Free The Slanted Worlds by Catherine Fisher

“Push.”
    â€œNo! It’s too late.”
    Something crashed and gave. For a second he thought it was him, that he was out, then behind him the lock burst. Pinned halfway to freedom, he slipped off the bracelet and flung it at Gideon, who caught it with astonished speed.
    â€œTo Venn
. Not Summer! Promise me!
”
    Hands grabbed him, hauled him out from the bars with careless, brutal force, knocked him down. He crashed into a black circle of boots.
    The window was empty.
    Gideon was gone, and if he answered, Jake didn’t hear it.

7
    What doth my mirror show?
    It showeth not what a man looks like but what he is.
    Not what he sekes for but what he hath found.
    From
The Scrutiny of Secrets
by Mortimer Dee
    The diary of Alicia Harcourt Symmes:
    After the strange demise of my dear papa, and now that I am truly his heiress, I think it would be a suitable tribute for me to continue his diary. His name was John Harcourt Symmes, and he was a Victorian gentleman of science, in those distant days when the study of the occult could still be scholarly, and respectable. Unlike now, where I am called a foolish woman and people smirk at me behind my back.
    I knew hardly anything about him until the day the letter came.
    I was a young girl of 19, living a quiet life with my aunt and uncle in the rectory at Charlecote Thorpe in the county of Yorkshire. It was a remote, windy hamlet on the moors, the nearest town ten long miles away. I had lived in that dingy and depressing house since I was eight, the year when my dear mama passed over to the Other Side. She had separated from Papa very early in her marriage, and no one ever told me why. I was kept in complete ignorance. It was never even spoken of by my aunt and uncle. I could only suppose there had been some terrible scandal, some wonderfully thrilling disgrace. Mama had even reverted to her maiden name of Faversham, though in secret I practiced my true forbidden name over and over in my books in childish handwriting.
    Alicia Harcourt Symmes.
    It had a refined sound to me, even then. It made me feel like a different person, as if I had some hidden dark mirror image of myself.
    I was an isolated child. Not ill-treated but certainly unloved. It was clear to me my aunt had only taken me in out of duty to my dead mother. I had only my dolls to play with, as the village children were thought too rough and uncouth to come to the house. Sometimes I used to peep at them from between the heavy velvet curtains, as they ran on the moor and small scruffy dogs chased after them. I envied them their wild fights, their screeching arguments, their real families. Because, though I seemed outwardly a quiet and reserved child, respectful and silent in company, the truth was that I was seething with rebellion.
    I loathed my life!
    Maybe that was why I was fascinated to learn more of my father. Once, coming very quietly into the room, I heard my aunt in conversation with one of her cronies, the curate’s wife, and she was saying: “. . . My dear, he experimented in the occult, in fiendish, terrible things Of course, he was a most depraved and villainous creature. How my sister came to fall under his spell remains the sorrow of my life. Do you know, they say at one time he even kept a girl from the streets and she actually became . . .”
    Then they saw me, and fell silent.
    How I pondered those words in the curled cave of my bedclothes! How in secret I would imagine and dream of my father! Depraved and villainous! I shuddered with delight. I pictured him tall and devilishly handsome, with a curled mustache, and I prayed that one day he would come in a great carriage and whisk me away from the tedium of the dull dark house, to Paris, to Rome, to London!
    But he never came.
    Instead, on my twenty-first birthday, the letter arrived.

    Sarah spread the photocopies of the Dee manuscript on the kitchen table. Piers had enlarged them, so that the page of scribbled