Catherine Fisher - Obsidian Mirror

“Fine. I told you to call my cell phone.”

“I tried! There’s not one scrap of signal down there. Listen, have you told Venn about Maskelyne?! I mean, about that gun.”

“Not yet. Don’t talk too much, because anyone might be listening. Piers has this place wired up like NASA.”

“Well, I just want to say don’t say a word! I’ve found out something, it might be nothing, but…we should meet.” He heard something rustle. A voice, close by. A dog barking.

“Where are you?”

“Wintercombe. At the post office. I think it’s going to snow, but can you get here?”

He looked wearily at the sky. It was no longer blue. Heavy cloud lidded the valley. “I’ll come, but I’ll have to walk. Is there any sort of shortcut through the Wood?”

Silence. Then she said, “Jake, you don’t go in there. Ever. Do you hear?”

“You sound like Venn.”

“He’s right. If you were a local, you’d understand.”

“About the Shee.”

She laughed, but it was nervous. “Well, okay, they’re just legend. But people do disappear in there. Stay on the drive and come along the lanes. I’ll meet you here in say half an hour. Okay? Bye!”

The phone clicked to silence.

He held it a moment, listening, but there was no sound on the line, and he put it down, just as Piers came through the hall carrying biker’s leathers and a helmet. Jake stared.

“You ride?”

“A Harley. Lovely beast. Puts a girdle around the earth in forty minutes.” He hung up the jacket and shrugged into the worn lab coat. “Weather’s closing in.”

Jake nodded and walked up the stairs. As soon as Piers had gone, he ran back down, felt in the pocket of the leathers, and pulled out the key of the bike.

He tossed it with one hand. And caught it in the other.

Sarah put the kitchen phone down as gently as she could. She sat for a moment, considering. Had Jake read the journal? And who was this girl, this Rebecca? But she knew why she was restless. Talking to Jake about his father had hurt. Because she had a father too, and a mother, locked deep in one of Janus’s dungeons. And she could never talk to anyone about that.

Resentful, she slipped up the back stairs to her room.

Jake didn’t even know how lucky he was.

It was bitterly cold. She was already wearing two sweaters that Piers had found for her, but now she pulled a coat on over them and then opened the secret panel in the floor.

She took out the notebook and the black pen. For a moment she hesitated, fighting dread.

Then she wrote:

I’m not afraid of you.

YOU SHOULD BE. The answer was prompt, eager, as if he had been waiting for her. It spread in bold letters diagonally across the page.

AND DON’T LIE, SARAH. YOU ARE AFRAID. YOU ARE THE LAST OF ZEUS—THE OTHERS ARE ALL DEAD. YOU MUST KNOW THAT.

She clenched a hand over her mouth. But no. He was trying to break her. It filled her with hot fury.

Liar, she wrote. Liar. Liar. Liar.

DO YOU THINK YOU CAN SAVE THE WORLD? BE THE GREAT HEROINE? MY REPLICANT KNOWS WHERE YOU ARE. HE WILL ENTER THE HOUSE SOON. YOU’RE ALL ALONE, SARAH. ALONE AND AFRAID AND FAR FROM HOME. IF YOU SUCCEED IN YOUR PLAN, YOU WILL NEVER SEE YOUR PARENTS OR YOUR WORLD AGAIN .

She wrote so fast, the pen tore the paper. I think you’re the one who’s scared. If even one of us is alive, you’re in danger. Tonight I’ll be close enough to the mirror to touch it. And then—

AH YES, BUT WHAT IF VENN FINDS OUT WHAT YOU MEAN TO DO?

She slammed the book shut.

Was that another tap at the window? Suddenly wild, she leaped up and flung the shutters wide. Snow was falling gently against the window, a soft crystal scatter. She stared at it, entranced.

August 1847

I have spent too many pages detailing my frustrations with the machine, my failures, my long nights of work. Suffice to say I have become a stranger to my old haunts, and my obsession with the mirror grows. Someone else is equally obsessed. Burglary has been attempted at my house at least twice. Last week, as I walked down New Bond Street, a hansom cab came from nowhere and deliberately attempted to run me down. Had not a warning been shouted to me by a stranger, and had I not been quick and agile, I should have been killed. This was Maskelyne, surely, or his Oriental accomplice, because I am certain Maskelyne entered the mirror.

Tonight, however, something amazing has happened. I can barely describe it steadily even now for excitement. I have had to take cordial and stand outside in the cool garden, breathing the night air.

I have had to make myself inhale slowly, to calm my racing heart.

I note it down here, carefully.

The date is 11 August. The moon is full, the weather warm. The time 12:34. This is what happened.

I repeated my operations of yesternight with the rewired machinery and this time something sparked. A peculiar smell of burning filled the room. And then I felt a great sucking pain in my chest and leaped back, because it seemed to me that the mirror had become hollow, a bottomless chasm. It was no longer…here.

Then I saw a figure.

It was standing within the penumbra of the mirror, darkened and warped, but it was most certainly a human figure, despite the barbaric clothing it wore. A figure of some ancient, primitive time.

It moved, lifted its head, looked at me. I saw this was a girl. A young woman, her hair hacked off, as short as a boy’s. The shock was so great I stepped backward, and as our eyes met I forgot all scientific discipline and cried out. I recorded nothing, I just stared.

She spoke. It was a whisper through the dark glass. She said, “Where is this? Who are you?”

She seemed as terrified as myself. I was to her, perhaps, some savage god, some angel of the Old Testament, dark and vengeful.

I wish now I had raised my hand and been benevolent, had made my voice wide and reassuring. Instead I was so astonished, I had only breath to foolishly gasp, “My name is Symmes.”

“Symmes.” She intoned it like a syllable of prayer.

Then she smiled.

And the mirror was solid and empty.

At the edge of the Lake, Gideon watched the snow.

He saw how it fell with silent intensity, how the fallen trunks and briars and thorns took on its whiteness with such a gentle cruelty, you couldn’t even see it happen. Just, after minutes, the clotting and accumulation of death.

He understood this. This was the way the Shee worked, this relentless coldness, the slow burial of life, the freezing of his soul. He knew they had almost won with him; that he had forgotten nearly everything of his human life, that he was far more one of them than he even dared think. They had made him immortal and his humanity was a lost thing, far away and in a forgotten place.

He looked back.

They were playing the music.

He stepped, quickly, out of the Wood, into the world. The music was dangerous, the most lethal spell they had. If you listened to it, it devoured you; you sickened for it like a drug. Once you had heard it—and he had heard it for centuries—you could never forget it. Never.

“Gideon?”

Summer stepped out in front of him. Her short dress had become blue today, an ice-blue shift to fit the world’s weather, her arms and feet bare. “Where are you going?”