In a Glass Grimmly (17 page)

“Uh, guys?” said the frog, peering just above the edge of Jack’s pocket. “We’re not going down there, right?”

But Jack and Jill had come too far, done too much, to turn back now. Besides, the only door to the house was locked, and there were no windows. Where else could they go?

“Okay?” said Jill.

“Okay,” said Jack.

“Not okay,” said the frog.

Jill reached her foot probingly into the impenetrable gloom. Her foot touched something. She put weight on it. The something held.

She stood on the something and reached her foot forward again. Again, she found something to rest on. She shifted her weight carefully. This something, too, held her. And now she could tell what the somethings were. They were stairs.

Jack and Jill, holding hands, descended into the heart of the darkness.

One step, and the children stopped. One more step, and they stopped again. The stairs were not even, but rather knobby and irregular. They twisted around and around in a tight spiral. Jack’s and Jill’s clasped hands were slick, and they held onto one another so hard they could not feel their own fingers. One more step. And another. And another.

And then the obscurity was softened—there rose, from beneath, an eerie, flickering yellow. A few more steps, and Jack and Jill found a candle that seemed to hang, suspended, in the darkness. Jack reached out his hand and found a curving wall. It was not smooth. It was strangely ridged, oddly bumpy. He let his hand trail along it as they descended to the floating candle.

When they were but a few steps away from it, they began to make out what held the candle up. It was a strange candlestick, extended from the wall. The candlestick was long and straight and smooth in the middle, but at either end was a rounded protrusion. Even in the flickering yellow candlelight, the children could see that the candlestick was white. Bone white.

And then Jill was screaming. Jack turned around, threw his arms around her, and then, because she would not stop screaming, he clapped his hand over her mouth. Jill’s eyes were wide, and they were rolling around in her head. Jack whispered,
“What? What?”
But still her eyes rolled. He tried to follow their frantic gaze. He looked at the candlestick. Then he followed the wall down. Then he examined the stairs that they were standing on. A cry rose to Jack’s lips, but he clamped them shut and held it in. The candlestick, the walls, the stairs were made of human bones.

“Run!” the frog cried. “Run!” Jack’s hand shot out and clamped his mouth shut, too.

Jack’s and Jill’s eyes locked in the darkness.

They stood up.

Okay.

Imagine you were over at someone’s house. Let’s say for a playdate.

Your friend disappears for a moment, and you happened to go looking for her. You look all over the place. Then you look in the basement.

And let’s say that you discover that the basement was composed entirely of human bones.

I hope, in such a situation, that you would do the sensible thing—and run away as fast as you possibly could.

In other words, I hope that you would not do what Jack and Jill did.

For Jack and Jill had seen cruel giants, and murderous mermaids, and child-snatching goblins, and Eddie. It was going to take more than a bone staircase to make them run now. Once on their feet, they pushed the horror in their chests down as far as they could, clasped hands once more, and started down the stairs again.

The staircase twisted around and around, and now distantly spaced candles in candlesticks of bone lit their way, leaving just a single stair in complete obscurity before the dim light of the next candle made their horrible surroundings visible again.

And then the stairs ended, and a series of candles lit a long hall. Jill covered her mouth. Jack looked away. The walls, the ceiling, the floor were all made of bone.

Down the long, gruesome corridor, Jack and Jill saw a square where the flickering candlelight was brighter. Slowly, walking as silently as they knew how, they approached it. It was a doorway.

Stronger candlelight danced through it. Jack looked at Jill. She nodded.

Slowly—so slowly that you would not have seen him moving if you did not know that he was—Jack extended the edge of his head past the bone door frame, until nothing more than his ear and his eye would have been visible within the room.

Jack jerked his head back.

Jill stared at him. He gestured for her to do as he had done. Just as slowly, just as imperceptibly, Jill moved her head so that with a single eye she could see the contents of the room.

The first thing she saw was a light fixture—an enormous chandelier, in fact—hanging from the center of the chamber. It was suspended from the vaulted ceiling by tangled cords of rib bones, interlocking crazily. Below them hung the nine-pointed chandelier, each point made of a skull resting on a platter of pelvises. Strung between the nine points were femurs, hanging like laundry from a drooping line. The chandelier was covered with candles, dripping their yellow tallow over the white bones. Jill’s gaze ran upward to the ceiling. It gave new meaning to the term rib vaulting. Ribs were extended in undulating curves from the top of the walls to the center of the ceiling, where a line of skulls smiled down at Jill. And one could tell, from the chandelier, from the ceiling, from the walls and the floor, that these were not just any human bones. They were the bones of children.

From the rib vaulted ceiling, long cords of rope hung taut, and at the end of each cord was a sack. A yellowed, bloodstained sack. Just about the size of a child’s body.

Below these sacks, in the center of the room, stood a bone altar. On it sat a shining circle. It was, without any doubt, the Seeing Glass, its surface now perfectly clean, perfectly clear.

Before the Glass, before the shrine of bone, knelt the three Others.

“Please!” the silk merchant moaned. “Show us your secrets, great Glass! Give us your wisdom!”

The Seeing Glass sat on the altar, silent.

“What must we do for you?” pleaded the oil merchant. “Mirror of truth! Show us your power! We beg you!”

The Seeing Glass stared down from its shrine, impassive.

“Guiding light of the Goblin Kingdom . . .” intoned the old woman. “Repository of the world’s greatest secrets . . . Giver of power . . . Keeper of truth . . . Please . . .”

“We are so close . . .” the silk merchant whispered.

“We have sought ye a thousand years . . .” murmured the oil salesmen.

“Please!” cried the old woman. “PLEASE!”

Nothing.

The old woman sighed bitterly—a sigh of a thousand years of frustration—and lifted herself to her feet. “I will try to read the spell again,” she said. She approached the Glass. Jack’s and Jill’s heads now both peered, ever so carefully, around the bone door frame.

The old woman bent her silvery head over the glass. “Fo timb hat da jeek, bok no father,” she read. “Fo timb hat da jeek, bok no father!
Fo timb hat da jeek, bok no father!
”

“What the heck does that mean?” whispered the frog. Jack clamped his mouth shut again.

“EVERYONE!” she bellowed. “EVERYONE CHANT IT!”

“
Fo timb hat da jeek, bok no father!” they chanted.
“
Fo timb hat da jeek, bok no father!
Fo timb hat da jeek, bok no father!
”

“It isn’t working!” the old woman cried. “It doesn’t work!”

“They will pay!” the silk merchant bellowed, on his feet now. “Just like all of the other children have paid for failing!” And he gestured violently at the bones and bloody sacks above their heads.

Jack’s and Jill’s eyes followed his gesture and then met. Jill jerked her head toward the stairs. Jack nodded and straightened up.

“Yes . . .” muttered the old woman. “We must admit it. They have failed.” She shook her head.

“I bet they’ll taste good, though,” the oil salesman shrugged. “That is a small consolation.”

The children’s faces went white.

Jill made a small movement toward the stairs.

Jack, on the other hand, stepped into the room.

Jill turned, saw Jack, and had a heart attack. The frog had two. In a row.

The Others spun. For a moment, they stared, too stunned to speak.

And then the old woman managed to say, “Just who we were looking for.”

The two men moved toward Jack and clamped their hands around his thin arms. “Hello there,” said the silk merchant.

“It turns out,” smiled the oil merchant, “that this Glass of yours isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” Their grips felt like they would crush Jack’s bones.

“Turns out,” the silk merchant agreed, “it’s a fake.”

The old woman shook her head. “And we
did
have a deal.”

Jack’s chin was set and his eyes were flashing like flint when he said, “Let us try. Let us try to make it work.” Jill was standing in the doorway behind him, watching him, trembling.

The old woman slid up to Jack and lifted her face to his. “You have an hour to make the Glass work. Our patience has expired.”

And she swept past him, past Jill, and out of the chamber of bone. The silk merchant flashed Jack a smile. For the first time, Jack noticed that his teeth were like pins, tiny and sharp, sticking up from blue gums. Jack shuddered. The silk merchant laughed and left. The oil salesman followed him.

Jack and Jill walked up to the Seeing Glass, now clean and clear. They brought their faces before its shining pane.

In the Glass, Jack saw a boy. His face was lined with sweat and caked with filth. His mouth was set in fear.

In the Glass, Jill saw a girl. Her hair was wet and matted to her forehead. Her skin was blistering and deathly pale.

Above their faces, along the top of the Glass, ran a strange script. It read,
“Fo timb hat da jeek, bok no father.”

“What does it mean?” whispered the frog, peering from Jack’s pocket.

Jack and Jill shook their heads.

“This is it?” asked Jill. “It just looks like a mirror.”

Jack picked it up from the bone altar.
“Fo timb hat da jeek, bok no father,”
he muttered. Then he shrugged. “How do you think it works?”

Jill rubbed the silvered pane. Nothing happened.

Jack shook the Glass. Nothing.

The frog begged it: “Please do something! Please! Please?” Of course, nothing.

“I don’t understand,” said Jack. “Begehren said it was the greatest treasure in the world.”

“Even Meas said it was worth looking for,” Jill agreed.

So they redoubled their efforts. They tried everything they could think of to make it work, from singing to it to wearing it like a hat. Nothing helped.

The hour was nearly gone.

“I give up!” Jill cried at last. “Forget it! It’s just a stupid mirror!”

“
Now
she says it’s a stupid mirror,” says the frog. “
Now
that we’ve gone to the sky, and underground, and are trapped in a room of bone by psychopathic cannibals.
Now
it’s just a stupid mirror.”

Jack muttered, “They’ll kill us. They’ll kill us.”

The children sat down. Above their heads, the body bags swung slowly at the end of creaking twine. A few drops of blood fell to the bone floor between the two children.

“Oh God . . .” Jill groaned.

“Okay, that’s it, good-bye,” said the frog. “I’m going to go hide. They’ve never seen me, as far as I know. As far as I know, they don’t know I exist. So I’m just going to hide. Sorry, guys. Good luck to you. Good-bye.” He hopped from Jack’s shirt and began looking for a place to stow himself until the carnage was over. “I’d stay and die with you,” he added, “but this was
not
my idea. In fact, as you recall, I counseled you against this course of action about, I don’t know, a
thousand times
.”

“They’ve never seen you . . .” Jack murmured.

Jill let her head collapse in her hands.

“They’ve never seen you,” Jack repeated, standing up.

“So?” said Jill.

“So I’m going to survive this thing yet!” announced the frog.

“They’ve never seen you!” Jack grinned.

Jill and the frog looked at Jack like he was crazy.

Ten minutes later, the Others slid back into the room. Their faces were dark, but their eyes were bright.

“Well?” said the silk merchant. “Have you prepared yourselves?”

“With salt and rosemary, perhaps?” the oil salesman smiled.

Jack and Jill spun from the mirror at the same time.

“It works!” they both cried excitedly. “It works!” Jill ran to the old woman and grabbed her arm. “Come see!” she cried. “Come see!” Jack was standing by the mirror, grinning madly.

The three Others rushed to the Glass. They peered into it. “What?” demanded the old woman. “How? I can’t see anything!” She was shaking, as if the anticipation of this moment was too much for her. “Show me!” she barked. “Show me!”

Jill said, “Step back.”

All three Others stepped back at once, their eyes glued to the Glass.

And Jill said,

Mirror, mirror, on the wall,

Who is the fairest of them all?

And, from deep within the altar of bone, a voice resounded:

In eye, in cheek, in hair, in hand,

The queen is the fairest in the land.

“IT WORKS!” the Others screamed. “IT WORKS!” Their cries rumbled from the pits of their bellies and ended in a screech so high it hurt Jack’s and Jill’s ears. “IT WORKS!”

The old woman grabbed Jill. “Do it again! Ask it another question!”

Jill took a deep breath.

Mirror, mirror, tell me, sing,

Of the giants, who is king?

And the mirror replied,

Great of arm but weak of head,

Aitheantas was. Now he’s dead.

“IT KNOWS!” the old woman shrieked. “IT KNOWS EVERYTHING!”

“How does it work?” the silk merchant demanded, grabbing Jack by the arm. “How did you get it to work?”

“The same way you cleaned it,” Jack explained. “Call it ‘Mirror, Mirror.’ Then rhyme your question.”