LUCY’S LIDS fluttered open, allowing the sting of the light to burn through her pancake pupils, shocking her consciousness awake.
She could hear a muted voice calling her name, echoing around the furthest reaches of her scrambled mind, drifting in from the aether… Calling… Calling.
The voice gradually brightened, pulling forward from her distant dreams. ‘Lucy…? Luuuucyyyy…?’ it called. She spun in her mind, trying to find the voice. ‘Lucy,’ it called again.
Her eyes ceased rolling beneath her flickering lids, and she groaned awake, reeling in the farthest extremities of her confusion.
The voice suddenly shot forwards to pin-sharp clarity. ‘Lucy? Are you okay?’ it said. ‘Talk to me!’
She felt a hand tapping her cheek. The voice was drenched in concern and familiar tones. ‘Speak to me. Are you okay?’ it asked – softly spoken, gentle, caring… The voice was Sam’s. ‘Lucy! Please wake up!’
She drifted her blurred vision towards the question. An out-of-focus silhouette of Sam was standing by the side of her prostrate body, looking down upon her.
Her drifting eyes finally managed to lock and pull focus, resolving the genuine concern on his face. ‘What? Um…? Where the hell am I?’ she mumbled, feeling decidedly groggy.
‘You’re okay, don’t worry,’ he assured her, ‘you’re safe now. You’re in my room, just relax, okay.’
‘Your room? What the hell am I doing in your room?’ She looked around, bewildered. ‘W-What? What happened?’ she asked – confused by what felt like teleportation.
‘Well. I-I think you fainted?’ he said. ‘But I don’t really know what that looks like, so I’m not really sure… I’ve only ever seen it in films. It’s actually kind of frightening.’
Lucy had only ever blacked out once before in her life, during a particularly memorable inoculation at school. She’d never been good with needles – the same as her mother. The sensation she felt then as she’d succumbed to her fear of the needle – a sensation of shifting within herself – was very much the same as now.
‘I fainted?’ she slurred, bemused. She struggled to sit upright, and swung her legs off the side of the bed. She stared through the floor for a time, running through her mind anything resembling a recent memory…
Through the swirling collage of images, one alone pushed through, slowly emerging, subtly obvious like an omen. It resolved into an image of the three-headed entity, mouth stretching long, its elongated tongue tasting the air.
Suddenly, she could remember it all. ‘Shit, Sam! That – thing! What the fuck was that thing?’
‘What do you mean, “thing”?’ he asked, startled by her sudden animation.
‘In the library, crouched up in the corner of the library!’
Sam looked blankly back at her, not comprehending a word she was saying. Doubt and confusion tugged at his brows.
Lucy couldn’t help but react. ‘Are you telling me you didn’t see that – that creature?’ she snapped in disbelief. ‘You must have done? I don’t know what the fuck it was, but you must have seen it?’
‘No,’ he responded, ‘I didn’t see anything.’
Lucy closed her eyes tight, trying to pull the memory to the fore. ‘It said something… A word I’ve never heard before. Now what the hell was it…?’ She cupped her hands over her eyes to lock herself into her thoughts. ‘Asmo, Asmo, deus? Or something…? Yes, that’s it. “Asmodeus”?’
Her words meant nothing to Sam. ‘No I didn’t see, or hear that. I didn’t see or hear anything,’ he replied – perplexed. ‘All I know is I didn’t like you being there alone, so I jumped in Dad’s buggy and drove up to join you, and that’s when I discovered you on your hands and knees.’ His eyes softened. ‘You looked so frightened,’ he explained, attempting to mimic the expression he’d seen on her face, not having the words to hand to describe it. ‘So, what was it you think – I mean, what was it you saw? Think you saw?’ he asked, attempting to walk a more diplomatic line, and failing miserably.
‘It was a creature, sort of like a man, but not a man, if you know what I mean.’ She shut her eyes again. ‘But it had more than one face, heads I mean? Shit! I don’t know what it was, but it was there I swear it,’ she insisted, painfully aware how unbelievable it all must have sounded.
She rolled a humble head, ‘I thought you were it. I thought it had got me.’ She peered up at him with wet, timid eyes. ‘Thank you, Sammy… I’m so glad you came to help.’
Sam flashed the weakest of smiles beneath a brow tight with empathy. She only ever called him ‘Sammy’ when she was being genuinely compassionate towards him, the sobriquet forming a knot in his stomach, and he sensed his heart beating in his chest, the adoring thump pulsing through to his neck, and behind his eyes. In spite of her aggression, he loved her.
‘I believe you,’ announced another voice. It was Hilly, who’d just walked into the room holding an open book.
‘Hilly!’ cried Lucy, enthusiastically overjoyed at seeing her.
Hilly carefully closed the book and placed it down on Sam’s desk. She trotted over to the bed, wrapping herself around a person who she’d always considered to be – in all but actuality – her older sister.
‘Are you okay now?’ asked Hilly. ‘We were worried.’
‘I’m fine, Hill,’ she responded into the young girl’s dewy gaze, cupping her cheek gently in her delicate hand.
Lucy visibly flinched, shooting a worried look up at Sam. ‘Did you tell my mum? You didn’t tell Mum did you?’
‘Noooo, I didn’t tell Helen. She wasn’t supposed to know you were there, right?’
Lucy vented a heartfelt sigh of relief. ‘Yesss. God. Thank you.’
Sam allowed himself a smile.
Lucy threw another look his way. ‘The floor… of the library! What was going on with that floor?’ she asked, recalling her ordeal.
‘Erm… the floor? What about it?’
‘How the hell could you have not noticed the floor!’
‘Well, you know, I was a little bit busy trying to carry you out to the buggy, sorry if in trying to help you, I failed to absorb the details of the house!’ he replied – more than a little put out by what was beginning to feel a bit like deep ingratitude.
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry,’ she mewed, apologetically, ingratitude being the farthest thing from what was in her heart.
‘That’s okay,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Anyway, what about the floor?’ he asked – his interest spiked.
‘I don’t know how to describe it. There was a sort of hidden floor that they’d uncovered. Like a big well, a shallow well.’
‘They’d?’
‘Your dad, and my mum I presume?’
‘And…?’ he coaxed, keen to know exactly what it was she’d seen. What he’d failed to notice.
Hilly looked on too, her eyes also inviting the details. She flicked a glance towards the book on the desk.
Lucy took a calming breath. ‘It was a pit, in the ground, hidden. Like a magic one, for doing witchcraft stuff. I could tell, it was a sort of devil-worship thing.’
‘What, in the library?’ asked Sam, a what-the-hell tone colouring his voice.
‘Yesssssss! In the library,’ she barked, her patience fraying.
Sam dropped his gaze to the floor, gathering his thoughts… ‘Wait here, I won’t be long,’ he instructed, authoritatively. He looked across to his sister. ‘Hilly, stay here with Lucy, okay?’ Before she could respond, he turned, and rushed from the room.
‘Where are you going?’ Lucy shouted from the bed, but there was no reply.
They both heard the door of the cottage slam, and the engine of the buggy start and drive away.
Lucy looked across at Hilly, Hilly shrugged…
*
Sam was back at the hall, standing in the library, looking down in awe at Lucy’s discovery…
Generations of locals had whispered of such a site, knowing it to exist somewhere within the bones of the old house, but no one had ever actually seen it to confirm its existence. But now, Sam Fletcher – overwhelmed by a sense of grim foreboding – was looking down into the very place where the notorious Mallette must have performed all of his rituals.
He found the fact that Mallette had gone to such extraordinary lengths to conceal what lay before him more than a little disconcerting, realising that for someone go to that much effort to hide something, then it must be a particularly squalid ‘something’ that’s being squirrelled away from the judgment of others.
His eyes scanned the details of the pit, it smelled damp, a centuries old stench of mildew and wet earth burning the back of his throat.
His gaze drifted up to the altar. ‘Christ!’ he whispered.
He looked about the room for any signs of the entity Lucy described, but he saw nothing. He snorted dismissively and shook his head, attributing her experience to an overwhelmed imagination.
Sam looked down into the well again, fascinated by how macabre it looked in comparison to the studious room it inhabited. He stepped to the edge, dropped to a hand, and hopped into the pit.
He stood upright and was shocked to realises that the walls were nearly his height.
He looked about nervously, but could see no steps apparent in order to climb out again. The ceiling of the library seemed so much further away now. He rocked on his heals at the sense of negative vertigo, feeling unnervingly cornered and decidedly exposed.
He lowered his attention back to the pit, and circled the stone altar, carefully placing his feet to avoid the makings on the ground.
He took up the knife in his hand. The steel had a coating of terracotta rust. He wrapped his fingers around the handle and gripped it tight, and made a few stabbing motions in the air.
He lifted it into the light fanning from the doors, then he realised, the blade was in fact made of a slither of bone, and the deep-red staining, wasn’t rust at all.
He ejected the blade from his fingers back onto the altar, wiping the palm of his hand on his jeans, his face twisting with revulsion.
He took a breath, and stepped in again, this time, with a little more reluctance, and began examining the cloths that were draped across the altar. There were three of them, all embroidered with Arabic script and cabalistic symbology, similar to what he’d seen flanking the stone staircase outside.
He decided to take one with him to do some research. He grabbed a corner of the middle one and lifted it revealing the bare stone beneath. But it wasn’t the sandy colour he was expecting, it was black.
Sam frowned, and swiped his finger across the top of the altar. The dark substance powdered to his touch. He sniffed at it, but it had no scent.
He rolled the dust between thumb and forefinger, before dabbing it against his tongue. A metallic, almost copper taste erupted across his taste buds. He lifted his hand into the light, the tip of his finger was now stained deep maroon.
Sam gagged, and bent over, spitting his revulsion onto the ground!
He heard a woody creak from the corner of the room, from deep within the shadows high above his head.
His eyes snapped towards the sound, scanning the dimly lit corner from whence the noise came…
He stumbled and pushed his back against the wall, his body stiffened with fear, his erratic breathing almost deafening in such purity of silence.
Sam hovered motionless, continuing to stare into the lightless corner, but he could see nothing.
The groan came again, and it didn’t take much of a stretch of his unnerved imagination to think that there could be someone, or something lurking in the unlit crevasses of such an antiquated study.
He finally succumbed to the realisation that there was probably truth in everything Lucy and his sister had claimed they saw, despite having seen none of it himself, however bizarre their claims may have seemed.
A crippling sense of solitude began to incinerate his ardour, his only companion being an eerie silence, and the oppressive atmosphere that had been slowly inhabiting the space since his arrival.
He turned, and scrambled desperately at the walls of the well, trying to climb out. His toes slipped on the greasy sandstone, struggling to get purchase, smudging decades of Mallette’s notes and scribblings. He finally managed to rise up onto his hands, hooking a knee on the edge, and heaved himself to his feet.
He started to back out of the room, nearly taking a toss over the stacks of floorboards.
He regained his footing, and stumbled out into the entrance hall, erratically grabbing at the handles of the library doors and slamming them shut behind him.
Sam sprinted, magnetised to the slither of outside that he could see across the hallway.
He thought he heard the doors of the library opening behind him, but he didn’t dare turn to look, hoping it was just the birth-child of his unnerved imagination, and not something far more real.
He darted through the gap into the sunlight, and turned to heave the heavy doors closed with everything he had within him.
They crashed shut, the sound echoing through the trees surrounding the house. Then he realised he didn’t know where the keys were.
‘Shit!’ he spat, shying from the monolithic entrance towering above him, wondering if he really did hear someone, or something following…?
He froze, and stared, expecting the doors to creep open… But after the longest minute of his life just watching and waiting for movement that never came, he released his held breath, and dropped to his knees – exhausted by his not inconsiderable apprehension.
He finally managed to gather himself together again, clearing his mind of what he assumed must have been some kind of fear-induced paranoia.
But he was less able to reason his mind free of the things the two girls had claimed witness to.
He turned his back on the house, his eyes gravitating towards the steps. He could see sunlight glinting off the pools through the twists of the elaborate railings.
His intrigue in his sister’s claim, and the utterly terrified look he’d seen in her face – a look that he felt sure would be seared into his memory forever – drew him slowly down the steps until he was resting his weight against the rusted handrail.
He watched the water, and noticed the swirling mists had cleared. He turned his curious gaze skyward. The sun had begun dropping towards the horizon, and along with it, the temperature.
Wisps of cloud were beginning to form from the moisture the baking, midday heat had lifted from the soil.
Sam peered down into the tar-blackness of the water again, and saw the assembling clouds reflected off the stillness with the clarity of a scrying mirror.
Sam leaned towards the inverted sky, mesmerised by the sheer perfection of the veneer to all that existed beneath the surface.
He scanned for an imperfection: a ripple, a bubble, the iridescence of drifting butterfly wings, or God forbid, fingers rising from beneath the inert glassiness, breaking through the film into the world above. His world. But all he could see were the clouds.
He leaned further in, magnetised by the image. The handrail digging into the tops of his thighs, but he failed to feel any pain – far too mesmerised by the serenity of the onyx-sheen…
He heard a sharp, metallic snap! Then suddenly jerked forwards and out of his trance.
The rusted handrail sheared! The tendrils of decayed ironwork snaking beneath bending to the force of Sam’s body weight, lowering his panic-stricken body towards the inky water.
He shuddered as he went weightless, flailing his arms back, blindly grabbing for anything substantial enough to halt his descent.
He managed to grasp a section of the railing still fixed solid, and heaved to pull himself back from the stagnant water.
His other hand pushed frantically against the disintegrating section, and with a loud tink, the entire panel broke away, and dropped into the pool.
‘Oh ssssshit!’ he cried, finally regaining his balance. He took a moment to steady himself, then looked around to see if there were any disapproving eyes looking on. There weren’t, he was alone.
Anxiety twisted his stomach into a fist as he considered just how much trouble he could be in. It was an accident, but the reality was, that although he lived on the grounds, this wasn’t his house. But worse than that, as close as the families were, this building belonged to the boss. His father’s boss!
He pondered his situation. But for what good reason would I be here? Leaning over this pool? he asked himself. What good reason could I give, that wouldn’t get Lucy in trouble? Questions he was not sure he could answer with any level of validity – given that the house lay unlocked, and he had no reason to be there, at least none that related to his usual daily habits or chores.
Damaging the property of what was in reality, his father’s employer – however friendly the two families may have been in their everyday interactions – wasn’t sitting well.
He suddenly felt nauseous, uncertain of the reaction he’d receive should ‘the parents’ learn of what had been going on. Potentially, he was very much in trouble.
He carefully leaned to look down at the pool… He could just see the corner of the panel protruding from the water.
Sam strained to lean out further, trying to better see it. One of the wrought-iron twists had bent back into a loop, and was hooked onto some of the carved details on the stonework buttress.
He desperately tried to evaluate his options in the midst of his panic, and decided the only one open to him, was to try to retrieve the section, and temporarily wire it back in place in the hope that no one would notice. Then, on a day when the grounds were free of parental eyes, he could return, and attempt to repair it well enough that no one would ever know it had been broken.
His father had recently taught him how to MIG weld, a skill he’d always wanted to learn, but he wasn’t expecting a chance to practice to come along quite so soon.
He scanned the area one last time to check he was still alone, then carefully, started to edge himself across the stonework towards the pool.
He looked down at his feet, and noticed the archaic details in the weathered sandstone were crumbling under his shoes. ‘Oh, crap!’ he barked, quickly manoeuvring his feet to areas without detail, keen not to do any more damage than he already had.
He squatted, and strained his fingers out towards the ironwork panel, but he was unable to reach it.
He noticed other areas with no detail, and stepped across to one of them, and reached out again… He was a matter of inches from being able to grab one of the bars.
Frustration started to percolate in his gut, but he had to try to quell it, the panel potentially just one clumsy fumble away from being lost in the pool forever, and not knowing how deep it was.
He noticed a couple more of the blank areas on the stonework, closer to the submerged railing, and stepped across to them, and tried one more time…
He squatted down, straining his arm out, the ends of his fingers just about kissing the metal, carefully making micro lunges, trying desperately to wrap his fingers around one of the bars…
‘H-H-How are you d-doing that?!’ implored a voice from somewhere behind him.
Sam’s heart leapt into his throat, and he turned his head towards the question. Lucy and his sister stood static on the gravel, just staring at him, both wearing as shocked an expression as any face had ever worn.
Lucy had her hands clapped tightly across her mouth, hiding a lip curling with fright. Her widened eyes shook at a sight beyond comprehension.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Sam, confused.
‘H-How, are you d-doing that!’ begged Hilly.
‘Doing what?’ he fired back.
Lucy dropped her hands from her mouth. ‘L-Look. Look at yourself,’ she whimpered, a tear curling from the corner of her eye and meandering down her cheek.
Sam carefully unwrapped his fingers from around the bar, and stood. But he didn’t rise higher, weirdly, he extended out from the side of the pool?
He turned his attention selfward, and it suddenly dawned on him that Lucy and Hilly lay horizontal across his vision, but he was standing up? ‘What the…?!’ he said, looking around cluelessly. He bent his eyes down to his feet, and stammered a breath laced with utter disbelief. He appeared to be standing, but on the side of the stonework that flanked the staircase!
His head was level with the rest of his body, hanging parallel to the surface of the water… He could reach out a hand, and dip it into the pool.
Sam had been so engrossed in retrieving the panel, he hadn’t noticed that he’d been walking around the curvature of the carvings, arcing towards the pool. And now – somehow – he defied gravity.
He started to quake at the impossibility of what he was apparently doing, but he tried not to panic.
Lucy and Hilly were still staring at him, terrified by the surreality of what was unfolding before them – so at odds with the known laws of physics and the real world.
Hilly began to weep uncontrollably, struggling to handle what was beginning to feel like a nightmare, a nightmare that she was unable to wake from.
Lucy was so frozen in her own universe, that she didn’t even noticed Hilly’s distress.
Sam was totally paralysed, trying to come to terms with gravity that seemed to be pulling sideways.
He turned his head to face forwards, looking down at his reflection in the onyx sheen, backdropped by the sky of newly formed clouds above, and behind him.
His mind fought to form anything close to a cogent thought. He took a deep breath, and tried to exhale the heaviness from his stomach, and reason away his fears enough to be able to motivate his limbs.
He looked to his feet again, and noticed the blank areas he was standing on had rings of complex symbology surrounding each one. Looking on retrospectively, they seemed designed, almost purposeful, meant to be, left blank for a reason, and the more he examined them, the more he realised they looked more akin to stepping stones than anything else.
He compiled a theory, and felt ready to test it… He lifted one of his feet, allowing a moment for his balance to settle, then tried placing it down on an area heavy with detail…
Sam suddenly felt a force wrapping its fingers around his internal organs, and start to drag him towards the water! He quickly lift his foot again, and placed it back where it was before. The force suddenly swung back through his feet, and with a jolt, sucked him onto wall again. The severity shocked him.
He steadied himself, and turned to look at the girls.
‘I think it’s the blank areas,’ he cried, ‘they’re holding me here. I don’t know how, why, or what the fucking hell it is that’s happening – but they are. They’re holding me.’
He glanced at the other blank patches, then back to Lucy. ‘They’re kind of like, like stepping stones, or something? But I’m not sure,’ he explained. ‘Come here. Don’t be afraid. Come and look!’
But all Lucy could do, was stare, shaking uncontrollably.
‘Come over and see,’ he insisted. ‘Please, Lucy, it’s okay.’
She had to fight hard to unstick herself, but somehow, she managed to summon enough ardour to unglue her feet from the gravel. Cautiously, she walked across to the pool, her legs close to buckling at the site she was being forced to behold, barely able to carry herself towards something she was fundamentally ill-equipped to comprehend.
They both stood in eerie silence, ninety degrees apart, witnessing the impossible.
Lucy shuffled past the base of the handrail to the side of the pool and tilted her head, inspecting the intricate symbology surrounding Sam’s feet. ‘There are some more of those blank areas I think you’re talking about,’ she said, ‘there’s like – a whole row of them.’ She rotated her gaze. ‘They seem to keep going, down to the water.’
She panned her eye across to meet his. ‘Try another step,’ she suggested, ‘go on, try…’
Sam’s whole face gasped at her suggestion, a suggestion far easier to make from the side of the pool, than to actually contemplate while hanging above it. But he also knew it was the natural thing to attempt next, so was unable to turn his exasperation into an argument against the idea.
He steeled himself and, with determined eyes locked on the next featureless step, strode with conviction to it…
It landed, and he was still dry. He took another deep breath, and stepped across to the next one in line… Again, it worked!
His nose was now just inches from the surface of the pool, and Lucy gasped at a sight that was so completely alien to everything she’d ever known. Her gasp transformed into manic laughter, laughter that infected Sam, and he couldn’t help but join in.
He turned his face down and peered into the ink, and saw his elation reflected back at him. The flawless sheen, mesmerising in its perfection, quelled his hysteria, and his face relaxed out of its joy.
He drew a hand tentatively to his shoulder, then slowly, and deliberately, started lowering his arm towards the pool.
Lucy stopped laughing, and watched with breath held…
Sam’s fingers touched, then broke the surface of the fluid. His brows flickered – expecting it feel much colder, and more like water than it did. What the hell was it?
A meniscus of the inky liquid sucked up each finger as they were lowered into its mesmerising sheen, his hand dropping deep below the surface, until his whole arm was completely submerged before him.
He stirred it in the fluid, but to his surprise, felt no resistance, no discernible drag – not at all what he was expecting.
The sensation unnerved him, and then he remembered the fingers Hilly said she saw rising from the pool.
He quickly snatched his arm from the water, startling Lucy. ‘What is it?’ she snapped. Sam didn’t answer. ‘Sam. What is it? What’s happened? What’s wrong?’
Sam stared at his arm, his expression blank, cloaking his confusion.
He placed his other hand flat against his arm, dabbing it several times over… ‘It’s dry! It’s completely dry,’ he whispered, turning to Lucy. ‘It’s not wet at all, not a single drop!’
His words did nothing to alleviate Lucy’s confusion, and she couldn’t bring herself to say anything. She felt like she was inside a bubble, just watching events unfolding in a world that she didn’t herself inhabit.
Sam turned his attention back to the carvings in front of his feet again. He could see a couple more of the steps – the ones Lucy was talking about – dropping to the surface of the water, the last of them half submerged.
Counter intuitively, his actions fuelled purely by uncontrollable curiosity, he strode to the next blank footprint… it landed, he breathed… He took, and held a full breath, then stepped again, his face pushing through the surface tension of the ebony film.
Lucy gagged on a failed attempt to shout ‘stop!’ But for whatever reason – maybe a selfish desire to know what was there – she didn’t try twice.
She released a yelp as she watched Sam step down the wall, and drop beneath the surface. Tides of viscous-black fluid washed across his back, colliding along his spine, engulfing him, and he was gone… Hilly sprinted to the pool’s edge, joining in Lucy’s shock and disbelief, and screamed her brother’s name towards the last of the ripples as they dissipated.
Lucy had no idea how to react, or what to do. They both just stood, watching the place where they last saw him…
Seconds past, feeling more like minutes. Maybe they were minutes, neither of them could tell anymore, their inner monologues unable to judge anything with a level of certainty anymore. Years of tuning ‘what we know to be true’, completely undone by a series of events so bizarre as to cause a crash in the very logic of their existence.
Hilly flinched and grabbed Lucy’s arm. Lucy looked at her, then followed her needled gaze down to the pool. There was a bulge forming on the surface, pushing up from beneath – then it split, and Sam emerged through the fluid, striding from beneath the midnight-sheen, like a newly forming volcanic island rising from a prehistoric ocean floor.
They watched him walking up the wall, his pin-sharp concentration focused on accurate foot placement…
He arced over the curvature of the buttress like a windscreen wiper blade, until he finally stood upright again, and stepped through the gap in the fractured handrail onto the stairs.
Lucy and Hilly burned him with looks of disbelief in their eyes. The curtains of water that Lucy would have expected to see cascading off the hems of his clothing didn’t exist. He looked completely dry! But how?
She started to sob, she didn’t know what was happening anymore.
‘Where did you go?’ asked Hilly. ‘Why aren’t you wet?’ Questions the young were far better equipped to ask than anything resembling an adult, far less inhibited by knowledge or logic.
Lucy watched Sam as he slumped down onto the steps, waiting for a response to Hilly’s questions.
Sam stared at his feet, visibly close to succumbing to the effects of shock, but they could both see him actively fighting it.
‘What happened…? What is it, what did you see?’ asked Lucy softly, seeing how understandably shaken he was.
Sam lifted his gaze to meet hers. He peered deep into her tear-glazed eyes, his face paper-white and ashen. ‘It was…’ He took a deep breath. ‘It was this house,’ he said, with a quick glance behind him, his voice soft, as though barely able to convince itself of what it was saying.
‘What…? What do you mean?’
‘Down there… Below us… There’s, there’s another here, another Hobswyke Hall.’
Lucy pulled Hilly into her side – more for her own comfort than anything else. ‘What does that mean, “another here”?’
‘There’s another place, Lucy. Through there. A complete other, what’s the word? Realm? Yes, realm.’
He shook his head at what he heard himself saying. It sounded ridiculous, and he knew it, but he’d seen it. ‘It’s another place, with another house, another grounds, a whole other world, a different world, but it looks every bit the same as this one.’
He flicked a look at the pool and nodded, ‘Through there, through the water.’
Lucy’s face contorted. ‘I can’t believe it. Are you being serious?’
‘Yes! Yes I am…!’ he barked. ‘It seemed to be a world that looks exactly like ours.’ He reconsidered his words. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not exactly, somehow, it felt different, it felt – wrong?’
He looked down at the pool again, then turned to face the girls.
‘Lucy, I could sense this place I was in was evil, it was bad… It was putrid!’