The open French window creaked on its hinges. A hint of breeze carried the smell of wet into the room. Outside, a steady rain was falling, and wisps of fog snaked over the great lawn down to the Bay of Eternity, pink hued in the light of the rising sun. For a long time no one moved.
The first time Susan and Charles had come to stay with their uncle, they had awakened to a blanketing fog and rain that swept Drift House onto the Sea of Time, an adventure from which they had narrowly escaped with their lives. During that first voyage, the Oakenfelds had defeated the mermaid Queen Octavia and, with the help of Pierre Marin, the man who had originally built Drift House, repaired the two radios that piloted the house through space and time. The children and their uncle had returned from that voyage with the assurance from Pierre Marin that Drift House could never again be taken onto the Sea of Time without its occupants’ permission.
Right?
The sight of the rain held Charles and Susan transfixed. It was nothing like that first deluge, which was so thick not a glimpse of land had been visible. The children could see the patio wall, the lawn, scattered trees, the Bay of Eternity in the distance. But still… What if…?
Uncle Farley cleared his throat. “What am I thinking? The damp is going to throw the harpsichord out of tune.”
He hurried to the open window with a one-slippered shuffle. The latch settled into its groove with a definite click.
“Uncle Farley,” Susan said when her uncle had turned back to the room. “You don’t think …” She let her voice trail off, and nodded at the rain.
Uncle Farley laughed, the first easy moment since the ugly scene with Mr. Zenubian.
“It’s just rain, dear Susan. I’m afraid it’s been a wet spring up here. Nothing to worry about other than mud and mosquitoes. Now then, Charles. What is this book of yours that’s causing so much commotion?”
“It’s not Charles’s!” Susan cut in before her brother could answer. “It’s both of ours.”
Charles glared at his sister—he’d been going to say the same thing, but Susan made it seem like he was some kind of hog, or even a thief.
“We think Mar—” Charles broke off, suddenly remembering that Uncle Farley didn’t know about Murray’s older version. “I mean, someone delivered it to our apartment in New York. Murray thinks it came from the Sea of Time.” That seemed safe enough.
“Really?” Uncle Farley’s eyes lit up. He joined Charles on the sofa. President Wilson hopped on the sofa’s back, and Susan had to content herself with looking over the boys’ shoulders.
Charles pulled back the oilskin. The book had a presence in the room like another person. It filled everyone’s nose with the rich warm smell of leather, a drier tang of old paper. The gilt letters seemed to wink in the early-morning murk, whereas the deeply impressed grooves below the title seemed to suck up what little light there was.
“The Lost Cities,” Uncle Farley read and, as Susan had done in New York, he ran his finger over the letters and the seven hollow lines beneath them. Charles watched his face closely, but Uncle Farley didn’t give any sign that he felt the tingle Charles felt through his pajamas. The book was warm on his lap, like a baby or a puppy, but the feeling was more than physical. Charles knew—he just knew—the book was speaking to him alone.
Uncle Farley reached for the upper right corner of the cover.
“You know what, Uncle Farley?” Charles was startled by the sound of own voice. “Let’s wait to look at this till we’ve gotten dressed and, um, had breakfast. I know it sounds funny, but I don’t feel right looking at this in my pajamas. And, um”—he blinked rapidly, to draw attention to his eyes—“I need my glasses.”
Never one to turn down a meal, Uncle Farley said, “Good point, Charles.” He held up his one bare foot with a chuckle. “I commend your sense of decorum.”
They left the book in the music room as they went upstairs. Charles didn’t want to let it out of his sight, of course, but the look Susan flashed him said she wasn’t going to let him alone with it. Uncle Farley asked President Wilson to “sit watch” over the book. The parrot seemed to take Uncle Farley’s request literally. He hopped onto the oilskin as though it were a nest, and murmuring something about having been “up all night,” promptly went to sleep.
Later, during breakfast, Uncle Farley seemed distracted, getting up from the table several times and walking to the windows. At first Susan and Charles wondered if he were worried about the weather, despite what he’d said earlier. But the rising sun burned away the clouds, and lent further proof that the rain was entirely normal. Then, before he’d cleaned his plate, Uncle Farley suddenly muttered, “Excuse me,” and hurried out of the room. A moment later, a faint voice trickled into the room:
“Oh. My. Word.”
The same lightbulb went off over Susan and Charles’s heads.
“The drawing room!”
“What? What?” President Wilson started from sleep with a flurry of feathers. “Where is the scoundrel? I’ll scratch his eyes out!”
“Guard the book!” Susan called to the parrot as she hurried out of the room.
“I am not a serv—” But the children were already gone.
From the hallway the children could see strange lights pulsing through the drawing room door. When they actually entered the room, they pulled up short. The room’s walls were undulating in a way they’d never seen before: here an iceberg, there a wall of water, here a snowcapped mountain, there a massive sandy pyramid. It was like being in a movie theater with screens on all four walls. There were desert expanses on one side and solid clots of forest on another, wide stretches of dark open water over here and endless, empty expanses of blue sky over there. Strange houses with grass growing on their roofs alternated with cities of pale buildings that looked like they were made from dried mud. Something was on fire here, and clouds of smoke seemed to sting the children’s eyes, while over there an almost perfectly circular island sank beneath the sea.
It was this last that caught Charles’s eye. Perhaps jogged by the book in the music room, he said, “Is that… Atlantis?”
But even as he said it, the island was gone. Then, on the opposite wall, there was a burst of color so bright it painted everyone’s face orange and red. A volcano was erupting in a wall of lava, and at its base rested a city of red brick and white pillars.
“Pompeii!” Susan exclaimed. But even as she said its name, the city was gone.
There was another city, this one surrounded by a wall, inside of which Charles spied an enormous horse, and then it too seemed to dissolve in flames.
“Troy!”
“Lost cities,” Uncle Farley breathed quietly. “They’re all lost cities. But why?”
There were other cities, some of which were no more than little camps, others that seemed so magical and splendid it was hard to believe they were of our world. Uncle Farley spotted the hard ones: Timbuktu, the ancient capital of West Africa, and the Arizona cliff dwellings of the Anasazi, and Tenochtitlán, the Aztec metropolis that now lies beneath Mexico City. Charles recognized Machu Picchu, the last home of the Incas. Susan guessed that a tiny stand of cabins was the lost colony of Roanoke. Everyone recognized the Easter Island statues, and the atomic bomb exploding over Hiroshima. And then there was another image that was even more familiar, though far, far more distressing.
“Uncle Farley!” Susan said. “It’s the, it’s the—” She couldn’t say it.
“It’s the twin towers,” Charles said. His voice was cold and flat. It reminded Susan of Murray’s voice, since he’d gone to the future and come back.
The horrific image grew and grew, until the two silver spires filled up opposite walls of the room. Smoke billowed from broken windows, shrouding the walls of the drawing room a uniform gray, and Susan actually coughed. The quality of the color thickened, seemed almost to dampen, and without quite knowing when it had happened the onlookers realized the smoke had turned to fog. And, also without understanding, the three people in the room sensed that the strange, overwhelming show was over.
“Uncle Farley,” Susan said. “Do you think we’ll go—we have to go—to all those places? Even—” She shuddered at the memory of the last image.
Uncle Farley didn’t answer her. He walked over to a side table with a distracted expression on his face. There was a piece of pottery on a stand, into which the smooth contours of a woman’s face had been impressed. The face was haunting—empty, blank eyed, yet searching for something.
“It’s from Pompeii,” Uncle Farley said quietly.
“Really!” Susan reached a hand toward the face, but Uncle Farley was still speaking.
“It’s a death mask.”
Susan jerked her finger back. “That was put on a dead person’s face?”
“Not exactly. She was alive at first. It’s lava. It vitrified around the woman instantly, preserving her face for eternity.”
“Vitrified? That sounds like a word for”—she turned toward the door—“you, Charles. Charles?”
But she was speaking to empty air. Charles was gone.