Catherine Fisher - Obsidian Mirror

“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.

Still as winter’s most frozen corpse, Gideon saw the man flicker by; a thin, lank-haired man, his eyes hidden by small blue lenses that seemed to reflect everything.

A man with no substance.

A man like a wraith, an echo. And slinking at his heels, white as paper, the soft-padding wolf.

Safe in his Shee-craft, Gideon let them pass. He watched them merge into the shadow of the house. They left a darkness on the night, a vacuum.

Maybe Jake had been wise not to open the Dwelling. “Because Shee I know,” he breathed to himself. “And humans I know. But what sort of creature are you?”

A starling flew down and landed on the branch beside him. It fixed him with a black sidelong eye and said, “She asks is there anything to report?”

Gideon kept his face calm—they were experts at reading the slightest expression. He made up his mind then in that instant. He would escape them, even if he had to die. She would not own him for all time.

“No,” he said. “Nothing to report.”

Wharton heard voices coming, froze in his examination of the mirror, swore once, slid hurriedly behind the clockwork. He crouched behind a bank of levers just as Piers ushered Sarah through the labyrinth. Venn was close behind them.

Venn looked at her. “There’s nothing to worry about. Piers and I are both here…in case.”

Sarah stared around at the crude webbed labyrinth, the alien, crowded machinery. Then she saw the mirror. “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m not scared.”

It was a lie. To see it again, this terrible device, the shadowy warped reflection of her face in its depths, terrified her. It was festooned with trailing wires and monitors, and she knew far more than Venn about the devastation it could cause. She tried to sound calm. “Is this it?”

Venn came and stood beside her, so they were both reflected. “This is it. The Chronoptika. An impossibility in itself—a concave mirror that seems flat. It was obtained by a Victorian eccentric called John Harcourt Symmes, back in the 1840s. He claimed it could warp time. But his results were generally failures, though we don’t know for sure. One volume of his journals is missing. His last experiment may have worked.”

She said, watching Piers test systems and flick switches, “What happened to him?”

Venn shrugged, unhappy. “Forget him. We won’t be trying anything as stupid. Just getting the thing calibrated.” He looked at Piers. “The bracelet?”

“Not yet. Stand here please, Sarah. I just need to run some tests—your height, weight, and so on.”

She stepped onto a small Plexiglas platform. “This mirror. How did you get it?”

“A long story.” Venn seemed so tense, he couldn’t keep still; he walked around to Piers and watched him impatiently. “Will she do? She has to.”

“Two minutes.”

“And David Wilde? He worked with you on this, didn’t he?”

Venn raised his head and his eyes were hostile. “I suppose Jake told you that. Leave it, Sarah, I don’t want to talk about David.”

I’ll bet you don’t, she thought. What about her! She was the one facing the risks. But she bit her lip and told herself to stay calm. This was what she was here for. And she was so close!

“Right.” Piers scuttled around the mirror. “There were a few rather strange readings there, but nothing the system can’t handle. I’ve been trying to build in a reflex barrier—a sort of safety function. We didn’t have it when we lost David, so you should be safer.”