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J.J.’s courage than he had expected. The only way into it was to drop down into a hole in the ground, then lie down on your stomach and wriggle through a short tunnel. But once that was behind him J.J. didn’t find it too bad. They had emerged into a long, narrow room with a muddy floor and an arched stone ceiling.
    “Impressive, isn’t it?” said Anne Korff, holding her candle up high so that J.J. could get a good look at the place.
    “Yes,” he said, and meant it.
    “There used to be thousands of these all over Ireland,” said Anne. “Very few are left now.”
    “What happened to them?”
    “I suppose most of them are still there, somewhere. But people blocked them up.”

    “Why?”
    “Well, I suppose they could have been dangerous. Maybe cattle fell into them, or children. Or perhaps there were people who didn’t want anyone going in or out to the other side.”
    “You can get out the other side?” said J.J.
    “That’s what I’m going to show you,” said Anne.
    She led the way along the chamber and ducked through a second crawl hole in the wall at the end. J.J. followed the wavering light of her candle and found himself in a second room, slightly smaller than the first.
    “Some of them have more chambers,” said Anne. “This one has only two. Some parts of the world have amazingly complicated versions of this: pyramids, catacombs, henges, and suchlike. The Irish have always had a knack for keeping things simple.”
    J.J. could see no way out of the room. He began to get an inkling that “the other side” might not mean what he had assumed that it did. Anne led him into the farthest corner of the room. She indicated the angle where the two walls met.
    “This is the way through,” she said.
    J.J. could see nothing but solid stone walls. “Where?”

    “You really believe anything is possible?” said Anne.
    “I do,” said J.J. with conviction.
    Anne Korff, carrying the only candle, walked through the wall and disappeared.
    Suddenly alone, in impenetrable darkness, J.J. experienced a moment of gut-wrenching terror. But before he could yield to panic, Anne Korff came back, stepping out of the wall just as she had stepped into it.
    “I’m going through now,” she said. “And this time I’m not coming back. Do you want to come or stay?”
    “Wait!” said J.J., too alarmed and confused to decide anything. “Don’t leave me here in the dark again!”
    “Come on, then,” said Anne. “Don’t think. Just walk…”
    She caught hold of his sleeve. The prospect of being left alone in the darkness again was a lot more frightening than walking into a wall. As Anne stepped forward again, J.J. followed.
    He had never imagined that it was possible to walk out of a place and arrive into it at the same time. But that appeared to be exactly what had happened. The room was exactly the same in every respect. The onlydifference that J.J. could perceive lay not in his surroundings but in himself. The sense of urgency that had pervaded his every waking minute for as long as he could remember was suddenly gone. He had grown so accustomed to it, in fact, that he had stopped being aware of it. Its sudden absence was astounding. He felt weightless.
    Anne had turned back toward the wall. “It’s a sort of membrane,” she said, stretching out a hand. It disappeared into the stones. There was no gap. Nothing opened. The stones fitted snugly around her arm. They looked solid, but they must have been as fluid as water. “It’s a perfect seal,” she went on. “We don’t break it when we come through. It molds itself around us and closes again behind us, just like water does when you get into it.”
    “Through where?” said J.J. He was still trying to get to grips with the concept of walking out of one room and arriving in it. As far as he could make out, they hadn’t gone anywhere.
    “Come and see.”
    Anne led the way through the two chambers; to J.J. it appeared to be the same way that they had come