SAM’S PHONE BUZZED. It was a message from Lucy:
We’re back. Can you meet me at the fork? L. X
Yes, I’ll be there in 10, is that OK? X
Perfect. Please don’t bring Hilly, there are things I have to tell you that I don’t want her knowing. At least, not yet anyway. X
K…
Dusk was beginning to soften the evening light, the cooling air lifting moisture from the forest floor infusing the surrounding woodland with the fresh scent of the pine trees.
Sam paced the path at the fork. He figured that if anything resembling a parent should hove into view, then he could just keep walking in whatever direction he was traveling, as though he had a purpose other than to keep a clandestine assignation with Lucy… A far easier lie to present.
Eventually, he saw Lucy coming down the bank, her long legs striding towards him with a discernible sense of urgency, occasionally bursting into a light jog.
She turned to look behind her – checking she wasn’t being followed. ‘Hi,’ she whispered through a face shining with excitement, keen to relay the stories she had to tell. She gestured to Sam to start up the path, away from the houses.
‘So…?’ Sam asked, under his breath, cocking an ear towards her, inviting her to tell all.
‘Well,’ she said, allowing her voice to elevate to soft-spoken – having created sufficient distance between themselves and any unwanted ears. ‘I managed to speak to my nan…’
She proceeded to unload every minute detail of what her grandmother had relayed to her earlier in the day. Then ran through all of the odd and confusing events that had ever happened to her over the years that for some reason, stuck in her mind. Things she saw, or overheard, that at the time made little sense, but that now fitted within the narrative of the secrets that her grandmother had finally made her party to.
They ambled the grounds for well over an hour, Sam listening quietly, absorbing every detail spilling from Lucy lips, furnishing himself with all the facts he may need to formulate an opinion, should Lucy ask for one…
They ended up sitting on a bench overlooking the lake. The sun had dropped below the horizon, underlighting stacks of striated clouds stretching over the silhouette of the tree-lined hills in the distance. The air grew cold.
Sam removed his hoody and wrapped it around Lucy. She thanked him with a smile and rested her head on his shoulder.
‘I don’t know what to do, Sammy? Do I talk to Mum? Nooo, that wouldn’t be good.’ She sighed, answering her own question before Sam could even open his mouth. But he was already shaking his head in agreement.
‘God, I wish I hadn’t found those damn keys.’
‘But you did,’ said Sam, ‘so there’s no use wishing for something you can’t change, and besides, is it such a bad thing?’
Lucy couldn’t make her mind up if it was, or if it wasn’t… ‘What did it feel like?’ she asked. ‘What did you see, Sammy, when you went through? I didn’t like to ask yesterday, you looked – well – too shaken up.’
Sam rolled his eyes to the sky, trying to put words to his experience. ‘It was like– like dipping beneath water, but coming out of water all at the same time,’ he explained. His brows furrowed. ‘I pushed my face under the water, or whatever it is, but it felt weirdly dry. So I opened my eyes, and I was rising from the other pool, the one on the other side.’
Lucy peered onto the still surface of the lake, trying to clear her mind of extraneous thoughts so she could attempt to imagine what Sam was describing. ‘So what does it look like? The other place?’
‘Thing is. When I came out on the other side, I was rising from the pool on the opposite side of the steps. And also, after I’d looked around for a while, it occurred to me that everything was the wrong way round to the way it is here.’
‘The wrong way round? What do you mean the wrong way round?’
‘Everything was – what’s that way of saying it? “Mirrored”. Yes. Everything was mirrored. You know – right is left, left is right, everything flipped the other way. But other than that, it all looked pretty much exactly the same as it does here.’
Lucy sighed, still no closer to knowing what to do next. But there was one feeling that she was unable to shake – despite having been trying for the past twenty four hours.
She rose from the seat and walked to the edge of the water, toying the toe of her trainer among the pebbles. she turned back to Sam who was watching from the bench.
‘Tomorrow. Please, Sam, if you would… I want us both to go through to look around.’
‘No,’ snapped Sam.
Lucy shook a defiant head towards his sharp refusal. ‘I’ll go anyway, with or without you, I have to. But I’d much rather you were there with me.’ She tilted her head. ‘Please, I need to go through. I need answers, answers I don’t have, and I think the only place I can get them is through that pool.’
Her pleading gaze pawed at him – beseeching. ‘Where did my mum disappear to, Sam, for all those years? And how did she get pregnant with me!’ Lucy peered deep into Sam’s eyes. ‘And how is it, she ended up sitting among shards of glass in the middle of a mirror ten years later? But more than any of that, how the fucking hell is it at all possible that there’s a fucking doorway to another world sitting outside of my old house?’
Sharply delivered swear words emitting from such an angelic face shocked Sam, and he could see she was never going to be swayed. He’d seen the exact same look of determination in Lucy’s face before, and knew it to be unshakable. He sagged… ‘Tomorrow?’ he asked, reluctantly.
‘Yes. Please. Sometime in the morning?’
Sam sat silently for a while, toying with the notion… ‘Okay, tomorrow morning it is, you and me. We’ll go through and see what’s there.’
Lucy strode to him and flung her arms around him. ‘Thank you, Sammy. I can’t do this without you. I-I need you…’
Sam escorted Lucy back to the gatehouse, hardly a word passing between them the whole way there, both of them uncertain of what they might find on the other side of the water.
‘Well, goodnight then,’ said Lucy, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow morning. Oh, and thanks for everything,’ she added.
‘That’s okay,’ he replied, ‘that’s what I’m here for. See you tomorrow.’
*
Lucy wandered into the kitchen having hardly slept, beckoned downstairs by the sounds of breakfast being prepared.
She’d already dressed, but today sported an old pair of jeans and a T-shirt. She’d also had the foresight to dig out a bag of waterproof makeup she once purchased for a holiday to Florida, just in case.
Her mother was standing at the stove turning bacon. Lucy walked up behind her, and pecked a kiss on her cheek. ‘Good morning, Mumster, is any of that for me?’ she asked, with a cheeky grin.
‘Of course, sweetheart. I was actually using the smell to lure you out of that bloomin’ bed,’ she joked, with a smirk and a jaunty nudge of the shoulder. ‘Sleep well?’
‘Um – nah, not really. Couldn’t shut my mind off, kept thinking about stuff, you know how you do.’
‘What kind of things?’ her mother asked, with mild concern.
‘Oh, nothing important really, don’t worry about it. Just stuff.’
‘Why don’t you go and get back in bed for a bit?’
‘Nahhh, I’ll be fine. A cup of tea’ll wake me up. Want one?’
‘Mmm, please,’ Helen replied, leaning a big smile over her shoulder.
Lucy filled the kettle and slapped it on.
She looked across at her mother cracking eggs into the pan, then down at the tea cups, trying to work out how quickly she could get away.
Stealthily, she took up her phone and sent a text to Sam, to see if he could meet in about an hour, before quickly swiping her phone onto ‘silent’.
A reply flashed up on the screen:
No problem, Luce. I’ll meet on the path near Hobswyke. X
*
An hour later, Lucy – heavily laden with breakfast – strode along the path towards her old home, an expectant fizz in her belly.
She’d not felt this apprehensive or excited about anything for a very long time, probably since childhood, when everything seemed to be an adventure.
She could see the occasional glimpse of Sam through the trees as she traipsed up the path, his face looking anything but excited.
‘Hi, Sam,’ she warbled.
He watched her on the approach, forcing the most unconvincing smile Lucy had ever seen.
‘Oh, Sam, please don’t fret,’ she said, caressing her words.
‘I’m not bothered about me. It’s you.’ He shook his head a couple of times as she finally arrived, leaning a kiss onto his cheek. ‘If anything ever happened to you. I couldn’t—’
‘Oi!’ she snapped. ‘I can look after myself you know. I am – after all – a woman.’ She punched him hard on the shoulder and giggled.
‘Owah!’ he complained, rubbing his arm and grimacing. ‘Well alright then, if you’re sure. On your head be it.’
‘Yes, I am sure. I’ve thought of nothing else all night. So let’s do this – okay?’
‘Okay.’
They both crossed the gravel towards the break in the handrail. The fizz in Lucy’s stomach intensifying. She wished she hadn’t had such a large breakfast.
Sam turned to address her. ‘I’ll go first and check it wasn’t all just some weird hallucination or something, and then you can follow.’
Lucy gulped back her nerves. ‘Okay.’
Sam positioned himself in the break, then checked to see there was no one else around.
He breathed deep to calm himself. ‘So you have to keep your feet inside the blank areas, they seem to be what stops you from falling.’
‘Okay. I understand.’ She nodded.
He started making his way across the stonework, making sure to land each tread accurately.
He had to work to keep balance as his body, once again, began arcing over the curvature of the carved, stone buttress, and down towards the pool. So it wasn’t a dream! he thought to himself. It was real.
Lucy watched, feeling every bit as amazed as she did the first time she saw it.
‘Here,’ said Sam, ‘take this.’ He stooped, lifting the broken section of railing from the water, and passed it up to Lucy.
She crouched down and took it from him, taking care not to upset his balance, and heaved it up the wall. She laid it flat on the ground and stepped into the break.
Sam walked down the wall a few paces, then whirled his hand towards Lucy, instructing her to follow. ‘Come on, just step carefully. Do exactly what I’m doing,’ he said, ‘and don’t worry, you’ll be just fine.’
Lucy manoeuvred to the top of the curvature, and began to mimic Sam’s actions, treading carefully, fighting to keep balance, until she too, began to arc over the stonework and down towards the uninviting membrane to another place.
She started to laugh – half joy, half mania.
‘Shhhhh! Concentrate,’ Sam barked.
Lucy attempted to rein it in, but she just wanted to laugh uncontrollably at how amazing what was happening felt.
Sam’s face fronted the surface of the liquid for the second time in two days. He took a full breath as before, and stepped through.
Lucy watched the viscous ink engulfing him beneath her elated gaze. She gasped!
A hand rose elegantly from the water like an Arthurian legend. She could see by the watch that it belonged to Sam.
He flexed his fingers a few times, inviting her to take hold…
She took a moment to fortify her nerves, then gently, wrapped her fingers around his, and he guided her slowly down the wall to the surface of the pool…
She paused for a beat, steeled herself, then closed her eyes tight, and took her leap of faith through the midnight sheen…
Lucy could feel her face and hands passing into the fluid, a tide of pressure swiping over her face, past her ears and the back of her head to her ponytail, as she sank further under.
She swung her hands and body through until she felt certain she was completely submerged, and fought to not panic, amazed at her own actions given her inability to swim.
‘Open your eyes, Lucy. Go on, open your mouth. It’s okay, breathe,’ instructed Sam’s detached voice.
She was aware – as Sam had predicted – that she didn’t feel at all wet, or any of the pressure of being submerged in a liquid as she should.
‘Trust me, Lucy,’ he urged, ‘just open your eyes…’
Lucy relaxed her squint, allowing her eyelids to part a little.
Slithers of blurred light cut through her lashes, resolving as she opened her eyes into an image of Sam’s excited face looking down at her. She un-pursed her lips and took a breath…
‘Come on,’ Sam enthused, guiding her up the wall, ‘let’s go.’
They both walked up and over the mirrored buttress until they were standing against a handrail, a handrail that looked every bit the same as the ones at Hobswyke.
Lucy then realised – as Sam had described – that they’d risen from the pool on the opposite side of the steps, rising from the pool on the right, when they dropped through the one on the left?
Sam clambered over the railing, then leant across to assist Lucy.
Safely on the steps, she could at last drink in awe the sight she beheld… It was a view wholly familiar to her, but in a place she’d never been before.
She broke from Sam’s side to walk slowly up the staircase towards a gothic manor house, overgrowing with thorn-laden brambles, each barb an inch long, twisting through the architecture of the building. But still, she was able to make out – through the tortured snakes of spiked foliage – a building that looked identical to Hobswyke Hall! ‘What is happening?’ she muttered.
She pivoted around at the top of the steps, and looked out from the front of the house.
It all looked the same as home, except, the pathway from the hall peeled away from the opposite side of the clearing, the lake was to the right, instead of the left, and there was a greyness to all she saw, as though the colour and joy had been drained from all her eyes could see.
Everything was overgrown and crumbling. In an advanced state of decay, rotting, rusting, untouched by caring hands.
‘Hands!’ Lucy shouted.
‘Hands?’ Sam replied.
‘Yes… Who lives here…? Someone must. Hilly saw a hand?’
She turned her focus back towards the house and noticed the main doors hanging slightly open. She walked cautiously across the flagged landing and presented her eye to the gap, and was amazed to find that everything she could see inside also looked the same as home.
She spun her excitement back to Sam. ‘I think Hilly did see a hand. Someone must be here to have opened this!’ She began to push the door. ‘Let’s see if we can find who it belongs to.’