“He’s there.” Jake opened the door, but she said quickly, “Oh, I don’t like this. It’s scary. Maybe I should come with you.”
“I have to go alone.” He was already outside. “Thanks for the lift. I can find my own way back.”
“You must be joking.” Rebecca leaned over and turned music on, a blast of rock. “I’m not going anywhere. Look, I’ll give you ten minutes, then I’ll drive in next to you. Or sooner, if you scream.”
He managed a smile. She was so excited, in her tilted blue beret. “Okay, Superwoman. You can come in and rescue me.” He slammed the door, turned his collar up against the freezing night, and walked toward the parking lot.
It was a gray vacancy. He felt he was walking into nothingness, into nowhere, that he might crash into a wall or a door or stride off the edge of the earth and fall forever.
Headlights flashed, once, to his right.
He groped toward them and found a vehicle—something low and dark, but he couldn’t even see the make, or find the handle, until a door swung open and the husky voice said, “Please get in, Mr. Wilde.”
He hesitated. Then he slid into the warm interior.
The stranger in the driver’s seat clicked on the inner light. He was a dark-haired man, astonishingly handsome, until he turned, and Jake saw the scar that furrowed the left side of his face.
“So you came, Jake,” he said.
10
I felt most uneasy. I was in a desolate place and only the cabman knew my whereabouts. But I kept my voice calm. “I fail to see how one can walk in Time.”
“One thousand guineas, Mr. Symmes.”
“This is ridiculous. Do I look such a gull? It is simply a mirror.”
“Buy, or leave. Others will be desperate for it.”
An old line. I put on a scoffing look, but I was tormented. The name of Mortimer Dee was known to me—he had been an astrologer in the reign of Elizabeth. Anything belonging to him was of great interest. But a thousand guineas! I said, “Five hundred.”
He came close, his face twisted in sudden anguish. “I’m not here to bargain! Do you think I would sell this treasure to a fool like you if I wasn’t utterly so deep in debt, I cannot survive!”
Affronted, I stepped back. “Very well.” We would see who was the fool. I put my hand to the revolver in my pocket.
But at that moment, in the next room, a woman screamed.
Journal of John Harcourt Symmes, December 1846
JAKE KNEW AT once he shouldn’t have come. The situation prickled with danger. He said, “Where’s my father?”
The stranger stared straight ahead. “On the phone you asked my name. It’s Maskelyne. Does that mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“They really have kept you in the dark. You haven’t read Symmes’s journals?”
“Who’s Symmes?”
Maskelyne nodded, weary. “It’s a pity. We could have been useful to each other.”
Jake kept his hand on the door. “Tell me what you know or I leave now.”
“This place is too public.” Before Jake could even object, the man had started the car and was backing swiftly out of the parking lot into the lane. Jake said, “I could jump out.”
“You won’t.”
He glanced back, imagining Rebecca’s total panic. This wasn’t working out as they had planned. “Where are we going?”
“Nervous, Jake?” Maskelyne glanced across at him. “Please don’t be. Soon, at least one of us will have everything he wants.”
Piers tugged the curtain wider and looked at the empty alcove. Then he balanced the laptop in one arm and tried the handle of the door leading to the Monk’s Walk. It opened. He looked inside—a tilted, listening scrutiny. Then he closed the door, locked it securely, and walked away.
Wharton watched the small shadow vanish from the gap under the door. He came from the dimness, took out his handkerchief, and mopped his face. Stupid. Stupid! But it would have been so embarrassing to be caught out there peering through keyholes. When he was sure Piers had gone, he tugged the door, but it didn’t move. “Oh bloody hell,” he said hopelessly to the darkness.
He was trapped in the Monk’s Walk.
He turned. There was a great emptiness at his back, a long stone corridor, with mullioned windows along the right side, the left a bare stone wall running with green damp. Forbidden territory.
He crossed to the nearest window and opened it.
The river ran twenty feet below, crashing through its gorge, a surging swollen torrent, leaves and boughs snatched away in its roar. Reflected in it was the moon, a circle fragmented by branches.
No way down.
He looked up the stone arcade. Sarah was in danger; he needed to speak to her and quickly. There must be some other way out. He just had to find it.
Five minutes later he was shivering with cold and totally lost. The remains of the medieval Abbey were tangled under the house—a warren of low halls and cellars, stairs and storerooms. Moonlight slanted in through the few windows, and damp had caused acrid yellow mold to accumulate over the carvings of faces and wide-winged beasts. Worm-riddled angels regarded him serenely.
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.