Amber House (35 page)

Matthew’s box.

I opened the lid, desperate to find the thing that would help me save Sammy. But the box was empty inside, except for the mirror in the lid.

I shook my head, incredulous. This had to be it. This had to be what Nyangu had sent me for. “Wait,” I said, remembering. “It’s a puzzle box.” I started pushing at the sides, trying to identify the piece that would move.

“Let me try,” Jackson said. He inspected the edges carefully, then pressed firmly on the rear edge of the right side. The whole side panel slid forward.

“Yes!” I said. “That’s how he did it.” Jackson slid all the pieces in turn until the front came entirely free, revealing the little hidden drawer. Inside lay a brooch made of two intertwining locks of hair, mounted under glass on a silver backing.

“That’s a love knot,” Jackson said. “A snip of hair from two people woven together. It’s a kind of charm.”

I picked it up to look at it. Words were scratched into its silver back:
ANNIE AND MAGGIE FOREVER
.

Was this what Nyangu had wanted me to find?

It was or it wasn’t, but I didn’t have time to look for anything else. A little over half an hour left. I dropped the love knot into
the main compartment of the box and stood. I had to keep moving. “We still need to find out how Sammy got lost,” I said. “Let’s go to the nautical room. And — if I find a trail, I can’t lose it. Because I might not be able to get back to it again. I can’t have anything break my concentration. No noise. No furniture in my path. No closed doors. Can you help?”

“I’ll handle it,” he promised.

I tucked Matthew’s box into Sammy’s backpack and hooked an arm through one of its straps. Then I lay down in the berth in the nautical room with Heavy Bear in my arms. I closed my eyes and imagined Sammy, trying to get back to where he had been last night.

I imagined him lying small under the covers with Heavy Bear clutched against his chest. I imagined his breath moving softly in and out, his eyes darting behind his lids, his brow furrowed with the burden of a dream. And I heard him speak.

“No one?”

I opened my eyes to the darkness of an echo. Beside me, Sammy stood without waking and went to the door. I did the same in my vision of Sammy’s past. Dimly I heard Jackson following along behind us.

He padded down the hall in his footed pajamas. His eyes were open, but I knew he wasn’t awake. He stood at the top step, teetering. Uselessly and helplessly, I worried for him, standing there surrounded by night, at the top of those long stairs. Then he continued down.

I shadowed him into the east wing and down to the door at the end of the hall. Sammy opened it and seemed to see someone. “No one,” he said again, and jumped down onto the stone
walk. He trotted, as if chasing somebody, toward the entrance to the maze.

We jogged down the leaf corridors, filled with light and shadows cast by the full moon of the night before. The fabric feet of Sam’s pajamas got soaked by the remnants of the rainfall, but he didn’t wake or slow down. Even in his sleep, he knew his way to the center.

He stopped at the end of the last corridor, where the hedges opened around the iron gazebo. As I slipped up behind him, he started forward again, to the marble steps, where he bent and reached for something.

Sam stood, holding the thing in front of him, then looked deeper inside the gazebo. He walked forward a couple of steps, his hand outstretched, as if he were about to take the hand of someone taller. Then he crumpled, like a marionette whose strings had been cut.

“Sammy,” I cried, as I ran forward to kneel by him, unable to touch his little body, fallen there the night before.

He’d seen someone. He’d picked up some object, and it had triggered a vision of a person who had offered him a hand. How could that be? Was the gift different for Sam? And the person he’d seen — was she one of the ones who could see the future?

I needed to see what Sammy had seen.

I glimpsed, in this vision of the night before, a patch of gold on the gazebo floor near where Sam lay. It was my mask, from the party. I reached for it, but all I felt was the cold marble tiles. I could see it before me, but in the time where my body was, the mask was someplace else.

Full daylight flooded my eyes. I squinted. I was in the gazebo, and Jackson was crouched over me.

“Sam touched my mask and then he seemed to see someone,”
I told him. “He reached out his hand like he was going to take someone else’s. I need to find —”

“— the mask.” He’d already found it where it was lying. He held it out to me.

“I don’t understand how this is possible,” I told him. “I can’t touch anything in a vision. How could he take somebody’s hand?”

He thought a moment. “Sammy was sleepwalking. Dreaming.”

He touched someone in a dream?
He touched … and crumpled. I got it. I finally understood. The touch was the moment he got lost. No. The touch was the moment he got
taken
. Someone had coaxed his dreaming spirit right out of his body.

“Oh, God,” I said, shaking my head. “How am I supposed to follow him there?”

“That game you played — Hotter, Colder — you weren’t sensing his body, Sarah. You were sensing his spirit. That spirit is still here, trapped in Amber House. You’ll find him,” Jackson said. “You always do.”

I nodded, swallowing my doubt like a lump in my throat. Then I took the mask from him, held it in both hands, and closed my eyes to daylight.

And opened them to dusk. The green walls around me were noisy with crickets and frogs, the wisteria in full bloom, and the hedge tops weren’t yet grown any higher than my shoulders. I was in a time when the maze was still young. I looked all around, but I couldn’t see Sammy.

Except — I could sense him again. He had been there. He was still close. I could feel that heat. I just had to focus.

A young woman emerged from the maze, black-haired and lovely in a gold and silver hoop-skirted gown. Deirdre. On her face, my gold mask. The man who walked beside her wore a tailcoat trimmed in gold braid — a military uniform. Tall, blond, blue-eyed, with full lips and a slightly curving nose. The
Captain, as youthful as I had ever seen him. He seemed attentive and flirtatious, but also detached, as if he were dancing and admiring his own steps. I loathed him. He leaned in to murmur something in the girl’s ear, then reached up and pulled off her mask.

She was maybe sixteen, an ivory-skinned beauty. She looked at him with shy longing. He laced his fingers in her hair and tipped her lips to his.

Movement caught my eye. A little girl in a white gown was climbing down through the trapdoor of the newly-built gazebo. It wasn’t who I expected — it wasn’t my little girl in white. This child had pale skin and blue eyes. And my mother’s features.

“Maggie,” I said.

She looked at me. She looked right at me. This wasn’t like Nyangu, looking into the future at me looking into the past, or even Fiona, guessing at my presence. Maggie was
from
the future here, just the same as I was. So how could she
see
me? Or I her?

There seemed only one possible answer. Though her body was long dead, somehow her spirit still wandered Amber House. And because she had traveled into the same moment in the past as I had, her spirit was somehow aware of mine. As I was of hers.

If that was true, then that had to mean that when Sam had come to this same moment the night before, some
other
Amber House woman must have traveled back here as well. Must have seen him. And led him away.

I thought furiously. Why was Maggie here? What kind of insane coincidence would bring her to this same moment as Sam and his — soul-snatcher? And I realized, it wasn’t coincidence.
Maggie
must have brought Sam here. What had I heard him say in his sleep, when he rose from his bed? He’d said, “No one?” That was his name for her. The imaginary friend who played hide-and-seek with him, and showed up in mirrors all over the house. No one. It made my skin crawl.

Maggie had led Sam here deliberately. But why? Whatever she was, Maggie could not be the person who had taken him. Sam had reached
up
to take that invisible hand.

I had no idea what was going on, but it seemed like I needed to talk to Maggie. If that was even possible.

Just then, she beckoned to me to follow. And jumped down into the hole in the heart of the maze.

“Maggie! Stop,” I said, running after her. I swung my feet around to the ladder and descended behind her.

Part of me wondered how I was able to do this, to pass through a door in my vision that wasn’t open in the present. And I realized that Jackson was doing as he’d promised — making it possible for me to stay within the vision. He must have foreseen the need for me to go down through the trapdoor and opened it up. I blessed him and wondered what it cost him, but I stayed focused on following Maggie. Maggie, who clearly wanted me to follow. Maggie, who was heading toward that faint feeling of warm energy that drew me on.

She was gone into the darkness when I touched bottom. I wished for light, but knew I would have to do without. The tunnel was straight and its floor fairly even. I forced myself to start walking, trailing the back of my shirt-sleeve-covered wrist along the wall to help keep me on track. I heard Jackson again following behind me.

My hand bumped against wood. I had reached the door to Heart House. It was open. I went in blindly, my hands outstretched, afraid I’d collide with something. The door to the farther room was ajar, filled with a faint light. Hugging my hands to my chest, I walked through it.

Maggie was there, holding a candle, looking back at me. Perhaps even waiting for me. She turned and pressed a hidden lever, revealing an opening I had never seen before. She went in, and the light went with her.

“No,” I moaned. “Another secret door” — one that wouldn’t be open in my time. But then I remembered Jackson. “The lever is about five feet up near the center of the wall.” And I heard, from far away, a click, a creak. I felt, smelled, a weight of stale air wash over me. The passage was open.

The dark that shouldered around me from behind was cold and featureless; the pitch-black that snaked down out of that passage was thick, repellant. I did not want to go into it. But Sammy was up there, on the other side. I slid my right toe up the rise of the first step until it cleared the edge. Then I stepped forward. Both feet on the first step, I repeated the process, and climbed the second.

I could feel — on my face, on my arms — soft, hair-thin touches that clung and grew thicker with each step I took. It seemed the spiders of Amber House had done their best to close and seal this passage.
Good mothers
, I thought. A staccato of tiny feet ran from my temple down my cheek. But I did not scream. I followed the faint thread of my connection to Sammy, up and up again.

More than a dozen steps up, my head bumped wood. I waited, afraid to push with my hands, hanging on to my sense of Sammy, thinking and not thinking of Jackson. I refused to hear the muffled sounds of movement above me. But when fresh air fell upon me, I started forward again, up into the closet in Amber House’s kitchen, its door open to the light of a fire in the hearth in whatever time I now traveled.

Some part of me, some physical part, felt the shroud of webs I was wearing. I looked at my hands, and saw them clean, but
felt
them sticky with spider silk. I passed them over my face and hair, feeling and not feeling the gray trailings that hung there, swept up by my fingers. I would not see the spider that ran down my wrist to my palm and sank fangs in its center, pain a blossom in my hand. I only brushed her off and went on.

Through the dining room and into the entry. I felt with my heart for my path, and knew it was up the stairs. I looked to the top and Maggie was there, looking back. She turned and ran on.

Halfway up the staircase, my attention was pulled by a disturbing blankness on my right — the mirror that hung there. I saw my reflection draped in webs, standing in a day-lit hall, with Jackson behind, his face creased with worry, his hands partially raised, as if he wished he could help. My sight was filling with sunlight — I was losing the connection.

I squeezed my eyes shut and again concentrated on Sam. I waited for the warmth to grow, turning my face from the mirror. When I opened my eyes, I was back in the shadows of a long-ago evening.

And I could feel Sam, getting hotter. He was — above.

On the second-floor landing, I saw movement in the portal of the eastern wing. Someone standing there, someone watching me. I could feel her presence like an ice statue, like cold fury. I backed up two paces, then turned and fled up the farther staircase.

Darkness pooled in the narrow steps at the top. When I reached the last landing, light fanned sideways into the hall from the partially open door at its end. I slipped in.

The large garret room that in my time had been dust-laden and packed in all its eaves with taped boxes was in this time set up as a nursery, empty and abandoned. Two iron-framed beds sat naked under the far window; two children’s chairs stood in the middle of the floor before a simple trunk of unpolished wood. The rest of the space was bare.

Sammy and Maggie, sitting in those chairs, looked up at me when I walked in.

“Hello,” said Sam, and Maggie said, “Hello.”

“Sam?” I said.

“Sam is my bear,” my brother told me. “He’s five years old. Who are you?”

Who am I?
I repeated to myself, feeling chilled. “I’m Sarah, Sammy. Don’t you remember?”

“Sarah?” Sammy laughed. “My sister’s name is Sarah too.” He gestured toward Maggie.

“Sarah too.” Maggie nodded.

“You’re Sarah?” I said, confused.

“Did you see my toys?” Sam asked, jumping up to flit about the room, pointing. “This is my horse. And this is my ship. And this is my tiger.”

He did not seem to know that every place he pointed was empty.

I reminded myself that he was sleeping, dreaming. True, he was in the same past as I, or else I couldn’t have spoken to him. But he had come here in his dream, and in his dream he stayed. In that dream world, reality had no bounds. Where I saw an abandoned nursery, he saw a room filled with toys that didn’t exist. I wondered if Maggie dreamed them too.

“Your toys are wonderful,” I told him. “What’s your name?”

“My name is Matthew.”

Matthew. Whose sister’s name was Sarah.
Sammy was dreaming he was someone else, just as I’d once dreamed I was Sorcha and Fiona and Sarah-Louise.

I needed to wake Sam up. I needed to make him remember who he was, make him remember the real world. But I couldn’t even touch him. How could I wake him?

I dimly sensed Jackson watching me, and felt grateful for his presence. But then I turned my attention back to the children.

“How did you get here?” I asked Maggie.

She struggled to find a few words on her own. “Mama took me,” she said.

Mama. Deirdre. She took Maggie down into death
, I thought, and in the next thought realized:
Persephone.
Maggie had gone into the underworld, never to come out.

How could it have happened? Somehow, when Maggie had fallen from the tree — had fallen into unconsciousness — her dreaming spirit had traveled into the past, as Sam’s had, as I had myself those few times. Her spirit had gotten trapped here, unable to find her way back to her body, back to her life. Her body had died because of it.

And now the same thing was happening to Sam.

And “Mama,” Deirdre, had done this. Deirdre, the woman who’d been driven insane by the loss of her own children. I remembered that she’d spent the last weeks of her life barely waking, even though Sarah-Louise had tried so hard to wake her up. Perhaps Deirdre’s dreaming spirit had stumbled upon Maggie’s and wrapped it up in her own mad vision. Then she’d looked for a Matthew too, to have both her lost children restored to her. And she had found Sam at that moment of her first kiss.

I needed to get Sam out of here. I needed him to wake up, before what had happened to Maggie happened to him.

“Does your mama let you go out?” I asked Maggie.

“Nope,” Sam said. “We never go out. It’s not good outside. There are dark things. And spiders.”

“Spiders,” Maggie said.

“Mama locks all the doors,” Sam said.

“Not
all
the doors,” Maggie said.

No, not all
, I thought. Not the secret door that led to Heart House. Which Maggie had found.
Clever girl.
That was how she wandered through the past, I thought, and met Sam, and became Fiona’s Persephone.

“You looked for someone who could help,” I said to her.

She nodded, her eyes pained. “Someone who could help.”

“Who?”

She shrugged a little and shook her head. “Who,” she said.

No one she could remember
, I thought to myself with anguish. But maybe she’d been searching for her beloved older sister. Who wouldn’t walk those paths in the past anymore.

Sam spoke up, his voice a little angry. “We don’t need help. Mama gives us
everything
.” He brightened at a thought. “You want to see the bestest thing of all?” He skipped forward to stand near me and indicated an invisible something, standing upon the chest. He made the motions of winding a key. “See?” he said. “A carousel! With a song in it!” He hummed along.

I closed my eyes and tried to hear through Sammy’s ears, see through Sammy’s eyes. Tried to imagine a carousel set with tiny animals that spun in a circle around the center, while a melody poured from its heart.

When I opened my eyes, I could almost see Deirdre’s dream nursery, like glimpses in my peripheral vision. A zoo of animals tucked in their cages. A rocking horse, hand painted. A model of a three-masted ship. Toys and balls and books and puzzles of every shape and size.

The bare walls became, at the edges of my sight, cozy with draped fabric patterned in red and yellow and white. A braided rug warmed the floor and a table stood in the middle of the room, covered with a cloth. A fantasy nursery, decorated with mad splendor, for two children who had come here in their dreams and now could not wake.

And in the center of it all, the china carousel, playing a melody I knew very well. A melody of six notes that Sammy had been singing since before he could talk. How could that be?

I was cold to the pit of my stomach.

“That’s beautiful,” I said, struggling to keep my voice even.

“Thank you,” he said cheerfully.

“You’re welcome,” I answered in the rhythm of our old joke, dipping my head to catch his eye. And he looked at me swiftly, a tiny furrow between his eyebrows.

From far away, through an echoing tunnel, I heard the knocker rap against the front door of Amber House. It had to be the police. I was out of time. The nursery slipped sideways and blackness ate the edges.

I focused on Sammy. I held on to Sammy. The music had stopped, the shadows were empty, but I was still there. And Sammy was still there.

“I’m going to have to go soon,” I told him.

“That’s too bad,” he said.

“I want you to come with me.”

“Want to come,” Maggie said softly.

“Nope,” Sam said. “Can’t go out.”

“Look at me, bud.” I sank down to the floor, where the world was more solid, and I could look Sammy in the eye. “I’m your sister. Sarah.”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I’m pretty sure I would remember.”

“You’ve got to remember, Sammy.” I reached out a hand. And stopped myself. My fingers hovered over his, but could not touch them. “Samwise,” I said, pleading. “Sam-my-man.”

He hesitated, then — “Nope!” he shouted.

My hand hurt in the center, and the pain seeped up into my arm. Jackson had said the good mother was poisonous. I was tired, so tired. I set down Sam’s pack. And remembered what it held —
the needful thing
.

I opened the pack and got out Matthew’s box. Lifted the lid. And I saw myself looking back at me, sitting in an empty attic.
The mirror’ll show you true,
Nanga had said to me, long ago.

I could hardly see Sam anymore. A boy of smoke. I closed my eyes and sensed for him.
Warmer, warmer.
I turned the mirror
toward him, imagining him there, seeing Matthew’s looking glass. Conjuring that belief in my mind, I struggled to keep hold of both thoughts — Sam and the mirror. “I brought your box. Weren’t you looking for it? Can you see it? Can you see yourself in the mirror?” I forced my eyes back open and he was there, solid.

He was looking at the thing in my hands. Worry had settled in his eyes. He looked closer. “I’m not in the mirror.”

I nodded tiredly. “Because you’re not really here, bud. You’re asleep. You have to wake up.”

“It’s dark in the mirror.”

“I came to find you, Sam.”

He looked at me. He whispered, “You’re my Jack.”

The door opened. There was cold behind me. I turned my head to see. It was the woman from the attic — mad Deirdre, dressed in a sack shift, her wild and matted hair gone to gray.

“You shouldn’t
be here
,” she said, frightened. “Who are you?”

“I’m Sarah.” I gestured toward Sam. “He’s not … your son.”

“You dare suggest I mistake my own son?” she said, outraged. “My husband sent you, didn’t he? He is always trying to confuse me.”

I’m tired
, I thought.
I need to sleep.

She bent close and peered into my face. I didn’t know why I’d found her frightening. She looked nicer now. Beautiful. And kind. “Lay your head down for just a little while,” she said soothingly.

I was forgetting. I turned back to my brother. He was fading into darkness. “Sam?” I said.

Maybe he answered. “I have to go.”

“Matty?” Deirdre cried, fear returned to her voice. She stretched out her arms to him.

“Nope,” my little brother said. And part of me smiled.
All right, Sammy.

Dimly, I saw him pad toward the door in his footed pajamas. “Come, Sarah,” he said. Then he disappeared.

Maggie was there still. Tears leaking from her eyes.
Persephone
, I thought again. I felt vexed. I wanted to sleep.

“It’s dark in the mirror,” she repeated. The shadows were crowding around her, blotting her out. Maggie, whom I had never known, her spirit trapped here in this past before I was even born.

I remembered the thing inside the box Nanga had sent me to find. The love-knot brooch. I could do this last thing. I pulled it from my pocket and set it on the trunk in front of me. Maybe I saw Maggie look at it. Maybe I saw her mouth shape a word. “Annie.”