The Dickens Mirror (34 page)

“What are you getting your knickers in a twist about, Doyle?” he muttered. So what if Battle’s personal habits were a little odd? Did he
care
that Battle bared his arse cheeks to the winter wind? No.
But this is just so … off
.

It wasn’t until he got closer to the mirror, an ordinary oval set in a wood stand, that he realized it was much warmer here, and the scent of wood smoke was stronger.
What?
He pressed a palm to the wall alongside the mirror. By his side, he heard Black
Dog snuffling with interest. Glass wasn’t toasty but not freezing either.
And that ought to be an outside wall
. Unless there were other rooms behind this one? Possible; he’d never been up here. But then who was Battle’s neighbor? The hall had been completely dark.

“Strange.” Lifting his lantern, he examined the mirror. The wood stand was a reddish-orange wood, teak or light oak, and carved: flowers, vines, bizarre symbols.

The symbols, dear
. Black Dog nudged.
Look at them. See something familiar?

Black Dog was right. Leaning forward, he squinted at a design along the right-hand side of the mirror that he recognized: three interlocking circles. Setting his lantern on the floor, he withdrew Battle’s pouch of skeletons and searched until he found what he was looking for. Unhooking the brass key from its fabric loop, he held it before his bull’s-eye.
Same design
. It was also the key Battle’s finger kept straying toward. What had he said? They weren’t in the morgue because … “Too cold,” he said.

Yes, and the wall is warm, poppet. So what if …

“The mirror’s really a door, or masks a door.” There would be no reason in the world for anyone to check unless he had the key. Opening his lantern all the way, he aimed the beam. The light washed shadows flat, but he saw that the symbol was raised a touch higher than its background. Either more deeply incised or … “It’s a flap, like what you use for a Judas hole.”
Or in this case
 … “No, it can’t be this easy,” he said, even as he used the tip of a finger to lever the flap out of the way and expose the keyhole hidden beneath. Socking in the key, he gave it a twist. Deep in the mirror, he heard the tongue slide and the lock disengage. The mirror popped out, enough to hook his hand around an edge.

Be very sure, my dear
. Black Dog’s voice held an edge of warning.
Once you cross through the looking glass, this can’t be undone
.

“Ya joking? I’ve murdered a man,” he said. “I’m already committed.”

He slipped inside, with Black Dog close behind.

THERE WAS ONLY
one window, cracked to allow for ventilation, and a corner hearth in which the remains of a fire were beginning to burn low. The room was close and comfortably warm. The only furniture was three low cots over which sheets were drawn.

My God
. He felt all the hairs on his body bristle. Moving slowly, he fanned his dark lantern over each cot and saw how the body beneath tended the sheet. Two seemed roughly the same size, though one was a bit slighter than the other—a woman or a thin boy, he just wasn’t sure. The other was small. A child, he thought.

He stood at the foot of the cots, turning his lantern from one to the other. “What were you doing, Battle? What are you hiding here?” It was strange hearing his voice.

Go on
. Black Dog nosed his left hand.
This is what you came for, after all. Pick a card, any card. Don’t you want to see, poppet, don’t you?

The child, he wasn’t ready for. So he selected the one on the left, which was the slighter of the two adults. Heart throbbing, he lifted the sheet.

WHAT HE SAW
was bad enough that if he hadn’t jammed his knuckles between his teeth, he would have surely screamed. Yet that still wasn’t the worst of it.

The worst of it was when it opened its eyes.

The Liquid Dark

STEPPING AWAY FROM
the down cellar prison she’d made for Elizabeth, Emma opened her eyes to find herself where she’d first come to: huddled on a lumpy mattress in darkness as inky as the bottom of a mine shaft. Formless sounds threaded through the air like a continuous loop from a grade-B horror movie. That weird, wavering, rippling air teased gooseflesh from her skin. If she didn’t know better, she’d have thought she was in a movie special effect, something science fiction-y where the heroine wandered into a crackling plasma field. Weird. Like fingers kneading her skin.

Wobbling to her feet sent a bolt of nausea surging up her throat. Gulping, she swayed on lumpy mattress as the liquid dark sloshed from side to side. Her chest grabbed again, and she started to hack, grunting and tucking in her elbows. Pain sliced her ribs. Rusty-tasting fluid splashed into her mouth and made her gag. Coughing hard, she staggered, lost her balance on the uneven mattress, and tumbled back onto her butt.

“God.”
Her hand was all gluey and … were those
clots
? Or
was she bringing up something worse? Hunks of lung, maybe? Shuddering, she ran her bloody palm over her skirt. She wished she had something to spit into. She snuffled against another nosebleed. Her lungs felt congested. Every breath gurgled.

“I think there’s something really
wrong
with you, Elizabeth.” Her mouth tasted like a crushed can: flat beer and old aluminum. That shivery, weak feeling was seeping through her limbs again, and her joints ached. “Like you’re
sick
-sick.” Jesus, what if Elizabeth had something terminal, like TB or cancer or something?

Well, I sure as hell can’t be here if she dies
. She armed away sweat from her face. It bothered her a little that she didn’t feel guilty about that thought either.

Maybe eating something would help. Had they left her something? What if no one had? Then what? Shout until someone came? Could be why everyone down here was screaming. She had visions of patients trapped like flies between windowpanes. Shouting probably wouldn’t help either. From what she remembered, all this was a faraway gabble on the main floors, only so much aural mist steaming up through iron grates. But shouldn’t someone have checked on her by now? Or even before? Didn’t they care about sick patients?

Maybe they don’t do rounds down here. You know, out of sight, out of mind
. That brought on another wave of panic.
Calm down. Your hair’s still damp
. She touched a finger to her bandaged forehead. Only a dime-sized crust of blood.
You haven’t been here that long
. Or someone might have come in while she was out of it to get her cleaned up, check her dressings. Would they leave food or water?

Squatting, she reached to her right where her head had been when she woke up and began carefully walking her hands over rough, lumpy fabric to a seam. As she moved, the fabric seemed
to undulate under her hands the same way the air wavered. After what seemed like a long time but was probably no more than a half minute, her fingers butted another mattress set on a perpendicular to the one she was on.
Right; you’d expect that in a padded cell
. Finger-walking to her right, she found the vertical seam of a corner and another mattress. Using an index and forefinger, she cored into the seam. Her finger sank to the second knuckle before her nail ticked against …

Not brick. “Rock? Like a
cave
?” She held her finger there a minute, feeling how the rock also seemed to … well, not
give
exactly, but deform ever so slightly. “You know what this reminds me of? Down cellar, when I first touched the square.”
That
had felt icy and had burned, but the minute
give
was similar. What kind of place was this? She thought back to the whisper-man’s prison: a black-mirror cave, an energy sink constructed of odd volcanic glass. Could explain why Kramer took the cynosure.
He’s really afraid I
could
use it down here
. Which meant that wavery, undulating sensation she felt, the way the air seemed to move was free energy?

Wow. What if
she
was in a Peculiar? It was possible. Kramer had panops, but it was
Meredith
who used them and understood about energy sinks and Peculiars; she’d made them. So Kramer knew Meredith, or maybe both McDermotts?

Moving to her left now, she inched forward, fingers quivering like antennae. They’d done some unit on the juvenile justice system in a sociology class once, and she remembered that most of the prison doors had slots and peepholes and … 
Ah
. Her hands brushed cold, rough iron. She couldn’t feel all the way to the top of the door, but that was all right. Lifting her arms, she walked her hands slowly right and then left, searching the door as
methodically as she could, mapping out the grid in her mind. Perhaps two inches above her left eye, her hand brushed a round disk soldered in place. There was a small, quarter-sized depression in the center. When she stuck her finger through, the tip bumped up against more metal.

Bet that’s a peephole
. She was tempted to look through, but Elizabeth was too short. Besides—an eerie frisson tickled her neck—she’d always been a little afraid of peepholes. In movies, when people looked through to check out which bad guy might be waiting, she always wondered why no one put a stiletto through …

Something rustled off her right shoulder.
Shit
. That had been behind her. Small hairs prickling, she turned a very slow half circle, held her breath, and listened. Nothing … nothing … that strangely turgid air bunched and gathered … and nothing … nothing. Her pulse was starting to thump now … and noth—

A rustle. Again. Very light, but very definitely there and
closer
 … And now another very fast flick as something—a finger, a hand—whisked along her neck.

“Guh!” Her heart rocketed into her skull, and then she was wheeling away from the door, turning a crazy, drunken one-eighty that was way too fast. Gulping, she steadied herself.
I heard something, I
felt
that
. But what had it been? What if it was a rat? This was an underground cell, for God’s sake; rats and all sorts of things lived in the dark, in sewers and tunnels and … 
Stop it, stop it, stop …
But
something
had touched her,
twice. Unless it’s just this weird space, something about the air
. Maybe it’s not
clear
; could there be fog down here, or mist? Or spiderwebs?

Cut it out. Next thing you know, tarantulas will drop from the ceiling
. That was also just too damn close to Bode and those scorpions.
Her mind kept looping back to
energy waves, energy waves, careful, careful; don’t
make
something happen; don’t jinx yourself
. But she couldn’t assume anything. If there really was someone or something in here, then it wasn’t crawling or slithering around.
It’s tall. It touched me on the neck, the cheek
. The darkness felt as if it had changed somehow, too. More … solid?

Yeah, like when you wander into a room and you
feel
the bureau or bed before you run into it
. Raising both arms and reaching with both hands, she took a cautious, sliding step forward and then a second, and a third.
So I might be sensing furniture or another wall or …

Something eeled from the liquid dark and closed around her wrists.

Second Room

EMMA’S DOWN CELLAR
prison was both a spectacular bore and quite singular. The walls were a kind of lumpy gray brick she’d never seen. Some twenty-five paces wide and as long, the room turned out to be bare of anything other than a squat mechanical contraption with a profusion of square metal pipes, perhaps a foot across, running away into the walls. A few feet away, there hunkered two white cubes—again, both metal and with hinged doors. The air inside one smelled a touch mildewed, like damp wool. The other released a puff of scorched linen.

Interesting detail
. Elizabeth let the smells roll on her tongue.
Emma really has left quite a lot of herself here. Quite a bit of personality
. Holding that strange blue spiral candle aloft, she turned a circle. “I need a way out, Emma,” she murmured, her gaze touching on that squat contraption with metal tentacles and those two cubes, then drifting on. “Show me a …”

The far wall was no longer solid—and now, there was a second room.

“Oh, Emma, what is this place? What are you up to?”
Elizabeth took a few hesitant steps toward the inky square of an opening, then gasped as a raft of thick, gelid air sighed out to raise the hackles on her neck. In her hand, that steady yellow flame suddenly bent nearly horizontal, as if some giant had decided to blow it out. She quickly shielded it, worried that if the flame went out this time, it wouldn’t spring back.

Beyond, the blackness seemed to breathe, the air to fizzle with a sound that was like bits of ice crunched under a boot, and she thought,
Voices?
On an impulse, not even understanding why she was doing it, she extended her arms, thrusting the candle before her. The blackness ate the light. She couldn’t see inside at all. Dropping to a crouch, she played the light back and forth over the floor. The demarcation between this room and the one beyond was stark: one side grainy but gray with reflected light, the other completely dark as if veiled in black velvet.

What if there is no floor?
With her free hand, she reached into the dark: first a finger, just the tip—the air was cold but not so bad she couldn’t stand it—and then the first knuckle and then all the way up to the third.

“Oh God,” she said, almost without inflection. Her finger just … disappeared. She could feel it and, beneath, some sort of surface that was not the same as this gritty stone floor. No, this was smoother, like glass. She let her entire hand drift in, watching as the darkness beyond closed around it. For a giddy moment, she imagined something might make a grab, but nothing happened. Exhaling, she retrieved her hand and thought about it a moment longer. This space was now here where it hadn’t been before. Would she be able to find her way out once she was inside?
What if this is a trap?
Somehow she didn’t think Emma was that skilled.
She might not be that devious either
.