by Anya Allyn
16. HALL OF MIRRORS
~CASSIE~
Tonight, the families of the castle feasted. The celebrations reminded me of the Feast of Fools that we’d had in the dollhouse. Lavish delicacies of every kind adorned the huge table in the dining hall. Fiddlers played as we ate. Much of the food was laced with alcohol, and I soon felt myself swaying at the table, my vision unfocused.
Emerson sat cracking jokes at the table as though he’d never been ill, as though he’d never sat out in the garden like a stone statue. He’d had a miraculous recovery the night after he’d been dragged screaming through the castle. No one spoke about how Emerson was before. Aisha seemed relieved, letting a smile slip now and again at the festivities around her.
Mr. Batiste began tapping his wine glass with a spoon. All guests turned to him attentively. He stood. “As we all know, tonight the most special of nights will happen here at the chateau. It is a night that only happens once every six years. Of course, I am talking about the s’emparer, a night in which the château decides which fair maidens the single men will take in marriage.”
He glanced over at his sons. “The s’emparer is a proud night for the parents of the château and an exciting one for the young unmarrieds. We should all celebrate our good fortune in being here and taking part in this historic event. And we give our unswerving loyalty to our great one—the founder of the chateau—Monseigneur Balthazar Batiste!” He raised his glass. “Bon santé!”
Everyone stood but Molly and myself and raised their glasses. “Bon santé!”
Their cheers crashed through my head. Sienna cast sly looks at Zach from over the top of her wine glass. Zach sat drinking bottle after bottle of wine and barely eating.
The people of the castle seemed excited by the events happening later tonight, and their voices grew increasingly loud and sharp.
After the feast, their games seemed to go on forever. I was grateful when at last Molly and I were told we could go to our rooms.
* * * *
I woke in bed as a loud noise cracked through my head.
Outside, it was still night, cold mists climbing in through the open window. Molly slept soundly in the bed opposite, moonlight picking out the smooth features of her face. I thought I must have dreamed the sound, until the deep, crashing sound came again. Grinding noises reverberated through the air. For a moment, I was reminded of the scraping sound of Clown as it traveled along the passages of the dollhouse. But these sounds were heavier, and everywhere—above and below me. I sat bolt upright as the noise pounded in my ears, here in the room. A thick, stone wall barreled through the center of the room. Jumping from the bed, I tried to run across to Molly. But the wall slammed into the other side of the room and stopped there. A solid wall stood between Molly and me. Screaming Molly’s name, I felt around the wall’s surface. There was no way through.
The floor shook beneath me. The entire floor shuddered slowly downward. On hands and knees, I huddled into the floor rug. The castle was collapsing.
The floor came to a stop, level with a floor that was lower in the castle Everything fell silent. Too afraid to move, I stayed where I was.
The room I was now in was larger than the room Molly and I were being kept in. A flickering lamp illuminated walls that were hung with a dozen tall, gold-framed mirrors. Theatrical costumes and masks hung on hooks.
Seconds passed. The castle remained still. I stared around at the joins in the floor and walls where my half of the room that I shared with Molly had joined with half of this one. The joins met each other with exact precision. If you had just walked into this room, you wouldn’t know that it had newly been formed from two parts. Whatever was happening, the castle wasn’t collapsing. It was designed to do this.
I stepped from the room into a long corridor. The same mirrors lined the corridor. I saw my face, white and terrified, reflected a hundred times or more. I put my hands out to touch my face in the mirror, and my hands fell through. I stepped through the optical illusion into another hallway—yet another hallway of mirrors. Every way I turned, I headed straight down a hallway that was exactly the same as the last.
I turned, sensing something from the corner of my eye. Dark, curling smoke wound along the wall of mirrors behind me. I knew the smell—it was not the smell of fire but the heady, spicy smell of a cigar.
“Is someone there?” I called.
High, pealing giggles echoed. I caught the reflections of two girls dressed in suspenders and top hats as they ran past. I whipped around, but they were nowhere. I’d seen the girls before in the Great Hall—Henry’s sisters. A heavier figure in a long cloak strode past, ashing his cigar on the floor. A black hooded cape shrouded him, his face painted white—a black Poiret-clown’s mouth drawn over the top of his lips. Black vertical lines were drawn over his eyes. But I couldn’t find where he really was—all I could see were his reflections in every mirror.
More giggles rang through the hallways. I began running, blundering into walls. Every passage looked exactly the same. Every corridor I ventured down seemed to take me back the same way. The Poiret-clown’s cape brushed past my arm. I screamed. But when I turned, no one was there.
I stopped still. I’d become part of some game that I wanted no part of. A thought pushed into my head. If something’s not working, try doing the exact opposite.
Closing my eyes, I walked directly into a wall of mirrors. Falling to my knees, I found myself in a dim corridor, away from the endless halls of mirrors. Picking myself up, I loped from the corridor into a wide, empty space. There was nothing here, no doors or corridors. The only way out was a stone stairwell that was set into the floor. Hesitantly, I stepped over to the stairs and made my way down.
There was nothing on the next level down except for supplies—army gear from some long-dead army. Metal armor and swords and boots were stacked on shelves. Another spiral staircase led down to another floor. My heart knocked against my ribs.
I hoped it led to the outside of the castle, only I’d lost all bearing on where I was. I forced myself to keep going. The stone steps were worn and stained beneath my feet. The air grew colder, ancient. Smells of earth and decay rose inside my nostrils. It was like walking through a dead space. Not the velvety black of night, but a space where all light had bled away.
Revulsion climbed through me. I knew where I was. I’d found another passage into the dungeons. I couldn’t bear to stay here a moment longer. I turned to flee back up the stairs.
A booming noise came from underneath the floor, as though the floor might lift up and shatter at any moment. A wall shifted upwards out of nowhere, blocking the stairwell. The last of the light from the lamps was cut dead.
My breaths came in short, erratic gasps. I made rigid steps across the floor. Hot breath brushed over me, but when I turned there was no one there. A voice ushered through the air, coming toward me—as though in whispering waves.
I ran.
A dim, reddish lamplight shone at the other end of a corridor. I stumbled forward. In the dark rooms along the corridor, chains and devices hung from the ceilings.
I tried to calm myself as I made my way further into the dungeons, hoping to find another way out. But the dungeons were a labyrinth.
A scraping noise set my teeth on edge. I pushed my back into the wall and moved my head slowly around to peer into the next room in the corridor. My breath sucked from my chest. Someone—a girl—was hung upon a hook, long hair hanging from her limp head.
No, not a girl. A doll. A marionette. In her arm there was a joint.
An aged man sat in semi-darkness, wearing thick-lens glasses. He held another life-size doll over a table, and whittled at her nude body here and there with a knife. Strings were connected to her joints. He didn’t seem to notice me at all. I crept past the doorway.
The dungeons were massive—as large as the castle floors above them. They must have housed a lot of prisoners at one time.
Snatches of voices echoed from a room further along the co
rridor—one thin and sharp and the other deep. I stayed close to the wall as I moved closer.
Inside the room were two people. One of Parker’s uncles—Beaumont Baldcott—was chained to the wall, dressed only in leather underwear. A woman in an outfit with metal spikes strolled toward him, whip in hand.
The man’s eyes flicked upwards and he caught sight of me. “Did you come down here to play?” A smirk played in his pudgy cheek.
“I do not want to play with you.” My teeth were almost clenched shut.
The woman turned toward me. I gasped at the sight of her—Dr. Verena Symes.
“Cassandra,” she said, “You needn’t feel ashamed of your desires. I’ve seen your mind and it is so tight, like a bundle of nerves wrapped into a ball. Let it go… let it all go….”
She smiled, showing all her teeth. She looked different than she had at the psychiatrist’s office. She wore a ton of black stuff around her eyes and gleaming red lipstick. Of course she looked different. She was different all along, even though she had pretending to be someone else.
“You know why you’re here,” said the man suggestively. “You don’t come down to a dungeon at midnight to play hopscotch.”
I took a step backward, preparing to run. My body came up against another. I turned. The man from the hall of mirrors stood behind me—his face half in darkness. His mouth twitched into a small grin. I recognized him now—he was another of Parker’s uncles.
He gripped my arms and herded me into the room. I fought as Dr. Verena locked me into metal clamps against the wall.
The man with the painted face went to stand at the back of the room, silently leaning against the wall.
“You can’t keep me here.”
“My dear, you’re here because you want to be. Why not just accept that?” Dr. Symes peered at me like I was some strange insect that she'd just skewered with a pin.
“So do we play now?” Beaumont Baldcott licked his lower lip.
“She is my patient,” scolded Doctor Symes. “This is no time for a play session. She needs treatment.”
Beaumont gave a heaving sigh. “You’re so boring when you want to play doctor, Verena.”
She arched an eyebrow at him. “Just run along and get the medicine, like a good slave.”
He shot her a petulant look and stepped over to a large black bag that was lying on the floor—the bag like one of those doctors' ones you saw in old movies. He grabbed a fistful of medicines in glass bottles and what looked like leather underwear.
She cast him a withering stare. Tossing the underwear aside with one hand, she grabbed a bottle from him with the other. She took two small green capsules from the bottle. I clamped my teeth together. She forced the capsules in. I felt their contents dry in my mouth. She held my mouth shut, not allowing me to spit any of it out.
The dry mixture scraped down my throat like coffee grains. The taste was bitter, metallic.
She pulled over a chair, the legs scraping along the stone floor.
“You must be treated, Cassandra. You won’t get better without it.”
Her words sounded as though they came from a long way away, through the pounding blood in my head. I had the strange sensation of her being so close to me that I could see her eager eyes directly before me and feel her breath on my face, while at the same time she looked as though she were sitting fifty feet from me. Beaumont chained himself to her chair, kneeling at her side.
“Now, where were we?” she exclaimed. “Ah, now I remember. Just before you traveled into the underground, you wished for the world to swallow you whole. No? You kissed the boy—Ethan McAllister, and this was such a hideous, unforgivable act that you wished to plunge yourself deep into the earth?”
Twisting my mouth, I nodded. “How do you even remember all of that?”
“Ah, I still have the notes in my office.” Stepping over to a desk in the corner of the room, she pulled out a thick file. ”Let’s see now—did you get your wish? Oh yes, yes you did. See, the earth provides. It took you into its womb.” She flicked through pages. “It seems that you told Dr. Alexia that before your mother packed up and brought you to Australia that there was one thing that disturbed you more than anything else. What was that thing, Cassandra?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes you do. You said that what you feared more than anything was growing up. You didn’t want the adult world. You wanted to remain tethered to childhood.” Her eyes focused on me like a camera lens. “What happened when you crawled out of that long, long tunnel of the underground, sweetie? What happened when you crawled out of the womb? Was the world out there too much for you? Is all this new-found knowledge burning you up inside, twisting your mind?”
“Is that what happened to you?” I shot back.
She sat back a little, giving a hollow laugh. “Oh how quaint. Trying to turn the session around to me. Well that won’t do either of us any good. I’m already so self-aware that I’ve become a knife, cutting myself to pieces.”
Beaumont Baldcott touched her on the arm. “Ouch,” he said.
“You see I’ve over-analyzed myself,” she continued, “which is a dreadful thing, really. You can chop and dice an apple, and put it all back together, in a fashion. But once the pieces are exposed to the atmosphere, they all start to brown and wither.”
“You have a rotten core, darling. And I love it.” Beaumont nodded.
She smiled vaguely. “But now we must return to the session.” Frowning, she read through the notes. “And who brought you to the forest in the first place? Ah yes, your mother’s boyfriend, Lance. The man you describe here as the clown who turned your life upside-down.” She leaned forward. “Tell me, Cassandra, was there a clown in the dollhouse?”
“Yes, there was a clown,” I said reluctantly.
Beaumont and the painted man nodded their heads like a silent chorus.
She smiled, her face bright. “And what else did you find in the dollhouse? A set of Raggedy dolls, by chance?”
“No... just one.”
“Are you sure? What did you find in the tunnel, Cassandra?”
“Ooh, I do like dark tunnels,” said Beaumont.
I remembered the Raggedy Andy doll as it lay blackened and decayed on the floor outside in The Dark Way. I tried to stop myself from saying it to her. But I seemed unable to stop myself from speaking. Her little green pills squirmed like snakes in my head.
“Yes, yes,” she encouraged. “And who did you find all festering and ugly in a deep dark hole in the dollhouse? Oh my—Raggedy Andy. Your father. And your father’s name just happens to be Andy. And your mother’s name is Anna. Oh dear. What is going on? Of course, the Raggedy dolls are meant to be brother and sister. Oh but look here. You say the one time your father did return to live with you and your mother, there was no passion between your mother and he. Oh and my, my—you state here they were like a feuding brother and sister.”
She tapped her pencil on the file. “Oh no, but then he went away. Oh my poor dear, yes, Raggedy Andy went away and never came back.”
“I don’t want to have... this conversation.” My words were hazy.
“Of course you don’t. Everyone resists treatment. But you won’t get better without it.”
Her eyes glittered. “And the dolls were like all those authority figures who stopped little Cassandra from doing what she wanted to do… weren’t they? Except secretly, deep down, she really wanted them there. She wanted them to stop her from growing up.”
“That’s not true.”
“Isn’t it? You didn’t want to become your mother. You saw her and all her failings, all her adult miseries. You wanted to go back… to the time when you were little, back to the last time you were truly happy.”
“Shut up!” I screamed at her. “I’m not listening!”
“You don’t need to listen to me. It’s all your own words. Right here.”
“You shouldn’t have stolen Doctor Alexia’s notes. You’re not a real psychiatrist. And
what did you do to her and her baby?”
A smile curled at the edges of her lips. “Darling girl, what makes you think I’m not a real psychiatrist? Do you imagine the people of the castle don’t have real jobs? Lord knows the castle can’t keep us all. And besides, what are you accusing me of? I only slipped a little of a special herb in Doctor Alexia’s tea. Just something to give her a little rest in hospital.”
“She almost lost her baby,” I breathed.
“Well, all’s well that ends well. She went on to have the brat. And you must understand that obtaining the Speculum Nemus has greater importance than the fate of any mortal. Your eyes will open, eventually. Just like your friend, Aisha.”
“Aisha’s just scared. She’ll remember who she used to be.”
“You’ve projected your own thoughts onto another person, dear child. That’s never wise. You can’t make people into who you want them to be, no matter how hard you try.”
“You’re trying to get inside my head.”
“As a good psychiatrist does. You’re wrong in thinking I’m not trained. But I wanted to marry into the chateau, and that meant being a good servant of Monseigneur Balthazar.”
“You have a husband? And you’re down here with these men?”
She and the men tittered. “How quaint of you to be concerned. Don’t you know that on the nights when the castle walls move, anything may happen?” Her arms seemed to stretch from the other side of the room as she flickered her fingers in my face. “But I’ll be with my loving husband again before the end of this night.”
Beaumont Baldcott hung his head and she patted it.
“What did you give me?” I demanded. “What kind of drug?”
She shrugged. “Some might call it hallucinatory. I prefer to call it medicinal. It helps to open the mind. Your mind is shut as tight a miser’s purse, darling.”
She left her chair and walked around the dungeon floor in a circle. “So tell me, dear, what does the castle mean to you? What does it represent?”
“It doesn’t mean anything to me.” I spoke between clenched teeth.
