‘But I think someone has been visiting the underground room. In any event, someone has been coming in and out of the factory – and they haven’t been locking the doors properly.’
‘What?’ I said, not understanding.
‘Someone has been surreptitiously visiting here. And both you and I know how to lock the doors properly. So who do you suppose that could be?’
For a moment I stood there silently with Tara watching me. ‘It’s not Ophelia,’ I said eventually. ‘She wouldn’t do something like that.’
‘How do you know that? You hardly know her. You have no idea what she might do.’
‘But I know that she wouldn’t do that.’ I said it loudly, stridently. ‘You must have made a mistake.’
‘I didn’t make a mistake.’ Tara’s face had a defiant look to it.
‘Well, then there must be some other explanation.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like . . . Richard came over or someone else from the office. I don’t know.’
‘Well, I do. I already asked. Richard said that no one had been over since his first visit here with you.’
‘In that case there must be another explanation.’ I said it with a conviction I didn’t by any means feel. ‘There must be.’
‘Okay,’ Tara said, turning back to her computer. ‘When you’ve worked out what it is I’d like to know.’ The image of the mirror – dark, resplendent – was still in sharp focus on her screen. We both stared at it for a moment before I turned and walked back to my desk. I was suddenly weary, overcome by tiredness. I sat down heavily and surveyed the disorder of my drawings once again. Taking a breath, I began rearranging them, grappling with the unwieldy pile of sketches, then, when I had finished, rearranging them again. After twenty minutes, there was no more structure or clarity among them than there had been before. I sighed and looked up to see Tara watching me.
‘You look exhausted,’ was all she said. ‘When was the last time you got a good night’s sleep?’
I shrugged. I couldn’t remember.
‘Maybe you should go home, work from there?’
I shook my head. ‘I work better here.’ It was the second lie to slip easily out of my mouth.
‘Okay,’ she said, and then added sceptically, ‘I hope you make progress.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, knowing that was unlikely. I closed my eyes and tried to clear my head. But my mind was in turmoil. I kept thinking about what she had told me. I thought of me and Ophelia in the underground room together. Then I wondered if Ophelia could be visiting it alone. I didn’t think so but it was possible. After all, she had access to my keys and she had done it before. I sighed. I didn’t want to believe it. But if it wasn’t her, then who was it?
I turned and looked at Tara, tapping away at her keyboard, busy once more with her work. Her words about Ophelia echoed in my head.
‘You hardly know her. You have no idea what she might do.’
19
WE MADE OUR way down into the underground room, candles in our hands.
I watched Ophelia move ahead of me, studying the mirror for a moment or two, gently touching the surface of the glass before placing the candle she held on the floor. Then she unhooked the green shoes from the corner of the mirror. The ribbon rested lightly over the fingers of her left hand, and she swung the shoes slightly as she walked around the room. I placed my own candle upon the floor and then turned to watch her, walking in the candlelight, rocking the shoes back and forth, back and forth, in her slim, pale fingers. I couldn’t stop watching her: there was something provocative, flirtatious about the action that made me smile. Finally, she sat down on the bed and slipped off her own shoes. She looked up at me, said something and laughed. The sound bounced indolently around the room but I couldn’t hear it properly, nor the words that she was saying to me. It was all I could do to keep my eyes on her, on this beautiful creature now lying back upon the mattress, her feet visible against its edge in the candlelight.
I watched Ophelia slide the ribbon out from beneath the straps of the green shoes, watched them fall, released, against the dirt floor, watched her weave the soft velvet of the ribbon between her fingers. As I continued to look at her, at her face tilting now towards me, speaking to me in the half-light, I felt a huge surge of arousal. I walked over to the bed and knelt on the floor beside it. As my hands moved up her legs, under her skirt to her thighs, she sat upright in front of me. I felt her pull impatiently at the buttons of my jeans, adjust herself and slide on top of me. I closed my eyes, buried my head in her neck, inhaled the strong smell of her and the room: roses and jasmine and earth. I heard her voice and the sound of her laughter, felt her taking each of my hands in turn and tying them behind my back. I felt a sudden pinch around my wrists, tight and soft at the same time. The ribbon. As I realised what she had done, I heard the sound of my own laughter. It sounded odd, unlike me, as though it came from a long way away.
As she put her arms around my neck and pushed down hard on top of me, my bound hands sought support from the floor. In the darkness of my mind’s eye, as I felt myself inside her, I longed to search out an image of myself in the mirror. Longed to see something clear beyond the vague blackness of eyes and mouth and hair. I felt the need deep within me to connect with it. My reflection. I opened my eyes and looked at Ophelia moving against me, green eyes flashing, breathing hard, wild in her abandonment. It was then that I felt it again, the intense uncurling of that feeling, blooming deeply within, erotic, angry, irrepressible. As I looked at her, I struggled hard to release my hands from the ribbon. I wanted, more than anything, to feel her skin beneath my fingertips, to feel the subtle beat of her heart. But the ribbon held fast and eventually I surrendered to the darkness.
Time had passed. I had no idea how much. Maybe half an hour. Equally it could have been ten minutes or an hour. The surface of the mirror flickered and pulled the light towards it. I looked to my right and there was Ophelia, at my side in the shadows. Her bare feet were just visible in the candlelight. The sight of them made me smile. I took her hand in mine and, as I did so, I caught sight of the bruising on my wrist that was beginning to show. My hands ached as if in response, imagining the pull, the restraint of the green ribbon against them. I pictured Ophelia above me, moving, writhing in the darkness and as these thoughts crowded into my mind, I felt another surge of anger and arousal. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, tried to calm myself. I breathed in and out deeply a few more times, connected the air outside to the air inside, the darkness outside to the darkness within. And I began to feel calmer. I imagined the dark air of the room moving deep inside me, bringing me peace. Then I imagined the darkness inside taking over completely, my self disappearing. I opened my eyes and looked again into the depths of the mirror. The darkness now seemed almost fluid, different from before. I looked again, deeper, but I couldn’t see myself. Intrigued, I concentrated, sought out my reflection. The black irises that should have been blue. As I continued to look, I finally found them. So I concentrated and looked into my eyes. I squinted to focus more clearly in the darkness. But something was different. I focused harder and the reflection became clearer. I blinked and looked hard again.
I saw a vision in the glass, clear for the first time, a dark, distorted version of myself. My eyes were possessed of a deep haunting blackness, staring intensely at me, focused, determined. My face was distended, the skin tight over a thin, skeletal face, my cheekbones sharp. My lips in the mirror parted and smiled at my self standing in the underground room. They sneered at me and the face followed suit, depraved, corrupted, carnal, yet undeniably powerful. I stared, horrified yet hypnotised by my reflection.
A second later the face vanished.
20
I JUMPED AS if I’d been given an electric shock, stumbling several steps back from the mirror. I took a couple of short, stifled breaths and then my eyes flashed across its dark surface once again. But I could no longer see what I had seen a moment before.
&
nbsp; Turning towards Ophelia, I saw her looking at me, stunned, mouth open slightly, as if she too had been given an electric shock.
‘What happened?’ she said in a whisper.
‘I don’t know,’ I managed to get out eventually, struggling to button my jeans and fasten my belt. ‘I don’t know what just happened. But I need to get out of this room.’ My gaze flickered briefly towards the mirror, then I turned on my heels. I raced up the stairs, vaguely aware of the sounds of Ophelia following behind me.
Minutes later, sitting opposite each other at Ophelia’s kitchen table, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the space between us, neither of us spoke. We didn’t even look at one another. I took a long slug of my drink. My mind was jumping around between conviction and disbelief at what I had just experienced. Or thought I had experienced. And I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn’t sure what I had seen. At the end of the day, I just didn’t believe my own eyes.
‘I want to know what happened in there,’ Ophelia said at last. Her eyes were dull and had dark circles underneath them. She looked like she hadn’t slept in a fortnight. She took a sip of whiskey, looking at me as she swallowed. Then she rolled the glass between her fingers, slowly back and forth. Her skin looked pale in the kitchen’s artificial light. Even paler than usual. It gave her an air of intense vulnerability. I felt something twist in my stomach.
‘Are you okay?’ I said, reaching towards her across the table.
She looked at my hand but continued to roll the glass between her fingers. ‘Yes, I’m okay. I’m just anxious, that’s all. What happened back there?’ She was staring at me, her eyes wide.
I hesitated, trying to assemble my thoughts. ‘I thought I saw something. My own reflection. Someone else’s. I couldn’t say for sure. The whole thing happened in a matter of seconds.’
‘I’m not sure I follow.’
I wasn’t sure I followed, either. That was the whole point. ‘Well, one moment I felt like I was looking at my own eyes. And then they weren’t mine any more.’ One moment they were ordinary, simply corrupted by the darkness of the glass, and the next they were simply corrupt. There was a world of difference, it seemed to me, between the two states. ‘And then my whole reflection didn’t feel like my own,’ I added.
‘So whose was it?’
‘I’m not sure, but someone else’s.’ I paused. At least, I hoped it was.
Ophelia sat upright in her chair and stared at me incredulously. Neither of us seemed to be able to think of anything to say. ‘What were you thinking about when it happened?’ she said finally.
‘Nothing in particular.’ The words flew out of my mouth but I knew they were a lie. I had been thinking about darkness, connecting to it, breathing it in. Suddenly I felt cold. Perhaps those thoughts had in some way influenced what I saw. If I saw anything, that is. I took another shot of whiskey and felt its warm rush down my throat.
Ophelia was watching me closely. ‘Were you scared?’ she said eventually.
I looked down at my hand around the whiskey glass and noticed that it was still shaking slightly. I nodded. ‘Although I think it was more shock than fear. And now I’m not even sure I saw anything.’ I shook my head and then I reached out my hand to her again. This time she took it. ‘Are you okay?’ I asked her.
She looked at me for a long moment, then let go of my hand, grabbing the Jack Daniel’s bottle and refilling our glasses. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. Then she tipped her head back and downed her shot of whiskey.
‘Did you see anything?’ I ventured.
Ophelia looked back at me but she was silent.
I wanted to ask her more, to know if she had gone back to the underground room by herself after the first time. But she seemed withdrawn, upset, and I knew by now that it was better in such circumstances not to press her. So instead I bent over and stroked her hair. ‘Look, I’m exhausted. I need to sleep. But I’m aching for a shower. Will you join me?’
She looked at me then and smiled. For the first time since we had returned. ‘Thank you,’ she said quietly.
‘What for?’
‘For not pushing me.’ Then she got up from the table and made her way to the bathroom.
When I turned on the television a black and white film from 1954 was on BBC2. The Barefoot Contessa, starring Ava Gardner. Now I loved that movie, in particular the scene where Gardner, playing sex symbol Maria Vargas, dances a sublime barefoot flamenco for Rossano Brazzi. Ophelia had never seen the film so we lay in bed drinking whiskey and watching a spellbinding and mostly shoeless Vargas until we couldn’t stay awake any more.
Ophelia fell asleep first, her body angled towards me, her hand cupping her cheek. I looked at her face, luminous in the flickering blue light of the TV. The worry lines that had etched themselves into her face during the day had dissolved with sleep. Her skin was smooth, childlike once again. I turned off the television and, facing her, lay in the darkness waiting for sleep to come.
But, despite my weariness, sleep wouldn’t come. Instead my mind circled around the events of the last few weeks: the discovery of the underground room, my nightmare, and now the face staring back at me from the depths of the mirror. The face that was and wasn’t mine. Just thinking about it all made my stomach twist with anxiety.
I shivered and drew a little closer to Ophelia, reassuring myself of her presence. I stroked her hair and let my fingers run gently over her face. She was still, the flow of her breathing shallow, uninterrupted. As I watched her, my stomach twisted even more tightly. Who was this girl? Could I rely on her? Something told me in my gut that I could but I had been trusting my gut much less of late, distrusting even myself and my motivations. I thought of the mirror, shadowy in the darkness of the underground room, and an image of the face I thought I’d seen there flashed momentarily across my mind. But I pushed it away, down into the darkness inside. I was overwrought, oversensitive. I needed to put all that aside, all the distractions that I seemed to spend so much time dwelling upon. I needed to forget about Catherine, Diane, Henri and the mirror, suspend all thoughts of the underground room. I needed to sleep and work. I needed to concentrate on my drawings and show Richard that I could do it. I needed to pull myself together. Or my life was going to unravel. A fleeting image of my wife Maya floated across my mind. But I pushed it away too. I pulled Ophelia closer, inhaling the smell of her skin, the scent of her hair against the pillow. I could trust her. I knew it. So close to her, my mind calmed and my breathing slowed. I could almost hear the wings of sleep beating against the darkness and moving ever closer.
I opened my eyes and even though the room was still in shadow I saw her green eyes looking back at me. So she was awake too. I smiled at her, closed my eyes and tried to turn over. Only I wasn’t lying down. I wasn’t in bed. I was somewhere else.
I opened my eyes again. The woman was sitting opposite me, watching. Candles arranged on the floor beside her spilled soft light over us, making the green of her eyes twinkle. Her dark hair hung in thick tresses almost to her waist and she was wearing a long, black dress with sleeves down to her wrists. Her hands were intertwined in her lap, her thumbs circling one another in a repetitive gesture, perhaps of anxiety. Incongruously with the rest of her appearance they were red and rough. I looked at her face again. She was young, in her early twenties perhaps, but already an absolute beauty, as if she’d just walked out of a painting by Rossetti. Her skin was smooth and pale, she had a long, straight nose, high cheekbones and lips that were pink and full. But her most distinguishing feature was her eyes. They were green, deep emerald around the pupil but much lighter towards the edges of the iris with flashes of yellow and orange. They were deep-set, a pronounced oval shape framed with long, thick lashes. The combination of her features gave her a look that was hard to describe. It was the oddest combination of innocence and knowingness. She seemed shyly youthful, yet something about the eyes gave her a provocative, almost feline quality. The more I looked at her, the more I had the feeling that I had seen
her before. Something about her was familiar. But I couldn’t remember where I knew her from. Or, in fact, whether I knew her at all.
The silence between us had just begun to make its presence felt when she spoke.
‘Hello, Johnny.’ Her voice was calm, confident and if she felt any nervousness I couldn’t detect it. ‘I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance at last.’ I smiled. She had a funny, old-fashioned way of talking. Bizarrely enough, I felt that if she had been standing she would have dropped me a small curtsy as she introduced herself. The thought had only just formed when her lips parted and she laughed, revealing bright white teeth. Then she leaped to her feet and bobbed down in front of me, her left knee grazing the floor. ‘Yes, I might just have done that, sir.’ She stressed the last word, pointedly.
I stared at her. It was as if she had looked into my mind. And then mocked me with what she saw there.
She laughed again, girlishly. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be acting in such a manner. Especially since we’ve only just been introduced.’ Then she smiled at me. It was a beautiful, intoxicating smile.
In spite of being wrong-footed – quite how, I didn’t know – I smiled back.
She sat down opposite me once more and scrutinised me. ‘Now, are you quite comfortable?’ she asked.
I nodded without thinking and then instinctively looked down at myself. I was sitting in an armchair, dressed in an old-fashioned three-piece suit and tie. I frowned. Where on earth had I acquired this from?
‘Don’t trouble yourself about that now,’ she said, as if reading my mind again. ‘It’s something for you to dwell upon later.’
I looked at her, perplexed and suddenly uncomfortable. I felt the itch of the stiff cotton shirt, the tightness of the tie knot at my neck.
‘You will have to come back to it. We don’t have much time here now.’ She smiled softly again. ‘I’ve got some things I want to say to you.’
The Medici Mirror Page 13