Haunt Me Still (22 page)

I WENT TO
the window. As far as I could tell, the whole museum had gone dark, though the buildings across the street still had power. The room, however, was not entirely black. Light from the streetlights, from the ambient light of London, drifted through the windows.

Eircheard and Owen should have been back by now, surely. I listened at the door but heard only silence. I folded the copy of the daguerrotype and the e-mail together and shoved them in the pocket of my jeans. “I’m going after them,” I said.

Joanna did not care to sit alone in the darkness, so we slipped out of the office together. With one hand on the wall, I turned right, counting three more doors before the corridor turned left. Up ahead, a faint light spilled into the corridor from the galleries leading off to the right, more like paler darkness in a shade of gray, rather than actual light, like the mysterious light in rembrandt’s gloomier paintings. I sped up, heading for it. Behind me, Joanna kept up.

I paused at the wide doorway leading into the Enlightenment Hall. The glow of London’s lights washed in through the high windows up along the gallery, bright enough to cast faint shadows of the trees and branches swaying outside, so that the whole hall seemed to be moving, dancing around the space amid lashing branches. The movement of the trees made the statues—Cupid, Pan, Hermes, Sekhmet—look as if they were moving, swaying to some silent music.

“I don’t hear anything,” said Joanna.

“That’s the problem,” I whispered back. “We should hear
something
.”

“What have you dragged me into?” Joanna said with more than a hint of accusation.

“Sorry, but we have to find Eircheard.”

Keeping to the deep shadows in the narrow lane between the long wall of books and a line of exhibit cases, we crept forward across the room. As we came to the wide-open space in the center, where the grand doors led out to the Great Court, we stopped.

The court seemed to be empty, save for the white lion-legged vase. More disturbing, we heard and saw nothing in the northern end of the gallery, where Eircheard and Owen should be.

We darted across the open space, sliding back into the shadows between the books and the exhibits until they came to an end, guarded by Sekhmet, sitting stiffly upright on her black throne.

“Kate.” Joanna was pointing. Something was draped across the goddess’s lap. A man’s tweed jacket. She stepped out and picked it up. Beyond I saw something flicker on the floor. A crystal ball. And beyond that a thick circle of wax lay on the floor, broken in two. I looked up at the case.

It was gaping open.

I drew forward, filling with dread. The mirror and its case were gone. And at its foot a body lay in a heap. Owen, with a bullet hole between wide-open eyes. I looked around for Eircheard, but saw no one else.

The glass of the case, though, was smeared with something.
Blood.
On the floor at my feet was a small pool of it; a trail of smaller droplets led straight on through the gallery. My stomach twisted in a sudden twinge of fear.

Coming up behind me, Joanna made a small squeak. At a quick motion from me, she went silent. I stood, hands on hips, thinking. We’d heard nothing, though this was an echoing space. That meant a gun with a silencer. Such as our stalker at the theater had possessed. Though it couldn’t have been that one.

Pulling Joanna forward, I followed the trail of blood.

At the end of the gallery, it led into a grand echoing stairwell. Beyond lay a smaller gallery, muffled in almost total darkness. A small spattering of drops crossed into the dark.

My eyes adjusted. Two more cases were open.

A cry rose from depths of the museum, rising in waves of agony and anger, and then cut to silence. It entered the small gallery from both ends and seemed to wind through space, bouncing off walls and cases.

Eircheard.

I turned back, peering out into the Great Court. It looked and felt like the ghost of some ancient snowstorm, pale and ethereal and cold. It was entirely silent, as if that cry, and perhaps all other sound, had never been. Against the far wall, faint in the distance, I thought I saw a trail of dark petals dropped haphazardly across the floor. Blood?

Somewhere above, we heard the clatter of hard shoes on marble, the spat of radio static, and a man’s voice barking orders. Security.

The mirror,
I thought, suddenly afraid. It was the one remaining thread, fragile as it was, that led somewhere through the darkness toward Lily. Pulling Joanna forward across the court, I ducked into a postcard shop, roped closed, as the security guard passed at a trot.

The trail of blood by the wall curved around the reading room, following it around to the front, stopping at the double doors facing the museum’s main entrance. One of them was ever so slightly ajar. Fear coiling around me, I pushed it open.

It was darker here than in the Great Court, but not so dark as in the galleries. High rounded windows circled the space three floors up, before the ceiling bent inward in a dome I knew to be blue and gold, the blue of robins’ eggs and the Virgin Mary, though now it looked nearly black.

“A temple of knowledge,” my aunt Helen had said. She’d brought me to study there for a week the moment she heard the British Library had been slated to be moved. The wheel of learning where Virginia Woolf and Karl Marx and Charles Dickens had toiled. With the departure of the national library up to new digs by King’s Cross, the space had been divided like a cathedral, the front third an empty, echoing nave where unhallowed tourists were allowed to wander. Separating the profane from the sacred, a long curved line of desks swept across the room. Beyond lay the museum’s private library.

“
Eircheard?
”

In answer, I heard nothing but a steady, slow drip. Up ahead, there was a gate through the black granite-topped information desk, like the little gate in an altar rail. Beyond curved a line of low shelves. Above these flickered two points of light. Candles.

In a library?
The candles stood atop the line of shelves, as if on some high altar.

With mounting dread, I crossed the room and stepped through the gate. Just inside, a stench of sewer thickened the air, and I stopped again, so suddenly that Joanna bumped into me. A little way off to the left, two white pillar candles stood six feet apart on the shelf. Between them, a black velvet shroud veiled a body. Just beyond it, a wide-eyed face leered at us, fangs bared.

I stepped back, hearing someone gasp, and the candles guttered.

My heart thudding against my ribs, I realized that the face was a human skull inlaid with wide stripes of black and turquoise stones, its eye sockets filled with large gleaming gray discs. Without lips, its teeth looked like bared fangs.

“The mask of Tezcatlipoca,” whimpered Joanna. The Lord of the Smoking Mirror.

Dee’s mirror. I glanced along the body, but the black mirror was nowhere to be seen. Beneath the closest candle, though, lay a stone knife, its blade a pale milky green.

Stepping forward, I lifted a corner of the shroud. Beneath lay a man with ginger hair.
Eircheard.
His face, which had so quickly come to seem dear, was contorted beneath his red beard, his eyes wide and staring. He was dead.

I reached out and brushed his eyelids closed; he was still warm. A sound scraped in my throat, and I gripped the edge of the counter to stay upright. What had they done to him?

I gave the shroud a small tug, and velvet slid to the floor with a small whisper that made the candle flames dance.

They’d stretched him naked on his back, his body arched over arms bound beneath him. Blood had pooled and thickened on the shelf top, dripping in slow, steady drops. Just below his rib cage, a wide slash gaped across his abdomen like an obscene mouth. Above that, a mark had been carved into his skin: a circle flanked by two smaller circles, all cut with a horizontal line. Carrie’s mark.

She’d killed him to consecrate the mirror. For a moment, everything went black before my eyes, and my ears filled with a thunderous rushing as fury spread through me. I looked wildly around the room.

“
Carrie!
” I heard myself cry. “
Cerridwen Douglas!
”

My voice echoed around the dome and died away. A rasping voice scraped through the darkness to my left. “
Nothing is but what is not.
” I spun toward it, but the light of the candles did not penetrate deep enough into the shadows. From the other side came another voice. “
She shall be queen hereafter.
” And then laughter sputtered down from above. I looked up. Ringing the room were two catwalk galleries lined with bookshelves, the upper one lit faintly by light drifting in through the high arched windows. A dark figure stood there, spread-eagled at the balcony as if embracing the night. Three more words echoed through the dome. “
She must die.
”

At the back of the room, the double doors flew open. Joanna grabbed me and dove for the ground, pulling us under the information desk, clamping a hand over my mouth as several pairs of footsteps strode forward across the floor.

Summer, 1590
Shoreditch, north of London

FOR THE FIRST
time, Dr. Dee walked into the building that he had helped old Burbage, the famous actor’s father, design: the Theatre, in the fields of Shoreditch, north of London. At least, it had been set among fields when it was built—almost fifteen years ago, that was now. In the intervening span, though, a hodgepodge of vaguely and not-so-vaguely disreputable taverns, brothels, and tenements had sprung up around it until it seemed to be pretty much an extension of the city.

It would be interesting, he supposed, to see his design at work. He’d drawn it partly from the inns and great halls that players had long been accustomed to playing in, as Burbage had insisted, and partly from drawings of old roman theaters. Less well known, he had also drawn on a different tradition of performance entirely—which, were the truth to be known, was the reason Burbage had come to him in the first place.

The crowd streaming in around him was boisterously jovial. By the time he reached his seat, he’d been propositioned at least three and possibly four times by ladies of questionable virtue—the last of them wearing a concoction of orange feathers on her head that would surely annoy whoever had the misfortune to sit behind her. In fastidious black scholar’s gown and skullcap, Dr. Dee found her plumage alarming enough seen briefly from the front.

He had come to see the first public performance of young Master Shakespeare’s new play,
The First Part of the True Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster.
An extravagant title on the part of a little-known upstart, though possibly the most prodigal thing about it was the promise implied by the word “first.” What, after all, had a mere player, a glover’s son from provincial Warwickshire, to say about the mighty ones of the kingdom?

On the other hand, Master Shakespeare had the backing, it seemed, of the earl of Derby’s charming scamp of a younger son, the Honorable William Stanley, with whom he was much of an age, though their stations in life could hardly be more different. Dr. Dee bit his lip, considering. If anyone could tell the Lancastrian side of the “contention” in question, a long and bloody dynastic war that had lasted generations, it would surely be the Stanleys, who’d acquired their earldom by decisively backing the correct side in the last battle, setting the crown on the queen’s grandfather’s head.

It was not, however, the politics or the history of a war of roses—the Lancastrian red against the Yorkist white—that had captured Dr. Dee’s curiosity. In general, he cared little about what young men more prone to revels and riots than to study might say about matters best left to the wise. But this play, he had heard, strayed into territory altogether more dangerous and more dear to his heart. Mr. Shakespeare had dared to conjure a demon on the stage.

He was not the only one who’d heard the whispers. Most of the mob, he reckoned, seemed to be there for the same reason that he was—to watch the magic—though more out of prurience, to be sure, than a learned and professional attachment to the subject. Stuffed to its rafters, though the day was hot and sticky and the sky threatened to dump rain, the whole place was abuzz with wonder and a deep thrill of fear: Would the play—
could
the play—raise something more in its circle than a stage demon? Would the spirits of hell know the difference between a proper conjuror and a player-conjuror? Would they care, even if they knew?

Dr. Dee did not, as he had feared, have to sit through wearisome hours of warriors’ bombast before arriving at the magic. It appeared—or at least the dark promise of it did—almost as soon as the characters began speaking and the crowd’s chatter subsided. Young as he was, Mr. Shakespeare, thought Dr. Dee, knew how to stick bums to seats.

A short time later, however, when the magic itself arrived, Dr. Dee was no longer so sure about that. Onstage, two Jesuit priests, a witch, and a fool of a duchess gathered in the company of a conjuror. Somewhere, someone began rippling a thunder sheet, the sound of it so low at first that it was felt more than heard. The conjuror began to move, casting a circle around himself using words and motions and even props that lifted every tiny hair on Dr. Dee’s body. Up on the stage, the man gathered speed and force, and around him the rumbling of thunder rose. Through the commotion, a deep voice roared “
Adsum!
”—“I come,” in the Latin tongue favored by the denizens of hell. There was a small puff of smoke; when it cleared, a demon stood growling on the stage. A player, of course, but it had to be admitted that his entrance, no doubt through a trapdoor, was unsettling.

“Asnath!” shrieked the player-witch, naming the spirit. As her cry died away, there came a bright flash and a great crackling of sound that no thunder sheet could ever make. With a sudden stench of sulfur, lightning hit the flagpole rising from the building’s tallest turret. The banner that hung there burst into bright fire even as the skies opened up in a thick downpour that drowned the flames.

As one, the audience rose, the seated to their feet and the standing to their toes, and a long “oooooh” spiraled around the stage.

Behind the player-demon, a shadow thickened and stretched skyward. Dr. Dee, a tall man, pushed himself up to stand on the bench and pointed a long finger at the darkness. “
Void,
” he bellowed in a voice that might have quelled the waves.

On the point of dissolving into trampling chaos, the crowd suddenly stilled. Even the actors froze, and the rain blew over as quickly as it had started, until the only movement was the trembling of the old wizard’s arm. He stepped down from the bench and walked solemnly down the aisle, people parting a way for him. Down the stairs he went, and back into the street.

In the theater, a tucket of trumpets broke out at Burbage’s insistence, and the play went on, fighting to be heard over a great murmuring among the audience. Heading back toward the city on foot, Dr. Dee did not notice, the world having closed into a dark tunnel around him.

He did not, like most of those in the crowd, ask what had happened up on the stage. He knew what had happened. What he wanted to know was how the boy had done it. How had he learned what he’d put on the stage?

He had first come to Dr. Dee’s attention last December in the company of Derby’s son, at one of the lowest points in his life, returning after several years on the Continent to find his precious library in his home out at Mortlake ransacked: four thousand books—the collection of a lifetime—gone, the precious glassware in his alchemical laboratory smashed or taken, the two globes Mercator had made especially for him stolen, even the shelving stripped from the walls. Into this mess had walked Master Stanley with Master Shakespeare, a mirror under one arm and a manuscript under the other.

Master Shakespeare, Derby’s son had explained, after introducing them, had recently returned from Scotland, where he had come into the possession of certain objects Dr. Dee might welcome. As the boy set the round mirror of polished black stone in his hands, Dr. Dee had looked up sharply. This, too, had been stolen from his library, but not this library, and not recently. He had last seen it in Antwerp twenty-five years or so before, in the hands of a young witch with red hair and a Scottish accent.

Without a word, the lad had laid atop the mirror a manuscript. It was old, in an antique form of Welsh that even Dr. Dee found difficult to read. So far as he could make out, it concerned a Welsh witch who lived in a lake and wove strong spells with the aid of a cauldron.

On the subject of exactly how he’d come by either mirror or manuscript, Mr. Shakespeare remained coy. Dr. Dee, however, let the question slide, as collectors often must, he told himself. He was intrigued. He was enthralled. And he was happy to start his library anew with two such rare finds at its heart. He had welcomed Mr. Shakespeare to visit when he pleased and make use of his library how he might.

That had all been well and good. The books trickled back, and with them intellectuals from all corners of the kingdom. His home once again became a gathering place for scholars of all sorts, hashing out questions of all kinds. How many ships could the emperor of Cathay command? What was the proper title and style of the czar of russia? How did geese navigate their migrations? Was there such a thing as an unbreakable cipher? And what was the hierarchy of hell?

It was the last question that a small coterie of his best and brightest students—the most daring thinkers of the kingdom—pursued, among others. His scholars of the night, they called themselves. It was among these, William Stanley and his protégé included, that he’d shared a summary of his deep studies of Mr. Shakespeare’s manuscript.

Not even among this select group, however, had Dr. Dee shared the information that he intended to attempt one of the rites described in the manuscript. Cleaned up, of course, polished into something acceptably Christian. He had shared that, in fact, with no one save Arthur, his eldest son, ten years old, who was currently serving as his scryer. It had taken three days to prepare the room and the properties, and one more to fast and bathe, to make the two of them ready. A month or so ago, this had been. They had retired at nightfall to his innermost study, beyond the double sliding doors, with the black mirror and a candle, and they had set to work.

How someone else came to be there, he still could not understand. Surely he had seen that the room was empty before they started. He could not quite remember, but it was force of habit: How could he have failed on this occasion? But it seemed equally odd to suppose that someone could have entered after they had begun, without their knowledge. He had purposely left a creak in the doors for just such an eventuality, but no sound had disturbed either him or his son.

But someone
had
been there. A shadowy presence he became aware of as they finished the rite, not knowing how long he had been there or what he had seen. Not knowing, indeed, who he was, though Dr. Dee and Arthur had both given chase through the maze of his library and out into the street.

In the rite, they had been equally disappointed. It had promised clarity of both sight and thought, but neither he nor his son had noticed a change. Dr. Dee had long been resigned to the fact that he would never see the spirits for himself, save on the rarest of occasions, and then only dimly. But for Arthur, this blindness to the spirit world was still a raw hurt that the boy strove to heal, and the failure of this ceremony had seemed a hard blow. It had, however, been a private disappointment.

Until this afternoon, when he saw it, mimicked and even parodied, lifted on the common stage. How had the player known, unless he had been the watcher in the shadows? Knowledge, though, was for sale the width and breadth of the kingdom. The watcher need not have been the boy himself, Dr. Dee thought.

Except that there had been one or two details in the casting of the circle that not even a glimpse of Dr. Dee’s private ceremony could explain. Details available only in a singular manuscript in a crabbed and antique form of Welsh that he would not believe the young man had at his command. And if he had acquired these details neither from Dr. Dee nor from the strange manuscript,
where had he got them
?

And the only answer Dr. Dee could light upon was the possibility of the player having glimpsed, in some other place, a different version of the rite from his own.

Mr. Shakespeare has recently returned to us from Scotland,
Mr. Stanley had said upon introducing them. Words that now haunted Dr. Dee. Where in Scotland, and when? With whom?
And to what effect?

At the start of the afternoon, the player’s unprecedented rise in poetic power and popularity had seemed no more than a curiosity. Now there suddenly seemed to hang around his reputation a faint stench of sulfur such as Dr. Dee had scented on the air in the playhouse.

His fine black gown bespattered with mud and grime, the old wizard reached the Thames without much awareness of having walked right through the city. Treading heavily down some stairs and into a waiting barge, he bespoke a row upriver to Mortlake.

Leaning back in his seat, the cool pull and slip of the water rushing by his ears, Dr. Dee shuddered. Young Master Shakespeare had written what he should not; he was sure of that. How he’d come to know it perhaps not even heaven knew.