Authors: Catherine Fisher
Obsidian Mirror (20 page)
The whine rose in Jake’s teeth and nerves. It shivered down his spine. He wanted to yell for it to stop, but he forced himself to keep still, his eyes fixed on Sarah. She was gazing into the mirror. He moved so he was behind her, but saw only blackness.
“Nothing.”
“Exactly.” Venn’s voice was breathless with triumph. “Nothing.
No reflections.
Nothing.”
Sarah said, “A room. A man, thickset, with a mustache. He’s seen me. He’s talking to me.”
The whine rose to screaming pitch. The web vibrated. Piers said quickly, “Shutting down.”
“No!”
Venn’s eyes were on the mirror, searching. “Not yet. Not till I see it. Where is it, Sarah? Where?”
But she spoke, not to him but to the mirror. “Where is this? Who are you?”
The answer came from no one in the room. It was a thin, pompous voice, oddly quailing. It said,
“My name…my name is Symmes.”
The Shee knelt and touched the footprints, sniffed them. Then it raised its hands to its ears. “What
is
that terrible whining cry?”
Gideon was wondering that too. “Is it the world freezing up?”
He had been with them so long, they had taught him to hear as they did. He could hear the cold night coming down, puddles on the graveled track hardening infinitely slowly, the icy crystals lengthening and creaking to a pitted surface. He could hear the birds edging on their frozen roosts, the blown barbs of their feathers, the blinks of their beady black eyes. He could hear the frost crisp over the windowpanes of Wintercombe.
But this whine was worse than all of that.
“Sounds like a human machine.” The Shee rose, disgusted.
Gideon nodded. The creatures’ aversion to metal still pleased him, even after all this time. It was their one weakness. The Shee listened, snow dusting its thin shoulders, its moon-pale hair glimmering.
“Summer will want us to investigate.” Gideon turned.
The Shee’s eyes went sly. “Enter the Dwelling? Many have tried. Venn is too careful.”
“For you, he is. But I might be able to….”
“Summer forbids it.”
It was a risk. They were treacherous beings—this one would betray him in an instant. So he said heavily, “You’re right. And after all, tonight, there’s the Feast.”
The creature grinned, as he had known it would. “The Midwinter Feast! I’d forgotten! We must get back.”
Its quicksilver mind would be full instantly of the promise of the music, the terrible, fascinating music of the Shee. The music that devoured lives and time and his own humanity, the music that enslaved him and haunted him and that he hungered for like a drug.
“You go,” he said. “I’ll come later.”
“I have to bring you. She’ll be furious.” Its bird-eyes flickered. He saw the small pointed teeth behind its smile.
“I’ll follow you. I just want to see where these prints go.”
It hesitated, tormented. Then nodded. “Very well. But be quick!” It turned, and its patchwork of clothes ebbed color, a magical camouflage, so that now it wore a suit of ermine and white velvet, the buttons on its coat silver crystals of ice. It stepped sideways, and was gone.
Gideon kicked the gates shut.
He ran, fast and hard, toward the house.
The screech ratcheted up the scale, a nightmare howl that made Piers snatch his hands back and swear.
Sparks cracked in the dark.
“Turn it off!” Wharton yelled.
Sarah was sucked flat against the web. Behind her, grabbing her arms, Venn said, “I can’t see him. Is he there? What does he look like?”
She screamed. “I’m falling. I’m falling!!”
The mirror was gone. It was a wild, gaping rent in the world. A scatter of objects lifted from the desk, flew, and were sucked straight in. With a vicious crack, part of the web came free, one green cable whipping past Jake’s head and vanishing with a bright blink like lightning.
“Stop it!” Jake yelled.
“Not yet.” Venn shoved him off. “I’ve got you, Sarah.”
But she was fighting him, struggling back. Jake yelled, “Let her go!”
He grabbed her. A fusillade of rivets cracked past him; he dragged her down. For a terrible unbalanced moment he and she and Venn were one tangled person, dragged and flung forward. The green web held them against it, but the force of the hole was too strong, it pulled hair, hands, breath like an immense invisible magnet, and then just as Jake could feel the agonizing suffocation rise to his throat, the whine cracked, and with an explosion that flung him backward off his feet the mirror came back.
He staggered. The room roared with smoke. Wharton was yelling, “Fire!” In the corners of his eyes brilliant crackles of red were spurting up.
Sarah pulled him up. She screamed something, but his ears were ringing.
Flames
whoomed
into the roof. He saw Piers and Wharton appear and vanish through clouds of steam, a ferocious hissing, and then something seemed to pop in his head and his hearing came back, and the fire extinguishers were pumping fierce cascades of foam over the sparking cables, the flaring embers of books and circuits.
And then, in a terrible sudden silence, there was only his breathing.
When I came to I was lying in my room with my Indian servant applying stimulants to my brow. The room was oddly dark and stank of burning, with some of the furniture overturned, but strangely nothing seemed severely damaged. A few objects were strewn on the floor, smoldering.
I sent Hassan out, righted my chair, and sat on it gaping vacantly at the mirror. I had seen a girl from another time and had spoken to her.
We had conversed, across ages.
It was then that I realized that not only my life had changed, but that the world had changed utterly. Out there gas lamps were being lit, men were hurrying out to taverns to buy their evening meal, theaters were opening their doors, the vast populace of London was teeming in the rainy streets.
Yet here, in this solitary room in a house among a million others, I, John Harcourt Symmes, had broken open the boundaries of time and space.
So when the brick crashed through my window I almost screamed with the sudden shock of it.
It landed on my mahogany desk, scattering papers and books, and I leaped up and ran to the smashed star of the window and stared out.
In the dim shrubbery to the side of my gate a dark figure flickered and was gone.
Hassan came racing in, with the men I had hired. “Get out there,” I snapped at them. “And do your duty!”
Quickly I closed the shutters and picked up the missile. It was a half brick, and I shuddered as I thought how it might have smashed the mirror itself to pieces. Tied to it with a length of dirty string was a note, which I unfolded. It read: “You have stolen from us and we will have our payment. And until we do, you will never sleep soundly again.”
I crushed it in my fist and smiled. The poor wretch from the shop, perhaps. The first thing I would do was have him sought by the officers.
And then, believe me, I would amaze the world.
Soft steam hung in the dimness. Jake looked at Wharton, who stood breathless with his empty extinguisher, surveying the wreckage.
Burnt-out wires glowed like cigarette tips.
Ash drifted in an icy draft.
Sarah hugged herself, the snake bracelet tight in her fist.
Venn picked himself up and pushed past Jake. Ignoring everyone, he ducked through the safety web to the mirror, and when he reached it he put his
hands against it, meeting his own contorted reflection.
Piers came from the controls, a zigzag of soot on his forehead.
“The mirror itself is undamaged,” he said. It was almost a plea. “It’s not the end.”
Venn was staring at himself. His hands, maimed by frost, gripped the black glass. For a second Jake was sure he would grasp it tight and pick it up and throw it to floor, shattering it in a million pieces.
But all he did was stare into his own blue eyes, his hands flat on the solid, unforgiving surface.
He seemed to Sarah to be staring at the torment of his failure.
And of hers.
If a speculum is polished sufficiently, it becomes invisible. For it doth reflect all about it, so that the eye sees only that which is shown, not the devyse that showeth it. And if a man becomes hard as diamond, faceted and flawed, he too will show nothing of himself, onlie the fractured images of his world.
From
The Scrutiny of Secrets
by Mortimer Dee
“I
’LL TAKE IT,”
Sarah said.
Piers looked at her closely. “You’ve had as much of a shock, invisible girl, as him. You should go and rest. It’s almost midnight.”
“The last thing I want is sleep.” She took the tray with the mug on it and turned to the door. The house was silent, its long corridors still. Wharton had finally gone to bed, and where Jake was she had no idea. Failure seemed to hang in the air, as acrid as the lingering stench of smoke. She was tired, and as she walked along the dim corridors, she still felt the terror of the mirror, dragging at her.
But this had to be done.
She knocked on the door.
No answer. “Venn? It’s Sarah.”
She knew he wasn’t asleep. She said, “Let me in. Piers has sent you tea. He’s worried stiff.”
She balanced the tray and groped for the handle, her wrist encircled with a white ring where the snake had grasped it. She eased the door open.
His room. She had expected a mess, like Jake’s, but it was spartan. Nothing on the shelves, no clothes, none of his prized ceramics. The furniture was black, modern, glossily lacquered. In all its surfaces reflected snow was falling.
“Leave me alone, Sarah,” he said, his back to her.
“You are so like Jake. Anyway, you don’t mean that. Part of you must be excited about what we did.”
“Must I?” He was sitting in a chair facing the window.
She put the tray on a table and turned. “I spoke to someone in the past. It’s a breakthrough! Piers will repair the damage.”
“It’s over,” Venn said. “Burned out. Finished.”
His voice chilled her. She walked over to him. “He says it looks worse than it is.”