I drew back. He waved me to a chair, but I remained on my feet. “How is a mere mirror a device of great power?” I asked, careful to sound casual. “Or do you and your confederate think to make a gull of me?”
He just gazed at me. His eyes were dark, his face half demon, half angel. I confess I found myself so mesmerized, my voice died to a pitiful silence.
Standing before the mirror, he said, “Let me explain. Some years ago, while clearing ground for building work in a remote district of London, workmen struck stone. Eagerly they uncovered it, and found a tomb. And then another. They had stumbled on a small, forgotten graveyard belonging to some long-demolished church. The tombs were ancient, their very existence lost. There was talk of plague-pits, of disease, and lurking horrors. The men refused to dig further and their employers became uneasy. So they called me in.”
“Why you?”
He smiled. “Because sir, I am a specialist in moving the dead.”
I thought then he must be a gallows-crow. A body-snatcher. One who robs graves for the insatiable anatomists of London’s hospitals. I said, “I see. But there would be nothing…fresh…there, surely.”
His dragging smile. “The owners wanted the site cleared. I desired knowledge. Does that surprise you? Maybe you are a mere amateur in the dark arts, Mr. Symmes. I am not. In that place I opened many unusual graves. Monks and nuns, soldiers and merchants. But one tomb was special. In it, I found this.”
His hand went out and gently caressed the mirror frame. I felt a shiver of jealousy, as if it were already mine.
“It was buried with a body?”
“No. That was the strange thing. There was no body, not even the smallest fragment of bone. But the tomb slab had a few words still legible, upon it, including the name MORTIMER DEE and below that ALCHEMIST AND PHILOSOPHER. Alchemist was a word that interested me deeply. The grave I would date from the 1660s or perhaps earlier.”
I stared, astonished, at this beggarly man who could read and who spoke like some scholar and yet was obviously a practiced rogue. Then I walked cautiously around the mirror. It gave a disconcerting twist to my reflection, as if some other Harcourt Symmes peered out of it. “And what does it do?”
He gazed at me. For a moment I thought I saw the depths of a great despair in him. He said, “It allows a man to walk through the doorway we call time.”
Sarah looked up. She gazed out at the darkening estate where the wolf and its handler waited for her.
“And make a hole in the world,” she whispered.
Jake kept out of the Wood. Whatever the Shee were, he had seen enough of them. He half expected Gideon to be waiting for him behind some oak tree, but the drive was dim and gloomy, and only the rooks looked down at him with their beady eyes.
He ran. It was already getting dark, the brief December day fading to a smoky twilight. Tomorrow was the shortest day, the solstice. Dad’s birthday. Dad always said it was his luck to have less daylight than anyone else, and to be so close to Christmas. He’d always insisted on having breakfast in bed to make up for it. Jake had had to bring it up on a tray—toast, usually burned, and black coffee. Once, when he was about nine, he’d put a picture of Mum on there and a rose in a thin vase, but his father had just put those aside and said “Nice try, old man,” and crunched the toast.
What was the point of remembering that now?
He raced all the way up the foggy drive, stopping only to gasp for breath, sure he was watched. The bare tree branches interlaced over his head. Finally he saw the dark metalwork of the gates emerge from the fog.
He avoided the small camera. It clicked and whirred—maybe Piers was searching for him. The fog was lucky; curling out of the damp ground, it would keep him hidden. He climbed the wall, his boots scraping against the mossy bricks, and jumped down the other side into the lane.
Then he took out his cell phone and called Rebecca.
Wharton stood rigid on the landing.
Of course he totally disapproved of eavesdropping, but there was no way he was missing this.
Piers’s and Venn’s voices were muffled by a heavy black baize door. He approached it carefully, praying the floorboards wouldn’t creak. He kept still, his hand on the doorknob, and glanced back up the Long Gallery. Then he crouched and put his eye to the keyhole.
“I should throw you into the river!” Venn was pacing, glaring at Piers. “Are you mad or just stupid? You bring these people here now, just when we’re ready, when we’ve found a subject…”
“I didn’t know that when I sent the e-mail. Besides, it was David. I was thinking of David.” Piers came up to Venn and sat on the floor before him, squatting like some eastern sage. It was a posture that astonished Wharton. “Think, Excellency! The boy is a connection to his father. That might be vital. It seems clear that the device responds to emotion as much as anything else.”
“It doesn’t respond to mine.” Venn’s voice was bleak. He moved; for a moment Wharton saw only blackness blocking the keyhole. Then Venn was slumped in a chair by the window. He drew his hand through his tangle of hair. He looked weary.
Piers crouched by him. “I worry about us using the girl.”
“Not that again!”
“We might lose her too. We have no right to put her in such danger.”
“Don’t we?” Venn’s voice was so low, Wharton had to press against the keyhole to hear. “There’s no other way. After David went…I dare not use it on myself. If I vanish in there before we can calibrate it, I’ll never see Leah again. Otherwise it would be me. You know that.”
“But a girl we don’t even know.”
Venn looked up, staring at the door so intently Wharton jerked back, suddenly sure those ice-blue eyes could see straight through to him. “That’s the strange thing. I do know her. As soon as I saw her, I felt as if I did. I can’t explain it. But if it’s her life against even the chance of getting Leah back, I’ll take the risk a hundred times over. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do, Piers, no one I wouldn’t sacrifice! And remember, you work for me. I own you, body and soul, and you will do whatever I say.”
He was out of the chair and striding toward the door.
Wharton leaped back, looked desperately around for somewhere to hide. There was an alcove with a curtain across it; he dived behind it and stood there, the dusty folds against his nose and mouth.
Even as he was trying not to sneeze, Venn swept past him, the curtain billowing.
He waited. He heard a click, as if Piers had followed his master into the corridor. Then the small man said, “Wharton knows about her.”
Venn answered, but Wharton didn’t hear the words. His heart was beating too loudly. Then a distant door slammed, but a few creaks of the boards told him Piers hadn’t gone. Carefully he edged the curtain aside and put one eye to the slit. The small alert figure was standing only feet away, with a laptop in his hands, but he wasn’t looking at it.
He was listening.
His eyes were bright.
Wharton shuffled back into the darkness.
Piers instantly turned toward the curtain. “Sarah? Is that you?”
He waited a moment, then walked over and tugged the material aside.
The alcove was empty.
Rebecca pulled the car up near the bridge and dimmed the headlights. “Here?”
“It’ll do. He must be parked up in the pub yard.”
They both gazed out. “Look at it,” she muttered.
The fog had thickened as night fell. Now it was a gray, swirling, freezing mass against the windows, even the village lights reduced to barest pinpoints. “I can’t see any car. I can’t see anything.”