| |
AS HOGS CLOSED THE door behind her and turned the key in the lock, Amy planted her hands on her hips and rolled her eyes. “Well, that’s rubbish.”
She needed to escape. But obviously couldn’t right now with pirates awake and about. So she sat and stared at the keyhole, fingering the little pocket sewn into the inside of her undergarments, listening and waiting. Listening to the noises outside and waiting for them to die down. The shouting. The shrieks. The laughter. At night, it seemed Jameson’s Paradise became a chaotic den of anarchy and drunkenness.
Darkness closed in around her, and she was glad she did not have to see anything in the village. It was bad enough listening to it. There were sounds of fights breaking out, a woman screaming, children crying. Even though it was nearly pitch-black in the room, Amy closed her eyes against it, trying to shut it out.
The pirates were late partiers. It was hours before the noise died down. And still, she waited. She did not want to risk that someone might be awake and walking the streets. Not until the only sound left was the faint lapping of the waves on the shore outside did she dare to move. Jameson had only returned to the house once to yell something at Hogs before leaving again, and she hadn’t heard anything from him since.
She pulled her little golden key out of its pocket and laid its string about her neck before tucking her shirt back in. Moving across the room, she gingerly stepped across the floorboards to the door, aware of every little sound of wind and waves and breath. The key fit perfectly into the keyhole, and the click as she unlocked the door made her wince. In the silence, it sounded like the boom of a firebarrel. But no one stirred.
Forcing herself to take a few deep breaths, she concentrated on slowing her pulse, as Aaron had taught her all those years ago when they were breaking Walter out of Riverscrest Castle. Then she stripped the blanket and sheet off the bed, turned the handle, and opened the door a crack.
The faint moonlight drifted through the windows and shone upon the surface of the mirror table in the middle of the room. There was no one in the room.
The floorboards creaked as she took an unsteady step through the doorway, making her heart pound inside her chest. Her pulse thudded so loud in her ears – surely someone else could hear it too? She closed the door as quietly as she could behind her.
Something about the glowing table tugged at her memory, and she found herself moving across the floor towards it as quietly as she could. Standing before it, she stared down at her reflection. It was a cold colorless empty reflection. It shifted, like ripples on water, and her fingers that gripped the edge of the table for support began to sink into the surface, as though the cold hardness were melting.
She jerked her fingers back, wobbling a moment on her good foot to keep her balance. She could have sworn she heard a voice calling to her, a familiar terrifying voice that raised the hair on the back of her neck, but it was cut off as soon as she stopped touching the mirror.
The rattling of a doorhandle and the following boom of a door downstairs being flung into the wall made her jump. Heavy footsteps thumped up the stairs. Whipping her head around, Amy’s eyes darted across the room, searching for a place to hide. As the footsteps drew nearer up the staircase, she slid into the shadows behind an armchair against the wall, tucking the dark blanket around her. There were blessings to being small and petite after all.
The footsteps reached the top of the stairs, and Jameson’s red silk shirt and black boots briefly flashed across her line of sight before disappearing on the other side of the armchair. The thud of his boots stopped, and she could hear him muttering, from somewhere in the middle of the room it sounded like. Over by the mirror table.
The mirror. What was it that the merqueen had said about a mirror? Beware the mirror. Was this how he summoned demons from other worlds? Was that what he was about to do now?
Amy leaned ever so slightly to the right, peeking out around the armchair’s embroidered back. In the middle of the room, Jameson stood leaning heavily on the edge of the mirror table and staring out of the windowpanes. Somewhere out in the darkness beyond the balcony and across the channel was the Vah’rem island, where Airdella and Gail and Cap’n and Billy and Sawyer were safely out of the pirate’s reach.
Or were they? Just what was Jameson planning to do? He was now looking down at his reflection in the cold mirror. She could barely hear his mutterings, could make out nothing of what he was actually saying. It was almost as though he were arguing with himself, debating what to do. Or was it with someone else? His reflection? ... Or that terrifying voice from the back of her memory that she heard in her head when she had touched the mirror?
Jameson jerked back away from the table, startling Amy, and she shifted quickly back into her hiding position. She held her breath in the shadows, concealed behind the armchair. She could no longer see Jameson, but she heard him draw a deep breath and swear a curse before pounding his fist on something.
His boots stomped angrily across the room and up the stairs to the third floor.
Amy silently let out her breath, pressing her forehead against the fabric of the armchair, still not daring to leave its shadow. She waited. Waited until Jameson’s footsteps and angry mutterings had devolved into drunken ramblings and then to silence.
Only then did she move to stand, wincing at the cramps in her legs from crouching for so long. How her ankle was throbbing. The mirror table gleamed in the moonlight, and Amy shuddered.
You must destroy it. The merqueen’s farewell warning rang in her head. But how to do so without waking up Jameson? If she shattered the mirror and someone heard, she would have no chance of escaping. But neither could she leave without destroying it.
Pulling the blanket off her shoulder, she folded it several times before covering the mirror. Then she looked around for something heavy. Ah! A metal sculpture of a merlion sitting on the corner table by the sofa. She admired it for a moment then struggled to lift it. After taking a few deep breaths, she held it over the table, willed it not to make too much noise, and dropped it. The muffled crunch was deafening in the silence. Amy cringed, closing her eyes and holding her breath. Her heart thudded in her ears, but no one stirred either above or below.
She released her breath and lifted the edge of the blanket. Silvery shards underneath glittered in the moonlight. Smiling with satisfaction, she gave the merlion a little pat and covered the shattered mirror with the blanket again.
Now she turned to the large glass doors opening onto the balcony. They were not locked, and she limped as quietly as possible across the boards to the railing. As she had hoped, the balcony hung out over the water. She ripped the sheet into strips, wincing at the noise, hoping it wasn’t too loud. But Jameson’s drunkenness appeared to be working in her favor.
Tying the strips to one another, she tied a loop in one end of her makeshift rope and slung it under her arms. The other end she wrapped around the railing. Clinging tightly to the rope, she rolled forward over the wooden beam.
As she dangled in the air, it took all her strength to maintain her grip. She moved her hands down, paying out the rope and lowering herself down. The cool water made her curl her toes for a moment, but then it closed in around her, offering itself as a place of hiding and shelter. Safely down in the dark waves, she was forced to tread water against the currents, and she pulled the other end of the rope until it dropped down beside her.
She swam under the pier. There was nowhere for her to walk to, even if she didn’t have a sprained ankle. The channel was too far for her to swim across. Amadea had taken back the diadem that allowed her to swim underwater. And Jameson had taken her golden shell from the merqueen. She would have to hide under the pier for now. Surely even if the crew of Bertha Mae was not able to get to her, Amadea and the merpeople would be out looking for her.
Thus it was that when Hogs went upstairs to bring her out onto the balcony the next morning, he found the bed stripped of its sheet, the merlion statue on top of the mirror table, and no other signs of the prisoner’s escape.