Wharton shook his head. Then he saw the newspaper. It lay folded on a small table by the door; Piers must have gotten it from the village, because it was today’s. The local rag, but something. He flicked the pages. He’d read it when he came back, with a cup of tea. It would probably be the highlight of his day.
Then his hand held the page still.
It was her.
He had only seen her briefly, when she’d brought in the breakfast tray, and the photo was very small, but surely that was Sarah. She was dressed in different, dull clothes and her hair was longer. The byline said Still no sign of missing patient.
He glanced around.
Then he folded the paper, tucked it inside his coat, and went out.
Sarah sat on her bed, knees up, and wrote quickly with the black pen.
Will certainly try to find JHS’s box again. It has to be the one recorded in the files…. When will Venn re-activate the mirror? A boy called Jake Wilde has arrived…claims to be Venn’s godson. He’s already disrupting things. Today there was a strange…
She stopped, searching for the right word. Vision? Ghost?
The writing faded. Suddenly, out of nowhere, panic and a terrible loneliness seized her; she wrote franticly, in a wild scribble. Are you left, any of you? Max, Evan, Cara? ANYONE? What’s happening back there?
One by one the letters died away.
She felt numb and empty.
But then, just as she went to close the notebook, something started to appear. A few words, emerging slowly, as if they struggled through some immeasurable distance. Cold with concentration and a growing horror, she watched them form.
YOUR FRIENDS ARE DEAD, SARAH. NO ONE IS LEFT. NO ONE HEARS YOU BUT ME. WE CAN CONVERSE NOW. YOU AND ME. SARAH AND JANUS. YOUR LORD. YOUR MASTER.
Terrified, she slammed the book shut and stared at its cover, her heart thudding. For a long moment she sat there, fighting against fear and despair. Was it true? Were they all gone? If so, it was all up to her.
She jumped up, crammed the pen and book back into the secret space under the floorboard, and raced downstairs.
Piers, wearing an apron with a huge red sauce bottle on it, was peeling potatoes at the kitchen sink.
“Sarah, good,” he said at once. “Venn wants you to be there tonight. The Monk’s Walk, at eight o’clock.”
Her heart missed a beat. “Already?”
“He’s desperate to get the thing working again.”
She began to wipe the dishes and put them away. There was so much to ask, but she had to be careful. “The thing?”
Piers grinned. “You’d never make an interrogator, Sarah. If you want to know details, speak to Venn. But he’s heading out again, so you’ll have to wait.”
“I thought he never left the estate.”
“Maybe the estate is bigger than you think. Maybe it contains the whole universe.” He tossed a peeled potato into a saucepan with perfect accuracy.
Calm, she said, “I’m really sorry, but I’m afraid a mirror got broken this morning. Up in the Long Gallery.”
He turned and looked at her.
“Jake…slipped against it. It cracked.”
“Thirteen years bad luck.” He looked utterly dismayed.
“Yes. It’s a pity. Especially as there aren’t any mirrors anywhere else.”
Now she felt better because he was the one wanting to ask the questions. He said gloomily, “Damn. Damn damn damn. I was supposed to get rid of them all. If Venn finds out he’ll hurl me halfway around the world….”
“He won’t. Not from me.” She sat. “Jake said he saw his father’s reflection in it. I think he’s a bit obsessed with his father, don’t you?”
Piers still seemed worried about punishment. So she said, “Who’s the scarred man?”
“What?”
“The scarred man. Something Venn said.”
But he was too quick for her; already he was slicing another potato and flicking it into the pot.
“Absolutely no idea,” he said, grinning.
Annoyed at the lie, she got up and stalked to the door. “Suit yourself.”
But walking down the corridor, she thought fast. Let herself smile. She’d never have a better chance than now to get at the box.
The small study on the ground floor was empty. She stood inside, listening to the silence. The sun slanted in, a faint wintry glimmer from the window she had climbed through yesterday.
The room smelled of ashes, and the grate held the gray, flaked remains of burned logs.
She closed the door and locked herself in. Then she crossed to the bureau, opened the small cupboard, and felt through the papers and files until she found the box.
She pulled it out. The initials JHS gleamed in the sunlight. She took it to the window seat and perched on the faded red upholstery. Then she opened the box and carefully took out the journal.
It was a small fat notebook, much worn. The covers were black cloth, stained with greasy finger marks. It had clearly once been badly damaged by fire—the edges of later pages were crisped brown and in places whole chunks were burned away.
She opened it. The handwriting was spiky and formal in flowing brown ink. It was difficult to read at first, until her eyes got used to it. Venn must have made a transcript long ago. But she didn’t have time to find that—she’d have to do her best with this.
It was amazing to be holding it here, in her hands.
She read the first page.
June 24, 1846
My name is John Harcourt Symmes. On this day I begin my book of the Chronoptika.
The details of all the processes are in the appendix; my notes on the obtaining of the precious metals and the meteoric materials will be found in the red leather binders which accompany this. Here, I propose to record only my personal observations and the details of every demonstration I conduct with the device, every success and failure, because I have learned that to fail is as important as to succeed. I am determined to write everything down. I am not afraid. It will be a tragedy for the world to lose what I have discovered.
Sarah glanced up. The grandfather clock whirred; now it chimed, eleven soft notes. Piers was busy; Venn out. She had time. She curled up on the window seat and read quickly.
Jake sat on a bench in the cloister. He leaned his head back against the cold stone and shivered, because the morning was bitterly cold. But he needed to think.
Of course Sarah had seen the face in the mirror. So why deny it? Was she scared? Of Venn? And who was she? Certainly not Piers’s niece.
Something tapped his boot and he glanced down quickly. A brown hen cocked its head and looked at him with one bright eye.
“Buk,” it said.
Jake jerked his foot and the hen squawked away.
He needed to find his father’s room. There might be something there, some message left for him, some clue. He needed to act, not sit here and let the ghost-face and his father’s terrified voice eat into his energy.
Venn. Surely he had heard that.
A door clicked. He jumped up and scrambled behind a pillar just as Venn came into the cloister. He wore a long coat, and strode quickly down the arcade, his tall shape flickering through the trefoiled arches. At the end he unlocked an iron-bolted door and ducked out, into the grounds.
Jake moved out stealthily after him. Here was a chance to get him alone. Outside. Make him answer.
Beyond the door was a flight of stone steps. Venn was already down them, brushing through the wintry wastes of an herb garden, the frost-blackened twigs snapping as he passed. Sharp scents of last summer’s lavender came to Jake as he slipped along the path. At the end was an iron gate; Venn opened it and it clanged behind him.
Reaching it, Jake saw Venn enter the Wood.
He closed the gate, but the clank made him look down, and he saw that the whole thing was hung with metal objects. Rusty bells and crosses, knives, even broken shears clattered against each other like some bizarre charm bracelet. He stared at them
, noting the iron strip hammered down across the threshold.
What was Venn keeping out?
He ran to the edge of the Wood and crept in. It was dank and chilly. Venn was far ahead; Jake slunk after him, wishing he’d brought a coat. The track led down between gnarled bare oaks, their heaped leaves slabbed with frozen puddles. He stepped on one; it wheezed and cracked.
Venn looked back.
Jake froze, deep in shadow, praying the low sun would be in the man’s eyes. After a moment Venn turned and walked on. Jake followed more warily. Now he didn’t want to catch up. He wanted to see where Venn was going.
What if his father was being held prisoner somewhere in the Wood? If Venn was heading there now?
The path led deep into green gloom. Soon it was no more than a narrow trail, soft with humps and hollows. He slowed, eyes and ears alert. The Wood darkened around him. It had become a thicket of thorns and brambles, impassible; above him the canopy of branches a closed lacework against the sky. Great roots sprawled across the track; he could hear only his own breath and the soft trickle of water in some hidden ditch to his left. His foot splashed a muddy spring.
Breathless, he stopped. Venn was too far ahead to see.
Suddenly panicky, he turned. To his astonishment there was no way back. Branches clustered behind him; he took a step toward them. Brambles blocked his way. He reached out and pushed them, and they snagged at his hand.
This hadn’t been here before.
Was he even facing the right way?
Strange disorientation came over him; he had no idea which way was forward or back, in or out, north or south, as if the Wood had wriggled and twisted. Even the air was as dank and smoky as a November night, though it had been a sunny morning outside.
“What’s going on?” he whispered. “Where is this?”
“This is the Wintercombe, mortal. And you’re inside it.”
Jake turned, fast. A boy of his own age was leaning against a tree trunk. He wore a lichen-green tailcoat and his skin was as pale as ivory.
“What did you call me?” Jake demanded.
The boy smiled a bitter smile. “You heard. I called you mortal.”
8
He was as cold as far Iceland,
His heart a frozen splinter
He was as dangerous as the dark
on the deepest night of winter.
Ballad of Lord Winter and Lady Summer
All my life I have been an inquirer after strange and singular knowledge.
I was orphaned early; my father, Charles Harcourt Symmes, being killed in an uprising in India. I was left a child alone with his fortune—wealth gained from the slavery of men and women in his factories and mines; their squalid lives in his cholera-ridden slums. What can you do to rid money of such dark origins? As soon as I came of age I sold everything and had the houses torn down, but perhaps my doom was already fixed. My life already cursed.
Certainly my career at Oxford was not a success. I was a lonely, bookish student. I had the money to fill my rooms with arcane volumes and pursue research into subjects that would have shocked my professors. I attended no parties, did no punting on the river. I worked steadily and gained my degree, but made no friends, and after I had left, I doubt many in the ancient town ever knew I had been there.
I bought a large house in London and began my pursuit of dreadful secrets. The truth is, I lived two lives. By day I was a member of polite society. I attended meetings of scientific academies, was to all appearances a young amateur gentleman about town. My interests were in the new wonders, the experiments of Galvani, the mysteries of Mesmer. I was calm, quiet, popular with the ladies. I was known as a collector of phonographs and chronographs and all the modern paraphernalia of science. My only eccentricity was believing the earth might be hollow.
But by night!
By night I was a tortured soul.
It is true that my mother died in an asylum for the insane. I never knew her, but perhaps I inherited her corrupted blood. How else can I explain how I, like the man in Mr. Stevenson’s excellent story, have such a dark shadow inside me.
The city made me evil. Something about the lurid twilights of London, the slow lighting of gas lamps down the Strand, worked the change in me. As soon as darkness fell I would put on a long cloak and leave the house, walking till the early hours. I roamed the teeming streets of the poorer districts, flitted down the dank, unspeakable alleys of Soho, explored the warrens of filth that were Wapping and Whitechapel.
I desired secrets. Magic. The occult arts of darkness. I desired to enter the deepest depravities of the soul, down ways too terrible for science and too unholy for religion. Above all I desired power—over men and women and beasts. A power only I, of all the world, would possess.
Sarah looked up. A door had opened somewhere in the house. Frozen, she heard Wharton’s steady tread squeak past the door of the study. She waited awhile, but there was no other sound. She leaned farther into the narrowing sliver of cold sunlight. This was it. This was where it had begun.
I dare not write much of this, lest you think me mad. I made expeditions to the corpse-yards of London, so heaped with the dead that the ground oozed with their reek. I explored deep crypts, assisted in dissecting the bodies of gallows-hung murderers. I joined weird sects and strange covens. I allowed vampiric women to feed on me. And all the time I sought my own secret source of power, and found only cheats and charlatans and depraved souls.
Until I met the scarred man.
It was an obvious question, but Jake had to ask it. “If I’m a mortal, what are you?”
The boy straightened. A flicker of amusement crossed his pale face. “That’s my business. I’m curious about you. I watched you all come to the Dwelling last night, first the girl, then you and the big man. Venn doesn’t let strangers in, so who are you?”
Jake said, “The girl? Last night?”
The boy shrugged. “In your world, last night. I saw her hunted by a wolf. A wolf of frost and snow. So, why do you follow Venn into the Wood? He must have warned you.”
Jake said shortly, “Maybe that’s my business.” He wanted to hurry back, get away with the surprising knowledge that Sarah was a stranger here too, but the boy stepped in front of him. “You can’t. There’s no way back without my help.”
Eye to eye, they measured each other. Then the boy said, “Gideon.”
“Jake Wilde.”
Gideon’s green eyes widened in sharp understanding. “So you’re the son!”
In the twilit forest, the moon was a silver fingernail through the branches. Jake’s hands gripped to fists. “You know about my father?”
“Only what I’ve heard. They don’t tell me anything. She and Venn, they keep the secrets.” Elegant, he flipped his coattails and sat on a fallen branch. His hands, Jake saw, were as brown and lichen-stained as the bark of the trees.
Jake took a breath. “Is he…Do you know if my father is dead?”
Gideon shrugged. “He’s not dead, weakbrain. He went journeying. And they can’t get him back.”
It happened like this. In November 1846 I was passing a small shop in Seven Dials and heard a tap on the window. I stopped and turned. Between the stuffed heads of a fox and a badger, a wizened Asian man of some ancient age was beckoning to me.
I looked around, but as it was indeed me he seemed to mean, I went in.
The shop stank of glue and unknown potions. It was dark, and on every shelf glassy-eyed beasts stared out in hideous rigidity. Great stags loomed from the walls. Under domes, mummified birds were fixed in unfluttering flight.
I said, “Such things hold no interest for me.” I turned to go, but he reached out a hand like a dried claw and laid it on my sleeve. I shook him off—I confess it—with a shudder.
“Death and life,” he whispered. “The arrest of Time’s decay. These things hold no interest for sir?”
I looked at the fellow. “Perhaps. But…”
“Sir requires more than the captu
red life, the feathers and the bones. Sir requires, perhaps, a machine.”
A thud went through my heart. “What machine?”
He shrugged, an insolent gesture. “A device of great power. So strange and terrible, only an adept of the deepest arcana might dare to use it. One such as yourself.”
This was surely a ruse to rob me. And yet there was something in the dark gleam of the man’s eye that ensnared me.
I looked around. “Where is it?”
“Not here.”
“The price?”
“It is not mine to sell.” He leaned over and pressed a small token into my hand. “Tonight, at eight, sir must go to Solomon’s Court, off Charnel House Alley. Find the house with the pentangle. Show this token. And you will see.”
Then he turned and walked into the shadows of the shop.
Outside, on the wet pavement, I gazed at the thing in my hand. It was one half of a gold coin—a Greek stater, with the face of Zeus, his nose and eyes cut jaggedly away.
Jake said, “What do you mean? Journeyed where?”
But before he could ask any more, a glitter of light flashed deep in the Wood. Gideon leaped up—a movement so fleeting that he seemed to vanish and reappear in the same instant. He grabbed Jake and hauled him down among the nettles and bracken. “They’re coming! If they see you here, they’ll take you. Don’t even breathe.”
Astonished, Jake curled in the bracken. The urgency in the boy’s voice was all too real. He kept still, cold mud soaking his knees and fingers.
No one came. He glanced at Gideon; in the moss-green gloom he seemed perfectly camouflaged, though they crouched right next to each other. Gideon pointed, through the trees.
Jake turned. A tiny shimmer caught his eye. He stared at it; saw a patch of glossy leaf, a lichened tree trunk.
And it became them.
He breathed in, felt Gideon’s warning grip.
They were almost people.
The Obsidian Mirror Page 7