Eileen said nothing, and Darwen felt the color in his face rise.
“All that time I thought you were ignoring me, talking on your phone and stuff,” he said, “you were spying on me!”
“I did what Octavius asked,” said Eileen.
“And you somehow connected me with him,” said Darwen, trying to make sense of it all, astonished as the pieces fell into place.
“The moment you came to Atlanta, he was going to connect with you,” said Eileen, suddenly frank and forceful. “That wasn’t me. I just told him where you would be and when. He released the flittercrake into the mall to lead you to the shop, not me.”
“He led me to the shop?” Darwen gasped. Rich and Alex were frozen in silence, watching.
“He had to!” Eileen replied. “Everything suggested that you would be the new mirroculist. He had to meet you to be sure.”
Ask him how he knew your name, Darwen thought. Those had been Scarlett Oppertune’s last words. Mr. Peregrine had known who he was, known what he might be, and the gift of the mirror had been a test, plain and simple. Lightborne had admitted as much.
“Wait,” said Darwen, shaking his head, like he was trying to clear it. “How did he know I was going to be a mirroculist?”
“The Guardians had been . . .” Eileen hesitated, picking her words carefully. “Monitoring you.”
“But I was just a normal kid!” Darwen shot back. “This mirror stuff didn’t start till I came here!”
“The abilities of the mirroculist,” Eileen recited, as if she was remembering something she had read long ago, “don’t start at birth. They begin as the subject crosses into adulthood.”
“I’m not an adult!” Darwen shouted back. “Look at me! I’m a kid.”
“Sometimes,” Eileen said, even more carefully, her eyes fixed on the carpet, “an emotional trauma accelerates the process.”
Darwen was about to yell back at her when the weight of the words struck him and he fell silent. Alex was also looking down. Rich was staring at him, his mouth open, his face a mask of shock.
“Emotional trauma,” Darwen repeated.
“Yes,” said Eileen. “I’m sorry, Darwen, but it’s true. You might never have become a mirroculist if it wasn’t for the road accident that killed your parents. It pushed you over the edge and activated your abilities. No one could have known that for sure, but when the Guardians learned that a possible mirroculist was coming, we had to find out. I was positioned to keep an eye on you and make sure you met Mr. Peregrine. I’m sorry that I couldn’t tell you. It was for your own protection.”
Darwen said nothing. For a little while Silbrica had been a kind of home for him, a refuge from his loneliness and sadness; it had been an enchanting secret, a place where he was special. But now it seemed that had only been possible because of what had happened to him, what he had lost. In a moment of startling clarity, he saw that he would give it all up—the portals, Moth’s forest, all the beauty and adventure of Silbrica—to have his family back the way it had been.
“My aunt,” said Darwen at last. “Did she know?”
This took Eileen so completely off guard that she actually laughed.
“Not a clue,” said Eileen. “As far as she was concerned, I just showed up at the right time and was far more flexible than the other babysitters she interviewed.”
“But you seemed so . . .” Darwen tried to find the word.
“Uninterested,” Rich supplied.
“Obnoxious?” offered Alex. “Insufferable? Jackassy?”
Eileen gave a half smile and a nod of acknowledgment. “Gonna be a theater minor when I go to college,” she said. “If I ever get to.”
“Majoring in what?” asked Alex, skeptical.
“Physics, I think,” Eileen said with a self-deprecating shrug.
“Yeah?” said Rich, pleased and impressed. “Cool.”
“But wait,” said Darwen. “If it’s so rare to be a mirroculist, and my gift was triggered by some emotional trauma, what about them?”
He nodded at Alex and Rich, who returned his gaze a little guiltily.
“No idea,” said Eileen, and there it was again in her face: that deliberate blankness, as if she was hiding some feeling even from herself. “When the Guardians heard that you opened a portal,” she said to Alex, “they went nuts. First they didn’t believe it. Then they went into full-on research mode trying to figure how it was possible, but no one came up with anything. When they find out he’s a mirroculist too . . .” she said, glancing at Rich. The sentence trailed off, and she just shrugged and shook her head.
“So,” said Darwen, “you’re still working for the Guardians?”
“Right now,” said Eileen, “I just work for Octavius. He was my link to the council. Since he disappeared, I’ve communicated with them only once, through a Spanish agent of theirs. . . .”
“Jorge,” said Alex and Rich together.
“Right,” she said. “You know him?”
“Let’s say our paths have crossed,” said Darwen. “What did he tell you to do?”
“Keep you safe,” said Eileen. “Help you find Octavius, and help you gather allies to stand with us against Greyling.”
She sounded uneasy, even a little resentful that after her years of service, Darwen—who was no more than a kid in her eyes—was in charge.
“So Greyling hates you too,” said Alex, grinning. “I’m pretty sure he hates us more, but at least we’re on the same side.”
She said it so easily, reveling in it like it was a badge of honor, that all the tension evaporated. Eileen started to laugh and soon they were all laughing with her. For a moment all the danger they had passed through, all the terrors surely to come, seemed no more than a game, a bit of fun in which they got to be the good guys and nothing serious could possibly happen to them. They were just sitting in a fancy living room, basking in the softening light from the windows and chatting as if they were swapping stories from books. Darwen was the first to stop laughing, and he did so with a sudden sense of dread that made him wince with a pain as clear as that in his thigh.
“Well, one good thing’s come from all this,” said Eileen.
“What’s that?” asked Rich.
“I get to see Silbrica again,” said Eileen, beaming so that she looked like a completely different person.
“Mr. Peregrine didn’t bring you across much?” Alex asked.
“What?” said Eileen, the smile evaporating. “No. He wasn’t a mirroculist.”
“Isn’t,” said Darwen, firmly.
“What?” asked Eileen.
“Mr. Peregrine isn’t a mirroculist,” Darwen spelled out. “Not wasn’t.”
“Right,” said Eileen. “Of course.”
He managed not to add that it was starting to seem like the old shopkeeper and Eileen were the only people who weren’t mirroculists, because he didn’t want to rain on Rich’s parade. And it was, perhaps predictably, Rich who seemed most keen to press on.
“So now that we’re here,” he said, “what are we going to do? Is there a way to find where those places we could see in the watchtower actually are? Mr. Peregrine was in one of those labs—”
“What?” snapped Eileen, so brusquely that Darwen glimpsed the old babysitter he had loathed for months. “You saw Octavius? Where?”
In all the confusion of the fight in the Atlanta mansion, Eileen had not had a chance to study the windows in the observatory. Now she was eager to learn all they had been able to see, after which her pacing took on the feel of a tiger in the zoo, glaring.
“Maybe we should go outside,” suggested Alex, who was also starting to get antsy.
“This is Silbrica, remember?” said Darwen. “Who knows what’s out there?”
Normally this remark would have had a serious, weighty quality to it, but with the windows s
howing only the early evening falling softly on acres of manicured gardens, even Darwen knew he sounded paranoid.
“You don’t even know that those gardens are real,” he insisted. “Might be a trick of the windows, an effect to make the house feel nicer. Maybe if you step outside, you’re actually in some underground cave crawling with monsters.”
“One way to find out,” said Alex, moving to the French windows.
“No!” said Rich. “Not yet. We should see what there is to find here before we go wandering off into whatever dangers are waiting out there.”
“Right,” said Alex, considering the view from the window. “Wouldn’t want to risk the perils of a formal English garden. We could prick ourselves on a rosebush or have to run from servants trying to serve us cucumber sandwiches.” She turned abruptly to Darwen. “I take it you didn’t have a garden like this at your house?”
“No,” said Darwen flatly.
“Huh,” said Alex, as if this was disappointing but to be expected. “The version of England you came from sure isn’t like the movies.”
“Right,” said Darwen. “’Cause all English people live in palaces or thatched cottages, and take tea with the queen.” He rolled his eyes. “Americans,” he muttered.
“Hey!” protested Rich. “What did I say?”
Darwen picked at his bandage.
“He’s just feeling a bit less special than he did before you became a mirroculist,” said Alex with a careless shrug.
Darwen saw the hurt confusion flash through Rich’s face and shot Alex a murderous look.
“What?” she remarked. “I’m just sayin’.”
“Well, don’t,” said Darwen. “It’s not that, Rich. It’s just this stuff about how I became a mirroculist. And my leg,” he added for good measure.
Rich didn’t look completely convinced, but he nodded.
“We should search the house,” said Eileen, as if coming to the end of a private debate. “There must be clues as to where we should go, portals, perhaps.”
“I know we have to find Mr. P and all,” said Alex, “but what about going home? Our families are going to start looking for us about now. If we’re not back in an hour or two, my mom will call out the national guard.”
Darwen hadn’t thought of this.
Eileen frowned as if just remembering what a pain it was to be dealing with kids who couldn’t drive wherever they wanted to go at any time.
“Well,” said Darwen, “we can’t go back the way we came. The Atlanta mansion clearly isn’t safe. We’re going to have to find another way, so I say we start looking. We’re supposed to be connecting with allies to stand against Greyling, remember? Maybe we can learn about where Mr. P is at the same time.”
“So we split up and search the house first,” said Eileen.
“No way,” said Alex. “When we split up in the other house, things got bad faster than Rich’s dad at an all-you-can-eat barbecue.”
Darwen shot Rich a glance to see if he was offended, but the other boy just shrugged. “The man likes his pork,” he said.
“Together then,” said Eileen. “Darwen, can you walk?”
“Not right fast,” said Darwen, getting to his feet, “but yeah.”
“Okay,” said Eileen, her face set grimly. “Let’s do this.”
Chapter Eleven
The Map Room
It took ages to search the mansion. The building was, at least structurally, an exact copy of the Atlanta building, so that by the time they were done, the light in the gardens outside had dropped to almost nothing. There were caryatids holding up the second story of the lobby, and the house had the same sprawling and irrational collection of rooms. But there were differences. Apart from the windows lining the perimeter walls, the Silbrican version of the watchtower was quite empty: no bed, no observation mirrors, no bathroom door beside a long case clock. So far as they could see, there were no portals of any kind anywhere.
Back downstairs they found another room that had no parallel in the Atlanta house. It stood at the end of a wide hallway hung with brownish paintings of distant hills and waterfalls, behind a pair of polished oak doors. They had seen nothing like these doors in the other mansion, and Darwen instinctively knew that they had found what they were looking for. There was a momentary hesitation as he, Rich, Alex, and Eileen decided they were ready for whatever they would find on the other side; then Eileen, still cradling the almost empty blaster, pushed the doors open.
The room on the other side was one of the oddest Darwen had ever seen. It was circular, and sunken, so that the landing on which they emerged was actually a kind of second story that ringed the chamber below like the gallery in a round theater. Along the rail of this gallery were set copper plates marked with numbers, each one with a pair of buttons beside it, one red, one black. The room below was empty except for a curious tiled floor overlaid with a giant spiderweb of copper wire and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of old-fashioned lightbulbs set into the ground, each one marked with a four-digit number.
“It’s a circuit board,” said Rich.
“It’s a map,” said Alex.
“It’s both,” said Darwen, pushing one of the red buttons on the rail. On the floor below, an amber bulb came to life and throbbed softly. Darwen looked at the plaque next to the button.
“It says 5547,” he read. “Wait. I know what this is. It’s a plan of all the gates in Silbrica! Look there, in the middle! That’s the Great Apparatus: a circle of a hundred portals.” He pressed the black button, and as the amber bulb died, half a dozen others in different parts of the room lit up. He frowned thoughtfully. “What does that mean?” he mused.
“Let me try,” said Alex, punching buttons at random so that half the floor seemed to glow.
“Stop that,” said Rich. “We can’t learn anything if you push things willy-nilly. We’ve got to be scientific. Everyone stop pushing buttons!”
Grudgingly Alex obliged, though she mouthed “willy-nilly?” in disbelief.
“Okay,” said Rich. “So the red buttons light one bulb, which marks a portal. But the black buttons light up . . . well, it varies. Sometimes it’s only one or two, sometimes it’s more, and they aren’t all grouped together. That light over there comes on when I hit this black button and when I hit this one, but the other lights that come on at the same time are completely different.”
Rich scowled.
“Isn’t it obvious?” said Alex.
“Not to me,” said Darwen.
“The red button shows the location of the portal,” said Alex. “The black button lights up wherever that portal leads.”
Rich’s scowl deepened. “Maybe,” he said, “but how can we be sure?”
“Simple,” said Alex. “Look. Push this black button for portal 2339, five lights come on. One of them is—let me see—4231. Okay, find the buttons for portal 4231.”
Eileen and Rich walked quickly along the great circular walkway, scanning the controls on the rail.
“4231!” shouted Eileen. “Got it.”
“Push the black button,” said Alex.
Eileen did so and eight lights came on, including . . .
“2339!” Alex confirmed. “Easy peasy. So this should give us a way to get to every single portal in Silbrica.”
“The observation windows in the watchtower all had numbers!” shouted Darwen. “Including the one where we could see Mr. Peregrine.”
“Don’t suppose you remember the combination?” asked Rich, who looked a little shamefaced.
Darwen flushed and shook his head.
“Try 8449,” said Alex.
Everyone turned to look at her.
“You think that’s right?” asked Darwen.
“Pretty sure,” she said.
“How on earth did you remember that?” asked Rich.
“My birthday
is in August,” she said, as if that made everything clear.
“So?” said Rich.
“August is the eight month, half of eight is four, plus another four to get us back to the eight, then add one for the final number, nine. See?”
Rich’s eyes narrowed. “That makes no sense at all,” he said.
“Works, though, doesn’t it?” said Alex.
“But there’s no system,” said Rich. “It’s just random.”
“Guys,” said Darwen, and everyone stopped and looked. He had pushed the red button beside the plate reading 8449 and a crimson bulb had come to life over on the far side of the room. “That’s where he is.”
“If we can trust Alex’s completely arbitrary method for remembering stuff,” Rich qualified.
“That’s where he is,” said Alex with such certainty that even Rich let it go.
“Why is the bulb red?” Rich asked, but no one answered.
“So how do we get there?” asked Eileen.
“Should be easy enough to find out,” said Darwen, pushing the corresponding black button with a rush of hope he hadn’t felt for weeks.
That hope stalled immediately.
No lights came on.
Darwen pressed the button again and again, but nothing happened.
“Maybe the map is broken,” said Rich.
“Let’s see,” said Alex, hoisting one leg over the rail and dropping softly to the floor below before anyone could stop her.
“Careful!” shouted Rich as she began picking her way across the copper wires on her tiptoes.
“Good suggestion,” said Alex dryly. “’Cause I never would have thought to be careful with all these little glass bulbs and an electric current down here.”
“Fair point,” said Rich.
“I see the problem,” said Alex, squatting delicately close to the only bulb that was still lit, the bulb for portal 8449. She pointed, tracing the spiderweb strands of the copper wire out from that one glowing red spot. “These have all been cut,” she said. “Every wire connecting to this bulb has been clipped. Why would the Guardians do that?”
Darwen’s heart sank.
Darwen Arkwright and the School of Shadows Page 9