The Lion Tamer’s Daughter

by Peter Dickinson

  There was a noise on the stairs, somebody running up, several people. Quickly Eddie and Pierre moved out into the lobby to meet them. Men’s voices then, loud, arguing in French, too fast for me. Eddie came to the door and beckoned to me, so I went over.

  There were three of them. I think I’d noticed them at one of the tables outside the hotel when we’d arrived. They looked pretty tough and determined.

  “These appear to be friends of Monsieur Albert’s,” said Eddie. “They want to know what happened to him.”

  “The mirror took him,” I said.

  Eddie translated. The men looked at each other. One of them shrugged.

  “Et alors son miroir a fini par le manger,” he said.

  “Il le devait une âme,” said one of the others.

  We stood out of the way and they looked through the door, but wouldn’t come into the room. Two of them crossed themselves. They went back to the top of the stairs, talked a little in low voices, and left.

  I turned back to the room just in time to see Mum going round to the front of the mirror.

  “For God’s sake don’t look in it!” I yelled, but she’d already done so.

  “Sorry, darling, but it’s just a mirror,” she said. “Have I done something wrong?”

  I suppose it must have been the final straw. I vaguely remember registering that Melly/Melanie had come to and Janice was hugging her down at the end of the room, and that was why Mum had gone wandering off, to leave them alone together, and the next thing I remember was waking up and knowing I was in a hospital even before I opened my eyes, because of the smell. I don’t remember this either, but according to Mum the first thing I said was “Get the cover on the mirror. Somebody’s got to get the cover on the mirror.”

  They said it was shock, though I tried to tell them it was just the heat. I expect they were right, but I was ashamed of just passing out like that, when it was all over. Every time I thought about what had happened and how nearly it had all gone wrong I got the shudders, so in the end they gave me a sedative and kept me in hospital all night. Melly too …

  (Don’t bother from now on whether I say Melly or Melanie—it’s the same person. A lot of people have two names, anyway.)

  Mum and Janice had told the doctors that we’d had some kind of terrible shock when we were alone together, and they didn’t know what it was, and we’d both passed out. Actually Melly seemed pretty well OK, but she couldn’t remember anything that had happened in the room, so they kept her in hospital too, but they let us out next morning.

  Janice had insisted on staying with Melly, and Mum felt the same about me, so they’d slept in chairs by our beds, and Eddie came and picked us all up in the morning, and we went and had breakfast together in the most normal, touristy restaurant we could find. We got a table with a big umbrella out on the pavement in one of the squares, and I told the others what had happened.

  Eddie hated it. He really fought against having to believe it. Even with Melly being so obviously Melanie as well, and so happy about it, he still wanted to find some way of thinking that Monsieur Albert had somehow hypnotized us all, me and both girls and both mums and him and the other detective, Pierre, and somehow stolen out with the missing girl, but in the end he gave up.

  “All right,” he said. “Provisionally, and with a lot of misgivings, I’m prepared to act on the assumption that what you say happened actually did so. It is still an unholy mess. There is a missing kid I should have reported last night, as far as anyone outside is concerned, and I bloody nearly did so, in spite of Janice and Trish begging me not to. One reason I didn’t was that Pierre had found those three types who barged in on us having a drink outside and talking it over, and he managed to settle down at the next table and listen in. They certainly appeared to think that our friend had disappeared into the mirror in the way Keith has described.

  “And here is another reason …”

  He took an old book out of his briefcase and showed it to us. Its cover was some kind of pale leather, the color of an old dinner-knife handle. He flipped through the pages so that we could see that it was full of a spidery sloping handwriting.

  “I found it in the man’s bag,” said Eddie. “I threw the other stuff into the river but I thought I’d better take charge of this in case it told us anything. I was up half the night trying to make head or tail of it. I think it’s about three hundred years old. It’s mostly in French, with some Latin and a bit of Italian, I think. I thought I might be able to read the French, at least, but it’s full of magical jargon and the writing’s hell to make out. Almost the only bits I could make sense of are the various headings, which are in capital letters. Look.”

  He showed us a page. Even I could read the words at the top. POUR PREPARER LA CHAMBRE. To get the room ready.

  “What happened to the mirror?” I said. “Is it safe? Have you got it covered up?”

  “In a minute,” he said. “Let’s finish with this. There isn’t a title or anything, it just starts straight in. It’s a sort of instruction manual for various operations.…”

  He leafed through and read out some of the headings.

  “To call out of the mirror one who is trapped in it. To return one to the mirror. To make two from one. To summon from afar the phantasm of one who is trapped in the mirror. To make one enter the mirror and bring out the phantasm—”

  “Hey! Wait a sec. What’s that?” I said, because something, a brown envelope, had fallen out of the book as he turned the page.

  “Just a bookmark he was using,” said Eddie. “Nothing in it except a few bits of hair. Well—”

  “No, wait,” I said, and scrabbled in the back pocket of my jeans. Mum hadn’t managed to get back to the hotel for clean clothes for me, so I was wearing what I’d had on yesterday. At least they’d dried out.

  I fished out the envelope Monsieur Albert had given me and looked inside. There were some short dark hairs in it.

  “Sorry,” I said. “It’s all right. But you remember I told you about him snipping bits off the girls’ hair. I just thought …”

  “Let’s have a look,” said Janice, so I passed her the envelope. She shook the hairs out onto her hand and looked at them.

  “No, that’s not Melly’s,” she said. “It’s much too coarse. May I see the other one, Eddie?… Yes, that’s hers … Oh, my goodness …”

  “That’s what he was putting in the cup,” I said. “I should have remembered he was a conjurer.”

  Nobody said anything for a bit. More than anything else that had happened this gave me the cold shivers. I don’t know why.

  “I wish I knew what the hell he thought he was up to,” said Eddie. “And even more how the hell he thought we were going to let him get away with it. But at least it bears out what I was saying. My other reason for not insisting that he has somehow tricked us all is that everything goes to suggest that the man himself believed in the genuineness of what he was trying to do. He was going to do what he’d promised us, though he was also going to cheat us in the end.”

  “And he did it,” I said. “What he’d promised us, I mean. Right, Melly?”

  She nodded. It was much easier for us, of course. I’d been there. I’d seen it. I knew it was true. And Melly knew she’d got what she wanted, though she still couldn’t remember a thing about how it had happened. It wasn’t that hard for Mum either, because she’s so good at putting herself in your shoes. When I’d been telling the story she’d practically been in the room with me, living it. But it was much tougher on Janice. It wasn’t her kind of thing at all. (I’ll put this in here, though it comes later, and I wasn’t actually there. Mum told me. It was at the airport. We were going home together because we’d had to change our tickets anyway. I’d gone to look at the bookstore while Mum cruised the duty-free and Janice and Melly stayed with our bags. Mum got back to find Janice alone, because Melly had gone to the toilet. She was crying. “I keep remembering my other daughter,” she told Mum. “It’s all right when she’
s here. Then I know I’ve got them both. But when she’s not …”)

  Eddie wasn’t so involved, of course, but he still hated it, like I’ve said, and you can’t blame him.

  “We’re all going to be in very serious trouble if anyone finds out that we’ve failed to report a missing child,” he said. “I’m going along with this for the reasons I’ve told you, but I’m risking my job and my license to do so. We’ve all got to get out of here and back to England as soon as we can fix fresh flights, and till then Melly will have to show her face at both hotels, so that questions don’t get asked. You’ll have to think of a story about why only one girl’s flying home—the other one’s gone to stay with friends and will be coming home by car with them, or something. And I don’t know what the lawyer’s going to say about the money he’s holding—we’ll just have to see. And God knows what I’m going to put in my report.”

  “Well, I think you’ve done wonders,” said Mum. “I’m sorry we’ve landed you in this mess, and thank you for being so good about it.”

  He shrugged and smiled.

  “At least it makes a change from watching people’s wives,” he said.

  “You were going to say about the mirror,” I said.

  “I don’t think there’s much we can do about that,” said Eddie. “After I’d got you to hospital I went back to settle with Pierre. I’d left him to see if he could find anything out, and as I’ve told you he did pick up a bit by listening to the talk outside. But as soon as he went in and tried to ask questions and they realized he’d been with us, they threw him out. He was waiting for me in the square. I went back in on the excuse of wanting to pay for the damage to the door and they threw me out too. It was a woman. She was furious, and frightened, and she wouldn’t take any money, and that’s all I know. Pierre, by the way, is aware that something pretty rum was up, and he doesn’t want to know about it. As far as he was concerned he’d only seen one girl.”

  Well, I hung around with Janice and Melly while Eddie and Mum went off to see the lawyer. Luckily he’d already decided for himself that Monsieur Albert was a crook, and though they couldn’t tell him the whole story, anything like, they told him enough for him to agree that if Monsieur Albert hadn’t shown up in a month to claim it, he’d send the money back to Mum. Then we drove around with Eddie and did touristy things and had an amazing meal in the evening to celebrate, and though it was still roasting hot and we ought by all rights to have been dead with exhaustion, not to mention nervous as hell that a lot of French cops were going to show up and start grilling us about what we’d done with the missing girl, we didn’t bother about any of that. We just talked and laughed and had a really good time.

  It was because of Melly. She wasn’t wild with high spirits, or anything, but there was this great glow of happiness flooding out of her, so strong that you felt nothing could ever shake or change it. I’d only got to look at her for the stuff that had happened in the Orangerie to sort of fade out and lose its grip. Yes, it had almost gone horribly wrong, but it was never going to, because it had to end like this. This was fixed.

  The last thing Eddie said to me when we said good-bye was, “I’d still like to know how the hell the bastard thought he was ever going to get away with it.”

  We all flew back to Birmingham because Mum had a fortnight off and that meant we could go and stay with Melly and Janice at Coventry, and catch up on old friends. When Dad had died Mum had said she never wanted to set foot in Coventry again, but now she really enjoyed herself, and even talked about him sometimes as if she was getting used to the idea that he wasn’t around anymore.

  The thing I found really hard to take was the idea that Melly and Melanie were one person, not two people who happened to be living in one body. I think I could have coped with that. It was easy for Janice once she got home and settled in to all her usual ways. As far as she was concerned she’d got Melly back, happy and full of life, and Melly helped by just being Melly for her, not smoking or swearing, and by hanging around with her old crowd. She kept her Melanie hairdo, but she’d been nagging for months to be let have it cut like that, and Janice might have given in anyway.

  It wasn’t hard for Mum, either, though she’d got fond of Melanie at Bearsden. The business about this being both of them didn’t seem to bother her. That’s how it was, and if Melly was happy with it, she was too.

  It was different for me. I’d always been fond of Melly. I’d missed her when she wasn’t there, and if she’d come up to visit us in Bearsden I’d have been glad to have her around and sorry when she left. But when Melanie had been living there with us I’d been a lot more than just glad—there’d been something about her which really got me going, something—I don’t know—dangerous. (Actually I think there must have been about Melly too, only she didn’t let you see it.)

  I used to nag away at this when we were alone together. I couldn’t help it. I wasn’t going to tell her straight out how I felt, but I kept noticing little things that reminded me, and saying something about them. For instance, we were washing up and I passed her a cup to dry and she’d switched hands since the last cup—she was good as ambidextrous now—and I said something about that as if I was joking but she didn’t answer. Then, when I was doing the next cup I realized she’d stopped drying so I looked up. She was watching me half sideways, smiling that Melly smile.

  “I ken weel what you’re effing thinking, you poor wee laddie,” she said.

  I felt myself blushing like a beetroot. She laughed and kissed me on the cheek but my hands were all covered with soapy water and I couldn’t grab her, and then she was back to being Melly.

  She came up to Bearsden for her half term. (Janice was working and stayed in Coventry.) Scottish half term wasn’t the same as English, so the first two days we only got the evenings together, and the first of them Mum was there so we just sat around and talked. She was different in Bearsden, not just Melly or Melanie, but somewhere between, and older-seeming, very sure of herself without having to prove it to anybody, the way you felt Melanie had needed to.

  The second evening Mum said she had to work late. Melly’d got tea ready by the time I was home and she put it on a tray and took it into the living room so that we could sit on the sofa and pretend to watch telly and have a really good cuddle. That was great. God, I was happy.

  After a bit she said, “You remember that dream I told you?”

  “The nightmare, you mean? About the man taking you across a big field toward a traveling cage with some kind of monster in it?”

  “Aye. I had it again.”

  “Oh … That sounds bad. Does it mean …?”

  “No. It was just the once, and I won’t have it anymore. I’ll tell you. I was a bairn again, and watching Papa feed his lions, and I went wandering off but there was nobody with me. There was this big field, and over the far side one of the traveling cages, so I went to see. The door was open, so I climbed the step and looked inside, but there was nothing there except this old mirror with its glass all broken. I looked at it awhile, and then I said to myself, ‘I must go and find Papa and show him.’ That’s what I’ll be doing tomorrow.”

  “Going to Edinburgh?”

  “Aye. It’s a thing I must do, and I didn’t need the dream to tell me. Do you ken how old I am?”

  “Trick question. Not fourteen, anyway?”

  “Twenty-eight years I’ve lived in my two bodies, and I’m not shutting any of them away, or it’ll be like having a room in my house I’m scared to go into because there’s a ghoulie in it.”

  “Can I come too?” I said. Next day was Saturday, and Sunday she was off back to Coventry.

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” she said. “We’ll tell Trish we’re going to Edinburgh, and she’ll get the wrong idea, think it’s for a sentimental visit to where we met up.”

  “She doesn’t know anything.”

  “She does, too. Got eyes in her head, hasn’t she? Bet you couldn’t sit still, last few days before I showed up. Why
do you think she stayed away tonight?”

  “Anyway it isn’t the wrong idea,” I said.

  “Maybe not,” she said.

  Then, later, I said, “Are you going to tell him what happened at the Orangerie? You still don’t remember any of that?”

  “Nothing. I’ll just tell him what you told me.”

  “I’ve worked out a bit more, if you’re interested.”

  We hadn’t talked about this hardly at all since we’d left Arles. She hadn’t wanted to know. But I’d been over and over it with Mum and I’d been down to the main library in Glasgow and read everything I could find about doppelgangers and magic mirrors and so on.

  “All right,” she said.

  “It isn’t about what actually happened,” I said. “It’s about what Monsieur Albert thought he was trying to do. You remember Eddie reading those bits out of the book while we were having breakfast? And then I interrupted him by asking about the envelope with the hair in it?”

  “Yes—but I wasn’t paying a lot of heed.”

  “Well, one of them was ‘To make two from one.’ That’s what he did when you were a baby, and I bet there was something in it about how it only lasts for seven years, or fourteen, or whatever, and then the two have to come together again. And there were two others. One was about summoning the phantom—no, the phantasm—of someone who’s trapped in the mirror, and one about making someone go into the mirror and bringing out the phantasm. That’s what he was doing when I stopped him. You’d have been in the mirror and your phantasm would have been outside, and he’d have passed the phantasm over to us and we’d have thought it was you. It would have been just like you and talked like you, and it might have been a bit dopy but we were used to that, and it wouldn’t remember anything, like you don’t, and I wasn’t supposed to have seen anything that mattered. And then Mum would have paid him the money and we’d all have gone home, and after a bit he’d have called your phantasm back. I don’t think it would just have disappeared. I think it would have died, and we’d have buried it and all been very sad, but if we’d dug down and opened the coffin there wouldn’t have been anything in it. I found a story like that in the library.”