CHAPTER 27
THE MURANO CABINET
Lucy did not enter the dark library like a thief in the night: she didn’t skulk or sneak or even tiptoe, but walked straight in as if she had every right to be there, though she did turn and click the door closed behind her, calmly picking up a chair and wedging it beneath the door-handle.
She had no need to light a candle to see her way through the cluttered space because of an orangey-light which kindled and blazed out from her sea-glass the moment she crossed the threshold. This unnatural brightness threw stark shadows that lurched threateningly across the walls as she threaded her way past the tables and cabinets, making inexorably for the black cage at the centre of the room.
When she got to the obsidian plinth she stopped abruptly, her hands splaying out and moving across the slick enamelled surface of the woven metal cube as if they were doing the seeing for her eyes, which were fixed and open, but still somehow asleep and not focused on anything in particular: indeed if she hadn’t moved with such clear purpose (and if there had been anything other than the dark to witness her progress) it might have been thought she was either stone-blind or trance-walking.
She found the door in the side of the lattice, and a second later the lock and catch. Her fingers moved in a light exploratory dance across the mechanism, and then nimbly manipulated it so that something pinged and the door jumped open a crack. Her fingertips quickly found the edge of the door and pulled it open.
An angry hiss emerged from the depths of the cage.
But a very thin wire attached to the door on the inside had been pulled upwards by the action of the door opening.
The path of this wire descended through a small tube in the floor of the cage and continued on a zigzag path–via an intricate series of pulleys, quadrants and tubing–all the way downwards through ceilings and floors and walls to the main servants’ bell-board in the basement. On this rectangle of polished mahogany were lines of curlicued springs attached to shiny brass bells. The lines of bells were split into floors, and each bell had its own label describing the room from which it was being rung. There was only one bell that was different. It was a dark iron bell, larger than the rest, and its label, reading “LIBRARY”, was not written in black but red ink.
This bell clanged into life as the wire was pulled taut, the sound shattering the deep quiet of the sleeping house.
It was so loud that the bell could be heard two floors above, though Lucy’s head was cocked and listening to something else entirely: the angry hissing coming from the half-buried urn in the floor of the cage.
Something was flowing out of the urn like a black river crossing the dark volcanic sand. The light blazing from her sea-glass cast a grid of shadows across the interior of the cage, which made it hard to see precisely what the thing was until it began to coil its body beneath the hanging key and rear up, its hood flaring out in warning.
It was a black cobra, jaws stretched wide, revealing the shockingly pink interior of its mouth and the needle-white bone-jag of two venomous fangs held ready to strike.
Angry red eyes looked at her.
The snake was unmistakably guarding the key.
Lucy did not step back.
She didn’t close the cage door.
She didn’t show any fear at all.
Instead she leant in and put her face to the opening, her eyes still dreamy and half seeing, and she spoke very softly.
“Shhh,” she whispered. “Shhh. Soyez calme, mon petit. Tout va bien…”
The snake continued to hiss at her, quivering with the tension of muscles held ready to strike its blunt nose forward and bite.
Lucy held the stillness for a long time, waiting for it to set.
And reached carefully into the cage.
The snake didn’t move.
Her hand slowly approached the key.
And still the snake didn’t move.
The red eyes seemed hypnotised by the soft pink flesh on the hand reaching between it and the key.
The hissing stopped.
Lucy’s fingertips reached the key, felt iron beneath them.
And the snake struck.
Death-filled fangs stabbed at the back of her hand.
Whiplash fast.
Her hand moved faster.
The cobra hit the key exactly where her hand had been, but that hand had lifted out of the way and now dropped to grip the snake on either side of its head before it could swirl around and bite at her again.
“Non, non. Soyez calme, j’ai dit…” she whispered.
And with a final muscular convulsion all the tautness left the snake and it went limp in her hand.
She carefully withdrew the cobra from the cage and held it clear of her body as she reached in with her other hand and lifted the key from the hook in the roof of the cage.
She grunted in surprise at the weight of the thing, which was more than its size hinted at, and as the weight came off, the hook sprung upwards and the cage simply fell to bits in a tinkling shower of metal, revealing that it was a cunning construction of short pieces of sprung steel that had been interwoven with each other and only held in place by the heft of the key, which had acted as a kind of anchoring keystone or counterweight.
More cunningly, or perhaps just more maliciously, those pieces of steel had razor-honed edges.
Three pieces of metal sliced cuts into her forearm as they fell, and the damage would have been worse had she not been wearing Sara’s gloves.
The pain seemed to cut through the sleepiness in her eyes and she winced and looked round as if seeing things for the first time.
Her eyebrows cocked in surprise at the nightmare into which she had woken.
In the other a key.
Blood dripped onto her bare foot from her arm.
And the floor around her was now strewn with scalpel-sharp strips of curved steel.
“Merde,” she breathed. “Quel bordel…”
The cobra began to move in her hand, its tail curving upwards and finding her arm, trying to wrap around it as if it too was waking up again.
She stepped back and winced sharply as one of the metal shards cut into the ball of her foot.
“Salopard!” she hissed.
There was the sound of feet outside the door and a crunch from the chair wedged under the handle as someone tried to get in.
“Lucy!” shouted Sara Falk. “Is that you?”
Lucy grimaced silently. The cobra writhed against her firm grip, and its hood began to flare again as she looked desperately around the room for a place to hide.
“What are you doing, child?” shouted Cook. “It is dangerous in there!”
Lucy saw the shuttered windows next to the ornate glass cabinet at the far end of the room. She took a deep breath, swore under her breath one last time, then flung the writhing snake far into the shadows behind her and leapt forward onto the manuscript-strewn tabletop beside the black plinth.
Her feet skidded on the loose paper but she kept her footing and ran the length of the room, nimbly hurdling piles of books and jumping from table to table towards the windows.
Outside, on the landing Sara was pounding on the door as Cook leapt to the bannisters, red flannel nightgown billowing round her like a spinnaker, and roared down the stairs.
“Emmet! You lollygagging lump of useless sod, shift yourself!”
In the library Lucy skated to a stop by the shutters and reached up to unbar them, only to discover they were padlocked shut.
She hissed in frustration and looked round.
Something else hissed at the far end of the room.
And then hissed again. Closer.
Lucy bit her lip in frustration. And then her eyes fell on the Murano Cabinet.
Outside, Cook heard heavy boots clattering up the stairs so she turned back to the door and joined Sara’s efforts to break it open by throwing her shoulder against it. She only managed to bounce off and drop the blunt end of the boarding axe held in her free hand onto her shoeless foot.
“Bugger,” she winced.
Inside the library all was now dark.
There was the sound of someone large clumping up the stairs onto the landing, and then a sharp crack as the chair wedged under the door-handle smithereened shards of wood in all directions as the door flew open and Emmet tumbled into the room, followed by Sara Falk and Cook.
The room was pitch-black, bar the shard of light now lancing across the room from the door behind them.
“Lucy?” said Sara.
Emmet snapped his fingers and pointed.
The shard of light fell across the obsidian plinth, revealing the urn and the sand and the complete absence of cage.
“The bloody key’s gone,” said Cook. “Damnation—!”
“LUCY!” shouted Sara. “Where are you?”
There was no reply.
Lucy was crouched in the darkness inside the Murano Cabinet, her head smarting from an unexpected collision with something hard and angular. In one hand she held the stolen key. In the other she held her sea-glass tightly so its light would not betray her. As she adjusted her grip a sliver of light did flash out, and she covered it quickly. In the flash of vision it afforded she saw the inside of the cabinet was entirely mirrored, her reflection multiplied to infinity as the parallel sides reflected themselves back and forth in each other, and there was a bracket with a candlestick on it screwed to the back wall of the cabinet, the thing she had banged her head on as she entered the confined space. She did not have time to think how strange it was that a cabinet should be lined with mirrors, nor why it was equipped for internal illumination.
“Right,” said Cook, hefting her axe and looking suspiciously around at the shadows beneath the tables. “I hate snakes. Emmet, if you see that blasted cobra you have my permission to stamp it into a pancake.”
“It won’t attack her,” said Sara. “The snake’s protective. She’s one of us—”
Emmet snapped his fingers again and pointed to the far end of the room.
There was a very thin line of light just to one side of the shutters. Emmet ran towards it, Sara half a pace behind him.
Inside the Murano Cabinet Lucy tightened her grip on the sea-glass. Then she realised that the light was not coming from her at all. Instead to her dismay she saw that far away down the chain of infinitely reflecting Lucys there was a bright light, harsh like a naphtha flare, and it was approaching as if someone or something was able to step from one reflection to another, and each time it or they did the light bounced and the figure got closer.
Her heart missed a beat–and then kicked back in at triple speed.
Her mouth was dry and the glass at her back was cold and hard as she scrunched against it, instinctively trying to get as far away as possible from whatever was approaching down the tunnel of reflections.
Her head turned and she saw to her growing distress that the figure with the lantern was only visible in the mirror ahead of her. Although the glass mirrored her on both walls, the light-bearer was not reflected in the mirror behind her, as if the laws of physics covering reflections didn’t apply to him.
She instinctively knew that this was a very bad thing.
Lucy could think fast.
Whatever she was doing, whyever she had woken up to find herself in this forbidden room with a stolen key and a deadly cobra in her hands, she did not know, but she did realise that explaining this to the people outside the cabinet was going to be infinitely less unpleasant than meeting the thing calmly walking towards her through the layered reflections in the mirrors.
So she kicked at the doors, but they opened an instant before her foot made contact, so she fell backwards onto the floor of the cabinet and stared up at Emmet.
“Get her out of there NOW!” Sara shouted, running towards Emmet as Mr Sharp ran into the room behind her.
Emmet hesitated a moment, his attention taken by the growing light blazing out of the left-hand wall of the cabinet.
“Emmet!” cried Sara.
Emmet turned and reached for Lucy and three other things happened at once:
The cobra lunged past Cook and flew between Emmet’s legs, heading for the mirror in front of Lucy like a black javelin, striking at the approaching lantern bearer.
Lucy, flinching away from Emmet, stumbled and fell back into the mirror behind her: it happened so fast she only had time to catch Sara’s eye in panic as she–impossibly–disappeared through the glass without breaking it, just as the cobra struck at the other mirror.
Sara threw herself past Emmet, diving for Lucy, her outflung hand reaching deep into the mirror after her as if plunging into a vertical pond just as the snake hit the other mirror like a blunt-nosed hammer.
The glass of that mirror shattered.
Mr Sharp leapt through the air and caught Sara’s collar, stopping her falling further into the mirror which Lucy had tumbled back into.
She grunted in shock.
The stunned cobra dropped insensible to the floor of the cabinet as the approaching light in the mirror it had shattered smithereened into a thousand points of light which snapped off as the tunnel of reflections cut off in an instant.
“Sara—?” said Cook, puffing up behind Emmet and stopping dead with a terrible gasp of shock.
Sara lay across the floor of the cabinet, her arm flung towards the mirror through which Lucy had been dragged.
She pushed off and scrabbled awkwardly to her feet, helped by Sharp, who gasped at the sight of her wrist.
There was no blood.
But there was also no hand.
The arm was sheared off cleanly at the wrist.
Sara stared at the stump as if the limb suddenly no longer belonged to herself.
There was still no blood, no gore, no inner flesh, no white flash of neatly severed bone.
“Sara,” said Mr Sharp, his voice strangely choked.
There was just a mirrored oval.
Glass seemed to have fused itself to the cut end of her arm.
“Oh,” she said, staring dully at it. “Oh…”
Sara Falk looked up at the older woman and the golem and the young man with the brown pain-filled eyes, and for a moment her face was visited by that of the uncomprehending little girl who had been scared from her bed by the Green Man so many years before.
For a beat of time the house was again silent.
Then her eyeballs rolled white as she fell forward into a dead faint, and Mr Sharp and Emmet caught her as bells shattered the quiet as the clocks struck midnight, marking the moment they all knew to their horror that Lucy, the key and Sara’s hand–gloves, rings and all–were abruptly, brutally and irretrievably gone.