The Door in the Moon Read online

  Wharton said, “To the Summerland? God forbid! I went there once down a well and—”

  “Not there. He’s with Summer, in the Wood,” Gideon muttered.

  “Great. And how do I find them?”

  “Don’t worry about that. They’ll find you.”

  The big man sighed. “Right,” he said. “If no one else has the guts . . .” He took a breath, turned, and marched firmly from the room.

  Into the silence, Piers said, “Crumbs. I don’t envy him.”

  Gideon was silent. Part of him wanted to flee after the man into the green freedom of the Wood. But he managed to stay still. Only, deep in the pocket of his coat, his fingers played with the strange, paper-thin, stolen flower.

  3

  My gift, she said, is the cowslip,

  The silver of the moon.

  The bees’ kiss to the flower’s lips

  on the hottest afternoon.

  My pain, she said, is the wasp sting,

  the scorch of the fiery sun;

  the scream of the dying fledgling

  as the weasel’s work is done.

  Ballad of Lord Winter and Lady Summer

  JAKE FINALLY WORKED the tape free. He spat it off, took a breath, then whispered, “Are you in here? Sarah?”

  There was no answer. He was disappointed, and then glad because there would have been no point in her getting locked up too. She needed to be free.

  They had brought him through the mirror into a place of total darkness. He had had a glimpse of a candle, a single tiny flame somewhere in the distance, a sense of space, an echoing dimness, and—

  Sarah’s hand had slipped from his just as the tall man had untied his wrists, hustled him through a door, and bolted it firmly behind him.

  He looked around cautiously.

  “Is anyone in here?”

  His own voice came back at him, resonating as if from a high ceiling.

  He threw the tape on the floor in disgust. He could be anywhere . . . For a moment a wave of despair and sheer anger crashed over him, made him clutch his hands into fists and want to yell aloud. How could they do this! Snatching him from the search for his father, the long fruitless work on the mirror . . .

  Yet . . . the mirror had worked for them. Allowed them to journey.

  That had to be a small wan hope.

  Breathing deep, controlling his fury, he groped, hands out. Almost at once he stumbled against the edge of a table and fumbled his way along it. On the surface he felt a few small cold objects, and among them, a square box. Shaking it, he smelled oil, knew it for a tinderbox, and struck it. The tiny blue flame spurted in the dark, steadied and grew. He saw a candelabra with six candles.

  He lit them quickly, then picked the whole thing up and looked around.

  His heart leaped with terror.

  Men and women stood around him in crowds. Silent and unmoving, they stared at him out of the gloom; their eyes glassy in the flame light. No one spoke. Each of them was rigid, their clothes a crazy motley of ages and times, Elizabethan players, a Roman centurion, medieval women. For a moment he thought he had interrupted some fancy dress party, but the silence was too unreal, the stillness too complete, and he understood with another shiver of fear that they were not even alive.

  Then, piled in a corner, he saw a heap of legs and hands and feet, of severed limbs and spare torsos, of severed heads all gazing blankly up and out, and he knew these were waxworks.

  He allowed himself a shaky laugh.

  They looked so real!

  He made himself move toward them, but as soon as he did, the candle flames cast huge wavering shadows; everything seemed to shift slightly, the figures to move, the light glittering in their eyes.

  It gave him the creeps.

  In front of the ranks of waxworks were three booths containing more complex figures. Still as statues, frozen in attitudes of waiting, a Scribe sat with pen poised, a Dancer balanced on tiptoe. The nearest was an Indian Conjurer in a striped coat sitting before a table with three balls upon it.

  Jake looked at it closely, bringing the candles up. And perhaps he touched some handle, because to his shock the figure suddenly came alive, and he stepped back with a gasp as it turned its head and fixed him with glassy eyes.

  Music squeaked from its rusty interior.

  The automaton picked up a cup and showed nothing beneath it. Then it replaced the cup and with a jerky, impatient action, picked up another. A small red ball lay there.

  Jake watched. The figure covered the ball, then revealed that it had vanished. Lifting the third cup, it showed that the ball now lay there, and the dark painted face smiled a brief smile, nodded, bowed, and was still.

  Machines. Very old ones. Wind-up. Clockwork.

  Jake raised the candles high, wax splatting on the floor. He was in a low, raftered room, maybe an attic. It was crammed with the waxworks, and though he knew what they were, he didn’t want to stay here, among these lifeless eyes that watched him.

  “Jake!”

  It was a whisper; it made him run to the door.

  “Sarah? Is that you?”

  “Who else would be mad enough to come?”

  It made him grin. “I’m glad you did. Where the hell are we?”

  “Not sure.” Her voice was close to the outside of the door, as if she had her lips to the keyhole. “The two men have gone. Down a wooden stairway and out into a street, I think. They’ve locked the door behind them. It’s dark out here—there are corridors, wooden, all rotting, stairs, plenty of locked rooms. Maybe we’re in some sort of storehouse or warehouse. It’s hard to tell. What’s in there?”

  “Waxworks. Automatons.”

  “What?”

  “Mechanized puppets. Used for entertainment. We can’t have journeyed too far back. Look, Sarah, they can’t be leaving me here alone for long. They’ll be back soon. Can you get me out . . .”

  “No chance. There’s a huge lock.” He heard her rattle it. “And the door itself is solid.”

  “Right. Then listen. Get a weapon—”

  “Jake, this is not a game. I’m not smashing someone over the head.”

  “For the lock! To break the lock.”

  She breathed out, tense. “Oh. All right. I’ll look around.” She seemed to move away, then her voice come back. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  He was about to be sarcastic until he realized she was probably as scared as he was, so he forced a laugh. “I won’t. Thanks for coming along, Sarah.”

  “Venn won’t thank me,” she whispered.

  Jake pulled a face. That was only too true.

  Sarah moved away from the door, reluctant. Judging from the glow coming under it, Jake had found light of some sort, but she had nothing. Groping the walls was useless; there were no electric light switches.

  She made her way along the corridor.

  It was low roofed, but some dim illumination filtered from somewhere, so gradually she realized she was walking on trampled earth, and that the walls were painted a dingy green. Here and there they were stained as if by past water leaks, and scuffed as if many people had rubbed and run their hands along them.

  Was this a school?

  Some sort of theater? A slum?

  At the end was a door that creaked open at her touch, revealing a stairwell. She leaned over and looked up. The stairs turned in a wide square into the dark. Sarah waited, listening. The building was utterly silent around her. Then, on some higher floor, something made a small popping sound.

  “Hello?” she murmured.

  The stairwell took the word and sent it back to her, fading into nothing.

  Her hand on the greasy banister, she started up.

  It was a bare, bleak stair. She could smell damp, and a sweetness, and a faint but reassuring hint of onions. Twice more the
popping noise came; she paused to listen to it, and it was distant, as if outside.

  By the time she reached the top landing she was breathless, and her calf muscles were tight with strain.

  Facing her was a dilapidated door, with one phrase on it, scrawled in red paint, vivid as blood. It said VIVE LA RÉVOLUTION!

  “Oh no,” she said, very softly.

  She forced down the handle; the wind snatched the door from her and flung it open.

  She stared in delight and dismay.

  She was standing on a narrow balcony and before her spread the massed rooftops of a great city. Gray stone and red tile glittered under a cloudless blue sky. Sunshine blinded her; she had to shade her eyes to look, and she saw balustrades and gables, a crammed tangle of alleyways and streets and lanes pierced by the high spires of countless churches, the twin towers of a mighty Gothic cathedral, the silver flash of a river under its bridges.

  Where was this?

  Not London, she knew. The sun was too bright, the design of the buildings all wrong.

  Was this Paris?

  The cathedral must be Notre Dame.

  She looked for the Eiffel Tower but obviously it didn’t exist yet—she had only seen pictures of it and the TV transmission of its ruined end, when Janus’s troops had entered the city at the start of his career. If it was Paris, it was old and dirty and its streets narrow.

  Directly below her was a mean boulevard, lined with trees. Carts and carriages rumbled along it, noisy on the cobbles. The popping noise made Sarah grip the rail and look down carefully; there was a market of some sort going on. Voices and vendors’ cries, the bleat of ewes and crowing of a caged cockerel rose up to her, the stench of a city without drains or sewers. But beyond that a gang of drunken men were firing muskets wildly into the air, and a barricade of tattered furniture and broken timbers had been heaped haphazardly across the street. She stepped back quickly.

  The clothes of the women told her this was the eighteenth century. She knew little about that period in France, except that there had been a great revolution, and rich people had been guillotined, hundreds of them.

  That was all she needed.

  She turned, ducked back inside, and ran down the stairs. Jake would know more. Passing a broken banister, she went back and pulled it out; the black wood cracked loudly and she froze, listening, and thought she caught some other noise, a rumble deep in the bowels of the building.

  Suddenly scared, she made her way down, telling herself not to be stupid, that all anyone would see was a broken stick moving by itself in thin air.

  Then, halfway along a landing she heard a bang somewhere below, a loud shout that might have been her name.

  Abandoning caution she turned into the corridor and raced along it.

  But the door to the waxwork room was wide open.

  And Jake was gone.

  He had meant to be ready for them, to hide among the waxwork figures, but they had obviously expected that and been almost silent; they’d come in fast, at least five big men all with flaring torches, and grabbed him before he could even scramble up. A black cloak was flung around him, the hood pulled firmly up and over his face.

  He squirmed, took a breath, and yelled, “Get your hands off me!”

  One of the men snorted a laugh.

  Jake was bundled out. It was hard to see anything; he smelled the outside before the warm air hit him. The stench of the cities of the past was something he was becoming used to, but this was more pungent even than plague-ridden Florence—rotting vegetables, dung, the sour acrid sting of some leather or tanning works that started his eyes watering. And the brilliant unmistakeable heat of the sun.

  They pushed him up into something that swayed like a carriage; he felt a grimy velvet bench, then men squeezed in beside him on each side. The door was slammed, horses were whipped up.

  As the vehicle moved, he was flung against the man to his left, who swore at him.

  Jake went very still.

  He thought fast. First, Sarah must have been left behind. She could hardly have climbed on the coach, and though it was traveling slowly, she could never have followed it through the crowded streets.

  Because he could hear a crowd out there now, a babble of voices, the coachmen yelling at people to get out of the way, the slap of hands against the paintwork, angry cries in French—French?—against the window.

  He managed to throw the hood back from his eyes.

  There were five men in the coach with him, all huge, all armed. Three sat opposite, cudgels on their knees. One held a pistol, cocked, near the window.

  For a moment Jake was flattered; then he realized the weapons were not for dealing with him.

  There was a riot going on out there.

  The streets were alive with a raging mob. He saw snatches of faces, stalls turned over, shops being stripped of food. Women struggled away with trailing armfuls of cloth, an old man staggered under a cask of wine. There were barricades of heaped furniture; twice the coach had to back up in front of them. And he could smell the tension, the wild unleashed anger out there in the city, smell it in the billows of smoke from burning houses, in the crackle of flames, the spilled fruit and cabbages squashed under the wheels of the carriage.

  “Liberté!” he heard. And then, clearly, “Vive la Révolution!”

  “Bloody French lunatics,” one of the men beside him muttered. Another, the one with the pistol, said, “Shut up,” and rapped the ceiling hard with one fist. The carriage speeded up, turned a corner, throwing Jake back in his seat. The window blinds were yanked firmly down and fastened.

  But he had seen enough.

  This was Paris, surely, sometime during the Revolution, a time of riot and anarchy. They’d called it the Terror. And he had managed to lose Sarah in it.

  He spoke up. “Where are we going?”

  Silence.

  “Why have you brought me here? Who sent you? Is it money? For a ransom?”

  No one answered, so he said, “Venn will never pay it. He wouldn’t care . . .”

  One of them snorted. “No one wants your money, boy.”

  A thought struck Jake like a joyful blow. “Is my father behind this? Dr. David Wilde? Did he—”

  A huge hand took hold of his jaw. Strong fingers pushed into his cheeks, squeezing them together.

  “Shut your mouth, cocky little monsieur, or I’ll see to it you’ll be missing a few teeth to talk through. Deliver you whole, she said, but a bit of damage in transit wouldn’t be my fault. Get that?”

  He nodded.

  When the hand withdrew he sucked his cheeks in, still feeling the bruising grip. As the carriage rattled on, he thought about that single word.

  She.

  Who was she? Summer? Was this the Summerland after all?

  Conserve energy, he told himself. Watch, listen, stay alert. He was suddenly so hungry his stomach churned, but no one spoke to him again, and as the coach turned corners and rumbled under archways, he sensed that they were crawling deeper and deeper into the dense mass of the city, into its packed and stinking heartland, the filthiest slums and alleys.

  Jake swayed beside the morose men.

  He was in a lot of trouble here.

  And this might just be the start of it.

  Sarah sat wearily against the wall among the waxworks. She felt sick, a little giddy. A point of pain was beginning behind one eyebrow. She had been invisible too long.

  Back in the Lab, there had always been stories and rumors about the children who died, about the early failed experiments, when Janus’s scientists had been inexperienced and the powers he had designed untested. She remembered too the terror of the white blankness creeping over her whole mind, as if her whole personality would somehow vanish away if she let it.

  Two hours—two and a half at the most—was the safe limit. She mi
ght be over that already. With a sudden panic she raised her head, terrified even as she made it that the switch might not work anymore, that she might have to stay like this forever.

  But her arms and legs and feet and hands were there. She gazed at them in relief.

  She felt better at once.

  There was no way out. The building was a locked tenement, empty and derelict. The main door was firmly bolted. So she just had to . . .

  Something clanged.

  She leaped up and darted into the crowd of waxworks.

  With a rattle of keys, two men hurried in. Ragged, dirty, roughly dressed in soiled aprons and breeches, one big and one stooped, they walked between the waxworks, talking loudly and laughing boldly, as if to keep away the silent stares of the still figures.

  Sarah’s eyes watched them. These men were nervous, in a hurry to get out.

  They hurried to the three automata, dragged out a wooden packing case lid and fitted it over the Conjuror, carefully, then lifted it on two poles and staggered out with it, locking the door behind them.

  After a few minutes they came back for the Dancer, the case wobbling as they lifted it.

  One of the men glanced around, clearly scared.

  “Hear that?”

  “What?”

  “Thought I heard something. Like breathing.”

  Standing among the crowd of waxworks, Sarah let her eyes go still and vacant. She stared ahead, fixed.

  When the men came back for the third time, the big one gazed at the waxwork crowd uneasily. “Bloody glad to be out of this lot,” he muttered.

  The stooped man cackled. “Tell that to the contessa.”

  Over the third figure, the Scribe, they placed the wooden lid, carefully, wary of its waxen face, its poised fingers holding the plumed pen. A corner of the purple velvet cloak got snagged in the packing case; the men shoved it in, impatiently.

  Then they lifted the heavy wooden box.

  “Lot heavier, this one,” the smaller man complained.