Advent Page 7

  He took up his staff. With the instrument of his authority over the fiery spirit in his hand, he reached once again for the mirror and raised it before his eyes as steadily as he could.

  Within it his image gazed steadily back at him, the wall of his laboratory behind, apparatus glinting by candlelight; but the picture of him in the mirror had eyes that were circles of dancing flame, and its mouth curled with a joyless smile even as his own lips parted in revulsion.

  The reflection of his mouth spoke to him. ‘Do you see us?’

  ‘Silence!’

  His image raised a finger – his finger – to its lips and smiled again. The hand it lifted was the right. The magus saw that in the mirror it was not wearing the ring. Gripped by doubt, he glanced down and saw his treasure there on the small finger of his own right hand. It was his; it was not lost. She had spoken wrongly: it belonged to him. The mere sight of it restored some of his self-possession. It also reminded him not to lose time. It was unwise for him to wear the ring long.

  He faced the infernal copy of himself as bravely as he could, reminding himself that he had seen worse.

  ‘Hear the conditions I make,’ he said, forcing authority into his voice. ‘If you keep safe what I will give you, you will be freed. You will keep it until such time as another looks deep in this mirror. Then you will surrender it to them, and in that moment you also will be unconfined.’

  The hideous parody of his face sneered. ‘It is insufficient.’

  It was fortunate for the magus – so he believed, at least – that he had expected this. He knew how the lower beings loved to kick against the pricks whenever they could, and he was prepared accordingly to bargain in return for the task he was imposing on it. If he had not already considered the means, he doubted he could have maintained the presence of mind to converse with the awful image facing him.

  ‘Very well. Then I offer you flesh.’

  The myriad voice sighed once more, a drawn-out, wordless, hungry groan.

  ‘When you are free I will allow you substantial form. You will be my familiar. You will be more than spirit. Is this sufficient?’

  There was a long pause. Then the reflected lips tightened in a deadly smile and whispered, ‘It is.’

  The smile made the yellow bile rise to his throat. He felt a powerful urge to be rid of the sight in the mirror. He laid it down quickly and fetched a small knife.

  ‘Very well.’ He had rehearsed these words, which, along with the act of putting aside the mirror, made it easier to speak calmly again. ‘As I am man, made in God’s image, my living soul belonging to myself alone and incorporate in this mortal body, so I will put into your keeping a part of myself, making that part spirit only as you are spirit.’ He held the blade of the knife in one of the candles. The flame forked around it. ‘When another looks deep into this mirror, you will surrender up that spirit to flesh again, and at that time you will also be free and may seek corporeal form.’

  In the silence that followed he withdrew the blade, letting it cool.

  ‘You may speak,’ he said.

  ‘By what power?’ The voice was nowhere. The shadows in the corners of the room seemed to utter it.

  He raised his right hand in front of his face. ‘I hold the key that opens the passage between your world and mine.’

  ‘It is not yours to hold.’

  ‘Be silent!’ the magus shouted. ‘May your utterance be cursed! Go from—’ He choked back his rage, horrified at how close he had come to finishing the sentence and so releasing the spirit from its service. He closed his eyes and let his heart subside. He could no more afford fury than fear. His decision was made, he reminded himself. There could be no contradiction.

  Reining his passion tight, pushing the whispered words out of his thoughts, he put down the staff and held his hands above the mirror. He pressed the point of the knife against the skin of one finger, just below the nail, and pricked. A single drop of blood beaded out and fell on the surface of the glass. It spread like oil over water.

  The voice made a long, wordless, whispering sound.

  He picked up the mirror again. The glass was dry and smooth, and showed nothing but a cloudy red expanse, as if he were cradling a fragment of the dawn. He brought it close to his mouth.

  Once again he felt for the power of the ring.

  The

  world around him sang with life. A dawn sky was scarlet, portending a terrible day. He was hurtling towards disaster. Its mists cleared suddenly and in the mirror a face that was nothing like his own returned his stare, eyelids peeled back with measureless, insane terror. It was an unknown face, a woman’s face. It saw him as surely as he saw it. They saw each other’s fates, the same fate, more dreadful than death

  The magus had meant to breathe gently over the mirror, joining the air and water of his living spirit to the blood that was its earth and fire. But the vision dragged the air out of him. Instead of exhaling, he cried out. The glass fogged over and then blazed. An invisible wind howled through the ring, tossing him like a dead leaf, thundering in his ears. He heard the woman scream, with his own voice.

  Then he crumpled to the floor.

  The small mirror fell beside him, face up, blank with the dimness of the room.

  Outside, dusk had come early. Fat storm clouds erased the day. Their load of sleet had begun to scour people out of the streets. While the greatest magus in the world lay in a dead faint, the storm grew fiercer. An angry demon was riding it, people muttered to themselves.

  It was some hours before he at last emerged from his laboratory, the box with its immeasurably precious talismans tucked inside his travelling cloak. His servants knew better than to ask questions, even when they saw him as deathly pale as now. When, though, he called them before him, paid them all nine times what they had from him in a year and dismissed them, they went away telling each other – and, later, everyone else – that this night, surely, his final reckoning had fallen due.

  Part II

  Tuesday Morning

  Six

  The hammering at the door wouldn’t stop. Gavin clutched the arms of the chair, rigid with fright.

  ‘Miss Grey?’

  The bolts juddered. He’d been jolted awake and couldn’t get hold of where he was or what was going on. Someone was outside. Someone wanted to get in.

  He remembered thinking Miss Grey was out there, but he couldn’t connect the thought with the relentless noise. Not the calm, withdrawn Miss Grey he knew, always so grave. Quiet as the grave.

  There was a voice, faint, bleak. He could scarcely hear it at all over the rain and the hammering. It came from somewhere outside, beyond the curtained windows. It sounded like a cross between a person’s voice and a keening animal, or merely the wind.

  What if it was Auntie Gwen, coming home to find her own front door bolted? Could the rain and the night make even scatty, peaceable Auntie Gwen so frenzied that she’d batter and moan?

  Could she have met something outside that had driven her to this?

  All he had to do was get up and look.

  When he saw things he didn’t want to see, Gavin’s habit was to stand still, put his head down and wait. As often as not they’d be gone by the time he counted to twenty. The green face would have gone back to being only an arrangement of shadows in the leaves; the stony-eyed crow twisting its neck to look down from the curtain rail would vanish into the pattern of the wallpaper.

  He counted to fifty. By the time he finished his eyes were squeezed shut and his hands were over his ears, and still the banging went on.

  The fire had faded to a pocketful of embers. He shivered as he pushed himself out of the armchair. His legs felt numb. He dropped to his knees, crawled across the carpet to the window and put his eye to the crack between the curtains.

  There was a dead girl outside, trying to get in.

  She was barefoot in the sheeting rain, thin and pale as paper, wearing something white and filthy and shroud-like which clung to her, sodden nearly
to transparency. Her eyes were closed and her face was slack. Her legs were splattered with mud, as if she’d just dragged herself out of her hole in the ground. Rain bounced off her nose and lips and shoulders and streamed down her arms. One arm hung beside her like part of a carcass; the other was still beating at the door.

  She moaned with her ghost of a voice, the same words over and over. ‘Come back,’ it sounded like. ‘Come back, come back,’ as if she’d been abandoned in her grave and was pleading with him to join her there.

  Gavin curled up on the floor and started counting again. He tried to think of a big number to count to, but he couldn’t. He was too terrified to think anything at all.

  The banging stopped.

  In its wake came a silence so absolute it made his ears sing. After as much of that as he could bear he uncurled himself and made himself look out again, knowing he’d never move from this spot on the floor until he was sure the zombie had gone.

  She was not gone, but the arm that had been raised now dangled at her side, and the head – strewn with lank wet hair, a bony nose and chin poking out between them – had lowered itself. The cries stopped. She’d turned back into an upright corpse, motionless. The downpour rinsed mud from it.

  She turned away from the house and shuffled off into the dark.

  Gavin slumped to the floor.

  The clock caught his eye: a few minutes past midnight. The witching hour. How had he let himself be lured here? No one lived here. It didn’t feel like a house at all. It was a tiny island of light in a sea of ghastly dark. Waves lapped at its edges, threatening to swamp him. He sat as still as he could, listening for any movement, dreading the next sight, the next sound.

  The clock was ticking on, which was a small reassurance, as he wouldn’t have been surprised to see its hands whirl backwards or hear it strike thirteen. There was a scratchy rustle by the draped entrance and the cat nosed through the curtain into the room, looking at Gav as if disappointed that he should have found a corpse at the door at all out of the ordinary. He began to wonder whether it had actually happened, though he’d never learned what that meant, actually happened. It was a phrase his parents liked a lot.

  But Hester Lightfoot had heard Miss Grey, out in front of the house. Or at least heard the same voice. It wasn’t just him. She heard voices; the paper said so.

  Perhaps she’d heard Miss Grey on the train as well. Hadn’t she run out of the carriage suddenly, looking shocked and weepy?

  When five cold and silent minutes had passed without anything happening except the cat treading carefully around the room looking for somewhere to sleep, he decided it was probably safe to move. He thought about getting the fire going. Light and warmth, and something to do. It looked ash-grey and cold, but when he knelt down to sweep the hearth clear he was surprised to feel warmth on his hands. Prodding with a shovel, he found embers. He dropped a sheet of old newspaper among them. A curl of smoke snaked up the chimney and then it was ablaze. Gav watched in astonishment. He’d expected a long struggle. They had a coal fire at home, and his father always insisted that no one else understood the mysteries of laying and lighting it.

  The cat had occupied a basket in front of the fire and was curled up, tail over its nose. Its slow breathing, and the rising crackle of the fire, made the house much less creepy. Nevertheless he went on tiptoe across the room and held his ear to the green curtain for a long time before he dared go past it, and then the first thing he did in the dining room was drag a chair to the front door and wedge it under the handle. Then he went around the house switching on every light he could find.

  He looked in Auntie Gwen’s bedroom to see if she’d left a message or some other clue to where she’d gone. All he found was a wreck of clothes and spangly jewellery and towels and indeterminate wispy things. There was nothing odd about it, except in the way that everything about Auntie Gwen was odd.

  He was beginning to feel the disorienting fuzziness that always went with being awake in the middle of the night. If he stopped moving he imagined he’d probably fall asleep on the spot, but he couldn’t cope with the thought of what might happen if he closed his eyes. He went back downstairs to make himself tea. The kitchen window was uncovered – the only bare window in the house – and he felt horribly exposed in front of it, but he made himself put the kettle on. While it was heating up he got the fire going in the dining room, coaxing it back to life as surprisingly effortlessly as he’d managed with the other one. He lit all the candles beneath the glass hanging as well. If the luxuriantly soulful face that looked out from it was the household goddess, he thought he might as well tend her shrine. Maybe she’d help keep the zombies away and bring Auntie Gwen back.

  Mug of tea clasped between his hands for warmth, he went back into the living room, surveying its chaos of paper and print. No doubt there were all sorts of clues about what she might be up to lying in plain sight, but there was no way of guessing where to start, and he shied away from the prospect of sifting through her scatterings the same way he’d always tried to steer her away from the topic of Miss Grey, or the naked girl in the pool in the park, or the crow in his bedroom, or everything else that used to get her so excited.

  He checked the clock again. It was a very long time until dawn.

  Putting his tea down on a pile of loose sheets and jottings, he settled back into the armchair. His eyelids felt heavy at once. To keep himself occupied, he picked up the scrapbook again. He went through it more thoughtfully.

  He was leaning over the arm of the chair, having just picked up his mug, when he saw his name.

  The base of the mug had left a circular tea stain on the piece of paper beneath. It was the back of an envelope, scribbled on like every other scrap. Gav hadn’t been looking when he’d put down his tea, but now he saw that the ring had appeared round a single word, written in prominent capitals in Auntie Gwen’s narrow handwriting. The word was caught perfectly, in the centre of the circle, underlined twice:

  His first thought was that Auntie Gwen had left him a message. He hadn’t noticed it before – the papers must have shifted around a bit when he put the mug down – but when he flipped the envelope over it turned out to be only some letter addressed to her, the address typed on the front: a PO box number in a place called Falmouth, a postcode. She’d jotted some kind of telegraphic list on the back. It must have been the nearest scrap of paper to hand.

  The last thing she’d scribbled was his name. He frowned at the smaller notes above it:

  Jess!!

  chap girl?

  (O.J.)

  key chap Joshua Acres

  well

  Swanny’s O?

  Then a bigger space and, in overexcited capitals:

  Jess? Joshua Acres? Not much more incomprehensible than any other bits of her writing he’d glanced at. And yet there was his name at the end, as if it was the conclusion to the rest.

  He flipped the envelope over again to check the postmark. Posted from London, last Thursday. The letter must have just arrived. She’d jotted this down very recently.

  He thought for a moment, then went and got her letter to his mother out of his bag, sitting by the fire to reread it.

  It struck him that she’d practically begged Mum to send him down to stay with her. Something about the way she’d crammed the words onto the two sheets of paper. And how overexcited she’d sounded about seeing him again. Why? They hadn’t spoken for years.

  Where was she?

  Miss Grey wanted him to be here. Let the boy go in. She’d found her voice. Come, she told him. And here he was, and someone else could hear her, and one of those things that couldn’t actually happen had been right outside the door, making the house shake with its dead white fist.

  He sat and stared at nothing. The heaviness washed over his eyes. The fire whispered to him quietly, and more quietly. He began dreaming even before he fell asleep.

  Morning crept through the house like disenchantment. Gavin woke with a stiff neck and a groggy head
. There were sounds in the house, ordinary domestic noises: a scraping plate, a cupboard door closing. Auntie Gwen must have got up before him. He rubbed his eyes, not quite recognising where he was. The room had changed its character completely by daylight, as strange rooms do. The dullness of a cloudy morning had got inside it. It looked tired, safe. Birds sang outside.

  Something in the kitchen got knocked over. Auntie Gwen had always been clumsy. Dad had jokes about her magnetic hands that repelled everything. Gav wondered when she’d got back.

  He stretched and got up.

  ‘Auntie Gwen?’

  The cat miaowed from another room.

  There was no one in the kitchen. The cat had been nosing its bowl around on the floor. As he watched, it jumped to the countertop and tried to push open the handle of a cupboard, then sprang down again, leaning against his shins, demanding food. He found the right box in the cupboard and left the cat crunching and purring while he went upstairs.

  ‘Auntie Gwen?’

  He looked in every room, heart sinking as his memories of the night started to come back clearly and the brief comfort of the dawn drained away. The air of sudden abandonment in the house had been a bit creepy in the dark. Now it only made the place dreary.

  She still wasn’t home.

  He opened all the curtains as he went, at last seeing the landscape the house sat in. It took a small effort of courage when he got to the living-room windows and thought of what he’d seen outside them in the night, but he opened those curtains too, looking out onto nothing more sinister than a patch of muddy lawn, the driveway, a simple iron fence beyond and then an empty field sloping down, just grass and the sky, with a faint concentration of cloudy brightness low and to the right suggesting that the sun might be rising. On the other side of the house, through the kitchen window, the view was blocked after a few feet by a tall hedge of something evergreen and glossy, shaded by taller trees behind. There was the edge of a clothesline, and under it one corner of a vegetable patch. Nearby sprawled a rosebush, in full flower, pink saucers defying the morning dullness. From the upstairs windows he could trace the passage of the driveway, starting at the gateposts where Hester had pulled up her car, past the front of the house, and then away to the left down the slope of a hill, where it disappeared into a brown and crooked wood.