The Room That Remembers You

POV: Viv

She went in first, because that was the rule, and because she was the only one who could.

The door to the Mirror Room stood at the end of a short black passage, a round door of dark wood bound in silver, with no handle and no lock. Josiah had said it would open for her. It opens for anyone who wishes to see. She had not liked how he said it. She put her gloved palm against the silver, and it swung inward on a breath of cold, and Viv stepped over the threshold into a world made entirely of herself.

It was round. That was the first thing. A perfect circle, perhaps forty feet across, with a floor of polished silver-gray stone and a ceiling that rose into darkness. And every inch of the wall, from the floor to a height she could not see, was glass.

Not single panes. Not even single mirrors. The glass overlapped itself in leaning panels and shingles, like the scales of a fish or the feathers of a bird, panel upon panel, each tilted a degree off the one beside it. Some were clear. Some were tinted gold or smoke or green. Some were cracked, or clouded, or silvered on one side only, so that the room beyond them seemed to be moving. A hundred versions of the same lamp-lit chamber glimmered back at her out of the walls, each a little different from the last. And in every one of them stood a girl in a gray serving dress and a white cap, with her hands at her sides.

Fifty of me, thought Viv. A thousand.

It should have been wonderful. Mirrors had been her friends since she was twelve: her doorways, her roads, her way out. She had walked through the glass of a hundred shop windows and the polished brass of a hundred door knobs. She loved the cold of them. She loved the way the world folded.

She did not love this.

Behind her the door swung closed, with a soft, final, well-oiled click.

…

"Dex?" said Viv.

She had meant to say it lightly. It came out thin. Her voice went up into the dark and was caught, and handed from panel to panel, and thrown back at her from fifty directions at once, each time a little changed. Dex. Dex? Dex. She heard the echo go all the way around the room and come back to her ears like a whisper in her own throat.

"Dex, it's closed."

No answer. The silver-bound door was solid as a wall behind her; she put her hand on it and felt the grain of the wood and the cold of the silver and nothing else, no seam, no catch. She had been counting on that. She had been counting on a very different thing.

All right, she thought. I'll walk out.

She turned to the nearest panel, a tall pane of clear glass framed in tarnished bronze. Her own face looked back at her, white and angular and set. She laid her hand against it. She leaned, as she had leaned a thousand times, and waited for the old cold flood.

Nothing.

The glass was only glass.

She pushed harder. She put her shoulder against it, and her forehead, and felt the hard smooth flatness of it against her skin, as unyielding as a plate on a table. She closed her eyes and reached for the Gift, the deep inner knack, the knot beneath her breastbone that made the world open. It was there. She could feel it, warm and ready. But when she pushed, there was nothing on the other side to push into. It was like leaning on a door that has been painted over. The glass did not fold. It did not part. It simply threw her own reflection back.

It swallows them, said Josiah's voice, in her memory. It swallows them.

She understood, then, what he'd meant.

It was not that the Room kept her out. The mirrors were too many. They looked at one another; they looked at her. Every pane reflected every other pane, which reflected the one beside it, which reflected her, in an endless dizzy regress, until there was no clean surface anywhere, no single glass for a girl to step into. The Gift went toward them like a thread toward a thousand needles, and was caught in every one, and lost.

Her mouth was dry.

Don't panic.

She stood very still in the middle of the floor, with her hands tucked into her sleeves, and made herself breathe. The silver light shimmered. Somewhere, a very long way off, water was falling from a height.

And a woman began to sing.

…

It was very faint.

She thought at first that it was the water. A thread of sound, high and clear and warm, drifting out of the walls. It came from the left, and then from the right, and then, strangely, from inside her own head. It was a woman's voice. It was singing in Italian, in a dialect she had not heard in seven years, with the slow rocking swing of a boat on a swell.

Ninna, ninna, mare mio...

She did not move.

It was not a song she knew. That was the cruelty of it. She had known it, once: every word, from the first note to the last, the way she knew her own name. Her mother had sung it in the kitchen while she stirred the pot. She had sung it at the washtub, with her sleeves rolled to the elbow. She had sung it on the deck of the steamer, in the dark, in a wind that tasted of salt, with a six-year-old on her lap. And Viv had lost its name. She had spent it, three weeks ago, on the Watch depot keys, and kept only the tune.

The tune was there. It rose up out of the glass. And, wrapped around it, as bark wraps a tree, were the words.

She heard them.

She heard every one. Ninna, ninna, mare mio. The wave. The window. The little lamp in the harbor. They came to her whole and sweet and perfectly in order, and the name, the actual name, hung at the end of the first line like a ripe fruit, ready to be taken. She had only to listen. She had only to stand there and let it fall.

Viv put her hand over her mouth.

In the nearest pane, the reflection of her own face was gone. In its place was a kitchen.

…

It was a narrow room with a low ceiling and a stove, and the window over the sink was open. Through it came the sound of the street: a cart, a shouting child, the cry of a man selling lemons. On the stove stood a copper pot, bubbling, giving off a thick red steam that smelled of tomatoes and basil and garlic, of onions slowly browning in oil. A table, scarred and clean. Two chairs. A blue-and-white plate with a chip in the rim.

A woman stood at the stove with her back to the glass.

She was small and round and quick. Her sleeves were rolled. A cloud of dark hair, escaping from its pins, curled on her neck. She was humming. She stirred the pot, tasted from the spoon, made a face, added something from a tin. She said something over her shoulder, in the quick Italian of the south, to a person Viv could not see.

Vivi, come here, taste.

The smell hit her like a wave.

It struck her in the stomach, and the throat, and the backs of her eyes. She had forgotten. She had not known she had forgotten. She had been in the Charter Hall kitchens, and the Wick Street boarding house, and a hundred cheap eating-houses, and nothing had smelled like that. Not once. Not in seven years. And now it was here, the red sweet warmth of it, and she could hear her own voice, at six, at eight, piping Mamma, I want more.

She was crying. She had not noticed it start.

Vivi.

The woman at the stove turned.

She had a round, kind, tired face. She had a gap between her front teeth. She had the same dark eyes as the girl who looked back at her out of every glass in the room. She smiled, and held out the wooden spoon, and her eyes were full of the helpless dumb tender love of a woman who has nothing to give but a spoonful of sauce.

"Cara," said the voice, from the mirror. "Stai qui. Stay here. Stay with me."

Viv took a step forward.

…

It was a long time before she understood what was happening.

It came to her in the way a thing comes to you in a dream, slowly, with no one point of waking. She was standing at the foot of the glass. Her hand was against it. She did not remember lifting it. The surface under her palm was no longer cold. It was warm. It was as warm as a kitchen. And all around her, in the walls, the other panels had changed.

They were not showing her anymore. They were showing this.

The Mirror Room had a hundred panels, and in every one of them there was a scene. In the nearest, a little girl in a yellow dress was running on a quay. In the next, a brass band was playing under a striped awning. In the third was a table set for six, with a white cloth and a candle, and an empty chair. A bakery. A barber's. A rooftop at dusk. An old man who smelled of pipe smoke. A woman's hands, plaiting a braid. A boy's face, laughing, with a gap in the teeth. Faces and faces and faces: the Wick Street landlady's goat; the first friend she ever had; the ink-stained fingers of the dancing master; the cracked yellow stairs of her stepfather's house.

All of them were hers.

All of them were things she had lost. Every one. The names, the faces, the small shining objects of a life, each in its glass, each shimmering softly, each calling her in its own warm voice. Come here. Come here. Stay.

It remembers, she thought. It remembers me.

It's feeding on me.

She knew it with a cold flat certainty, the sort of knowing that comes in the instant before a fall. The Room was not guarding anything. It was not a vault, or a trap, or a ward. It was a lure. It lived on what people wanted, and what they wanted most was what they could not have, and it had built itself a skin of silver and glass to show it to them. She had come in with six years of small, careful theft in her pockets, and the walls had turned out her pockets, one by one, and laid every stolen morning on the floor.

And I want it, thought Viv. Oh, God, I want it.

It was the truest thing she had ever known. She wanted it more than she wanted the ticket. More than the ocean. More than her own bright hard freedom. She would have stayed in that kitchen for a hundred years, tasting the sauce, with her mother's hand on her hair and the lemon-seller's cry in the window. The Room had not needed to cage her. It had only needed to be kind.

She took another step. The warm glass rippled. Her fingertips went in.

…

"Viv."

It came from a long way off. It sounded like a man calling from the bottom of a well: thin, flattened, drawn out, a voice with water in it. She flinched. She did not turn.

"Viv!"

She knew that voice. She tried to remember why it mattered.

"Can you hear me? Don't, don't touch the glass. Whatever it is. It isn't real. Viv, do you understand me? It's a, it's—" The voice broke off, and came again, ragged, hoarse. "It's a lie. It's the Room. Listen to the cane."

"Dex," she said, vaguely.

Tap.

It was a small clear sound, like a knuckle on a door. Tap. Tap. It came from somewhere far off in the glass, regular as a clock: the iron ferrule of a cane on stone.

"Come back," said Dex. "Come away. I know what it's showing you. I don't know how I know. It's whatever you want. Don't take it. It'll cost you, it'll, it'll take what you have, and give you nothing. I have a, a" his voice cracked, "I have a ledger. I've written down everything you've lost. I've got it all written down. You don't have to keep it. I'll keep it. Come out."

She stood in the warm light, with her hand in the glass to the wrist, and listened.

She listened to the tapping. And she listened to the woman in the kitchen, calling her cara, and it was a thing she could not hold in the same moment: the warm, impossible sweet red kitchen, and the cold hoarse boy with the cane. Two doors. Two roads. One led to a woman she'd lost, and the other to a man who wrote down her losses, and she knew, with sudden terrible clearness, that she could not take them both.

If I use the Gift to break the glass, I lose more. The glass takes a memory for every pane.

If I don't, I stay.

If I stay, I'm happy.

She almost laughed. It was so reasonable. It was the most reasonable thing in the world. And the little voice at the back of her head, the one that had survived six years of indenture and a thousand cold mornings, the one that had never once believed in anything it could not hold in its hand, said, very clearly: Happy is a price too, Viv. Everything has a price.

Even this.

…

She drew her hand out of the glass.

It hurt. It felt as though she were pulling a hand out of a warm bath into cold air, and her fingers came away trembling, glistening with a faint wet silver, and the kitchen rippled and began to darken. The woman at the stove turned. The smile slipped. She looked hurt, and puzzled, and so very, very young.

"Cara?"

"I'm sorry," said Viv.

Her voice shook. She stepped back. She lifted her right hand, which was still wet, and the silver ran down her wrist and dripped from her fingers like quicksilver, and she held it up before the glass. She did not know what she was doing. She only knew that if she could not go through, she could at least write.

She touched the pane. The wet silver left a mark.

She wrote one word, with her forefinger, in the careful copperplate she'd been taught in the first year of the indenture. Large letters, slanting, perfectly formed. The mark ran down the glass in a bright thin line and then stood there, trembling.

MAMMA.

The kitchen stopped.

It did not fade. It stopped. The red steam hung in the air. The spoon froze, halfway to the woman's mouth. In every panel of the Room, a thousand lost mornings paused, as though a breath had been drawn and not let out, and in the silence, from far away in the glass, there came a tap.

Only one.

It was loud. It was very loud. It rang out like a bell, like a shot, and with it came a deep, heavy, resonant thud, as of a blow struck by something hard and carved and solid. The head of a cane. The whole room shuddered.

A crack ran across the glass.

It started at her word. It went out from the M in a bright zigzag, branching, splitting, forking into the next pane and the next. A high clear singing note filled the room, thin as a wire, rising. The panels began to shiver. The woman in the kitchen put down her spoon, and wiped her hands on her apron, and looked at Viv with eyes that were all at once very old and clear and kind.

"Va bene," she said. "Va', figlia mia."

It's all right. Go, my daughter.

And the whole wall broke.

…

It shattered with a noise like laughter.

That was the only way she could ever think of it afterward. Not the clatter of broken glass but a bright tumbling cascade of sound, rising, ringing, spilling over itself in gold and silver, the sound of a woman laughing at something that has struck her as unbearably funny. A warm throaty chuckle. A breath. A great glad shout. It rang round the chamber from the floor to the roof, and the glass came down in long shining sheets, flashing, scattering, and through it, all in a rush, came a flood of cold plain light.

She flung up her arm.

Shards struck her sleeve and bounced away. A ringing silence followed. When she looked down, she was standing in a drift of glittering splinters, up to her ankles, in a bare round stone room, and a few paces from her, ankle-deep in the glitter, stood a young man in a swallow-tailed coat, white as a sheet, with a cane in his fist and the carved snake's head cracked at the throat.

"Dex," said Viv.

She tried to say something more. She could not. Her throat had closed. She felt for it, the thing she had been about to say, the sound she had been about to make. She groped for the warmth of the laughter that had filled the room, the throaty cascade, the breath. It had been so beautiful. It had been hers. She had heard it a thousand times in a little blue-and-white kitchen.

She reached for it.

There was nothing there. A smooth clean place, where a sound had been.

She stood in the ruined chamber, with the glass glittering round her feet, and understood: That was the Cost. Not the Gift. Not the breaking. Only the saying goodbye. She had paid for it, in the last coin she had left, with the laugh of the woman who had stood at the stove. She knew the kitchen. She knew the pot, and the smell, and the face. She knew that the face had laughed.

She could not remember what it sounded like.

She did not cry. She stood quite still, with her cold wet hand held out in front of her, and a thin line of silver drying on her skin, and the tears came down her cheeks without a sound.