She stopped dead.
Seeing it here in this darkness, tied down in its tangle of cables, it seemed a sinister vacancy, a moonlit door to nowhere, to non-places outside the very universe itself.
It had always made her afraid. Now as she crept on, breath held, it seemed to reflect the terror inside her.
Keep calm, Jake told himself. They couldn’t have stolen the bracelet because Venn kept it on his wrist and never took it off, and without a bracelet, they wouldn’t dare use the mirror.
The thought was a relief, but he was trying not to panic. They had hauled him, struggling hard, through the green mesh and he had seen with disbelief that no lasers had triggered and no alarms howled.
Whoever they were, they were experts.
He tried to yell, fought so hard a flask toppled from a bench and smashed, a star of glass shards.
“Hold him! Hold him still!” The small man walked up to the mirror and pushed back one dark sleeve of his coat.
Around his wrist curled a silver snake bracelet with a stone of amber.
Jake swore, kicked free, turned to flee, but the tall man gripped him with wrathful ease. Already the mirror had opened into a throbbing emptiness, the wide black doorway into time. Jake yelled, “No. No! You can’t do this!”
“Just watch us, Jake.”
They grabbed him, one on each arm, and before them was nothing but darkness, and they forced him forward and leaped into it. But just as Jake felt the throbbing terror of the mirror envelop him, his eyes widened in astonishment.
A small hand, cold and invisible as a glass glove, had slipped into his.
And journeyed with him.
The cat waited until the black vacancy had collapsed, until the room had stopped shaking, until the mirror stood silent and solid. Its own fur and whiskers were flattened with the terror of the implosion, its green eyes wide.
Then it padded to a secret infra-red beam that crossed the floor, and very deliberately, put a paw on it.
Every alarm in the house exploded into noise.
2
I have long forgotten where I was born. Maybe I had no birth. Maybe memory cannot last the centuries I have endured. In truth I have journeyed among beings that were hardly men, even unto the courts of kings and wizards. Always I sought wisdom, from chained dragon, from forbidden tract, from demon and angel.
I have read the great stones. I have stolen the apple from the Tree.
And out of all my sorcery I have made that which will destroy the world.
From The Scrutiny of Secrets by Mortimer Dee
WHARTON’S DREAM WAS definitely a nightmare.
He was back in the stark white classrooms of Compton’s School, standing, in some ridiculous pajamas, before a class of bored and belligerent boys. Lounging at the front desk, wearing a shirt, tie, and slim gray trousers, was Summer.
The faery creature propped her small bare feet on a chair and looked around curiously. “Hello, George! So this is where you used to work. It’s a bit grim.”
He ignored her, and cleared his throat. “Gentlemen, please! This term we’ll be studying Shakespeare’s greatest comedy, A Midsummer—”
“My play!” Summer blew him a graceful kiss. “George, you’re doing my play. How very sweet of you!”
The boys sniggered. Wharton glared. He knew this dream. He loathed this dream. Because, any minute now, all hell would break loose.
“You know”—Summer swung her legs down and stood—“it’s so lovely being in your dream. Venn only dreams about Leah, and Gideon isn’t allowed dreams anymore. But yours are so easy, George.”
She reached out a red-nailed finger and touched his pajama lapel. A white rose sprouted from the buttonhole. “Let’s do my play. Shall we?”
Before he could answer, he felt his ears grow, his nose thicken. His hands clenched up into hooves, he sprouted a coat of velvety gray hair. He opened his mouth and all that came out was a startled bray.
Summer giggled helplessly. “I always knew you could act, George.”
He was nothing but a donkey-headed man in pajamas, and the boys roared with delight as he shook his head and stamped and hee-hawed his wrath, until suddenly the school fire bell erupted into sound, and he sat up so fast in bed that he almost cricked his neck.
For a moment hot humiliation was a sweat all over him. He put both hands to his ears, bemused.
The bedroom door crashed open. “Alarms!” Piers gasped. “Intruders! Go!”
Army training kicked in. Wharton was out of bed in an instant, trousers dragged on, dressing gown grabbed. He opened the wardrobe, pulled out the shotgun, loaded both barrels. “Who? How did they get in?”
“No idea.” The little man was hopping with anxiety, his white lab coat inside out.
“Shee?”
“Doubt it.”
“Where’s Venn?”
“Away.”
Wharton scowled. He knew what away meant. “You mean in the Wood?”
“Where else!” Piers looked sour.
“And Jake? Gideon?”
“No sign.”
“Okay. Move. Move!”
They raced down the corridor. The door to the Monk’s Walk was wide; Wharton swore, backed, swung in, and held the shotgun steady.
The corridor was empty.
Piers whispered, “Oh hellfire. If the mirror is gone I am dead. Worse than dead. Eviscerated.”
Wharton shook his head. “Not just you. How the hell could anyone get in here?”
He moved from cover to cover, dodging down the stone cloister, through pale slots of light. The short summer night was black; the moon had risen; he could smell the warm stirring leaves of the Wood.
At the arch, he waited, listening. Nothing. He yelled, “You in there! Put your hands up and stand still! Or I’ll blast you to kingdom come!”
Still nothing.
He exchanged a glance with Piers. The small man, or genie, or whatever he was, crouched behind a pillar and shrugged.
So Wharton took a breath, breathed a prayer.
And went in.
High in the highest attic of the Abbey, Gideon had no dreams. He lay in the hammock Piers had set up for him, one long leg dangling over the side. His eyes were closed but there was no sleep for him anymore, because Summer had stolen his sleep, and now he had nowhere he could go to escape from the terrible fear of his endless life. The Shee, those faery creatures of the Wood, had stolen more than his dreams. They had stolen him once, long ago, made him their changeling, taken him into that place they called the Summerland, the unplace where time didn’t exist.
He was mortal, but ageless.
Young, but old.
He loathed them. And even here, in this house, they still had him trapped.
Even though he kept all the windows of the room firmly locked and barred, even though he didn’t want to, he could hear the moon anoint the leaves with silver. The faintest stir of branches came to his Shee-sharpened senses. Out there green buds unfurled, insect wings of finest gossamer unfolded. And then, slowly at first but growing in the dark like a wave of sound, just as they did every night, the nightjars began to sing, an eerie rasp, like a choir of sinister voices.
He opened his eyes.
They were singing for him. The Shee were calling him, taunting him, mocking him through beak and bill, tormenting him with their songs of the wood, of the sweetness of the Summerland, the long unchanging days of music and hunting and cold laughter.
He hissed with despair.
Then the alarms exploded. He leaped out of the hammock; at once, swift and light as a shadow he was out and running, down and down the stairs, along the corridors, skidding into the labyrinth just as Wharton was threatening the last cobwebbed corner of the room with the shotgun.
“What is it! What’s happened? Is it the mirror?
”
“Don’t ask me.” Wharton seemed reluctant to put the weapon down. He prowled around in bewilderment; almost, Gideon thought, disappointment. “Don’t understand it all. No one here. Nothing missing. No damage—just this flask smashed on the floor. Piers, if one of those blasted cats of yours has set off that alarm, I will personally . . .”
He stopped.
The black cat had leaped up onto the workbench and was sitting right in front of Piers. It made a few urgent mews.
Piers stared. “What!”
The cat mewed again, at length. Then it began licking its tail with furious concentration.
Piers’s face was as white as his coat. “Forget eviscerated,” he breathed. “I’ll be hanged, drawn, and quartered.”
“Tell me,” Wharton said. “Tell me!”
Piers absently made his hand into a fist and blew into it. When he opened it, he held a handkerchief, which he used to mop his face. “I used to be trapped in a bottle. I hated it, but looking back, it was a quiet, comfortable life.” He looked up. “Someone’s kidnapped Jake.”
“Jake?” Wharton was stunned, but Gideon said quietly, “Who?”
“Don’t know. Tertius couldn’t get a good look at them. Two men, with weapons. Not Shee, human, but with something strange about them. Journeymen, for sure, because they had a bracelet and they forced him at gunpoint into the mirror. They may have come in that way too.”
Wharton had to sit down. He dumped the shotgun on the bench. “Jake . . . dear God! But . . . the alarm . . .”
“The cat did that. These people were like shadows. Nothing registered them. As if . . . they didn’t exist. Experts.”
“Or Replicants,” Gideon said at once. “Replicants don’t really exist.” He turned to look at the mirror and saw his green coat glimmer in its dark depths. “But why Jake? Do they think they can get some kind of ransom for him? And it means they must have access to the mirror, in some other time.”
His quicksilver reasoning left Wharton feeling befuddled. “Jake. Kidnapped! It’s unbelievable!”
He couldn’t seem to get it into his head. “And where’s Sarah? Surely she must have heard . . .”
“Ah,” Piers said. “Yes. Well. You haven’t heard the worst of it. Sarah’s gone too.”
“Gone?”
“Not kidnapped. Oh no. Seems she followed them in, invisible. The cat says they had no idea she was there.”
“But . . .” Wharton struggled with it. “Sarah has no bracelet. You need physical contact with whoever is.”
“She’d have held on to Jake.” Gideon allowed himself a rare smile. “She’s crazy, that girl. But when have they gone? Can you track them?”
Piers leaped up and ran to the mirror. A whole new console had sprouted from its side in the last month; now he tapped the controls nervously. After a minute he said, “Far enough, it seems. Between two and three centuries, but I’m not really able to pinpoint accurately . . . We need Maskelyne on this. Quickly.”
As he said it, each of them wondered why the scarred man had not been first here. His care of the mirror was obsessional, as if it was part of his soul.
“I’ll go and find him.” Gideon left them to it, slipped out, and ran down the stone steps at the end of the Monk’s Walk. He had been this way once before—since the spring he had explored every crack and corner of the building, every room and garret and cellar, because he had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. If he put one foot outside the safety of the Abbey, the Shee would be on him like flies. He had betrayed Summer, helped Sarah steal the coin from her. If Summer got her claws on him he would certainly pay. But, he thought acidly, these days she didn’t seem to care. She had Venn to distract her.
At the dimmest turning of the stone stair was an ancient Gothic porch doorway and through that another tiny stone stairwell led down into the cellars. Why did the scarred man have to lurk in the very depths of the earth? Gideon wondered. Mortals seemed to have this urge to dig themselves in—to find dark corners and caves, to build houses, to hide from the sun and the sky. He couldn’t understand it. Living locked up in the Abbey, not even able to climb the trees or stand under the blue sky, was becoming unbearable for him. Day by day he was getting more irritable, more tense. He wondered how much more of it he could stand.
The door at the bottom was small and heavily ornate with great black wrought-iron hinges—the metal made him shiver, but he knocked urgently. “Maskelyne? Are you there?”
No reply.
He turned the handle and went in, ducking under the low lintel.
The room was as bare as if no one lived there. A neatly made bed, a table with a pile of papers and a pen, a photograph of Rebecca—which she had surely placed there herself. Gideon looked at her face smiling out at him, her plait of red hair. Did she know she was the girlfriend of a ghost? Because whatever Maskelyne was, he was not Shee and maybe no longer even mortal.
Then he paused, curious.
Next to the photo lay a large leather-bound book.
There was something strange about the book. As Gideon looked with his Shee-sight, it seemed to glimmer, to be faintly doubled or trebled in outline, as if it existed in several dimensions at once, superimposed over and over on itself. It was a phenomenon he had seen before, in his wanderings through the crazy slanted worlds of the Summerland, and it always intrigued him.
He walked cautiously over to it.
The thick volume was bound in calfskin. Once it had been dyed a lustrous purple, but now it was faded and powdery at the corners.
On its cover, a diagram of occult letters was inscribed. Around it a delicate silver chain lay open and unlocked.
He shuddered. He had heard the Shee whisper about books like this—grimoires, spell-books, the possessions of the greatest sorcerers. The faery creatures feared them, because in them were spells that could command obedience, and the Shee loathed to be under mortal beck and call. In fact, if they saw this, they would certainly try to tear it to shreds.
Reluctant but fascinated, Gideon reached out and opened the pages.
They were of crisp yellow parchment, slightly greasy to touch, and their margins were an intertwined tangle of knots and branches, as if some great tree grew all the way through the book. Drawn by some long-dead scribe, demons and monkeys and men and monsters lurked among the leaves. Gideon leaned closer. Small silver birds sang in there, and a dog with three heads that barked faintly, and a snake of gold and turquoise scales that slithered in and out of the dark unreadable letters.
He turned another page.
This time the margins showed two dragons fighting, their open jaws breathing out flames, so red and yellow that he felt their heat.
And lying in the fold, paper thin and faded to the palest of purples, was a flower.
His fingers picked it up, carefully, felt the strangeness of it. It was a flower from no mortal plant and from nowhere in the Summerland either. It lay in his palm like a fragile proof of worlds beyond even all those he had known.
“Come away from that book.”
The voice from nowhere made him jump; he turned fast.
Maskelyne stood in the darkness of the embrasured wall, though Gideon knew for a fact he had not been there seconds ago. A dark man in a dark coat; his scarred face made him half demon and half angel. He came forward swiftly and slammed the book closed, keeping his hand on it. “Are you a fool to look on things you know are dangerous!”
Gideon had jerked his fingers back with the speed of a snake. Now he thrust his hands in his pockets and shrugged. “Don’t fear me reading your secrets, master. I never learned letters.”
“Some books don’t need to be read.” Maskelyne fastened the chain tight and locked it with a tiny key, which he put in his pocket. “Some books will infect you like leprosy.”
“So why keep it, then?”
Maskelyne g
lanced at him sidelong, the scar on his face jagged and deep. “That’s my business. What’s going on? Who’s taken Jake?”
He turned and walked out quickly; Gideon ran after him. “You know?”
“The mirror told me. Just now, as I slept, the mirror whispered to me. It murmured its displeasure. It’s angry, Gideon, and I fear that.”
He ran and the changeling ran after him, up through the stairs and dim rooms to the labyrinth. Piers had cleared the workbench; he and Wharton sat waiting, gloomily.
When he saw Maskelyne, Wharton jumped up and said, “Find out how far.”
Maskelyne went to the panel. His slim fingers touched the controls. It wasn’t as if he operated the thing, Wharton thought suddenly, but rather as if he communicated with it, in some bizarre way.
“Well? Can you tell? Where have they taken him?”
“Before 1800. Or within a few years of that date. But they came from another period. More like 1900.”
“Could it be Symmes?” Piers said hopefully.
Wharton shook his head. “No. John Harcourt Symmes had had his accident and gone into the future by then. The mirror was locked up in his empty house in London for ten years, just moldering under a dust-sheet, until his daughter, Alicia, came.”
“Well, it seems someone else used it during those years. Someone who moves from period to period with practiced ease. A real journeyman.” Maskelyne turned away and sat down. He looked deeply troubled. “I’ll do the best I can to find out who. Meanwhile, someone has to go and tell Venn. Jake is his godson, after all.”
Piers and Wharton looked at each other in dismay.
“Not me,” Piers said. “Gideon.”
“Are you mad?” Gideon shook his head. “I can’t go back to the Shee.”
“And I must stay with the mirror.” Maskelyne stood and stared into its darkness thoughtfully. “This incursion has changed something. Since the spring we’ve spent weeks working without much result, but these intruders have done what we could not. They have woken the mirror again.” He turned his handsome side to them. “I need Venn’s bracelet and he needs to know what’s happened. You’ll have to go and get him, George.”