WHAT THE MIRROR TAKES

Day 49 of 100

"This," whispered Josie, "is the most stupid thing I have ever done, and I once gave a sailor a laudanum enema on a dare."

"Hush."

"I'm only saying."

"You are saying it at a volume that will carry to the Dean's bedchamber."

"The Dean sleeps like the dead. I put something in his cocoa."

Mara stopped on the stair and turned her head. In the light of the shuttered lantern Josie's face was round and moon-pale and entirely unrepentant, with a wisp of curl stuck to her forehead, and a bunch of keys in her fist that she had stolen, that morning, from the porter's lodge with a skill that did honor to her profession.

"You drugged the Dean?"

"A thimbleful. Chamomile and a little something. He'll wake up with a headache and a warm feeling about the Bureau." She grinned. "Go on. I'm the lookout. It's what I've been dreaming of."

They went down.

…

The Cold Stacks lay beneath the Academy library like a second, shabbier library, left over from some earlier century and forgotten.

You reached them by a spiral stair from the back of the Rare Books room, behind a door that was locked and had been for thirty years. The stair went down, and down, and round, and ended in a vaulted cellar the size of a chapel, cut straight from the rock of the hill. The air was cold enough to see. It smelled of limestone and mildew and long-dead paper. Row after row of shelves ran back into the dark, black with age, sagging under the weight of folios that no one had asked for since Lincoln.

Nobody came here. Nobody was supposed to. It was where the Academy put the books it could not burn.

And since Monday, Dr. Ines Calder had been working here.

Mara had learned it from Josie, who had it from the Dean's secretary, who had mentioned it in passing over the tea-tray with the vague complacent importance of a woman who knows a thing she does not understand. The Bureau doctor's taken the old Chancellor's study in the Stacks. For her notes. She's most particular. She keeps it locked.

It was a small room at the far end, built into the angle of the wall: stone-floored, windowless, with a deal table and a camp-chair and a long iron press. The door was oak, bound with brass. Josie tried four keys. The fifth turned.

They stood on the threshold a moment, listening.

Silence. The tick of the lantern's shutter, cooling. The far-off, faint, steady drip of water.

"In and out," said Mara.

"In and out. And if she comes?"

"We say we were looking for Paracelsus."

"At two in the morning."

"I'm known to be eccentric."

They went in.

…

It was exactly the room of a woman like Calder. Not a paper out of place. The table bare except for a blotter, a pen-tray, and a single lamp; the chair squared to the edge; the press shut and locked with a lock the size of a fist. Mara knelt before it with her case of tools, the pins that Winnie Ostrander had given her one rainy night, with the remark that "a librarian ought to know what she is guarding against," and went to work.

It took eleven minutes. Josie held the lantern and chewed her lip and said "Hurry," four times, in a dying voice. Then something clicked, deep inside the iron, and the door swung open with a long low groan.

Inside, on three shelves, lay ledgers.

They were bound in gray buckram, like the Hollis summary. They bore a number on each spine, in a precise hand, and a date. I. 1889. II. 1890. III. 1891. Nineteen of them, in a row. At the end stood a twentieth, thicker than the rest, and next to it a slim black volume with a ribbon.

"Which?" breathed Josie.

"All."

"We haven't the time."

"Then the last two." Mara took the black volume first, because it was on top, and because there was something in the very look of it that she disliked. She carried it to the lamp, and opened it, and held the page to the light.

TRIAL RECORD — PRIVATE. Dr. I. Calder. Not for the Bureau's files.

She turned a leaf.

…

Trial 1. 4 Oct. 1889. Brattleboro, Vt. Subject A: female, 22, schoolteacher. Subject B: Doppel, same description. Mirror of Truth (prototype) activated at 3.40 p.m. Subject B stable throughout. Subject A experienced immediate contraction of the corona; light drawn into the iron frame within 90 sec. Subject A lost consciousness at 4 min; pulse failed at 11 min. Declared dead by Dr. Wells at 4.07 p.m.

Result: Subject A identified as the Doppel.

Remark: Subject B returned to family, as the Original.

Mara read it again.

She did not feel the cold of the cellar. She did not feel anything. She only read, with a distant clear attention, as one reads a thing in a language one has learned and never expected to use.

Subject A identified as the Doppel.

Subject B returned to family, as the Original.

"What's it say?" whispered Josie.

"It says they killed the wrong one."

"What?"

"Wait."

She turned the page.

Trial 2. Burlington. Subject A: male, 41, bookseller. Mirror draws Subject A. Subject A expires at 9 min. B stable. B returned to family.

Trial 3. Rutland. Subject A: female, 15. Mirror draws A. A dies. B returned.

Trial 4.

Trial 5.

She went on turning. The pages came faster. The wording did not change; it had the dry procedural rhythm of an inventory. Mirror draws A. A expires. B returned. There were small variations. Once the subject had lasted fourteen minutes. Once there had been a convulsion. Once, in Trial 9, Calder had written: Subject A, female, 30, pleaded to be spared. Declined. Once, in the margin, in smaller letters: The mother arrived at the door during the procedure. Had to be removed.

On the fifteenth page she found a column of figures.

SUMMARY OF 19 TRIALS.

Subjects drawn by Mirror: 19. Subjects "identified as Doppel": 19.

Subjects who expired within 24 hrs: 17.

Subjects who survived: 2.

Survival rate of the drawn party: 11%.

Of the 2 survivors: both continued to exhibit debilitation. One (Trial 12) was subsequently committed. One (Trial 16) was transferred to Washington, to Dr. H.'s care.

Note: The Mirror does not discriminate between Original and Doppel. It draws whichever light is the weaker. In the Original, the weaker is nearly always the Original.

Reason: the Original, bereft of its other half, is the lesser vessel. The Doppel has the Original's memory and the Original's will, but not the Original's wound. It is, in the physical sense, the more stable.

The page was blurring.

The more stable.

She put her hand flat on the table. It was cold, and perfectly solid, and she held it there until the room stopped moving.

The Doppel is the more stable. The Original is the weaker vessel. The Mirror draws the weaker.

Eleven percent.

He knew.

…

"Mara."

"I'm all right."

"You're the color of tallow."

"I'm all right." She wasn't. She stood there with her back to the iron press and her arms wrapped round the black book, and it was all she could do not to be sick. "Jo, listen. Listen to me. They have been killing the originals. For five years. They've been putting an honest, frightened woman in front of that glass, and taking her light, and telling the family that she was the Doppel. And the copy—"

"Goes home."

"Goes home. Gets her husband and her children and her chair by the fire. Because the Mirror says it's real." Her voice shook. "And the Director knows. He must. It's his Mirror. He built it. He must have seen the figures."

"He signs for it," said Josie.

She had picked up the first of the gray ledgers and was scanning it with her lips thin. Her face had changed. The cheerful roundness had gone out of it; it looked harder, and older, and very like her mother's.

"Every one," she said. "Approved. A.H. Right down the page." She flipped a leaf. "And what's this? Disposition of the drawn light. It says— Oh, Mara. Oh, God."

"What?"

"It doesn't just vanish." Josie's finger was shaking on the line. "It says the Mirror concentrates the drawn light in the iron frame. And then it's—" She read it out, in a flat dead voice. "Transferred to the Reservoir at Blackfrost, by Dr. H.'s instruction, for the maintenance of the Vault's wards."

"The what?"

"The Reservoir."

…

They found the rest in the twentieth ledger.

It was not a ledger of trials. It was a different thing, bound in the same gray cloth, but thicker, and written in a different, hurried hand, and Mara knew it for Calder's private diary before she read the first line. It was a plain account, set down night by night in the cold regular script of a person who has never lied to her own notebook. It did not name the Bureau's crimes. It named only facts.

Blackfrost Vault, 14 Feb. 1892. Inspection with Dr. H. Present: myself, the Director, Warden Greaves.

The Vault is not a prison. I wish to record that I understood this, for the first time, today.

The Sealed persons (146 at present count) are not confined in the cells. The cells are empty. They are kept in the lower chamber, which Dr. H. calls the Reservoir. They are in a state of suspension, neither sleeping nor waking, in racks of iron. Each is connected by a copper filament to the central column. The column glows. I stood at its foot for some minutes. It gave off warmth, and a sound. I will not say what the sound was.

I asked Dr. H. what became of them.

He said: "They become the Bureau's strength."

I asked what that meant. He said that souls, once sealed, are not destroyed, but "drawn." That the energy of a soul is of an extent no engine can equal; that one person's light, sustained, will power a ward for a decade. That the Vault's wards, the Bureau's great Sight-engines, the Academy's own protections, are all fed from this one source. That the Sealed are not dead. They are only used.

He spoke gently. He wept a little. He said it was the mercy of the Act.

I did not sleep.

Mara read it to the end, and then she sat down on the camp-chair, because her knees had stopped working.

"It's a battery," she said.

"What?"

"The Vault. It's a battery. Every Doppel they ever sealed, every pair, both of them, they weren't locked away. They were plugged in." She laughed, a thin cracked noise. "Hollis was right. Sixty-seven cases. And I thought, at the Annex, that the eleven were somewhere. That they'd been moved."

"They were."

"To be used."

"To be used," said Josie.

She sat on the edge of the table, with her hands in her lap and her face white, and neither of them spoke. The lamp hissed. Out in the dark of the Stacks something dripped, and went on dripping, with the slow indifference of water.

…

"There's more," said Josie, after a time.

She said it flatly, with her finger marking the place.

The last pages of the diary were different. The hand had changed. The lines were crowded, and slanted, and in two places the ink had run, as if the writer had been unable to hold the pen.

3 March 1894.

The Director visited me at the Bureau's laboratory. He was in excellent spirits. He had the Thornwick report in his hand. He said: "Ines, it is the very thing I have waited for."

I asked what he meant. He said a Doppel was manifesting at the Academy of a quality he had hoped for, but had not dared to expect. Not a stray, not a common soul-tear from hysteria or accident. A true Division. A soul cut clean in two by a single act of magic in childhood, and kept so for ten years. He said it was "ripe."

I said I did not understand.

He said: "The Reservoir is failing, Ines. It has been failing for two years. The old souls give out. A hundred and forty-six are not enough. The wards will fall by midsummer, and the Bureau with them. We need something larger than the Act has ever offered."

I said: "Larger?"

He said: "A whole soul. Divided and reunited. It is the greatest source of power on earth. Greater than a thousand of the others. And the opportunity has come to us on the hundredth night, under an eclipse, when the veil is thinnest, in the Soul Sanctum of the Academy itself."

I asked what he intended.

He said: "I intend to draw them both."

Mara had stopped breathing.

I asked: "And the girl?"

He said: "There will be no girl. That is the beauty of the Rite. The Erasure takes the whole of them, body, name, record, memory, and leaves nothing for the world to mourn. The Mirror will draw the weaker; the Rite will draw the other. At the moment of totality they will be one light, and the light will be mine."

He smiled. He said: "I shall not have to sign for it. No one will remember that they existed."

I have written this down. I do not know why. There is no one to give it to.

I am afraid of him.

She turned the last page.

It was almost bare. A few lines, ruled off, in a smaller and steadier hand, like a sentence passed:

ECLIPSE NIGHT. 29 JUNE 1894.

ERASURE RITE, SOUL SANCTUM, THORNWICK.

TARGET: BOTH.

…

She did not know how long they sat there.

The lamp burned low. The cold seeped up from the stone floor, through the soles of her shoes, through the bones of her legs, until it seemed to her that she was no longer sitting in a room at all but at the bottom of the lake. Beside her Josie was crying, silently, with her fist against her mouth. It was no sound at all. A tear ran down her chin and fell on the page.

"Both," said Josie.

"Yes."

"He knew from the first. Before the Ascension. Before Rooke ever—" She choked. "He was waiting for you."

"He was waiting for a Division. Not me. Anyone." Mara's voice was quite level. She was surprised at it. "I think there are not many. It takes a particular sort of accident. A child. A tearing. Ten years of keeping the pieces apart." She looked down at her hands, which lay on the black book like the hands of a stranger. "He must have been watching for a girl like me since the year it happened."

"Since 1884."

"Since the card. Case 1884-17. He took the file to Washington. He kept it." She drew breath. "He's been counting the days to my Ascension as I have."

"Then it wasn't an accident."

"What?"

"The tear. Whoever did it. If Halloran was watching you since then, if he'd kept you—" Josie raised her wet face. "Mara, was it him?"

She had asked herself the same thing, on the cot in the loft, in the dark; and some creature at the very back of her mind had answered, quick and cold and terribly certain: No.

She did not know why. She only knew the shape of the answer. A boy's hand. A rope. A gray sky.

Not Halloran, she thought. Someone else. Someone who was there. Someone who cried.

"I don't know," she said.

"You will."

"Yes."

"We'll find out. We'll—" Josie wiped her face on her sleeve, furiously. She stood. She was shaking, but her jaw was set. "First we'll stop him. We've fifty-one days. We've the Captain. We've Winnie, and the old professor, and—"

"And a pair of iron doors," said Mara, "and a man who wrote the Act."

"And us."

"And us."

"Then we copy what we can," said Josie, "and we go."

…

They copied for forty minutes.

Mara wrote in the black notebook in a small hard hand, page after page, the trial figures, the Reservoir passages, the Director's words. Josie held the lamp. They did not speak. Once Mara stopped and sat with her pencil lifted, staring at the line that said Subject A, female, 30, pleaded to be spared. Declined. She did not know why that one. She thought of the sister, or the mother, or the husband, who had come to the door, and been removed.

She wrote it down.

At a quarter past three, with the notebook full and the black volume replaced in the press, she locked the iron door and slid the picks into her case. They doused the lamp. They stood in the dark of the little stone room, and listened, and heard nothing. They went out into the Stacks, with the lantern shuttered to a thread, and climbed the stair, and let themselves out by the back of the Rare Books room into the sleeping Academy.

The quad lay under a pale moon. A cat went along the wall. High overhead the clock tower rose against the stars, gaunt and silent, with its four white faces; and from somewhere beyond the hill came the long thin mourning call of a loon.

"Fifty-one days," said Josie.

"Fifty-one."

"What do we do?"

Mara stood with her back to the cold stone of the library and looked up at the clock.

"Tomorrow," she said slowly, "I am going to tell the Captain everything."

"All of it?"

"All of it. The ten days are up." Her mouth twisted. "He has a right. And so have I. I have a notebook full of proof, and a friend who can pick locks, and a man who has promised to be wrong in my company. I shall give him the chance to be right."

"And if he doesn't believe you?"

"Then I'll have been honest," said Mara. "It's more than anyone has managed so far."

She turned and started across the grass. Josie fell in beside her. Behind them, in the quiet dark of the library, the old building settled and creaked, and in the iron press below the Stacks the ledgers lay shut upon their figures, and the key of the Erasure Rite lay waiting among them like a coiled snake in a nest of paper.