The Dickens Mirror (12 page)

No!
Cringing, her courage fleeing, Elizabeth pressed herself against cold brick. At the door, Battle still stood, impassive, his
gray eyes fixing her with a look of detached interest. Doyle only fidgeted. Meme—her very
good
friend—was useless.

“N-no tonics, no more t-teas.” That pressure in her chest was growing, unfurling in a hot, dark, menacing rose. Above her eyes, the
Other
was trying to claw its way out of her skull. “I promise, I’ll—” Her scalp gave a shout as Weber wrenched her hair with one huge paw.

“Open your mouth, Elizabeth.” Selecting a phial, Kramer withdrew a minute stopper. “Don’t make me force you.” When she still didn’t budge, Kramer sighed, then flicked a finger. “Weber? If you please?”

“Right,” Weber said, and pinched her nose shut with his free hand.

“Wait! You don’t need to
do
that!” Bode said.

No!
A bolt of panic ripped through her. Her right hand closed around the bone spike as she dug the nails of her left into Weber’s wrist. Her chest was already churning; she could feel her throat working, trying to get her to open her mouth and breathe,
breathe
!

“Don’t hurt her!” Bode tried shoving Weber to one side, but it was like trying to move a monument. “Let me, sir. I can get her to take it.”

“We’re managing, thank you,” Kramer said. “Open your mouth, Elizabeth.”

“Nuh.”
Parting her lips just enough to suck a breath through the gate of her teeth, she fought to twist away from the mouth of that small brown bottle of poison.
“NNN—”
She kicked and tried to bite as Kramer grabbed her face in one hand, but then he was straddling her, using his greater weight to crush her into her mattress. She heard the
tick
of glass against her teeth, and then she was coughing and choking against a thick, unctuous yellow
liquid first seeping and then gushing into her convulsing throat. Rearing, she spat out what she could but knew: too late.

“Stop fighting.” A dribble of tonic and her spit trickled over Kramer’s tin cheek in a viscous yellow tear. Kramer studied her a moment, then nodded at Weber. “Open her mouth.”

“Nnnuhhh.”
But she could feel the drug working its black magic in her veins, and when the slow slide of it next moved over her tongue, she swallowed automatically.

From the door, Battle spoke up. “Is this really necessary, Doctor? The girl’s in a frenzy.”

Kramer’s face darkened. “Balls. Don’t tell me my bloody business,” he muttered, too low for anyone but her to hear. Pitching his voice a little louder: “She needs calming, Inspector. Agitation only fuels the
dédoublement de la personnalité
, the splits in her mind.”

“Yes.” Battle’s tone was dry. “My French is adequate, thank you.”

Kramer turned a look over his shoulder and said … something. She wasn’t sure what. All at once, everything outside her own head was beginning to rush away. It was the drug, she knew, dissolving the last of her resistance. She heard herself let go of a long sigh, and as she did, there came an even stranger sensation of something loosening, as if her mind was a fist and just now decided to relax.

No
. A muted clutch of fear in her throat.
Don’t. You can’t. I won’t let …

But it really was too late. She felt the sudden squirm as the
Other
wriggled and began to work its way free, one long jointed leg rising from the dark to hook a claw on a lip of pink tissue. Then another leg, a new claw. And another and then another …

“Yes.” Kramer’s weight was on her chest, which was going icy
and still even as the
Other
quickened. Everything and everyone else was gone: Weber, Meme, Graves. Battle and that constable, Doyle. Bode. “It’s just us now,” he said. “There is no one to stop you. She’s been dealt with, so come. Come back.”

“Whaah?”
The word pulled at her tongue like warmed taffy. She couldn’t see properly. Her eyes weren’t working, wouldn’t focus. She’d a sense he wasn’t talking to her at all. Then who?
Oh God
. He was talking
beyond
her to the
Other. No, no
 … Her head moved in a sluggish negative. “L-leave m-m-meee …”

“No, shhh, shhh, don’t fight. It’s too late for that anyway.” Kramer’s tone was intimate, pitched only for her. His breath feathered over her face and neck. “Let it come back, Elizabeth. Let her return to this
Now
.”

It? Her?
She felt her eyes struggling to latch onto his, set deep in their sockets of flesh and tin. And he’d called this a
Now
. “H-how do you … kn-know a-about …” As Kramer slid his hands under her shoulders and gathered her up, her blurred vision caught on a glint of brass in his breast pocket. She squinted, forcing her gaze to sharpen. Brass, yes, and a wink of … 
Purple. Purple glass
.

Oh God.

Kramer had a pair of panops.

SHE HAD NO
time to wonder how, or why. That would come later. For now, what mattered was this: Kramer knew about
Nows
. With the panops, he must’ve seen past her mask, and he
knew
what lived in her, understood that she was a vessel, filled with many voices, many pieces, the creations that were her father’s doing. All those
tonics and teas were to sap her resistance, and now all that she was teetered on the brink of oblivion as he called to a very particular voice and presence, the
Other
, to fill her up, take over.

“Wh-what have you done?” Her awkward fingers tried working their way into his pocket for the panops. “Where … where d-did you g-get … where is m-my mother, my m-muh …” She dragged in more air. “Wh-
why
?”

“Stop fighting.” The slink of his whisper was all the more awful because he was so close, he might have been a lover. “Let her take you. She will save us, Elizabeth.”

Save them?
No. I can’t lose myself
. But she was sinking fast, the mattress seeming to evaporate beneath her.

“Come.” Kramer’s voice hummed in her ear as he called
past
her to something—someone—else. “Now. If you can hear me … now, Emma.
Now
.”

“N-nooo,”
she moaned. “No, you … you m-mustn’t summon it by
name
.”

“But I must. I will
have
her.” Kramer held her so close she could smell him: the salt tang of his skin, the mustiness of wool, the dank reek of wet, exposed muscle from the half of his face that rot had claimed. “Come, Emma, come to me. Come
nowwww
.”

All of a sudden, her vision purpled; the air wavered, as when the walls tried to buckle, or Mrs. Graves’s face decided to slump. In the center of her forehead, hot pain, bright as a comet, blazed a path through the heart of her mind. She thought she must have cried out, because Bode’s alarmed shout came to her, but muffled by distance, as if she were a star, dwindling to nothing more than a flicker, drowned out by this
Other
, the strongest of the many voices, all the pieces of her,

PUT ME WHERE I BELONG.

A voice that resolved into that of a girl, some girl now storming through her body. This was a voice belonging to a girl who would risk everything: DROP ME INTO THE NOW WHERE I’ll FIND THEM AGAIN: ERIC AND CASEY AND RIMA AND BODE AND—

Bode? It
knew
him? No, that couldn’t be right. Unless Bode wasn’t who he seemed either. A black fist grabbed her heart.
No, not him, too. He can’t possibly be a piece. Please, God, help me, leave me something, someone …
And then she was swooning into the abyss, just as little Alice fell forever; even as something else was rushing up, erupting to fill the void she—Elizabeth—left behind.

In the next second, she felt the switch as it happened—as the
Other
swamped her mind, shoving everything she was to one side, and opened her mouth and …

 … SNARLED
,
“NO!”

This voice was huge and so fierce even Kramer started and was, for one precious moment, off-balance.

Seizing the bone spike, the
Other
exploded with a new, manic energy, and on a bellow:
“NOOO!”

IT WAS A
miracle Kramer didn’t lose an eye or wind up with that rough dagger impaled in his throat. The
Other
drove hard and fast enough for either, but he was already falling back, and the bone’s jagged tip instead jammed into that tin mask. But by then the
Other
was on her feet, diving for that open medical bag and
all those shiny knives. Neither fully Elizabeth anymore and not yet completely Emma, the
Other
made it past Bode, who tried a grab, and as far as halfway down the hall, where she was cut off.

After that, things went very badly. Breaking Weber’s nose with a bell jar was quite satisfying, even though Elizabeth was receding to a bright point by then, like a spider scuttling to the safe center of its web, thinking to the
Other
, this Emma,
This is no way out. They’ll trap you the way you’ve trapped me
.

Yet the
Other
—Emma—tried. The mad chase through the corridors, with the others thudding after, and Emma, the
Other
, chanting to herself:
I am Emma Lindsay, I am Emma … I remember Eric, how he felt, his voice, his eyes …
Praying to the rattling glass bauble and strips of tin around her neck:
Get me out, get me out, take me anywhere but here; just get me out!

There is no Sign of Sure
. This Emma was a fool.
It’s only glass. You’re a mad girl in a ruined world
. What was left of Elizabeth, now so deep down inside her own skull, looked through the backs of her own eyes and saw a mirror, growing huge in her sight, and this fool, this Emma, rushing for it. In the instant before that catastrophic smash, what remained of Elizabeth registered Emma’s surprise, the girl’s shock at what she saw, and felt just the slightest sense of vindication:
Yes, that’s me, you see. Look in the mirror, Little Alice, loooook
.

After that—through the aftermath of Bode and Doyle wrestling her into a strong dress, and then Kramer, again, holding her close, crooning into her ear, filling her with drugs, claiming her—well … the only mercy was that Elizabeth wasn’t really all there anymore.

That is … most of her.

Poppet

CHRIST. EVEN BEFORE
the whole debacle—that mad chase through corridors before manhandling that screeching girl, gory and slick with blood let from barbs of the mirror she’d shattered—Arthur Conan Doyle thought the whole business, this
murder
investigation Battle was so keen on, was a bloody mess. Now, still winded, Doyle stood with the inspector at some distance from Kramer, who sat cross-legged in a pool of smeary, red, jagged glass, cradling and crooning to Elizabeth as if she were a child.

God, get me out of here
. Doyle skimmed sweat from his lower lip with his tongue. Three days gone without, his guts in a twist, and a positive
deluge
of shite ready to spew out his bunghole—if Battle didn’t let him off this bloody ward with its bloody nutters; if Doyle didn’t find a pipe or a syringe or a pint of gin or a good half glass of laudanum soon—Doyle thought he might just pop out the inspector’s eyeballs with his thumbs.

Now, now, poppet
. It was that insidious, guttural snarl steaming from the muddle of Doyle’s mind.
Calm yourself. That temper will be the death of you
.

The voice was nothing new. That it was
right
wasn’t new either. He thought that if it had a face, it must be that of the black dog with the maddened red eyes tattooed on his right biceps. Whenever he felt the urge for another drink, one more dose, a third pipe, a second needle, his right arm squirmed like a bag of worms, and then the black dog was husky and full in his ear:
Ahhh … there, my beauty, there, that’s it; take that pipe, down that drink, use the needle and aaahhhh, that’s good, so gooood
.

Why he’d gotten the tattoo of this hulking, muscular, fire-breathing black hound with its hellishly infernal eyes and slavering fangs was a mystery, though it was probably because he’d been drunk as a lord when he let the first mate have at him with his needles.
God
, he missed all that. Best kip of his life was his berth aboard the
Hope
after a long spell on the ice: reeking of seal blood, biceps and thighs aching, exhaustion creeping ever so deliciously from the tips of his toes to the roots of his scalp. Never slept better than when he’d bashed the brains of fivescore baby seals with his spiked club.

Although … here was something he didn’t understand. If he tried to dredge that first mate’s face from memory? Nothing came. Same for the ship, its captain, the other men.
Hope
was correct, but there was nothing meaty under the word except those few sensations—the twinge in his muscles, the stink of dying seals. The tattoo of a ravening black dog on his arm was real enough. But the rest was mist.

Probably the drugs muddying his memories. Or that damned Peculiar. God, he needed a drink. A needle. Or a pipe.
Something
. His eyes felt full of pins.
Anything
.

Or what?
The black dog bunched under his uniform coat.
You’ll make paste of Battle? Have a care, poppet. Your lolly daddles have always been a problem, ever since you were a wee bairn running the slums of Edinburgh
. The black dog was nothing if not a little mocking.
And
oooh
,
who can forget that
nasty
business with your pap?

Plug your cakehole, can’t you?
He may be a cock-up, but he wasn’t stupid enough to talk out loud to something that wasn’t there, thank you
very
much. Anyway, his father

A
RRRTIEEE
 … A
RRRTIEEE