The Dickens Mirror (47 page)

You have to go for it
. Sucking in a deep breath, she pushed through the surface. She felt her throat convulse from the shock of frigid water on her face. Her eyes burned. What she could see was meager: a pale wash that wasn’t light so much as less dark, and then a much deeper shadow that was Bode. When she reached her right hand, her fingers knotted in his coat. While he was still buoyant—
and that means air in his lungs; that’s what my instructor
said
—he was deadweight dangling from a hook. So
push
his legs away from her, and his upper torso ought to move in the opposite direction, toward her and the opening.
Then, if I can grab his head, get his nose and mouth to the surface
 …

Walking her right hand down his chest, she pushed as hard as she could, wretchedly aware of how much strength Elizabeth’s frail body didn’t possess. Nothing happened for a long second. Then, all at once, she felt the slow, vertiginous swirl of his body as he twisted; saw the fingers of his right hand, limp as a dead starfish, swim into view. Fingers scrambling for purchase, she clutched a fistful of coat at the base of his throat and hauled him toward her. Through the water, there came a very dull
clump
as his head met rock, but she couldn’t do anything about that. The water darkened even more, stained with a wash of fresh blood. Screaming with strain, her shoulders balled and clenched as she tugged.
Now or never, come on, come on! Just a little more, a little more
. … But she couldn’t do it. Her lungs were on fire, and he was just too heavy and
damn it!
Rearing back, she coughed out the last of that breath, sucked in another, and shouted, “
MEME! Help
me! This is your space! Do you want Bode to die? Help …”

“Help yourself.” The voice came from only a few feet away, and she looked up to where he stood at the very limits of her pathetic little torch’s light. “You know what to do.” Somehow Kramer’s serpent’s whisper was so appropriate here. “Use the strength only shadows possess. You did before, when that shadow-boy bludgeoned Weber. I know it must have been he. I saw him and so did Meme.”

“That was different. I nearly died.
I
didn’t do anything.” Her arms were shuddering. Still clutching Bode’s coat in both hands—his dark hair fanning over the surface, his face just
inches
from open air—she looked at Meme, who stood a little back and to Kramer’s left. “You were there, Meme. You know I had no control over that.”

The other girl, with
her
face, didn’t answer. She might as well have been talking to a department store dummy.

“Of course you do. Drop your barriers. Let them come. That was the point of putting you down here to begin with. This space responds to shadows.” Kramer readjusted his panops. “Stop wasting time; Bode will be beyond saving in seconds.”

“I don’t know
how
!” Although she had an inkling of what needed doing. But what if she wasn’t allowed to come back?
Eric killed Weber when he didn’t have to. He’s half shadow
. Or more than half.
Maybe what’s left isn’t close to the boy I knew
. What if she ended up like Elizabeth, shut away in some mental prison because Eric, whatever he was now, decided he liked being in control?

In the valley, Bode died to give you time. He’s helped you here when he didn’t have to
. She turned her focus inward.
Do this for him, and do it now
.

IN LESS THAN
the blink of an eye, she was in two places at once: outside, straining to hang on to Bode’s body, and inside, in a suggestion of a kitchen at the blank wall from which she’d erased an iron door. Nothing but an expectant silence on the other side. Who knew what waited in the dark? But she had to go through with this.

Make me a door
. All around, at once, the space went from a half-gloaming to a blaze of yellow sun; from an amorphous haze to bright cabinets, a potbellied stove, pans on a rack. In the distance,
she could hear the thump and boom of water on sandstone. There was a proper door now, too, not of iron but knotty pine.

Please, Elizabeth
. Stretching, she reached above the jamb. Her fingers closed around the wire pick that only Sal and Jasper and she knew was there.
Don’t fight him; let Eric through. Let him help me. Let us both stay long enough to find a way to end this
.

Jimmying the pick into the keyhole, she heard the thumb lock snap, and then she turned the knob and stepped back as the door swung open.

“Eric?” she said.

The Woman in Black

DOYLE HAD ONLY
the vaguest notion of how he’d gotten here. The time between finding what lay in Battle’s secret back room and now was a blur, a span of time as blank as the faces of the other constables, the desk sergeant, the anonymous silhouettes jostling through the murk and snow. If he didn’t know better—and he wasn’t sure he did—Doyle would’ve sworn he’d fallen into the gap between chapters, where a character ends one scene in a particular locale only to begin on the very next page somewhere else with no idea how he got there and yet is expected to behave as if he knows what’s going on. Really, this place was something from a novel; it was truly that bizarre.

The underground room beneath the derelict criminal wings was cavernous, huge, hollowed from strange rock that pulsed with a sulfurous glow as if keeping to the rhythm of a hidden heart. The air wobbled and shimmied. Sensible, keeping criminal lunatics from mingling with the merely insane. Best to box them in: private wings, their own kitchen, this … well, was it a clinic? Doyle thought this place must once have been some kind
of infirmary or a surgery. Or perhaps an old basement morgue; asylum doctors performed their own necropsies. Whatever this had once been, it now could have passed as the underground laboratory of a madman: chains, manacles, examination and operating tables, worktables chockablock with various scientific instruments.

There were also cells, six in all, three to a side. Of the cells on the right, only the very last held prisoners: a man and a woman. The man was fortyish, with thick black hair and large spectacles set in a queer frame that didn’t look like metal. His clothes were odd: not proper wool trousers but some worn blue material. Instead of a high buttoned collar, his shirt had lapels. Yet the man
was
vaguely familiar in the way of someone you might pass on the street every day. The
contours
of his face, the shape of that jaw, reminded Doyle of someone.

The woman—she must be the man’s wife; Doyle just had this feeling—was very handsome, with fine bones and a glossy mane loose around her shoulders. Her clothing was equally strange; she wore a man’s trousers of the same blue material, and her blouse, filmy and insubstantial, was scandalously low-cut. Still, she’d have looked almost normal but for all those bandages, splotchy with old blood, on her arms. From the sheer number on her left forearm and wrist, Doyle thought she must be right-handed.

Self-murder, just like Elizabeth
. If not for her clothes, Doyle would have mistaken her for one of Kramer’s patients. To cut oneself so badly, the woman must be deranged, but Doyle didn’t think that was the only reason that the man, her husband, had his hand firmly clamped over the woman’s mouth. In fact, Doyle understood exactly why the man was doing it altogether. His
wife’s dark eyes sparkled with horror. If Doyle were she and their places reversed?

Oh, I’d scream
. His own eyes traveled from the couple in their cell to a tall woman in black who stood in the alley running between. This woman in black was, besides himself, the only other person in this mad place not behind bars.
Yeah, come face-to-face with you, I’d be pissing my inexpressibles
. (Actually, he was very close anyway.)

Although the man … the handsome woman’s husband … was
concerned
, he wasn’t frightened, Doyle thought. More
apprehensive
, but also
interested
. Doyle hadn’t missed the sharp look the man gave
him
when Doyle had laid out his burdens, what he’d stolen from Battle’s secret room.
Like he knows what’s in them, and
that’s
got him worried
. But the man’s eyes also kept ticking to the middle cell on Doyle’s left and—Doyle thought—one particular occupant.

I agree, poppet
. Black Dog nosed his fingers.
He’s intensely interested in that little girl, don’t you think? If I didn’t know better, I’d say he might
even
know her
.

He thought Black Dog was right. He also wondered if he shouldn’t do something to help.
But what am I to do?
His eyes roved over Rima, who lay in a heap, awash in blood and horribly bruised. On the stone floor a short distance away from Rima, the mute with the blotchy plaster on her chin sat cross-legged with Tony’s head cradled in her lap. (And was that a
cat
crouched alongside?) From the fresh cuts and bruises on her arms and face, the girl had been in quite the brawl. As for Tony, a single glance was enough: the boy was infected. His skin writhed as squirmers burrowed and eeled and chewed. As another spasm shook Tony’s thin frame, bright red foam bubbled over his lips and fresh
crimson rivulets leaked from his nose and both eyes.

But it’s the mute that man’s interested in
. Black Dog sounded positive.
Oh, don’t misunderstand: I think he’s keen on everything and everyone here. But her … you can see it in his eyes, how greedy they are. Almost …

Proprietary
. Yes, Black Dog was right. Doyle’s gaze shifted to the closest cell and the two boys there. One was a veritable whippet of a young man, with a shaggy scruff of blond hair and narrow blade of a nose. His clothes were also rather bizarre: a loose olive-green overshirt, with what appeared to be military insignia, and matching trousers. Both garments had many outside pockets simply
begging
to be picked. Doyle had never laid eyes on that boy before.

As for the
other
boy in the same cell … well, Doyle knew him. After a fashion. This boy’s clothes, rough trousers and a coarse shirt, were much too large, and his feet were bare. Doyle thought the boy must’ve been caught before he was properly dressed and then given the first clothes that came at hand. The boy was sick, too; that was obvious. His arms were limp, the hands upturned like dead spiders. Glittery with fever, his eyes were large in his pinched face, and he was gasping, his bare chest going like a bellows. His brown hair was a mass of short, damp corkscrews. Although he was cleaner, a bit more meat to his bones, there was no doubt.

Twins?
His eyes clicked from that boy to the Tony he knew and then back again. The boys were also somehow fundamentally dissimilar, as if they might be actors: the
same
boy plucked for a different role depending on which play was to be staged. It was in their general
look
; he couldn’t explain it to himself any better than that. In one cell lay the Tony of this moment, this particular
drama:
his
Tony. In the other was a Tony destined to play a part in some far future.

Darling, I think you’ve got it. They’re from different … eras? Worlds?
Even Black Dog was interested.
Fascinating, especially given what’s in those sacks. What you stole from Battle’s secret room. Oh, and take a good long look at that woman in the far cell, and then that woman in black. You’re a detective. After you discard the rest, what remains …

No, I don’t care. It’s not my business
. Doyle tore his gaze away. A Tony from a future?
Absurd. Eyes playing tricks. It’s the air, the wobble in this place
. He stole a look at his own hand, saw how the outlines—the stubby fingers, the grimy nails, his broken lifeline chalked black with Battle’s blood—wavered and undulated in this bizarre air. Made him sick. If he wasn’t stone-cold sober, Doyle would’ve thought he’d shot himself up good, or drunk off a half dozen pints until the world swirled, nothing nailed down, everything gone molten. He was muddled, that was all, and ashamed. It was seeing Rima in the cell that did it. He should help her. Hadn’t he
said
he would? What was
wrong
with him?
Kramer was right. You
are
a meater
. But what could he really do?

I want a needle. I want a pipe, a draught
. God, hadn’t this been where he’d come in? Guts in a tangle, and so awash in sweat he ought to steam with the reek. But of course, he couldn’t smell himself anymore. Only his cravings were real now.
I’d take poison, bleach my brain. Anything to go back to the way I was
.

Though that would never happen now, would it? Not unless Battle performed a Lazarus.

Of course—his eyes bounced to those three sacks laid on examination tables—that Battle might rise from the dead was entirely possible at this point. Considering.

HE’D ONLY THE
dimmest recollection of hitching the station’s one remaining nag to a cart—all the while averting his gaze because he could
swear
the horse’s face was scrubbed clean, no eyes, no muzzle—loading those sacks, and then weaving through a crowd that paid neither him nor the horse any mind.
That’s wrong, that’s wrong
, he thought, doggedly plodding along, reins in one hand, bull’s-eye in the other.
The horse is meat; they ought to mob
 …

At that moment, he’d felt a sudden, very familiar tug on his arm. “Oi, dearie.” The hag’s voice was an iron nail screeching over glass. “Fancy a bit of boiled leather?”

For a split second, he almost welcomed this.
All right, this I know; this is …
That choked off. A good look and he’d have screamed if his throat hadn’t ratcheted tight.
No no no no …

The hag still wore that absurd, rumpled wool cap parked at a jaunty nautical angle—and yet now her face was as featureless as molten slag.