by Anni Taylor
“Watch your language,” said Harrington, hunching the shoulders of his tall frame as though bad words physically hurt him. “No one needs to cuss to express themselves.”
“Has everyone finished telling me off?” said Ruth. “Because you know, if anyone else wants to take a shot, go for it.”
Hop looked confused by the whole exchange. “I think we need to talk about the box.” He pointed to each of the six symbols. “We’ve got five of the letter I and one zero.” He looked back over his shoulder. “If the mirrors match the positions of the symbols, then the zero is pointing at that mirror straight across from it.”
“Finally, someone with a brain.” Ruth didn’t step across to the mirror though.
I rushed over and attempted to peer under and around the frame of the mirror that corresponded to the zero. “It’s fixed to some kind of bracket.”
Ruth was suddenly behind me, aggressively twisting the mirror. “It kind of swings. What’s the point of being able to do this?”
I worried she was going to break something, and then we wouldn’t finish this challenge.
“Hang on,” Ruth said. “There’s something on the back of this bad boy. A painting.” Wrangling with the bracket, she pulled it up to arm’s length and flipped the mirror completely around. The bracket folded back flush with the wall and out of the way.
The painting, like the mirrors, was old, on a religious theme, in rich golds, crimsons and royal blues. It was a depiction of a terraced mountain, all of bare rock. Ladders stretched upward everywhere on the mountain, with monks on the rungs—demons flying around the monks. Clouds ringed the mountaintop, a golden crown emitting light. Everyday people occupied the lower levels of the mountains, being prodded off the edges by the demons and falling into deep water. Drowned people littered the water below. On the middle levels of the mountain, virginal-looking women were holding onto large metronomes.
“The artist was obsessed with the idea of people either going to heaven or hell, wasn’t he?” Ruth remarked dryly.
“The monks here seem obsessed with a few things.” Hop scratched his temple. “Ladders . . . water . . . metronomes . . . hexagons . . .”
“Does anyone happen to know the artist?” I asked hopefully. Hell, I knew nothing about art. I’d spent most of art history class consumed by very improper thoughts of Cooper Cadwell, who had stringy, dyed black hair and drew morbid pictures of abattoirs.
The other four shook their heads.
I cursed under my breath. “Damn. Poppy used to work for an art museum. But she’s not here.”
“But what is it supposed to be telling us?” Harrington knitted his thin eyebrows together so tightly they formed a single line.
“Isn’t it obvious?” said Ruth. “The gold crown in the heavens is God and the demons are the tormentors of humans.”
“Well, yeah,” Harrington replied defensively. “But where’s the puzzle? The mentors are really making this one too complicated.”
“The letter I could also be the Roman numeral for the number one,” said Hop, running his fingers across the box’s surface.
“A series of ones and then a zero?” Ruth’s face creased into a deep frown. “Like a binary set of on/off switches?”
Hop nodded. “Maybe. If so, then the mirrors are the on switches and the painting is the off switch. Or, if we’re going to get religious, then it could have religious meaning. I’ve studied the binary system at university. It was Gottfried Leibniz who refined the binary number system in the 1600s. The system reminded him of the Christian statement, creatio ex nihilo, which means creation out of nothing. Leibniz believed the binary numbers unified belief in God. Leibniz was very interested in the famous Chinese I Ching. I studied Leibniz along with the I Ching. The sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching can all be represented by the binary system.”
“What’s a hexagram?” I asked, trying to plough my memory of the geometry I’d learned at school.
“This,” Hop told me, pointing at the pattern on top of the box—the six-pointed star that I’d noticed before. “The I Ching hexagrams also correspond to yin and yang. Yin being a broken line and yang being an unbroken line. Or, yin is a zero and yang is a one.”
“The number one could also mean God,” said Duncan. “My wife is a born-again Christian.” His left eye twitched at the mention of his wife. “I’ve studied up on her books, trying to understand what she believes. In the Bible, God means unity. The number one.”
Ruth dragged her fingers through her hair. “No, that doesn’t make sense here. Because then you’d have five gods and one non-god—the zero.”
Duncan raised his eyes to the clock. “Ten minutes to go, people! I think we might need to try to flip the other mirrors.”
Duncan seemed pleased with himself, but Ruth gave every appearance of wanting to punch him. But for once, he’d gotten us back on track. The talk of yin and yang and binary numbers hadn’t gotten us anywhere.
Racing around, we—other than Duncan—checked the other mirrors. The other mirrors were fixed to the wall.
I hated to agree with Harrington, but he was right. This challenge was infuriating. There were no clues to lead the way.
The others returned to the hexagonal box to continue debating God and numbers.
I stood gazing into the dark surface of the mirror. I realised then that I could see a vague illustration of the same painting we’d seen on the other side of the sixth mirror.
Why was it there?
As I angled the mirror to gain a better view, the lamp below the mirror cast a harsh light across my face, and I caught sight of my features. The illustration of the mountains and caves formed a face that merged with mine. The caves of the paintings made hollow places of my eyes, and the tumble of boulders into the water made my mouth look like it was hanging open in a silent scream.
Revulsion washed through me, and my stomach twisted.
But I couldn’t look away.
I’d suddenly been confronted by the real and raw me. The addict.
All my pain, and the pain I’d caused others, was here. I wasn’t the wife Gray needed. I wasn’t the mother my girls needed. I hadn’t been the child that my mother wanted. My whole life, my mother had told me about all the things I was lacking. I was never enough. I could see it all, here, now.
“This is it,” I said, my voice hoarse. “This is it.”
I heard Ruth call from across the room. “What’s it?”
“They just want us to look into the mirrors,” I told her as I watched her reflection. “If you angle the mirror, your face . . . changes.”
“Well, I’m not doing it,” she stated firmly. “That’s not a challenge. That’s a—”
“Who are we to question what the challenges are?” said Duncan. He surprised me by walking up to the mirror adjacent to mine and adjusting it. Within a second, Duncan’s body began trembling. “Oh, I don’t like this. I don’t like it at all.”
Hop stepped up to a mirror next, moving it until he saw what Duncan and I were seeing. “I look like my father. In one of his black moods, telling me I need to do better. Study harder. Put in more hours.”
“He sounds like a charmer,” Ruth remarked.
“That’s the last thing he was,” said Hop, his voice different, almost raspy. “He hung himself in the kitchen of our home. Every time we sit down to dinner, my family has that reminder of him.”
We all fell silent for a moment.
“That’s awful,” I whispered to Hop. Twisting around, I cast a pleading glance at Ruth and Harrington. “Let’s get this over and done with.”
“How do we even know this is what they want?” Ruth gave a rigid, unconvincing shrug. “Maybe the mirrors are just there to distract us.”
“This is plain ridiculous,” agreed Harrington.
I wanted Duncan to do his usual and remind them to be team players, but he’d plunged into silence, absorbed by whatever his mind was conjuring from the image in front of him.
“Maybe,�
� I said, wrenching myself away and marching over to them. “But we have to try it. Get over there before I have to drag you there myself.”
Inwardly, I was jelly. I never ordered people to do anything. Even with Willow and Lilly, I was too soft and patient.
Ruth swung her head around to view one of the cameras up high on the ceiling. “Is this really what you mentors want? This? It’s insanity.”
She walked up to a vacant spot in front of a mirror. Angling the mirror, she stared down into it, muttering darkly. “Okay. This is it? Really? The mentors will have to try harder. They can’t get me with this. I already confronted my demons, years ago. And you know what? My demons can go to hell.”
But she fell into a sudden silence.
I returned to my own spot in front of a mirror. The skull-like sight of myself wasn’t any easier the second time.
Harrington begrudgingly took a place by the last mirror. “It’s a trick. I’ve heard of an experiment where a psychologist had fifty people stare at their own image in a dark room until they imagined they saw their faces change into different things. All fifty of them got weirded out. Half of them saw some kind of monsters. Here, they’re just speeding up the effect with this stupid illustration. Because we don’t have very long.”
I heard soft sobs. Hop and Duncan.
“If I saw him again in another life,” said Hop, “I’d kill him with my own hands.” I knew he was talking about his father.
Duncan made strange, discordant humming noises, like he was on the edge and trying to stop himself from completely breaking down. “Amelia never loved me. She doesn’t love me. She married me because she didn’t have a better option. Do you know what it feels like to look at your wife and see only loathing in her eyes?”
Ruth grabbed the mirror, shaking it. “I’ve seen you before. I’ve seen you . . .”
“Who have you seen, Ruth?” I asked.
“The demon inside me,” she answered, her voice wavering in and out like a radio signal. “It won’t let me go. It’s been with me since I was sixteen.”
“Let it go now,” Hop urged her. “Leave it in the mirror.”
“It’s too clever.” Ruth shook her head, and her shoulders trembled as she clung to the mirror’s frame. “I had my first daughter when I was sixteen. That’s the first time I saw it, laughing and clinging to my back when I was giving birth to her. I was high on heroin and in the worst pain of my life. When I was nineteen, I had my second daughter. I lost both of them. For fifteen years, I’ve promised them I’d get them back and be a mother. But the demon always gets me. Heroin always wins.”
I looked sideways at Ruth. “I have two daughters, too.”
Her jaw muscles were tight as she returned a glance. “Hold them tight.”
“This is me, who I am,” said Harrington. “No more or less. Everything bad I’ve ever done, I see it staring back at me. There’s me as a kid, locking our dog in a dark cupboard because I was being bullied at school. I can still hear him whimpering. Man, that’s confronting . . .”
“I hear you,” said Duncan. “I was bullied all the way through school. Why they chose me to pick on, I’ll never know.”
“We think we’re gods,” said Hop in a hushed voice. “That’s what this challenge is telling us. Like the symbols of gods pointing to the mirrors. We think we’re masters of our own destinies. But we’re not. We don’t even know ourselves. We’re not in control.”
“It’s in the numbers,” I breathed. The image before me seemed to suck inward, as if it were breathing, trying to draw me in. I began feeling disassociated from my own image, the gaping mouth turning into a mocking smile. When I turned away, the reflection of my face remained in the mirror, watching me.
Above me in the mirror, I saw a light change colour. I turned. The bulb below the clock had changed to green.
I could hear the breaths of relief around the room, but those breaths were ragged, conflict etched deep on everyone’s faces.
This challenge had wiped me, confused me, picking me up and dumping me in a dark place. I was repulsed by myself, wanting to peel my own skin off and destroy the image in the mirror.
There had been nothing to solve in this challenge. The challenge had been to see inside yourself.
I felt unsettled, as if the ground beneath my feet were no longer solid.
33. CONSTANCE
MY PLANE TO LONDON TOUCHED DOWN in the early hours, just before dawn. Five in the morning. I dragged myself through the airport feeling lost and dazed—I was a terrible long distance passenger. The long span of airport windows showed a bleak, rain-soaked day. Not the English summer I’d pictured.
I wished James was here. He’d deal with everything while I got myself together. He’d tell me what I needed to do. But I didn’t have time to get myself together.
Here in the gloom and darkness of a strange country, sitting on the cold seat of a cab, I finally admitted to myself what I’d never been able to admit before. James was a father figure to me. That was what he’d always been. I had nothing else in the way between myself and that truth now. There was nothing here to hide behind—no charity dinners to attend with James, no shopping trips with Kara, no contractors to direct in maintaining our house and grounds, no useless knickknacks to buy.
Yes, James was a father figure. He directed me. That sounded odd, but it was comforting. My own father had never been a real father. There’d been no comfort in him. He’d been—still was—a bitter alcoholic prone to rages. James never raged.
Otto had been a bit like my father. Except that it was drugs instead of alcohol that made him so unstable, and I’d always felt that he loved me. Otto, with his long hair and swagger and motorcycle, had been a complete separation from college life—one that I’d run towards. Everything with Otto had been a frenzy, even the simplest trip to a river for a swim. Because he’d insist on us swimming in that river naked at midnight. One night, we’d stolen a boat, jumped off overhanging tree branches into the black water and had sex on the river bank with willow leaves lapping our bodies. At the time, it’d seemed like we did things no one else did.
In a way, Otto had directed me, too. Everything had been so spontaneous, I hadn’t noticed. But it had been Otto’s wild imaginings I’d been swept up in, never my own.
Why did my thoughts keep returning to Otto?
I had a vision of myself in this cab, chasing Kara like some faded, aged shadow of her. As if I were actually here chasing my youth or some part of me I’d lost.
This trip was threatening to destroy the life I’d built.
The sun rose while the cab drove to my hotel. The weather grew impossibly bleaker, rain streaking across the windows.
The hotel room was better. Decorated in a style I called cheerful chilled. Lots of understated yellows and creams and muted greys. The room smelled of Italian coffee.
I showered and changed then tried to grab an hour’s nap but failed. Whatever mechanism in my head needed to kick into gear in order to put me to sleep was malfunctioning. I washed down three Promaxa with a glass of water that tasted awful. Still, I couldn’t relax. I tossed and turned on the hotel bed for the next five hours until it was time to meet Rosemary.
Rosemary wanted us to meet at a café. When the clock ticked around to ten in the morning, I combed my hair and stepped down to the foyer to call a cab.
The café was on Old Street, Central London. The cab driver pulled up outside a cosy-looking coffee shop. I wound my way through bicyclists and stroller-pushing women to the café and went to order myself a coffee.
I sat and waited. I hadn’t seen Rosemary in person—not even a photograph. There were no pictures of her offered on her website.
A woman who’d just bought coffee and cake at the counter wandered through the shop looking for a seat. She sat next to me. “It’s silly weather for July.”
I nodded automatically. “I thought it would be sunny.”
“I hope you’re not too disappointed.” She placed two bags of bread
and fruit on the seat opposite, just like any of the women who’d been shopping around town this morning. “How are you, Constance?”
It was the first indication that it was Rosemary—the private investigator.
“Oh, it’s you,” I answered in surprise. “I’m fine. Just tired.”
She wasn’t what I expected. She was ordinary. She was the woman you passed in the grocery aisle who looked slightly frazzled and a bit worn around the edges. I’d expected a bit of glamour, someone who matched with the deep, quick voice. Even her name didn’t seem a match. Instantly, I worried that she wasn’t the real deal. This slightly frumpy woman couldn’t find my daughter.
“Long flights are never much fun,” she said. “Do you feel like eating? A slice of cake? The butterscotch tart looks quite good. I should have chosen that instead of the sponge. The cream tends to give me more trouble than what it’s worth.”
“No, thank you. I’m not much of a person for cake. Anything savoury, I’m first in line.”
“Count yourself lucky. This sweet tooth of mine is a curse.” She stirred her coffee. “I only just manage to keep from blowing up like a balloon.” She glanced at a cyclist riding past. “At least I do that—cycling. I quite like riding about. It relaxes me. Ah, cycling and cake—the perfect balance. Do you ride?”
“Sometimes. Only with James—my husband. I’m more of a jogger.”
“You do have a runner’s body.”
“Thank you,” I said, though I wasn’t sure if it was a compliment or just a statement. More than one friend had unkindly called me a stick due to my lack of curves.
“So, you’ve been to London before?” she asked.
“My fifth visit, I think. All the trips were for my husband’s work—he has a lot of business here in the UK. I love London. There’s so many interesting little pockets to lose yourself in.”
“Yes, lots of pockets. That’s a good description. My wish is that we find your daughter quick-smart and that the two of you are soon off exploring some of those pockets together.”
I found myself panicking at the words wish and we. I wasn’t interested in wishes. And this wasn’t supposed to be a team effort between Rosemary and myself. She was the expert, and I was relying on her.
