Ice and Fire: Chung Kuo Series (8 page)

Then, suddenly, he stopped and turned and almost ran outside into the corridor again.
‘There!’ he said, exultant, and she watched him pace out the distance from the end
of the
corridor to the doorway. Fifteen paces. He went inside and did the same. Twelve. Only
twelve!

She saw at once. The mirror. The mirror was a door. A way through.

He went to it at once, looking for a catch, a way of releasing it, but there was nothing.
Frustrated, he pulled books down from the shelf and knocked at the wall behind them.
It was brick, solid
brick.

For a moment he stood before the mirror, staring into it. Then he laughed. ‘Of course!’

He turned and pointed it out to her. ‘Level with the top of the mirror. That row of
books opposite. Look, Meg. Tell me what you see.’

She went across and looked. They were novels. Famous novels.
Ulysses
,
Nostromo
,
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
,
Vanity Fair
,
Howard’s End
,
Bleak
House
,
Daniel
Martin
,
Orlando
and others. She turned back to him. ‘I don’t understand. What am I looking for?’

‘It’s a cryptogram. Look at the order. The first letter of the titles.’

She looked, doing as he said. D.A.E.H.R.E. V.O.N.O.T.T.U.B. Then she understood. It
was mirrored. You had to reverse the letters.

He laughed, ahead of her, and reached up to find the button.

With a faint hiss of escaping air the mirror sprang free. Beyond it was a room. Ben
shone his lamp inside. It seemed like a smaller version of the library, the walls
covered with books. But in
its centre, taking up most of the floor space, was a desk.

He shone his lamp over the desk’s surface, picking out four objects. A letter knife,
an ink-block, a framed photograph and a large, folio-sized journal. The light rested
on the last of
these for some while, then moved upward, searching the end wall.

Meg came alongside him. ‘What are you looking for?’

‘A window. There must have been a window.’

‘Why? If he really wanted to keep this room a secret, having no window onto the outside
would be the best way, surely?’

He looked at her, then nodded. But she, watching him, was surprised that he hadn’t
seen it for himself. It was as if, now that he’d found it, he was transfixed by his
discovery. She
shone her lamp into his face.

‘Meg…’ He pushed her hand away.

She moved past him, into the room, then turned back, facing him.

‘Here.’ She handed him the journal, knowing, even before he confirmed it, whose it
was. Augustus. There was a space for it on the shelf on her father’s study, amongst
the
others there. She recognized the tooled black leather of its cover.

Ben opened it. He turned a page, then smiled and looked up at her.

‘Am I right?’ she asked.

In answer he turned the book and showed her the page. She laughed uneasily, shocked,
then looked back up at him. It was a picture of Ben. An almost perfect portrait of
him. And underneath, in
Ben’s own handwriting, was a name and a date.

‘Augustus Shepherd. Anno Domini 2120.’

‘But that’s you. Your handwriting.’

He shook his head. ‘No. But it’s a clue. We’re getting close, Meg. Very close.’

Beth Shepherd set the two bags down on the kitchen table then went to the garden door
and undid the top catch. Pushing the top half back, she leaned out and called to the
children.

‘Ben! Meg! I’m back!’

She went inside again and busied herself, filling the cupboards from the bags. Only
when she had finished did she go to the door again and, releasing the bottom catch,
go out into the rose
garden.

There was no sign of them. Perhaps they’re indoors, she thought. But then they would
have heard her, surely? She called again, moving out through the gate until she stood
at the top of the
lower garden that sloped down to the bay. She put her hand up to her eyes, searching
the sunlit meadows for a sign of them.

‘Strange…’ she muttered, then turned and went back inside. She knew she was back quite
early, but they usually came when she called, knowing she would have brought something
special for each of them.

She took the two gifts from her handbag and set them on the table. An old-fashioned
paper book for Ben – one he had specifically asked for – on sensory deprivation. And
for Meg a
tiny Han ivory. A delicately carved globe.

Beth smiled to herself, then went down the steps, into the relative darkness of the
dining room.

‘Ben…? Meg?’

She stopped at the bottom of the steps and listened. Strange. Very strange. Where
could they be? Ben had said nothing about going into town. In any case, it was only
a little after twelve. They
weren’t due to finish their lessons for another twenty minutes.

Curious, she went upstairs and searched the rooms. Nothing. Not even a note on Ben’s
computer.

She went out and put her hand up to her brow a second time, searching the meadows
more thoroughly this time. Then she remembered Peng Yu-wei. The android tutor had
a special location unit. She
could trace where they were by pinpointing him on Hal’s map.

Relieved, she went back upstairs, into Hal’s study, and called the map up onto the
screen. She waited a moment for the signal to appear somewhere on the grid, then leaned
forward to key
the search sequence again, thinking she must have made a mistake. But no. There was
no trace.

Beth felt her stomach flip over. ‘Gods…’

She ran down the stairs and out.

‘Ben! Meg! Where are you?’

The meadows were silent, empty. A light breeze stirred the waters of the bay. She
looked. Of course, the bay. She set off down the slope, forcing herself not to run,
telling herself again and
again that it was all right; that her fears were unfounded. They were sensible children.
And, anyway, Peng Yu-wei was with them.

Where the lawn ended she stopped and looked out across the bay, scanning the water
for any sign of life. Then she turned and eased herself over the lip, clambered down
the old wooden steps set
into the clay wall, and ran across towards the jetty.

The rowboat was gone.

Where? She couldn’t understand it. Where? Then, almost peripherally, she noticed something.
Off to the far left of her, jutting from the water, revealed by the ebb of the tide.

She climbed up again, then ran along the shoreline until she was standing at the nearest
point to it. It lay there, fifteen, maybe twenty
ch
’
i
from the shore, part-embedded in the
mudbank, part-covered by the receding water. She knew what it was at once. And knew,
for a certainty, that Ben had done this to it.

The android lay unnaturally in the water, almost sitting up, one shoulder, part of
its upper arm and the side of its head projecting above the surface. It did not float,
like a corpse would
float, but rested there, solid and heavy, its torn clothing flapping about it like
weeds.

‘Poor thing,’ she might have said another time, but now any sympathy she had for the
machine was swamped by her fears for her children.

She looked up sharply, her eyes going immediately to the far shore and to the house
on the crest above the cove. They had been forbidden. But that would not stop Ben.
No. The sight of Peng
Yu-wei in the water told her that.

She turned, her throat constricted now, her heart pounding in her breast, and began
to run back up the slope towards the cottage. And as she ran her voice hissed from
her, heavy with anxiety and
pain.

‘Let them be safe! Please, gods, let them be safe!’

Ben sat at the desk, reading from the journal. Meg stood behind him, at his shoulder,
holding the two lamps steady above the page, following Ben’s finger as it moved from
right to left, up and down the columns of cyphers.

Ben had explained it to her. He had shown her how the frontispiece illustration was
the key to it. In the illustration a man sat by a fireplace, reading a newspaper,
his face obscured, the scene
reflected at an angle in the mirror over the mantelpiece. Using the magnifying glass
he had found in the left-hand drawer, Ben had shown her how the print of the reflected
newspaper was subtly
different from the one the man held. Those differences formed the basis of the cypher.
She understood that – even the parts about the governing rules that made the cypher
change – but
her mind was too slow, too inflexible to hold and use what she’d been shown.

It was as if all this was a special key – a coded lexicon – designed for one mind
only. Ben’s. It was as if Augustus knew that Ben would come. As if he had seen it
clearly, as
in a glass. It reminded her of the feeling she had had in the room below this one,
stood there amongst the shrouded furniture; that the house was not abandoned, merely
boarded up temporarily,
awaiting its occupant’s return.

And now he was back.

She shuddered, and the light danced momentarily across the page, making Ben look up.

He smiled and closed the journal, then stood and moved past her, leaving the big,
leather-bound book on the desk.

Meg stood there a moment, staring at the journal, wondering what it said, knowing
Ben would tell her when he wanted to. Then she picked it up and turned, following
Ben out.

Always following, she realized. But the thought pleased her. She knew he needed her
to be there – a mirror for his words, his thoughts, his dark, unworded ambitions.
She, with her mere
nine years of experience, knew him better than anyone. Understood him as no one else
could understand him. No one living, anyway.

He was standing there, at the window, looking down thoughtfully through the broad
crowns of the trees.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘I’m trying to work out where the garden is.’

She understood at once. There had been a picture towards the back of the journal –
a portrait of a walled garden. She had thought it fanciful, maybe allegorical, but
Ben seemed to think it
was an actuality – somewhere here, near the house.

She stared at the book-filled wall above the desk, then turned back, seeing how he
was looking past her at the same spot. He smiled and moved his eyes to her face.

‘Of course. There was a door at the end of the bottom corridor.’

She nodded. ‘Let’s go down.’

The door was unlocked. Beyond it lay the tiny garden, the lawn neatly trimmed, delphinia
and gladioli, irises and hemerocallis in bloom in the dark earth borders. And there,
beneath the back
wall, the headstone, the white marble carved into the shape of an oak, its trunk exaggeratedly
thick, its crown a great cumulus.

‘Yes,’ Ben said softly. ‘I knew he would be here.’

He bent down beside the stone and reached out to touch and trace the indented lettering.

Born December 7 2106

Deceased August 15 2122

Oder jener stirbt und ists
.

Meg frowned. ‘That date is wrong, surely, Ben?’

He shook his head, not looking at her. ‘No. He was fifteen when he killed himself

‘Then…’ But she still didn’t understand. Only fifteen? Then, belatedly, she realized
what he had said: the
whole
of what he had said. ‘
Killed
himself?’

There was a door set into the wall behind the stone. A simple wooden door, painted
red, with a latch high up. Ben had stood up, facing it, and was staring at it in his
usual intent manner.

Doors
, she thought,
always another door
. And behind each door something new and unexpected. Augustus, for instance. She had
never dreamed he would be so much like Ben. Like a
twin.

‘Shall we?’ Ben asked, looking at her. ‘Before we set off back? There’s time.’

She looked down at the headstone, a strange feeling of unease nagging at her. She
was tempted to say no, to tell him to leave it, but why not? Ben was right. There
was time. Plenty of time
before they’d be missed.

‘Okay,’ she said quietly. ‘But then we go straight back. All right?’

He smiled at her and nodded, then went to the door, stretching to reach the latch.

It was a workroom. There were shelves along one wall on which were a number of things:
old-fashioned screwdrivers and hammers, saws and pliers; a box of nails and an assortment
of glues; locks
and handles, brackets and a tray of different keys. A spade and a pitchfork stood
against the wall beneath, beside a pair of boots, the mud on them dried, flaky to
the touch.

Meg looked around her. At the far end, against the wall, was a strange upright shape,
covered by an old bedspread. Above it, hanging from an old iron chain, hung a bevelled
mirror. As she
watched, Ben went across and threw the cloth back. It was a piano. An old upright
piano. He lifted the lid and stared at the keys a while.

‘I wonder if it’s…’

Some sense – not precognition, nor even the feeling of danger – made her speak out.
‘No, Ben. Please. Don’t touch it.’

He played a note. A chord. Or what should have been a chord. Each note was flat, a
harsh, cacophonic noise. The music of the house. Discordant.

She heard the chain break with a purer note than any sounded by her brother; heard
the mirror slither then crash against the top of the piano; then stepped forward,
her hand raised to her mouth
in horror, as the glass shattered all about him.

‘Ben!!!’

Her scream echoed out onto the water beyond the house.

Inside the room there was a moment of utter stillness. Then she was at his side, sobbing
breathlessly, muttering to him again and again. ‘What have you done, Ben? What have
you
done?’

Shards of glass littered his hair and shoulders. His cheek was cut and a faint dribble
of blood ran towards the corner of his mouth. But Ben was staring down at where his
left hand had been only
a moment before, sounding the chord. It still lay there on the keys, the fingers extended
to form the shape. But the arm now ended in a bloodied stump. Cut clean, the blood
still pumping.