“Well, go on then. Try it.”
“What if I’m wrong?”
“Then you’re wrong, that’s all. Look – if you don’t want to do it, I will.”
“Maybe I ought to say the rhyme again.”
“The cat didn’t say the rhyme, did it? The cat just jumped.”
Josh took a step back, ready to jump, but before he could do so, Nancy said, “For God’s sake, Josh,” and jumped herself.
“Nance!” Josh shouted. But Nancy didn’t hit the wall. She landed on the other side of the candles, among the leaves, and in some extraordinary way the wall seemed further away, even though it wasn’t. She turned to him and smiled. “It’s all right” she said, although her voice sounded watery and strange, as if she were trying to talk to him through a diving mask. She started to make walking movements toward the wall even though she must have already reached it. She walked six or seven paces before she turned around again.
“It’s here!” she called. Her voice sounded even more distorted. “There’s another alleyway, here to the left!” She lifted her arm and pointed and her hand disappeared from sight, right into the brick. “It’s here, you can make your way through!” With that, she took a step sideways and disappeared too.
Eleven
Josh shouted out, “Nancy! Nance! Wait up, will you! Nance!”
Several passers-by stared at him. He was shouting at a brick wall, after all. Three young secretaries in short skirts looked at him and burst into fits of giggles.
There was nothing left to do. He prayed to God that his faith in the jumping-over-the-candle ritual was as strong as Nancy’s, and jumped.
He landed in the leaves on the other side, holding out his hand to balance himself. Nothing seemed to be different, except that the wall at the end of the niche appeared to be much further away than it was before. He turned around and looked back, and Star Yard was just the same. He could hear the shuffling of feet and the bustle of traffic and he could even feel the warm morning breeze.
He turned back and started to walk to the end of the niche. Nancy was right: there was a turning on the left, which seemed to lead to another dead end, just as it had in his hallucination. But he could hear Nancy’s footsteps through the leaves ahead of him, and when he called out, “Nancy!” she called back, “Hurry up, slowpoke!” and her voice sounded normal once again.
He went to the end of the next section of alleyway, and there was another alleyway, on the right. He went down that, and turned left. As he turned the corner, he made a point of looking up. The sky was uniformly gray, just like his hallucination, and there were scores of pigeons clustered on the window ledges of the buildings on either side. His sleeves brushed against the dirty brickwork.
Nancy was waiting for him at the end of the last section of alleyway, the back of her hand lifted against her forehead. The sun wasn’t shining here. In fact, it looked like rain. But as they stepped out of the niche, they were still in Star Yard, exactly where they had been before. People were still hurrying through it, swinging their briefcases, and at first the noises of a busy day in the City of London sounded just the same.
As he stood and listened, however, Josh gradually became aware of a difference in pitch. The traffic seemed to whine more; with a chug-chugging undertone; and he heard two or three motor-horns make an old-fashioned regurgitating noise, instead of the nasal beep of most modern cars. And there was a mixture of other unfamiliar sounds, too. The rumbling of cartwheels, and the clopping of horses.
Up above the rooftops he heard an abrasive droning, like a circular saw. It grew louder and louder, and he looked up to see a small stubby-winged airplane fly overhead, with a huge, idly rotating propeller, closely followed by another, and then another.
The effect was astonishing. Wonderful, and frightening, both at the same time. Josh took hold of Nancy’s hand. “Jesus, Nance. We’ve done it. We’ve come through, haven’t we?”
He looked back at the niche. It was exactly the same, except that there were no candles burning in front of it. “It’s one of the six doors. No doubt about it. We’re through. This is the parallel world.”
The people who walked past them were dressed in heavy, formal clothes. Everybody wore a hat: the men in bowlers or trilbies or pork pies, the women in berets or cloches. They all wore overcoats. Nobody wore sneakers and it was noticeable how well polished their shoes were.
“Do you think we’ve come back in time?” asked Nancy. Several people slowed down and stared at her, in her fringed buckskin coat, her short white skirt and her knee-high buckskin boots.
“I don’t know. Maybe we have. It doesn’t look like anybody ever even heard of Adidas.”
Nancy glanced anxiously back at the niche. “I just hope we can find our way back OK.”
“We must be able to. If Julia was here, and they dumped her body back in the real world, then the doors must work both ways.”
A young lad with a cloth cap went past, carrying a large basket heaped with loaves of bread. When he caught sight of Nancy he turned around and gave her a piercing wolf-whistle. “’Ere, miss! Left your frock at ’ome?”
“This is so embarrassing,” said Nancy. “Even if we haven’t come back in time, I don’t think anybody’s seen a miniskirt before.”
“You could button up your coat.”
“I have a much better idea. Let’s go back and find some clothes that don’t attract so much attention.”
“We’ll have to find some candles first.”
“What? I thought you bought a whole box.”
“I did, but I left them behind on the sidewalk.”
“God, Josh. You’re a genius. How did you think we were going to get back?”
“I didn’t. I didn’t really believe that we’d get here at all.”
“Well, we must be able to buy some candles.”
They walked down to the bottom of Star Yard. Most of the people who passed them were in too much of a hurry to notice them, but a rowdy group of office girls and their bowler-hatted boyfriends all stopped and stared and said, “Blimey, look at ’er!”
When they reached Carey Street they began to realize what a different world they had walked into. The older buildings were almost all the same, except that they seemed much more heavily blackened with soot. But the road was cobbled, even if the cobbles had been covered over with tarmacadam, and the traffic that snarled it up looked as if somebody had emptied a 1930s motor museum. Rileys, Bentleys, Wolseleys – all with huge chrome-plated headlamps and sweeping mudguards and running-boards.
They made their way down Chancery Lane, past the dark Gothic windows of the Law Society building. The sidewalks on both sides of the street were crowded with people, all dressed in overcoats and hats. Josh was beginning to think that he must be the only person on the planet who wasn’t wearing anything on his head. An old gentleman with a red carnation in his lapel stopped and took off his bowler hat and stared at Nancy with his mouth open, as if Mary Magdalene had just walked past him.
Fleet Street was even more crowded than Chancery Lane. The traffic was at a standstill, all the way down the hill to Ludgate Circus. A steam train crossed the railway bridge on the other side of the circus, chuffing thick brown smoke and orange sparks into the air. Through the smoke Josh could make out the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral.
They crossed Fleet Street, weaving their way between buses and taxis. On the opposite corner there was a newsstand, with scores of magazines and newspapers on display. The posters for The Evening News announced ZEPPELIN ACCIDENT: SEVEN KILLED and RANGOON RIOTS: REBELS QUELLED. The news-vendor wore a flat cap and a long shabby coat and had a burned-down cigarette stuck to his lower lip. Every now and then, without warning, he whooped out, “‘Orrible hairship haccident, seven day-ead!”