Obsidian Mirror (17 page)

“What’s that?” Sarah leaped up so fast, her chair fell over.

“The gate.” Piers flitted out of the room and she ran after him, quickly, through the old scullery and into the dairy, though now its cold marble counters held only TV monitors and a keyboard.

Piers’s long fingers flicked on the keyboard. Sarah stared at the screen. She was looking down at the wrought-iron gates from a high, awkward angle, through a camera grimy with dirt. No one was there.

“Odd.” Piers clicked the camera; it panned left and right, up and down. They saw the rutted lane, a high hedgerow, bare brambles, some mud slashed with tire tracks. Then the left-hand pillar with its stone lion.

“There’s no one there,” she said, anxious.

“Well, something set it off.”

“A fox?”

“Maybe.” He touched a switch and the image flickered; she saw by the digital clock in the corner that he was running the footage backward.

“So we really can go back in time,” she said, trying to joke.

“Mortal time is only an image. The capture of images.” Piers stopped. “There! See! What’s that, I wonder.”

A figure. The edge of a dark shape, standing in the untidy tangle of the high hedges. Someone motionless, blurred in the grainy image, there and then not there,
so swift, it might have been a movement of branches and thorns.

She stared at it, knowing it was Janus.

Piers looked grave. “Houston, we have a problem. Tell me, Sarah, did that look like a man with a scarred face to you?”

“Why?”

“We’ve had such a man hanging around in recent months. Maybe one of Summer’s, but I fear he knows something.”

“Who’s Summer?”

Piers giggled, nervous. “You don’t want to know.”

She didn’t answer. She was peering at the mud in front of the gate, where the tires of cars had flattened it. Even in the dim image she could make out the prints. Broad splayed paw prints.

“It could be anyone,” she said, in a whisper.

“F
OR A START,
she’s not Piers’s niece.”

“I gathered that.” Jake turned the stiff key in the lock of his father’s room and opened the door. The room was dim, the curtains drawn. He crossed the room and dragged them open. Pale winter sunlight lit the bed, a neat dressing table, its shaving things set out carefully. A comb and brush, snagged with a few hairs, lay under a thin film of dust.

He didn’t touch them. Instead he opened the wardrobe.

“Yes, but I’ve discovered exactly who she
is.
” Wharton sat thoughtfully on the bed. “And I have to warn you, Jake, this isn’t good.”

He wasn’t listening. The scent of his father hung in the clothes, it came out and seemed to enfold him, and the memories it brought caught in his throat like choked breath. The aftershave, the cheap French cigarettes, the indefinable musty mix that had made David Wilde. Always joking, always full of dire puns and stupid pranks.

He reached out and touched the stiff, hanging clothes, the old tweed suit from some charity shop in Oxford, the check shirt, the black overcoat that Dad had thought made him look like a pre-electric Bob Dylan. Underneath, in casual pairs, his boots and shoes, his sneakers standing as casually as if he’d just stepped out of them.

“Jake?” Wharton was behind him. “Are you okay?”

He wasn’t. The clothes blurred. He wanted to rub his hands through them, push his face against them, breathe in their scruffy, warm Dadness. He wanted to go through the pockets and pick out every rolled candy wrapper, every torn train ticket that his father had touched. But he couldn’t, not with Wharton here. That would have to wait.

He said, “I’m moving into this room.”

“Well, I suppose Venn won’t mind that. But Jake, please. This is important.”

Reluctant, he closed the cupboard door and turned.

“I saw it in the local paper,” Wharton said, and held out a torn article. Jake took it and stared at the photo.

“It looks like her, but…”

“She’s cut her hair. Read it.”

He stood still and let his eyes race over the words.
Psychiatric…Criminal…still missing.
By the end he was taut with attention and surprise. “This is crazy. She’s on the run and he’s hiding her here?”

“Not from the kindness of his heart.” Wharton looked uncomfortable. “I heard him yelling at Piers. He wants her for this series of tests because no one will come looking for her if she disappears. It’s cold-blooded, Jake. Venn is so desperate, he’ll do anything to succeed. Does he really believe he can get his wife back this way?”

Jake said, “His wife?”

“It’s perfectly clear.” Wharton stared gloomily at his shoes. “His wife died in the car accident and he was driving. It was his fault. He must be eaten up with guilt and remorse. That’s enough to send any man a little insane—and he was an extreme personality before that.”

Jake went to the window and stared out. “He thinks he can change the past? Go back before the accident and make sure it never happens? That’s like a fairy tale. Something out of a Greek myth.”

“Fairies don’t exist. The Chronoptika does.”

Jake, thinking of the Shee, wasn’t so sure. But he turned and said, “Why would she go along with this? Sarah, I mean.”

“He may be paying her.”

“But she saw the past. You heard.”

Wharton was looking at him pityingly. “Oh come on, Jake. Do you really believe her? Think about it! She wants to stay hidden here. She gives him what he wants. A little fanciful description. Anyone who’s seen a period drama on the television could do as well. No, she’s humoring Venn, and Piers seems happy to go along with it all, though that slave of the lamp stuff is a mystery to me, I must say.”

Jake frowned. He went up to the chest of drawers and opened the topmost one. Folded T-shirts. And facedown, a silver frame. He said, “That reminds me. How come you were in there with them? Did Venn ask you?”

Wharton cleared his throat. “Ah, yes. Well…I…was worried about the girl. I insisted on being there.”

Jake shot him a quick look. “What a hero.” He turned the silver frame over.

The zoo.

A cheeky seven-year-old Jake Wilde eating chocolate ice cream, licking a fragment of the cone. The baby chimp in the keeper’s arms. A woman, slim, in
white jeans and a blue shirt, her hair short and dark, laughing.

Her hand on his head.

He stared at it. He had not seen his mother for so long, she seemed like a stranger.

This was the past. The only past left. Captured by light, frozen in a rigid image. Gone. But if you could re-enter it; if you could go back to that place and be that person again, if you could live that moment again, better, without the stupid remarks, the arguments, the mistakes, wouldn’t that be a thing worth taking all the risks in the world for?

Very slowly, he set the frame upright next to the others on the dressing table. He turned, sudden. “What happens now? What’s our plan?”

“Venn will try again tonight, it seems. We’ll both be there. I won’t allow him to exploit Sarah, or you.”

Jake shrugged. “If what you say is true, she’s exploiting him.”

A knock. Sarah put her head around the door and said, “It’s the phone for you, Jake.”

He ran down after her. Wondering if she’d caught any of the conversation. Then he thought of Maskelyne, and stopped. “Is it a man?”

She glanced back. “It’s Rebecca.” She pulled a coy face. “Being oh-so-very secretive and oh-so wanting to talk
only
to you.”

He wanted to say
Jealous?
But that would be stupid. Instead he watched her walk down the passageway before he picked up the receiver. “Hi.”

“Jake! Are you all right?” Rebecca sounded relieved.

“Fine. I told you to call my cell phone.”

“I tried! There’s not one scrap of signal down there. Listen, have you told Venn about Maskelyne?! I mean, about that gun.”

“Not yet. Don’t talk too much, because anyone might be listening. Piers has this place wired up like NASA.”

“Well, I just want to say don’t say a word! I’ve found out something, it might be nothing, but…we should meet.” He heard something rustle. A voice, close by. A dog barking.

“Where are you?”

“Wintercombe. At the post office. I think it’s going to snow, but can you get here?”

He looked wearily at the sky. It was no longer blue. Heavy cloud lidded the valley. “I’ll come, but I’ll have to walk. Is there any sort of shortcut through the Wood?”

Silence. Then she said, “Jake, you don’t go in there. Ever. Do you hear?”

“You sound like Venn.”

“He’s right. If you were a local, you’d understand.”

“About the Shee.”

She laughed, but it was nervous. “Well, okay, they’re just legend. But people do disappear in there. Stay on the drive and come along the lanes. I’ll meet you here in say half an hour. Okay? Bye!”

The phone clicked to silence.

He held it a moment, listening, but there was no sound on the line, and he put it down, just as Piers came through the hall carrying biker’s leathers and a helmet. Jake stared.

“You ride?”

“A Harley. Lovely beast. Puts a girdle around the earth in forty minutes.” He hung up the jacket and shrugged into the worn lab coat. “Weather’s closing in.”

Jake nodded and walked up the stairs. As soon as Piers had gone, he ran back down, felt in the pocket of the leathers, and pulled out the key of the bike.

He tossed it with one hand. And caught it in the other.

Sarah put the kitchen phone down as gently as she could. She sat for a moment, considering. Had Jake read the journal? And who was this girl, this Rebecca? But she knew why she was restless. Talking to Jake about his father had hurt. Because she had a father too, and a mother, locked deep in one of Janus’s dungeons. And she could never talk to anyone about that.

Resentful, she slipped up the back stairs to her room.

Jake didn’t even know how lucky he was.

It was bitterly cold. She was already wearing two sweaters that Piers had found for her, but now she pulled a coat on over them and then opened the secret panel in the floor.

She took out the notebook and the black pen. For a moment she hesitated, fighting dread.

Then she wrote:

I’m not afraid of you.

YOU SHOULD BE.
The answer was prompt, eager, as if he had been waiting for her. It spread in bold letters diagonally across the page.

AND DON’T LIE, SARAH. YOU ARE AFRAID. YOU ARE THE LAST OF ZEUS—THE OTHERS ARE ALL DEAD. YOU MUST KNOW THAT.

She clenched a hand over her mouth. But no. He was trying to break her. It filled her with hot fury.

Liar,
she wrote.
Liar. Liar. Liar.

DO YOU THINK YOU CAN SAVE THE WORLD? BE THE GREAT HEROINE? MY REPLICANT KNOWS WHERE YOU ARE. HE WILL ENTER THE HOUSE SOON. YOU’RE ALL ALONE, SARAH. ALONE AND AFRAID AND FAR FROM HOME. IF YOU SUCCEED IN YOUR PLAN, YOU WILL NEVER SEE YOUR PARENTS OR YOUR WORLD AGAIN
.

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.