The Door in the Moon Read online

  Maskelyne sat at the workbench, facing the mirror. She paused, watching him. He had his fingers wreathed together and he was staring into the darkness, lost in some deep reverie, or maybe in memories of past lives that she could never be part of.

  Stupidly, she was jealous.

  She came and put the plate down with a noisy clatter. “You need to eat.”

  He looked up, startled. “Oh yes. Thank you.”

  “It’s not Piers’s cooking, but it’s all I can do. The supplies down here are limited.” She glanced at the mirror. “Still no sign of them?”

  “None.” He brooded. “Not even a murmur. As if, on the shortest night of the year, the mirror sleeps. And yet maybe the mirror too has dreams.”

  She sat down. “You can feel them?”

  “Barely. Mere colors and smoke drifts. Fleeting like clouds over the moon.” He cut the sausage in half and ate it as if it had no taste at all.

  She said, “I want you to tell me about it. What you remember.”

  He shook his head, and the scar down his cheek moved in and out of the light. “When I threw myself into it without a bracelet I was scattered, Becky. My whole body and soul, broken to its atoms, split like a swarm of fish when the shark comes. Only now, after years, do I feel I am coming back together. What I was before, what I did, those things are like fragments of a smashed window, a kaleidoscope pattern. My mind works on them obsessively, but they no longer fit together.”

  “You did create it, though, didn’t you?”

  Maskelyne managed his rare smile. “I found it. Long ago, I went searching for it. For years. I climbed mountain ranges, explored the valleys and peaks of the world. I found much obsidian, but never the piece that would be good enough to make my mirror. Until one day, on the slope of an extinct volcano, I entered a deep cleft in the earth, a path that led down and down until I feared I would come to some Underworld, some dark Hades. Then, turning a corner, I came face-to-face with my own dark image and realized I had at last found what I longed for, a slab of obsidian that was perfect, without flaw or blemish, tall as a man, thin as a wafer. So I had them take it to my secret palace.”

  “Them?” she asked softly.

  He shrugged. “My servants. My slaves.”

  The word shocked her. But as if he was feeling along the most delicate thread of memory, so frail that a question might break it, he went on quickly, his husky voice a whisper in the buried room.

  “How many years it took, Becky! How much ambition, how much obsessive greed. To polish it, inch by inch, grain by grain, to perfection. No one else was allowed to see it. I kept it in the darkest and most secret chamber, down a labyrinth of passageways. No one knew the way to it but me, and at night, every night, when all the people slept, I was alone with the mirror. My eyes so close to it, my breath misting it. And slowly, so very slowly, I saw my reflection begin to form, appearing on its blackness, my eyes, my hair, my face, until I knew that the long work was done and the glass was ready for my spells.”

  She kept quite still. The food was cold and the mug of tea in her hands no longer steamed.

  She said, “When was this?”

  He looked up at her, eyes dark, as if he was blinded by memory. “Long ago. Too long to remember who I was then. A prince maybe, and a sorcerer. In some desert land far away.”

  She wondered swiftly about Egypt, about the Aztecs, about the lost civilizations of Sumer and Ur. Because she knew now that he must have lived many lifetimes, this ghost of hers, long lifetimes always moving in time. Fleeing Death.

  “And then?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Can’t?”

  “Won’t.” He ate the last bite of cold sausage. “There are things that shouldn’t be told. I was a different man then, Becky. You would not have liked me. I sacrificed everything to the fascination of the mirror, put all my greed into it, all my pride and energy. It became my own dark image.” He looked up. “I was an obsessed and evil man.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “You should. I’ve spent an age atoning for what I made. And I’ve paid, in pain and fear, and all I want to do now is take this . . . . thing . . . back to where it all began, where no one will ever find it.”

  Watching him, she saw how his meshed fingers clenched. “And the coin?” she said. “What about that?”

  The mirror rippled.

  She felt it happen, a disturbance in her teeth and bones.

  The cats, as one, opened their eyes.

  Horatio gave a low chatter and swung down into her lap.

  Maskelyne stared at the black glass.

  “Venn?” she whispered. “Jake?”

  “Neither. Sometimes I fear it listens to what we say.” He stood tall, paced along the monitors, checking each one. “The coin was made as a safeguard. Maybe he knew, that man I used to be, maybe he understood that one day the mirror would destroy us all. The coin is a matrix, an unform. But it will only work if the two halves are joined, and they are so powerful I had to hide them far apart, dimensions apart.” He paused, listening. “And now one half is in this house. That scares me. Sarah’s idea was ingenious, but without running water over it, the coin is exposed and vulnerable. I have to get it, Becky, and I should try now, before They come back.” He turned. “Will you help me?”

  What could she do but say: “Of course. What do we have to do?”

  Wharton lay on his back under the moon, staring up. The pale disc shone down on him. Was there a face in it? A man in the moon? A lost man, marooned?

  If so, he was that man. He was in deep trouble.

  As soon as Summer had walked back into the Wood, things had changed. For a start she’d looked at him almost with disgust, muttered, “Get this creature out of my sight,” and stalked off under the trees, her red dress shriveling to a cobweb of gray.

  A tall and disdainful Shee had brought him to this bare clearing and left him here. No food. No chair. Nothing.

  And when he’d finally said “Hello? Anyone?” nothing had happened. The moth-Shee and the others were nowhere to be seen.

  At first he had been glad just to lie wearily on the grass and try to understand what had happened back there. What the hell did Jake think he was doing? And Venn—if the revolutionaries had him prisoner, the man was likely to end up on the guillotine. What a mess! And he, Wharton, the only one with any common sense, was stuck in here in this crazy forest and there was no one to— He stopped.

  Sat up.

  This was his chance. Before he could talk himself out of it, he was on his feet.

  The Wood was still. The faintest of warm breezes touched his cheek. Through gaps in the heavy foliage the midsummer stars glinted; the clearing was lit with the magical silvery sheen of moonlight.

  A small thread of path led away between two trees.

  He took a step toward it; no Shee appeared.

  He reached the trees and peered around them. The path led downhill, the tree roots almost forming steps.

  He started down.

  His breathing was loud; his heart thumped in his chest. Calm down, George! he ordered himself, but halfway down the twisty steps he knew he felt only fear.

  Every tree was a wizened being, every bole and hole a dark eye. Brambles scratched him. The soil was baked hard and thudded with his footsteps.

  He reached the bottom panting for breath and found himself in a dank cleft under a darkness of clotted branches. Far off, one moonbeam gleamed.

  Which way to the Abbey?

  An owl hoot came from close by; he jumped, jerked about.

  It came again, a soft savage message of intent, and he remembered how he had once seen Summer transform into that bird, break out in beak and claw under the great storm she had called down.

  He started to run.

  Maybe that was his mistake.

&nbs
p; The thud of his feet became a thud in his head, and then a thud in the earth; it became a drum that someone was beating, an urgent rhythm.

  When he stopped, it went on.

  The Wood woke. Branches gusted and crackled. Leaves drifted down. A cloud masked the moon.

  He ought to go back, play safe, but he wouldn’t. Stubbornness burst out in him; he set his shoulders, lifted his chin. No one scared George Wharton, he thought.

  Even as he thought it, a vibration gathered in the air, a swarm of something came out of the trees like a buzz of dusty bees and was all over him, their stings ferocious and real, and he was squirming, yelling, beating them off, until gasping, he whirled around.

  And there was nothing there.

  A branch snapped; a hare pelted out past him. He backed after it down the path.

  The piping began then, haunting music, sweet and cheerful, but it filled him with dread. He knew this story. He knew what was coming.

  He stood still. And looked up.

  Through all the dark branches, their party clothes crackling to carapace and wing, their eyes unblinking, their silvery hair crisping to feathers, their fingers hooking to claw and talon, the Shee were gathering in their host, some as hounds, some as hawks, some as half-human runners, some riding silver horses with skeletal heads, galloping on cloud and branch and grass, swift as vengeance under the trees.

  Wharton panicked. Even as he turned and fled he knew it was the worse thing he could do. The bray of a silvery horn rang out joyfully behind him. He leaped a fallen trunk and plunged into the Wood, running heedless, falling and picking himself up, thrashing through thicket and briar and sudden empty space. He gasped hard and breathless up a slope where thin young trees grew so close he had to duck and weave and squeeze between them, the ground all humped and hollowed with banks of decayed leaves, the hounds yelping so he could feel their teeth snapping at his ankles, at his heels, at his—

  A hand shot up and grabbed him, yanked him down into a burrow of brown earth, clamped itself over his mouth.

  A hand with dirty fingers as small as a rat’s.

  “Will you shut your noise!” a testy voice growled in his ear.

  Wharton’s eyes went wide. He rolled over.

  “Piers?” he whispered.

  17

  Many went to the scaffold with great bravery. Others wept and screamed. The crowd in the square became a many-headed beast that roared and slavered, an insatiable monster of vengeance, and in its voice I heard the centuries of disease and poverty and want.

  So I too cried out.

  Maxim Chevelin,

  A History of the Late Revolution in France

  VENN OPENED HIS eyes, but that didn’t help.

  He was in a dark place and it was rocking under him. A great jolt shuddered through him. He tried to sit up, but felt at once that his hands were tied behind his back; he was lying, facedown, in a layer of mud in the bottom of some lurching vehicle.

  The word tumbril came into his mind. He struggled harder.

  Someone whispered, “Stay still, monsieur. Best to play dead.”

  Venn’s ribs ached. He had been beaten and kicked with some relish. He eased his head aside. “Where are they taking us?”

  “We think to the Conciergerie.” The answer came from a young woman sitting above him. Her silk dress was bedraggled; her whisper showed her raw terror.

  “And then, no doubt, an appointment with Madame Guillotine.” This speaker was a tall man, his powdered wig still on, his once beautiful coat torn, but he sat in the cart with great hauteur. “An appointment, mes amis, that I do not intend to keep.”

  Venn realized that the cart was crowded with prisoners. The girl whispered, “Monsieur . . . how do you intend to escape?”

  “Like this, mademoiselle. Boldly and openly, as befits a true son of France.” He stood up. “Vive le roi!” he cried. Then he leaped over the side of the open cart.

  The girl gasped. Venn struggled up. They were crossing a high bridge over the Seine; he saw the moonlit rooftops of Paris, the rearing towers of Notre Dame. The prisoner had leaped up onto the palisade of the bridge, kicking away men that grabbed at his ankles.

  One shot rang out, a musket crack. The air stank of cordite.

  When the smoke cleared, the man was gone.

  “Mon Dieu,” the girl whispered in horror. “Such a noble hero! And they killed him.”

  Venn wasn’t so sure. He thought maybe the man had jumped before the shot. But even so, his chances in the dark undertow of the river wouldn’t be good.

  He closed his eyes and, through the sickening pain in his head, thought of the despair that must have lain under that pride.

  Not a solution he intended to try.

  They rattled on, the prisoners silent. Venn worked at his bonds, managing to loosen them slightly. Dried blood was in his hair.

  After a while he gave up and sank back

  Anger was hot in him, anger at Jake and at Summer. And at himself. Because now Janus had the purple flower, had taken it before their eyes, and with it who knows how much power over Summer. The thought of Janus and Summer in some vengeful league turned him cold with fear.

  Abrupt darkness closed over him.

  The cart rumbled under an arch, bumped over cobbles, then stopped. “Out,” someone snarled. “All of you!”

  Venn was last. He closed his eyes and deliberately hung limp, so they had to drag him and half carry him between two of them. If he had the least chance he would crack their heads together and run for it.

  But the doors that slammed behind him were vast oaken barriers, and the men were armed, and his own sword was gone.

  Then panic flashed through him.

  The bracelet.

  So far he had been lucky; it was jammed well up under his sleeve and his captors must not have noticed it. But as soon as they did they’d take it, and then he’d have to fight for his life and the whole future of the mirror.

  He heard them unlock a heavy door. It grated on its hinges; a foul stench gusted out of the darkness inside.

  They flung him in, facedown.

  He made no sound, lay bruised on the stones, his face in musty straw that leaped with fleas.

  Only when he was sure they were gone did he lift his head and sit up.

  The gloom implied a small space, a high ceiling.

  He said softly, “Is anyone here?”

  No answer.

  First he worked on the bonds. They had been hastily tied, and he finally managed to wrench them loose enough to slip them off. Rubbing his scorched skin, he tugged the bracelet down and examined it, holding it close to his eyes in the dark.

  It seemed unharmed, though there was a slight dent in the silver head of the serpent. He flipped open the amber eye and touched the dark space where the tiny fossil had been, now lodged in the mirror frame. Twice before the mirror had shown them journeymen. Could Maskelyne see him now?

  “Do you hear me?” he said quietly. “Anyone? It’s me. Venn.”

  Nothing.

  He had no way of knowing if they heard him or not. Outside, in the corridor, heavy boots approached.

  He shoved the silvery ring inside his shirt.

  The footsteps passed.

  Venn sat still, breathing out, making himself relax. And suddenly, quite out of nowhere, he thought of Leah.

  Her face emerged from some locked and clotted place in his memory, as if at that moment a darkness had been stripped from it, some terrible clinging growths torn from it.

  He sat amazed at his own folly.

  How could he have forgotten her? How had he let Summer beguile him? The time he had lost! He saw Leah’s face, and she was smiling at him, but it was the painted face of the portrait in his room, and for a moment he had to struggle to remember the real, infuriating, careless woman, the woman who
lay late in bed and read novels, who was always late, who knew how to mock him softly. The one he loved. The one he wanted back.

  The thought of her made him curl his hands into knots. And yet even now, he knew there was a thin, cruel sliver of jealousy in him, sharp as a shard of glass, when he thought of Summer smiling, not at Wharton, who was no one, but at Janus.

  He shook the thought away. Leah. Leah was all that mattered.

  And escape.

  “So where is it, this house of the Black Cat?”

  Sarah said, “Somewhere near the Seine. Built out over the water.” She sat hugging her knees, with Gideon’s silvery jacket draped over her maid’s dress. Even in the steamy heat of the hothouse, she felt chilled and dispirited and unutterably weary.

  They had hidden here as the château burned. It had been chaos back there—even now dark figures were running and piling up looted goods on the dark lawns. The destruction sickened her, because she recognized it. She had seen it in the End time.

  Gideon said calmly, “Try not to get involved. We’re only passing through.”

  “That’s a real Shee attitude.”

  He tipped his head. “Mortal history seems to be full of terrible times.”

  “And we walk straight into them.”

  “At least we can walk out again.”

  She looked up. “I really hope so. Because my fight is for the most terrible time of all.”

  Gideon nodded, but her fierceness hurt him. He had thought she would be grateful to him for coming to find her, but she seemed to have forgotten that already.

  She was such a mystery to him!

  He stood up and rubbed another patch in the steamy glass and stared out. “When it gets light—which should be soon, because this is the shortest night—we should head for the city and find the mirror.”

  Sarah rubbed her dark skirt. “Jake said Moll knew where his father was. Do you think that’s true?”

  Gideon considered, hands in pockets. “She seems a tricky creature.”

  “Fond of Jake.”