But Josh was suddenly overwhelmed with a terrible feeling that he was going to be trapped between these two brick walls for ever. He was only six or seven feet from the end of the crevice. He could see daylight, and hear traffic, and he knew that it was the real world, his world, where there were no Hoodies and no Holy Harps and the skies didn’t grind with the sound of Zeppelins. But he couldn’t move any further. He was exhausted, agonized, and he simply couldn’t find the will to continue.
“Move!” Ella urged him. “Come on, Josh, you have to move!”
He shook his head. It was strange, but he almost felt like going to sleep, pinned between these walls. Anything was better than trying to scrape his way through. Anything was better than carrying on.
“Move, Josh, you bastard!” Ella screamed at him.
“I can’t,” he told her.
“Oh yes, you can. Because Nancy’s waiting for you; and your parents are waiting for you; and, most of all, because Julia wants you to catch the man who killed her, Josh, and you won’t be able to do that if you’re stuck here between these two brick walls.”
Josh looked at her. He had never seen a woman’s eyes look so fierce.
“You’re right,” he said. “God, I hate you. But you’re right.” And, inch by inch, he began to drag himself further along the crevice, until at last he reached the end. Ella followed him, and the two of them walked along the narrow alleyway until they reached Farringdon Road.
Outside, on the street, there was a blast of noise. Buses, trucks, taxis, trains. Hundreds of hurrying pedestrians. The air was thick with pollution, but at least the smell was familiar. He had left behind the oily diesel of the other London’s buses, and the stench of horse manure. He looked up in the sky and saw a small private jet whistling on its way to London City Airport. The sky was streaked with cloud, but the day was bright, and it was his sky.
They took a taxi back to west London. Josh was beginning to tremble uncontrollably, and Ella wanted him to get to bed as soon as possible.
“Do you want me to call you a doctor?” she asked him, as they went up in the hotel elevator.
“What am I going to say to a doctor? All of my teeth have been drilled right down to the nerves and there are holes in my body. He’s going to think I’m some kind of sado-masochist.”
“Just watch out for infection, that’s all.”
“I’ll take a salt bath. But I need sleep, more than anything else. And I need to see Nancy.”
He opened the door of his hotel room. “Hallo?” he called. “Nancy?”
He knew that she wasn’t there, the moment he stepped inside. The television was blank, the bed was neatly made. He walked through to the bathroom and switched on the light, but she wasn’t there either.
“Maybe she’s gone round to your place,” he suggested. He opened the closet. She didn’t seem to have taken any of her clothes. There was a beige cardigan lying across the bed which he had never seen before.
Ella held up a note that she had found on the dressing table. “I don’t think so. You’d better read this.”
Josh sat down on the bed. The note was written in big, loopy writing, the kind that Nancy used for love letters.
Don’t be mad at me, Josh. I pray that Ella has brought you back safely and that you’re able to read this note and I want you to know that I love you so much. But there’s only one way to finish this, and that’s to catch Frank Mordant. I knew you wouldn’t let me go, so I’ve kind of made a unilateral decision. I’m one hundred percent sure that I can handle this, so please don’t worry about me. I’ll be back before you know it, and I’ll be bringing Frank Mordant back with me.
Twenty
Did you know that she was going to do this?” Josh demanded.
“I didn’t have a clue, Josh. Honest. But it sounds to me like she’s got some kind of a plan.”
“How the hell does she expect to catch Frank Mordant single-handed? The goddamned Hoodies will have her before she’s gotten anywhere near him!”
“She probably stands a better chance alone,” said Ella. She picked up the cardigan that Nancy had left on the bed. “It looks like she bought herself some period clothes, too, so she shouldn’t attract too much attention.”
“I have to go after her,” said Josh. “She doesn’t have any idea what kind of danger she’s in!”
“I think she does,” said Ella. “I told her all about Frank Mordant. Well, the little we know. Obviously she’s decided that she can deal with him better if she deals with him alone.”
“Deal with him? Deal with him? How do you deal with a guy like Frank Mordant in a world where the Hoodies are loose? You might as well deal with your broken sink disposal unit by sticking your hand down it.”
“Josh, there’s nothing that you can do. You’re injured; you’re in shock. You need to sleep for twenty-four hours just to get your head back together. Besides, you can’t go looking for Nancy because you’ve only been back here for less than an hour.”
“I’m not tired, Ella. I’m going after her.”
“Josh, it’s impossible. You have to wait for at least one full rotation of the earth before you can go back to that London. Otherwise, you’ll carry on to the next London, and the next.”
“But it’s only a door, right? You come in, you go out.”
“We call it a door but it’s not like a normal door. If you go through it again and again, all on the same day, you’ll take yourself further and further away from the London you left. We’re talking about parallel worlds here, Josh. Worlds within worlds, like one of those Japanese ivory balls, with another ball inside it, and another ball inside that. To put it in words of one syllable, things have to line up.”
“Ella, I can’t let Nancy wander around alone in that other London. She’s not sightseeing, for Christ’s sake – she’s trying to find a serial murderer!”
“Hasn’t it occurred to you that she might know exactly what she’s doing?”
“Oh, sure. And maybe bears go into the woods and dress up as women.”
Ella laid her hands on his shoulders and looked him directly in the face. “You cannot go after her, Josh. Neither can I. Right now, all we can do is to give her some time, and wait to see what happens. If you really want to go and find her tomorrow, then we’ll talk about it. But you’re a wanted man now, and you won’t be able to do it unaided. If the Hoodies catch you again, they’ll kill you, no doubt about it.”
That evening, Josh ordered a turkey club sandwich on room service, and after he had eaten it, he poured the entire contents of the salt-cellar into the bathtub, to make a healing saline solution. He had a long and painful soak, and several times he nearly fell asleep. When he managed to haul himself out of the bath, he stood in front of the steamed-up mirror. He hardly recognized himself. He looked like an amateur boxer after an unsuccessful fairground challenge; or the victim of a head-on traffic accident.
It was so tempting to creep between the clean white sheets of his hotel bed and fall asleep. After all, hadn’t Ella told him that there was nothing he could do until tomorrow? But he wasn’t sure that Ella had been telling him the truth about the rotation of the earth. Simon Cutter had said the same thing, but both he and Ella had shared a vested interest in him not going immediately back through the door. Ella, because she obviously cared about him, and wanted him to rest; and because she didn’t want him causing any more trouble for the resistance movement. Simon, because he had wanted to exploit him for all of the watches and laptop computers and bottles of whisky that he could get.