Obsidian Mirror

21

I confess that my ruse pleased me exceedingly, and made me foolishly proud of myself. As I hurried to my study with the bracelet I chortled that a man like Venn, a man who had claimed to travel in time, could be tricked so easily.

I gave instructions to Hassan and secured the apartment. Then, with trembling fingers, I fastened the bracelet around my wrist. The metal was warm, and the eye of the snake seemed to shimmer and wink at me.

I was agitated with fear. But I switched on the apparatus.

Journal of John Harcourt Symmes

JAKE WAS COLD. Cold and hungry and tired.

He sat huddled up in a corner, his arms around his knees, trying not to shiver.

“Where’s your watch?” Venn muttered.

“Stolen. As soon as I got to this God-forsaken place.” Jake didn’t look up. “They got the bracelet too. If it hadn’t been for Moll, they’d still have it.” Quickly, he outlined the events in the ruined theater.

Venn listened without comment, his spare figure looking even leaner in the dark Victorian suit.

When Jake had finished, he said, “You did well. And now we’ve lost it again.”

In the bleak stillness they heard the rattle of cab wheels above them, the iron clang of horseshoes on the cobbles of the street. A tiny grid in the roof above Jake dripped rain.

“What about you?” he asked.

Venn shrugged. “I think I must have arrived here about an hour or more after you. All I remember is grabbing your sleeve and then nothing. But we’ve discovered something—that it’s possible for two people to journey together, and arrive at least close in time.”

“Were you in the alley?”

“No. A dilapidated garden behind a public house. A dog was barking—I was disorientated, dizzy, but I managed to scramble out. I turned a few corners and walked straight into a scene from Dickens. It was the Tottenham Court Road, I think, but with stalls, and a fish market…I just stared.”

“Where did you get the clothes?”

Venn looked uneasy. “Well, obviously I had to go native. There was a…shall we say, very drunk gentleman trying to find a closed cab. I whistled one up and helped him into it. When I got down a few streets later I was wearing his clothes. I did leave him mine. In a neat pile.”

Jake couldn’t help a grin.

Venn met his eyes. For a moment they were both laughing.

Then, abruptly, dismay rolled back. Venn said, “Symmes could be doing anything up there.”

Jake glanced at him. His godfather’s face was suddenly taut with anxiety; he stood and paced and kicked in convulsive rage at the door. “A pompous, smug fool, and we let him do this to us. He could wreck everything—he could just vanish like David and leave us stuck here. We have to get out, Jake!”

“Don’t waste your energy.” Jake uncurled and stood. “That door is solid.”

Venn looked upward. The damp bricks of the roof oozed lime-white secretions; mold blossomed in green velvet clumps. “The pavement can’t be far above us. If we had some sort of lever, some tools…”

“We don’t.”

Venn swung around, his patience snapped. “Can’t you say anything useful? If you hadn’t had the stupid idea of entering the mirror, neither of us would be here.”

“I didn’t want you to come. You could have stayed.”

“Are you mad? David would never have forgiven me if…”

“Don’t talk about him as if he’s dead!” Jake’s frustration ripped out too. “You don’t care about Dad! All you care about is your guilt. Ending the way it makes you feel. Maybe you don’t even care about Leah!”

It was said before he knew he’d said it, and even in his cold fury he was appalled at himself. Venn stared stricken, disbelieving. For half a second the very darkness of the cellar seemed fractured, as if a stone had been thrown that had cracked the black glass of the world.

Then, in a whisper, the roof said, “Jake! Can you hear me? It’s me. Moll. Jake, where are you?”

He rushed to the corner where the grating was, stupidly grateful. “We’re here. How did you know?”

“Oh you really ’ave got no idea,” her voice said, acid. He could almost see the pitying shake of her small tangled head. “Did you think I’d just scarper with the dosh? No chance! I waited outside just to see if you’d come out. I didn’t trust that cove Symmes. Too smarmy. Too cocksure.”

“Well, you were right. He’s got the bracelet and we’re locked in down here. Can you get us out, Moll?”

She laughed. “Watch and learn, Jake. Remember?”

“Listen, don’t get yourself hurt.” But she was already gone.

He turned.

Venn was leaning against the wall, watching him. As if Moll had not even spoken, he said, “Do you really believe that? That my selfishness could be so gross? Is that what you think of me, Jake?”

Jake frowned. “I didn’t…”

“You must have really hated me. Far off, in your comfortable school in Switzerland.”

“You had your obsession. I had mine. I thought you’d killed him.” He looked away. “I had to blame someone. You were there. You were responsible. There was no one else.”

Venn nodded, slowly. He said, “I see now that I failed you. I never really thought about you. I just wanted you out of the way, because I couldn’t have interruptions. But you’re wrong about Leah. Yes, it will ease my shame and guilt—and believe me, Jake, they are terrible. But I’ll move hell and heaven to get her back, no matter who tries to stop me, or who gets hurt. Because Leah is a part of me. She’s my soul, Jake. They say the Venns have no souls, that they are half Shee, without remorse, ruthless. I was like that. Leah changed me. I’ll force the whole world and time and fate to do it, but I’ll get her back.”

His hubris was breathtaking. But for a moment Jake almost believed a man could do that.

Then, with a small scrape and rattle, the door was unlocked.

They spun around.

Moll stood there, hugely proud, hands on hips. “Can’t I leave you alone for a second, you poor sods?”

Jake grabbed her and swung her up. “You’re a wonder! What—”

A crash interrupted him. A vast, echoing crash, high in the house.

Venn leaped for the door. “The mirror!”

Sarah ran through the Wood. Even in her invisibility its power snagged at her. In the corners of her eyes were fragments of places that could not be here; the edge of a plowed field, the tilted plane of a city street. When she looked at them, they were gone. She was in a kaleidoscope, a place of pieces, a broken universe, all in random order; she felt terrified that some great upheaval would rearrange everything in seconds. This was like that old story of the girl who had gone through the looking glass into a world where cats grinned and eggs talked. But going through the looking glass was the one thing she hadn’t managed to do.

Breathless, she stopped. As she bent over, gasping in air, she wondered why the Shee weren’t following her, even trying to find her. Surely their curiosity would be intense.

Around her the Wood waited, silent.

And then, very faint and far away, she heard it; the sound that she had most dreaded. Even before she cried out in shock and clasped her hands tight to her ears, she knew it was too late, that in that sharp, brilliant instant the damage had been done.

The music was piercingly sweet. A single note, high and enchanting.

She screamed, “No!” and ran, hands crammed against her ears. If she stopped, if she listened, she was finished. It would haunt her forever. She crashed through bushes and brambles, ducking under two leaning oaks, and suddenly there was no ground but only water, and she fell forward, headlong, into it.

Bubbling, airless dark.

She came up with a scream, coughing, weeds plastered to her face. Between its strands she saw Gideon. He was standing on the bank, watching.

“Help me!” she screeched. Then she sank again, and there was no bottom. Long ribbons of weed tangled her; water slopped into her nose, down her throat; her cry was a gurgle of terror.

“Gideon!”

He stood on the brink. “I can’t! If I touch water…!”

“Help me!”

“I can’t…Summer says…”

“You’re not Shee. You’re human!”

She grabbed a branch; it snapped. Crowflowers snagged her clothes, daisies and nettles, long loosestrife, like dead men’s fingers. She fought desperately to stay up, to swim, but they had never taught her that in the Lab, and every movement dragged her down to gulp and choke, and in the pain of no breath she saw herself in a nightmare mirror, lying dead in the flowers.

A hand.

It was close and tough. It grabbed her hair and hauled. She moaned, but the hand had her now, around shoulders, around waist.

Her foot stumbled on soil, then they were out, bursting into air, crawling up the bank, grabbing the hanging willow boughs to pull themselves up. Icy air burst into her lungs. Painfully she coughed and choked and vomited out water and weed.

When she could speak she said, “You…did it.”

He sat, dragging his hands back through his streaming hair. Some of the green lichen had washed from his pale skin; he looked different. Less lost. Grabbing her arm, making her turn, he said, “That’s you and Jake. You both owe me a life now. The Shee never keep their word. So show me that humans are different. Get me away from her, Sarah.”

The intensity that broke through his usual languid carelessness made her nod, silent.

He dragged her up. “Come on. Before you freeze.”

Between one step and another they raced into winter, a bitterly cold white-out of horizontal snow that stung her eyes to water. The roar of the blizzard was ferocious. Sarah and Gideon stumbled through shoulder-high dead bracken and the crashed trunks of ancient elms, snow whitening their hair, their lips; the whole world a wall of snow coming straight at them, and as Sarah leaped aside into the path, her ankle twisted; she fell sideways with a screech, hands down in the frozen drift.

Something gave a harsh cry, just above her.

A huge starling sat on a branch, huddled against the blizzard. Its small beady eyes, tilted in curiosity, watched her.

Gideon stopped. “They’re here. You go on,” he yelled, his lips close to her ear. “Don’t forget me.”

She scrambled up and hobbled, shivering. Where was the Abbey? The wind was so ice sharp through her wet clothes, it was hard to catch her breath. In seconds she was alone, not sure if she was even heading the right way. Maybe the Shee were enticing her back even now, toward that jagged place where the corners of worlds intruded.

She staggered out of the trees into the knee-deep snow of the drive.

And gasped.

Wintercombe Abbey was an arctic ruin in a wasteland.

For a moment she knew she had emerged from the forest in the wrong time, centuries too late, because surely this was the ghost of a house, every roof and gable thick with snow, the very windows silted up, the door wide open and blocked with a great drift.

No lights burned, no chimneys smoked.

Maybe they were all dead—Venn, Piers, Jake. Maybe this was her own desolate winter, Janus’s world of no hope and no color.

Then, faint as the tiniest point of light in a dark eye, she saw the flame of a candle. It glimmered at a high window in the Long Gallery, then moved, as if carried past the panes. Someone was in there.

Sarah picked herself up and fought her way to the door. The steps were thick with snow, but a trampled mix of deep prints led in.

She wiped her face and eyes, pushed back her soaking hair.

Then she forced her way through the built-up snowdrift into the hall.

It was in darkness. The stairs were marked with wet prints. Very quietly she followed them up, running her hand along the thin snow-crust on the banister. Reaching the first landing, she stopped.

A sound came from above her, up in the high vault of the ceiling, a small creak, a tinkle. Dust fell on her. She saw that the chandelier up there was swinging, softly, as if the gale had set it in motion.

A ripple of movement stirred the dark red hangings of the landing.

She turned, but the stairs behind her were dark and empty. Not even a cat.

Suddenly, panic rose up in her. She turned and ran, heedless, breathlessly up, because she had to get back, find the mirror, find Venn. She hurtled into the Long Gallery, and almost crashed into the Replicant.

It was sitting with its feet on a chair, and it was so young! A slim soldier, hair tied back now, thin lips drawn in a delighted smile.

It was on its feet and had tight hold of her before she could twist away.

“How lovely to see you, Sarah,” it said.

The mirror stood in a fortified zone. Under Wharton’s orders, Rebecca and Maskelyne had dragged the heaviest furniture against the door, then retreated to the labyrinth, where the only weapon they had, the shotgun, was aimed at the entrance arch. Wharton kept it, and had the glass gun jammed in his belt.

“Because I don’t trust you,” he snapped, when Maskelyne asked why.

Rebecca shook her head in disbelief. “If that thing gets in here…”

“It wants the mirror. Not us.”

They sat, crouched in silence. Wharton breathed heavily.

Rebecca glanced at Maskelyne, a shadow in the darkness. She knew he was looking at the mirror.

He had realized with sickening speed that there was nothing he could do without power. To be so close to it must be so tantalizing for him, she thought. A torment. She said, “Can you feel it?”

“I can hear it.” His scarred face turned in the darkness. “I hear it sing. A single high note, beyond sound. So strange and far off, like a voice from eternities distant. But I can hear it, Becky.”

From behind, Wharton said gruffly, “I never got to hear how you two know each other.”

Rebecca was silent a moment. Maskelyne said, “Tell him, if you want.”

Wharton heard her sigh. “I don’t know how to. It started so long ago. I was maybe six, seven, when I first saw him. In dreams. A man falling and falling through dark space, a rectangle of sky. He was calling out to me, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. I told my mum, but she laughed at me. Nightmares, she said.

“Slowly, he came to earth. I began to see him land, crashing in slow-mo. Between dreams a month apart he might only have moved a millimeter. I got used to it. I stopped telling people, because they thought I was strange. But I used to lie awake on rainy nights, worried, in case he would get wet.”

She grinned at him. “Then one night, he was there, in my room. He was see-through, like a ghost. He sat on my window seat and whispered, ‘Don’t be afraid. I’m a friend.’ No one else saw him. When my mum came in to wake me the next day, she walked straight through him. He wasn’t there.”

Maskelyne said, “It was a drastically delayed manifestation.”

“Talk English,” Wharton muttered.

“Time, stretched out like elastic. I was coming through the mirror, but it was taking years.”

“What?” Wharton stared, appalled. “Might that happen to Jake?”

“Jake has the bracelet. I had nothing. I was lucky even to survive.”

Rebecca smiled. “I didn’t know any of that then. He was just my secret friend. He lived in my house and no one knew about him. Sometimes he was there and sometimes not, all over the farm, in the barns, in the fields, in the place down by the stream where I used to play.” She laughed, soft, in the dark. “I wasn’t scared of him. I liked him. Half beautiful and half ugly, like a man put together from pieces. He came out of my books, he was Heathcliff and Rochester and all those dark heroes. He was my shadow. I waited for him.”

“For me,” Maskelyne said quietly, “her entire childhood was only a few frail moments. I was there, then gone, and when the world flickered back the girl who lived in it was a month, a year older, and it was summer, or a sudden autumn. I realized what must be happening, but what could I do? I was trapped.”

Rebecca said, “Do you remember the day I was ten, and there was a party? I had all these kids around, and it was fun, but then suddenly Maskelyne was there, in the middle of them, sitting like a ghost at the feast, among balloons and music and no one could see him but me. He looked so weary. I pretended to be sick and everyone got sent home. And then I made him go to sleep on the sofa.”

Wharton looked up. “Listen!”

They froze. After a while he said, “Sorry. Thought I heard something.” Still fascinated, he glanced at Maskelyne. “How long before you…arrived fully?”

“In Becky’s time, eight years. By the time she was fourteen I was here constantly, barely flickering. Then it got difficult—I took to living in an old mill—house on the edge of her father’s farm, up on the edge of the moor, because by then I needed food, warmth. Sleep. Slowly, I became a real person, not a ghost anymore.” He was looking at her, smiling sadly.

She said, “He told me about the mirror. So we started to research. We knew it must be close by. Then we realized Venn had it.”

Maskelyne said, “I went to Switzerland and found Jake and you on the point of leaving. I followed you onto the plane and phoned Rebecca from London. She got on the train. I think you know the rest.”

Wharton gave him a hard stare. “So you want the mirror for yourself.”

Maskelyne glanced quickly at Rebecca. She said, “It was his. It belongs to him. And when he goes, I go too.”

Astonished at the change in her face, Wharton looked away. She wasn’t at all the ditsy girl who had nearly crashed that car. She was a young woman in love with a ghost.

Then Maskelyne said, “There it is again.”

Wharton wriggled out of the labyrinth and inched his way to the door; now he was leaning against it, his ear to the ancient wood. He looked up. “I can hear voices. Someone’s out there, talking to him.”

He turned his head and listened again, and his face darkened. He said, “I think…It is. It’s Sarah.”

Then he took the glass weapon and held it out.

Maskelyne’s fingers closed around it.

“Thank you,” he said.