The Nowhere Emporium (15 page)

On route to their destination, Daniel and Ellie made one detour, visiting Mr Silver’s apartments and collecting a long brown hair from his pillow. The hair was not difficult to find. Mr Silver had enough of them, after all.

“The
Book of Wonders
says we need one of his hairs for this to work,” said Daniel. “I’m not really sure why…” he squinted at the page in question. “His writing gets pretty bad sometimes. I guess there’s only one way to find out.”

The Emporium was becoming impossible to navigate safely. Patches of creeping nothingness were appearing more and more, sucking Wonders into the void, weakening the rest of the Emporium, which was decaying like a row of bad teeth. Not only were there dangers in the form of fallen bridges, caved-in passageways and flooding tunnels, but Daniel also found that his sense of direction was almost completely gone. Thankfully, the surviving Magpie became a guide.

When they arrived at the door, in a corridor full of mirrors, Daniel leaned close to the gold nameplate.

“Memorium. This is it.”

From somewhere deep in the Emporium came a rumble. The floor trembled. Daniel ran his fingers along the wall, tracing hairline cracks.

Through the door lay a movie theatre with a carpet the colour of fresh blood, and row upon row of seats padded with red
velvet, all facing a huge screen.

Something happened to the air beside Daniel, and the shadows moved, turning into the shape of a man. The man was tall and gaunt, with sandpaper-rough skin and a patch over his left eye. He wore a black uniform with gold piping and carried a torch. He smelled of dust and sugar.

He said, “I am your usher for this evening. How may I be of assistance?”

“Erm … how does this work?” asked Daniel.

The usher smiled.

“We show you the past, plucked from memories. The true past, mind you, not coloured by bias or age or worn away by time. Everything, exactly as it happened. The price is a single hair.”

“What we want to see…” said Ellie, “it’s not our own past. It belongs to someone else.”

The usher’s good eye flicked between Daniel and Ellie.

“Do you have a hair that belongs to this person?”

They nodded.

“Then we do not have a problem,” said the usher. “Take a seat if you please.” He led them to the front row, directly beneath the screen, and signalled that they should sit. He held out a hand. “Payment.”

Ellie took Mr Silver’s hair from her pocket, placed it in the usher’s hand. He brought it up close to his good eye. Then he took off his hat, revealing the strangest head of hair Daniel had ever seen. A large section of his head was completely bald. But there were places, here and there, where hair sprouted. The hair was many different colours and many different lengths.

The usher took Silver’s hair. He produced a sewing needle from the pocket of his uniform. He threaded the hair through the eye of the needle. Then he raised the needle to his head,
pressed the end into his scalp, and proceeded to sew Mr Silver’s hair into his own head. When he was satisfied that the hair was in place, he replaced his hat and sat in the empty seat next to Daniel, who had watched all of this with horrified fascination.

“Now we can begin,” the usher said. “What exactly would you like to see?”

“We need to find out the story between Mr Silver and Vindictus Sharpe,” said Daniel. “Anything from Silver’s memories that can help us understand Sharpe a little better – and if there’s anything in there we can use against him, all the better.”

The usher gave a thoughtful nod.

“Very well.”

He sat back in the chair beside Daniel, raised a hand to his face, and lifted his eye patch.

Daniel could not help looking; he caught a glimpse of the usher’s hollow eye socket, just as the lights of the theatre died away, leaving the place in darkness. Then the usher’s body straightened out, became rigid, and a beam of white light erupted from his empty eye socket and thundered onto the screen.

A crackling noise tickled Daniel’s ears, like the scratching of a record. The screen was filled with flashes of white, which slowly resolved into a grainy picture: a snow-covered city in the dead of night; a lone figure climbing the steps of a serious-looking building covered in gargoyles…

…and they saw it all: Lucien Silver, the frightened little boy teased by the other children, rescued from loneliness and torment by a mysterious stranger on a freezing Edinburgh night. The years of teaching, of perfecting the art of magic, of mistakes and missteps punished by beatings, and rainy days spent gazing through the narrow windows of a mansion, wishing that he did not have the gift, longing to be like everyone else.

The scene shifted. Lucien gave his first performance in the
grand sitting room of a townhouse, in front of only Sharpe and an old woman named Birdie.

And then the performances began. A whirlwind lifestyle of travel and fame. Packed theatres across the globe were transfixed by the magic of Sharpe and Silver. But it was easy to see that a shadow was growing in Sharpe’s heart, fed by jealousy of his protégé’s talent. Lucien’s invention of the
Book of Wonders
seemed to be the final blow, and by the time Daniel and Ellie had watched Birdie’s funeral, Sharpe had abandoned Lucien, cast him back to the harsh reality of the world.

A cloud of steam filled the theatre, and when it had cleared, the screen showed Edinburgh once more. Lucien Silver stepped from a train, and he was much more like the Mr Silver that Daniel knew, confident and proud. When he opened the doors of his Emporium for the first time, his customers were afforded a view of a magical world unlike anything they had ever seen.

And then Sharpe was back, and Silver was walking the Emporium arm in arm with Michelle, and he was happier than Daniel had ever seen…

But the good times did not last.

Daniel gasped when Michelle betrayed Mr Silver. Ellie grabbed his arm tight when she witnessed her father drop to his knees, his
Book of Wonders
gone, stolen by the love of his life. Ellie’s grip only tightened when Silver answered the door on a rainy night one year later to discover a baby on his doorstep, a note slipped between the blankets.

Next they were following Lucien as he strode with purpose up a street lined with maple trees and huge houses. Lucien paused at the gates of the largest house, beside a nameplate bearing the name Vindictus Sharpe. He stared through the bars. Then he ran his fingers over the locks, and the gate was open, and Lucien was striding up the steps towards the front door…

Something happened to the picture then. It began to stretch and distort and break apart. There was a familiar face, a sneering Vindictus Sharpe who made them jump in their seats, and after that neither Daniel nor Ellie could make out anything besides the muffled sound of voices, and a scream, and a flash of red…

The lights of the theatre blinked softly back to life, casting the place in a warm amber glow.

“What happened?” said Daniel. “We need to know what happened next!”

In the seat beside him, the usher, whose expression had been vacant throughout the showing, blinked his good eye. He sat up. He replaced his eye patch and gazed around the theatre as if seeing it for the first time. Then he looked at Daniel, and his eyebrows knitted.

“Well, that’s never happened before,” he said, removing his hat and scratching at the patchwork of hair on his scalp.

“Put it back on!” said Ellie. “Fix it!”

“Can’t do it,” said the usher. “There’s no way to play back the final scene. It has been tampered with. Someone does not want it to be seen, simple as that. Whatever it is you wished to uncover, I’m afraid it’s going to remain a secret.”

Something stirred in Daniel’s brain…

A secret.

The world faded around him. In his mind, he was no longer in the theatre. He was back in his early days at the Emporium, on the night he first wrote in the
Book of Wonders.

Back in a room full of secrets.

“May I have the honour of leaving the first secret in this room?”
Mr Silver had asked.

Daniel leapt out of his seat, grabbed Ellie by the arm, and began to pull her back up the aisle towards the exit.

“Daniel, let go! Would you please tell me what is going on?”

They clattered out of the door, leaving the old theatre in silence once again.

The usher climbed from his seat, and watched after them. He scratched his chin.

“What a strange pair,” he said. The lights died once more, and with a flutter in the darkness, he was gone.

Daniel had not visited the room of Secrets since the night he first scribbled it into the book. He feared that it might have crumbled away, and he was relieved to find it still standing. Most of the snow globes were still empty, but there were a few, scattered here and there, that had been filled by customers. Their secrets lay inside the glass domes: a single white flower, a torn love heart, a clockwork bird, waiting like lost treasures.

“So every one of these is a secret?” said Ellie, plucking a globe from the column and stuffing it straight back when she realised that it contained a miniature skull.

Daniel began to climb the steps, winding up and around the column, searching the secrets with his eyes.

“Yup,” he said.

“So what are we looking for?”

“I don't know exactly. I'm hoping I'll know it when I see it.” He had forgotten just how many snow globes there were; thousands of them twinkled in the dim light. His eyes scanned every one of the glass spheres as he wound up the steps, careful not to miss anything.

And then, there it was, nestled among hundreds of empty globes. When Daniel's eyes found it he knew that it was right. He reached up and gently lifted the secret from its place, then
carried it back down the steps. He held it out in an open palm.

“We're looking for this,” he said. “It belongs to Mr Silver.” He held the globe up. “You saw the film in the Memorium. Silver doesn't want anyone to know what happened the night he went after Sharpe. I'll bet that's the secret he left in this globe.”

Daniel raised the globe above his head, and brought his hand down as hard as he could, throwing the glass orb to the floor, where it bounced and rolled away. He went after it, and picked it up, examining every millimetre of the glass.

“Not even a scratch,” he said. He tried throwing Mr Silver's secret against the walls. He stamped on the thin glass. He even tried smashing two secrets together. Nothing worked. The globe remained whole. Daniel yelled in frustration and tossed the secret away.

“Daniel, stop!” said Ellie, stepping in front of him before he could try to break anything else. “Just stop.”

Daniel's shoulders slumped. He looked around the room.

“I'm sorry. I just thought there was a chance, with the Emporium losing its power, that the secrets might not be safe any more. That the snow globes would be weak.” He sat down, still out of breath. “We need to find out what happened that night, Ellie. It's the key to everything. I feel it.”

Ellie's grey eyes suddenly opened wide. “Of course!”

“Of course what?” said Daniel.

“We've totally missed something,” said Ellie. “We've been thinking about Papa's secret all wrong, approaching it as if he's the only one who knows what happened. But he's not, is he? There were
two
people involved.”

Daniel stared up at her, feeling a wide smile spreading across his face. She was right: whatever Mr Silver was hiding, Vindictus Sharpe knew about it too – and that meant they could use Sharpe's memories to unlock the mystery.

“You know what?” he said. “I was wrong earlier. You are a genius.”

“I know,” said Ellie. “One problem though: we need a hair from Sharpe's head to make this work.”

Daniel had to admit, this was a sticking point. It wasn't as if Sharpe would pluck a hair from his own head and hand it over with a smile.

“We'll figure it out,” he said, and they headed for the door. “By the way, I've been meaning to ask: in the Memorium, when we watched Mr Silver's past, it showed a baby being dropped off on the doorstep of the Emporium. Was that … that wasn't…”

“Me?” said Ellie. “Of course it was.”

Daniel paused, confused. “But … all that seemed to happen a long time ago.”

Ellie nodded. She smiled, although it was not a happy smile.

“You know the birthday ball Papa threw for me – the one celebrating my twelfth birthday?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, that was the 121st time I've turned twelve.”

Daniel blinked.

“You've been here that long?”

“I have.”

“And you've never … there's never been … you haven't got any older? Not even a single day?”

“Papa let me grow up just enough that I wouldn't be under his feet all the time. But he didn't want me to go out into the world on my own. Now we know why. As long as I was in the Emporium he could protect me from Sharpe. So he put the shop in its own little bubble, with its own rules, its own time, totally separate from the world outside. And that's why I've been the same age for so long. People don't age here.”

“That means … me too?” said Daniel. “If I stay here I'll never
get any older?”

“Time only passes normally when you go outside,” said Ellie. “It'll take you ages to grow up.”

“I can't believe Mr Silver didn't tell me!” said Daniel. “I mean, he mentioned that he hadn't aged for a long time but … He should have told me!”

Ellie frowned. “Would it have changed your mind? Would you have come to work here if you'd known?”

“If I'd known I'd turn into Peter Pan?” said Daniel. “The boy who never grew up? I don't know. Maybe.”

A deep growl reverberated around the place, like the rumbling belly of a hungry giant. The floor trembled, and the snow globes rattled in their places. Several secrets fell from the column. Daniel wondered how many Wonders had just disappeared forever.

Together they scurried away, leaving the door to the room of Secrets to click quietly shut.