Haunt Me Still

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  Master Shakespeare, Derby’s son had explained, after introducing them, had recently returned from Scotland, where he had come into the possession of certain objects Dr. Dee might welcome. As the boy set the round mirror of polished black stone in his hands, Dr. Dee had looked up sharply. This, too, had been stolen from his library, but not this library, and not recently. He had last seen it in Antwerp twenty-five years or so before, in the hands of a young witch with red hair and a Scottish accent.

  Without a word, the lad had laid atop the mirror a manuscript. It was old, in an antique form of Welsh that even Dr. Dee found difficult to read. So far as he could make out, it concerned a Welsh witch who lived in a lake and wove strong spells with the aid of a cauldron.

  On the subject of exactly how he’d come by either mirror or manuscript, Mr. Shakespeare remained coy. Dr. Dee, however, let the question slide, as collectors often must, he told himself. He was intrigued. He was enthralled. And he was happy to start his library anew with two such rare finds at its heart. He had welcomed Mr. Shakespeare to visit when he pleased and make use of his library how he might.

  That had all been well and good. The books trickled back, and with them intellectuals from all corners of the kingdom. His home once again became a gathering place for scholars of all sorts, hashing out questions of all kinds. How many ships could the emperor of Cathay command? What was the proper title and style of the czar of russia? How did geese navigate their migrations? Was there such a thing as an unbreakable cipher? And what was the hierarchy of hell?

  It was the last question that a small coterie of his best and brightest students—the most daring thinkers of the kingdom—pursued, among others. His scholars of the night, they called themselves. It was among these, William Stanley and his protégé included, that he’d shared a summary of his deep studies of Mr. Shakespeare’s manuscript.

  Not even among this select group, however, had Dr. Dee shared the information that he intended to attempt one of the rites described in the manuscript. Cleaned up, of course, polished into something acceptably Christian. He had shared that, in fact, with no one save Arthur, his eldest son, ten years old, who was currently serving as his scryer. It had taken three days to prepare the room and the properties, and one more to fast and bathe, to make the two of them ready. A month or so ago, this had been. They had retired at nightfall to his innermost study, beyond the double sliding doors, with the black mirror and a candle, and they had set to work.

  How someone else came to be there, he still could not understand. Surely he had seen that the room was empty before they started. He could not quite remember, but it was force of habit: How could he have failed on this occasion? But it seemed equally odd to suppose that someone could have entered after they had begun, without their knowledge. He had purposely left a creak in the doors for just such an eventuality, but no sound had disturbed either him or his son.

  But someone had been there. A shadowy presence he became aware of as they finished the rite, not knowing how long he had been there or what he had seen. Not knowing, indeed, who he was, though Dr. Dee and Arthur had both given chase through the maze of his library and out into the street.

  In the rite, they had been equally disappointed. It had promised clarity of both sight and thought, but neither he nor his son had noticed a change. Dr. Dee had long been resigned to the fact that he would never see the spirits for himself, save on the rarest of occasions, and then only dimly. But for Arthur, this blindness to the spirit world was still a raw hurt that the boy strove to heal, and the failure of this ceremony had seemed a hard blow. It had, however, been a private disappointment.

  Until this afternoon, when he saw it, mimicked and even parodied, lifted on the common stage. How had the player known, unless he had been the watcher in the shadows? Knowledge, though, was for sale the width and breadth of the kingdom. The watcher need not have been the boy himself, Dr. Dee thought.

  Except that there had been one or two details in the casting of the circle that not even a glimpse of Dr. Dee’s private ceremony could explain. Details available only in a singular manuscript in a crabbed and antique form of Welsh that he would not believe the young man had at his command. And if he had acquired these details neither from Dr. Dee nor from the strange manuscript, where had he got them?

  And the only answer Dr. Dee could light upon was the possibility of the player having glimpsed, in some other place, a different version of the rite from his own.

  Mr. Shakespeare has recently returned to us from Scotland, Mr. Stanley had said upon introducing them. Words that now haunted Dr. Dee. Where in Scotland, and when? With whom? And to what effect?

  At the start of the afternoon, the player’s unprecedented rise in poetic power and popularity had seemed no more than a curiosity. Now there suddenly seemed to hang around his reputation a faint stench of sulfur such as Dr. Dee had scented on the air in the playhouse.

  His fine black gown bespattered with mud and grime, the old wizard reached the Thames without much awareness of having walked right through the city. Treading heavily down some stairs and into a waiting barge, he bespoke a row upriver to Mortlake.

  Leaning back in his seat, the cool pull and slip of the water rushing by his ears, Dr. Dee shuddered. Young Master Shakespeare had written what he should not; he was sure of that. How he’d come to know it perhaps not even heaven knew.

  CAULDRON

  Double, double toil and trouble,

  Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

  36

  HUDDLED IN JOANNA’S arms beneath the desk, I twisted to look back up at the high balcony. The mocking figure was gone.

  Below that lay Eircheard. As the footsteps moved steadily toward us, I made him a silent promise. I will kill her. I will find Lily, and then Carrie will die.

  Near the little gate, the footsteps slowed. Stepping through, two pairs of shiny black shoes stopped, so close to us that I could have reached out and plucked at their trousers. Overhead, radio static scratched the darkness. Security guards, then.

  “Jesus,” said a male voice. Farther back, a third person spun away, and I heard the sound of heaving. Then another sound cut through it. Somewhere at the back of the room, a door creaked.

  “Bastard’s still here,” growled the closest guard. “Hey!” shouted the second. “Stop!” They took off running, the third stumbling after.

  Joanna and I wasted no time. Scooting out from under the desk, we ran in the opposite direction, sprinting through the main doors into the Great Court, our footsteps ringing against the marble floor as we turned back toward the Enlightenment Gallery. Behind us, someone shouted, pattering down the stairs curving around the reading room.

  We didn’t look back. Skidding through the gallery, we crouched behind an exhibit case as scattered footsteps ran into the room after us, stopping just inside the door. There was a slight jangling of keys and another burst from a radio. Guards, again.

  What had happened back there in the library? What door had opened? There must be an emergency exit, presumably out to the Great Court level we were on. But there were also doors, somewhere, that led down into the warren of rooms beneath the reading room—the old stacks of the British Library. Where had the killers gone? Was there a floor between us, or had they, too, headed back this way? How many of them were there?

  And how many guards?

  Somehow, we had to avoid all of them and get out of the museum before the police arrived.

  Whoever had killed Eircheard and Owen had taken the mirror. Would the killer, as we had done, go looking for more information? In Owen’s office? Jesus, his office. I’d left Dee’s book, my bag with all our other papers, my jacket—everything—in Owen’s office. Flashlight beams sliced through the darkness. There was a fifty-fifty chance that our pursuers would go left instead of right. If they glimpsed the open case, that chance went up to a certainty…and once they saw the trail of blood, they’d surely follow it as fast as we had. It would give us a chance. Fishing in my pockets, I fou
nd a pound coin and lobbed it high. It clattered down somewhere in the distance, and the lights instantly swept that way, catching on the open case. As the guards stepped down toward it, Joanna and I sped in the other direction. As we reached the staff corridor, I caught her hand, stopping her. After the gallery, the windowless corridor was utterly dark. I did my best to still my breath, listening for sounds up ahead.

  Behind us, the museum had become a tangle of echoing shouts and footsteps, but ahead, I heard nothing. Guiding ourselves with hands on the wall, we plunged into the void. The corridor seemed to have stretched to a mile or more, so that it took forever to come to the turn leading right and begin counting the doors. At the fourth, we stopped and I put my ear up to it. Had anyone else got here first? Hearing nothing, I flung it open.

  The room was empty, but one of the windows had been opened wide, so that gusts of chill autumn air swirled around the room, moaning lightly in the corners. A handful of leaves scraped and swirled across the floor.

  Grabbing a war club from a shelf, I yanked open the closet. No one was there, but our jackets still hung inside. On the floor sat the bag with Dee’s book and the folder from Lady Nairn. I looked in the bag. Everything was still there.

  Gathering our things, we went to the open window. Whoever had been here had gone through it, but it was still our best bet for getting out unseen. I leaned out. The night air was tangled with sirens, but I saw no sign of a person.

  Climbing out, I let myself drop to the ground. Joanna dropped beside me. We were in a narrow graveled and tree-lined side yard—essentially a private roadway used as an employee parking lot, separated from the public street by a wrought-iron fence. Joanna pointed off to the left. Twenty yards up stood a narrow gabled guardhouse the size of a telephone booth. Beyond that a gate opened onto the street. We edged forward.

  The gate clanked in the wind. Drawing up to the guardhouse, I glanced inside. The guard was slumped back, a bullet hole between his eyes. He’d died the same way that Owen had.

  At the bottom of the road, a siren screamed along Great Russell Street heading for the museum’s front entrance. In the other direction, it looked as if there wasn’t another cross street for a half mile. Row houses, many of them converted to hotels, lined the road on both sides. Lights began to flick on in their windows.

  Taking my hand, Joanna darted through the gate and across the street, dragging me up a little way to a spot where the row houses ended and a brick wall, twelve feet high and covered in ivy, began. She started to climb. Slinging the bag over my shoulder, I followed. The brick was old, scarred and pitted from centuries of urban air, which made for easy climbing. We were up and over, landing in a spiky pile of conkers, just as a siren veered around into the road behind us and a car squealed to a stop.

  We stood in a garden fronting two houses set back from the street; between them and the last row house, a path led back into shadows. Joanna pulled me toward it.

  The path led back to a narrow tree-studded garden stretching left and right the length of the entire block, surrounded by buildings on all sides. Around us, dogs were beginning to bark, and more lights winked on.

  Eircheard. I felt bile crawling upward again and swallowed hard against it. I needed to think.

  Beside me, Joanna was trembling, her face taut with horror. “The mask of Tezcatlipoca, the knife. Even the cut. It’s how Aztec priests sacrificed: cutting just under the rib cage and up through the diaphragm to reach the heart.”

  Tezcatlipoca, I thought. God of mocking laughter. God of night and sorcery and death. The Aztec Lucifer. Lord of the Smoking Mirror.

  “Jesus, Kate, that was an Aztec sacrifice. Owen was right, that woman is insane….” Her voice was rising toward hysteria.

  “Listen to me.” I took her by both shoulders. “It wasn’t Aztec. But it was a sacrifice.”

  “Not—”

  The mirror was missing. If Eircheard’s killers had really been Aztec devotees, they’d have taken all three objects. Not just the mirror.” And they wouldn’t have quoted Macbeth.

  “Why the mirror?”

  “It was being consecrated. With blood.”

  Her eyes widened. “But the only reason for that—”

  “Is to work black magic.”

  Joanna took a step back. “You knew how dangerous this was, and you still involved me?” she asked thickly. “Without warning?”

  In my pocket, my phone drummed to life. “Sympathy for the Devil” again. Lily.

  It was a picture message. A photo of Lily, bound as I’d seen her in my dream on the hill, except this time, she was also blindfolded. Beneath the photo were two words: 24 hours. “What’s going on?” demanded Joanna.

  I shook her off, frowning at the phone. The manuscript they’d asked for looked to be untraceable, and they’d taken the mirror. What else did they want? What was I supposed to do now?

  How had they known? I wondered suddenly. How had they known to come to the museum? To go after Dee’s mirror? Possibly, they’d followed Eircheard and me. Or had they somehow bugged one of us? I stared at the phone in my hand—the phone whose ringtone they’d reprogrammed. What else had they done to it?

  It gleamed in my hand, a mocking and treacherous magic mirror of an all too modern variety. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to throw it as far as I could, to drown it in some fathomless deep, but it might as well have been chained to my bones: It was the one frail link I had to Lily.

  I began to shake.

  Think.

  They’d taken the mirror. But they hadn’t yet given up on the manuscript.

  Which meant I couldn’t, either. But what other leads did I have?

  Owen’s snide voice slid through my mind: You’ll have to do better than that. Second inquiry in as many weeks, as it happens, about lettering around the perimeter. He’d held up the old photograph. A page that I’d shoved into my pocket, just after the lights had died.

  I fished it out.

  Holding the dark mirror, Macbeth glared out at me beneath his preposterous hat. Edwin Forrest, on the day of the riot he’d helped to instigate, or at least had done nothing to quell.

  Forrest.

  As Joanna stared openmouthed, I crouched down, setting the bag on the ground and scrabbling through the folder to find Ellen Terry’s letter and Aubrey’s diary. I am hoping that you can glimpse the Forest through the Trees, wrote Terry. And at the bottom of Aubrey’s page, Max Beerbohm had quoted Macbeth: Who can impress the Forrest, bid the Tree unfix his earth-bound root?

  Both of their “trees” referred to Beerbohm Tree. Did both of their “forests” also point to a man? Either Max Beerbohm had misspelled “forest,” or he’d spelled “Forrest” correctly. Was Terry’s “forest”—with one “r”—also a reference back to the American actor? And if so, what did her reference mean?

  Her letter said nothing of the mirror. But it did speak of the manuscript. And the “poor soul” who believed herself the guardian of its whereabouts was a fellow denizen of the drama whose personal tale is as tragic as any role she might encharacter on the stage. Was she someone who’d known Forrest? Who’d been caught up in the gunfire and screaming and blood of the riot?

  I slid the e-mail from behind the photo. The Xeroxed photo—or maybe “scanned” was a better term—had been e-mailed by Professor Jamie Clifton of New York, who’d somehow known to ask about the posie around the mirror. How? What did the original daguerrotype reveal that the copy did not?

  It was a thin filament to follow through a dark labyrinth. But it was all I had. I phoned Lady Nairn to tell her what I knew and what I needed: a meeting with a man and a daguerreotype in New York.

  37

  “EIRCHEARD?” LADY NAIRN exclaimed with a strangled cry when I told her he was dead. “They killed Eircheard?”

  I spared her the details for the time being; I didn’t trust my voice to deliver them without quivering, in any case. Instead, I told her what little I knew about Jamie Clifton. “I need to make sure the man’s t
here, before I get on a plane.” I rubbed my temple as if I might squeeze out a coherent plan. “He’ll be expecting news from Owen Knight, the curator he’d contacted at the museum. Let’s set up a meeting between Clifton and Knight for tomorrow morning, early. With the implication of passing on news about the photo and its mirror that will leave the professor panting.”

  “Will Mr. Knight go along with this?”

  “He’s dead. And since Carrie and company killed him, I like to think he won’t mind us taking his name in vain.”

  “And you’d like me to arrange it?”

  “Not you. Ben.” His very name tasted bitter with guilt and sadness.

  “Would you like to speak to him?”

  Yes, some part of me cried in silence. More than anything. But I couldn’t, not with Sybilla’s blood on my hands. Aloud, I said, “No. But you need to.”

  “Leave it to me, then,” said Lady Nairn, suddenly all brisk business. “In the meantime, head for farnborough. I’ll have a private plane waiting. As soon as we confirm that Professor Clifton’s at home, you can take off.”

  “And if he isn’t?”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  I felt suddenly drained. “Carrie’s killed for both the knife and the mirror, Lady Nairn. She’ll come after the cauldron too—within the next twenty-four hours, if Lily’s captors aren’t lying about their timing.”

  “Let them,” she said darkly. “They shan’t have it. Now go and hail a taxi.”

  As I hung up, Joanna glared down at me, hands on hips, her earlier hysteria condensed to anger. Her long dark hair lifted a little in the wind; moonlight glinted on the silver mesh around her neck, rising and falling with each breath. “The knife, the mirror, and the cauldron? Plus three dead bodies, one of them a sick ritual killing? What insanity have you pulled me into?”