by Brian Knight
“Penny!”
Zoe stumbled back a step, thinking of the wand tucked in her backpack somewhere behind her, but she could not turn. Her eyes were pinned helplessly on the monstrosity reaching up along the partially open door.
The Birdman’s clawed fingers grasped the door chain and ripped it free of door and wall.
The door crashed open, affording Zoe with a full view of the room on the other side, the room where no room should be, and she remembered it from their expedition the previous day. It was one of the locked and secret rooms in the House of Mirrors that Penny had viewed through a keyhole and later described to Zoe. The room that was too large to fit inside the trailer.
One of the tapestries fluttered, and she saw the kids lying on the floor behind it, stretched out in the relaxed poses of the deeply sleeping. Not just the four kids whose disappearance had caused such a panic in Dogwood, but a dozen or more, laid out side by side.
“Penny, help!”
Zoe heard Penny’s answering shout, too far away.
The Birdman rushed forward, snapping its beak at her, its eyes fixed on hers.
She tried to look away, but could not. Even as the room around her began to fade and she felt her knees buckle, her neck craned and her eyes stayed on his. She heard the thump of her body against the hard wood floor of the living room, but the expected pain did not come. Her whole body was numb.
The gray fog became darkness, but it was not yet the darkness of unconsciousness. It was the darkness of huge black-feathered wings unfolding over her.
Penny was pulling her pajama top over her head when Zoe screamed from below.
“Zoe?”
She heard the front door crash open, then Zoe’s wordless shriek.
She ran for the open trapdoor from her attic bedroom to the hallway below, still struggling to pull her shirt down. She tottered over the edge for a moment, trying to free her hands from the leather chord and the Phoenix Key hanging around her neck. Now that they kept the book locked inside the trunk while they were away, Penny never went anywhere without the key. By the time she’d untangled herself and started down the sliding stairs, Zoe’s cries had regressed to mere babble, like the frightened half-talk of someone caught in a horrible dream.
Penny pounded down the upstairs hallway, bare feet slapping the floor painfully, and slid to a stop at the landing, grabbing hold of the handrail leading down the stairs.
There, she saw what she had feared.
The Birdman darted through the open front door, wings twitching and flaring up as if it wanted to fly away and had to restrain itself. Zoe hung from one of his arms, her sneaker-clad feet dragging on the floor and bumping over the threshold.
“No!”
The Birdman turned its horrible head and looked back at her over one shoulder. “I’ll come back for you.” Its voice was a high-pitched squawk, the voice of a trained parrot turned mean.
One clawed hand reached behind it and gripped the door, and before it swung shut Penny saw the room beyond, the room that shouldn’t have been there at all: walls with fluttering red tapestries and a stone table supporting perhaps a hundred flickering candles. On the far side of the strange room, standing before a stone wall that looked natural rather than man-made, was a door with an inscribed brass knob and key plate.
This was the room she’d spied through a keyhole in the House of Mirrors.
She scrambled down the steps and lunged for her front door, but it slammed shut before she could reach it.
When Penny opened it again, there was only the dark of night and a slightly overgrown yard beyond the front porch.
In a flash of intuition, Penny understood the business with the doors. The door in the hollow, how it had come to be there, and why. The strange doors in the House of Mirrors, and how the rooms glimpsed on the other side of them seemed too large to be contained in a simple trailer. She understood Zoe’s story about her first encounter with The Birdman, who had seemed to materialize inside her closet, and she understood why it hadn’t come for her.
There were no upright doors in her room for him to come through, just the small trapdoor in the floor.
Penny ran to Zoe’s backpack and spilled its contents onto the floor. She plucked her wand from the pile, and the small mirror lying next to it, and ran back to the front door. Still dressed in her pajamas, she slipped on her shoes, bolted outside, and ran through the dark. Half convinced The Birdman would drop from the sky at any moment to bear her away, she ran with all her speed toward Aurora Hollow.
She had no doubt The Birdman would come for her, and probably soon. When he did, she wanted to face him on her own terms, and at the door of her choosing.
As summer in Dogwood glided into fall, the winds that often swept the town intensified and grew cold teeth.
Penny beat her frantic pace over the high field to the hollow, and the wind gusted up stronger, pushing at her back as if it wanted to pick her up and throw her into the clearing. She stumbled, almost fell, saw the treetops emerging from the creek canyon, and skidded to a halt at the edge. The wind gusted again, threatening to push her over, then it stilled.
Penny half slid, half ran down the crumbling trail, brandishing her wand before she even hit the bottom. Flames exploded from the stone ring, rising a dozen feet into the air, licking at a few stray boughs, then dropped down to a normal level.
Penny ran past the fire, stopped in front of the door, and faced it.
The Birdman would come soon, and Penny only hoped she could handle him alone when he did.
But what if she didn’t have to face him alone?
She closed her eyes and conjured up the image of Tovar, her father, red hair standing like frozen flames above his narrow and freckled face, smiling up at her from the mirror.
When she opened them again, she stared down into the mirror and said, “Father.”
For a few seconds her own reflection stared back up at her. Then, like last time, her image faded in a fog, and Tovar’s face appeared in its place. Like last time, he seemed surprised to see her, but his shock quickly changed to one of curious amusement.
“I need your help,” Penny said, not sure if he could hear her or not, but knowing she had to try.
When the amusement dropped from his features, his eyebrows, red as his hair, red as hers, lifted in surprise.
“Can you come here?” Penny asked.
He watched her for a few more seconds, then nodded. His voice sounded through the mirror, muted, but clear. “Yes, little lady. I’m on my way.”
His image darkened, faded, vanished.
A metallic click drew Penny’s eyes up to the door, and she watched the knob turn, then, with a squall of rusted hinges, it swung open and Tovar The Red stepped through into Aurora Hollow. A cloak hung over his broad shoulders hiding his arms, the hem drifting down to his scuffed boots. Light from the open doorway behind him outlined him like an aura.
She saw him standing there, only a few feet away, and a jumble of emotions too complex to sort out swept her current worries away. She forgot about Zoe. She forgot about The Birdman. She forgot about Susan, who would return home soon to find the front door standing open, the lock chain torn loose, and both the girls gone. She could not speak. She couldn’t even move.
“Never in my life,” Tovar said, his voice colored by the same unidentifiable accent as Ronan’s, “would I have expected to face you here, like this. There were rumors…”
His voice broke off, and he looked at her, his eyes, green like hers, narrowed a little. “What is your name?”
For a moment, Penny couldn’t answer him, and when she did find her voice, it was dry, and almost as rusty as the hinges of the door.
“Penny,” she said, and her paralysis broke.
She rushed forward then, wand clutched and forgotten in one hand, the mirror in the other, and threw her arms around him.
Tovar did not return the embrace, only stood stiffly looking down at her, his fiery eyebrows arched in mild surprise.
Standing there, with her arms thrown around the man she had just called father, she looked into the open doorway, and felt herself go cold, as if her blood had turned to ice water.
She looked through the door and into a hallway, one she had explored with Zoe the day before. It was a narrow hallway lined with doors, and she was looking in through one of them.
She released him and stepped away. She was once again aware of the wand in her hand, held at her side. She lifted it, pointing it at him.
“Who are you?”
Tovar’s mild surprise bloomed into a good-humored grin.
“Little Princess Penny,” he said in a singsong voice. “How have I vexed thee so?”
“Are you my father?” Her voice rose to a near shout, and the wand began to shake in her hand.
Tovar regarded her, regarded the shaking wand in her hand, and his good humor departed.
“It was a fine fantasy while it lasted, wasn’t it, young Penny?”
She saw something shift under his cloak, and shouted. “Don’t move!”
The rustling beneath his cloak stopped, but the expression on his face was supremely unconcerned. “A challenge, is it? Very good! Playing the part of the benign entertainer was getting old.”
His cloak flew out behind him, as if thrown by a strong breeze, though there was none. Beneath it, he wore his simple white shirt, only half buttoned. A key swung from a chain around his neck.
Before she could react, his wand was up, pointing at her.
There was no time to throw a spell, so she dove to the side. Something that looked like a ghostly red skull flew past her. It smashed into the tree behind where she had stood, and she watched as its trunk withered and cracked, its limbs drooped, some snapping under their own weight, and its leaves grayed and fell to dust.
“No, not wise at all, I suppose,” Tovar said, as if he’d just been scolded. “They’ll want you alive. Yes, I think they’ll be very interested in you, young Penny.”
Tovar muttered something in a language too strange to comprehend, and a purple fog rushed from the tip of his wand, shifting form—a giant purple bird, a vaguely human form with outstretched arms, a shapeless, vaporous blob—as it moved through the air toward her.
Raising her wand from where she lay on the ground, Penny used the first spell that came to mind. She conjured a wind, focusing it on the approaching purple mass, forcing it back toward Tovar.
Tovar merely grinned wider at her through the poisonous‐looking purple fog, unconcerned. When the fog had retreated to within a foot of him, he touched his wand tip to it, and it flashed like a flame and sizzled away to nothing.
“You do know a thing or two,” he said, and laughed. “This is going to be fun.”
His grin vanished when Penny sent a half-dozen burning red sparks at him. He waved his wand in a quick circle before him, and her sparks exploded into flames against an invisible shield.
Penny staggered to her feet, raising her wand again and waiting for the flames to clear. When they did, and the distorting shimmer of the shield he’d placed in front of himself faded, his good humor was gone. The expression on his face was something like anger. Before anger though, Penny thought she’d seen surprise. Maybe even uncertainty.
“You’re not that good, Little Red,” he said, and sent a glowing arch of blue lightning at her.
The first fork missed her, striking the dead tree to her left. The second fork struck her in the chest, lifting her off her feet even as it sent bright pain through every part of her body.
A moment later, she hit the ground on her back, her clenched jaw jerking open in a scream of pain. She could feel randomly twitching muscles, could see her hair dancing as the last few stray volts left her.
Penny rolled onto her side, tried to push herself up, but her trembling arms would not support her weight. She dropped to the ground again, tears of pain and frustration making tracks across her dusty cheek. She tried to push herself again, and only succeeded in freeing her trapped right arm.
She watched Tovar’s booted feet approach her, tried to turn her head to face him, but could not. She tried lifting her wand, but her arm only twitched uselessly in the dirt.
Then he stood over her, and when he spoke, the good humor had left his voice too.
“You have guts, I’ll give you that, but The Phoenix Girls never did know when to quit, and I can see you’re following in their footsteps.”
He took a final step forward, close enough for her to reach out and touch him were she able to lift her arms. She did manage to turn her face up to his. “What do you know about The Phoenix Girls?”
“I know more than you’d believe, little Phoenix Girl,” he said with some of his old humor, good-natured on the surface, but with a thread of cruelty she’d missed before. Mostly it shone out through his eyes. Those green eyes.
So much like her own.
“But you didn’t call me here to talk about that troublesome band of witches, did you? No, I believe you are curious about your father.” He placed his hands on his hips and laughed.
“What do you know about my father?” Though her traitor muscles still trembled and twitched, she had enough strength to yell.
“Again,” he said, “more than you would believe. I suppose I can tell you enough to whet your curiosity at least. I could tell you everything, but where’s the fun in that? I like to leave people guessing.”
He crouched down then, and Penny noted the wand in his hand, pointed downward and slightly behind him. He leaned in close to her, and his smile faded.
“Where your father is now, there is no coming back from.”
This time when Penny tried to move her arm, it did cooperate. She thrust the tip of her wand up into his chest, and sent her spell at him with every ounce of fury she possessed.
There was a crack as loud as a pistol shot, and Tovar flew backward through the air, a small charred hole in his shirt where her wand had touched, leaving a fine tendril of smoke wafting upward. Sparks danced across the ends of his flame-like hair, between his fingertips, arched between his boots.
She saw the wand fall from his hand even as he flew through the open door into the secret hallway of the House of Mirrors, and she lunged for it. Her movements were still slow, jerky, but she reached the black wand, clutched it with her free hand, and rose on quivering legs.
Tovar lay, still as death, on the other side of the door.
Not dead, she thought, just knocked out.
Somewhere past him, on the other side of that open door, The Birdman held Zoe prisoner. Zoe and the other kids, she had no doubt.
Before she stepped through, she raised her wand and forced the hinge bolts out of their rusty sleeves. They fell to the dirt, and then the door itself tipped over, crashing to the ground in a puff of dust and leaves.
If she was going to go through that door, she wanted to make sure it would be open when she and Zoe came back.
If she and Zoe came back.
Taking a deep, steadying breath, Penny crossed the threshold from the hollow into The Birdman’s lair.
Chapter 19
Flight of The Birdman
Penny considered the doors around her, then turned back to the one she’d just come through. Second on the right coming in from the emergency exit, the one Zoe had spied trees behind when she’d looked through the keyhole.
She’d seen her reflection in the first one. A mirror, but what kind of mirror?
Zoe and the rest of the kids were behind one of these doors, she was certain of it.
Now, how to open them?
Penny turned back to Tovar, still lying sprawled out next to the open door, and spied the golden glint of a chain around his neck. She stuck his black wand into the waistband of her pajamas, pointed hers at him, giving it a quick come to me flick.
Tovar’s key, smaller than her Phoenix Key, old and tarnished, slipped from underneath his cloak, pulling the chain tight as it tried to fly to her. Another flick of her wand and the chain q
uivered, tightened, then snapped. It flew into the palm of her waiting hand.
“Gotcha!” Penny jammed the key into the closest keyhole, twisted it, and resisted the urge to cheer when the lock clicked.
She twisted the doorknob and pushed it open. A quick scan revealed a large and empty room furnished with antique-looking furniture, every wall draped with scarlet tapestries.
Next, and more out of a wild, irresistible curiosity than any real hope of finding anything, Penny opened the door behind which Zoe had seen her reflection. There was no room behind that one, but a mirror standing the length and depth of the opening. This mirror had a wet, swimmy look to it, as if it were made of a sheet of standing water rather than glass. Penny found herself wanting to reach out and touch it, and forced her hand back to her side.
The next door opened on a room not much larger than a closet, and after a moment she realized that’s exactly what it was. Through rows of hanging robes, every color from scarlet, to green, to black, she spotted another door. She pushed her way through and grasped the plain brass doorknob. The door was unlocked, but opened on nothing.
As Penny turned to leave, she regarded the rows of hanging robes. After a brief hesitation, she riffled through them. It wouldn’t be good for the other kids to recognize her if she did manage to find them. She found a red one. It was a little too large for her, but it would have to do. On her way through, she grabbed a green one that looked about Zoe’s size and stuffed it into one of her robe’s oversized pockets.
She opened other doors at random; one opened on what she thought was the inside of a cargo trailer stuffed with dismantled bleachers, a stage, and other props from Tovar’s show. She realized she was looking out through the open door of the giant safe.
The next two doors opened on nothing at all, just black, open space that seemed to vibrate a faint, discordant hum. These she slammed shut, not liking that hum or the possible horrors such an endless black space might hold.
The next door opened on a cavern, furnished with more of the hanging scarlet tapestries and a stone table covered with flickering candles, giving it the appearance of a secret, underground office—a place where unspeakable business is done and horrible deals made.
