far corner stood an easel shrouded in a piece of stained cloth. There was a different cover on the bed, all emerald and peacock-blue, embroidered with twining feathers and iridescent eyes: it was very beautiful but somehow it repelled her. She could imagine it stitched in pain by women with blistered fingers and vision weakened from peering at their labour. She caught its reflection in the spotless mirror, turned away; and then her gaze was drawn back to the glass. The image showed her a bedroom within a bedroom, the alien invasion of Alison’s possessions, the books, the paintings, the plant. But the sumptuous curtains were threadbare as before, the carpet dim with age, murky with ingrained dirt. ‘Will…’ Fern whispered, suddenly pale, struggling with the evidence of her senses.
But her brother was concentrating on the television. He had wheeled the unit away from its place against the wall and was toying with the remote control, obtaining nothing but crackle and snow. He had not noticed the mirror, and Fern found that she shrank from drawing his attention to it, more than half afraid he would not see what she saw. She forced herself to look elsewhere, her glance alighting on a box at the bedside, a rectangle of some dark wood, its sombre hue veined as if with faint gold, the lid inlaid with ominous characters in red enamel. When she touched it a scent came to her, as if carried on a nonexistent breeze in a room with barely a draught: the smell of a northern forest, of sap rising, leaves opening, roots drinking, as if the wood still lived, dreaming of the days when it was a tree among trees. She felt round the rim of the lid, encountered the metal clasp which closed it, and bit back the beginnings of a scream. The stab of pain was like a burn, though her hand was unmarked. ‘What is it?’ Will inquired, distracted from the television screen.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Fern. ‘It felt like the door handle, only worse. I need gloves.’
The gloves were in a drawer under the bedside table. Fern noted with disapproval that they were made from the skin of a reptile, snake or lizard; the mottled patterns appeared to alter in a changing light, as if, like the wood, some elusive memory of life lingered in the dead scales, shifting colours like a chameleon. She pulled on the righthand one: it had looked overlarge but the fingers seemed to shrink onto hers, skin melding with skin, until it no longer resembled a glove and she knew a sudden terror that it would never come off. Her arm would terminate for all time in a claw. ‘Can you open it now?’ Will demanded. She pressed the clasp without ill effect; the lid lifted of its own accord. Inside, the box was divided into sections. There were tiny jars and bottles with labels too minute to decipher; a squat book, leatherbound and handwritten, its pages sere with age; strangest of all, an unmarked video cassette, the tape invisible in its opaque casing. ‘Let’s try it,’ said Will, his expression bright with a mixture of curiosity and daring; but he could not pick it up. Fern took it in her gloved hand and inserted it in the machine, then they sat on the peacock bed-cover to watch. Will pressed play. There was a click, and the screen disappeared. The square outline of the TV set framed a hole, bottomless as the Pit, a window into nothing. A solitary star, infinitely remote, no bigger than a grain of dust, winked and died in its depths. ‘They do it with computers,’ Will said. He did not sound convinced.
The image came rushing up towards them from the point where the star had died, spinning to a halt, shuddering into coherence. This was no two-dimensional film but a spyhole on reality, a street with exhaust fumes and erratic sunshine, an old man getting into an old car. He tugged a bunch of keys out of his pocket, glanced at it in irritation, and put it back, subsequently producing a much smaller bunch which evidently included the key to the ignition. It came to Fern that this must be Great-Cousin Ned, and on that first keyring was the one key they sought. But the image was gone; another crowded on its heels, and another, a quickfire succession of instant and incident, fragments of history tumbling over each other, hurtling back further and further into the past. A market stall with a tray of trinkets where sifting fingers brushed over an object she could not see; a coved cellar piled with cases on which the dust lay undisturbed; a uniformed figure picking up something from a blood-smeared floor; two men staring into a flame, their faces lit from below, one chubby and eager, the other very young but already shrewd, his forelock limp with sweat, premature lines in his thin cheek. For a second, his eyes lifted, and they were brown and golden and green as a sunlit wood. Then the chimera was lost, overwhelmed in a chaos of other faces: a gipsy, a woman with languorous eyes, a man with a bitter mouth. A waveless sea trailed at the stern of a seedy fishing boat, the sails hanging immobile in the torpid air. The setting sun spilled from beneath the cloud-shelf and flashed like fire across the ocean, igniting a path of gold where a dark silhouette rose to a fatal rendezvous. And then the water closed over all, and far below a skull blossomed, growing slowly into flesh and form, but before Fern could see any clear features white hands covered it, and it was gone. At the last there came another boat, a struggling vessel with bent mast and splitting timbers, riding on a storm beyond imagining. The tempest shook the television set as if it were made of card; a gust of wind tore round the room, wrenching at the curtains, snapping the window wide. Lightning crackled in the gap where the screen used to be. Fern and Will felt themselves lifted up, they and the house and the hillside without, as if the dimension in which they dwelt had turned into a giant elevator, and the only fixed universe was inside the television. They clung to the bedposts like children on a Ferris wheel, soaring through the tumult of sky and sea, until they could see the many-coloured flares pulsing like a phantom coronet above the roof of the clouds, and hear the thunder-drums rolling down below. And then a hole was ripped in the canopy and a chasm opened amidst the waves, and there was the ship plunging into it, and the helmsman was swept away, and Fern knew the glimmer at his throat was the missing key, and she saw the pale arms of the mermaid dragging him to his death. A swift darkness spread across the vision, blotting out even the storm, and a voice boomed out of it as cold and empty as the deeps of space. ‘It is forbidden to go further back,’ it said. ‘The city has been banished from Timer and Forever, history and memory. No man shall look on Atlantis again.’ There was a snick like the closing of a door, and the screen was back in place. The room around them was stationary; house and hillside did not stir. Fern was trembling so violently she did not trust herself to speak.
‘My G-God,’ stammered Will. ‘My God.’ And: ‘What was that? What did it all mean?’
‘It means we’re in trouble,’ Fern said briefly, when she was sure she could keep the quiver out of her voice. She pressed the eject button and replaced the video in the box.
Will was recovering his nerve, too quickly for her taste. ‘It felt like a rollercoaster ride through the Big Bang,’ he declared. ‘I’ve never been so terrified—never. Wow. Bloody wow. What do we do now?’
‘Leave,’ said Fern.
Will lowered himself over the window-sill, feeling for the topmost rung with an unsteady foot. ‘Careful,’ said his sister. She thought she might have been able to open the door with the glove on, but she could not be certain of resealing it afterwards, and she did not want Alison to realise anyone had been in the room. Will disappeared from view and she took a last look round, flinching automatically from the mirror, hesitating when her eye fell on the easel. She went over to it and twitched the cloth aside. The area that resembled mould seemed to have grown, closing in about the horse’s head: there was a note of panic in its midnight gaze. Fern caressed the surface of the painting with her gloved hand; its mottling altered immediately, coagulating into dark blotches which broadened into rippling bands, the colours flickering and changing like shadows in a jungle. Her fingertips skimmed the stable door, feeling for the lock that was not real; something jolted at her touch, and she began to tremble again, but with another kind of fear, a fear of her unknown self, of the glove that grew on her hand, of the thin current of power that trickled through the very core of her being. She retreated sharply and the cloth slid down over the picture: she would not lift it again. Will’s voice came to her from outside: ‘Fern! Fern!’ She pulled at the glove —she thought it was stuck but it slipped off easily. Putting it back in the drawer, she straightened the peacock coverlet and made her exit through the window, pausing to fiddle it shut before she descended the ladder.
‘Do you think she’ll guess we’ve been there?’ asked Will. He had obviously forgotten his light-hearted dismissal of Alison earlier that week.
‘I hope not,’ said Fern.
They