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    Instead, her hand went through the door when she pushed, just sliding in, like a spoon going into thick soup, and then the whole of her slid through and was gone.
    6. Miss Tarrant
    I wasn’t scared, like you’d have thought, seeing Adalina walk through the door like that, and I was sort of prepared for it by that business with the switches. I could see from that, without having to think about it, that things were happening for her that weren’t happening for me, and the other way round, and the same with going into the nursery after her the night before, and finding it all shut up and empty. But it was weird all the same, seeing her slide out of sight like that. I tried the door handle, but the door was locked, which was how I’d left it the night before, and the door was an ordinary hard door I couldn’t have slid into to save my life.
    But like I say, I wasn’t scared, because Adalina just wasn’t scary. She was as ordinary as the door. I’d held her hand in mine and I knew she was real, and that was all there was to it. I didn’t bother unlocking the door and going in after her, because I knew I wouldn’t find anything different from the night before. Instead I went back along the corridor and lit my candle and switched off the lights and went up to my room and got into bed and blew out my candle and lay there in the dark, thinking about it.
    You’ll have worked out by now, I daresay, that we came from different times, Adalina and me. I hadn’t, though I could see her dress was old-fashioned. But then you’ve probably read stories and seen stuff on TV about people from different times, and the only book I’d read like that was The Time Machine where it doesn’t go into this business about not being able to change anything in any time except your own. Besides, in stories and things you don’t have to believe it, it’s just an idea you go along with for the sake of the story. But when it’s happening to you you’re trying to think about something you just aren’t set up to believe in, and that’s difficult for anybody, leave alone a kid of twelve who doesn’t know much about anything.
    In the end I decided there were two Theston Manors, just the same as each other, and in the same place, only two different lots of people lived there, and they couldn’t see each other or hear each other, so they didn’t know about each other and they couldn’t change anything at all in the other one’s Theston Manor. Only because both of us, Adalina and me, had been scared stiff by the same thing—what I called the cave—and at the same time in our two different Theston Manors, our fear had somehow sort of joined up and let us through to each other. But only as far as each other. We still couldn’t change anything in the other one’s Theston Manor. We couldn’t even hear each other, talking the usual sort of way, because voices are sounds and sound travels by moving the air around—I’d read about this in a Pears’ Cyclopedia back at the orphanage—and it was no use me stirring the air in my Theston Manor with my voice because it still didn’t stir anything in hers. Mind you, I didn’t get that far all at once, that second night, but that’s how I was thinking by the time, four or five nights after, when she was really late.
    I’ll have to go back. You’ll have spotted I had a problem. I couldn’t go telling my grandmother night after night that I’d got a headache or she’d have decided I was sickening for something, and then she’d have started dosing me with Syrup of Figs, which was always the first thing she tried—she’d have given me Syrup of Figs if I’d broken my leg, most likely, just to be doing something till the doctor came. So around quarter past eight I made out I was getting sleepy. I don’t suppose I was much of an actor, because