Thomas blinked. On his shoulder his mouse dug his tiny claws in, making Thomas feel like he was being poked by needles, and he finally closed his mouth.
“Moose,” he whispered. “Did you see that?” The mouse offered no reply except to scamper to the top of the boy’s head. Gently but impatiently, Thomas lifted the mouse down and looked him in the eye. “Moose. Unless I’ve contracted some sort of food poisoning from that last batch of canned peaches and I’m already hallucinating, that was a person. A person talking to me from a circle in midair. Don’t you see?”
Thomas stared into Moose’s shining black eyes, like two tiny berries in his small furry face. “Mum and Dad were right! They must have been. No matter what Mackintosh or anyone else says about them being a pair of loonies, this has to prove that they were on the right path.” He paused, considering, and then gave a shrug. “I don’t know if that’s what they would’ve expected, but we’ve got to take what we can get.”
He stood up, popping Moose onto his shoulder. “Let’s go and record our findings, my friend,” he said. Thomas closed his book and tossed it on the pew before hurrying down the aisle. He clambered up the stairs to his father’s workroom. Storm lanterns were dotted about, throwing a gentle glow onto the dark wooden cupboards and desks. His father had built everything in here except for the telescope.
Now that his dad was gone, this was Thomas’s place.
He made for a nearby desk with two radio sets on it—or at least what appeared to be radio sets. One was normal enough: a short, squat thing made of wood, which Thomas always had tuned to the BBC Overseas Service. The other machine was the interesting one. It had a large round face with a single delicate hand, long and tapered. The hand bobbed back and forth, measuring what sounded like tiny variations in the sea of static that poured from the machine’s speaker. It was always on too, but it had never picked up a single radio broadcast and it never would. His parents had always called it an Oscillometer and so Thomas did too.
On this occasion Thomas ignored both machines, instead pulling out the top drawer of his desk and taking out his logbook. Thin and hardbacked and bound in black leather, this book contained every detail of Thomas’s life. What he ate, who he saw, whether he had any contact with Mackintosh, how often he took a bath—and most importantly whether there was ever any change in the signal put forth by the Oscillometer. Monitoring its output was the only interesting thing he ever wrote about in his logbook—at least until today.
He opened the logbook and flipped to the correct page, which had been prepared with boxes drawn carefully with a ruler and his precious, rationed ink.
May 20, 1941, he wrote in the box marked Date before checking his wristwatch. 10:04 a.m. approx., he recorded in the next box, marked Time. Then it came to filling in the largest box: Event. He tapped his pencil on his chin for a moment or two, trying to gather his thoughts. Finally he began to write.
Spent the morning (08:40 onward) reading downstairs. With no warning at 10:00 approx. a circle appeared in midair, about the size of a shaving mirror. In it, a girl—11/12? Dark hair, curly; spectacles; dark eyes; overall complexion dark; name: Tess (?). Visual contact only. No sound. Communication via written notes, miming. Had not heard of War. Had no connection (as far as can be discovered) with M and D.
Thomas paused for a moment, tightening his lips and swallowing hard. He had never stopped looking for his mum and dad, and he knew he never would. There had to be something out there that could tell him where they were—and perhaps this girl was it. He clenched his fist and continued. Girl (Tess) did not seem to know what was happening and seemed to have no control over contact. Thomas grimaced at his own words, the tiny flare of hope that had been lit inside his chest already fading.
“Thomas!” came a shout, loud and guttural, from outside. “Thomas! I know you’re in there, you pest!” Mackintosh, Thomas thought, his stomach churning. He slid the logbook away and closed the drawer silently. Then he lowered himself to the floor and folded up tight, his knees against his chest, and waited.
“I’m not calling you again, lad! I’ve made breakfast. You can come in and eat with me, or you can do what you normally do and sneak in like a thief once my back’s turned.” Thomas, listening upstairs, grinned to nobody but himself.
“Have it your way,” the man outside continued, sounding weary. “But why you want to eat terrible food cold is beyond me.”
“Because it’s better than eating with you,” Thomas whispered.
After a few minutes of silence, he guessed Mackintosh had started making his way back to the house—but still Thomas moved carefully. He reached his provisions cupboard and took out a small silver-wrapped square—the last of his chocolate. He undid the foil and broke off a single piece, letting it melt on his tongue, but not before snapping off a corner of it to give to Moose. Together the boy and the mouse enjoyed their bounty and wondered whether their luck was about to turn.
Tess sat rooted to the spot on the chapel pew.
“What on earth was that, Violet?” she asked the spider, but all she got in return was a long look from Violet’s shining eternal eyes. “Yes, of course,” Tess said, as though Violet had answered. “You’re right. It was another reality. I looked through and it was another reality. One with a war in it, apparently.” She blinked. “Excuse me for a minute.”
She bent forward and kept her head low, having once read that it helped you not to faint. Violet made her way along Tess’s leg to sit, confused, on her owner’s knee.
“I’m all right, girl,” Tess whispered, her eyes shut tight. “Or at least I will be. I hope.”
Tess’s heart finally calmed and she sat up. Slowly she settled back into the pew. Then she picked up her experiments notebook and pulled her pencil out of her hair.
It was like a circle of fast-moving water with light shining through it, she wrote, the words tumbling out in such a rush that her handwriting became like a shorthand only she could read. It was like looking through a waterfall only without getting wet. It was silent. It didn’t smell of anything and it didn’t give off heat or cold, at least that I could feel. The place I could see when I looked through seemed almost exactly the same as here, but the differences were: chapel looked newer and instead of me there was a boy. And a mouse. The boy (Thomas) didn’t seem afraid or upset, even though I must have looked like someone peering through a circle in the air…Tess’s pencil stilled on the page. Her mouth fell open and her heart began to race again.
“It’s what Miss Ackerbee was talking about,” she said. “The circle in the air!” She put the pencil and paper down and picked up the object again. Her fingers were shaking. “That was what she saw, the night my dad—” She stopped, not quite able to finish her sentence out loud. The night my dad left me, she continued, inside her mind. She saw him looking through this thing, just like I was doing. Miss Ackerbee even said the circle shimmered. It has to be the same.
“So she wasn’t being poetic, or dramatic, or making it up,” Tess said, and Violet gave her a look. Tess pulled a face. “I know, I know, Miss Ackerbee wouldn’t do that and I should have trusted her from the start—all right, Vi. Stop going on about it, won’t you?” She heaved a sigh. “And as for my dad…,” she continued, stroking the device and running her fingertips along each marker, “he touched this, same as I’m doing now.” She smiled, but it was a sad and fleeting thing. “So this is almost like holding his hand.” But why did he leave it with me? Tess shuddered, thinking about the power of the device she’d just wielded. It could see between worlds—and now it was hers without even a note to explain why, or how it worked.
“Well, one thing’s for sure—it has to stay away from Mr. Cleat,” Tess whispered to herself, tightening her grip on it. “Whatever my dad was trying to do, he must have meant this for me alone. And if he wanted me to be safe”—she paused, sucking hard on her top lip—“if he wanted me to be safe, he wanted this to be safe too.”
Eventually she came back to herself with a shiver. She’d forgotten her watch and so had no idea of the time; it felt like a millennium had passed.
“We’d better be heading back, girl. They’ll be wondering where we are,” she said to Violet, gently settling her onto her head-top perch. Then Tess got to her feet, slid the object back into her cardigan pocket and hurried down the aisle. The area around the chapel was deserted and Tess was soon safely on the garden’s gravel path. She glanced at the bower seat as she straightened her clothes—there was no sign of Mrs. Thistleton and she was glad to see Mr. Cleat’s book was still there. With luck, nobody had even noticed she’d been gone.
She picked up the book as she passed and tucked it beneath her arm as she hurried toward the house trying to look like nothing was amiss—but the device in her pocket had never felt more conspicuous than it did now. She felt like she was carrying around a hive of sleeping bees, or a ticking bomb. Sooner or later it was going to explode and she had no idea what would happen once it did.