Sarah reached out toward the obsidian surface, and touched its solidity with her hands. “So where did they go, Piers?” she said quietly.
He shrugged. “Somewhere near where the mirror is. David told us that he did not actually emerge from it, but it was within a mile or so from his arrival point. They have to find it.”
But his voice was uncertain.
As she turned, a flicker of eyes caught hers, a green glimmer in the mirror.
She gasped. “Who’s that?”
Piers grabbed a crowbar. “Where?”
At first she thought it was one of the cats. Then she reached into the shadows and drew him out. He slid into the candlelight as if he had materialized out of air, a green-eyed boy in a ragged frockcoat, watching her with the wary stare of a trapped deer.
The boy from the Wood.
Gideon said slyly, “Don’t you know me, Piers?”
Sarah saw Piers’s eyes widen in disbelief and then raw fear. “You! How did you get into the house?” He whirled, flashing the flashlight into all the dim corners. “Are they here? Is Summer here?”
Gideon smiled. “Stay calm, little man. It’s just me.”
His eyes moved to Sarah’s. “After an eternity in the greenwood, I finally got inside.”
“Wait!” Jake came forward and grabbed the peeler’s arm. “There’s no need for this. The kid’s…the child is perfectly harmless.”
His heart was thumping. Terror froze him. Without the bracelet, he was trapped here forever. He would have to live out his life in this stinking century and never see his father again.
The girl watched him through her thatch of dark hair. Her eyes glinted with sly triumph.
“Er, allow me to…” Jake’s hand scrabbled in his empty pockets. A single pound coin remained; he pulled it out and held it up, so that it glittered in the gaslight. “Allow me to recompense you for your troubles, my man. And leave the child out of this.”
He sounded like a bad actor in a worse period drama, but that was all he knew of the past, all anyone could ever know, the thousand clichés of film and TV. All the history lessons in the world couldn’t help him now.
The coin gleamed.
The peeler said, “Well…mebbes I could.” His eyes on the coin.
Jake threw it.
It flashed through the dark. The man let the girl go and grabbed for it; instantly she ran, past Jake, so that he had to yell and twist after her, over the slippery cobbles of the yard, under the arch into a street ripe with the refuse of the dark houses that overhung it.
She was fast and fleet as a rat, and he was still aching from the journey, but he caught her at the corner and flung her around.
“Wait, you little brat.” Breathless, he held her off as she kicked and tried to bite. Then he held her in a firm arm-lock. She screamed.
“Will you be quiet!” Jake looked around nervously. The fog masked the houses’ deep doorways. “Quiet! You said you saw them. The men that robbed me. I paid for your freedom. You owe me!”
She stopped struggling and stared at him. Then she said, “Leave off.”
He let her go.
She looked up at him through her hair, poised to run. “You don’t ’arf talk rum.”
“So do you. What’s your name?”
“Moll.”
He grinned. “I’m Jake. Moll, I need to find these men and I need to find them now.”
Behind them in the fog, a whistle blew. The girl gave a quick glance and said, “Not here, mister. Too many rozzers. We’ll go to Skimble’s.”
Before he could argue, she was gone, running into the fog, and he had to follow, clutching at the pain in his side.
Down dim streets lined with runnels of flowing sewage, through labyrinths of dark alleys the girl led him, and he followed, deeper into the warren that was London’s squalid heart, totally lost among the courtyards and warehouses, the occasional flaring naphtha light of a late shop or a tavern where shrieks and shouts echoed. Cabs clattered by him, dark figures in cloaks and tall hats, women with painted faces called at him from doorways. Every wall was a patchwork of peeling advertisements.
Moll slowed to a walk, darted down a passageway between two derelict buildings and clattered down some steps behind a rusty railing.
“Wait,” Jake said, uneasy. “Why here?”
“Because this is it, mister.” She pushed at a warped dark door until it opened.
Jake stopped.
She caught his arm, impatient. “Don’t be frit. It’s just Skimble’s.”
She pushed through into a corridor and he followed, wary. The corridor was dark, running with damp. Once it had been ornate though, because above him were odd swirls of gilt paint, a ragged swathe of scarlet curtain, tied with a fat tassel of silk.
“What is this place?”
She shrugged. “A doss. A night pad.”
He had no idea what she meant. And then, as they came to the end of the corridor, she ducked under a broken barricade of what looked like smashed-up chairs and led him into a sudden emptiness of tilted palaces and crumbling, painted paper mountains.
They stood on a wide stage and before them ancient seats soared in tiered glory into the ceiling.
“Skimble’s,” she said.
17
I dream of the scarred man. He comes and stands at the foot of my bed, and he is half angel, half demon. He says, “Don’t try to use the mirror. The mirror will possess you. The mirror will devour your soul.”
He is too late. I have already discovered that.
My house is a fortress, locked and bolted and barred. But ghosts and phantoms flicker here, in polished surfaces, in glass and crystal.
And someone is watching every move I make.
Journal of John Harcourt Symmes
“WHO IS HE?” Sarah snapped.
“Like I said.” Piers lowered the crowbar reluctantly. “He’s is a changeling. He’s with the Shee. Venn knows him.”
Gideon laughed. He flicked his coattails and sat, as if relishing the comfort.
She was astonished at him. He was thin, almost insubstantial, as if his very being had worn away through centuries. And yet under the fever-bright eyes and the crazy costume, there was a lost boy, someone so far from everyone else, there was no way back, and she understood that only too well.
Not only that, his presence here was a sudden fierce hope for her. The Shee, if they existed, were reputed to be creatures that lived outside time. To them, all times were the same.
She thought quickly. “Jake brought you here?”
Gideon shrugged. “Foolishly, I thought he wanted to help me. But he only wanted me to operate the machine. That was all he cared about.”
“And what do you care about?” Sarah quietly watched as Piers turned back to the black mirror.
The boy smiled, bitterly. “Going home. Though that is not possible.”
“Why not?”
“Because nothing is left. They took me centuries since. Now I can’t leave the estate, so Summer says.”
“Summer?”
“Their queen. She’s told me many times. If I even set the toe of my foot on the unenchanted earth, I will dissolve into the dust I should have been five hundred years ago. She taunts me with it. I have no idea if it’s true, or if so much time has truly passed. Living with them—there’s no day and night, no seasons. No ageing.”
“But…the Wood…it’s real.”
“The edges are.” He shrugged. “As you go in deeper, it changes. You come to a strange place, where it’s always warm, the leaves are always green. Another world, not like this.”
She looked at him. “An ageless land of summer. It sounds perfect.”
Gideon allowed himself a small, hard smile. “You think so? These creatures, they’re not like us. Like you. They are beautiful and they think only of themselves, their music, their cold laughter. No ambition, no future, no past. They exist, like the wind. They’re like butterflies mostly, but even butterflies die. The Shee don’t die. They don’t fear death. They have no fear at all.”