The Dickens Mirror Read online

  “Come on, Bode,” she said, “here’s the light. Look up. Think. Bubbles rise.” Where is he? Why hasn’t he come up yet? Flicking her gaze to the left, she looked for the ladder’s boreholes, then followed those to where she thought the opening must be. With a start, she saw the water there was a little darker and then realized that what she was looking at were streamers of diluted blood.

  “No.” She thought about it for exactly a half second, then clawed her way to a stand. Hugging the wall, she balanced her makeshift torch on a rung high enough where she thought a splash wouldn’t douse it. She dropped to the rock again, the temperature change stealing her breath. Just one more piece of bad news; she knew that from those CPR lessons Jasper had made her take before he’d let her kayak on Superior. A lot of people didn’t drown in cold water; they suffocated because when cold water hit their faces, they gasped. Reflex. Their windpipes clamped down at the first wash of icy water, and then it was over unless they got to the surface.

  Leaning forward, she thrust her right arm through the hole, stretching as far as she dared, afraid of losing her balance and sliding in headfirst. All she felt was cold water and stone and … Something brushed her hand. The contact jerked a gasp from her throat, and she almost flinched away before she registered: fingers.

  “Bode!” Flopping onto her stomach, she dug the points of her boots into the rock and plunged both arms into the water. Her left fingers scrabbled over the limp back of his left hand and then a wrist, the bunched folds of his coat sleeve, the hump of his left shoulder. Coat’s hung up on something. Finger-walking around his shoulder, she felt a stout thumb of metal protruding from the wall, and understood at once how he must be oriented: listing to his right, legs falling away from her and to his left, which put his head and chest under the lip on her side of the hole.

  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.

  2

  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.

  PART SIX

  THE DICKENS MIRROR

  DOYLE

  The Woman in Black

  1

  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 wo
man—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.

  2

  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.

  Shite! His head went airless, and he thought, That’s all right, Doyle. Go on, pass out now, boy-o. Take a bit of a kip. Been a long day.

  “Five pieces for a fadge.” When the hag leaned close, the blank of her face churned. “Hate if you’ve an—”

  Let me, poppet. Black Dog’s massive head flickered out of the corner of Doyle’s eye as it leapt. Quick as a lick, the hag was on her back. There came a ripping sound of wet cloth, and then a spume of purple blood.

  Horrified, Doyle’s jaw unhinged, and he might still have screamed except for something he noticed that gave him pause.

  They were in a crowd—and yet no one stopped. The stream went on, with no more care for him or Black Dog or this dead hag than if they’d been boulders around which the crowd had to part in order to be on its way. In this small eddy, this transparent pocket about which the outside world—if this was a reality at all—flowed, time was at a standstill.

  There we are. Black Dog held the ragged, dripping meat of the hag’s throat clamped in its mouth. Then, with a flip of its head, it swallowed the steaming, bloody chunk in a single gulp as, all around, the crowd swarmed. Turning, Black Dog threw Doyle a wink. Not to worry, my darling. It set off, oiling around the hag’s still-twitching
body, threading the needle of a path through the faceless swirl of bodies. Follow me. I know the way.

  I see Black Dog, really see it. How? Why? Bending against a slash of wind, he plodded, leading the faceless horse. Sweat leaked from his scalp to soak into his high collar. I see it now when I ain’t never truly done before. The scream he’d stoppered simmered at the back of his tongue. Whatsat mean?

  Either Black Dog didn’t hear or felt no need to reply. Perhaps all for the good, that.

  Time … passed. Or maybe it hadn’t, and only his surroundings had streamed past in an amorphous blur, like riding a carousel spinning so quickly the world smeared. Whatever the case, at some point they were just there, at the asylum’s wrecked front gate, with its ruined guardhouse. That, at least, hadn’t changed. Then another gap in time, and he was traversing the rear grounds. Ahead, the broken edifices of the derelict criminal wings loomed, and then the wide bore of a subterranean entrance seemed to pull apart like a gigantic maw … so he had descended … and he seemed to fade into this place. Because there were no corridors, no door, no openings carved from stone. Everything—walls, ceiling, floor, even the instruments—was indefinite, hazy, out of focus. Unformed, as if some god had yet to fashion them from black mud, like the flat fronts on the street, the blanks of the crowd.

  And yet, when Doyle thought about it: aside from the wobble and shimmy, Bedlam now seemed the only real, solid thing.

  Well … and Black Dog.

  3

  “DO SOMETHING!” IT was the little girl, the supposed mute. “If Rima draws any more from Tony, it’ll kill her.” The girl glared up at the woman in black, who stood just beyond the bars. “Do you want Tony to die?”