Obsidian Mirror (14 page)

It was a labyrinth.

When he finally reached the clear space at its center, he stared, amazed at the money Venn must have spent on this. State-of-the-art computers, monitors and screens, radiation counters. The area was spotlessly clean, the floor vacuumed dustless.

And in the center, as if it were the focus of this obsessive attention, a mirror.

He walked around it, considering.

It seemed a slab of black glass, high as a man, wafer-thin, smoothed to perfection, held upright in an ornate silver frame. Cables were attached to it at all four corners. At its back, he stared at a confusion of older machinery—rusting wires, clockwork cogs, some Victorian contraption with a cranking handle and a dial with one snapped finger. As if Venn had imposed modern technology over older.

In a locked glass cabinet next to it he saw a single silver bracelet, resting on a black cushion. It was a band of fantastically engraved silver, in the form of a winged snake biting its own tail, coiled around a glowing amber stone. Small red lights showed it was alarmed.

Wharton didn’t touch it.

He came back to the black mirror. His own face, wry and puzzled, confronted him. The mirror was concave, surely; it seemed to be curved, the reflection all wrong but yet the glass was flat. And the clock face had numbers, but they were not the usual ones.

They said 1600 1700 1800 1900.

“What the hell is this?” he whispered.

Maskelyne swerved the car off the road and into the woods. They bumped down a track and stopped. He turned the engine off. Sudden silence wrapped them.

Tense, Jake waited.

Maskelyne turned, the leather seat creaking. “I’ll tell you the truth now, Jake, because no one else will. Your father and Venn have been experimenting with a device—a black mirror—that has the property of subverting normal chronology. That is, altering space-time. They’ve been working on it obsessively. They got it to work and they made a few trials with objects and animals. They needed a test with a human. Twice David
Wilde volunteered to enter the mirror. The second time, he vanished. Venn and his slave have not been able to get him back. He was, as we say,
journeying.
So I’m afraid your fears are right, in one sense. Your father is dead. Depending on how far back he went, he may have been dead for centuries.”

“That’s not possible. How can—”

“I’m afraid it is.” The flat conviction in his voice stunned Jake.

He sat still, numbed. Then he said, “But how do you—”

“Know all this?” Maskelyne stared into the dark trees. “Because the mirror was mine once. It belonged to me, and it was stolen. And I intend to get it back.”

Sarah closed the journal, threw it down, and looked at the clock. Jake hadn’t come back. It was getting very
late. She put her hand to the jagged coin that hung at her neck and fingered it, then held it still.

So this was how Symmes had gotten hold of the mirror. They’d always wondered about that, about his claims to have made it himself, but no one had known for sure, because Janus had the journals, locked in some deep vault, secret and guarded.

Janus.

Where was he? The young, lank-haired Janus, already plotting his future behind those blue spectacles. Was he prowling the grounds now, trying to find a way in? Trying the doors, letting the wolf snuffle every threshold?

Something tapped at the shuttered window.

She listened, tense with fear.

One tap. Then another.

She stood, crept up to the dark wood, and stood staring at it, her heart thudding. Was he out there? Could the wolf smell her in here?

“Who’s there?”

“Let me in.” A whisper. A voice against the glass, like the wind in a crack of darkness. “Please.”

She jumped back, just as the door opened behind her. Piers put his head around and said, “If you’re ready, Sarah, we’ll set up now.”

For a moment, tight with trauma, she didn’t understand. Then she turned. “Right. Yes. Let’s go.”

Symmes’s journal lay on the table. There was no way of getting to it without Piers’s quick eyes seeing, so she walked calmly in front of it and out of the door. He moved aside for her.

He led the way, his shadow long on the wall. She noticed how strangely thin his hands were, how he pattered lightly up the staircase. But halfway up he stopped her with his spidery fingers on her arm. “Listen to me, Sarah. Go down to the telephone now and call the Linton Institute and tell them where you are. Believe me, that would be best.”

“No,” she said.

“That policeman, then.”

“Not him!” She glared at him, fierce. “What’s the matter with you? You haven’t told anyone I’m here? Venn promised.”

Piers shrugged. “No one has betrayed you. But I’m scared. The process is dangerous…”

She walked past him, quickly. “Don’t worry about me. Besides, Venn said if I didn’t go along with it, he’d send me back there himself.”

Piers smiled. A small, unhappy smile. “He wouldn’t do that. I know him. The threat shows how desperate he is.”

“I just want to help.”

He sighed. “Well, I’ll be there. I may be totally useless, but I’ll try to make sure we don’t lose you.”

He led her down the Long Gallery. She noticed how the fog had thickened outside the mullioned windows, and had even crawled into the house, misting the end of the vast room. One of the cats ambled past them, its green eyes slitted, and then there was another, curled tight under a table.

“How many cats are there?” she asked.

“Seven,” Piers said wearily. “Their names are Primo, Secundus, Tertio, Quadra, Quintus, Sixtus, and Septimo. They are plagues of my life.”

As he swept back a curtain to reveal an archway with a small door, the thought struck her that maybe the cats were all Replicants. Venn would have had to experiment, after all.

Piers unlocked the door, and a damp draft gusted out, chilling her. She saw a bare stone passageway, slanted with moonlit windows.

“The Monk’s Walk.” He took her arm with his spindly fingers, and led her in.

“It must be lonely for you,” Maskelyne said. “No parents. No friends.”

The car headlights showed swirling fog, dark trees.

“I have friends,” Jake said. He was still too devastated to be annoyed.

“Do you? You seem the isolated sort. The sort others find difficult to get along with. You remind me
of Venn, and myself. We are all locked into obsessive searches—his wife, your father.”

“You expect me to believe in time travel?” Jake turned, fierce, realizing his hands were clenched, his shoulders tight with tension. “Do I look that stupid?”

“You do believe it. You have the photograph to prove it.”

Jake stared at the man. “You know about that?”

“I’ve seen it.” Maskelyne’s voice was husky; his delicate hands gripped the steering wheel as tightly as if the car were moving at speed. Jake felt confusion, a sudden astonishing misery. “You knew my father?”

“I met him once.”

Fog was filling the car, misting them both. Jake had to say it. “I saw him. Back at the Abbey. I saw my father’s ghost in a mirror.”

Maskelyne turned, fast. “A black mirror?”

“Just a mirror.”

Disappointment flickered over the man’s ruined face. “Well. That is what Symmes called the
delay.
A temporal echo. Or perhaps more like a ripple. It means nothing. Your father isn’t there anymore.”

Jake shook his head. “Look. Tell me about this thing. The Chronoptika. Tell me everything.”

Gideon landed lightly on his feet and turned his back on the Dwelling.

So much for leaving a window open. He walked swiftly into the trees, simmering. He had taken Summer’s punishment for this Jake, this spoiled arrogant child. Had thought, after all the timeless eternity of his captivity, that maybe this could be a friend.

A human contact.

Summer was right about them. They were boring.

The moon balanced over the Wood. Snow was coming. He could sense its cold, silent approach.

And something else.

He stood still, listening, one hand on a vine of ivy.

Something uncanny had entered the estate.

He could smell it. All the hairs on the back of his cold hands could sense it. An intrusion from some dark place. A rank, animal stink.

He slipped into the undergrowth, crouching low. And then, so abrupt and close it made him shiver sideways, he heard it howl.

A long, eerie spine-chilling wail.

A wolf’s anger.

He breathed out dismay into the frosty air. Leaves crackled. A shadow ducked out of the trees.