Ravencliffe (Blythewood series) (6 page)

It was a girl’s voice, high and querulous. A deeper bass answered her in tones so low I couldn’t make out the words, only the low persuasive rumble.

“Well, if I could send them back money . . . and you’re sure this job out west will pay . . .”

Another rumble, almost a growl, followed.

“Then I’ll do it! Oh, but not today. I’ll have to pack a bag. I’ll meet you next week . . . yes, under the funny face like always. You always show me a swell time . . .”

The girl’s voice was carried away as the ride turned a corner and the wind was coming from the side. I lifted up in my saddle to see which horse the voices had come from, but I couldn’t tell. And even if I could, how could I tell if this girl was being lured into a life of slavery or was only eloping with her sweetheart? Still, if I could follow her next week when she went with her beau, perhaps she would lead me to where Ruth was being held.

We were swooping down now into the final stretch. The couples were all leaning forward, urging their horses on as if they were live breathing animals instead of wooden simulacra. The horse with the heaviest load would go fastest and win and I, alone, would come in last. The girl who was planning to elope would get away. I leaned forward and clucked my tongue as if it would make a difference—and to my amazement, it did! My horse sped up and overtook the others.

“Go, Ava!” I heard Nathan cry as I passed him and Helen, then two other riders. Only one horse was still in front of me. The man had already dismounted and was helping his companion down. I heard her giggling voice declaiming, “We won! We won!” It was the girl I’d heard before. She was wearing a sailor suit and a flower-trimmed bonnet. She threw her arms around the neck of her companion, her back to me.

“Yes,” I heard him say, his voice a deep rumble. “I always do.”

The bass bell in my head clanged as I passed the finish line, as if signaling my victory, but that wasn’t why it was ringing. It was because the man in front of me was Judicus van Drood. I recognized the Inverness cape and Homburg hat he habitually wore, looking heavy and out of place in the summer crowds. Our eyes met and he smiled, a wisp of smoke curling out of his parted lips. Then he slipped from his companion’s arms and vanished through the exit.

I jumped off my horse and ran after him, pushing rudely past the girl in the sailor’s outfit and through a curtained doorway . . .

Where the ground gave out beneath me. I was tumbling down into darkness, my arms flailing for purchase on slick walls, plummeting into the abyss.

7

I LANDED HARD
on the wooden floor, lights blazing around me like the fires of hell. A face loomed out of the glare, distorted and strange, the eyes circled with shadows, the nose bulbous and red, the mouth stretched unnaturally wide. The creature held out a red-gloved hand to me, beckoning me toward the hellfire. Ignoring it, I got up on my own and found myself towering over a little man. He shrugged and doffed his hat, and marched forward. Was he leading me to van Drood? A gust of hot air shot up my legs, lifting my skirts up above my knees. From behind the glare of lights I heard a low rumble. Laughter. I blinked into the glare and made out the shapes of heads and hats—feathered women’s hats and men’s straw boaters. It was an audience gathered to watch my humiliation. I pushed my skirts down and strode across the stage, where the little man—a dwarf in clown face—waited.

“Don’t be mad!” he cried in a loud falsetto. “Be bad! Join the audience and laugh at our next performers!”

So that was how it worked. They humiliated you, then offered you the chance to laugh at their next victims. Even if I would stoop that low, I had van Drood to find. I rushed past the dwarf.

“Try the fun house,” he whispered under his breath. “The humbug went that way.”

Had I heard him right? Could I trust him? And what was a humbug? Was he referring to the Homburg hat van Drood wore?

After exiting the stage, which looking back I saw was called the Blowhole Theater, I found myself in a vast vaulted pavilion full of screaming crowds. I looked in vain for van Drood as I passed a ride called the Human Roulette Wheel that spun people around in a mad circle and one called the Barrel of Love that tossed men and women around like bits of laundry in a tub. Then I spied the dark Homburg hat at an arched gateway that looked like the gates of hell. A Hellgate. Yes, that’s where van Drood would go. I entered a long narrow corridor that seemed to get narrower and narrower as I went forward. At the end of it I spied a wisp of smoke trailing behind van Drood. I rushed forward and collided with a wide-eyed, frightened girl.

Was it the girl from the Steeplechase? She looked familiar. But when I reached for her, my hand hit glass. I was staring into a mirror at my own frightened reflection. I wheeled around and a dozen Avas turned with me, all with their mouths gaping open and their eyes popping wide.

Foolish girl
, a deep male voice chided.
You don’t even recognize yourself.

I spun around again, searching for the source of the voice, and glimpsed the hem of a cloak and the brim of a hat vanishing on the edge of each mirror, as if van Drood had somehow slipped
behind
the mirrors. The thought that he was standing behind the glass watching me was sickening.

Of course I see you, Ava,
van Drood’s voice purred from behind a mirror. I stepped toward it, staring at my own face as if I could find van Drood behind the glass.
I’ve always seen you. Since you were a little girl.

My image in the mirrors wavered, blurred, and another image took its place. I was looking into eyes that looked like mine but weren’t. They were a deeper green, older, and shadowed by fear. They were my mother’s eyes. I followed them down to a little girl playing on the beach, running in and out of the surf like a sandpiper. My mother was watching me as a child . . . but why were her eyes so fearful? Then I saw
him
, a dark figure standing in the misty verge between land and sea.

I turned back to see my mother’s face, but the scene had already changed. I saw myself, older, walking down a street in the city beside my mother, both of us under a large umbrella.

“It’s stopped raining!” I cried, springing out from under the umbrella to leap over a puddle and holding my arms out. In my black cloak it looked like I had wings. As I lit down on the pavement I nearly collided with a man in an Inverness cloak.

“You were watching me to see if I was turning into a Darkling,” I said.

I wasn’t the only one
, he replied.

His voice came from behind me. I whirled around and saw another scene from my childhood: my mother standing behind me, brushing my hair. I could almost feel the brush stroking my scalp and the weight of my mother’s hand on my shoulder . . .

And her gaze on my back, eyes shadowed by fear.

She was afraid you were turning into a monster
.

“No!” I cried, turning toward the voice. A kaleidoscope of images spun around me: my mother measuring me for a dress, watching me reach for a book on a library shelf, her eyes always shadowed with fear, a look that I’d known throughout my childhood but that I’d assumed was from her own demons.

You were her demon.

“No!”

She was waiting to see what kind of monster you would become. That’s why she fled from her friends and family, why she hid herself in shame. Knowing that you would become a monster like the demon that ravaged her.

“No! That’s not how it happened. She was in love—”

How do you know that? Did she tell you that when you saw her in Faerie?

“No,” I admitted. “But Raven told me . . .”

Of course he wouldn’t tell you that one of his own kind attacked a defenseless girl. That you, too, are becoming a monster. Look.

The images from my childhood vanished, leaving only my present self. But as I stared at my reflection my wings burst through the confines of my corset and spread out behind me, and feathers began erupting from my skin, not just on the enormous wings, but from my hands and face—rough, ugly feathers that made me look like the bearded lady or the ape woman of Borneo. I turned from the sight, but the image followed me, multiplied a hundred times.

It’s a trick,
I told myself,
an illusion van Drood is creating.

But even as I said the words to myself I knew that if I didn’t banish the images I would see them forever. I would be trapped forever in this fun house, a hall of mirrors as cracked as my mind.

That was it. I stepped closer to the mirror, cringing at the closer view of the monster in it, and pounded the glass with my fists.

The glass shivered and I heard a faint tinkling sound . . . like
bells
. Why wasn’t my bass bell gonging if I was truly in danger?

Once before in the dungeons of Blythewood my bells had failed me. They’d been muted by the
tenebrae
. Were they muted now by the mirrors? Was that why van Drood had lured me here—because my bells didn’t work in the Hall of Mirrors?

Where’s your power now, chime child?
Van Drood’s voice mocked me.
Did you think you would keep it while you became a monster? Did you think that the power of Merope would remain in the body of the cursed race that destroyed her?

“Merope wasn’t destroyed by a Darkling,” I cried. “She loved Aderyn and he saved her.”

Is that what your Darkling lover told you?
Van Drood snickered.
Would you like to see what really happened?

The image of the feathered monster vanished from the glass. A moment ago I would have been grateful to see it gone, but as I turned around, looking into one blank mirror after another, it felt stranger not to see anything. My own reflection had been wiped from the glass. It was as though I didn’t exist anymore.

Then the mirrors started spinning, faster and faster, like the Human Roulette Wheel—or like a zoetrope I’d watched once in the nickelodeon, a wheel with images inside it that made a moving picture when you looked inside. Only I was
inside
it, and the pictures that began to emerge of a snow-filled forest were not just pictures. I felt the bite of the cold snow blowing through those woods and heard the howls of the wolves that prowled it.

Shadow wolves.

I knew exactly where I was.

I’d seen this story twice before—once in the candelabellum, a device kept in the Blythewood dungeons, and once in a spinning teacup that Raven had showed me. It was the story of how the Order of the Bells came to be. In both stories the seven daughters of a bell maker set off through the woods to deliver a set of seven bells to a prince at a castle. They were set upon by shadow wolves, creatures possessed by the
tenebrae
. When their cart toppled, the youngest sister, Merope, rallied her sisters to play changes on the bells to keep the shadow wolves at bay. They rang the bells through the night, one by one ceasing as they grew exhausted, until only Merope rang her solitary bell. When the prince and his knights came to rescue them Merope was gone, leaving a blood-filled impression in the snow.

That’s where the stories diverged.

The Order believed that Merope was abducted by a Darkling—an evil creature on the side of the
tenebrae
and all the monsters of Faerie. But Raven had showed me a version in which Merope was in love with the Darkling Aderyn, who saved her and then, together with the creatures of Faerie, helped battle the
tenebrae
. What story would van Drood show me in the hall of mirrors?

I watched warily as the shadow wolves pursued the bell maker’s daughters and Merope rang her bell to drive them away. Surprisingly, van Drood’s story followed Raven’s, as the great black-winged creature descended toward her and her face lit up with love. Aderyn gathered Merope up in his arms and carried her into the sky. Together they followed the sisters and the knights back to the castle, fending off the shadows that pursued them. I watched in horror as the prince was set upon by shadow crows and devoured by them—just as van Drood must once have been devoured by the
tenebrae
to become what he was now. Was that why he was showing me this story? Was he showing me how he became a Shadow Master so that I would feel sorry for him . . . or even
save
him?

“Can you be saved?” I asked aloud.

The revolving pictures juddered for a moment as I’d seen moving pictures in the nickelodeon jerk when the film got stuck in the projector—or as I’d seen van Drood himself jerk once before. He had looked then like a broken machine. Was a piece of him that was still human struggling to break free?

But then the pictures ran again all too smoothly. The prince was ripped apart by the shadows, the crows burrowing beneath his skin to eat him from the inside out. I bit my cheek to keep from crying out.

The thing that was once the prince turned to me, face bulging as the shadow crows moved beneath its skin, red eyes glowing, mouth spewing smoke. I watched in horror as the creature ripped open its own chest to extract a writhing crow.

I ducked to dodge the flying missile and heard a thud and cry of pain from behind me. I turned, thinking someone had joined me in the hall of mirrors and been hurt, but the cry came from a creature in the mirrors. Aderyn, the Darkling that had saved Merope, clutched his chest, his eyes wide with pain.

No!
Merope’s scream rent the air, shaking the mirrors, but not enough to dispel the image of Aderyn ripping the shadow crow from his chest. He tore it out, but a bit of the darkness had already burrowed inside.

Where it remained until his dying day, destroying him and Merope and their children and cursing all the Darklings.
Van Drood’s voice was very near now. I could feel his breath against my skin.

The shadows are already inside you,
his voice hissed,
as they are inside all Darklings since they corrupted Aderyn. His infection cursed all the Darklings. That is why they can no longer enter Faerie. That is what Raven didn’t tell you. And that is why you are a monster now. Just like me.

“No!” I whirled around, flailing my arm out in the direction the voice had come from, but it only hit glass, as did the pocket watch that I wore on a chain around my neck. The bells inside the watch chimed with the impact, faint and tinny, but loud enough that they reminded me of the watch’s purpose. It wasn’t an ordinary watch. It was an automaton repeater, given to me by Miss Emmaline Sharp to help me focus my own bells. I’d used it once before to dispel the
tenebrae
and once to banish van Drood. Now I grasped the watch in my hand and pressed the stem, praying it would play a tune that would destroy van Drood’s hold on me.

The two automaton figures—a woman and a winged man—drew back their hammers and struck the two bells between them, playing, to my surprise, the calliope tune I’d heard before on the Bowery. Perhaps it was just because that was the last music I had heard. I certainly didn’t see how the gay, antic tune would do anything against van Drood.

But the figures in the mirror began to move backward in jerky motions, faster and faster, as if they were actors in a vaudeville melodrama performing the parts. And now when Merope played her bells they rang out in the crazy calliope tune, growing louder and louder, the music shaking the mirrors. I stepped away from the glass just in time, before all the mirrors shattered.

As the glass fell all around me, one fragment landed on my hand. I looked down at the shard and saw inside it the image of a crow, its yellow beak just where the point impaled my skin. I flung it from me and looked up, prepared for a murder of mirror crows to descend on me, but the glass had all fallen away, and in its place stood the dwarf from the Blowhole Theater and Omar the Hindu Hypnotist, incongruously flanked by Nathan and Helen.