The Water That Remembers Another World [original version]

I found the pool at the edge of a wood, though I cannot remember how I came there.

I had been following a path beside a stream. The afternoon was fading, and the trees had begun to merge into a single dark mass beneath the branches. When the path narrowed and the stream disappeared among the roots, I continued for a little while, then stopped. The wood was unfamiliar, and I could no longer see the way back.

That was when I noticed the water.

The pool lay in a hollow between the trees, perfectly still. No leaves floated on its surface. No insects moved across it. The surrounding branches were reflected with such precision that the water seemed less like a surface than an opening into another place.

I knelt beside it.

At first I saw only the trees, the sky, and my own face. Then I noticed a stone bridge in the reflection.

I looked up. There was no bridge.

In the water, however, it was unmistakable: a low stone bridge crossing the stream, with moss between the stones and a broken parapet on the left. Beyond it stood a house with a red door.

I knew the house.

I had lived there as a child, though it had been demolished many years before. The bridge had stood at the end of the garden, where my sister and I used to sit and watch the water pass beneath us. I had not thought of either place for years.

I leaned closer. The house in the reflection was just as I remembered it, except that the windows were lit. Someone was standing in the doorway.

I could not see the face, but I knew the posture. My sister had stood like that when she was waiting for me to come home.

I touched the water.

The reflection trembled, and the person in the doorway turned away.

I withdrew my hand. The image settled again.

I should have left then. Instead, I put one foot into the pool.

The water was cold, but there was no bottom where I expected one. My foot passed through the surface, and I felt stone beneath it. I stepped forward. The water closed around my leg without wetting my clothes, and the reflected trees rose around me like the walls of a corridor.

For a moment, I was suspended between the two places. Then I stepped onto the stone bridge.

The air smelled of damp earth and woodsmoke. Somewhere nearby, a dog barked. I turned and saw the pool behind me, lying in its hollow among the trees. On its surface I could see the wood I had just left, but the reflected trees were bare, and the sky above them was full of stars.

I looked towards the house.

The red door stood open.

Inside, I found the kitchen as I remembered it: the long wooden table, the copper pans, the crack in the hearthstone. A clock hung above the mantelpiece. Its hands were moving backwards.

My sister stood at the table, arranging cups.

She looked older than the girl I remembered, though not as old as she would have been. When she saw me, she smiled without surprise.

“You're late,” she said.

“I didn't know you were here.”

“You always say that.”

She placed a cup on the table. I noticed that the tea was already cold, though steam rose from it.

“What happened to the house?” I asked.

She glanced towards the window.

“What do you mean?”

“It was demolished.”

She considered this, then shook her head.

“No. You left, and then the house was empty. I stayed for a while. After that, I don't remember.”

I wanted to ask her what she meant by left. I remembered the argument that had preceded my departure, the words I had spoken, and the silence that followed. I remembered the journey away from home. But I had never returned, and I had always understood that my sister had moved elsewhere before the house was sold.

“You're remembering it differently,” I said.

“Perhaps.”

She sat down opposite me.

For a while we drank our tea. The clock continued to move backwards. Through the window, I could see the garden, the bridge, and the stream. Everything seemed familiar, yet the familiarity had an odd quality, as if I were remembering a place I had never visited.

“Can I come back?” I asked.

My sister looked at me for a long time.

“You can come back,” she said. “But you may not find me here.”

I left the house and crossed the bridge. The pool was waiting beyond the trees. I stepped into it, and the world of the house closed behind me.

On the other side, the sky was still grey. The trees were as I had left them, and the stream ran through the wood. I was standing on the same patch of earth where I had first knelt beside the water.

I checked my watch. Only a few minutes had passed.

I went home that evening and slept badly.

For the next few days, I tried to persuade myself that I had dreamed the encounter. Yet I could remember the kitchen in every detail, including the crack in the hearthstone, which I had not thought about since childhood. I could remember my sister's face, her voice, the cold tea, and the clock moving backwards.

I returned to the wood.

The pool was still there. This time, its reflection showed the house as I remembered it before my departure: the garden in summer, the windows open, my sister sitting on the bridge with her feet above the water.

I crossed.

The house was empty. The cups were stacked in a cupboard, the clock had stopped, and a layer of dust covered the table. I walked through the rooms, calling my sister's name, but no one answered.

When I returned to the pool, I saw myself reflected on the other side, standing in the wood with my back to the water. The figure raised a hand to its face. I did the same, and the movements matched.

Then the figure turned and walked away.

I watched until it disappeared among the trees.

I crossed back, but the wood was empty.

The next time I visited, the pool showed the house in winter. Snow lay on the bridge, and the stream was frozen. I crossed and found the garden buried beneath white drifts. The red door was locked. Through a window, I saw my sister sitting beside the hearth, reading a book.

I knocked.

She looked up, but did not seem to hear me. I tried the door, then went around the house to the kitchen entrance. It opened easily.

Inside, the air was warm. My sister put down her book.

“You've come back,” she said.

“I was here yesterday.”

“No,” she replied. “You haven't been here yet.”

I sat beside her. She told me about the winter, about the frozen stream and the snow that had covered the bridge. She spoke of events I remembered from childhood, but their order was wrong. A summer holiday had happened before the winter that followed it. The argument that drove me away had not yet occurred. In her account, I had not left home; I had simply been absent for a few days.

I tried to correct her, but each correction seemed to make the story less coherent. When I spoke of the house being demolished, she looked puzzled. When I told her that I had lived elsewhere for years, she asked where I had been hiding.

At last I stopped trying to explain.

We sat together until the light began to fade. Then she walked with me to the bridge.

“Will you come again?” she asked.

“I don't know.”

She nodded, as if this were the answer she had expected.

I crossed the pool alone.

After that, I began to visit whenever I could. Each time, the reflection showed a different arrangement of the world beyond it. Sometimes the house was occupied, sometimes abandoned. Sometimes the bridge was broken, sometimes new and white with mortar. I encountered my sister at different ages, and occasionally not at all.

I learned that the pool did not offer a choice between a real world and an unreal one. The world on the other side had its own continuity, though it was not the continuity I knew. Its events were ordered differently, but not randomly. Things belonged together there that had become separated in my world, and things that seemed inseparable to me had never been connected.

Once, I crossed to find the house standing in the middle of a field, far from the stream. The bridge led nowhere, ending abruptly above dry ground. Yet when I walked through the garden, I heard water beneath the earth. I followed the sound to a cellar door and descended into darkness.

At the bottom, I found a room full of water, clear as glass. The house was reflected in it, but the reflection showed the building as it had been before it was built: a bare patch of earth, a few stones, the roots of an old tree.

I understood then that the water did not merely remember what had happened. It remembered relations that had existed before the events through which I knew them.

I returned to the pool, troubled by this thought. I wanted to ask my sister what she remembered, but I was beginning to fear that every question I carried across would alter what I could find.

For several visits, I stayed on my own side.

The pool continued to show me the house, but its images became harder to recognise. The bridge was sometimes visible only as a shadow beneath the water. The red door appeared in the side of a hill. Once, I saw the kitchen table standing in the middle of the stream, with cups arranged upon it and the clock lying face down among them.

I began to wonder whether my visits had changed the world I was visiting, or whether I was simply learning to see what had always been there.

Then, one evening, the reflection showed the house exactly as it had been on the day I left it.

The door stood open. The garden was bright with summer. My sister was on the bridge, waiting.

I crossed before I could change my mind.

She was there, just as I remembered her, but she was not waiting for me. She was watching the water. I followed her gaze and saw the reflection of the house beneath the bridge, its windows dark, its doors shut.

“Do you remember this?” I asked.

She looked at me.

“Of course.”

“What do you remember?”

She turned back to the water.

“That we were here,” she said. “And that we were somewhere else.”

I wanted her to explain, but she had already begun walking towards the house. I followed her to the kitchen, where the clock stood still above the mantelpiece.

On the table lay a sheet of paper. It was a drawing of the pool, the bridge, and the house. Beneath the drawing, in my own handwriting, were the words:

I will come back when I remember.

I stared at the paper. I had never written those words, or at least I had no memory of doing so. I turned it over. On the reverse was another sentence, written in a hand I recognised as my sister's:

You have already been here.

I looked up, but she was gone.

I searched the house, then the garden, then the bridge. The pool lay beyond the trees, perfectly still. I crossed it and found myself in the wood beneath a darkening sky.

When I looked into the water, I saw the house, the bridge, and the garden. But now the reflection showed a figure kneeling beside the pool, looking down at me.

I recognised the figure as myself.

I raised my hand. The figure did not move.

Then I understood that the reflection was not showing me the place I had left. It was showing me a place from which I had not yet returned.

I stood there for a long time, watching the figure in the water. Eventually it rose and walked towards the trees. I could not see where it went.

I did not cross again that evening.

Since then, I have often returned to the pool. Sometimes I see the house; sometimes I see the wood; sometimes I see a landscape I cannot name. I have never found the same arrangement twice, though certain things recur: the broken parapet, the red door, the table, the clock.

I no longer try to decide which world is the original. I have come to suspect that the question assumes something the water does not promise: that two connected worlds must share a single order of events, or that one must be the source of the other.

The pool remains a threshold, but I no longer think of it as a door between places. It is more like a relation that permits each place to retain what the other has lost.

I still hope to see my sister again. I cannot say whether I will find her in the house, on the bridge, or waiting beside the water. Nor can I say whether she will remember me.

But sometimes, when I kneel beside the pool, I see her standing in the reflection, looking out towards the wood.

And sometimes, just before the image changes, she smiles.