This is too bizarre. Ghosts. A father who only appears in a mirror. What in the bloody hell am I doing in a madhouse like this?
"We have to get back," he said aloud. "I don't care if anyone can see us or not—it's too long for us to be missing, out of the house."
"Whatever they use to spy on us," she said blithely, "they will only see us having a lesson here outside, you reading and me making notes." She grinned. "My friend promised me."
"Even so." He stood up. "This is all a bit too strange for me, Ava."
"But I want to talk to you," she said, her wide-eyed face suddenly anxious again. "Truly talk. Don't leave, Paul! I . . . I am lonely, too."
Her hand, he suddenly realized, was gripping his. Helplessly, he allowed himself to be tugged back into a sitting position once more. "Talk about what, Ava? I know you're lonely—I know this is a terrible life for you, in some ways. But there's nothing I can do. I'm just an employee myself, and your father is a very powerful man." But was it true, he wondered? Were there not laws of some kind? Even a rich man's child had rights—was there not some parental responsibility to allow one's offspring to live in the century into which she had been born? It was hard to think: the noise of the stream was so insistent, the light beneath the trees so oddly diffuse, as though he labored under some kind of supernatural glamour.
What should I do? Quit and file, a lawsuit? Take it to UN Human Rights? Wasn't Finney pretty much warning me about that when he hired me? A sudden thought, like a splash of icy water—What really happened to the last tutor? They were displeased with her, they said. Very displeased.
The grip of Avialle Jongleur's pale fingers had not diminished. When his eyes met hers, he saw for the first time the true desperation, almost madness, under the girlish flightiness.
"I need you, Paul. I have no one—no one real."
"Ava, I. . . ."
"I love you, Paul. I have loved you since you first came to my house. Now we are truly alone and I can tell you. Can't you love me, too?"
"Jesus." He pulled away, shocked and almost ill with sadness. She was crying, but her face held both misery and something harder and sharper, something as fierce as anger. "Ava, don't be silly. I can't . . . we can't. You're my pupil. You're still a child!"
He turned to go. Even in his confusion he found himself stepping carefully over the ring of white, fleshy mushrooms.
"A child!" she said. "A child could not hurt for you the way I do—ache for you."
Paul hesitated, compassion battling with quiet terror. "You don't know what you're saying, Ava. You've met almost no one. You've had nothing to read but old books. It's understandable . . . but it just can't be."
"Don't go." Her voice rose to a raw pitch. "You must stay here!"
Feeling like nothing less than a traitor, he turned and walked away.
"I am not a child!" she shouted from inside the magic circle. "How can I be a child, when I have already had a child of my own. . . ?"
The long skein of memory abruptly tore and was gone. Ravaged, feeling a regret so fierce it was almost physical pain, Paul fell from the recovered past into the darkly fractured now.
The first thing he realized as he sat up, heart pounding, was that he could still hear rushing water, even though the echo of Ava's last bizarre pronouncement was completely gone. The second realization, which followed a split-instant later, was that he was sitting on the ground at the foot of an immense, impossibly huge tree.
"Oh, God!" he groaned, and for a moment hid his face in his hands, fighting the urge to weep. When he pulled his hands away the tree was still there. "Oh, God, not again!" The rough cylinder that rose beside him was as wide as an office tower, the gray bark stretching up what must have been hundreds of meters in the air before the first branches spread out from the central column. But there was something odd about the spectacle that only the massive disorientation of waking from the memory-dream had prevented him realizing immediately.
There was not one gigantic tree as in his first battlefield hallucination, a single magical pillar stretching up to the clouds: there were hundreds, all around him.
Blinking, he stood up, slipping a little on the loose ground.
It's real, he thought. It's all real—or at least it's no dream this time. He turned slowly, taking in the details he had not been able to absorb upon opening his eyes. It was not just the trees that were titanic. From where he stood, perched on a raised mountain of leaf fragments and loose soil, he could see that everything around him was immense—even the blades of grass were ten meters high, bellying in the breeze like narrow green sails. Farther away, through a stand of swaying flowers each as large as the rose window of a cathedral, lay an expanse of green water, the source of the pervasive rushing noise—water wide as an ocean, but rippling around huge sticks and house-size stones in a way that told him it was actually a river.
I've shrunk. What in the bloody hell is going on? He struggled for a moment, trying to regain some of the perspective lost by the surge of returning memory. Before what happened that day in the fairy ring came back to me, where was I?
On the mountaintop. With Renie and Orlando and all the rest. And with God, or the Other, or whatever that was. Then the angel came—the other Ava came—and . . . and what? He shook his head. Who's doing these things to me? What did I do to deserve this?
He looked around for his companions, wondering if any of them had wound up in this place with him, but other than the mighty river, nothing stirred unless the wind moved it. He was alone among the oversized stones and trees.
This must be the bugworld place Renie and the others told me about. His attention was suddenly drawn to a round rock only a few paces away, a near-spherical pebble about his own size, half-buried in the mulchy slope. He had glanced at it briefly in his first inspection . . . but now it was uncurling.
Startled, Paul scrambled a few steps up the slippery hill, back toward the trunk of the gigantic tree, but when he recognized the unfolding shape, a gray-brown shell in close-fitting segments, he felt a little better.
It's just a wood louse. A pillbug, as some called them—harmless, inoffensive. Though relieved, he was still uncomfortable seeing something usually found huddled in a pea-size ball under a plant pot now swollen to his own dimensions. A moment later, as the unfolded wood louse rolled over onto its belly and its dozens of legs stretched out to steady it on the uneven ground, he saw that the limbs were all different lengths, and that many of them ended in awkward hands with stumpy, disturbingly manlike fingers.
A chill ran through him as the creature reared up. Worse than the fingered hands was the front of the thing's head, a dim parody of a human face, as though parts not meant to serve such purposes had been crushed together into a mask—a brow-ridge above a dark, eyeless flatness on either side of the hint of a nose, a raggedly gaping mouth framed by tiny, atrophied mandibles.
Paul stumbled back as the thing lurched toward him, its strange arms reaching out like a crippled beggar's. So strongly did its pathetic, misformed face and halting gait speak of supplication that when it moaned "Fooood!" at him in a voice clearly not designed for human speech, he began to raise his hands in the same show of helplessness he had guiltily displayed to the itinerants of Upper Street back in London. Then a half dozen more of the creatures came rustling and squirming up out of the mulch, pushing their way to the surface to join the first in its pursuit, all crying, "Food! Foooood!" and Paul Jonas realized that the first mutation had not been begging, but ringing the family dinner bell.