I shook my head sadly and put some shoes in the bottom of the wardrobe. There was violence when surrealism was banned and there was violence as the same ban was lifted. Grubb continued his broadcast as he intercepted a policeman marching away a youth dressed in sixteenth-century garb with a faithful reproduction of the Hand of God from the Sistine chapel tattooed on his face.

‘Excuse me, sir, how would you counter the criticism that you are an intolerant bunch with little respect for the value of change and experimentation in all aspects of art?’

The Renaissancite glanced at the camera with an angry scowl.

‘People say we’re just Renaissancites causing trouble, but I’ve seen Baroque kids, Raphaelites, Romantics and Mannerists here tonight. It’s a massive show of classical artistic unity against these frivolous bastards who cower beneath the safety of the word progress. It’s not just—‘

The police officer intervened and dragged him away. Grubb ducked a flying brick and then wound up his report.

‘This is Henry Grubb, reporting for Toad News Network, live from Chichester.’

I turned off the television with a remote that was chained to the bedside table. I sat on the bed and pulled out my hair tie, let my hair down and rubbed my scalp. I sniffed dubiously at my hair and decided against a shower. I had been harder than I intended with Landen. Even with our differences we still had more than enough in common to be good friends.

As I was dealing with Landen in my own clumsy way, my uncle and aunt were hard at work in Mycroft’s workshop. As I was to learn later, things seemed to be going quite well. To begin with, at any rate.

Mycroft was feeding his bookworms in the workshop when Polly entered; she had just completed some mathematical calculations of almost incomprehensible complexity for him.

‘I have the answer you wanted, Crofty, my love,’ she said, sucking the end of a well-worn pencil.

‘And that is?’ asked Mycroft, busily pouring prepositions on to the bookworms, who devoured the abstract food greedily.

‘Nine.’

Mycroft mumbled something and jotted the figure down on a pad. He opened the large brass-reinforced book that I had not quite been introduced to the night before to reveal a cavity into which he placed a large-print copy of Wordsworth’s poem ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’. To this he added the bookworms, who busily got to work. They slithered over the text, their small bodies and unfathomable collective id unconsciously examining every sentence, word, vowel sound and syllable. They probed deeply into the historical, biographical and geographical allusions, then they explored the inner meanings hidden within the metre and rhythm and juggled ingeniously with subtext, content and inflection. After that they made up a few verses of their own and converted the result into binary.

Lakes! Daffodils! Solitude! Memory! whispered the worms excitedly as Mycroft carefully closed the book and locked it. He connected up the heavy mains feed to the back of the book and switched the power switch to ‘on’; he then started work on the myriad of knobs and dials that covered the front of the heavy volume. Despite the Prose Portal being essentially a biomechanism, there were still many delicate procedures that had to be set before the device would work; and since the portal was of an absurd complexity, Mycroft was forced to write up the precise sequence of start-up events and combinations in a small child’s exercise book of which—ever wary of foreign spies—he held the only copy. He studied the small book for several moments before twisting dials, setting switches and gently increasing the power, all the while muttering to himself and Polly:

‘Binametrics, spherics, numerics. I’m—‘

‘On?’

‘Off!’ replied Mycroft sadly. ‘No, wait… There!’

He smiled happily as the last of the warning lights extinguished. He took his wife’s hand and squeezed it affectionately.

‘Would you care to have the honour?’ he asked. ‘The first human being to step inside a Wordsworth poem?’

Polly looked at him uneasily.

‘Are you sure it’s safe?’

‘As safe as houses,’ he assured her. ‘I went into “The Wreck of the Hesperus” an hour ago.’

‘Really? What was it like?’

‘Wet—and I think I left my jacket behind.’

‘The one I gave you for Christmas?’

‘No; the other one. The blue one with large checks.’

‘That’s the one I did give you for Christmas,’ she scolded. ‘I wish you would be more careful. What was it you wanted me to do?’

‘Just stand here. If all goes well, as soon as I press this large green button the worms will open a door to the daffodils that William Wordsworth knew and loved.’

‘And if all doesn’t go well?’ asked Polly slightly nervously. Owens’ demise inside a giant meringue never failed to impinge on her thoughts whenever she guinea-pigged one of her husband’s machines, but apart from some slight singeing while testing a one-man butane-powered pantomime horse, none of Mycroft’s devices had ever harmed her at all.

‘Hmm,’ said Mycroft thoughtfully, ‘it is possible although highly unlikely that I could start a chain reaction that will fuse matter and annihilate the known universe.’

‘Really?’

‘No, not really at all. My little joke. Are you ready?’

Polly smiled. ‘Ready.’

Mycroft pressed the large green button and there was a low hum from the book. The streetlights flickered and dimmed outside as the machine drew a huge quantity of power to convert the bookworm’s binametric information. As they both watched, a thin shaft of light appeared in the workshop, as though a door had been opened from a winter’s day into summer. Dust glistened in the beam of light, which gradually grew broader until it was large enough to enter.

‘All you have to do is step through!’ yelled Mycroft above the noise of the machine. ‘To open the door requires a lot of power; you have to hurry!’

The high voltage was making the air heavy; metallic objects close by were starting to dance and crackle with static.

Polly stepped closer to the door and smiled nervously at her husband. The shimmering expanse of white light rippled as she put her hand up to touch it. She took a deep breath and stepped through the portal. There was a bright flash and a burst of heavy electrical discharge; two small balls of highly charged gas plasma formed spontaneously near the machine and barrelled out in two directions; Mycroft had to duck as one sailed past him and burst harmlessly on the Rolls-Royce; the other exploded on the Olfactograph and started a small fire. Just as quickly the light and sound died away, the doorway closed and the streetlights outside flickered up to full brightness again.

Clouds! Jocund company! Sprightly dance! chattered the worms contentedly as the needles flicked and rocked on the cover of the book, the two-minute countdown to the reopening of the portal already in progress. Mycroft smiled happily and patted his pockets for his pipe until he realised with dismay that it too was inside Hesperus, so instead he sat down on the prototype of a sarcasm early-warning device and waited. Everything, so far, was working extremely well.

On the other side of the Prose Portal, Polly stood on the grassy bank of a large lake where the water gently lapped against the shore. The sun was shining brightly and small puffy clouds floated lazily across the azure sky. Along the edges of the bay she could see thousands upon thousands of vibrant yellow daffodils, all growing in the dappled shade of a birch grove. A breeze, carrying with it the sweet scent of summer, caused the flowers to flutter and dance. All about her a feeling of peace and tranquillity ruled. The world she stood in now was unsullied by man’s evil or malice. Here, indeed, was paradise.