by Brian Knight
There was a door at the far end, standing feet away from a wall of solid stone. A large oval mirror hung on the front of the door, a mirror that at first glance appeared to be too filthy to reflect. As she ran toward it, Penny realized it was not filth, but a gray fog swirling in the interior.
Flickering candlelight glinted off something lying on the floor beside the door. A chain, Penny saw as she neared it. When she bent to examine it closer, she saw it was the lock chain from her own front door.
This is where he came through. This is where he brought Zoe!
This door had a plain doorknob, and there was nothing beyond it when she opened it but the room’s stone wall.
The engraved doorknobs always go to the same place, she thought. The ordinary doors go where you want.
If she only knew how.
It didn’t matter. She had to find Zoe.
Penny scanned the cavern again and saw no one. No sign at all that anyone might still be there. Just as she was ready to leave the cavern behind and search the next door, a faint ripple ran across a small section of tapestry to her left. Briefly, through a part in the curtain, she saw the cavern extended past that portion of tapestry.
Penny ran to it, very aware of how long this was taking. Also very aware that Tovar would awaken soon and come for her, and that The Birdman, who had not shown himself yet, could be anywhere.
Maybe even behind this, Penny thought, and hesitated with a fold of the hanging cloth bunched in her fist. Feeling equal parts hope and fear, Penny at last yanked the tapestry aside, tearing it from the wall.
She found Zoe behind it, and for a moment, all thought drowned in the certainty that she was too late. Zoe, her best friend, was dead.
The cold hand that seemed to have gripped her heart slowly loosened. Not dead, she realized with a rush of relief. Only sleeping.
Stretched out across the dirt‐ and pebble-strewn ground as comfortable as a baby in a crib, and sleeping.
Beside Zoe, and around her, other kids also slept—and not just the four from Dogwood. Some Penny recognized, but most she didn’t.
A loud snort from a boy nearby made her jump.
Penny ran to Zoe, knelt beside her, and gave her shoulder a shake.
“Zoe, wake up.”
She knew it wouldn’t work. The Birdman had put them into some kind of enchanted sleep only he would be able to break.
It did work.
Zoe’s eyes popped open, and she seemed on the verge of screaming until she focused on Penny’s face.
Resisting the urge to throw her arms around her friend, to shout with relief, Penny said, “Shhh, be quiet.”
She pointed all around them, and Zoe followed her finger, seeing the others sprawled across the cavern floor.
“Put this on. Hide your face,” Penny said, handing her the green robe.
For a moment Zoe only goggled, then she nodded, stood, and slipped the robe on. When it settled over her shoulders, she pulled the hood over her head.
Penny pressed Tovar’s black wand into Zoe’s hand and said, “We have to get them out of here, and quickly, before The Birdman comes back.”
Zoe gaped at the wand in her hand, then faced Penny. “How?”
Penny pointed toward the open door back into the House of Mirrors trailer.
Zoe looked through, her eyes growing wider by the second. Then the look of disorientation left her face and she nodded.
They realized quickly that it was an enchanted sleep. The Harvest Day parade could have proceeded through the cavern full volume and they wouldn’t have awakened. The key to breaking the enchantment was a simple one though.
“Katie,” Penny whispered, grabbing Katie West’s shoulder as she did so, and the girl’s eyes flew open at the sound of her name. Penny was sure Katie had seen her face beneath her hood before she had backed away, and could only hope she wouldn’t blab later.
Zoe had already awakened the other three town kids, but the others remained deaf to them.
“We’re going to have to carry them,” Zoe said.
Penny groaned, then nodded.
Penny went out first, peering cautiously through the open door, first one way, then the other, to see who might be waiting for them.
No one was waiting for them, but she was far from relieved.
Tovar was gone. He had awakened and escaped. Or maybe his feathery friend had carried him away. Someone had closed the mirror door, and Penny could almost picture Tovar walking through it, the reflective surface parting around his shape to admit him, then closing when he was through.
She had no doubt at all he was somewhere close, maybe hiding, but most likely watching and waiting.
There was nothing to do but go forward though, so she motioned to Zoe and Katie, who got the others moving in her direction.
Penny moved into the hallway, half carrying, half dragging the youngest of the sleeping kids, a girl a few years younger than she was, but only a little smaller. She moved slowly and kept her wand pointed ahead, just in case. Katie followed her, struggling under the weight of another sleeping kid slung over her shoulder. The oldest girl, the one who’d sprouted flowers during Tovar’s first show, carried one of the young twins from Auburn over each shoulder. The boy followed her, moving easily under his cargo. Zoe was last, grunting under the dead weight of a sleeping boy, her wand also out and ready to use.
The door at the end of the hall, the one that led nowhere but outside, was locked, and Tovar’s key didn’t fit it.
Penny cursed under her breath and stepped away from the door. She’d hoped to avoid this, but she wasn’t strong enough to break the door down, so she had no choice.
Holding her wand so the others could not easily see it, she pointed it at the door and blasted it open.
The sound was like a gunshot in the enclosed corridor, eliciting shocked cries from behind her. The door buckled and flew off its hinges, landing with a muffled crash outside.
The view beyond the door was perhaps the sweetest sight Penny had ever seen, the dark green of moonlit grass and the lazily moving water of the river.
Penny led them around the House of Mirrors and through the deserted park, winding through the games, rides, and booths until she reached the tree at the edge of the park, the one she’d seen Zoe reading under on her first trip into town. She dropped to the grass, relieving herself of the sleeping girl’s weight.
When they had all arrived, Katie opened her mouth to speak.
Penny shook her head and put a finger to her lips. “Don’t tell anyone.”
Disguising her voice as well as she could, Penny pointed at Katie. “Go to the Sheriff’s Office and tell them to come back here.”
Penny turned to the oldest girl and the boy, startling them back a step. “You two stay here and wait.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Zoe whispered, and Penny nodded.
They ran back to the House of Mirrors, jumped the back fence, and sprinted through the blasted back door.
Zoe stopped at the open door to the hollow, but Penny restrained her, grabbing the back of her robe.
“We can’t yet.”
“What?”
“They,” Penny paused for a second, not wanting to say the name, but knowing she had to. “Tovar and The Birdman used the mirrors to find people. They use these doors to kidnap them and get away.”
Zoe nodded. “Okay then. Let’s make sure they can’t use them again.”
Little as either wanted to, they made their way back to the cavern door.
“That’s the one,” Penny said, pointing to the big oval mirror on the door. “He used it to look through our little mirrors to find us.” She stepped through, back into the cavern, and ran to the door. Zoe followed, and when Penny bent down to pick up the door chain to her front door, Zoe nodded.
“Yeah,” Zoe said, and moved in front of the door, turning to view the cavern from this new perspective. “This is the room I saw when he took me.”
Penny dropped the door chain into h
er robe’s pocket, stepping back from Zoe’s raised wand.
After a few moments Zoe lowered her wand, frowning. “It’s not working.”
Penny raised hers, pointing it at the mirror, preparing to shatter it into a million glittering pieces.
Her wand would not respond. There was not even the fizzle or pop that usually meant she wasn’t focused enough.
After a moment’s debate, she grabbed the oval mirror and lifted it from its hook on the door. Carrying it under one arm, she followed Zoe through the cavern door.
“What now?” Penny wondered aloud.
Zoe considered the question for a moment, then she raised the black wand, pointed it toward the dead end of the corridor, where it led deeper into the House of Mirrors, and when she tried the black wand again, it did work. She sent a fat, boiling fireball flying down the hallway. A second later the hallway was in flames, and they ran toward the exit. The flames followed them, rolling across the floor like a wave.
Penny slid to a stop short of the exit and grabbed Zoe’s sleeve, yanking her to a stop.
“What are you doing?” Zoe almost screamed.
“Through there,” Penny said, pointing through the open doorway into the hollow.
They rushed through, and as Penny’s feet hit the ground on the other side, elation lit her from within.
“We did it!”
Elation quickly gave way to panic as flames licked the empty doorframe, dancing through and reaching toward the lower boughs of the willows like the merry tongue of a demon.
Zoe shouted in shock, then frustration. “Where’s the door?”
A second later, she spotted it and bent down, dropping Tovar’s wand and digging her fingers into the dirt under its edge. She struggled with it, lifting her end several inches off the ground.
Penny helped by lifting it with her wand, and Zoe guided it back into the frame.
“Hold it!” Penny dropped to her knees in front of the door, searching for the hinge pins.
“Hurry up. It’s getting too hot!”
Penny found the first, then the second a few inches away, and scrambled to the door on her hands and knees. She shot the first bolt into the bottom hinge, but was too short to reach the top.
Zoe snatched it from her hand and pushed it into the top hinge from the bottom. She shoved the door shut, and when the latch tongue clicked in place, the door began to cool almost at once. The orange glow of flames licking between the top of the door and the frame winked out.
Zoe did not relax with the closing of the strange door, but snatched the black wand from the ground and retreated a few steps. “He can still come through.”
“No, he can’t,” Penny said, and when Zoe turned to regard her, she pulled his key from her pocket. “He needs this.”
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure,” Penny said.
“Very well done, young ladies,” said a voice from the trees. “I would indeed need that key to come back through. Luckily for me, I’m already here.”
Penny and Zoe turned in unison to the sound of Tovar’s voice, both raising their wands. They fired identical spells at the red magician, but before either could reach him, giant black wings spread from his shoulders, pushing his cloak out behind him. He crouched and leapt, his wings pumping the air, and shot straight up through the trees.
Their spells passed below his feet, blasting leaves from the hanging willow limbs.
“Where’d he go?” Zoe spun in a circle, searching.
“I don’t know!” Penny searched the sky above them, saw a dark shape pass across the moon, then lost track of it.
They both screamed when something crashed through the green canopy over their heads. A moment later, one of Tovar’s boots landed in the dirt between them.
They both stared at it.
Tovar dropped from the night sky screaming, and Penny saw his feet, bootless bird’s talons, clenching and unclenching on empty air before one of them grabbed the back of Zoe’s shirt and the other snatched the wand from her hand.
Zoe shrieked as Tovar rocketed upward through the overhead boughs, then dropped her, and before Penny could even think to raise her wand to help, Tovar, The Birdman, plummeted downward again. He caught Zoe a bare moment before she would have crashed to the ground, pinning her against him, a human shield, and pointed his recovered wand at Penny.
Penny did not lower hers. If she did Tovar would capture her too, and any chance they had to escape him would be gone.
“You have been a lot of trouble, you little red monster! It’s a familial trait, like your father’s red hair, and those pretty green eyes.” Tovar’s face broke into a wide, handsome smile of good humor, but Penny knew that face was a lie, an illusion.
“You don’t know anything about my father! Let her go,” she shouted, taking a step forward, holding her wand steady. She did not attack though, as much as she wanted to. She was afraid she’d hit Zoe.
Tovar broke into gales of artless, honest laughter, the laughter of a man with some inside joke he’s bursting to share. “I know much. Much more than you, anyway. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever met a person so ignorant of their own history and heritage.”
“I don’t believe you!” She did though. She couldn’t help but believe him.
Tovar shrugged, a grotesque gesture that sent his wings fluttering.
“Your belief or disbelief matters not a bit. But if you require proof, you could always ask the woman you called mother when you meet her in the next life.”
He winked at her, and Penny found herself wanting nothing more than to blast that smile off his face.
“The woman who called herself Diana Sinclair was not who she claimed to be. I’m not altogether sure she knew who she was anymore.”
The smile faded from his face, and he fixed her with his cold green eyes. Not his real eyes, only part of the mask he wore, but his real eyes would be just as cold.
“However, you’ll have all the answers you could hope for on the other side. I’ll not return empty-handed.”
He twitched his wand upward, and Penny felt her own try to leap from her hand. She tightened her grip on it, using both hands to keep it from flying away. The force pulling it strengthened for a moment as Tovar pulled his wand upward, then disappeared as he relented.
Penny sent a blast of air at him, throwing his cloak out behind him like a black flag, catching his unfurled wings and throwing him off balance before he could tuck them back at his sides.
Tovar laughed. “Is that all you’ve got, little one?” He gave his wand a minute wave, a tight little circle.
The world seemed to twist in Penny’s vision, and a wave of nausea crashed down on her. Her knees came unhinged, and the pain that shot up her legs as they hit the hard, stony earth seemed unimportant in the face of the terror and confusion that suddenly held her. The earth itself tried to buck her off, and she fell face first to the ground, digging her fingers into the dirt as the world twisted, rolled, and tried to send her tumbling in all directions at once. All sense of balance, of up and down deserted her. Earth and sky swapped places, and she felt gravity itself rejecting her.
The sound of Tovar’s laughter pierced her terror like a needle, and a sudden, growing anger gave her a fraction of her focus back. She turned her face up, fighting a renewed nausea, and saw Tovar tracing complex patterns in the air before him. He finished with a sharp downward slash of his wand, and a bright purple line appeared in front of him.
It crackled, buzzed, glowed brighter, and opened like a vertical mouth in the air. Through it, Tovar and Zoe’s shapes were dim, almost not there at all.
Penny pushed herself up with trembling hands, could not quite gain her feet, and so knelt before the stretching, widening crack in reality, balancing herself on one hand and raising her wand with the other.
“Run, Penny,” Zoe cried, struggling fruitlessly against the arm pinning her to Tovar’s chest.
Tovar turned his attention back to Penny.
�
�They’ll want you alive, I suppose, but I don’t think they’ll care if you’re damaged,” and with a snarl, he brandished his wand at her.
Without thinking, Penny forced her wand up, and parried his spell with one of her own.
The shield shimmered between them for only a few seconds before her concentration broke and she spilled back to the dirt, but it was long enough. Penny saw his spell fly toward her, shining and opalescent in the firelight. It struck her shield, bowing it in as if determined to break through, then rebounded back on him.
The spell hit Tovar in the face, snapping his head back, knocking the wand from his raised hand, and she saw smoke rise from the singed and reddening skin of his hand.
His face, the false face of Tovar The Red, sizzled and burned away, and the dark, slick feathers and snapping beak of his true face appeared.
Tovar screeched, the cry of a wounded monster bird, and lunged for the doorway he’d drawn, dragging Zoe behind him.
Zoe punched, clawed, kicked, but could not break his hold.
“No,” Penny said, clawing the ground to drag herself forward, still held in the clammy grip of vertigo and nausea.
The sound of a low growl, something with a throat full of rage, drew her attention, making her skin prickle with a fresh wave of fear.
Then she saw him, crouched in his hole on the other side of the creek. His red fur bushed up, his snout wrinkled up to show snarling rows of sharp little teeth.
“Let go of her you dirty crow,” Ronan growled, and leapt across the water. He rebounded off the trunk of the tree at the water’s edge and flew at Tovar, scrambling up the smoldering black cape, sinking his teeth into the back of the monster’s neck.
Screeching in fresh pain, Tovar released Zoe and clawed at Ronan, catching him by his bushed out hackles, and threw him.
Before Penny’s chin hit the ground and she lost consciousness, she saw Zoe shove Tovar toward that glowing fissure he’d drawn between them.
Tovar The Red, The Birdman, tumbled through it, his screams fading like the scream of something falling down a long well.
