Read Online The Hidden World by Graham Masterton - Free Book Online Page A

her.
    â€˜I’m beginning to wonder.’
    â€˜Why should you think you’re mad?’ asked Mrs Crawford.
    Jessica shrugged and said nothing, but Epiphany said, ‘She’s been hearing voices, and seeing the flowers on her wallpaper move.’
    â€˜Piff!’ Jessica protested. ‘You promised you wouldn’t tell anybody!’
    â€˜Never mind,’ Mrs Crawford reassured her. ‘I’m not just anybody, am I? Where do these voices come from? What do they sound like?’
    â€˜They sound like children. They keep saying, “help us, help us, it’s coming to get us, we’re all going to be taken.” At first I thought they were coming from another bedroom, and then I thought they were coming down the chimney. I looked up in the attic, everywhere, but I couldn’t find them. It’s almost as if—’
    â€˜Yes? It’s almost as if what?’
    Jessica didn’t want to say, but Epiphany nudged her. ‘Go on, Jessica. Tell her.’
    Jessica hesitated for a moment, but at last she blurted out, ‘It’s stupid. It sounds like they’re coming from the wall.’
    â€˜I see,’ said Mrs Crawford, and she looked quite serious. ‘Can you tell how many children there are?’
    â€˜No, they all talk together.’
    Mrs Crawford thought about that for a while, and then she said, ‘You say you have wallpaper … what kind of a pattern is it?’
    â€˜Flowers … roses and irises and thistles.’
    â€˜Well, I want to show you something, and then I think you’ll realize that you’re not stupid and you’re certainly not mad.’
    She went over to a desk with a glass-fronted bookcase on top of it, crammed higgledy-piggledy with all kinds of books and papers and folded-up newspapers. She rummaged in one of the drawers for a while, then came back with a sheet of cardboard in her hand.
    â€˜I thought something was worrying you, didn’t I? I can always tell. My mother used to say that I had gipsy blood in me. I don’t know why: my father ran a radio-repair business, and my grandfather was a dentist – hardly what you’d call Romany stock. ‘Here,’ she said, squashing herself onto the couch right next to Jessica. ‘What do you see on this piece of cardboard?’
    Jessica frowned at it. All she could see was a pattern like interwoven string, fastened at intervals with decorative knots.
    â€˜It’s like some kind of weaving,’ she suggested.
    â€˜Yes, that’s right. But keep staring at it, and see if it turns into anything else.’
    Jessica stared at it and stared at it, but the pattern didn’t change. It began to shift slightly in front of her eyes, but that was only because she was staring at it so intently.
    â€˜Do you see the knot in the middle?’ asked Mrs Crawford. ‘What I want you to do is hook your finger around it.’
    â€˜I don’t know what you mean.’
    â€˜Hook your finger around it, all the way around it, and pull it.’
    â€˜But I can’t. It’s only a picture.’
    â€˜Try.’
    Jessica hesitated, but then she stuck out her right index finger and moved it nearer and nearer to the pattern, until it was almost touching the cardboard.
    â€˜Go on,’ Mrs Crawford encouraged her.
    She pushed her finger forward, and to her astonishment she was able to push it right into the pattern, as if the piece of cardboard wasn’t flat at all but a three-dimensional box criss-crossed with knotted string. She curled her finger around the knot in the middle, and she was able to pull it outward. She could actually feel its tension, as if it were real string.
    â€˜There now,’ said Mrs Crawford. Jessica withdrew her finger, and Mrs Crawford turned the pattern over to show her that it was still mounted on nothing more than a flat piece of cardboard.
    â€˜How do you do that?’ asked Jessica. ‘Piff –