When Gwyneth found the book in the attic, none of us had the least suspicion of where it would take us... I mean literally take us, lead us into another dimension, a parallel world...
I know, I know, it does sound crazy, I would not believe it myself if it had not happened to me... But let me start from the beginning.
My twin sister Gwyneth and I were brought up by our unmarried aunt who lived in a great house in the city. Our parents, having disappeared when we were three, left enough money for Aunt Clelia to send us off to the best boarding schools of the country. We did not see much of each other, or her, until we turned eighteen. Only then Aunt Clelia told us that our parents had left us a house in the countryside too, the very one where we lived before they vanished. The house was built by our grandfather, Clelia said, our father's father, whom none of us had ever met.
The only thing that Aunt Clelia could tell us about him was that he was a writer and an inventor, who disappeared without a trace before he could become famous... All the land talked about the mysterious event for a while back then, it happened soon after our mum married our dad, Clelia said. When our parents vanished off the face of earth years later just like him, the gossip started all over again. The police were involved and the investigation took years, but led to nothing.
In the end the house, which now belonged to Gwyneth and me, was shut the moment our grandmother, who apparently knew as little as anyone else about the disappearances, died. It was left abandoned for years.
Greatly intrigued by what Aunt Clelia told us, and having no one who could tell us anything more, Gwyneth and I resolved to spend the summer holidays in our house.
It took us weeks to make the dilapidated, supposedly haunted Land's end safe enough to live in. With the help of the bravest men from the nearest village where we settled temporarily in its only inn, we repaired the half crumbled staircases and fixed holes in the floors and the roof of the time and weather-worn building before we spent our first night there.
It wasn't the most pleasant of nights-- the gale-force wind blowing from the nearby sea made the newly restored house tremble and shake above our heads. But it could not blow out our happiness and excitement, we felt much more at home here than we ever had felt in Aunt Clelia's luxurious dwelling.
Another week passed before we finished with the works completely. Then, we discovered the attic, crammed full of grandfather's inventions, and books. There were dusty scientific tomes he studied to make some of the gizmos and gadgets we found scattered around, half-hidden under layers of spider webs, and volumes he wrote himself, some leather-bound and published, and others dog-eared manuscripts, notebooks full of pages yellowed with time rather than books...
And there was the book, an unfinished novel Gwyneth found lying on the floor at the foot of a tall, lusterless mirror. It was a silly story, in my opinion, talking about a parallel world which could be accessed from our own through a portal invented by grandfather himself. Yeah right. I dropped it after I read the first few chapters, but Gwyneth devoured it in two days, up to the last, unfinished page.
She started talking about grandfather's portal then. About finding a way into that fantastical world, born in his imagination. She said that he and our parents may have disappeared there... I did not believe it and told her so.
Then, at the end of the summer, while I went to the village to buy the train tickets for our return journey to the city, and to hire a guardian for Land's End so we would not find the house in a too bad state when we returned for the next holiday, Gwyneth... disappeared. Just like the others.
And suddenly I knew that they were all there. There was no point in calling the police, they would never find my family in grandfather's world... All I could do was to read that book my sister perused the whole summer and try to follow her wherever she went.
It took me one night and one day to read through it and understand that getting into that world was as easy as walking into that ancient mirror leaning against the attic's wall. All I needed was... to believe that I would walk through.
It wasn't that difficult.
The problem would be finding the others and getting back home, I realised the moment I pushed through the mirror, its surface jellifying around me as I moved, then solidifying again and fading away even as I looked back at it.
The problem would be... to survive long enough in grandfather's world to at least catch up with Gwyneth, I mused as I turned around and faced a giant fish floating in the air, its mechanical gills and fins whirring and buzzing ever so slightly as it swam through the surrounding forest away from me, the bright lights shining in its eye sockets illuminating even stranger creatures as it moved its enormous head from side to side...
Trying not to think about the possible dangers I walked into grandfather's world, following one of his inventions wherever it was headed.
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