“And the cost of the house,” Manny added.
“That too,” he agreed. “So, no.” He shook his head. “I’m here for the night. At the very worst, it’ll be uncomfortable and I’ll probably catch pneumonia. At best, I might just catch this person and finish this, once and for all.”
“You left out the bit where you might die.”
“I did,” he admitted. The thought curled and twisted at the back of his head. If the scarred man had killed Tony and Diane, he would have no hesitation about killing again. “I told you, I’ve made up my mind.” Jonathan Frazer didn’t look around. He was busy clearing a free area in the center of the room around a chaise longue. With great difficulty he had maneuvered the mirror to the center of the room, leaving a clear path to the door. Anyone entering through the doorway would be immediately visible, though he, hopefully, would be invisible in the shadows.
“And what happens if someone comes looking for the mirror?”
Her father glanced over his shoulder, his bruised face pale in the gloom. “Then I’ll hold him for the police, and maybe I’ll ask him a few questions before they arrive.”
“And the gun?”
“For personal protection only,” he muttered, turning away and not meeting her eyes.
“Dad…”
“Yes.”
“Be careful, Dad. Don’t do anything…”
“Heroic?” he suggested.
“Stupid,” she said.
Jonathan Frazer straightened, dusting off his hands. “Don’t worry. You know I’m a coward.”
“Yes, that’s why you came charging in here the other night, and nearly got yourself killed. That’s the sort of thing cowards do.”
“You sound like your mother,” he said gently.
“Dad!” she said in disgust, turning and walking away into the evening.
* * *
JONATHAN FRAZER SPENT the next two hours wandering around the guesthouse, looking through some of the pieces Tony had been in the process of repairing. Some of them had been there for years and now would never be repaired. There was far too much stuff here: it was no way to run a business, he had certainly overbought. But then he hadn’t expected the downfall in the economy and the slump in the interior design business. Although that was no longer his primary source of income, he relied on it for cash flow. His father had made the money, and then secured it with shrewd investments; all he had had to do was to consolidate.
Sitting in a late Victorian basketwork chair, he wondered what he would do now without Tony. Every firm that dealt in retail of any sort had someone like Tony Farren, someone whose knowledge was essential to the running of the business. Without Tony, things would be different; he would try to replace him, but finding someone with knowledge and experience was going to prove extraordinarily difficult and expensive. Also, he’d built up a lifetime of trust and respect for Tony.
Jonathan stood, the chair creaking and crackling beneath him. He would have to start taking a more direct hand in the day-to-day running of the business. And the first item on the agenda would be to sell off as much of this stuff as possible. He’d take it down to the store and maybe have a sidewalk sale. Looking around, he realized that he had tens of thousands of dollars tied up in stock.
He pulled aside a flatiron desk, wincing as glass slivers from the shattered light bulbs stung his hands. Diane had done a good job of cleaning up most of them, but … but she’d never completed the job. First thing in the morning he’d get someone in to replace the lights, and check the circuits: obviously something had overloaded them, some power surge from the house maybe, or the alarm. Yes, that was it, the alarm had overloaded, tripping the breakers, though he was surprised they simply hadn’t just died rather than exploding so spectacularly.
Then, maybe with Manny helping him, he could close the store for a couple of days and bring Robert, the sales assistant, in to help him clean the place up, do a little re-organization. Maybe he’d give some of the odd pieces of junk that Tony had been working on to a consignment store, see if he could make a little quick money.
He only realized the light was almost gone when he found himself squinting to read the sale label on a bookcase. He looked at his watch, it was late, and he was hungry, but reluctant to go back to the house and possibly have another argument with Celia. And he didn’t want to leave the guesthouse.
He maneuvered his way through the mess and lay down on a brown leather chaise longue, stretching out and crossing his feet at the ankles. Lifting the gun out of his waistband, he rested it on the top of his right leg, his hand loosely wrapped around the grip, the barrel pointed away from him where the mirror was a pale rectangle against the shadows. Carefully, deliberately, he turned the gun to point down. He didn’t want it going off accidentally and destroying the leather chaise. Or the mirror.
If you dealt with any old, antique or second hand artifacts for any length of time, you soon learned that there certainly were some pieces which came with a history and were unlucky—cursed was probably too strong a word for them. Every dealer had stories about cursed pieces. An Arizona dealer he knew had a penchant for knives, he’d been collecting them for years, and had one of the finest collections in the Southwest. A couple of years ago, he’d purchased a second hand Gypsy Jack folding knife online at a bargain price. When it had arrived he had opened the gleaming blade, admiring its finish and as he had closed it, it had snapped back unexpectedly, slicing off the tip of his finger.
An accident.
As he was attending to his wounds, his three-year-old son had somehow managed to open the knife. It dropped from his hands and stabbed him in the foot.
An accident.
Deciding to quickly resell the knife, one of the sale assistants almost severed his little finger while retracting the blade.
An accident.
But three accidents with the same piece? The dealer investigated. It turned out that the knife had belonged to a teenager who had used it to stab both his parents to death. The same day, the collector took the knife and flung it into the Yaqui river.
Such stories weren’t unusual, there were many unlucky pieces out there. A lot of antique jewelry had bad luck attached to them and a couple of years ago, he’d almost bought a bed which was reputed to be cursed: a couple had committed suicide in it. Tony had dissuaded him.
So was it unusual that the mirror could be cursed in the same way? Or was he simply allowing his imagination to run away with him?
Tony was dead. But Tony had had accidents before. Jonathan smiled, remembering the time he had become locked in an eighteenth-century sea chest, and then again when he’d become trapped in a fourteenth-century suit of armor. He took risks, he did stupid things … and he drank. Who was to say that he hadn’t been drinking that day, overbalanced and pulled the mirror down on top of him? Accidental death, the coroner had said.
And Diane?
Well, she knew the rules about playing around in the workshop. You simply didn’t do it, you concentrated and focused. She’d learnt that rule a long time ago when Tony had been teaching her how to use a SKILSAW. She had taken her eyes off the piece of wood for one second; had Tony not wrenched the plug from the wall, she would have lost all the fingers on her right hand.
And the scarred man? Why had he broken into the guesthouse—for the mirror certainly—and yet it wasn’t exactly hidden the night he had broken in. And even if he had found it, what was he going to do with it? It had taken four firefighters to lift it off Tony Farren’s body; how was one man going to haul it away? A sudden thought struck him: hadn’t the scarred man mentioned Tony’s name? Maybe he’d been involved with Tony, maybe there’d been an argument and the mirror had been pushed down onto him.
Jonathan Frazer sat bolt upright. This was craziness. He could feel his head spinning, his thoughts chasing one another. He was thinking like a madman, curses and plots and murders. He must be still feeling the effects of the valium the doctor had given him. Maybe that’s why he was so conf
used and sleepy.
But what would happen if he fell into a drugged sleep now? What would happen if someone broke into the guesthouse tonight? A pulse started in his temple and he felt his heart begin to pound in a panic attack. All the windows were screened, the skylights secured, so the only way in was through the door and that was bolted on the inside. He climbed up out of the chaise longue and lifted a box of tacks from the workbench and scattered them over the floor. He tied a length of fishing wire across the entrance to the little clearing where he had positioned the mirror so that anyone approaching him wouldn’t be able to do it without making enough noise to wake the dead …
Frazer began to laugh, a dry hissing sound, at the thought of waking the dead—Tony Farren’s and Diane Williams’s faces floating before his eyes. The laughter went on for two minutes before dissolving into gentle snoring.
18
THE FULL moon was high in the heavens, the sky clear and cloudless, its light cold and sharp across the dirty streets.
Edmund Talbott stood at the window of the apartment and looked out over the almost deserted street through a tiny rent in the newspaper he had pasted over the glass. The young woman in a too-tight, too-short dress and thigh-high boots had finally left her post on the corner across the road, obviously hoping to pick up a late customer coming out of the 7-Eleven at the end of the road.
The big man looked up into the heavens, gauging the time. He folded his arms and leaned back against the wall, watching the way the moonlight moved across the bare floorboards, the light still distinct even through the newspapers.
Talbott closed his eyes, concentrating, trying to remember the layout of Frazer’s guesthouse, orientating on it, fixating on the mirror in relation to the windows, then determining the fall of the moonlight. Finally, he relaxed, shoulders slumping; providing everything had remained untouched, the mirror was out of the direct moonlight—and anyway, there’d be no one in the room to see anything.
* * *
SHIMMERING MOONLIGHT MOVED down the length of the long room, gradually illuminating each of the screened windows in turn before moving on. It was close to three in the morning before the luminescence finally reached the mirror. Liquid silver ran down the length of the glass, bringing it to startlingly brilliant life. A trembling shadow drifted down the length of the tall glass.
Jonathan Frazer opened his eyes and looked at a wall of shining light. And then he discovered that shapes moved within, ghostly, flickering images wrapped around with smoke.
They were real enough to touch.
19
SMOKE, THICK, gray, almost glutinous, coiled and twisted around enormous pillars. Lower down, closer to the floor, tendrils of dank mist rose up through the cracked and shattered slabstones. Water dripped in the distance, the sound echoing hollowly through the high-ceilinged chamber. There was water on the floor, large shallow pools washed silver in the vague light, and the walls were streaked green with fetid moisture. The air felt damp, heavy, cloying, tainted with excrement, seaweed, and fish.
The cloaked and hooded figure moved through the swirling mist, seemingly unconcerned with the chill or the odors, moving confidently across the maze of broken stones and the other, less easily identifiable, debris that littered the ground. There were natural potholes strewn around the huge echoing chamber, as well as other, man-made traps. Even if someone managed to breach the outer security defenses without raising an alarm, they would have to be very lucky indeed to make it past this sanctum without succumbing to one or other of its lethal snares.
Moving deeper into the huge chamber there were sounds, distant and indistinct, occasionally broken by a rasping shriek that might have been metal on metal. There was light, too, an archway illuminated by warm golden light, incongruous in this dark and dreary place. A gossamer wind carried newer, though possibly even less pleasant odors, overlaying the stench of the place.
Two men suddenly appeared out of the shadows, the wan light running off their leather jerkins, sparkling on the swords and knives in their hands. Their faces were flat, impassive, eyes wide and unblinking, pupils tiny. Their lips and tongues were black.
The hooded figure stopped and straightened, throwing back the hood, shaking out a mane of thick black hair, coal black eyes regarding the two men impassively.
The two men stared at the woman, their mouths slack, dark saliva running onto their chins, into their beards. She stared them down, knowing that even though they had been trained to accept her, they could still tear her apart if she showed the slightest fear or hesitation.
Without a word they both saluted with their swords and stepped back into the shadows. They were effectively the last line of defense and even if an intruder managed to get this far, it would be impossible to pass them. They were twin brothers, taken from their mother at the moment of their birth and trained in the same way hunting dogs and pit bulls were trained—beaten, starved and tortured—until they were completely loyal to their master. Narcotics kept them docile and obedient, especially the weed that had originally been brought back by the knights returning from the Crusades.
The woman moved into the arched doorway and stopped, unwilling to intrude now, knowing that the work was at a very delicate stage. When he was finished, he would notice her.
There had been some improvements in the place since she had last been here. Equipment had been brought in, there was a table and chairs, a brazier. And the mirror. She caught herself looking at it, staring deep into its grimy depths before she realized what she was doing and tore her gaze away, forcing herself to concentrate on the room. The chamber was actually below the level of the Thames in a rotting wharfside warehouse, surrounded by filthy slums. And even in this overcrowded disease-ridden part of the city, the building remained unoccupied. People who entered its dank interior—homeless people, vagabonds, some of the women who plied their trade on the wharf—had been found dead in the street the following morning.
The building was cursed. As simple as that.
The woman smiled. How primitive these peasants were; how easily controlled. A few dead bodies and they spoke of curses. Yes, the building was cursed, but the only curse on it was the two half-human creatures. This might be the age of discovery and invention, and men might write about the Americas and the Indies as if they had actually been there, they might admire the new weeds, the fruits and the vegetables coming back from the New World, but in all their quest for knowledge, they were ignoring a greater, larger, far more mysterious world: a world of magic and power.
There was a man in the center of the room, tall, thin, a shock of red hair and beard emphasizing his pale skin, highlighting his green eyes. His clothes had once been white and cream, but now his silk shirt and hose and pale doeskin boots were soiled with the filth of the place. His hands were on his hips and he was looking at the floor.
Without turning around he raised his left hand, fingers crooked, calling her forward. She moved through the debris littering the floor to stand beside him, her arm moving around his waist, her head resting on his shoulder. “Kelley,” she murmured.
The man ignored her, staring at the floor. There was a pit at his feet, ten feet deep by ten feet wide. Thick iron bars, already speckled by rust even though they were barely weeks old, had been set into a stout wooden frame, which in turn was bolted to the floor.
And deep within the pit was a man.
The woman leaned forward to look down, taking care to lift the hem of her dress and long cloak off the floor. “He is young?” she said. It was difficult to make out his features or age in the dim lighting.
The tall red-haired man lifted the lantern from the table and held it high, shedding yellow light into the pit. There was a quick scrabbling movement as the rats scurried for cover and the young man came to his feet. He was naked, his pale body patterned in bruises and scrapes, covered in filth. His hair was thick—filthy now with grease and straw—but there was a distinctive bald patch in the center of his head.
“A cleric!” s
he said, delighted.
“A cleric,” the big man nodded. “He believes I am the devil.”
She smiled, showing long yellow teeth. “He is almost right.”
The big man smiled humorlessly. “I wonder what he will make of you.” His accent was flat, dull, almost crude.
“And he is a virgin?” she asked.
The red-haired man shrugged. “Who can tell these days? But he is young, fanatical, not the type to give himself to the sins of the flesh.”
“Wash him,” she said, turning away.
Kelley shouted aloud in a guttural language not unlike Gallic and one of the guards appeared. He pointed to the terrified man in the pit and spoke again in the same harsh tongue. The brute looked into the pit for a moment and then moved away, returning moments later with an enormous bucket of water which he dumped unceremoniously over the man below. The prisoner screamed with shock and surprise: the water had been pulled from the Thames and was freezing.
“Aris,” Kelley grunted. Again.
More water was emptied down onto the young man. He was now shivering so badly he could barely stand, and the water had turned the floor of the cell into a quagmire.
Kelley unlocked the heavy hasp lock and pulled back the gate. The dead-eyed guard dropped the ten feet into the sodden mire of straw and filth and hauled the cleric to his feet. Although he was barely conscious, he attempted to strike the guard with his fists. The guard slapped him once, a single blow that rocked his head from side to side.
Kelley lowered a makeshift ladder—a length of wood with pegs set on either side—and the guard climbed up, the cleric tossed over one shoulder.
“Anseo!” Here. He pointed to the long wooden table that had been set up before the mirror. The guard dumped the young man onto the table. His head thumped against the wood.
Kelley and the woman stood on either side of the table and looked down, examining him critically. He was perhaps seventeen years old, physically perfect, all his limbs, fingers, and toes intact. His back teeth had gone, but his eyes were unclouded by cataracts, the whites reasonably clear, tainted around the edges by yellow. His armpits and groin were free of growths or nodules and there were no cankers or pustules on his penis. Perhaps this one was a virgin. They had been unsuccessful on two previous occasions: both young men had been diseased.
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