The Bell Between Worlds (18 page)

“Why do you call her that? Roskoroy?”

“Oh, it was her father’s name, though here your father’s name is what you call a ‘surname’ – like Tate, for example. But for Simia, her father’s name is a matter of especial pride... but that’s a whole other matter.”

She drew in a breath and patted her knees. “Sylas Tate, I believe we both face much that we do not understand and we have to piece things together quickly. If the Ghor are so interested in your arrival, our hideout will not stay a secret for long.”

Sylas leaned back into the sofa. “But we were very careful. We…”

“They have ways,” said Filimaya with chilling certainty. She cleared her throat. “I must begin by telling you that your arrival is something of a surprise to us. It’s not a bad surprise by any means – indeed it may be a very good one – but it is a surprise nevertheless.”

Sylas looked confused. “But you sent Simia to
meet
me.”

“I
was
expecting you, but only once the bell had chimed. Those who know how to listen can hear the bell, even if it is not ringing for them.”

“And you know how to listen?”

“I do.”

He thought for a moment. “And the Ghor – would they have heard it?”

Filimaya shook her head. “No. But those whom the Ghor follow almost certainly would.”

“Thoth?”

She nodded.

“Now your arrival was a surprise because the chime of the Passing Bell is a summoning. It rings only at someone’s bidding.”

Sylas shifted uncomfortably. “But who would summon me?”

“
That
is the mystery,” said Filimaya. “For there is only one group of people who use the Passing Bell, and they are all but destroyed.”

“So it was them who…”

Filimaya shook her head. “No – it couldn’t have been them.”

“Why?”

“Because ‘they’ are us. The Suhl.” She gazed earnestly into his eyes. “This place, the mill, is one of only a few sanctuaries that we have left. There are just a handful of people still alive who are capable of raising the bell, and I know them all. Sylas, none of them conjured the bell.
We
didn’t bring you here.”

She settled back in her chair and looked at him steadily. He dropped his eyes. He had hoped that when he reached the mill he might start to understand what was happening to him, but now he was more confused than ever.

“So you don’t know why you are here any more than I do?”

“I have no idea,” he replied. “I don’t even know where ‘here’ is. Is this some kind of other–” he paused, still finding the idea quite ridiculous– “a kind of other
world
?”

Filimaya raised one of her slender eyebrows, but did not laugh. “Yes, in a manner of speaking,” she said lightly, “though it is best to think of it as something a little different, something a little more complicated. I’m afraid there’s no easy way of explaining it, so I’ll do my best to show you.”

She started pointing at objects in the room. “You will already have seen how the things around you seem strange, but at the same time familiar: the wooden panels, the sofa, the floorboards – all of them look like the things of your own world, do they not?”

Sylas shrugged. “Yes, of course.”

“That’s because your world is not as different from ours as you may think. Now take a look at the mirrors on the walls.”

He turned and looked at one of the mirrors mounted on the wall to their side. He squinted into the beam of light and even as he watched it dimmed slightly, then shapes and forms became visible in the brightness. At first they seemed random, but they soon started to form a picture – a picture that moved. He glanced in astonishment at Filimaya, but she too was staring at the mirror with one finger outstretched. When he looked back, the picture had taken shape. It was one that he recognised: on one side was the broad sweep of the river as it travelled round the meander, and on the other was part of the huge waterwheel, its massive blades flicking swiftly across the corner of the mirror. But, as he looked more closely, he could see that although it was familiar it was also quite different from the view that he knew, for it was looking down at the river from a great height.

His eyes widened. “This is the view from the roof of the mill!”

“Of course!” said Filimaya matter-of-factly. “That’s where we harvest our light, so all of our views come from there. Now look more closely. Look beyond what is strange and unexpected, and see what you
know
.”

Sylas glanced at her quizzically, then shuffled forward on the sofa until he was close to the mirror. He gazed at this strange window on to the world. He tried to ignore the weird, pointed roofs of the houses and the dark smoke lying over the town; he made an effort to imagine it without the distant tower, the vast waterwheel and the long lines of fishing nets along the riverbanks; and he did his best to look past the numerous strangely dressed figures he could see stooped over them and the curious little canoe paddling across from the far shore, its two occupants huddled over their oars. As these details faded in his mind, so he began to see the shape of the river and the form of the hills above the town. He saw the dark, shaded fringe of the forest and then, catching his eye and drawing his gaze upwards, the high, graceful circles of eagles in the sky.

He knew these things.

He felt the blood draining from his face as his eyes passed over the contours of hills that he remembered seeing from his window in Gabblety Row, and valleys filled with trees that he had gazed at when dreaming of places far away. When his eyes moved back to the river, he realised that he knew all too well these wide banks and this sweeping expanse of water. There, by a collection of fishing nets stretched across the mud, and there, where the little canoe was drawing close to a mangled jetty, were the places where the Hailing Bridge should have met the shore.

“Do you see?” came Filimaya’s gentle voice.

Sylas nodded, his eyes still fixed on the mirror. “It’s all just like home!”

Instinctively he peered across the river and over the town to a point in the distance – to the point where Gabblety Row should have been. He saw more pointed roofs and more bluish smoke, but no crooked chimney stack, no slanting walls, no Gabblety Row. Instead of the misshapen roofs and odd slumping walls he saw a strange-looking building of about the same size, flanked at both ends by tumbledown towers, each topped with its own pyramidal roof.

He let himself slip back on to the sofa and slowly lifted his eyes to Filimaya’s face. “So this world is in the same…
place
… as mine?”

“That’s right. Your world – which we call ‘the Other’ – occupies the very same space and the very same time as our own, but for some reason it is separate. Not only is it separate, it is different – like the other side of the same coin.”

Sylas shook his head and looked about him at the woodpanelled walls and the sofa and the door, as if doubting that they were really there. “You call my world the
Other
?”

She nodded.

“So what’s this place called?”

Filimaya smiled. “Well, most people know nothing else – to them it is simply the world. But to you and people of your world, ours has the same name: ‘the Other’.”

Sylas pondered this. “So ‘the Other’ is just the world you’re not in?”

“That’s right. It’s rather appropriate when you think about it, given that the worlds are a reflection of one another.”

There was another long silence. He wanted to ask more, but he had no idea where to start.

“It doesn’t seem real, does it?” she said.

“No,” he murmured, his eyes fixed on the mirror. “But after the last few days I’m not sure what real
is
any more.”

“It is indeed a strange twist of reality. And what is even stranger is that we, the Suhl, should be the ones who understand it best – for we believe in togetherness, the oneness of all things. To us this separateness is quite... wrong.”

“Well, it doesn’t seem
right
to me either.”

She gave him another of her sad smiles, seeming pleased with his remark.

“None of us finds these darker truths easy to accept – there are times when I still find them hard to grasp.” She drew a long breath. “But now I think we must at least try to understand more about you and what brought you here. Do you agree?”

Sylas drew his eyes away from the mirror, which still glimmered on the wall. “Yes,” he said, with new excitement. Perhaps this was finally the moment he would find out why all this was happening to him. Perhaps, he thought, casting his mind back to Espen’s last words, perhaps he would hear what it all had to do with his mother.

“So let us do this: tell me everything that led to you coming here – people, places, anything that you think may be of importance – then I will tell you if I can explain any of it for you. How does that sound?”

“Fine,” he replied. Yet, as he turned his thoughts to the past few days, he hesitated. “But so much has happened... Do you want to hear
everything
?”

“Let’s get as far as we can,” said Filimaya, settling back into her chair, drawing her legs up beneath her like a young girl.

And so Sylas began to tell his strange story. Filimaya listened intently, her sad eyes narrowing at times and widening at others. She was transfixed as he described Mr Zhi and asked him to explain every detail of his appearance and to recount every word that he had spoken. Sylas did his best to remember, telling her about his visit and ending with the moment he had been given the Samarok.

“Where is it now?” asked Filimaya, interrupting Sylas partway through a sentence.

He leaned over the side of the sofa and lifted up his rucksack. “It’s in here,” he said. “Do you want to see it?”

Filimaya eyed the bag keenly for a moment, but then drew her eyes away. “No. We can look at it later. Please continue.”

He replaced the bag by the side of the sofa, noticing how her eyes followed it until it was out of sight. He resumed his story with his awakening in the middle of the night, the awesome chime of the bell and the terrifying encounter with the black dog. He told of his meeting with Herr Veeglum as he left Gabblety Row, his flight through the estate and his encounter with Espen on the bridge. Again Filimaya wanted to know more about these two men – how they appeared, how they spoke, what they said – and Sylas did his best to remember.

He had no difficulty recalling Espen’s last words as he had fled into the forest: “
There lie your answers about who you are... about your mother.
”

He recounted every word and then paused, hoping that they might mean something to Filimaya.

For a moment she simply regarded him with the same warm, sad eyes.

“You hope that I know something of your mother, don’t you?”

He nodded eagerly.

“I’m afraid I do not,” she said, leaning forward and placing a hand on his.

Sylas’s heart sank. He had felt sure that, if anyone he had met would know something of her, it would be Filimaya. “Of course,” he said, dropping his eyes. “There’s no reason you...”

“Tell me about her,” she said, squeezing his hand.

He hesitated. He
never
spoke about his mother. That was his rule, his defence: his way of keeping her close, of keeping his memories intact and untouched.

“It’s all right,” said Filimaya, leaning back in her chair. “Simia will be a while yet, and we should save something of the rest of your story for when she returns. Tell me about your mother.”

To his surprise, Sylas found himself wanting to speak about her. Filimaya’s beautiful, kindly face somehow reminded him of her and he felt unexpectedly at ease. He knew he could trust her.

He began to describe his mum as he liked to remember her, when they had lived together in that lovely, warm little house in the country, the one next to the ruined mill and the angry little stream, where they had both been so happy. He talked about her important job as a biologist, of her love of learning, of her rooms full of books and laboratory equipment and charts and models. He talked excitedly about their walks in the woods when his mum would show him all of its wonders, and tell him what things were called, and explain how things grew and lived and died. And then, reluctantly, he described how it had all changed.

“It was just at night,” he said, “At first, that is. I remember hearing her from my room. The bedrooms were right next to each other and the walls were paper-thin. She really didn’t mean for me to hear. She hated me to hear. I just thought she was talking to someone… but it was the wrong tone. Her voice was quiet, as if she was speaking to someone very close. And then other times I would hear her singing quietly: so softly that it was as though she was singing a lullaby or something. But whenever I went in I found her on her own, curled up with her eyes closed as if she was talking in her sleep. And I’d think she was asleep, only… it was strange… every time – when I got near – she stopped.”

He looked at Filimaya. He saw none of the judgement in her eyes that he so feared.

“And then it got worse,” he said. “Much worse. Sometimes she’d wake up shouting… screaming. And she was so frightened. She’d come through to my room and sleep in my bed. Often she was shaking so much that she kept me awake. And she’d cry. She didn’t think I knew because she didn’t make a sound, but I could feel her when she hugged me... you know, sobbing... shaking.”

Filimaya leaned forward again, focused on everything he was saying, her eyes glazed with tears.

“And it just got worse and worse,” he said. “It started happening during the day and people stopped visiting. And then, one day, some people came and spoke with her, and showed her a lot of paperwork, and they had a big argument. Mum told me it was nothing to worry about, but–” he winced and swallowed hard– “but the next day they came back... and this time they came to take us away. And there were doctors there. For Mum. With needles and drugs and—”

His voice wavered and he pushed himself back in the sofa, keeping his eyes away from Filimaya’s, knowing that he might cry.

“And that was it. The last time I saw her. She was taken to some kind of hospital and I went to live with my Uncle Tobias in Gabblety Row...”