“And unofficially?”
“I am inclined to think that the mirror exerted its influence on the youths; paradoxically it can most easily influence the strong-willed and the weak. Ordinary people, with ordinary lives and ordinary worries crowding their ordinary minds are quite safe from its extraordinary powers. The rest of the story, I think you know.”
“Tell me.”
“The thieves took the mirror, wrenching the heavy cloth covering from it, exposing the glass. Once uncovered it began to feed. It took the life of your male assistant first, and then the female, and since then it has been feeding on the blood and energy of those all around it, growing stronger with every soul it takes.”
“The police say the auctioneers have no record of having sold the mirror to me, nor is there any record with the shipping company.”
“The records are probably computerized. The mirror probably deleted the records,” Talbott said simply.
“That’s impossible…” Jonathan started to say and then realized how stupid that sounded. “But I did have a printed-out record, a copy of the receipt and shipping details.”
“And what happened to them?”
“They … disappeared.” He found himself wondering if Beaumont had stolen them. “But what about the people who sold me the mirror? The assistant I was dealing with; the auctioneer, the truck driver who delivered it? Surely they must remember it?”
“You have no conception of the power of the object you’re dealing with,” Talbott said quietly.
“But what you’re suggesting is impossible…” Frazer said again.
“Everything is possible. Do you know anything about astral projection, Mr. Frazer,” Talbott asked suddenly, “or the astral plane?”
Jonathan shook his head.
“When a body sleeps, the spirit—the astral body—leaves the physical body and moves onto the astral plane. This plane may be a ‘physical’ place or it may be a state of mind, I don’t know. I merely accept its existence, and use it. There are various levels on this astral plane, and with skill and practice and determination, it is possible to move from plane to plane, to move one’s physical body through space—as I did when I visited you in the hospital room. You weren’t dreaming, Mr. Frazer, I really was there.
“On another level, a higher level, it is possible to see the souls of the newly dead leave their bodies. Some hover uncertainly about the corpse, others fly away to freedom, others are trapped.
“The astral plane is disturbed at the moment, Mr. Frazer. There is a presence, a force rippling through the usually placid domain. It is like a giant whirlpool, sucking everything around it into its circle. I have stood on the very edge of the plane and watched this thing. It is the non-physical manifestation of the mirror, Mr. Frazer, a whirlpool of all the emotions, the energies, the blood and sweat and semen, the pain and anger, that has fed the glass down through the ages. It is enormous, ravenous and ravening.
“And it is moving.
“People died around you last night, Mr. Frazer. Innocents. A woman in Beverly Hills with the same house number as yours cut her throat to be with her husband who had been dead ten years. Fooled by the image.
“A young boy, his face shredded by the glass from an exploding computer screen. Entranced by the image on the screen.
“A vagrant drowned in a small park just off Sunset. Beguiled by the image.
“And do you know what else I saw last night, Mr. Frazer? I saw the mirror feed. I saw it drink the blood of sacrifice. I saw it accept the emotion of passion.”
“Does the mirror only show the truth?” Jonathan wondered.
“Invariably. It rarely needs to lie. It counts on the fact that truth, like most things, is addictive. And the images on its surface are the ultimate narcotic; people return to them again and again.”
“Do you want me to destroy the mirror?” Frazer asked, not sure if he could.
“NO!” Talbott shouted. “Break it, and you have a thousand mirrors, each one complete and whole in itself. Anyway,” he chuckled, “I doubt if you’d get within a dozen yards of it with evil intent. The last person who even thought about that paid a terrible price…”
Frazer suddenly knew he was talking about himself.
“I cannot come and take the mirror from you now,” Talbott said, suddenly sounding distant and tired, “but cover it, for God’s sake, cover its surface with a heavy black blanket and turn it away from the moonlight. It will begin to weaken almost immediately, although it will take it a long time to return to some sort of quiescence. But when all the police activity has died down, then I’ll arrange to take the mirror from you and have it shipped back to England.”
“And then?”
“Then?” Talbott asked, puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“What happens when you take it back to England?”
“Then the whole process begins again. I don’t even know how or why it was created. The mirror is ancient, and the glass, its method of construction, and the materials are older still. I don’t know what magic, what natural forces went into its creations. But this is one of the most potent occult forces remaining in the world today; there is no way to hurry it along. In a couple of hundred years time, perhaps someone will have figured out some way of destroying it. But I doubt it.”
“But what happens if it continues to feed?”
“Every soul makes it stronger. It will kill and kill and kill again, and no one knows to what end. Maybe it is significant that it has always been the most active during the bloodiest events in human history. Do those periods of history awaken it … or does it cause them? I have no idea. But it has to be stopped Mr. Frazer, and only you or I can do that…”
As Frazer watched, the eyes in the mirror closed as the voice faded. He swiveled around in the leather seat … and discovered that there was no one in the back of the car.
55
WITH INFINITE care, Doctor John Dee removed the cork stopper from the glass jar. Blood flowed from the glass and ran along a series of metal coils which fed it into a series of narrow branching glass tubes that were positioned directly over the seven foot tall mirror. The liquid, thick and glutinous, ran down the length of the glass.
It congealed about half way down into a sticky mess.
“It needs human blood,” Kelley remarked.
Dee nodded distractedly. Animal blood had no effect on the glass, which meant that there was some element unique to human blood which activated it. And yet his own researches into human and animal blood had shown that there were minimal differences between the two. So the difference had to be metaphysical.
In the dim and warped reflective surface, Dee saw the door behind him open and the woman approach. She was naked as usual and as she neared him, he saw the ripples of power flow down the mirror’s surface, sparked by her proximity.
“Feed it with human blood,” she whispered, her breath tickling his ear, “then it will show you wonders.”
Dee stepped back away from the mirror and put his arm around the woman. Her flesh was chill and damp.
“I’ve been walking in the gardens,” she explained before he could ask the question.
“The villagers and staff will think you’re a witch,” he said softly.
“Do they not already think you are a witch?” she murmured.
Dee bowed in acknowledgement. Some weeks ago he had finally persuaded the woman to move to his home at Mortlake on the outskirts of London. She had travelled in the dead of night, bringing the mirror with her. The huge slab of glass was carefully swathed in sacking, packed between sacks of feathers and strips of leather. It had taken six strong men to maneuver it up the narrow winding stairs to Dee’s own study at the top of the house.
Since then he had experimented endlessly with it, attempting to recreate the fleeting images he had glimpsed on that first occasion.
And with little success.
The mirror became active in the woman’s presence, he knew that. And she was the most exciting,
the most erotic women he had ever encountered. Perhaps it was her natural magic firing his lusts, or perhaps it was simply that she rarely dressed, and usually wore little more than a cloak to cover her nakedness. At times he ached for her, and yet, despite Kelley’s assurances that she desired him, she had shown no signs of it. She touched him often, pressed herself against him, crowded him, but never with anything other than seemingly innocent intent.
And he still didn’t know her name.
He had asked for her name countless times, but all she would say was that when there was a time for names, he would know hers.
The only other way to activate the mirror was to use human blood. He had experimented with animal bloods and found them to be useless: in fact, they were worse than useless because they befouled the surface of the glass, clinging to the sticky black grit that covered the face of the mirror and were difficult to remove, but he was still reluctant to take that final step of smearing the glass with human blood. It smacked too much of witchcraft, and he was not a witch: he was a scientist.
The problem was that he had mentioned to the queen that he was in possession of a scrying glass of extraordinary powers, and she had pointed out to him the obvious potential for observing England’s enemies. He cursed himself now; he had never been so indiscreet before. Now, she was beginning to put pressure on him to produce results … and he knew from experience that her patience was not limitless and that often the favorite of today was the villain of tomorrow.
He needed to be able to show something to the queen.
John Dee looked over his shoulder at Edward Kelley. “Can we get some human blood?”
“My lord, in London, one can buy anything.”
“Pure blood,” the woman murmured. “Neither diseased nor tainted, preferably the blood of a virgin or a child.”
Kelley nodded again, bowing this time to hide the smile that twisted his thin lips. He had coached the woman well, but she was also a natural actress. And this was the role of a lifetime. If this was successful, then her reward would be great indeed.
* * *
THIS TIME THE blood had an immediate effect.
John Dee stood three feet away from the mirror, the woman standing at his left shoulder, Kelley in the background, while the blood slowly flowed down the length of the glass, slicing through the grime to leave long sparkling clean ovals in its wake. For the first time, Dee saw himself clearly in the mirror, tall and thin, gray-haired, great-bearded, the voluptuous raven-haired woman standing behind him, Kelley standing off to one side.
And then the glass clouded.
The gray-haired, gray-bearded image in the mirror had been replaced by a tall dark-haired man, with sharper, harder features than Dee’s. His short goatee beard was jet black. Standing beside him was a young woman, ragged, dirty, no more than a child … except for her eyes, which were cold and cunning. Behind them stood a tall, gangling youth, with a shock of fiery red hair, his head bent, his eyes squeezed shut in what looked like fear.
Dee turned slowly, beginning to realize what he was seeing. He looked from Kelley to the woman and then back to the glass … these images were from the past, this was Kelley, the woman, and himself as youths, decades ago.
But the image had changed. The glass clouded, and strange images, blood and fire, the flash of a knife blade descending, arising bloodied, writhed across the glass. Now it no longer reflected, it showed …
Dee: naked and aroused, sitting in a chair while the woman made love to him with extraordinary abandon.
The woman: naked, though now her belly had swelled and her breasts were full, the nipples dark. Dee was standing behind her, his hands on her shoulders.
Doctor John Dee started forward, trying to make sense out of what he was seeing: was this the future definite or the future possible?
The woman: lying on the ground, her legs spread wide, her body sheened with sweat, her head thrown back. A bloody head appearing between her legs, and then Dee reaching in and drawing out a girl child, raising her high as if in triumph or offering.
Dee looked at the woman by his side, saw that she too was staring intently at the glass. He glanced back over his shoulder, but Kelley was crumpled on the ground, his head buried in his hands, obviously terrified by the pictures flowing across the glass.
A child: perhaps four or five years old, naked, with hair flowing down to the base of her spine. Her hands were raised high above her head and were visibly glowing with twisting energies. She straightened, dropping her hands, pressing downwards with her palms, and then she shifted, rising upwards …
Dee looked at the woman and she turned her large dark eyes on him. The girl had the woman’s eyes and Dee’s long face. He gripped her shoulder, ignoring the mirror in his excitement. “It is our child. The child of a new generation of man—a race in tune with the natural magic of the universe.”
The woman smiled. “It is our destiny.” She turned to point at the glass. “Watch,” she whispered.
There were new images on the glass, images of blood and fire and a face. Wavering, indistinct, the face assumed a demonic cast, teeth drawn back from stained teeth, curling black hair spiked with grease, eyes wide and staring. He was dressed entirely in black with a broad ruff stained with blood and the knife in his hand was thick with gore.
“An evil man,” the woman whispered, “who brings evil to the queen.”
“It’s Essex,” Dee whispered. “but it cannot be, he is one of her most loyal subjects.”
“But ambitious?” the woman suggested.
“Ambitious,” Dee agreed.
“He should be taken away from the queen,” she said softly.
Dee nodded his head in silent agreement. He turned abruptly from the mirror and almost stumbled over Kelley who was still crouched on the ground, his head buried in his hands, his face screwed up in terror, tears on his cheeks. He had bitten through his lips and the blood had run down his chin. Dee kicked at him, cursed him for a coward, and staggered from the room.
As soon as the door closed, Edward Kelley rolled over onto his back, a broad smile on his lips.
“Well?” the woman asked.
“You were magnificent,” Kelley said. “I might almost say possessed,” he added with a smile.
“He’s leaving,” she said.
Kelley rolled to his feet and joined the woman by the window. They watched the carriage sway across the rutted track towards London. “The good doctor hurries to bring ill news to the queen,” Kelley said.
“What happened?” the woman asked, “where did the first images come from, those of Dee and me and you, too, I think, many years ago.”
“That was before I could take control of the images,” he muttered, rubbing the palm of his hand to his head. He had a pounding headache—the effort of projecting the images onto the mirror had been agony, and what Dee had taken for cowardice and an expression of fear, had been intense concentration and effort.
He had lost control of the mirror at a couple of points, when it had shown the blood and fire, but in the main the experiment—and the gamble—had worked spectacularly. Previously he had only projected pictures onto the glass, simple images that lasted only fleetingly.
Kelley had stumbled on the process by chance. When the mirror had been in the wharfside den, he had taken an old women in off the streets on the pretext of feeding and clothing her. Instead, he had dragged her unceremoniously down before the glass and cut her throat, spraying the glass with her thin blood. The results had been disappointing. The glass had cleared for brief moments to show a few strange and terrifying images—disembodied faces howling in what looked like agony—before clouding over again. He had been standing before the glass idly wishing that he had caught the woman’s blood in a goblet of some kind and allowed it to flow more evenly down the surface of the mirror, when he had suddenly seen an image of the goblet in the glass. It had lasted no more than a heartbeat, but Kelley had been an alchemist for long enough to immediately recognize the signs. He
had dragged the lifeless body of the old woman to her feet and sliced open her ragged bodice with his knife, exposing the dirty pallid flesh. He had cut through the empty dugs, and snapped the ribs beneath with his bare hands before finally wrenching the heart from the chest. Allowing the woman’s body to fall to the ground, he smeared the mirror with the bloody organ and then stepped away, the remnants of the heart still clutched in his left hand, the knife in his right. He looked down at the knife, and then brought it up before his face, looking closely at it, concentrating on the triangular Italian blade, the plain wire wrapped hilt.
And then he allowed the knife to fall to the floor.
But the image remained in the mirror.
He stared at it for five pounding heartbeats until the smeared blood dried on the glass and flaked away and the image faded.
But by then Kelley knew that he could project images onto the glass with his mind.
He thought the plan to remove Essex was his master stroke. With the queen’s favorite out of the way, she would obviously come to rely more and more on people like Dee for advice and guidance, and Dee was malleable.
Edward Kelley threw back his head and laughed aloud, even though the sound pounded through his skull, threatening to split it. Everything was coming together nicely.
And once they had Dee’s child and had sacrificed it to the mirror then everything would be complete.
The trap was baited.
56
THE TRAP had been baited.
With images that preyed on the fears of the humankind, it had successfully survived through the Dark Times, and the times of Imprisonment.
It had come close on occasion to escaping, to shucking off this crystal shell, but it had always been thwarted.
Mirror Image Page 19
