Catherine Fisher - Obsidian Mirror

A hand.

It was close and tough. It grabbed her hair and hauled. She moaned, but the hand had her now, around shoulders, around waist.

Her foot stumbled on soil, then they were out, bursting into air, crawling up the bank, grabbing the hanging willow boughs to pull themselves up. Icy air burst into her lungs. Painfully she coughed and choked and vomited out water and weed.

When she could speak she said, “You…did it.”

He sat, dragging his hands back through his streaming hair. Some of the green lichen had washed from his pale skin; he looked different. Less lost. Grabbing her arm, making her turn, he said, “That’s you and Jake. You both owe me a life now. The Shee never keep their word. So show me that humans are different. Get me away from her, Sarah.”

The intensity that broke through his usual languid carelessness made her nod, silent.

He dragged her up. “Come on. Before you freeze.”

Between one step and another they raced into winter, a bitterly cold white-out of horizontal snow that stung her eyes to water. The roar of the blizzard was ferocious. Sarah and Gideon stumbled through shoulder-high dead bracken and the crashed trunks of ancient elms, snow whitening their hair, their lips; the whole world a wall of snow coming straight at them, and as Sarah leaped aside into the path, her ankle twisted; she fell sideways with a screech, hands down in the frozen drift.

Something gave a harsh cry, just above her.

A huge starling sat on a branch, huddled against the blizzard. Its small beady eyes, tilted in curiosity, watched her.

Gideon stopped. “They’re here. You go on,” he yelled, his lips close to her ear. “Don’t forget me.”

She scrambled up and hobbled, shivering. Where was the Abbey? The wind was so ice sharp through her wet clothes, it was hard to catch her breath. In seconds she was alone, not sure if she was even heading the right way. Maybe the Shee were enticing her back even now, toward that jagged place where the corners of worlds intruded.

She staggered out of the trees into the knee-deep snow of the drive.

And gasped.

Wintercombe Abbey was an arctic ruin in a wasteland.

For a moment she knew she had emerged from the forest in the wrong time, centuries too late, because surely this was the ghost of a house, every roof and gable thick with snow, the very windows silted up, the door wide open and blocked with a great drift.

No lights burned, no chimneys smoked.

Maybe they were all dead—Venn, Piers, Jake. Maybe this was her own desolate winter, Janus’s world of no hope and no color.

Then, faint as the tiniest point of light in a dark eye, she saw the flame of a candle. It glimmered at a high window in the Long Gallery, then moved, as if carried past the panes. Someone was in there.

Sarah picked herself up and fought her way to the door. The steps were thick with snow, but a trampled mix of deep prints led in.

She wiped her face and eyes, pushed back her soaking hair.

Then she forced her way through the built-up snowdrift into the hall.

It was in darkness. The stairs were marked with wet prints. Very quietly she followed them up, running her hand along the thin snow-crust on the banister. Reaching the first landing, she stopped.

A sound came from above her, up in the high vault of the ceiling, a small creak, a tinkle. Dust fell on her. She saw that the chandelier up there was swinging, softly, as if the gale had set it in motion.

A ripple of movement stirred the dark red hangings of the landing.

She turned, but the stairs behind her were dark and empty. Not even a cat.

Suddenly, panic rose up in her. She turned and ran, heedless, breathlessly up, because she had to get back, find the mirror, find Venn. She hurtled into the Long Gallery, and almost crashed into the Replicant.

It was sitting with its feet on a chair, and it was so young! A slim soldier, hair tied back now, thin lips drawn in a delighted smile.

It was on its feet and had tight hold of her before she could twist away.

“How lovely to see you, Sarah,” it said.

The mirror stood in a fortified zone. Under Wharton’s orders, Rebecca and Maskelyne had dragged the heaviest furniture against the door, then retreated to the labyrinth, where the only weapon they had, the shotgun, was aimed at the entrance arch. Wharton kept it, and had the glass gun jammed in his belt.

“Because I don’t trust you,” he snapped, when Maskelyne asked why.

Rebecca shook her head in disbelief. “If that thing gets in here…”

“It wants the mirror. Not us.”

They sat, crouched in silence. Wharton breathed heavily.

Rebecca glanced at Maskelyne, a shadow in the darkness. She knew he was looking at the mirror.

He had realized with sickening speed that there was nothing he could do without power. To be so close to it must be so tantalizing for him, she thought. A torment. She said, “Can you feel it?”

“I can hear it.” His scarred face turned in the darkness. “I hear it sing. A single high note, beyond sound. So strange and far off, like a voice from eternities distant. But I can hear it, Becky.”

From behind, Wharton said gruffly, “I never got to hear how you two know each other.”

Rebecca was silent a moment. Maskelyne said, “Tell him, if you want.”

Wharton heard her sigh. “I don’t know how to. It started so long ago. I was maybe six, seven, when I first saw him. In dreams. A man falling and falling through dark space, a rectangle of sky. He was calling out to me, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. I told my mum, but she laughed at me. Nightmares, she said.

“Slowly, he came to earth. I began to see him land, crashing in slow-mo. Between dreams a month apart he might only have moved a millimeter. I got used to it. I stopped telling people, because they thought I was strange. But I used to lie awake on rainy nights, worried, in case he would get wet.”

She grinned at him. “Then one night, he was there, in my room. He was see-through, like a ghost. He sat on my window seat and whispered, ‘Don’t be afraid. I’m a friend.’ No one else saw him. When my mum came in to wake me the next day, she walked straight through him. He wasn’t there.”

Maskelyne said, “It was a drastically delayed manifestation.”

“Talk English,” Wharton muttered.

“Time, stretched out like elastic. I was coming through the mirror, but it was taking years.”

“What?” Wharton stared, appalled. “Might that happen to Jake?”

“Jake has the bracelet. I had nothing. I was lucky even to survive.”

Rebecca smiled. “I didn’t know any of that then. He was just my secret friend. He lived in my house and no one knew about him. Sometimes he was there and sometimes not, all over the farm, in the barns, in the fields, in the place down by the stream where I used to play.” She laughed, soft, in the dark. “I wasn’t scared of him. I liked him. Half beautiful and half ugly, like a man put together from pieces. He came out of my books, he was Heathcliff and Rochester and all those dark heroes. He was my shadow. I waited for him.”

“For me,” Maskelyne said quietly, “her entire childhood was only a few frail moments. I was there, then gone, and when the world flickered back the girl who lived in it was a month, a year older, and it was summer, or a sudden autumn. I realized what must be happening, but what could I do? I was trapped.”

Rebecca said, “Do you remember the day I was ten, and there was a party? I had all these kids around, and it was fun, but then suddenly Maskelyne was there, in the middle of them, sitting like a ghost at the feast, among balloons and music and no one could see him but me. He looked so weary. I pretended to be sick and everyone got sent home. And then I made him go to sleep on the sofa.”