The Door in the Moon (3 page)

“Come away from that book.”

The voice from nowhere made him jump; he turned fast.

Maskelyne stood in the darkness of the embrasured wall, though Gideon knew for a fact he had not been there seconds ago. A dark man in a dark coat; his scarred face made him half demon and half angel. He came forward swiftly and slammed the book closed, keeping his hand on it. “Are you a fool to look on things you know are dangerous!”

Gideon had jerked his fingers back with the speed of a snake. Now he thrust his hands in his pockets and shrugged. “Don't fear me reading your secrets, master. I never learned letters.”

“Some books don't need to be read.” Maskelyne fastened the chain tight and locked it with a tiny key, which he put in his pocket. “Some books will infect you like leprosy.”

“So why keep it, then?”

Maskelyne glanced at him sidelong, the scar on his face jagged and deep. “That's my business. What's going on? Who's taken Jake?”

He turned and walked out quickly; Gideon ran after him. “You know?”

“The mirror told me. Just now, as I slept, the mirror whispered to me. It murmured its displeasure. It's angry, Gideon, and I fear that.”

He ran and the changeling ran after him, up through the stairs and dim rooms to the labyrinth. Piers had cleared the workbench; he and Wharton sat waiting, gloomily.

When he saw Maskelyne, Wharton jumped up and said, “Find out how far.”

Maskelyne went to the panel. His slim fingers touched the controls. It wasn't as if he operated the thing, Wharton thought suddenly, but rather as if he communicated with it, in some bizarre way.

“Well? Can you tell? Where have they taken him?”

“Before 1800. Or within a few years of that date. But they came from another period. More like 1900.”

“Could it be Symmes?” Piers said hopefully.

Wharton shook his head. “No. John Harcourt Symmes had had his accident and gone into the future by then. The mirror was locked up in his empty house in London for ten years, just moldering under a dust-sheet, until his daughter, Alicia, came.”

“Well, it seems someone else used it during those years. Someone who moves from period to period with practiced ease. A real
journeyman
.” Maskelyne turned away and sat down. He looked deeply troubled. “I'll do the best I can to find out who. Meanwhile, someone has to go and tell Venn. Jake is his godson, after all.”

Piers and Wharton looked at each other in dismay.

“Not me,” Piers said. “Gideon.”

“Are you mad?” Gideon shook his head. “I can't go back to the Shee.”

“And I must stay with the mirror.” Maskelyne stood and stared into its darkness thoughtfully. “This incursion has changed something. Since the spring we've spent weeks working without much result, but these intruders have done what we could not. They have woken the mirror again.” He turned his handsome side to them. “I need Venn's bracelet and he needs to know what's happened. You'll have to go and get him, George.”

Wharton said, “To the Summerland? God forbid! I went there once down a well and—”

“Not there. He's with Summer, in the Wood,” Gideon muttered.

“Great. And how do I find them?”

“Don't worry about that. They'll find you.”

The big man sighed. “Right,” he said. “If no one else has the guts . . .” He took a breath, turned, and marched firmly from the room.

Into the silence, Piers said, “Crumbs. I don't envy him.”

Gideon was silent. Part of him wanted to flee after the man into the green freedom of the Wood. But he managed to stay still. Only, deep in the pocket of his coat, his fingers played with the strange, paper-thin, stolen flower.

J
AKE FINALLY WORKED
the tape free. He spat it off, took a breath, then whispered, “Are you in here? Sarah?”

There was no answer. He was disappointed, and then glad because there would have been no point in her getting locked up too. She needed to be free.

They had brought him through the mirror into a place of total darkness. He had had a glimpse of a candle, a single tiny flame somewhere in the distance, a sense of space, an echoing dimness, and—

Sarah's hand had slipped from his just as the tall man had untied his wrists, hustled him through a door, and bolted it firmly behind him.

He looked around cautiously.

“Is anyone in here?”

His own voice came back at him, resonating as if from a high ceiling.

He threw the tape on the floor in disgust. He could be anywhere . . . For a moment a wave of despair and sheer anger crashed over him, made him clutch his hands into fists and want to yell aloud. How could they do this! Snatching him from the search for his father, the long fruitless work on the mirror . . .

Yet . . . the mirror had worked for them. Allowed them to
journey.

That had to be a small wan hope.

Breathing deep, controlling his fury, he groped, hands out. Almost at once he stumbled against the edge of a table and fumbled his way along it. On the surface he felt a few small cold objects, and among them, a square box. Shaking it, he smelled oil, knew it for a tinderbox, and struck it. The tiny blue flame spurted in the dark, steadied and grew. He saw a candelabra with six candles.

He lit them quickly, then picked the whole thing up and looked around.

His heart leaped with terror.

Men and women stood around him in crowds. Silent and unmoving, they stared at him out of the gloom; their eyes glassy in the flame light. No one spoke. Each of them was rigid, their clothes a crazy motley of ages and times, Elizabethan players, a Roman centurion, medieval women. For a moment he thought he had interrupted some fancy dress party, but the silence was too unreal, the stillness too complete, and he understood with another shiver of fear that they were not even alive.

Then, piled in a corner, he saw a heap of legs and hands and feet, of severed limbs and spare torsos, of severed heads all gazing blankly up and out, and he knew these were waxworks.

He allowed himself a shaky laugh.

They looked so real!

He made himself move toward them, but as soon as he did, the candle flames cast huge wavering shadows; everything seemed to shift slightly, the figures to move, the light glittering in their eyes.

It gave him the creeps.

In front of the ranks of waxworks were three booths containing more complex figures. Still as statues, frozen in attitudes of waiting, a Scribe sat with pen poised, a Dancer balanced on tiptoe. The nearest was an Indian Conjurer in a striped coat sitting before a table with three balls upon it.

Jake looked at it closely, bringing the candles up. And perhaps he touched some handle, because to his shock the figure suddenly came alive, and he stepped back with a gasp as it turned its head and fixed him with glassy eyes.

Music squeaked from its rusty interior.

The automaton picked up a cup and showed nothing beneath it. Then it replaced the cup and with a jerky, impatient action, picked up another. A small red ball lay there.

Jake watched. The figure covered the ball, then revealed that it had vanished. Lifting the third cup, it showed that the ball now lay there, and the dark painted face smiled a brief smile, nodded, bowed, and was still.

Machines. Very old ones. Wind-up. Clockwork.

Jake raised the candles high, wax splatting on the floor. He was in a low, raftered room, maybe an attic. It was crammed with the waxworks, and though he knew what they were, he didn't want to stay here, among these lifeless eyes that watched him.

“Jake!”

It was a whisper; it made him run to the door.

“Sarah? Is that you?”

“Who else would be mad enough to come?”

It made him grin. “I'm glad you did. Where the hell are we?”

“Not sure.” Her voice was close to the outside of the door, as if she had her lips to the keyhole. “The two men have gone. Down a wooden stairway and out into a street, I think. They've locked the door behind them. It's dark out here—there are corridors, wooden, all rotting, stairs, plenty of locked rooms. Maybe we're in some sort of storehouse or warehouse. It's hard to tell. What's in there?”

“Waxworks. Automatons.”

“What?”

“Mechanized puppets. Used for entertainment. We can't have
journeyed
too far back. Look, Sarah, they can't be leaving me here alone for long. They'll be back soon. Can you get me out . . .”

“No chance. There's a huge lock.” He heard her rattle it. “And the door itself is solid.”

“Right. Then listen. Get a weapon—”

“Jake, this is not a game. I'm not smashing someone over the head.”

“For the lock! To break the lock.”

She breathed out, tense. “Oh. All right. I'll look around.” She seemed to move away, then her voice come back. “Don't go anywhere.”

He was about to be sarcastic until he realized she was probably as scared as he was, so he forced a laugh. “I won't. Thanks for coming along, Sarah.”

“Venn won't thank me,” she whispered.

Jake pulled a face. That was only too true.

Sarah moved away from the door, reluctant. Judging from the glow coming under it, Jake had found light of some sort, but she had nothing. Groping the walls was useless; there were no electric light switches.

She made her way along the corridor.

It was low roofed, but some dim illumination filtered from somewhere, so gradually she realized she was walking on trampled earth, and that the walls were painted a dingy green. Here and there they were stained as if by past water leaks, and scuffed as if many people had rubbed and run their hands along them.

Was this a school?

Some sort of theater? A slum?

At the end was a door that creaked open at her touch, revealing a stairwell. She leaned over and looked up. The stairs turned in a wide square into the dark. Sarah waited, listening. The building was utterly silent around her. Then, on some higher floor, something made a small popping sound.

“Hello?” she murmured.

The stairwell took the word and sent it back to her, fading into nothing.

Her hand on the greasy banister, she started up.

It was a bare, bleak stair. She could smell damp, and a sweetness, and a faint but reassuring hint of onions. Twice more the popping noise came; she paused to listen to it, and it was distant, as if outside.

By the time she reached the top landing she was breathless, and her calf muscles were tight with strain.

Facing her was a dilapidated door, with one phrase on it, scrawled in red paint, vivid as blood. It said
VIVE LA RÉVOLUTION!

“Oh no,” she said, very softly.

She forced down the handle; the wind snatched the door from her and flung it open.

She stared in delight and dismay.

She was standing on a narrow balcony and before her spread the massed rooftops of a great city. Gray stone and red tile glittered under a cloudless blue sky. Sunshine blinded her; she had to shade her eyes to look, and she saw balustrades and gables, a crammed tangle of alleyways and streets and lanes pierced by the high spires of countless churches, the twin towers of a mighty Gothic cathedral, the silver flash of a river under its bridges.

Where was this?

Not London, she knew. The sun was too bright, the design of the buildings all wrong.

Was this Paris?

The cathedral must be Notre Dame.

She looked for the Eiffel Tower but obviously it didn't exist yet—she had only seen pictures of it and the TV transmission of its ruined end, when Janus's troops had entered the city at the start of his career. If it was Paris, it was old and dirty and its streets narrow.

Directly below her was a mean boulevard, lined with trees. Carts and carriages rumbled along it, noisy on the cobbles. The popping noise made Sarah grip the rail and look down carefully; there was a market of some sort going on. Voices and vendors' cries, the bleat of ewes and crowing of a caged cockerel rose up to her, the stench of a city without drains or sewers. But beyond that a gang of drunken men were firing muskets wildly into the air, and a barricade of tattered furniture and broken timbers had been heaped haphazardly across the street. She stepped back quickly.

The clothes of the women told her this was the eighteenth century. She knew little about that period in France, except that there had been a great revolution, and rich people had been guillotined, hundreds of them.

That was all she needed.

She turned, ducked back inside, and ran down the stairs. Jake would know more. Passing a broken banister, she went back and pulled it out; the black wood cracked loudly and she froze, listening, and thought she caught some other noise, a rumble deep in the bowels of the building.

Suddenly scared, she made her way down, telling herself not to be stupid, that all anyone would see was a broken stick moving by itself in thin air.

Then, halfway along a landing she heard a bang somewhere below, a loud shout that might have been her name.

Abandoning caution she turned into the corridor and raced along it.

But the door to the waxwork room was wide open.

And Jake was gone.

He had meant to be ready for them, to hide among the waxwork figures, but they had obviously expected that and been almost silent; they'd come in fast, at least five big men all with flaring torches, and grabbed him before he could even scramble up. A black cloak was flung around him, the hood pulled firmly up and over his face.

He squirmed, took a breath, and yelled, “Get your hands off me!”

One of the men snorted a laugh.

Jake was bundled out. It was hard to see anything; he smelled the outside before the warm air hit him. The stench of the cities of the past was something he was becoming used to, but this was more pungent even than plague-ridden Florence—rotting vegetables, dung, the sour acrid sting of some leather or tanning works that started his eyes watering. And the brilliant unmistakeable heat of the sun.

They pushed him up into something that swayed like a carriage; he felt a grimy velvet bench, then men squeezed in beside him on each side. The door was slammed, horses were whipped up.

As the vehicle moved, he was flung against the man to his left, who swore at him.

Jake went very still.

He thought fast. First, Sarah must have been left behind. She could hardly have climbed on the coach, and though it was traveling slowly, she could never have followed it through the crowded streets.

Because he could hear a crowd out there now, a babble of voices, the coachmen yelling at people to get out of the way, the slap of hands against the paintwork, angry cries in French—
French?
—against the window.

He managed to throw the hood back from his eyes.

There were five men in the coach with him, all huge, all armed. Three sat opposite, cudgels on their knees. One held a pistol, cocked, near the window.

For a moment Jake was flattered; then he realized the weapons were not for dealing with him.

There was a riot going on out there.

The streets were alive with a raging mob. He saw snatches of faces, stalls turned over, shops being stripped of food. Women struggled away with trailing armfuls of cloth, an old man staggered under a cask of wine. There were barricades of heaped furniture; twice the coach had to back up in front of them. And he could smell the tension, the wild unleashed anger out there in the city, smell it in the billows of smoke from burning houses, in the crackle of flames, the spilled fruit and cabbages squashed under the wheels of the carriage.