by Dale Peck
And now a new shape took form around the circle of light ahead of Charles. A paler glow, also circular, of reflected light. For some reason Charles knew it was a face.
A boy’s face.
Featureless as a full moon on a cloudy night, the face stared at Charles as he approached, shining its light at Charles as he shone his light before him. They walked at the same tempo, with the same slight rise and fall. Their heads were at the same height. And suddenly Charles understood.
It was himself he was seeing up ahead, walking toward him.
Charles clutched the mirror book to his chest, even though he really wanted to throw it away. Was this the book’s doing? Was this how it worked? Had it made a second Charles who would duplicate every action that he, Charles—the original Charles—made? Would they blur together eventually, until neither knew which was the original, and perhaps fight to the death in order to claim primacy?
Charles could make out the dark circles of glasses ringing its eyes now (slightly lopsided, just like his), the thin mouth set in a firm, determined line. Maybe he shouldn’t think of this second Charles as an adversary, but as a helper, a partner even, something—someone—who would help Charles achieve all his goals twice as fast. Someone who could share the burden of Charles’s solitary nature. His steps quickened a little without his realization. He was still afraid of meeting his double, but eager too.
The boy’s features shimmered into focus: Charles saw tousled hair, disheveled clothing, the moccasins on his feet and the knife at his waist and his crossed arms. Only this boy’s arms held nothing. Just empty air and a glowing disk of light where his heart should be. His eyes widened as Charles approached. When Charles stretched out a hand in greeting, he did too. Their fingertips came toward each other.
Charles’s hands touched something cold and flat and hard. For a moment, with the boy’s hand pressed against his, Charles could believe that a sheet of glass separated him from his twin, but then, when he pulled back his hand and the boy pulled his back at the same time, when he scratched his head and the boy scratched his, and he stopped scratching and waved slightly and the boy stopped and waved back, and then when he gave up and picked his nose and the boy eagerly dug his finger in his own nostril, Charles had to admit that he was looking at himself in a mirror. A wave of disappointment flooded through him. Even though the boy had never existed, Charles still felt as if he’d lost something. He was still alone. And then:
“Charles?”
Charles nearly jumped out of his skin.
“The mirror does not show the books,” Iacob continued. “That is strange, no?”
Charles turned back to his companion. In the faint light there wasn’t much to separate the two boys: they were about the same height, both skinny, both a little messy, and Iacob’s dirty blond hair seemed almost as dark as Charles’s. And yet Charles, still feeling the loss of his twin, felt incomparably different and distant from Iacob. He realized again that the task he was doing could only be done by himself.
“Charles?”
Charles shook himself slightly. “I dunno what strange is anymore,” he said. “We’re underneath the Tower of Babel, being led by a pair of books that deliver messages without being opened. The fact that they don’t show up in mirrors is just, well, one more weird thing.”
Iacob stared at Charles quizzically for a moment. Then something seemed to catch his eye, and he aimed his light to his left, being careful to tilt the beam over Charles’s head so it wouldn’t touch his body.
“Charles, look.”
Charles turned, and saw immediately what Iacob was referring to: the beams of light from their mirror books shot into a wide open space, so large that the light only nudged at the shadows on the far end. It was a huge room, perhaps a cave of some kind. They stepped inside, and Charles put his hand on the wall. It was smooth and slick, and when he turned the mirror book toward it he saw that it was covered in enameled tile. The light coming from the glowing book was so golden in hue that it was hard to make out the exact shade of the tile, but Charles thought it was blue, just like the ones that covered the exterior of the building.
He and Iacob glanced at each other, but didn’t speak. The mirror books’ yearning was awful now, a desire so great that it knotted Charles’s stomach. It was like being sick and wanting to be better, but not wanting to take the right medicine to feel better. Part of Charles wanted to throw the book away and run, but another part—a part that didn’t feel entirely like Charles—held on even tighter.
“It is close,” Iacob said, and Charles nodded, even though Iacob was facing the other way. “Is it… in this room?”
Charles gripped the book in his hands, tried to focus on what it was saying.
“No,” he said finally. “But it will be.”
Iacob didn’t ask what Charles meant, as if he knew his friend couldn’t explain. Instead, by unspoken agreement, Charles turned left and Iacob turned right, and they walked into the huge room. Just a few paces to the left were three steps down, and Charles realized he had been standing on a raised dais of some kind. For some reason he immediately thought of the altar at the front of a church. Were they in some kind of subterranean temple?
Charles looked across the vast space at Iacob’s shadowy form. The single room seemed to be nearly as big as Drift House. Occasionally Iacob would wink out of sight. Charles was confused for a moment, until he realized that columns holding up the ceiling were coming in between the two boys. He turned his light toward the center of the room, and could make out a double colonnade outlining a wide central aisle and a pair of bays on either side. Aside from the columns and the dais, there didn’t seem to be anything else in the room—at least nothing that the lights revealed. But another sense told Charles that something was coming, and it would be here soon.
If, as Charles reasoned, this was some kind of temple, then the dais would be at the back of the room, meaning he and Iacob were now making their way toward the front. And as he progressed it seemed to him that the air grew fresher. One time he was even sure he felt a breath of breeze—hot and dry, like the desert air outside the tower. Maybe they weren’t so far underground after all, if fresh air could get down here? Or maybe the Babylonians had ventilation systems Charles didn’t know about. At any rate, Charles breathed in the clean air gratefully, letting it purge the mildewy residue of the damp corridors from his lungs.
Charles flashed his light around the room, looking for some sign that would tell him where to stand, where to open the books. The Wanderer had said he had to do it at the bottom of the jetty, and for all Charles knew a few inches could make the difference between success and failure. Up ahead, he saw another light as he had in the corridor, but he didn’t let it fool him this time. He figured it was just the amulet’s glow reflecting off the tiled wall, but when he turned the book to one side, the glow remained. Charles saw now that it was broad and diffuse, not at all like the reflection of the concentrated beam given out by his book, but rather like a light coming around a corner. And now it seemed to Charles that he heard—
“Footsteps!”
Iacob’s hiss cut through the empty air like a knife. He and Charles rushed toward each other in the center of the room, their lights dancing crazily over the walls of the temple. To Charles they suddenly seemed like beacons, announcing their presence to the whole world.
The footsteps were regular, heavy, multiple, like marching soldiers. Charles trained his beam around the dark room one more time, but couldn’t see anything besides the dark shadows of the columns and the unyieldingly flat walls, which offered no place to hide.
“We’ll have to go out the way we came in,” he whispered. “Put your book inside your shirt to cover the light.”
The boys scooted toward the back of the room as quickly and quietly as they could. Charles stuffed his mirror book under the tail of his shirt, but the glow pierced the fabric easily, so gulping slightly, he turned the front cover toward his stomach. The amulet’s touch against hi
s skin was simultaneously cold and hot, almost unbearable on one level and yet like nothing at all on another. But Charles didn’t let himself get caught up in the strange sensation. He had to get himself and Iacob out of the temple before it was—
Too late.
A second glow suddenly filled the room: a pair of torches seemed to appear from thin air, held aloft by a pair of figures that could have been statues or real humans. Somewhat in front of the two torches, so that their faces were in shadow, stood a second pair, one impossibly tall, the other much, much smaller. Charles felt the mirror book throb in response to this second figure. Beside him, Iacob let out a low moan, and Charles knew he was feeling the same, almost overpowering urge to run up to the dais with his book.
Summoning all his energy, Charles grabbed Iacob by the arm and whirled them in the other direction. By now a liquid orange glow filled the space at the front of the room, outlining a wide trapezoidal doorway. The glow was like the fire at the back of a dragon’s throat; from the sound of the thudding footsteps echoing into the cavernous temple, Charles figured that dozens, perhaps hundreds of men must be marching their way. And, judging from the brightness of the glow, each one of them must be carrying a torch.
Charles looked at Iacob. The boy was nothing more than an outline. Not a trace of light came from beneath his shirt, and Charles guessed he must be pressing it tightly against him. For a moment Charles let himself hope that the books would go undiscovered, but at the same time he knew it was not the books’ light that would give them away. The books’ yearning for the dais at the head of the room was so palpable it was like a siren, and Charles couldn’t believe that everyone in the room—in the whole of Babel—couldn’t hear it.
The marchers began to enter the room now, silent save for their footsteps. They split into two ranks, marched the length of each wall. Charles saw now that there were unlit torches mounted there, and when the marchers had aligned themselves along each wall they turned in unison and used the torches they were carrying to light the ones affixed to the walls. There was a hypnotic sameness to their movements, and it was hard to tell if they were soldiers or congregants. A short sword was scabbarded at each waist, but the men themselves were unarmored, wearing only pale tunics that left their legs and one shoulder uncovered.
Charles and Iacob stared at the men, mesmerized. When the torches on the side walls were lit, the marchers turned and crossed to the columns and, still in unison, slotted the torches they carried into metal holders mounted to each column. Then, stepping backward on their quiet, sandaled feet, one step, two steps, three steps, four, they realigned themselves along the outer walls. They placed their right hands on the hilts of their swords. They placed their left hands on their chests.
And then they just stood there.
Not once did any of them so much as glance at Charles or Iacob. Charles found himself hoping he and Iacob were somehow invisible, although he figured the soldiers were simply too disciplined to regard two unarmed boys as a threat. Well, Charles did have his knife. He reached for it, but didn’t unsheathe it. Even as his fingers closed over the flint, he knew no blade would protect him here.
He turned to Iacob. “Take your book out.”
Iacob blinked in confusion. “What—”
“Do it,” Charles said firmly. “Now.”
Charles reached into his shirt and came out with the mirror book. Hesitant but obedient, Iacob followed suit. The books seemed to turn to face each other of their own accord, and their twinned amulets glowed so brightly it seemed as if a beam of light connected them. Charles felt the book in his arms yearning, straining toward the dais to his right. Again, he was reminded of a dog on its leash, who smells his master in the dark and strains to run to him. But he refused to look in that direction. Somehow he knew he couldn’t give in to the book’s urge.
Across from him, Iacob was not so strong. The Greenland boy was turning toward the head of the room as if in a daze.
“Iacob, no!” Charles said, louder than he’d intended. “We have to open them here!”
Iacob turned to him, a look of baffled fear on his face. He held the mirror book at arm’s length in front of him. “I do not like this thing, Charles! I do not like what it makes me feel!”
“We have to open them,” Charles said insistently, even though the book in his hands was begging to be taken up to the dais. “Right here. On three. One, two—”
“No!” a voice screamed from the front of the room. “Guards, stop them!”
“Three!”
Through sheer force of will, the two boys whipped open the covers of their books. Instinctively Charles squeezed his eyes shut, but there was no need.
Nothing happened.
Well, one thing happened: the awful yearning stopped. Charles felt as if he’d been underwater and suddenly shot into fresh air. He gulped in grateful, deep breaths, even as the book in his arms settled like a fussy baby that’s finally fallen asleep.
Charles lifted one eyelid, saw Iacob staring at him quizzically. “Charles?”
A throat cleared at the head of the room. Charles turned, still dumbly holding the open book before him.
The room was hot now, and blazingly bright, and smelled of smoke. On the dais stood the two figures draped in white robes: a man wearing a high hat, holding a length of iron chain that led to a boy, bareheaded, his pale face so smudged with dirt that Charles honestly didn’t recognize him at first. But who else could it have been?
“Hello, Charles,” his brother said—his five-year-old brother, Murray, said, from a face that was still soft and round, not lean like Mario’s, but whose voice had already acquired the latter boy’s world-weary tone.
Murray managed a weak but mischievous smile. Pulling slightly on his iron leash, he said, “I bet you’re wondering what I’m doing here, huh?”
TWENTY-THREE
Closing the Jetty (part 1)
After she had been climbing for who knew how long, Susan finally accepted that she was never going to reach the eyehole. Something was conspiring to keep her away from it. Indeed, she was being detoured in the opposite direction, deeper into the horse’s—well, its throat, she guessed. Its neck. She called out for Marie-Antoinette one more time, but the only sound that came back to her was the ratchetty sound of wood splintering. The noise came from throughout the horse’s head, not just where her hands and feet were landing. Everywhere she looked, dried-up wood fell away to dust that somehow dissolved in the air, and in its place stood rich rounded tensile struts, brownish reddish in color, and warm to the touch, and pulsing.
“Why—you’re alive!”
Susan’s voice, floating into that vast space, sounded unfamiliar to her ears—grownup, knowledgeable. She wondered if she, too, were changing. She looked at the parts of her body she could see, her arms, her legs, felt her face and chest with her fingers. But the shell of her at least was the same. She looked up again.
“Can you hear me?”
When she had ridden in Frejo to the bottom of the Great Drain last year, she had been able to hear the deep sound of the whale’s words even inside his body—a sibilant vibration that had seemed to be inside her even as she was inside the whale. But in the Trojan Horse there was just a… feeling. An affirmation that was like the telepathic equivalent of a smile seen through a thick sheet of glass.
“Is Charles okay? Uncle Farley? Iacob?”
Susan blushed at the third name, and even as she felt again the feeling of affirmation, she added, “And Mar—Murray,” she corrected, using her little brother’s real name.
And now came a feeling Susan could not put words to. Not bad, but not good either. Heavy, like the pressure of water on your eardrums when you have swum too far down and aren’t quite sure you can make it back to the surface. But there was a certain clarity to this message, an awe-inspiring if not simply frightening realization that her youngest brother had become something that was somehow beyond her understanding. But what was she to do with such a feeling?
<
br /> Before Susan could think of the right words with which to express this question, she felt its answer inside her:
Climb. Deeper. Inward.
And now Susan could see that the network of tubes that she was clambering on had coalesced to form a chute leading into the darkness of the horse’s enormous torso. That darkness frightened Susan, and she balked at first. She didn’t like doing things when the reason why was kept from her. But the horse, or whatever it was, insisted: her only task right now was to climb. As she clambered over the struts, it seemed to her that there was just the tiniest glow emitted by those tubes nearest her—not enough to allow her to see more than a few feet in any direction, but enough to allow her to place her hands and feet safely, as long as she didn’t reach too fast or too far ahead.
“Really,” she said, although she was pretty sure at this point she didn’t have to speak aloud, or even in complete sentences. “You don’t have to be so spooky about it.”
Susan could’ve sworn she felt a wave of amusement course through her, and she chuckled gratefully. On she clambered, now definitely descending into the depths of the great animal, turning and going down the struts as she would a ladder, one rung after another, down, ever farther down, until she began to wonder if she’d missed a turn somewhere, and were actually descending one of the beast’s legs. And just as she thought that, she reached bottom.
