I stared at my reflection, different from me and yet the same. It was tantalising, mesmeric. In that moment when I caught sight of that vision of myself, I thought of a woman’s feet walking across the floor of a Paris fashion house. Was it a memory or something that I had merely read about? I tried to remember but I couldn’t. The thought was followed by a bloom of fear, of sudden terror, that she would leave me alone. I frowned. A strong man wouldn’t let her leave. I shook my head, looking at my face in the mirror. The dark, distorted reflection shook its head too. No, I couldn’t let her leave, leave me alone. I had to make her stay here.
I turned towards Ophelia, now standing against the side wall. I took another step towards her.
‘Johnny, is it you?’ Her voice was small, plaintive.
‘Of course,’ I snarled, but I didn’t feel quite like myself. My head felt thick, my body awkward, as if not quite comfortable within its own skin. I stared at her, saw her gaze dart to my hands. I looked down and saw that I no longer held the green ribbon in my right hand. It was now taut between both hands. I smiled and took another step towards her. ‘You know I can’t let you go. I can’t let you leave me.’
I heard her sob, saw her body shudder. ‘I don’t want to leave you.’
‘Stop lying. It’s why you’re here, after all. Well, you’re not going to leave. I won’t allow it.’
We were face to face now, staring into each other’s eyes. Ophelia’s skin was pale and her hair had fallen down one side of her face, across her cheek. I let go of the ribbon with my left hand to push the strands behind her ear. A memory clawed its way up from the darkness inside: a woman smiling in an open doorway, dressed in black, red shoes on her feet. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, feeling the memory move through me. It smelled of rainwater, jasmine and roses. I opened my eyes and looked at the woman in front of me.
‘Ophelia?’
‘Johnny?’ she replied.
For an instant we simply looked at one another, connected by memory. The next moment I felt a searing pain in my crotch. I buckled under the weight of it, staggering backwards, sensing rather than seeing Ophelia dart away from me. As I grabbed blindly towards her I felt an anger rise within me, heard a furious yell escape my lips. Then the darkness took over. My hand clawed frantically in her direction, catching her nightdress, and I heard a ripping sound as I pulled it towards me. I fell to the ground, twisting around, pulling her with me, grabbing at her legs, her arms.
We each struggled for a moment, she trying to escape, me trying to detain her, a writhing mass of limbs, breath, spit and blood. Then I was on top of her, grabbing and grappling with a fury matched only by her own. My hands were around her neck, feeling the rapid thud of her heartbeat. I closed my eyes and listened to it, to its reassuring sound, the fast throb of her pulse beneath the surface. It was intoxicating. Boom, boom. I felt the ribbon’s velvet crush against her neck. Then out of the darkness came another sound. Loud, terrifying, like the wail of a banshee.
‘JOHNNY!’
The noise reverberated around the room, thudding through my brain, dislodging the hypnotising sound of the beat. My eyes sprang open and I was suddenly alert. I looked down to see Ophelia beneath me, pinned to the floor by the weight of my body. My hands, holding each end of the green ribbon, were pulling it tighter and tighter around her neck. Her nose was bloody, her lip cut, her arms, flung above her head, marked and grazed from the dirt floor, her hair spread out chaotically around her head. Her eyes were closed.
‘Johnny!’
The noise came again, but not as loud this time. I looked up to see Tara standing over me. She was dressed in black. Her face looked thin and pale in the candlelight, the skin around her eyes dark.
‘Let her go, Johnny.’ Her eyes stared at me coldly.
A moment passed without any movement from either of us.
‘Let her go,’ Tara repeated slowly.
I looked at her and a smile uncurled on my lips. ‘No.’
For a moment she was savagely still, staring at me. Then I saw her arm move towards me fast and felt something smash against my skull.
I wavered momentarily as I registered the impact of the blow, then felt myself falling sideways onto the floor. I saw Tara then, watching me, a green shoe in her hand. And I saw, behind her, the candle lying sideways, its flame licking the exposed laths in the wall, threatening to grow, to envelop everything, including the mirror.
I blinked hard, trying to think. But in that moment time lost all meaning. When I reopened my eyes both Tara and Ophelia had disappeared. The flames had grown and I was struggling to breathe. I remembered the dream I had had – it seemed like such a long time ago. The sensation of falling and slow suffocation and death. So it has come to pass, I thought. That dream has, after all, come true.
Then the darkness took me again.
47
IT WAS THE voice that roused me.
At first it seemed to come from far away. A strange voice, whispering in the darkness, calling out to me. It brought me back to myself, to an awareness that I was lying on a floor that smelled of stale earth, my body hot and sweating, my head throbbing. I tried to open my eyes but I lacked the strength to do it. So instead I listened, trying to place exactly where I was. And then I heard it, again, echoing through my mind. A woman’s voice.
‘Johnny, wake up,’ it said.
Something about the voice was familiar, although it didn’t strike me as a voice that I heard every day. Nonetheless it galvanised me into action. There was an urgency to it that made me want to comply. I opened my eyes. The vision through my left one was blurred, obscured. But what I saw, nonetheless, brought me to with a jolt. A few feet in front of me the wall was on fire. The mirror, still suspended from it, was covered in flames. They licked its dark surface, dancing over the inky stains, melting the grey glass into liquid fire. The heat it generated was intense, burning my face and body.
I tried to move but even shifting my head a fraction caused me to wince in pain. My left eye was wet, my head tight and swollen and when I brought my hand to it I felt a sticky substance there. Blood, I was sure. And, in that instant, I remembered.
An image of Ophelia’s battered face flashed across my mind. I saw the bloody nose, the cut lip, saw myself pinning her to the earth floor, anger and horror in her eyes, and I shuddered with the remembrance of it. An image of the green ribbon floated through my mind. Was she alive? Did Tara make it here in time?
I opened my eyes, barely aware that I had closed them again, and looked again at the mirror, dripping molten silver onto the floor. I heard it creak and groan amid the crackling flames, watched the smoke drift downwards in thick curls, over its surface and towards the ground. I tried to move. I had to get out of here. There wasn’t much time. Shifting slightly, I caught a sudden flicker at the edge of my vision, the shadowy form of a woman. I opened my mouth but I couldn’t speak. I was having difficulty breathing. I felt my eyes closing and knew in that moment that I could fall asleep and never wake again. I could surrender my body to the darkness and drift into oblivion. As I slipped towards unconsciousness, my last thought was of my dream, of suffocation and falling. Had it all been leading to this? I wondered. Had it all been leading to this moment, here in the underground room?
Through the darkness I heard the sound of footsteps against the earth floor. Then I heard the voice again, floating through my mind.
‘Johnny, wake up.’
I forced my eyes open. I saw the outline of a woman once more. I tried to blink the blood away and looked again.
The shadow seemed to shift, moving closer towards me until I could clearly see her feet below the hem of her long black dress.
‘Amelia,’ I said. ‘Is it you?’
As she knelt beside me, her face came into view and I saw that it was her. She smiled at me then – that big, beautiful smile of hers – and stretched her hand out towards me. I reached for her, but she stepped towards the staircase. Then she waited once more. I could feel he
r as she stood there, watching me, willing me to move. And, somehow, I felt I couldn’t disappoint her. I dragged my body along the floor, feeling the agony of each breath. The weight of my head seemed immense, unbearable as I pulled myself forwards, following in her footsteps, pain ricocheting through me. Perhaps I slipped in and out of consciousness. Moments of darkness were followed by the blinding brightness of the underground room as I watched it burn. But I felt her presence beside me, always just beyond my reach, willing me forwards.
At the bottom of the stairs I paused, a searing pain in my temple. I tried to breathe through it but with each lungful of air the smoke seemed thicker and more dangerous. Fear moved through me in waves. But I saw Amelia ahead of me, calmly beckoning to me and carefully, one step at a time I followed.
The smoke funnelled around us, forming a column ascending upwards. I felt its thickness in my throat and I tried to take tiny breaths. Slowly, painfully, I inched my way upwards. I watched the smoke plume grey and purple in the flickering light around me. I closed my eyes, imagining myself looking upwards to the rectangle of light above, the door to the storage cupboard growing larger with every move I made. And as Amelia and I climbed higher, I began to entertain the tantalising possibility that I might actually make it out of here.
As I dragged my body over the last step and through the doorway, moonlight filled the dispatch room. It made me think of Diana the huntress, and in turn of Diane, the one whom the curse had been cast to entrap and the one who, ironically, had escaped unscathed. As I pulled myself further into the room, the smoke thinned and my breathing eased. A moment later I lay down in the middle of the floor.
Amelia knelt beside me and I saw her face clearly for the first time, her deep-set oval eyes, green with flecks of orange and yellow across the irises. For a moment we just looked at one another. Then she smiled.
I smiled too, realising this was goodbye. I knew somehow that I would not see her again.
A welter of pain shot through my body and instinctively I closed my eyes. When I reopened them she was gone. Slowly I eased my head left and right, trying to look around me, beyond my body on the floor of the dispatch room. As I did so I realised that I was lying more or less in the place where James’s body had rested more than a century before. Would I meet the same fate as him? I really didn’t know.
I closed my eyes again and took a deep breath, in and out. I thought of Ophelia and Tara out there in the darkness somewhere. And I prayed for them to be safe, and to know that when I’d acted as I had I was not myself but under the influence of a dark spell. I prayed for help to arrive soon or for the flames beneath me to miraculously die down. As I prayed I listened to the quietness of the night, across the silent east of the city.
And eventually from somewhere in the distance I heard a siren’s approaching wail.
48
I OPENED MY eyes. I was lying in a narrow bed, bright artificial light pouring down upon me from fluorescent strips in the ceiling. It hurt my eyes and I closed them again. I licked my lips. They were cracked and sore. I tried to open my mouth to say something but I couldn’t. My throat was parched and made me want to cough. Blips and beeps sounded quietly but continuously close by and beyond them I thought I heard subdued voices, the faint echoes of people coming and going, of life milling around me. But the sounds came to me as if from far away, fragmented, distorted.
For a few moments I lay still, feeling the uncomfortable press of tight crisp sheets against my body. I felt bruised and exhausted. I opened my eyes again and blinked against the light. Shadows came into and out of my vision. But as focus came I saw Ophelia sitting in the chair opposite my bed. At first I couldn’t tell if I was dreaming. She was dressed from head to toe in black and the blood from her face had been washed away. The only outward sign that betrayed what had happened at the factory was the cut across her lip. She had her feet pulled under her body and was staring out of the window into the night.
Sitting on her right was Tara, dressed in the same black clothes that she had worn at the factory. She was holding Ophelia’s hand. I felt my heart constrict. They were safe. Tara was staring vacantly into the middle distance but, as I continued to watch her, her gaze shifted towards me. For a moment we simply looked at one another and then she smiled. But as she did so a tear fell slowly, silently down her cheek. I returned her smile. Perhaps I understood a little of what she was feeling. Happiness that we had all made it out of the factory that night; sorrow that some of us almost hadn’t. I saw her rise from her seat and silently leave the room.
I turned back to Ophelia and as our eyes met I saw hers fill with tears.
‘Johnny,’ she said.
I nodded, feeling as I did a throbbing pain in my head.
‘I thought you were dead,’ she said, coming over to the bed. She sat down next to me and took my hand in hers. ‘Tara carried me out of there. Then she took me back to my flat. We called for help on the way. We couldn’t think of what else to do. I tidied myself, changed my clothes and then we came here. But so much time passed before they got to you. And when you arrived here you were unconscious. I thought you were dead,’ she said again. Tears pricked her eyes. ‘Can you ever forgive me for leaving you?’
‘Can you ever forgive me for trying to make you stay?’ I raised my hand to her face and ran a finger gently over the cut on her lip. ‘I’m so very, very sorry.’
Ophelia nodded gently and we were both silent for a moment.
‘They can’t figure out how you escaped. How you managed to get up the stairs with your injuries and with the smoke.’
Her words brought to mind the paramedics who had arrived at the factory fire.
‘But I just don’t understand how it was possible for him alone,’ they had said.
I wasn’t alone, I had wanted to say. But they would put it down to delirium, seeing ghosts, spirits where there was only smoke and mirrors. I smiled. Perhaps it had been a dream, perhaps not. But Amelia had been with me during the fire.
As they’d raised me onto a stretcher to take me to the hospital I thought I had seen dirty, sooty footprints across the floor of the dispatch room around the place where my body had lain. The prints were small, delicate, from the feet of a young woman. Then a tide of firemen moved into the space and the footprints were washed away.
Ophelia’s voice brought me back to the here and now. ‘What happened?’ she asked hesitantly, as if part of her wasn’t sure she really wanted to know.
I smiled at her. ‘I had a strange dream,’ I said, and as my eyes closed and I slipped again towards unconsciousness I thought I heard the soft sound of dirty, sooty footsteps making their way across my mind.
‘The basement was gutted. But the rest of the place is still intact. A little smoke damage only, they say. They think it was an accident. A bumbling architect falling down some dark cellar steps, the candle she was carrying starting a blaze.’ Tara winked at me and smiled.
I shook my head and although there was pain it was subsiding. A severely fractured skull was the diagnosis, but I would live. ‘I can’t let you take the blame for it, Tara. Don’t worry, I’ll square it with Richard.’ I had a feeling that things might get back to normal now. I pictured the flames licking the mirror’s surface, the molten glass dripping onto the earth floor, and felt that perhaps the power the mirror had once possessed had finally been destroyed.
I closed my eyes for a moment and an image of slave feet leaving footprints of mud behind in the darkness danced across my mind. How many others, I wondered, had been caught by the mirror, driven to murder by an ancient hate? But I would never know for sure. I thought of Catherine, the thwarted Queen, her frustrated love and desire, her betrayal and rage. Somehow she had poured these emotions into this gift that was not meant for her and let them sit waiting there, in darkness. Patiently waiting, as she had done, for her moment of vengeance. And in the end it had caught up with me.
I opened my eyes and raised my left hand so that I could see the third finger. The pale
circle of flesh remained there, a marker for the moment. Even though my wedding ring was gone, I was after all still married. I heard Tara’s voice in my head, our last conversation about the mirror. It is evil, she had said. And she had been right. But its evil, its power, was only unleashed on those who shared the same love as Henri and Diane. Catherine had waged war on the love of men and their mistresses, pulling the women towards it with images of what they most loved and driving men mad with lust and fear that they would lose what they most wanted. Her revenge had flowed through the centuries. The Frenchman and his slave. James and Amelia. Ophelia and me.
‘But I still don’t know for sure what happened between James and Amelia.’ I said it out loud, even though it was more to myself than anyone else.
‘Ah, well, I think I can help you there.’ Tara stood up and pulled something from the pocket of the black jeans that she was wearing. ‘I would have told you sooner, only you never return my calls.’ She smiled and put it down on the table beside my bed.
‘What is it?’ I said, straining to turn my head to see.
‘It’s a letter,’ she said.
I gazed at her. Another letter. I swallowed, feeling the dryness of my throat. ‘Where did you find it?’
‘After we spoke the other night, I got in touch with Mr Alexander. I wanted the number of Nathaniel Raven. I remembered you told me that he often came across letters in his line of work, letters accompanying other items, often retrieved from house clearances. If you remember, James’s Bloomsbury house is on the market. While it hasn’t sold yet, its contents are being cleared. I persuaded Nat to go there with me – to give me some antique collector’s credentials, if you like – and we went through it from top to bottom, looking for anything that might help. We found this along with Elizabeth’s personal, private possessions.’
The Medici Mirror Page 27