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?”
He shrugged, bitter. “Where can I go? You’ve trapped me in this forest.”
“The forest contains everything.” She came up and put her arms around him, hugging him close, smaller than he was. “Always so moody, human child. Always so sad. But you know, you can go anywhere, do anything. We’ve given you freedom. Far more than the other poor souls out here have.”
He opened his mouth to speak, but she laid a cold finger on his lips. “Do you want songs, Gideon, or dancing? Rich clothing? Food from far lands? To fly with the jay and scurry with the mole? All that’s yours. You’ll never age, never be old, never be sick or corrupted with some cancer. You have the life that humans dream of in their religions and their myths. You have eternity. What more is there?”
He wanted to say Love. Pity. But she wouldn’t understand what the words meant. He wasn’t sure that he did either. He wanted to shout out that it wasn’t enough, that he wanted people, people with all their faults and irritations and compassion and arguments. He wanted a place where fear had boundaries.
Instead he said, “Why did you choose me, Summer? Out of all the children in the world.”
She laughed, stepping back. “You were mine from the start. We’d play our music to you even when you were in the cradle. When you were older, you wandered for hours in the Wood. They couldn’t keep you in their cottages, their tiny dull family. You were too bold for that. Too beautiful. Then I decided to bring you to me. To make you mine, Gideon.”
He remembered that day. The kindly girl in the green dress who had taken his hand and drawn him away, deep and deeper into the Wood, and how tight her slim white fingers had been around his, and how at first he had turned because he could still hear his mother, fainter, always fainter, calling and calling his name. How he had tugged and pulled.
How she had never let him go.
Now he shrugged. “Let me go back. You could, if—”
“It’s too late.” She smiled at him, perfectly, calm. “Our time is not their time. Out there, centuries have passed. Your mother is dead, Gideon, your father, your brothers, anyone who ever remembered you. Dead for centuries. You’ve become a story. A legend. The boy who wandered away never to be seen again. A picture in an old book. A warning to mothers not to let their children out of their sight.”
She shrugged, a slight, careless movement. “You can never go back. Take one step out of Venn’s estate and you crumble into dust. To fine desiccated bone. You don’t exist anymore, Gideon. You are eternal, yes, but you are also long dead.”
She turned away. “The subject bores me. Come and hear the singing. And later we’ll ride out and hunt under the moon.”
She held out her hand. After a moment he took it.
But as they walked into the Wood he looked back through the snow and heard the roar of a motorcycle up the drive, and his eyes were sharp with recklessness.
13
The Wintercombe estate has been in his family for centuries. Orpheus Venn, a Cavalier nobleman loyal to Charles the First, reputedly received the land as a reward after the Restoration, and the family has lived there ever since. The valley lies between Dartmoor and the sea, and has a mysterious air. The locals believe the Faery Host inhabit it, and that one of Venn’s ancestors once had an amour with the Faery Queen, and that the family are now only half human. When asked about this once at a book festival in Bremen, Venn gave his ice-chip stare, snatched off the microphone and stormed out.