The Obsidian Mirror

by Catherine Fisher

  It was a labyrinth.

  When he finally reached the clear space at its center, he stared, amazed at the money Venn must have spent on this. State-of-the-art computers, monitors and screens, radiation counters. The area was spotlessly clean, the floor vacuumed dustless.

  And in the center, as if it were the focus of this obsessive attention, a mirror.

  He walked around it, considering.

  It seemed a slab of black glass, high as a man, wafer-thin, smoothed to perfection, held upright in an ornate silver frame. Cables were attached to it at all four corners. At its back, he stared at a confusion of older machinery—rusting wires, clockwork cogs, some Victorian contraption with a cranking handle and a dial with one snapped finger. As if Venn had imposed modern technology over older.

  In a locked glass cabinet next to it he saw a single silver bracelet, resting on a black cushion. It was a band of fantastically engraved silver, in the form of a winged snake biting its own tail, coiled around a glowing amber stone. Small red lights showed it was alarmed.

  Wharton didn’t touch it.

  He came back to the black mirror. His own face, wry and puzzled, confronted him. The mirror was concave, surely; it seemed to be curved, the reflection all wrong but yet the glass was flat. And the clock face had numbers, but they were not the usual ones.

  They said 1600 1700 1800 1900.

  “What the hell is this?” he whispered.

  Maskelyne swerved the car off the road and into the woods. They bumped down a track and stopped. He turned the engine off. Sudden silence wrapped them.

  Tense, Jake waited.

  Maskelyne turned, the leather seat creaking. “I’ll tell you the truth now, Jake, because no one else will. Your father and Venn have been experimenting with a device—a black mirror—that has the property of subverting normal chronology. That is, altering space-time. They’ve been working on it obsessively. They got it to work and they made a few trials with objects and animals. They needed a test with a human. Twice David Wilde volunteered to enter the mirror. The second time, he vanished. Venn and his slave have not been able to get him back. He was, as we say, journeying. So I’m afraid your fears are right, in one sense. Your father is dead. Depending on how far back he went, he may have been dead for centuries.”

  “That’s not possible. How can—”

  “I’m afraid it is.” The flat conviction in his voice stunned Jake.

  He sat still, numbed. Then he said, “But how do you—”

  “Know all this?” Maskelyne stared into the dark trees. “Because the mirror was mine once. It belonged to me, and it was stolen. And I intend to get it back.”

  The scream rang out; I moved at once.

  As the police whistles split the night, I shoved the man aside and grabbed the mirror. He came at me fiercely, but I drew my revolver and pointed it at him. “Back, sir!” I commanded. He stood still.

  In the opium den the screeching of the woman was astonishingly loud. A door splintered. Men’s voices rang through the squalid court.

  My cabman had done his errand well.

  The scarred man’s face was white with dismay. “You’ve betrayed me,” he said.

  The device was in my hands and I confess I laughed. “I’m not such a fool to pay a thousand guineas for a mere warped mirror!” I raised my voice and yelled, “Help, ho! In here!”

  His eyes were black with rage. I knew he would be caught by the Peelers, and it would go hard with him, that he would be transported at least for body-snatching, or even climb the gallows.

  The door shuddered. A hefty shoulder burst through.

  The scarred man stepped toward me and I jerked back in case he had a knife. But all he did was spit words in my face. “You have no idea how many lives you will destroy by this.”

  And then…imagine my astonishment! Then he made a rapid run toward the mirror, and as the police crashed in and the door burst wide he threw himself at the glass and into its blackness.

  And vanished!

  A great, silent, ringing explosion filled my head. I dropped the gun and almost swooned, because the room was a wild, deep vortex that dragged at the very throbbing veins and nerves of my body.

  Then I lost consciousness, and knew no more.

  Sarah closed the journal, threw it down, and looked at the clock. Jake hadn’t come back. It was getting very late. She put her hand to the jagged coin that hung at her neck and fingered it, then held it still.

  So this was how Symmes had gotten hold of the mirror. They’d always wondered about that, about his claims to have made it himself, but no one had known for sure, because Janus had the journals, locked in some deep vault, secret and guarded.

  Janus.

  Where was he? The young, lank-haired Janus, already plotting his future behind those blue spectacles. Was he prowling the grounds now, trying to find a way in? Trying the doors, letting the wolf snuffle every threshold?

  Something tapped at the shuttered window.

  She listened, tense with fear.

  One tap. Then another.

  She stood, crept up to the dark wood, and stood staring at it, her heart thudding. Was he out there? Could the wolf smell her in here?

  “Who’s there?”

  “Let me in.” A whisper. A voice against the glass, like the wind in a crack of darkness. “Please.”

  She jumped back, just as the door opened behind her. Piers put his head around and said, “If you’re ready, Sarah, we’ll set up now.”

  For a moment, tight with trauma, she didn’t understand. Then she turned. “Right. Yes. Let’s go.”

  Symmes’s journal lay on the table. There was no way of getting to it without Piers’s quick eyes seeing, so she walked calmly in front of it and out of the door. He moved aside for her.

  He led the way, his shadow long on the wall. She noticed how strangely thin his hands were, how he pattered lightly up the staircase. But halfway up he stopped her with his spidery fingers on her arm. “Listen to me, Sarah. Go down to the telephone now and call the Linton Institute and tell them where you are. Believe me, that would be best.”

  “No,” she said.

  “That policeman, then.”

  “Not him!” She glared at him, fierce. “What’s the matter with you? You haven’t told anyone I’m here? Venn promised.”

  Piers shrugged. “No one has betrayed you. But I’m scared. The process is dangerous…”

  She walked past him, quickly. “Don’t worry about me. Besides, Venn said if I didn’t go along with it, he’d send me back there himself.”

  Piers smiled. A small, unhappy smile. “He wouldn’t do that. I know him. The threat shows how desperate he is.”

  “I just want to help.”

  He sighed. “Well, I’ll be there. I may be totally useless, but I’ll try to make sure we don’t lose you.”

  He led her down the Long Gallery. She noticed how the fog had thickened outside the mullioned windows, and had even crawled into the house, misting the end of the vast room. One of the cats ambled past them, its green eyes slitted, and then there was another, curled tight under a table.

  “How many cats are there?” she asked.

  “Seven,” Piers said wearily. “Their names are Primo, Secundus, Tertio, Quadra, Quintus, Sixtus, and Septimo. They are plagues of my life.”

  As he swept back a curtain to reveal an archway with a small door, the thought struck her that maybe the cats were all Replicants. Venn would have had to experiment, after all.

  Piers unlocked the door, and a damp draft gusted out, chilling her. She saw a bare stone passageway, slanted with moonlit windows.

  “The Monk’s Walk.” He took her arm with his spindly fingers, and led her in.

  “It must be lonely for you,” Maskelyne said. “No parents. No friends.”

  The car headlights showed swirling fog, dark trees.

  “I have friends,” Jake said. He was still too devastated to be annoyed.

  “Do you? You seem the isolated sor
t. The sort others find difficult to get along with. You remind me of Venn, and myself. We are all locked into obsessive searches—his wife, your father.”

  “You expect me to believe in time travel?” Jake turned, fierce, realizing his hands were clenched, his shoulders tight with tension. “Do I look that stupid?”

  “You do believe it. You have the photograph to prove it.”

  Jake stared at the man. “You know about that?”

  “I’ve seen it.” Maskelyne’s voice was husky; his delicate hands gripped the steering wheel as tightly as if the car were moving at speed. Jake felt confusion, a sudden astonishing misery. “You knew my father?”

  “I met him once.”

  Fog was filling the car, misting them both. Jake had to say it. “I saw him. Back at the Abbey. I saw my father’s ghost in a mirror.”

  Maskelyne turned, fast. “A black mirror?”

  “Just a mirror.”

  Disappointment flickered over the man’s ruined face. “Well. That is what Symmes called the delay. A temporal echo. Or perhaps more like a ripple. It means nothing. Your father isn’t there anymore.”

  Jake shook his head. “Look. Tell me about this thing. The Chronoptika. Tell me everything.”

  Gideon landed lightly on his feet and turned his back on the Dwelling.

  So much for leaving a window open. He walked swiftly into the trees, simmering. He had taken Summer’s punishment for this Jake, this spoiled arrogant child. Had thought, after all the timeless eternity of his captivity, that maybe this could be a friend.

  A human contact.

  Summer was right about them. They were boring.

  The moon balanced over the Wood. Snow was coming. He could sense its cold, silent approach.

  And something else.

  He stood still, listening, one hand on a vine of ivy.

  Something uncanny had entered the estate.

  He could smell it. All the hairs on the back of his cold hands could sense it. An intrusion from some dark place. A rank, animal stink.

  He slipped into the undergrowth, crouching low. And then, so abrupt and close it made him shiver sideways, he heard it howl.

  A long, eerie spine-chilling wail.

  A wolf’s anger.

  He breathed out dismay into the frosty air. Leaves crackled. A shadow ducked out of the trees.

  Still as winter’s most frozen corpse, Gideon saw the man flicker by; a thin, lank-haired man, his eyes hidden by small blue lenses that seemed to reflect everything.

  A man with no substance.

  A man like a wraith, an echo. And slinking at his heels, white as paper, the soft-padding wolf.

  Safe in his Shee-craft, Gideon let them pass. He watched them merge into the shadow of the house. They left a darkness on the night, a vacuum.

  Maybe Jake had been wise not to open the Dwelling. “Because Shee I know,” he breathed to himself. “And humans I know. But what sort of creature are you?”

  A starling flew down and landed on the branch beside him. It fixed him with a black sidelong eye and said, “She asks is there anything to report?”

  Gideon kept his face calm—they were experts at reading the slightest expression. He made up his mind then in that instant. He would escape them, even if he had to die. She would not own him for all time.

  “No,” he said. “Nothing to report.”

  Wharton heard voices coming, froze in his examination of the mirror, swore once, slid hurriedly behind the clockwork. He crouched behind a bank of levers just as Piers ushered Sarah through the labyrinth. Venn was close behind them.

  Venn looked at her. “There’s nothing to worry about. Piers and I are both here…in case.”

  Sarah stared around at the crude webbed labyrinth, the alien, crowded machinery. Then she saw the mirror. “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m not scared.”

  It was a lie. To see it again, this terrible device, the shadowy warped reflection of her face in its depths, terrified her. It was festooned with trailing wires and monitors, and she knew far more than Venn about the devastation it could cause. She tried to sound calm. “Is this it?”

  Venn came and stood beside her, so they were both reflected. “This is it. The Chronoptika. An impossibility in itself—a concave mirror that seems flat. It was obtained by a Victorian eccentric called John Harcourt Symmes, back in the 1840s. He claimed it could warp time. But his results were generally failures, though we don’t know for sure. One volume of his journals is missing. His last experiment may have worked.”

  She said, watching Piers test systems and flick switches, “What happened to him?”

  Venn shrugged, unhappy. “Forget him. We won’t be trying anything as stupid. Just getting the thing calibrated.” He looked at Piers. “The bracelet?”

  “Not yet. Stand here please, Sarah. I just need to run some tests—your height, weight, and so on.”

  She stepped onto a small Plexiglas platform. “This mirror. How did you get it?”

  “A long story.” Venn seemed so tense, he couldn’t keep still; he walked around to Piers and watched him impatiently. “Will she do? She has to.”

  “Two minutes.”

  “And David Wilde? He worked with you on this, didn’t he?”

  Venn raised his head and his eyes were hostile. “I suppose Jake told you that. Leave it, Sarah, I don’t want to talk about David.”

  I’ll bet you don’t, she thought. What about her! She was the one facing the risks. But she bit her lip and told herself to stay calm. This was what she was here for. And she was so close!

  “Right.” Piers scuttled around the mirror. “There were a few rather strange readings there, but nothing the system can’t handle. I’ve been trying to build in a reflex barrier—a sort of safety function. We didn’t have it when we lost David, so you should be safer.”

  Venn watched, motionless. “She’s ready.”

  She said, “Yes.” Defiant, her eyes on his.

  “Then put this on, please.”

  Piers held a wide silver cuff of metal. The bracelet. She stared at it, then held her arm out, tugging up her sleeve. The bracelet was icy around her wrist. It hung a little loose. Her heart thudded, like a tiny vibration in the glass.

  “Good. Now…” Piers turned, but Venn grabbed him.

  “Wait.” Venn was staring at the shadowy corner behind the generator. Sarah turned quickly, but Venn’s voice was a roar of anger.

  “JAKE! Get out from there.”

  Nothing.

  Then she saw it too, a shadow, lurking close. For a moment she knew the Janus Replicant had crept inside, that it was here. Then it detached itself. Something clattered and Wharton stepped out, looking guilty and dismayed and determined. “Actually, it’s not Jake. It’s me. And I’m afraid I can’t let this charade go on for one second longer. It all stops now.”

  “So you see,” the scarred man said quietly, “the mirror is a dangerous thing. Venn is working blindly, with no second chances; he’s lost the bracelet your father was wearing and has only one left. No margin for error. Yet he is obsessed. If he had a subject he considered expendable, he might…”

  Jake looked up. “Subject?”

  “Someone to experiment on. Someone young, healthy. Expendable. He may ask you. If he does, you must refuse.”

  Jake wasn’t listening. “Sarah.”

  “What?”

  “She had something she wanted to tell me, and I didn’t listen. But it shouldn’t be her, it should be me!” He grabbed at the door handle, furious. “Let me out of here! Or drive me back, now.” He whipped around. “We have to get back there before…”

  He stopped.

  Maskelyne was facing him, the scar cruelly obvious now, the dark eyes clear and sad. “I’m sorry to be crude, Jake. But that’s not possible.”

  He had a small strange weapon in his hand. It looked like a long-barreled dueling pistol, but it was made of transparent glass. The muzzle was pointed directly at Jake’s head.

  Jake stared in
disbelief.

  “I want my mirror back. You are all I have to trade with. Venn’s beloved godson.”

  Jake almost laughed. “Are you crazy? He can’t stand me! You’d be doing him a favor!”

  His scorn was scathing. Just for a moment, Maskelyne froze in doubt.

  And Jake attacked.

  He grabbed the gun; the man twisted away. Jake’s fingers were tight over Maskelyne’s; he tugged, forcing the weapon up, his other hand gripping the man’s throat. Maskelyne was stronger than he looked; they grappled, breathless. Then Jake shoved and kicked, the gun slipped, he touched the trigger. An explosion of brilliance flung him back in the seat, rocking the car, knocking all breath out of him. For a strange, timeless moment the world was splayed darkness, a bruising crash in his ears that became a steady, fierce hammering on the car door. He struggled up.

  He got the door open. Sudden bitter cold.

  “Jake!”

  He was outside. Rebecca was dragging him, holding him up. “What happened?” she gasped. “Are you hurt?”

  He could taste blood. He swallowed and the roar in his ears popped; the night was a fog around him. He was shivering with cold and shock.

  “Jake! Can you hear me!”

  “I’m not hurt.” His lip was cut, his hands too. She stared into the car, her face white.

  “Is he dead?” It was a whisper of dread.

  The windshield was a cobweb of shattered crystal, its center a neat circular hole. Maskelyne lay slumped head-down over the wheel.

  She leaned inside and touched him, feeling chest and neck. “Oh thank God. Thank God. He’s alive.”

  Jake grabbed the weapon, then dropped it. Whatever it was, it had fired light, not a bullet. “Let’s go. Before he comes to.”

  “Shouldn’t we call an ambulance…”

  “He tried to kidnap me. And I have to get to Sarah.”

  Maskelyne’s hand twitched. He moved, and groaned. Instantly Jake and Rebecca were out and running, between the trees, leaping branches, fleeing down the track to the road. Rebecca was faster; she had the car open and the engine fired up before he got there; breathless, he threw himself inside. “Go. Go!”