The shop was down a side street which led only to a patch of abandoned scrub. The woodwork around the windows and door was painted in browns and greens, dulled by urban grime and decades of weathering. The bowed display window was lit by a single, dim, bare bulb. A recessed door, to the right of the window, had a spider’s web spanning the upper half, discouraging entry.
Jake was intrigued by the odd assortment of items gathering dust in the window. It was his grandad who had suggested the shop might be a good place to find interesting antique microscope slides.
Just three days before, on his sixteenth birthday, his grandad had given him an old brass microscope. His mother had sniffed, and said it was just another piece of junk to gather dust in Jake’s bedroom. But it took pride of place on his small desk.
On his first foray into the shop, Jake held his money in a tightly clenched fist, thrust into his trouser pocket. A bell above the door rang as he entered, a bright sound in the gloomy interior. Jake paused just inside the entrance and looked up to see the bell still swinging, but now silent, on its curled metal strap.
Unlike any other shop he had been in, it was mostly dusty cabinets, some with drawers, but very little on open display. At the far end of the shop, an old man sat behind a glass-topped counter. Jake wondered at first if he was real, or an exhibit rescued from a waxwork museum. He was wearing an old-fashioned bowler hat. Layers of dust had settled on that too, turning the felt a soft brownish grey. The man’s eyes moved. He was looking directly at Jake.
“What are you searching for young man?”
Jake took a step backwards, his heart pounding. His hand found the door handle again.
“Come in, no need to be afraid. I have many things here that might interest you. Everyone who visits me is in search of something special.”
Jake edged forward, straying away from the door. He heard it click shut behind him. His fingers trailed along the top of a set of cupboards and came to rest against a tall cabinet. It consisted of several sections of shallow drawers. The cabinet was taller than Jake, and, even if he stretched to open the higher drawers, he would not be able to see what was in them.
“I think you will find what you are looking for in the eighth drawer from the top.”
Not wanting to take his eyes off the man, Jake counted down from the top drawer by letting his fingers move down over the brass handles. The eighth drawer down slid out smoothly. A spider crawled over the front lip and dropped to the floor on an almost invisible thread. Jake glanced to see what the drawer contained.
It was divided into sections by thin slats of wood. Row after row of microscope slides were slotted into grooves. There were dozens of them. The ends of each slide were wrapped with paper. Maroon, green and dark blue patterns were broken by circles or ovals of cream, each with an inscription in a cursive hand.
In Jake’s pocket, his fingers played with the coins they were guarding, turning them over, checking the sum of their value. The old man told him to select a single slide but gave no indication of which. While watching the man, Jake’s fingers counted to the sixth slide in, the third row from the right.
“Take it. A gift. From me to you.”
“Really?”
The man smiled and nodded. In the movement of his head, a little dust lifted from his bowler hat and swirled in a beam of light from the street outside.
Jake did not want to linger in the shop. He edged back towards the door, found the handle, and escaped into the daylight. His eyes took a moment to adjust. The bell had not rung when he’d left, and he turned to check he wasn’t being followed. The spider had already started to repair its web. He relaxed his grip on the slide and held it up to the sun.
There was a small circular design in the centre of a clear glass circle. It didn’t look like anything special, and Jake suspected the man had given it to him because it was worthless. He put the slide in his pocket and set off home.
Alone in his bedroom, Jake angled the microscope so that sunlight was reflected on the mirror beneath the slide carrier. He eased the slide into place. An image slowly came into focus, but it was not a section through a plant stem, nor a sample of bone structure. The face of a woman looked back at him, framed in a thin black circle. A cloud must have passed over the sun because the image shimmered, as though the woman had moved. A cold drought of air enveloped Jake, and he turned to check that his bedroom door was closed.
He looked at the slide again, moving it fractionally. The woman had long blonde hair circled by a garland of daisies. She was pretty, around Jake’s age, and was wearing a white top with floral embroidered edging. Jake became aware that he was holding his breath in case anything should disturb a painting so tiny and perfect. A name, inscribed by hand, read Janice Parker.
She was looking down, as though something below her, just out of the picture, had caught her attention. Without warning, she looked up, her lips moving as though she was speaking. Jake pulled his head away from the microscope and pushed his chair back. What he had seen was impossible.
He spoke sternly to himself. “You’re such an idiot. You shouldn’t have smoked that weed last night.”
From the kitchen, his grandad’s voice drifted up through the house. Jake’s hand edged forward to remove the slide, but he was reluctant to touch it lest he disturb the girl, and he left it in place. He went downstairs to see what his grandad wanted, first ensuring that his bedroom door was locked,
He nodded to his grandad and went to the fridge for a bottle of Coke. His mother said she was dropping something over to their neighbours and could he make his grandad a mug of tea. Jake nodded, his hand still shaking slightly from what he thought he’d seen. He tried to remember where he had bought the weed which he had smoked the previous evening. Once they were alone, his grandad asked if he had visited the shop yet.
“Yeah. There was an old man in there, he was odd. He gave me a slide, didn’t even want anything for it.”
“So, you had no trouble finding the shop?”
“Yeah, it was exactly where you told me it was.”
Jake was surprised when his grandad said that he had not seen it for over fifty years. A man, sounding very much like the same one Jake encountered, had given his grandad the microscope, and a single slide.
“I returned the slide. I wanted to give the microscope back as well. It scared me. He told me to keep the microscope, and that I’d know who to give it to when the time came.”
“What do you mean? What scared you?”
“The slide had a picture on it. In amazing detail. A portrait of a young woman.”
Jake hesitated. He did not want to believe what he had seen, but his grandad’s description sounded like the same slide.
“Did she have flowers in her hair?”
“She did.”
“Did she move?”
“That’s what scared me.”
His grandad told him that he had never returned to the shop, and that he wasn’t sure it would still be there. He had looked down the side street many times but could never see it. He assumed the shop must have shut sometime in the past.
“So Jake, it sounds like you have already looked at the slide?”
“A few minutes ago. It’s weird. I thought I was imagining it.”
Jake did not tell his grandad about the weed hidden in his wardrobe but thought he would probably be much less concerned about it than his mother would be.
“Could you hear what she was saying?”
“No. Could you?”
Jake took a sip of his Coke. The kettle boiled and his grandad made himself a mug of tea.
“Sorry. I was supposed to make that for you.”
“Do you want to look at the slide again? Both of us together?”
Jake sat on the bed, while his grandad pulled the chair up to his desk. He leant forward and turned the knurled knob on the side of the eyepiece to focus the slide. Jake held his breath until his grandad pulled away from the microscope again.
“She’s still doing it, talking, saying something, but I can’t hear her.”
Jake had hoped that it was all in his imagination. He flopped back on his bed and mumbled a few swear words.
“Couldn’t have put it better myself Jake, but there must be something we can do, some way of hearing what she’s saying.”
“Frequency,” Jake said, staring at the ceiling and frowning. “Maybe she’s speaking outside the frequencies we can hear. I mean, she is tiny.”
“So, how does that help? Are we going to need a bat as an interpreter?”
Both fell silent again, but Jake pushed himself up on his elbows.
“We could record her, then tweak the frequency, if she’s saying anything, even at super high frequency, I think we might be able to hear it that way.”
Jake stacked a pile of paperback books beside the microscope, and balanced a microphone on them, close to the centre of the slide. He plugged the cable into his laptop and opened an app while explaining what he was doing.
“It’s a condenser mic. It should pick up high-frequency sounds.”
He clicked on the record button on the screen and stared at the sound wave. It was flat, save for the odd pip and click, and a normal response pattern whenever they spoke.
“Nothing,” Jake said.
“Maybe she only talks when she knows we’re looking at her.”
His grandad leaned down to look through the viewfinder again. Jake saw the lines on the screen start to build.
“It’s working,” Jake said. “We’re getting something.”
Without taking his eye from the viewfinder, his grandad spoke to the girl in the picture.
“Can you hear us? Nod if you can, we can’t yet hear what you’re saying.”
“What’s she doing?”
His grandfather told Jake that she was crying, but that she had nodded. His grandad pulled away from the microscope.
“Don’t say anything about this to your mother.”
“No way. Mum would want me to take the whole thing back to that shop.”
“I’m not sure that would be possible. You see, I have looked for that shop before. It disappeared.”
Jake said it was right where his grandad said it would be.
“Can you play back what you recorded?”
Jake cropped the recording to the high frequency section and tweaked the setting in the app.
“Ready?” He asked.
His grandad nodded and Jake hit play. The voice was scratchy, some words only became clear with the third or fourth time of listening. Jake wrote them on a scrap of paper, making corrections as he became tuned to her voice.
“Help me. Please. I’m lost. Please. Help me.”
“Have you done an internet search for the name on the slide?” Jake’s grandad asked.
Jake shook his head. He opened a browser and typed in Janice Parker. There were dozens of hits, and several different Janice Parkers.
“Which one? It’s a common name.”
“Try adding missing person,” his grandad suggested. “After all, she said she needed to be found.”
Jake tried again and clicked on an entry headed ‘mystery disappearances’. Janice Parker was on a list of four young women, friends, who had not returned from a music festival in 1973. The website suggested an alien craft had abducted them. The police had refused to investigate reports of a mysterious event in one of the fields. They had dismissed ‘so called evidence’ of a UFO landing as nothing more than an illegal campfire.
Jake searched again for the names of all four girls and found black-and-white pictures of three of them. One looked exactly like Janice Parker. Jake’s grandad frowned.
“Is there any way we can talk to her and hear her answers as she’s speaking, without going through this recording business?”
Jake thought for a few seconds and said there were probably some real-time audio synthesisers, but he had no idea if there was one that would change frequencies on-the-fly.
“I can do some research, but it would probably be expensive, even if there is one.”
His grandad said he would cover any costs but emphasised again not to tell his mother.
“Are you two up there? Your coffee is here. It’s almost cold.”
“Speak of the devil. Remember,” his grandad said, “not a word.”
Later that day Jake searched for voice-changing apps and found one that sounded like it might do the job, but it was expensive. He messaged his grandad who agreed it was worth a try. He gave Jake his credit card details to buy it.
“Wait until I’m there before you look at the slide again. I don’t want to miss anything.”
Jake wrapped the slide in paper and hid it at the back of a drawer. He bought the app and set the controls to drop the frequency of any input. When he spoke into the mic, a deep, growling voice came from the laptop speaker and made Jake smile. He checked the settings he had used and made a note of them. On the second attempt, his voice came out more like an angry, rumbling volcano. He sent a message to his grandad that it all seemed to be functioning, and when could he come round again.
They decided to leave it until the next afternoon. Jake’s mother would be out, and neither of them wanted to be interrupted mid conversation with the girl on the microscope slide. Jake retrieved the slide from its hiding place and carefully unwrapped it. He blushed, as he was not sure if the girl could hear him or if she was being watched. He tried to reassure her.
“It won’t be long now, Janice. Tomorrow afternoon we can talk to you properly and should be able to hear what you’re saying.” He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and continued, “I hope you’re okay.”
He stared at the slide again. The girl was very attractive, and he wasn’t good at talking to real girls, never mind ones that were somehow locked in a microscope slide.
Sunday afternoon took forever to arrive. Just before his mother left to visit friends, Jake’s grandad turned up.
“I didn’t know you were coming round, Dad. You could have come for lunch if you’d said.”
“Last minute decision. Jake and I were talking about something yesterday, and I thought I might pop round and, um…”
He looked at Jake for help, but Jake stood there, fidgeting with the kettle.
“What were you talking about?”
“Oh, just stuff, you know.” He winked at Jake’s mother.
“You men are all the same. Put that kettle on and make your grandad a cup of tea. Will you still be here when I get back, Dad? I’ll only be an hour or so.”
“Should be. Yes.”
Jake and his grandad waited until she left. The kettle boiled at the same time the door clicked shut.
“Leave the tea for now, Jake. We have more important things to do.”
Jake had everything set up in his room, apart from the microscope slide, secreted at the back of his drawer again. Once unwrapped, he slid it into place. They both looked at each other.
“Do you want to ask the questions, Grandad?”
“Probably best. I would be no help on your laptop.”
Jake concentrated on the screen, ready to tweak the frequency slider if necessary. His grandad leaned forward to the microscope.
“Hello Janice, can you hear me?”
A slightly distorted reply came from the laptop speaker.
“I can always hear people speaking to me.”
Jake moved two of the sliders a fraction.
“Try again Grandad.”
The girl frowned. “There’s two voices.”
“My grandson is with me. His name is Jake. And we can hear what you’re saying.”
Her eyes opened wide. She put a hand to her mouth.
“How? Nobody has ever heard me before.”
“Jake would have to explain that. It’s something he’s done on his computer.”
“Are you scientists?”
“No. Not scientists. Do you know where you are?”
“I’m lost. It’s dark, and I’ve been here for ages.”
Jake whispered to his grandad to ask if he could talk to her. They swapped places, and Jake saw her wiping a tear from her eye.
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
“A bonfire, last night, but it’s all a bit hazy.”
“Was that at the festival?”
Jake and his grandad exchanged glances, both unsure where to go with their questions. Janice told them how she was at a festival with three friends. They had gone for the weekend. It was their first time.
“We took some pills. We shouldn’t have taken them we shouldn’t have trusted him.”
Jake asked who the pills came from, and Janice said it was the owner of a record shop. When she described it, they both recognised the same shop the microscope slide had come from.
“What was he like?” Jake asked. “The man in the shop?”
She described him as young, with long hair and a gentle voice.
“He always wore a bowler hat. It sort of suited him.”
When they had told him they were going to the festival, he gave them each a small box, containing a blue pill, and a plain ring made of shiny metal. He told us to wear the ring for protection and take the pill on the last night, at the bonfire. He also said to return the rings when they got home.
“But they weren’t expensive. They didn’t look precious or special.”
“Did you take the pills?”
“Yes, last night.”
She told them the festival finished on the Sunday, but none of them wanted to leave. They loitered on the edge of the site and found a group who were going to have a big bonfire to finish the weekend.
“We wondered how the man in the shop had known, but we joined them.”
“Was that when you took those pills?”
Janice looked down and said they had, and that she did not remember much after that.
“It was Mandy’s fault. She said we should all take them at the same time. I didn’t want to.”
“Ask her about the rings,” his grandad said.
Janice frowned as though she was trying to remember. Then looked straight at Jake again.
“We threw them in the bonfire. Someone had this idea that we should all let the fire consume part of us, something special, a symbol of being there. Mandy suggested we throw the boxes and the rings in it. So, we did.”
“You weren’t wearing the rings like that man told you to?”
“They were just cheap rings.”
Jake’s grandad nudged him. He had scribbled a message on a bit of paper telling Jake that they needed to find the rings.
“Janice, can you tell us exactly where the bonfire was?”
“It was on the edge of the festival site. We watched the sun go down across the valley. All four of us had our backs against a huge stone. It was an amazing sunset.”
His grandad had scribbled another note, saying that he thought they needed to find those rings.
Jake pulled away from the microscope and asked his grandad why. Janice did not say anything when there was nobody looking at her. His grandad said she probably couldn’t hear them either.
“Poor girl is probably in some sort of suspended existence.”
Nothing made sense. The slide, the girl, even the shop that only appeared to exist when it wanted to be found. Jake couldn’t see what difference finding those rings would make, but he had no better suggestion.
The following weekend, Jake and his grandfather set off for a boys’ day out, or that was what they told Jake’s mother. The old festival site was easy to find, and the large stone, that Janice said she’d sat against, facing west. There was, after all the intervening years, no sign of a bonfire.
The two of them set about their task by laying a line of string, due west from the stone, and searching with a metal detector on each side of it. They widened their search and had only found ring pulls, old cans and the odd modern coin, when the detector whined much louder than previously. Jake took the trowel and started to dig where the signal originated. It only took a few scrapes to reveal a shiny ring. Within another ten minutes they had all four.
“What do we do with them, Grandad?”
“Take them back to that man in the shop. He told the girls he wanted them back.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know. One thing at a time.”
Jake was about to brush the spider’s web aside and enter the shop, but his grandad had stopped a few paces back.
“What’s wrong?”
“I can’t believe it’s here. I looked for it so many times.”
“Come on, Grandad, let’s do this.”
Inside, nothing had changed. The old man behind the counter was smiling at them.
“So, you both return. Do you have something for me this time?”
Jake walked forward, more confident now his grandad was there. He dug in his pocket and put the four rings on the counter.
“Thank you for returning them. I feared they had been lost forever.”
Jake’s grandad put a hand on his shoulder, pulling him back gently.
“We’ll go now, if that’s all you require?”
The old man in the bowler hat dipped his head once in agreement. The two of them backed out of the shop. Both took a deep breath of fresh air and exhaled slowly.
“Is that it?” Jake asked.
“I’m not sure.”
They walked slowly to the end of the lane, only some twenty yards. When they turned to take another look at the shop, it had gone. A small car park had taken its place. A sign said, ‘Private. Patrons only’.
“We need to get back online,” Jake’s grandad said.
Back in his bedroom, Jake refreshed his previous search for Janice Parker. The results had changed. The old newspaper clippings were no longer listed, but there were links to several people named Janice Parker on social media. Jake clicked through them, with his grandad looking over his shoulder.
One lives locally. Jake messaged her. Janice responded immediately. He took a chance and opened a video link. She came on camera without hesitation.
“Do I know you? Either of you?”
She had spotted Jake’s grandad, and he took up the conversation. He told her they were doing some research into the history of festivals in the area, trying to find anyone who could give first-hand accounts of them.
Janice said she had only ever been to one.
“It was a bit of a strange weekend. There were four of us. And you probably know the sort of things that went on in those days, still do I dare say. But I’m not sure I’ll be able to help you that much.”
“And the other three people you went with?” Jake asked.
“We all still meet occasionally, although Mandy has some memory problems now, so best not to bother her.”
Jake asked her about the shop and the man in the bowler hat.
“My goodness, I’d forgotten that place. You know I always felt bad that we never took his rings back. I do hope they were not important.”