“Do you dream about your childhood? When you were small, in that cottage at the edge of the wood?”
He shook his head.
“I’m so pleased. It was so miserably dark and dingy. And yet you seem all not and no today, my sweet.” Her fingers carefully rearranged his hair. “All so quick and touchy. Are you hiding secrets from me, Gideon?”
He pulled his head away and stood up. “Of course not.”
“Again!” Summer’s small red lips sweetened to a smile. She sat back. “Answer me a question then, without no, or not, or never . . . can you do that?”
He recognized the trap. Hugging himself, he shrugged. “Summer . . .”
She held up a hand. “Did you bring something for Venn. Through my kingdom?”
“N— Would I do that?”
Fear. It made him clench his fingers tight. She saw that, her beautiful eyes missing nothing.
“Because if I thought you had, Gideon . . . If for a moment I thought you could do that, you see I would be so, so angry.” She tapped him lightly with a long white finger. “So . . . implacable.”
“Summer, of course I didn’t. What could I . . . ?”
“Something from some other time. Something in a small”—she tapped him again for each word—“black, velvet bag.”
He glanced down in horror. His right hand was shriveling. As he stared he felt it contract, the fingers merge, flesh meshing, bones knitting. Nails hooked to claws. The pain of shrinkage shot through him.
“No.”
Her finger on his lips. “Not that word, Gideon.” She kissed him, her lips soft.
His coat, green as lichen, rippled. The sleeve became feathers, dark and glossy. He felt his skin crack and sprout, his bones hollow out, become frail as twigs.
“I didn’t bring anything for Venn. I swear! Not Venn. Venn wouldn’t even . . .”
“Then who?” Her eyes were close against his, unblinking as an owl’s. “Who?”
“Jake. It was just . . . Jake . . . had journeyed.”
“What did you bring?”
He hated himself. He hated her. He wanted to die but there was no death. There would never be any death.
“The bag. There was some sort of plastic film inside.”
“And?”
“And . . . the bracelet.”
“Indeed.” Summer smiled, and her smile was cool and the terror grew strong in him. “So you helped them without telling me. Without asking my permission. Do you know what I will do, Gideon, for that?”
He knew. He had been a bird before, wind-blown, buffeted, pecked by the hosts of the Shee from one end of the Wood to another. He had been a fish, caught suffocating in a net; he had drowned endlessly in his own terror till he had torn himself free, and then the stabbing beaks of herons had caught him and thrown him and tossed him back. He had been a stone in the path, without a voice, without eyes, feeling only the pain of the Shee horses that rode over him. He had been trapped in the trunk of a tree, screaming in silent agony for centuries of no time.
He knew exactly what she could do to him.
He made himself stand tall. “Let me make up for it then. Tell me what you want, I’ll get it.”
His arm was a wing now. She stroked the feathers. “Anything?”
“Anything. Just . . .”
“I want the silver bracelet, Gideon.”
Gideon stared. “Venn wears it all the time.”
“Not when he comes here.”
Aghast, he said, “No. Then he leaves it locked in an iron safe. But . . .”
She leaned against him. “I want the bracelet. Iron holds no pain for you.”
Feathers broke out down his back, splitting the skin, tearing sinew, reworking his body. “Yes,” he gasped. “Yes, I’ll get it, please, just don’t . . .”
She stepped back, turned, her voice bored now, cold as stone, as the Shee descended in screeching flocks through the branches. “Until you do Gideon, no more sleep. No more dreams. Gideon shall sleep no more.” She clapped her hands.
“Come now, my people! Shall we hunt the wren? Shall we play?”
I should have known it would not be easy.
I did try. My advertisements brought many curious seekers, and I soon learned how simple it is to fool people. At my séances voices were heard, lights flickered, ghostly invisible hands drifted across the faces of my guests. In my trances I moaned and murmured and spoke in their own voices comforting messages from dead husbands and lost children. I read palms and consulted the tarot, I gazed long into crystals and traced out names and dates on the lettered tabletop.
I soon had a reputation and a growing clientele.
But after about two years of this I was restless and dissatisfied. Certainly I was making money. I dressed well, and wore the latest hats. But perhaps my conscience was beginning to trouble me, because although comforting the bereaved starts as a warm glow in the heart, it ends as the cold lies of a practiced charlatan.
It was late one evening, after a particularly troubling session, that I entered the room where my father had worked. It was not a room I frequented, being small and dark, but that evening it seemed charged with a strange, silent expectancy. The maid had gone to bed—by now she was a trusted accomplice in my business—so I lit a small fire myself and then sat on the green ottoman by the window looking down at the street, the few late travelers hurrying home out of the dark and cold.
The clock struck three a.m.
At that moment, for no reason I can relate now, I turned my head. As if a voice had called me.
The obsidian mirror stood facing me.
In it I saw a figure, dark and warped. I was wearing the robe I often wore for séances, a fabulously exotic caftan of purple and turquoise velvet; my hair turbaned and fixed with a brooch of kingfisher wings.
But with a chill of certainty I knew this reflection was not myself.
My heart was beating so loud I could hear it; sweat broke out cold on my back.
Was I, at last, seeing a ghost?
I resolved not to be terrified, and managed to stand. There was a lit candle on the sill; I took it up, and came closer to the glass.
The figure seemed to retreat from the light. I saw it was a man, in some dark, perhaps monkish robe. The candlelight threw strange, brilliant streaks of flame across the black glass.
“Who are you?” I whispered.
He came closer. I saw a man of average height, his face obscured by a hood, and behind him, as if in some other place, stone walls, a wooden bench, a table all laid with paraphernalia and alchemical apparatus.
A sudden idea stabbed me with joy. “Are you . . . are you my father? Father, is that you?”
He drew off the hood. “No,” he whispered.
He was younger, brown-haired, stubbled, worn thin with anxiety. “Where are you?” he whispered. “And when?”
“London. The year is 1904.”
His shoulders sagged; he looked haggard with disappointment. He sat on the bench and behind him, through a small window, I saw the blue sky of some hot climate.
“Are you a ghost?” I asked, quivering.
He looked up. “I don’t know what I am anymore,” he said. And then: “My name is David Wilde.”
It was Sarah who answered the door to the repeated, angry knock.
Rebecca stood on the steps under a dripping, striped umbrella. “He’s here, isn’t he?” She pushed past into the tiled hall. “What’s happening? What the hell have you done with him?”