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

did you see that?’
    â€˜I saw it all right,’ said Piff, in an awed voice. ‘That’s some conjuring trick, right?’
    â€˜Ah, but it isn’t a conjuring trick,’ said Mrs Crawford. ‘What I’m trying to prove to you is that you were quite right to wonder if the voices came from the wall.’
    She stood up; and put the pattern down on the table. ‘There is another world, a world of patterns, where what you see is what there is. It’s no more complicated than that. If a pattern looks as if you can hook your finger round it, you can. Do you ever see faces in your wallpaper?’
    â€˜In the roses sometimes.’
    â€˜I thought you might. Roses are always rather face-like, aren’t they? But in the world inside your wallpaper, they actually do have faces. In the world inside your wallpaper, or your curtains, or your carpets, everything is exactly what you perceive it to be.’
    â€˜There’s really a world there? Really?’
    â€˜Some people say that it’s the world we originally came from. They say that we decorate our homes and our clothes with patterns because they remind us of the world we once lived in.’
    â€˜You mean we can get through, from one world into the other?’
    â€˜Within limits. You hooked your finger round the knot, didn’t you? Where do you think your finger actually was, when you stuck it into that pattern? It didn’t come out of the back of the cardboard, did it? It wasn’t here, in this room. It was there, Jessica, in the world of patterns. Look.’
    Mrs Crawford knelt down on the green-and-yellow carpet, which was patterned with stylized waterlilies and curly leaves. She stared at it for almost a minute, and then she scooped her hand into it, actually into it, and lifted it up again, with one of the waterlilies in the palm of her hand.
    â€˜Whoa, that has to be a trick,’ said Epiphany. ‘No way you can do that for real.’
    â€˜Feel it,’ said Mrs Crawford, and handed her the woven-wool waterlily. Epiphany turned it over and over, then shook her head in perplexity and handed it back.
    â€˜How do you know about this?’ asked Jessica.
    Mrs Crawford replaced the waterlily, smoothed it over, and seamlessly it became part of the carpet again.
    â€˜If that’s not a conjuring trick, that must be real magic,’ said Epiphany.
    Mrs Crawford smiled. ‘No – I don’t believe in magic. But I do believe in other worlds – worlds that exist on the other side of mirrors, or reflected in ponds, or in wallpaper patterns.’
    She stood up and went to the window. The wintry light made her look very pale, as if she were a ghost of herself. ‘In fact, I
know
there are other worlds. I’ve known it since I was seven years old. They had a science conference in San Diego about five years ago and all of these eminent physicists said that there must be alternative realities, alongside “our” reality. And that was such a relief, because all of my life I had thought that I must have been imagining what happened to me, even though I was convinced that I wasn’t.’

The Sapphire Ring
    â€˜I t was in the winter of 1937. In those days, believe it or not, I used to live in your grandparents’ house. My mother was working as cook and housekeeper for George and Martha Pennington, and so she and I had rooms upstairs. In November I went down with a fever and I had to stay in bed for nearly three days. My bedroom had wallpaper with diamond shapes on it, and the more I stared at it, the more it looked like dozens and dozens of diamond-shaped faces.
    â€˜On the second night, just as I was going to sleep, I heard somebody talking to me, a woman. She called me by name, “Edwina! Edwina!” I was frightened at first, but then I heard singing. Sweet, sweet singing, so sweet that it would make you cry. And still this woman’s voice calling,