The Hidden World (6 page)

Jessica nodded. ‘My parents were killed in a car accident. It was a year ago next month.'

‘I'm so sorry to hear that. You must miss them dreadfully.'

‘Yes.'

‘I lost my mother in the summer, you know, and I miss her, too. But do you know something? I feel like she's never very far away. I don't know whether you feel the same.'

‘Sometimes.'

‘I was upstairs in the bedroom yesterday and I was straightening the bed when I felt her lay a hand on my shoulder. I knew it was her. I turned around, and I was almost expecting to see her standing there, but of course she wasn't.'

Jessica didn't answer. They had almost reached the pond, and Dianna's mother was slowing down. Then, as she was just about to park, Jessica said, ‘Last night, my mother stroked my hair.'

Dianna's mother stopped the Jeep and stared at her. ‘You really felt it?'

Jessica nodded.

‘Then it's true, isn't it?' said Dianna's mother. ‘They're not very far away, are they? They're still with us, you know. They're still so close!'

They skated close together, the four of them, chattering and laughing. Even though Epiphany and her friends were only thirteen, they accepted Jessica into their circle immediately, as long as she didn't mind talking about the latest Barbie accessories, and how cool it was to have a cellphone, and which boys in the eighth grade were really dreamy.

They skated all the way across the pond and under the trees, flashing from sunshine to shadow and back into sunshine. Jessica skated faster and faster, swooping around Epiphany and her friends and then spinning on the points of her skates. On the ice, it didn't matter if she had a limp, and she had always been a good skater. Her father used to take her skating regularly at Rockefeller Center.

She took hold of Epiphany's hand and helped her to pick up speed across the pond, and whirled her around like an ice-ballerina. Then she made all of the girls hold hands together, and they skated in a circle, faster and faster, round and round, all the way across the pond, until Epiphany tripped and they all tumbled over on the ice, laughing.

Jessica knelt on the ice on her hands and knees, gasping for breath. But as she tried to stand up, she thought she glimpsed something under the ice, something pale.

‘Jessica! Come on, Jessica!' called Epiphany. ‘Let's do it again!'

But Jessica was staring in growing horror at the blurred, oval shape that she could see beneath the ice. It looked like a face – a face that was wide-eyed with panic.

‘Help me.'

She heard the words as distinctly as if they were being whispered right into her ear, even with all the shouting, laughing and whooping from the other skaters on the pond.

‘Help me. It's coming to get us. It's going to take us all.'

Urgently, Jessica scraped away the fine crust of snow on top of the ice to clear a window. She looked down again, and the face was still there, pleading with her. And with a shiver, she recognized who it was. It was the same face that she had discovered in the attic, the boy with the rounded forehead and the long nose.

She hit the ice with her fist, twice, but all she did was hurt her fingers.

‘Help!' she screamed, awkwardly climbing to her feet. ‘Here! Help! There's somebody trapped under the ice!'

At first nobody took any notice. A middle-aged couple glided past her and simply shrugged at each other. But then she skated over to a large brown-bearded man who was teaching two little children to balance on the ice.

‘You have to help me! There's somebody trapped under the ice!'

‘What?' he said. ‘Where?'

He called his wife over to take care of the children, and then he came skating after her. Jessica took him to the place where she had fallen over and knelt down. ‘He was here! I saw his face! I heard him calling out for help!'

Two or three more men gathered around. ‘What's going on, Daniel?'

‘Girl here says that somebody's gotten themselves trapped under the ice.'

‘I saw his face! I heard him calling for help!'

The bearded man knelt on the ice next to her and started to clear it with the side of his glove. ‘Can't see nothing.'

‘He coulda floated further in.'

‘There's no current, though. He couldn't have floated far.'

‘He'll be drowned by now, won't he?'

‘Not if there's air between the ice and the water. That sometimes happens. He couldn't have called out for help otherwise.'

‘Where'd he fall in? There's no holes in the ice anywhere.'

‘That doesn't matter, we'll have to get him out. Jay – there's an ax in the back of my truck.'

‘I've got a snow shovel.'

‘Me too.'

‘We'll have to clear everybody off the pond.'

Five or six men ran off to their vehicles to bring shovels, tire irons and anything else they could use to break the ice, while several others shepherded everybody else up onto the banks.

Jessica stood back while the bearded man swung his ax and chipped into the ice. He swung again and again, grunting with every swing. At last the ice let out a squeaking crack, and a large triangular lump was broken away. Now all of the men started banging and hacking at it, and within a few minutes a large jagged hole had been made, where there was nothing but chilly black water.

The bearded man knelt at the edge of the ice and peered downward, shading his eyes. He even swished his arm in the water, to see if he could feel anything.

‘Nothing so far. Let's chop her back a bit … he could have floated toward the center.'

They hacked away at the ice for almost twenty minutes, until cracks began to spread all across the pond and they had to retreat to the edge.

‘I couldn't see nothing at all,' said the bearded man, sweating and shivering at the same time. ‘Are you sure there was somebody there?'

‘I think we ought to call the Sheriff,' said one of the men. ‘They need to send a diver down there.'

‘I saw him,' said Jessica. ‘I promise you, I saw him. He was calling out, “Help me, help me.”'

Dianna's mother came over; Epiphany had called her on her cellphone: ‘Jessica, are you all right?'

‘I saw somebody under the ice, I promise.'

‘That's OK. Listen, come and sit in the car, you're freezing.'

‘You won't take her away, ma'am, will you?' said the bearded man. ‘The Sheriff'll be wanting to talk to her.'

The Sheriff called just before supper that evening. He was so tall that he had to duck his head when he came into the kitchen. He had a big blue chin and a large nose but tiny, glittering eyes like a raccoon.

‘We dragged the pond from one end to the other, and all we found was a 'seventy-six Chevy pick-up and a whole tangle of lumber. I'm pleased to say that there was nobody trapped under the ice, but I don't think the skaters were too happy about it.'

Jessica was sitting at the far end of the kitchen table, with Grandpa Willy beside her. ‘Jessica says she saw somebody's face and heard them calling out for help and I for one believe her.'

‘I'm not saying she's lying, Mr Williams, but I think it's pretty obvious that she was mistaken. Maybe it was your own face you saw, Jessica, reflected in the ice? It was a pretty bright morning, after all.'

‘It was a boy. I heard his voice. He was calling for help.'

‘I understand you had a pretty bad knock on the head last week.'

‘It's nothing to do with that. I saw him with my own eyes. I heard him.'

‘Well,' said the Sheriff, ‘there's really nothing else I can do, except file a report.'

‘Thank you, Sheriff,' said Grannie. ‘You're sure you don't want some coconut cookies to take home?'

‘No, thanks all the same. I just hope Jessica makes a rapid recovery, that's all.'

‘Good-night, Sheriff.'

That evening, as they sat in the dining-room over a candlelit supper, Jessica took a deep breath and said, ‘Grandpa?'

Grandpa Willy looked up from his ham and greens. ‘What is it, honey?'

‘Grandpa, I went up into the attic.'

He chewed and swallowed and then he said, ‘You did, huh? Didn't I tell you, you really shouldn't go up there? The floor's only half boarded over, and it's not too safe. Wouldn't like you falling through the ceiling and ending up in bed with us!'

‘I'm sorry, but I thought I heard a noise.'

‘What kind of a noise?'

‘I don't know. Maybe it was nothing. But it sounded like voices.'

Grandpa Willy looked across at Grannie. It was difficult for Jessica to see Grannie's face because of the candles that were shining in the middle of the table.

Grannie said, ‘Is that the reason you asked me if there were any children in the house?'

‘That's right.' Jessica didn't know if she was making a serious mistake, asking Grannie and Grandpa Willy about what she had heard. Supposing there
were
children trapped in the house somewhere, and supposing Grannie and Grandpa Willy were keeping them captive? But when she really thought about it, it was too much like ‘Hansel and Gretel' to be true.

Grandpa Willy forked himself another boiled potato out of the tureen. ‘These old houses, they always make noises. It's the wind, mostly, blowing down the chimneys, and under the floorboards. The plumbing, too.'

Jessica said, ‘I went right down to the end of the attic and I found some masks.'

Grandpa Willy nodded. ‘I see. You didn't disturb them or nothing?'

‘Oh, no. I just looked at them. They scared me when I first saw them. I thought they were real children.'

‘We never quite knew what to do about those,' said Grannie. ‘We thought about taking them to the New Milford Historical Society Museum, but somehow we thought it was more fitting if we left them where we found them.'

‘Do you know who they are?'

‘Oh, yes. They were the Pennington children. The Penningtons used to live in this house before my father bought it. What all the children's names were, I can't remember, but they're written down someplace.'

‘What happened to them?'

‘They went down with the Rocky Mountain spotted fever. There was kind of an epidemic of it in this part of the country just before World War Two. Usually kids get over it, but this was a real bad strain, and they never did. The oldest child was fifteen and the youngest was four and all five of them died within a week.'

‘That's terrible.'

‘Yes, it was,' said Grandpa Willy. ‘The children's parents were spared, but of course they were grief-struck, and they never got over it. They had a death mask made of every child, so that they could remember what they looked like. But from what I was told the mother disappeared and the father just stayed in bed all day drinking and the house went to rack and ruin, and that's why my father was able to buy it so cheap. My father couldn't really afford it, and neither can your grandmother and me, but it's our home, and we plan on spending the rest of our days here. But I guess in a way it's those children's home, too, and that's why we left those masks where they were.'

‘That face I saw under the ice, at Millard's Pond … that looked like one of the death masks.'

Grandpa Willy reached across the tablecloth and held her hand. ‘I'm not saying for one moment that you didn't see what you thought you saw. I told the Sheriff that I believed you were telling the God's-honest truth, and I believe you were. But, more often than not, things aren't what they appear to be.'

Grannie said, ‘Do you want some more greens, sweetie-pie?'

Jessica lay awake staring at the ceiling. Supposing the knock on her head
had
made her go peculiar? After all, she had never heard the voices before she was concussed, and she had never seen the wallpaper move. Yet she was certain that she had felt somebody stroking her hair, and that she had seen a flower on the wallpaper flutter. And she was just as sure that she had seen the boy beneath the ice, his mouth opening and closing as he desperately struggled to breathe.

In the middle of the night, it started snowing again, thick and silent. Jessica slept with one hand against the wall, her fingers half open. She dreamed that a pale yellowish hand came sliding out of the wallpaper. It stroked her palm, then intertwined its fingers with hers, and gently started to tug her toward the wall.

She suddenly woke up, and she could actually feel the fingers tugging her, and she cried out, ‘No!' and whipped her hand away from the wall. She sat up for a long time, breathing shallow and fast, massaging her hand and staring at the wallpaper.

It had been a dream, hadn't it? It must have been a dream. But all the same, she climbed out of bed and curled up instead on her basketwork chair. She woke up very early the next morning with pins-and-needles in her feet and a creaking neck.

G
rannie made her a breakfast of hot waffles with maple syrup and blueberry jelly, and a big mug of hot chocolate with three spoonfuls of sugar in. ‘Are you all right, sweetie-pie?' she asked. ‘You look a mite tired.'

‘I didn't sleep so well, that's all.'

‘You didn't hear any more voices?'

‘No. But I couldn't stop thinking about those Pennington children.'

‘I know. It's so sad, isn't it? But things were a whole lot different in those days. Lots of children died of all kinds of quite ordinary illnesses like measles and chicken-pox. When I was a young girl there wasn't any such thing as antibiotics.'

Jessica washed her plate and her mug. Then she went into the hallway and put on her long black hooded overcoat, her long black scarf and her bright red Wellingtons. She called out, ‘Goodbye, Grannie, see you later!' and went out of the house into the snow. It was always quiet out here on the road to Allen's Corners, but today the hills were so silent that Jessica felt she was deaf.