Catherine Fisher - Obsidian Mirror

And the fog seemed to gather here. The rooms and corridors were full of it. Descending three wide steps, his footsteps loud in the stillness, he came to an archway with the stone mask of a snarling devil on each side. Beyond, wide and dark, seemed to be a vast space. He put his hand up and groped along the wall. Surely there must be some electricity.

His fingers found a round switch. He clicked it down. Lights crackled on above him, and then all down the length of a great hall, and he stared in astonishment.

It must once have been a refectory, or maybe the monks’ dormitory. Now the pillars were roped with wiring, the roof festooned with cables. Every inch of the floor was cushioned with a layer of soft carpet, so thick, his feet almost sank into it. There were banks of storage cabinets; in one corner a powerful generator hummed. But what puzzled him most was the netting. It hung, like the cobweb of an immense spider, from all the vaults and pillars of the room down to the floor, fixed into pinions, stretched rigid. Gazing up, he saw that the stuff was like thick wool. It was a dark malachite green, and had a bright, sticky sheen. He reached to touch it, and then stopped, overcome by the ridiculous idea that if he did, he would be glued to it forever, unable to pull away until Venn came and found him.

Carefully, keeping his head low and his hands at his sides, he ducked under and between the mesh. There was a way that led into it, a clear pathway that twisted and turned back on itself. It reminded him of a maze of grass hedges he had once been lost inside as a boy.

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.”

The scream rang out; I moved at once.

As the police whistles split the night, I shoved the man aside and grabbed the mirror. He came at me fiercely, but I drew my revolver and pointed it at him. “Back, sir!” I commanded. He stood still.

In the opium den the screeching of the woman was astonishingly loud. A door splintered. Men’s voices rang through the squalid court.

My cabman had done his errand well.

The scarred man’s face was white with dismay. “You’ve betrayed me,” he said.

The device was in my hands and I confess I laughed. “I’m not such a fool to pay a thousand guineas for a mere warped mirror!” I raised my voice and yelled, “Help, ho! In here!”

His eyes were black with rage. I knew he would be caught by the Peelers, and it would go hard with him, that he would be transported at least for body-snatching, or even climb the gallows.

The door shuddered. A hefty shoulder burst through.

The scarred man stepped toward me and I jerked back in case he had a knife. But all he did was spit words in my face. “You have no idea how many lives you will destroy by this.”

And then…imagine my astonishment! Then he made a rapid run toward the mirror, and as the police crashed in and the door burst wide he threw himself at the glass and into its blackness.

And vanished!

A great, silent, ringing explosion filled my head. I dropped the gun and almost swooned, because the room was a wild, deep vortex that dragged at the very throbbing veins and nerves of my body.

Then I lost consciousness, and knew no more.

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.”