Darwen Arkwright and the School of Shadows

by A. J. Hartley

  “Those trees,” Rich mused. “How old do you think they are? How old do you think the house is?”

  Alex’s brow creased, and for once, she was silent for a moment but gave Rich a significant look.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” said Rich.

  “Pre–Civil War,” said Alex with a slow nod. “But it can’t be.”

  “What do you mean?” Darwen asked. “People lived here before the Civil War, right?”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Rich. “But when the city fell to the Union armies, Sherman ordered it evacuated, then torched half the city. This house, in this location? It’s impossible.”

  “Then we’d better go inside and see what other impossible things it has to show us,” Alex reasoned.

  They moved in silence up the broad, weedy driveway, skirting the dry fountain—Darwen had seen smaller swimming pools—and into the shade of the mansion itself.

  “Check out the watchtower,” said Darwen, gazing up at the turret with the railed balcony.

  “They call that a widow’s walk,” said Rich.

  “Not sure I like the sound of that,” said Alex.

  Slowly they climbed the steps to the porch with its screened veranda and paused over the spidery writing on the card above the bell push: Mr. Octavius Peregrine.

  “I can’t believe we didn’t know this place existed,” Darwen whispered in wonder.

  Rich tried the tarnished brass door handle and scowled when it wouldn’t turn. “Don’t suppose anyone has a key?” he said.

  Darwen shook his head, but Alex stepped forward. “Let me try something,” she said, taking hold of the handle and turning it easily, so that the door shuddered slightly and swung open with a long, ominous creak.

  “How did you do that?” Rich demanded.

  “I’m a mirroculist too, remember?” she said, though she said it simply, apparently trying not to make Rich feel bad.

  “So this is a portal?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so,” said Darwen, peering into the dim hallway with its threadbare Oriental rug and faded paintings on the walls. “Just a Silbrican locking mechanism. The house inside looks real enough.”

  “One way to find out,” said Rich, bracing himself. Being careful not to touch the other two—and thereby take advantage of their mirroculist powers—he stepped cautiously through the doorway and into the house, paused to see if anything happened, then smiled and took a deep breath. “I guess we’re in,” he said.

  What they were in was far from clear. It was, as they had gathered, a very old and very large house, but it looked unlived in, and there were no obvious signs that Mr. Peregrine had spent any time there. The hallway led to an impressively spacious foyer and a broad staircase that branched into two and climbed up to a railed landing and corridors lined with doors. The foyer walls were interpersed with life-sized stone figures of women on plinths, their hands above their heads as if they were holding up the second story.

  “Cool,” said Rich, inspecting them. “The ancient Greeks used these on their temples sometimes. They’re called caryatids. They look like decoration, but they are actually structural, like pillars.”

  Alex, who didn’t need decoration to be structural, stood on her tiptoes so she could look the nearest caryatid in the face, then she stuck her tongue out at it. “They look like Miss Harvey,” she decided. “No fun at all.”

  At first they picked their way cautiously around the first floor together, finding a formal dining room with a long, polished table, now layered with dust, then a huge kitchen complex hung with copper pans and riddled with chill, stone-flagged pantries with undersized doors. There was a circular library whose high shelves were stuffed with leather-bound books, and what they could only describe as a ballroom, vast, open, and hung with chandeliers. Upstairs they found bedroom after bedroom, though each one resembled a carefully maintained exhibit in a museum and showed no signs of recent habitation, so that after a while Darwen found that the edge to his search had dulled. Soon they took to wandering off by themselves, calling out what they stumbled upon.

  “A music room!” yelled Alex, punctuating her announcement with a few plinky notes on an out-of-tune piano.

  “Another bathroom!” returned Rich. “Even bigger than the last one!”

  Darwen took a few more steps down a long hallway, opened another door, and peered cautiously in. The first thing he saw was an ancient rocking horse, then two stuffed bears—one with an eye missing—and a wooden clown on wheels.

  A playroom, he thought, then as his eye settled on the dusty crib at one end, he revised the term and called out, “Nursery.”

  There was a long silence, but then he heard footsteps in the hall outside and Alex stepped in. “Did you say—?” she began, but her eyes drank in the room and she didn’t need to finish the sentence.

  Rich was at her heels.

  “Mr. Peregrine had kids?” he asked.

  Darwen shrugged, small and embarrassed. He didn’t know. He hadn’t asked.

  “Man,” said Alex, picking up the wooden clown. It had a bright red, slightly chipped nose and staring glass eyes. “Who would give a kid this? Nightmare central, or what?”

  Darwen shuddered as he considered it sideways, remembering the clown mask Greyling had adopted when they’d met in Costa Rica.

  “I don’t think this was his place,” said Alex. “I mean, he might have lived here, but it feels like one of those rentals where all the furniture is already there and they bill you if you leave cigarette burns in the armchairs when you leave.”

  Rich gave her a questioning look.

  “My mom used to smoke,” she explained, “and we had an apartment for a while when my parents first split up. It wasn’t bad, but my mom was terrified of scratching the coffee table or whatever ’cause the landlord was always looking for reasons to charge us extra.”

  “If this stuff was here when he moved in,” Darwen mused, “then either the house was empty for a long time or Mr. Peregrine is really old.”

  “He is pretty wrinkly,” Alex agreed. “His hands look like one of those maps with the wiggly lines that show hills and such. What do you call them?”

  “Contours,” said Rich.

  “Right,” said Alex. “Contours. His hands are like that. Just the backs. Not the palms. The palms feel like paper when he touches you.”

  And suddenly, she stopped, and the three of them, gazing at the curious room with its ancient toys, felt Mr. Peregrine’s absence in ways they hadn’t before, and a sadness passed among them.

  “It’s like we didn’t know him at all,” Darwen said finally, staring at the empty crib. “He’s gone, and we’re trying to get him back, but all we’ve found so far is that we know nothing about him.”

  “We’ve only been looking five minutes,” said Rich, taking a deliberately cheery tone. “There’s tons of the house we haven’t seen. Every room so far has been in the center.”

  “How do you know that?” asked Alex.

  “Simple,” said Rich, nodding at the walls of the nursery. “No windows.”

  “Huh,” said Alex, turning on her heel and striding out and down the hallway.

  Darwen heard her trying door handles, then closing them again, each time calling sharply, “Nope!” He and Rich went after her, Rich opening other doors as they went.

  “I’m turned around,” Darwen admitted. “Which way is the front, the side we came in?”

  Rich started to point decisively, but his face clouded, and he shrugged. They followed the corridor at a brisk walk. It turned sharply left, then right, and along the way, they passed three more rooms, including two tiny bedrooms and an ancient walk-in closet, but they saw no windows, and Darwen could tell that Rich was getting agitated.

  “Doesn’t make sense,” he was muttering. “Should have seen one by now. The house is big, but it’s not
that big.”

  “Where’s Alex?” asked Darwen.

  They had been right on her tail, but as they made the last turn of the hallway, there was neither sight nor sound of her.

  “Alex!” called Rich.

  His voice sounded unnaturally loud in the tight and dusty hallway, where it seemed no one had spoken for decades.

  “Alex!” he called again. “Don’t be fooling around now. I’m serious. Where are you?”

  But there was no sound.

  Darwen tried another door, which stuck and only yielded judderingly when he leaned his weight upon it. It opened with a high-pitched squeal, revealing a bathroom with an antique, claw-footed tub and no sign of Alex. He stepped out, dragging the door closed behind him.

  “Not in there,” he began, then caught himself and looked wildly around. “Rich?”

  But Rich was nowhere to be seen either.

  “Not funny, Rich,” he said, opting for bravado. “Come on out.”

  Nothing.

  Darwen took three hurried strides down to the next corner and rounded it, half expecting to see both of them huddled together and giggling, but there was only more of the same moth-eaten carpet and blank wooden doors. No people. No windows. No way to gauge which way he should go.

  Darwen pressed on to the next corner, the next door, behind which he found bunk beds and a nonsensically massive chandelier right in the middle of the room, then doubled back, his heart starting to race.

  He was lost, and alone.

  He tried another door and found himself on the edge of an impossibly large and empty swimming pool, lined with cracked tile. The room on the opposite side of the hall contained a huge snooker table with a polished bar at one end with high stools. When he came out, he tried finding his way back to the bathroom with the claw-footed tub, but he couldn’t remember which way he had come. There was no sign of Rich or Alex anywhere.

  Not good, he thought. Not good at all.

  He ran back around the corner to a T junction, which he was sure he’d seen earlier, but now a pair of those women statues that Rich had called caryatids stood on either side, and Darwen was certain they had not been there before. He considered them warily, studying their blank stone faces and closed eyes, while he chose which way to go. They were elegant and their stone clothes hung in finely chiseled folds, their heads bent slightly below their out-turned elbows, as if focused on the weight they were bearing, but there was something about their stillness that unnerved him. They wore belts from which hung long stone swords, and while they were only carved, they looked curiously sharp. It took him a moment to realize that though Rich had said the caryatids were structural, these two—though they had their hands above their heads like those in the lobby—weren’t actually supporting anything at all.

  This, he thought, doesn’t feel right.

  Darwen edged around them, moving to the right, and called for Rich and Alex in a loud, slightly unsteady voice. No one replied.

  There were no doors on this hallway so Darwen moved quickly until he came to a rickety-looking staircase. There was nowhere to go but back, so he began to climb, each step creaking beneath him as if he was the first person to tread on it for years. He was halfway up the square spiral when he heard something on the stairs below and behind him: a creaking footfall and a curious rustle as of fabric. Darwen stopped moving to listen, conscious that the hairs on his arms were prickling upright. When no sound drifted up to him, he took two hurried steps down and peered around the corner.

  Where there had been nothing but the angular twist of the stairwell, there was now a single caryatid. The statue was motionless, caught in the moment of climbing the stairs, her arms no longer above her head, the long, keen-looking sword now held in front of her in one elegant stone hand. Darwen gasped, staring into the blank face with its closed eyes, but it did not move and gave no sign that it had not been standing in that very position for decades. Very slowly and carefully, making as little noise as possible, he began walking backward up the stairs, his eyes locked onto the caryatid till the corner of the stairwell hid her from view. Only then did he turn to face the right way and run up the steps two at a time.

  He climbed ten, twenty steps, then stopped. In the sudden silence he heard the creak of a step below him, the familiar swish of fabric for a fraction of a second before it too fell utterly still. He took two steps down and peered around the corner, a throbbing sense of dread making his arms and legs tremble. He knew what he was going to see but couldn’t stop himself from looking.

  There, frozen mid-stride, was the caryatid, sword drawn back this time as if she was going to bring it slashing down, eyes still closed, body utterly motionless, even the material of her dress seemingly carved from solid rock.

  Darwen didn’t wait. He hurried back up the stairs, sure now that he was ascending one of the house’s towers, perhaps the tallest one, the one with the door onto the balcony. He was suddenly desperate to see outside, even if he would be too high to make his escape that way. He rounded two more corners as he climbed, his legs starting to wobble with panic. There was a door at the top. He reached out to press the latch, and as it clicked home, he heard the rustle of fabric once more, this time right behind him. He turned quickly, and there it was, inches from where he stood, the stone woman with her sword raised over her head.

  And this time, the eyes were open.

  Chapter Seven

  The Watchtower

  Whatever the rest of her was made of, the caryatid’s eyes were not stone. They were amber and alive, and fastened on him with something like fury. Darwen was momentarily spellbound, then the caryatid came to lethal life, the sword swishing savagely through the air. He leapt backward through the unlocked door as the blade sliced into the doorframe, scattering splinters.

  Darwen fell backward into the room, landing heavily on a stained hardwood floor. His eyes were locked on the figure in the doorway, which was poised to stride in and skewer him where he lay. He tried to get to his feet, but he was almost paralyzed with fear and couldn’t wrest his gaze from the stone figure with the blazing eyes.

  The caryatid straightened up, filling the doorway with her impossibly fluid stone form. Then, without warning, she turned her back on him, becoming still as a sentry as she blocked the door.

  Darwen realized he had been holding his breath. He blew it out and inhaled deeply, finally managing to scramble to his feet, his eyes never leaving the caryatid’s back. She did not move, and the sense of her being somehow on guard insisted itself to Darwen’s mind ever more sharply.

  But guarding what? Keeping others out, or keeping him in?

  Darwen moved as far back as he could, then did a quick scan of the chamber before returning his gaze to the caryatid. The room was circular, or very nearly, and there were indeed windows all the way around it. Darwen thought Rich would be relieved, though the windows did seem curiously dark. Could he have been so lost in the house that he had lost track of time and it was now after sundown? That seemed unlikely, but then everything about this place was unlikely. He turned slowly, keeping the caryatid in the edge of his vision, and risked a closer look at the nearest panes of glass. He suppressed a gasp as he realized that they were not, in fact, windows at all, but floor-to-ceiling mirrors, a dozen of them.

  No comfort for Rich after all, he mused.

  Darwen checked the caryatid again, but it was still as any statue, so he dared another look around the chamber.

  In the middle of the room was a bed with a nightstand on which stood a glass of water. The bed was the only thing he had seen in the house so far that did not look like it belonged in a museum. Yes, it was as old as everything else in the mansion, but its covers had been kicked half off, and there was a clear depression in the pillow. Someone had slept in that bed recently.

  Mr. Peregrine?

  It might stretch his sense of recently, but Darwen hoped so. The
caryatid still hadn’t moved, so Darwen began to cautiously walk the perimeter of the room. At his back was a door—presumably the way to the balcony he had seen from the outside—next to which was a tall grandfather clock, its hands set to twelve and its mechanism silent. But Darwen wasn’t interested in that. All his attention was on the dark mirrors, through which he could see other places entirely.

  And hear them too.

  As he got over the panic of running from the caryatid, he became aware of irregular noises coming from the various mirrors: movement, distant machinery, even snatches of what sounded like conversation. He became still again, terrified of giving his own presence away, and edged closer to a mirror that showed what he could only describe as a laboratory whose walls were lined with machinery, much of it hooked up to a series of coffin-like metal pods, each with a window about head height.

  Darwen tested the surface of the mirror and, when it did not give to his touch, flattened his face against it to get a better look at the image on the other side. There was light inside the pods, and by that light he could make out strange faces. He gazed at them and then something in his brain clicked into place and he recognized what were surely . . .

  Scrobblers!

  There could be no doubt. They were huge and greenish, with protruding tusks, but they were also still, as if they were sleeping or dead. It took Darwen a moment to realize why he hadn’t recognized the scrobblers for what they were at once: they wore no goggles. He shivered and double-checked that there were no controls around the mirror he might accidentally trigger if he wasn’t careful. Fortunately, there weren’t any; these were portals for looking through, hearing through, but you could not pass through them. Mr. Peregrine—if this was indeed his room—had used this place as a kind of observatory, not a means of transportation.

  Before Darwen could examine the other mirrors, he heard footsteps on the tower steps: clumsy, running footsteps.