The Door in the Moon (22 page)

“Get rich JHS!” I told him. “You could be lord of the whole universe with this!”

But he never had the guts.

So, finally, yes, okay Jake, I nicked the bracelet and went off with it. Betrayed him. I felt a bit bad about that, so after the first job we pulled, I sent a wad of dosh.

Never thought he'd do anything so stupid, though.

When I heard about the explosion I went straight round there. Great scorch marks down the walls.

Sad really.

House was all locked up, but easy as pie to get into, and there it was. The obsidian mirror. Leaning all cool and arrogant against the burnt wallpaper, among all that black charred mess.

I knew then the old fool had journeyed without the bracelet.

Idiot.

So, anyway, that was the start of it, Jake. We borrowed the mirror. Couldn't leave it there, could we? Took it out at night in a hansom cab. And so I commenced my life of crime, and what a mad bit of fun it's been, and all them jewels I've had away and the times I've seen, Lord, Jake, you wouldn't believe.

But I was always really looking out.

For you, Jake.

And when I saw David, I knew it was time to come and get you.

I have had some experience of life. I believe myself fully capable of offering an excellent example to the boys of a sound moral outlook and the importance of hard work.

George Wharton, letter of application to Compton's School

S
ARAH STARED.

In the blink of an eye, Venn disappeared.

Then, before she could move he was back, the blade already falling, the crowd screaming with joy.

She screamed too.

But a trapdoor burst open under Venn's feet; he crashed down and the blade sliced only air.

The scaffold shuddered. The crowd surged back.

Sarah stood stunned, unable to believe what she'd seen, but the next moment Venn had picked himself up, scrambled out, and was right there next to her, grabbing her arm. “Run! Let's go!”

They hurtled through the packed people. She yelled “Jake!” and saw him ahead, waving her on. With a great rattle of wheels, a dark carriage drove around the corner of a building and thundered toward them, the horses whipped to fury.

Women scattered with screams of panic.

Long Tom hauled on the reins; the doors flew open.

Moll was already leaping up onto the box beside him. “In!” she screamed. “Everyone!”

Jake pushed David on; his father flung out a hand and held the door and hauled himself up. Jake scrambled after, but before Gideon could follow, the crowd had grabbed him and torn him down; they fell on him. For a sickening moment all Jake saw was his pale face lost in a sea of hands.

Suddenly, Venn and Sarah were there. Venn snatched a sword and swung it at the flinching men. “Get back!”

Jake jumped down; Gideon scrambled up. They turned to face the mob.

The three of them stood at bay, all in a line, while behind, Sarah clung in the doorway.

“God,” Venn muttered, seething with fury. “I'd like to take the whole lot of them on right now.”

For a wild moment Jake was totally with him.

Gideon said, “It would be so much like . . . being alive—”

But Moll's voice cut like acid through their ardour. “Nice heroics, cullies, but no time. Get in or we go without you!”

The horses reared. Jake turned, and Venn and Gideon crashed on top of him. Then the carriage was galloping at speed, and someone was picking Jake up and he realized he was on the worn leather bench with someone's arm thrown casually around his shoulders, and it was his father's arm. And all he wanted to do was shout and scream and stamp for joy.

Instead he leaned back while Venn picked himself up and Sarah smiled and Gideon dusted down his silver coat and watched with green envious eyes.

“Well,” David said calmly. “If that's a plan, I'd like to see what chaos is.”

“Will you take it easy!” Wharton slid down the remaining mud of the bank and fetched up against a dark granite boulder. “I'm nearly there.”

Piers was braced above, a white face against the moonlight. “Okay. Letting go now.”

“No! Wait! I'm not—
Piers!
” But Wharton was already slithering, the moon-pale rope dissolving around his waist back into the cobwebs Piers had made it from, and feet-first, he cascaded over the steep bank and plunged deep into the roaring black water.

God, it was icy!

Hitting the bottom with his feet, he crumpled, pushed, rose in a cloud of silt, and burst back to the surface as a frozen man, white and gasping.

A boulder rose up; he slammed against it.

“Piers!”

Water took his words, swallowed them, spat them out. He fought to keep his head above the surging current, but the river was incredibly fast; it crashed him against rocks, ducked him, battered him, sucked him down. In the deepest dark he was so cold he was warm, and for a moment was back in the summery wood lying on the green grass in the sun.

Then he was drowning deep in the green leaves of a van Gogh painting, which seemed, oddly enough, to be growing on an elder bush in the ravine. He spat and coughed until Piers said in his ear, “Time to climb up now.”

He opened his eyes. He was clinging desperately to a barren cliff, and beside him on the rock a warty green toad was watching with emerald eyes.

He looked up. “My God!” he breathed.

Wintercombe Abbey soared above like a gothic nightmare. Bats showered from it; the moon balanced on its topmost turret. It was black and smooth as the mirror. He could never climb up there.

He gave orders, but his body refused to obey. Instead it clung obstinate and shivering to the bank.

He took a breath; it was a knife in his throat.

“Scared, mortal?” The words were a sly croak in his ear. “I'm not surprised. The Shee always say the big men are the ones who crack first.”

Wharton growled. He reached out, grabbed a rock. Hauled himself up onto it.

The toad hopped onto his shoulder. “See you up top. I'll have the kettle on.”

A wet flop of tiny hands on his head. He roared with fury and pulled himself out of the river.

Immediately the warmth of the summer night enfolded him. He sighed with relief, water running from his clothes, trickling and dripping. Then he was climbing, hands and feet splayed against the rock face, and the surface was dry and crumbly in places, and in others clotted with great cushions of plump emerald moss.

He was halfway up when he felt something.

A dread in his nerves and muscles. A gathering of darkness.

He risked a quick look at the sky.

Were they birds or bats? Hard to tell. They were rising in a great spiral from the towers of Wintercombe, and whatever their shape, he knew they were Shee.

“Piers!” he whispered. “Piers, look.”

No reply. He cursed silently, intently.

Then he climbed faster.

But the row of windows of the Monk's Walk was far above when the cloud dissolved, and came down around him like black rain. Not birds but things shaped like the grotesque gargoyles of the house; crazy patchwork creatures of bat-wing and gryphon-beak and mermaid-tail and human eyes. They perched on the rocks and slithered onto the slanted slabs of the cliff-face, and in the roar of the waters they sat and looked at him, and all their eyes were hollows of silver, and all their claws as sharp as the pain in his bruised fingers.

He scowled, grabbed for the next rock. Instead his fingers closed around a small, white bare foot.

The owner of it giggled. “Oh, George. You're so bold.”

Summer was sitting on the narrowest ledge that slanted down the rock. Her short dark hair glinted; she wore earrings of pearl and a moon pale dress with lacy craters.

He snatched his hand back and hung there, fingers aching, splayed feet jammed in footholds.

She said, “I just thought I'd come and have a chat—”

“
Chat!
For God's sake, Summer I'm clinging for my life here.”

“About my proposal, George! About giving you another chance at life. Remember that? All the things you thought you might do?”

He did remember and for a moment it was all he wanted, to be anywhere away from this crumbling cliff whose fragments were plopping into the river far below.

She smoothed the dress over her bare knees. “If you want I can get my people to lift you, George. Take your clothes in their beaks and lift you up and fly with you to the roof, where you'd be safe. Then I'd wait while you popped in and got me the coin.”

“Coin?”

“Don't pretend you don't know. That girl Sarah has it.”

He stared. And then laughed.

It surprised even himself—it was a laugh of finality, exasperation, of real amusement.

Summer frowned. “Don't do that.”

His foot slid; he scraped it back up quickly. Then he said, “Okay, Summer. Here it is.
I am never going into partnership with you
. I don't want the mirror destroyed but I'd rather trust Sarah than you. I'd never betray Jake. Ever. And certainly I've made plenty of mistakes in my worthless life, but they were
my
mistakes and if I had another existence I would almost certainly make them all over again. So any fantasy you have that you can win me over ends here. Sorry.”

He knew she would cast him down. But that was all right.

He had said what he needed to say.

She was so silent he raised fearful eyes to look at her.

But all that looked back at him were the cold yellow eyes of a hawk, and they were embedded in her human face, and she shrieked, a sound so harsh and dark that all the stars seemed to tingle with terror of it.

And then she pointed one red-painted nail at him, and he let go.

And fell.

And fell.

And fell.

The carriage rattled through the dark alleys of Paris toward the Seine.

The five passengers had been silent a long time. It was as if the turmoil they had gone through had cleaned them out, used up all their energies, drained them of speech. Except for Moll, who could be heard boasting to Long Tom outside on the box about her
journey
back to save Venn. “A few tools, a few minutes. Bolt off the trapdoor, Bob's your uncle.”

They heard Tom laugh. “Neat as a pin, Moll. They don't call you Contessa for nothing.”

Finally Sarah raised her head and fixed Venn with a hard stare.

“What else happened back there?” she demanded.

The others watched as Venn rubbed a hand down his face. He looked gaunt and worn, and that peculiar glint of the Shee that had entered him over the last few months was suddenly more apparent than before.

“Happened?”

“The blade fell. I saw it. The blade fell and you were under it.” She closed her eyes, remembering the great horror that had swamped her. “And then . . .
You were gone
. For a second. Then you were back there.”

Venn looked at her, his stare arctic. “You imagined it. You blinked.”

“
I felt it
. A shudder in time.”

Jake listened, intent.

Sarah leaned forward. “And that means one of two things to me, and both of them bad. Either Summer intervened. Or Janus did.”

The coach rattled, slower now; it turned a corner, and the stench of the river grew strong.

Jake said, “Summer wouldn't—”

“Neither would Janus.” Venn's eyes were steady on Sarah's. “And if . . .
if
 . . . they did. If they offered me all the world in return for the safety of the mirror, do you think I'd take it, Sarah?”

For a long time she did not answer. When she did her voice was a whisper, “No.”

He smiled a wintry smile. “Correct.”

David leaned forward. “Of course you wouldn't. All you want is Leah.”

Gideon raised an eyebrow, looked at Jake.

“What?” David said. “What have I missed?”

Venn looked down. “Like I told you, Summer distracted me, David. She . . . enticed me away. You don't know what it's been like. But I swear”—he looked up, sharp—“that that's over. Forever.”

David looked dismayed. He said, “It has to be, O, it has to be now.”

Jake looked at Sarah, and Gideon. Neither of them seemed happy, or sure they believed Venn's vow.

In an uneasy silence, the carriage wheels bumped over cobbles and finally stopped, and the door opened and there was Moll, grinning at them all.

“Back home safe and sound! And not a hair chopped off anyone's head! I told you I could do it, Jake, didn't I? Aren't you pleased, Jake?”

He was so pleased he jumped out and caught her up and swung her around as if she was still that tiny urchin he had known, and she screeched and grinned with delight.

Dawn was a red slash of light over the housetops. Below the piles of the wharf, the dark river glimmered with reflected fires. Paris slept an exhausted sleep.

When they had all climbed down, Tom muttered “See you, Moll,” and drove the carriage quietly away into the dark.

“Where's he going?”

“To collect the gang. We have to get everyone back.” Suddenly her grin was gone; she turned and led the way inside. “Come on, quick now.”