Mirrorworld (6 page)

“Vee-aj-ee-a-
torr
-ee,” Eustace groaned, “not.. what you said. Good grief. Otherwise, though, not bad. You possess basic listening skills, at least. Got anything else for me?”

Marcus shrugged. “That’s all. The presentation was very informative, but I feel like I’d have been just fine with someone simply telling me all this.”

“Ha, but then would you have believed it?” Eustace leaned forwards. “It’s not like telling you that it’s going to be sunny out today, is it? If I’d come up to you in the street and told you, oh by the way, there’s another world hiding on the flipside of your quaint little Earth.. you’d hardly have taken me seriously, would you? No, don’t answer that. That’s why we bring you all here first.”

“This is the Mirrorline?” Marcus guessed.

“More or less, yes. This is the space between places, the weird dimension that wraps around and contains both of our planets. It is the space we must pass through to move between worlds.”

“It’s quite odd,” Marcus offered, rocking in his chair.

“Yes it is. And persuasive, too, wouldn’t you say? Certainly you seem convinced.”

“Ah, well, I’m only operating at about fifteen per cent of my total capacity right now,” Marcus said, “so I’ll believe anything you tell me.” It was true that he’d been whimsically entertaining the notion that he was still sitting at the bar, talking to a series of empty whiskey bottles, and that the last day or so had merely been a continuing stream of deranged hallucinations. Unfortunately, he was well acquainted with the deep, dark places in his mind, and they’d never looked like this before.

I worry that you’ll come to prefer the world in your head to the real one, and disappear into it,
his
memory whispered.

“Ha,” Eustace said again, failing to notice Marcus’s sudden shiver. “Well, believe this. This is the Mirrorline, but not the true Mirrorline. There is no ‘true’ form to it. It’s just chaos. Any shaped or organised existence here is entirely dependent on the people in it. This particular area has been designated as a tutorial area, complete with a really quite dull orientation video, but if we didn’t hold it in this form it’d quite happily fall apart in an instant. Are you alright?”

Marcus straightened up from the slump he had fallen into while the older man had been speaking, and blinked away the beginnings of tears. “Fine,” he said, rubbing his temples. “Just.. like I said, limited capacity. I’m keeping up. What was that about.. being ‘dependent on the people in it’?”

“Don’t worry, don’t worry, it’s under control. See, whenever we come here for whatever reason, one of us is designated ‘controller’, and is responsible for bringing order to the place. Eira here is currently twisting the raw Mirrorline around us into a shape we’re comfortable with. You can thank her for the comfy chairs. And perhaps a further demonstration? Eira?”

With a snort, the Master sat up from where she had been clearly dropping off to sleep on her sofa, which had at some point transformed into a canopied swing seat. Holding a sleeve back with one hand, with the other she made an elegant gesture, and a steaming hot cup of coffee materialised out of nowhere in front of her. She completed the movement by picking the cup out of the air, taking a sip, going “ahhhh” and sliding back down into her drowsing position.

Marcus was thankful for the show, as it gave him time to fight off that echoing memory. Even from amidst a battle within his mind, he had to admit that it was impressive. “Is it safe to be here when she’s falling asleep like that?” he asked.

“Oh yes, it’s fine.” Eustace chuckled roguishly. “She does her best work half asleep. It’s actually a very interesting area, but never mind that. See, there are Masters who can handle the paperwork, and there are Masters who are actually bloody good Linewalkers to boot. There aren’t many who can handle both. There are skill levels to this business, you see. Some have it naturally, some can learn it, some will be eternally hopeless. I knew I was destined for the scholarly life as soon as I discovered that the extent of my abilities was opening a portal barely big enough to step through. I’m sure you can sympathise.”

“Meaning?” Marcus asked, tearing his gaze away from the Master’s delicious looking coffee.

Eustace laughed again. “Don’t get twitchy, boy. I’m just saying. In theory anyone can learn to be a Viaggiatori, but in most instances you’ve either got it or you don’t. Linewalking is an art. You can teach geniuses to play it safe, but you can’t teach genius. And since you’re just sitting there looking unimpressed at pretty much everything, I feel I’m quite within my rights to declare that you, my boy, will never be a Viaggiatori. So I’m lead to wonder, what
are
you doing here?”

“I honestly haven’t got a bloody clue,” Marcus said flatly. “Your Master said I was important for something, but never got round to telling me what. Pretty much all I know is what you’ve just told me. I didn’t
ask
for this. I was quite happy drinking myself to d- into a stupor. Then you people whisked me up with your crazy magic and dropped me here and started chasing me, then hitting me, now insulting me. Thanks for that. A real homely welcome.”

“Ah, so the boy does have a little punch,” Eustace said with a grin. “Jolly good. Well, yes, I might happen to have some idea what all that’s about, but I’ll leave that one for Eira to explain. I’m going to have to disabuse you of your rampant stereotyping of magic, though, lad, because that’s some terribly Earthman thinking right there. ‘Magic’ isn’t some sort of convenient catch-all term to explain stuff you don’t understand. Magic is complicated. It’s a force, it’s energy, it’s something that has to be researched and understood before it can be controlled. In any case, ‘magic’ as you understand it.. that’s
pretty far from what we do. Wizards do magic. We do science. The dimensional science of the Mirrorline. That’s our area. How it all works, how the worlds fit together, what the concept of balance even means outside of abstract terms, all that jazz. It’s taken
decades for us to solidly configure reliable instant connections for travelling between worlds, for example, and we’re still ironing out the creases there. That’s to say nothing of the times that the Mirrorline decides to randomly explode and dump people and places from one world into the other. The more we know, the more we can prevent that kind of thing from happening, because if we don’t, then-“

Eustace was at this point cut off in mid flow, as a herd of horses charged past between himself and Marcus, knocking Marcus’s rocking chair over backwards in a shower of wicker and sweat.

“What the hell was that?” Marcus asked, as the herd stampeded off into the abyss.

“That,” Eustace said, “means story time is over for today. It seems that Eira has fallen completely asleep, and so her control over the Mirrorline is now being dictated by her unconscious mind, meaning that the things that will be happening in her dreams..”

“Happen here, to us?”

“Yes, that would be a largely correct assumption.”

“She said this place was safe!”

“It is,” Eustace said cheerily. “But I hardly think it’s an appropriate place for us to continue talking now that
anything
could feasibly happen. What say we wake her up and get out of here?”

“Yes,” Marcus agreed, “that sounds like an idea I could get behind.”

“Go on then, important man. Go wake her up.”

“What? Why me?”

“Because,” Eustace said with a wicked grin, “I’ve had to do it before. Good luck! I’ll be right here, not being murdered.”

“Great,” Marcus said, and turned to walk over to where the Master’s swing stood, only to find it was now in a completely different direction and quite a bit further away.

“You know how space and time blend in a dream, Mr. Important? That’s another thing that gets passed over into the Mirrorline. Most of the control we exhibit over it is entirely mental, y’see.”

“Great,” Marcus said again, trudging his way over to the Master. As he got closer, four huge, grotesque, half-rotted figures in purple robes appeared in the sky above him, and started barking and screeching incomprehensible orders down at him, before turning on each other in a display of colour and shape that far surpassed the hyperactive clouds from earlier.

“Now those,” came Eustace’s voice from behind him, “look suspiciously like our very own dear council, or rather, how they would look envisioned through the sleep-deprived mind of someone who has the dubious honour of dealing with them every day. Interesting what we can learn through dreams, isn’t it?”

Marcus ignored him. He reached the Master, who had spilt her coffee all over herself in dropping off to sleep. Tentatively, he reached out, and touched her on the shoulder. Nothing happened.

“And now,” Eustace continued, “they seem to have dissolved into some sort of pastiche of Portruss itself, slowly melting apart. Bits are dripping on me, Mr. Important. Do hurry up.”

Marcus shook the Master a few times. She murmured softly to herself, and somehow managed to throw the remnants of her coffee down Marcus’s trousers.

“Oh, now this is interesting. Erm, Marcus..”

Marcus snapped his head back around in Eustace’s direction, suddenly worried by how for the first time the old man had sounded less than entirely confident. As he span, the air suddenly filled with hideous, screeching laughter that blocked out anything else the old scholar might have said. Marcus looked around, frantically searching for the source of the arcane chortling, and found it in the silhouetted shape that was descending from the convoluted mess of the sky. Man-shaped, yet with dimensions far surpassing that of the average human, this striking figure was robed in dark flames that were blown out spasmodically by the sudden piercing winds that had struck up, and all seemed to be blowing inwards towards this vision, circling it upon arrival with whiplash intensity. The figure emanated a sense of menace and distress that dwarfed anything Marcus had felt from his staff, and he stood there rooted in terror against the protestations of his hind brain, sure that Death had caught up with him.

But no – this figure already had a staff of its own, a long, knobbly thing quite unlike Death’s smooth scythe. Also, though the head was little more than blackest shadow, it was un-hooded, and framed by a shock of long hair flashing about in the wind. And there was the laugh.. it hit notes of bitterness, madness and evil despair that seemed quite unlike any sound Death would make. It was unmistakeably human. Marcus thought he might have laughed that laugh once before.

“Marcus,” came Eustace’s voice, now somewhere beside him, “I really do think we should be leaving now.”

“What the hell is that?” Marcus yelled back, loudly into a sudden silence as the laughter abruptly cut off. Turning back to look at the dark vision, he was horrified to see it studying him in an almost contemplative manner, head cocked to one side. “What is it doing?”

There was no response but the old scholar’s distressingly panicky attempts to awaken the Master. Marcus tried to turn and help, but he was transfixed by the curious gaze of the figure, and stood frozen on the spot as it drifted closer. That dark face suddenly broke into a wide, jigsaw grin, and without further warning the figure swung its staff up over its head, rotated it a few times, then bought it down pointing squarely at them and blasted forth white light from its end. Marcus barely had time to think ‘not
again,
’ before the shockwave hit, passed through him onto Eustace and Eira, and blew them all apart into fragments of dreams.

“Do you remember our first date?” Alice asked, as they lay in the snow, waiting for day’s light to fade.

“Of course,” Marcus answered, gently extricating his arm from under her and attempting to massage some life back into it. “You told me that you’d never actually been on a proper date before. I didn’t realise at the time how transparent of a hint it was, but it certainly worked.”

“Well, you’d have sat there on your end of the computer and been content to IM me forever if I hadn’t done something about it. I got tired of waiting.” Marcus could barely make out her expression, so well was she wrapped up, but in the little gap between scarf and woolly hat he caught a glimpse of her smile. Alice had a full complement of attractive smiles, but this one was one of his favourites, a crooked grin that put him in the mind of a cat that had been caught eating the gerbil and regretted nothing.

“I’m still claiming that one,” Marcus said. “You can have the second date. That was all you.”

“Oh yes. We went to the movies. What did we go see?”

“I have no idea,” Marcus confessed, and lay back down with a soft crunch. A westerly wind had swept the storm into the city with little warning, and the snow had been coming down with aplomb for most of the day, but within the hour the worst had passed. The blizzard had lessened to a gentle caress of fallen flakes on a whitewashed world, and they’d decided to go to the park.

“You were the perfect gentleman, that first night,” Alice murmured after a moment. “Paid for the taxi, seated me, paid for everything, walked me home. We were at my front door, and you gave me a hug and ran away. I felt like a princess. A rather chaste princess, but a princess nonetheless.”

“For what it’s worth,” Marcus said wistfully, “I did want to kiss you.” He did so then.

“Let’s never leave this place,” Alice said later. “Let’s live on this hill forever. Let’s live in the hill.”

“We don’t have any supplies,” Marcus pointed out. “Ow,” he added.

“Don’t say that,” Alice said, punching him in the side again. “That unwavering dedication to practical rationality will ruin you, Marcus. You should dream a little more freely sometimes.”

Marcus hesitated at her words, stricken suddenly by a strange feeling that some far-off iteration of himself had seen her words come to life, her casual prophecy come true. He shivered, his sense of whimsy dispelled. “Do you really think so?” he found himself asking.

“I do,” Alice said solemnly, twisting to look into his eyes. “Sometimes it seems like you’re moving through life in a daze, interacting with but never quite touching the world. Poor Marcus, at once removed from his own life. I worry, sometimes, that one day you might be like that with me. I worry that you’ll come to prefer the world in your head to the real one, and disappear into it.”