“She’s not dissolving.”
“Give it a second,” said Darwen, lamely flicking the last drops from the glass in her general direction.
The thing they had thought was Mr. Peregrine, the thing that had turned out to be a flesh suit containing a giant insect, had been vulnerable to water. Eileen, on the other hand, merely looked irritated.
“Another breathtaking insight,” she observed, in a voice so precise, so unlike her usual vacant tone that the others stared at her. “This is Mr. Peregrine’s crack mirroculist and his sidekicks? No wonder Silbrica is falling apart.”
There was so much wrong with this remark and the careless way in which she delivered it that for a moment Darwen could think of nothing to say. Eileen, he noticed, was studying the weapon in her hands and frowning. The blaster looked like something halfway between a shotgun and a bazooka as fashioned by some mad Victorian scientist: all copper pipes, brass cogs, and intricately inlaid wood, ending in three different barrels, one with a tiny red light at one end, another studded with holes, and a third that flared like the horn of a trumpet. There were three blue lightbulbs set up above the trigger mechanism, but only one of them was lit.
“We have to get out of here,” said Eileen, to herself as much as to the others.
“Can’t we just, you know, shoot our way out?” Rich suggested, looking hopefully at the weapon in her hands.
“We can’t,” said Eileen pointedly, “because we only brought one blaster between four of us and we have already used up most of its power getting in. The terrapods always fight in threes, and each one will have a platoon of scrobblers in support. There’s no way we’re going back down those stairs.”
“What’s a terror pod?” asked Rich.
“Terrapod,” said Eileen, nodding hurriedly to the reptilian creature whose body almost blocked the door. “That. Not real bright, but strong, and tough to bring down.”
“I thought it was, like, a dinosaur or something,” said Alex, trying to sound flippant.
Eileen gave her a withering look and started scanning the mirrors on the walls.
“Who are you?” Darwen demanded.
“I’m Eileen,” said Eileen. “Your babysitter. Remember? I also work for the man you know as the owner of a little mirror shop in the unfashionable end of a trendy mall. None of which matters right now, so can we get on?”
Rich gaped at her.
“Is there a way through these?” Darwen asked, determined to seem like he knew what he was doing. “I might be able to open them if—”
“Of course not,” said Eileen, as if he was being stupid on purpose. “This is Octavius’s observatory. You can look through them, hear through them, but they aren’t portals.”
“Octavius?” Darwen echoed.
“Mr. Peregrine,” snapped Eileen. “Now give me a moment’s silence and let me think?”
As she spoke, the house seemed to tremble with a roar from below. She was right. Another terrapod was making its way through the halls below, and by the sounds of things, some of the scrobblers had already reached the stairs.
“Think,” Eileen muttered to herself.
“You’re sure there’s no way to open these observation window things. . . .” Darwen tried, pressing the surface of one that showed what looked like a stone circle on a rainy moor.
“I told you,” Eileen shot back without looking at him. “Will you please be quiet?”
Darwen felt himself flush and, catching glances from Rich and Alex, looked down. Given how close he had come to dying, it seemed amazing that he should be left feeling so stupid, useless, and afraid.
Eileen had flung open the door to the tiny bathroom, checked inside, and slammed it hard with a grunt of frustrated disgust. The door failed to latch and bounced half open, juddering as it hung.
“Why does it say twelve noon?” asked Alex, considering the grandfather clock that stood beside the bathroom.
“What?” snapped Eileen. “Who cares? It’s wrong, okay? Just let me figure this out. . . .”
“But it’s not just wrong,” Alex persisted. “It’s said that time since we got here.”
“So it stopped,” Eileen shot back, her voice rising. “Big deal! Octavius has been gone for weeks. No one wound it. Of course it’s stopped.”
“Where’s the pendulum?” asked Rich, who was squatting in front of the glass panel in the lower part of the clock’s case. “I don’t see a pendulum. I see gears and workings and stuff, but they shouldn’t be down there, and they sure as heck-fire don’t look like a regular clock.”
“Will you all just STOP TALKING!” shouted Eileen, turning so swiftly toward Rich that her blond hair whipped around, her eyes widening as they fell on the top of the stairs.
She dropped to one knee, made a rapid alteration to the settings on the blaster, and unleashed five quick shots that lit the room like yellow lightning. The two scrobblers that had been inching their way up the stairs dropped, and at least two more ducked back around the corner.
Eileen checked the blue light on the side of her gun, and her anger was replaced by something like despair. They were running out of time.
“What if it’s not a clock?” said Rich, who—amazingly—had not taken his eyes from the hands on the dial despite the shooting. “What if it’s a control mechanism?” And then, as if answering his own question, he added, “But for what?”
“The door,” said Alex, pointing at the bathroom door Eileen had failed to shut. “Close it.”
Darwen did so, hoping she had some idea what she was doing.
“Now move the hands on the clock,” said Alex.
“To what?” said Rich.
Alex shrugged. “Till you find something that works,” she said.
At the head of the stairs, Eileen fired twice more, but at the roar of another terrapod somewhere below, she backed into the room, looking haggard. As if for the first time, she noticed what Rich was doing. He had opened the glass window on the clock face and had taken hold of the long hand. He glanced at Darwen and shrugged.
“Set it to eleven,” said Darwen, stepping back from the door and considering the clock thoughtfully. He had no idea what he was doing, but someone had to make a choice.
Rich wound the long hand backward, and the hour hand edged back with it. “Done,” he said.
Eileen was now watching Rich closely as he reached for the door handle. He tried to turn it, but it wouldn’t move.
“It’s locked,” he explained.
“Maybe it needs the hand of a mirroculist like me to open it,” said Alex with a would-be careless air aimed at Eileen.
Eileen gazed at her, her face hard to read. “You really are—” she began, then stopped herself.
“Oh yeah,” said Alex. She took a couple of confident strides toward the door. She was reaching toward the handle when she was snatched backward by a massive greenish fist.
Darwen whirled around, but it was too late. As they had been focusing on the clock, the scrobblers had gotten up the stairs. Two of them were already inside and three more were coming. Behind them, pulling itself up the stairs like a wall of leathery flesh studded with two hard black eyes, was another terrapod.
Darwen flung himself at the scrobbler who had caught Alex, Rich at his heels. Eileen dropped and fired twice more toward the head of the stairs, but Darwen had no idea if she hit anything.
He and Rich hit the scrobbler just as Alex stamped on one of its heavy boots. Darwen punched twice into the creature’s stomach, feeling pathetically small. With its hands full, the scrobbler lowered its goggled face and opened its mouth wide, showing boar-like tusks. It was going to bite him, and the sheer horror of that loosened Darwen’s grip. He fell back to the floor.
“The door, Darwen!” yelled Rich. “Open the door!”
Darwen rolled to his feet and scrambled to the bathroom doo
r, standing and yanking it open in one move.
It was immediately apparent that their hunch had been right. Where the little bathroom had been there was now a long carpeted hallway lit with wall-mounted oil lamps that burned amber. Darwen had no idea where it led, but it would get them out of here, and if you had to be a mirroculist to go through, then the scrobblers couldn’t follow.
That also meant he couldn’t go through alone without abandoning the others. Alex would be okay if she could get free, but since Rich and Eileen weren’t mirroculists, Darwen would have to be touching them.
He turned back to where Alex and Rich hung on the arms of the massive scrobbler that was trying to shake them off, only to find that the other had shouldered its way past Eileen and was right on top of him.
He shrank into the corner. With one wild swing, the scrobbler slammed the portal closed. To make matters worse, the entrance to the stairwell was suddenly darkened by a massive reptilian head with the sharp beak of a snapping turtle: the second terrapod had made it up. Darwen dropped into a squat, and through the legs of the scrobbler standing over him, he saw Eileen hopelessly fiddling with her blaster as she retreated from the stairs into the room.
The scrobbler swung at Darwen with what was probably a tool but might just as well have been a medieval mace. He dodged and a portion of the wall behind him exploded in a shower of plaster dust. As he tried to run, the scrobbler caught his shoulder with one gnarled, clawlike hand and squeezed. The pain was intense and Darwen collapsed, dimly aware that the scrobbler was raising the mace over his head.
And then the room exploded with the roar of the terrapod and everything seemed to stop. The scrobbler winced, its grip slackened, and Darwen rolled out from under it. Alex and Rich had broken free too and were already at the portal, which Alex had opened.
“Go!” roared Darwen. “I’ll bring Eileen.”
They ducked inside, but as Darwen crossed to the portal, the terrapod managed to squeeze in from the staircase. Darwen didn’t see the slash of its talon, but he felt it open a cruel gash along the side of his thigh. He kept moving, feeling nothing but a curious cold deadness in his leg, which suddenly turned to fire. He tried to take a step toward Eileen, reaching for her with all his strength, and for a moment he saw her face quite clearly, as if he had never seen her before. All her teenage nonchalance, her irritation, her permanent disapproval had gone, and she looked very young, and very scared. She was still clutching the blaster in one hand, but she was no longer trying to shoot, and though one of the scrobblers had her about the waist, she was reaching with her free hand toward Darwen.
They were only inches apart. For a moment he thought he could reach her, but then he felt the impact of the terrapod’s fist, and he spun backward, falling through the portal and onto the carpet of that impossible hallway. The shock of the blow left him dizzy so that for a single, blessed moment he was able to forget that he had left Eileen alone in the room.
He called her name, but he knew that without being able to touch her, she couldn’t get through the portal, and try as he might, his legs just wouldn’t let him go back. He put a hand to his thigh and felt it come away warm and slick with blood.
Then Rich was pulling him along the hallway.
“Eileen?” called Alex from somewhere down the hall. “Where’s Eileen?”
Rich leaned into Darwen’s face. “She’s still in there?” he said, looking wildly back to the watchtower.
“I couldn’t reach,” Darwen murmured. “I tried, but I just couldn’t. . . .”
And then Rich was climbing over him, grasping one of his hands and stretching till he was close enough to the portal. Then he was gone.
“No!” called Darwen and Alex at once.
It was suicide to go back in there. And even if he could get to her, Rich wasn’t a mirroculist. He’d be trapped with the scrobblers and the terrapod.
“Rich!” called Darwen. He tried to stand, but the pain in his leg flared like he had been kicked, and he crumpled, his eyes closed tight. When he opened them, he saw Alex looming over him.
“One of us will have to go back in to get him,” she said.
Darwen could only nod, and then suddenly, impossibly, Rich was back, dragging a battered-looking Eileen through the portal behind him.
“What?” gasped Alex. “How did you . . . ?”
Rich, for all his exertion, managed a shy smile.
“Guess I’m one of you now,” he said.
Chapter Ten
Revelations
“How’s the leg?” asked Eileen.
Darwen wasn’t sure how long it had been since they had made their escape: twenty minutes? Perhaps more. Eileen had recovered much of her composure, but she was quiet, and the irritation that had characterized his babysitter as long as he had known her was gone, so that he found himself gazing at her, struggling to accept the idea that this was the same person who had bossed him and ignored him and generally treated him like an unpleasant inconvenience for the last nine months.
“A little better, thanks,” he said.
Rich produced an oversized handkerchief and Alex wound it tightly from Darwen’s knee to his hip.
“You blow your nose on this?” said Alex to Rich. “It looks like a tablecloth, man.”
Darwen grinned in spite of himself. The wound still hurt a great deal, but the bleeding seemed to have stopped.
The portal had taken them into a Silbrican version of the same mansion. The rooms were roughly identical to those on the Atlanta side, but this one had large, glorious windows overlooking acres of immaculate, manicured garden, which reminded Darwen of a stately home he had visited in England with his parents. No one had stepped outside yet, but they could make out lawns and flower beds and carefully clipped hedges laid out in geometric patterns as far as the eye could see.
Darwen was lying in a sunny sitting room on a pale couch, his feet up, while Eileen paced and Rich and Alex relived their escape from the watchtower. Rich seemed to have grown a couple of inches, the way he carried himself now. He could barely keep from laughing with delight at somehow having become a mirroculist, and no matter how much Alex teased him for being pleased with himself, he couldn’t stop grinning.
“So you can open portals,” she remarked. “Big deal. I could do that months ago. You gonna start singing and dancing like me too, copycat?”
“No one wants to sing and dance like you, Alex,” said Rich, unoffended.
“They want to,” Alex rejoined. “They just can’t.”
“I think I’ll take opening dimensional portals over being one of your backup singers,” Rich quipped, gazing out at the garden through the tall windows.
Darwen smiled because he knew how delighted Rich was, how proud, but he couldn’t help wondering where this left him. Darwen had mockingly imagined opening portals at the school talent gala because, as Mr. Sumners had shrewdly pointed out, he didn’t have any other talents. Now even this had been taken away from him.
No, he reminded himself, not taken away. I can still do it. For now. It’s just that other people can too. And that’s good because they are my friends and it makes them happy.
Or so he told himself.
“Rich Haggerty, the mirroculist.” Alex sighed. “Must be some kind of mistake. Like the Guardians wanted to give me even more power and some of it landed on you. Something like that.”
“This just eats you up, doesn’t it?” Rich cooed, grinning sideways at her. “No more waiting for you to open the portals for me. No thanks, Alex, I got this one. . . .”
“You’re quite the comedian,” Alex muttered, trying to hide her smile. “You should get yourself a red nose and some clown shoes. Man, the Guardians’ standards sure are slipping. I guess they let anyone become a mirroculist these days. . . .”
“No,” said Eileen, absently, but so thoughtfully that the others stopped sparring to l
ook at her. “They don’t. There should be one mirroculist. That’s how it works. One. Not two, and certainly not three. It doesn’t make any sense. Mirroculists aren’t made, they just are. One at a time.”
She looked more than serious. She seemed almost sad.
“How does that work?” asked Darwen, sitting up awkwardly. “I mean, it’s not destiny, right? Because I don’t believe in destiny.”
“I’m not a philosopher,” said Eileen.
Yesterday, Darwen thought, that statement in his babysitter’s mouth would have struck him as extraordinarily funny, but now he didn’t know what to think.
“All I know,” said Eileen, ceasing her pacing and sitting in a large wing-backed leather chair, “is that for centuries there has been one mirroculist. After each one lost the gift, another would be discovered, but sometimes it took time. There have been years when no one could open the portals between our world and Silbrica.”
After each one lost the gift.
The phrase rang in Darwen’s head like a mournful bell in the distance.
“How long have you been working for Mr. Peregrine?” asked Rich.
“For the last three years,” Eileen replied.
“But you’re . . . you know, human, right?” Rich pressed.
“Obviously,” said Eileen, a flicker of her former irritation coming back into her face.
“Three years?” said Darwen, sitting up properly now.
Eileen shot him a look, and there was something a little hunted in her expression, like she wished she hadn’t said that.
“So when you started working for my aunt, you already knew Mr. Peregrine?” he pressed.
“Sure.” She shrugged, as if the point was of no consequence, though Darwen thought she avoided his eyes.
“Wait a minute,” said Darwen, giving her a hard look. “You knew the day I met him, the day he gave me the mirror. Right?” His voice had an edge to it. “You told him who I was, or maybe he told you? Maybe he got you to apply for my aunt’s babysitting job, yeah? Was that how it worked? She never told me how she met you.”
Darwen Arkwright and the School of Shadows Page 8