the magnifying glass to the light.

It was smaller than a crown piece and had a thick ebony edge, rubbed smooth, as smooth as the glass itself. He looked at it for a moment, at the grain within the wood, at the silky rim. He lifted it to his face and saw the world change again inside the glass, reducing down to flurries of shade.

Richard Dadd leaned against Bedlam’s upper window.

This part of London’s greatest lunatic asylum, in 1844, was a long corridor, filled with people, and there were only two windows, one at each end. Between lay a hundred feet of squalling darkness, a storm of indistinct faces. There must have been one hundred and twenty men crammed into the space. A hundred and twenty in the dark, and only two windows. A place of madness and fright. Someone close to him was sitting on the floor, his possessions huddled into his side, his arm sheltering himself against the shuffling feet of the crowd.

Dadd looked at the face.

It was a boy of perhaps fourteen. His skin was dirty close to the roots of his hair, but he had been washed by one of the attendants, a flannel taken swiftly round his face, leaving the tidemark of grime. Dadd looked down on this stranger, seeing the bone, the eye socket, the mouth, the eyes. Most of all the eyes. The hand without the magnifying glass twitched, the second finger and thumb pressing together. He needed a pencil in his grasp, or a piece of charcoal. But not color. There was no color in these eyes, nor in any eyes he saw any longer.

He saw only an eye leached of pigment, with reflections hurrying within it. And deeper still, beyond the surface of the eye, the alternative landscape of thought. Inside the thought, instinct. Inside the instinct, creation. Here was God in the eye of a bewildered boy sitting on a filthy floor. Here was God, forcing the fuse into the explosive, priming the weapon. Here was God painting light on darkness, fashioning the stars, and breathing creation into ashes.

Dadd looked away from the boy.

He turned back to the window, to the crane fly caught against the bars.

He brought the magnifying glass to it, searching the dry, convulsing thorax, watching the brittle leg pulling in the web. The fly became a monster, but audaciously beautiful. Opaque segments formed its being, faint spindles of carbon. In the tissue, he could see mountains.

He could see open sky. He could see mouths and grasses and insects and instruments and folds of fabric and sailing ships and hands. He could see Bacchanalia and Diadonus, a vine seat, the blade of a knife, and bridges and moorland and clusters of ferns, and the magician with his arms outstretched.

He leaned back, gasping.

There was another world, and another world, and another world.