Dany spent the rest of that night in the Hall of Mirrors. Whether he needed to process whatever he had learned, or to return to the mirrored womb from which, apparently, he had been in some way born, he wanted to lay his head somewhere other than the hammock, next to Mona’s. So he placed his head on the scuffed mirrored floor, gazed up at the sky above him, where he saw his own reflected face and realised how much time had passed. Not that much, really, but the face that gazed back down at him looked somewhat older than the boy that gazed up. Four weeks, six weeks, eight? And the boy below was a different creature now. How different, he wondered, and was it a difference he could ever eliminate, so as to make the journey back to what he once was? He tossed and turned that night, remembering the cherry tree in the hedged garden that turned magically pink each spring. He remembered raking the fallen cherry leaves into the burlap sack his mother held open. He remembered the hair falling round her face. He remembered his father’s quote, as he sat behind, under a sun umbrella, on a canvas chair, his schoolboy copy of A Shropshire Lad open before him:
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now,
Is hung with bloom along the bough
And stands along the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Why white, he wondered, why not pink, as he shifted his head backwards and forwards on the glassy floor and gradually fell asleep.
He awoke to a reflected dawn, bounced from the entrance through a series of mirrors to appear like pink cherry blossom in the mirror he faced. He watched that blossom grow and seemingly wither into pale, whey-coloured clouds. Everything will change now, he realised, except for him until, apparently, the Fatigue took him over. And he wondered, was he feeling that fatigue already in the strange lassitude that flooded his limbs, when he noticed another reflection. Tucked between two mirrors, another reflection, lost somewhere in the avenues of reflections all around him, was what seemed to be the well-thumbed edge of a school copybook. He stood then, walked through hall after mirrored hall, until he finally found the reality. It was in a tiny gap beneath a low sloping mirror that angled towards the most inaccessible part of the floor. He edged the copybook out, then saw another, and again, one more. He edged them all out, with infinite care, between the mottled slats of glass and examined the copperplate handwriting of what, many years ago, had been a schoolboy not too far from his age. And he began to read then, page by unstructured page, the Walter Codex.
He read of Burleigh, the carnival’s fallen angel; Burleigh, whose Hall of Mirrors had somehow spawned him.
He spent the whole day there, crouched in the depths of the mirror-maze, reading. He heard the carnival wake up outside, the sounds of another day beginning. He saw figures then, like shadows on Plato’s cave, warped, enlarged, distended, multiplied many times. He heard the laughter of reflected bachelors, the giggles of their bachelorettes; he saw them clutch and tickle and initiate waltz moves, hand on hand, heel and toe, to the tinny distant music from the carnival tannoys. He registered some of them kissing, their faces enlarged by pleasure or hope or desire, but most of all by the mirrors that distorted them briefly before they went on their ways. Their ways, he knew, might lead to romance, children, birth and death. But those ways were not for him. He read until the sun was setting, making another, more lurid explosion of blossom in the sloping mirror above him.
And by the time darkness took over he was done. He knew more, now, of carnie ways than anyone in the darkening carnival outside. He had read the addendum to Walter’s codex. Walter’s prediction, scribbled on to those schoolboy notebooks, drawn from the fractured legends of half-remembered carnie lore. That a Captain Mildew would one day find a way to traverse those dimensions, travelled aeons ago, on burnt carnie wings. That before he usurped some poor human’s form, he would engender two sons, each a mirror of the other. And Dany wondered, as he wandered back out of those mirrors, into the darkness, whether he himself was one of them. He felt barely human; all carnie with a tincture of something else that, however much it might thrill and terrify, would be very dangerous to know.