Jonathan’s heart was not in where they’d washed up, finally, he and Lady Insult: the haunted version of his grandfather’s mansion. An anchor he’d have been glad to toss over the side. But could he even be sure it was the haunted mansion? No, he could not.
The two sat with some distance between them on the circular couch that surrounded the clock tower. Even in here, in the faint blue light, there were empty birdhouses and feeders hanging from the ceiling. They should have been ridiculous, but in that faint blue light they resembled cozy cottages, which comforted him. With sudden insight, he realized this was why Dr. Lambshead had added them—this place had scared him, too.
He could not forget the silky touch of the thing Alice called an Emissary as it fell through his skin, his flesh, and kept passing through. It was like a chronic ache and fever in him, a sore throat that wouldn’t clear. Would that feeling dissipate with time, become a fading afterglow, or did its presence gather even now in his heart, his lungs? He had no idea. He didn’t know if the beauty he had seen was a mistake, a ruse, or an illusion, or …
The war elephants in all their hideous mechanical glory, steeped in the blood of dead animals, smashing into the base of the tower …
In the midst of the assault, Jonathan had spied two shrikes, the birds’ sleek black-and-gray bodies performing aerial acrobatics at low altitude in an attempt to flee. But the air was full of smoke and the gouts of flame from the elephants unpredictable. They were lost, caught between hiding in the wheat not yet on fire and the hazard of flying between the elephants toward safety. They wheeled and dove and still were trapped.
A voice came to him as if from a dark, empty well lined with moss. A voice saying his name, telling him to answer a question.
Until he snapped back into focus, or she did, Lady Insult. Who had given her name as Alice Ptarmigan. From the other world, Aurora.
Another line from Dr. Lambshead’s letter came to him: “Beware false birds.”
Alice had started in with questions he wasn’t sure he understood.
“The Emissary, Jonathan. The wraith that popped up, just before the elephant smashed into the tower—did you do something to it? Not like them to appear then wink out like that.”
Is that what had happened? In the end, it had just been a confusion of falling stones.
“Jonathan, are you listening to me?”
He took her measure. The disheveled brown locks that told him she cut her own hair, the lines in her forehead, the long pale scar on the back of her left hand. He had thought they were closer to the same age. But that wasn’t true. Why had he wanted to believe that?
“I did nothing. It came down the stairs at me. I pushed it away.”
“You did what?”
“I pushed it away from me. Then we got down to the basement and you took me through the doors.”
Alice muttered something that might’ve been “Take something, give something.” Said in a resigned way, as if she needed to marshal patience. Well, not on his account. He’d lost patience long before this moment. So many doors, even just to get back to the haunted mansion—six or seven, he’d lost count—her hand tight around his wrist. Ordinary doors. Extraordinary doors. In busy corridors streaming with oddly clad folk and silent ones in the dead of night under a crooked moon. One in a forest, standing like a huge slab of headstone, with nothing behind it, Lady Insult whispering in his ear that they had to go back the “circuitous route” to “be sure.”
“Well, I did.” Repeated. With a snap of irritation.
“Not possible,” Alice said. “Not at all possible. Not ever, lad. To push a ghost. You must be mistaken.”
The frozen hands of the clock tower came free, jumped forward with a juddering rusty scrape to account for more time than had actually passed. Nor was the time correct. Nor did Jonathan care.
Alice had been watching him very closely, as if for signs of sickness. He half expected her to put the back of her hand to his forehead to take his temperature.
“It’s been a shock for you, I’m sure,” she said. “I’m sure you just want to go home. I have things to do, and you have a mansion to get back to cataloging.”
Get back to cataloging? The idea struck Jonathan as absurd.
“What things?” Jonathan asked. “Are you an insurance adjuster? A chimney sweep? A unicorn? I’d like to know.”
Alice leaned forward, into his space, eyes ablaze. “Given what you’ve seen, what do you think I do?”
The animals had been dead-alive, squirming inside the metal cage of the elephant’s stomach, a slow-motion half existence, unable to get free. The potato men had run screaming, trying to escape across the fields of cut wheat. The shrikes had shared some harsh language he’d never heard come out of a shrike before—the language of terror.
“I don’t know who you are, and I’m not leaving this place until I find out.”
She blanched, as if he had some power over her he didn’t realize. Well, good.
“You do realize I saved your life,” Alice said.
“I saved yours recognizing the wraiths were close. And let’s not forget you’d spent a lot of time trespassing in my mansion before that.” Perhaps that wasn’t entirely fair at this point, but it was also true.
Alice’s voice grew even chillier. “Why don’t I just leave you here and go off on my merry way? I hope you’re certain which door you take to get back.”
“Don’t care.” Did care, but also did know how to get back, and wasn’t about to admit it. Would she really leave him? He didn’t think so. “I told you I wanted answers.”
“It isn’t even night yet in this place, Jonathan,” she said, leaning back against the couch and folding her arms. “After dark, you really don’t want to be here. You won’t enjoy what you see through the windows.”
Jonathan ignored her, pointed at the dead monster. “Like, what is that thing, which you’ve not looked at once? And who are you, exactly? And what, exactly, is an Emissary?” This last question seemed very important at the moment.
“Or instead of taking a half day to answer all that, I could just knock you unconscious and drag your body back to your pathetic tiki bar.”
“You could. I don’t doubt it.” Not just the will, but the ability.
The barest verge of a grim smile from Alice as she calculated odds or variables in her head that probably included some of the answers Jonathan needed.
“Very well, then. Answers it is. A handful.”
Part of Jonathan listened to Alice Ptarmigan. Part of him tried to ignore how his hands shook ever so slightly and how what resembled phantom swifts flew backward in slow motion through what passed for sky outside. Stitching their way through the door, disappearing and reappearing in pursuit of … what? How beautiful and strange, and how he longed in that moment to put on that same unthinking speed and just be.
“I’m a member of the Order of the Third Door, one of Aleister Crowley’s sworn enemies. I knew your grandfather, and I helped him from time to time. Mamoud, the chap you met, is or was an intelligence officer for the Republic—hard to tell sometimes—a powerful secular state that also opposes Crowley. Mamoud isn’t necessarily a chum, but at the moment he’s also a member of the Order, believes in the mission. If for no other reason than his grandpa did. Other than that, and for all geographical questions, just consult the map in the corridor of your own blasted mansion.
“An Emissary is a person who faded—became a ghost—because they crossed over from another world into Aurora and stayed too long. Repurposed by Crowley, the despotic leader of the Franco-Germanic Empire that now threatens our world. All the worlds.”
“Aleister Crowley?” The semimystical British buffoon who experimented on his cat, led an ill-fated mountaineering expedition, and was described by the newspapers of his day as the evilest man in the world? There’d been a few paragraphs on him in a textbook at Poxforth. Rack’s textbook or Danny’s? He couldn’t remember much. Something about witchcraft or alchemy, along with an old photograph on the cover of a book, of a deranged-looking, moonfaced man wearing a funny hat.
“Not your Crowley. He’s a Rippler.”
“Ripper?”
“Rippler. Across worlds. Has doubles. Reoccurs. He came over to Aurora from a different Earth, or was brought over.”
Jonathan had no answer to that.
Alice continued: “As for that creature lying there, it’s the beastie that killed your grandfather. An epic battle by every indication, but no contest in the end. Thankfully, though, he managed to injure it mortally, so it couldn’t make it back through the doors to report to its masters. So Crowley still doesn’t know how to get to this place. Which is also why we doubled back through so many doors. You can go straight to somewhere from here to Aurora, but you never come straight back. Or you risk discovery. Carelessness in that regard is why so many doors on Earth are no more, destroyed. It’s one reason the Order exists, to help protect, hide, and monitor the doors.”
“Where do the second and third doors go?”
“Shouldn’t you get used to the first door … first?”
“Fair enough.”
Perhaps it was a mercy she’d batted that one back at him. Because it was true he felt all over again as if he were confronted by a talking carrot, a melodious potato.
“Why didn’t you get rid of it? Clean up a bit.” Motioning at what he could only think of as a monster, constrained within its red dotted line.
Alice snorted, as if he were a fool. Perhaps he was a fool.
“It’d be dangerous to move. Like this place, it’s dead but not dead. Volatile, under certain circumstances. Leave it, the creature will never move an inch. Touch it, and who knows what lurches back to life, or what magic distress beacon it tries to send back home. Besides, it’s a reminder to all of us to be on our guard.”
Anyone who could create as infernal a beast as the mecha-elephants wouldn’t stop at one killing. Anyone who would send an uncanny assassin after Dr. Lambshead had no boundaries.
Everything was about to get darker and more dangerous, Jonathan realized. Whether he wanted to stay clear or not.
A thought occurred. “How do you know it was Crowley who killed my grandfather?”
“Because he killed your mother.”
That sinking, floating feeling again, but he refused to give in to it. Later, back in the sanctuary of the tiki bar, hunched over, he could let his anguish show, where no one could see. But not now.
“So, you’re not sure.” Not staring at her, because he was biting back tears. He didn’t want to believe her. Had only her word for it. It couldn’t be true. It was one thing to know she was dead, another to hear it said by a stranger.
“It’ll never be put in front of a judge and a jury, if that’s what you mean.”
“And this place? Is it some sort of purgatory?” Better to forge ahead. What lay behind was no better.
“No. It’s a house on the borderlands. An old, ancient place. If that rings a bell.” Alice sounded almost respectful, as if they were in a cathedral.
“No bells are ringing.” They were, though.
“Remote and secure. Neither here nor there. Always on the threshold. Always becoming, never quite getting there. Not Aurora and not Earth. It’s not a ghost, but it’s not the actual thing, either. A way station. Does that help?”
“Like a poke in the eye. Isn’t that the definition of purgatory?”
She glared at him. “It’s like a gateway and a safe house got married and had a creepy child. That’s as much of an answer as you get. The Builders created it. The Order found it, preserved it. I imagine before the mansion was built, it ‘echoed’ whatever existed on that spot before.”
The Builders. Them again.
“And what lies beyond that glass?” Jonathan pointed to the windows.
Alice shrugged. “A world none of us want to know. Or care to know. Lifeless, peculiar. I don’t know if you can even breathe out there.”
Jonathan shuddered. There were birds in his head now, as if escaping from the empty feeders above their heads. Ghost birds. Fluttering around inside his skull, and he could not get them out.
Yet still he went on, wanting to burst through the nettle and tall trees, find a copse and feel the sunlight on his face. It was getting colder and colder in the haunted mansion.
“Who are the Builders, then, when they’re at home? Rather generic name.”
“You’re turning into a proper little owl, aren’t you? You’d die if you said their real name. Their real name would fill you up and fry all the neurons in your brain and leave you stumbling around like a zombie.”
“That doesn’t tell me who they are.” But it kind of did.
“The Builders created the doors between the worlds, before they disappeared. Some say they created the worlds themselves.”
“Good on them.” But he had a niggling itch in his head at the repetition of the name, a dawning awareness that he’d heard this before. That, in a pinch, he could have recited the Builders’ myth to her himself.
But Alice misread his puzzled expression, said: “You’re rattled. Good. You should be. The stakes are very high. Your place in all of this is insecure. You have no idea who and what are in play.”
“Did Dr. Lambshead want me to steer clear?” he asked. “Of all of this? Like you do? I don’t think so.” He didn’t know what Sarah had wanted, but he was beginning to guess.
“Like I do?” Alice said, folding her arms. “Do I? What if I just thought you were too young to be plucked for service? Raw, green—whatever the right word is. I don’t mean it as an insult. That you should go back to your stupid academy for now, out of the path of danger?”
“What if I don’t want to be out of the path of danger?”
Then regretted saying it. Because even after Spain, the thought of being in danger hadn’t hit home. Until now.
Along with the one other thing.
Oh, Sarah! It was almost too much, the way he felt now. Jonathan had known more than he realized. In code. Peter Cellars. Down in the cellar of his mind, Sarah had placed some of the answers. A clever Sarah, if an exasperating mother.
“Builders” had been “Cold Pricklies”; “The Order” had been the “Agency”; “Aurora” had been “Euphoria.” It all came back in a rush. The stories she had told him until he was too old for story time, and how that must have hurt not just because it meant he was growing up but because there was no other safe way to share what she knew.
Not three magic doors but five magic windows. Not talking carrots, but definitely talking turnips, in abundance. And he wondered just how alone she must have felt, at times, to have been in Florida, looking after him, reduced to acts of translation and deception. It struck him, sitting there in the haunted mansion, in such a profound way, what she’d given up to keep him safe.
Sarah had pretended to read the tales out of a book, but whenever he, indignant and then, over time, faux indignant, said that wasn’t the real story, had nothing to do with the image on the cover, he’d demand to see the pages and they’d both dissolve into giggles when it was clear she’d made it up and he was right. “The Monster’s Shadow,” “The Legend of the Cold Pricklies,” “The Talking Turnip and the Third Window,” and more besides.
Silly now, perhaps, but funny to an eight-year-old. All the things he’d thought were just a single mother entertaining her child, for amusement, for love, out of a sense of play … It was all more preparation or fair warning.
In one sense, that felt like a betrayal of their time together. In another way, it felt like a bond so strong it could reach out beyond death to speak to him. And couldn’t it have been both things? To amuse, and so he wouldn’t get the bends later. So he’d get his footing sooner. So he’d be up to the challenge of what came next.
The ache, the agony, that there was so much of it he couldn’t remember, that had not come along from childhood into his teenage years. Had he squandered her gift?
Regardless, the realization stiffened his resolve, made him ready to ask Alice the most dangerous question, and get it over with.
“What were you looking for in the mansion?”
A hesitation, a direct look from those blazing blue eyes, appraising him, and if he read her right, a frustration as well.
“An artifact of the Builders. Crowley has brought a … weapon … to Aurora with which he means to subjugate our world and, eventually, all the worlds. Somewhere in your grandfather’s mansion, I believe, there is an artifact that will allow us to capture this weapon and banish it. Because even without Crowley’s intent, it should not exist in our world. Everywhere it wanders, this object creates chaos in its wake.”
Jonathan contemplated her. Was she trustworthy? Was she at least more trustworthy than the alternatives?
“You mean the Black Bau—I mean the Wobble. Silly name for it.”
“Yes, that,” Alice said, giving him an appraising look, more respectful. “And not silly. Not really. Wobble is what you change Bauble to. Bobble, then Wobble. Twice removed. Like a cousin you don’t really know.”
“But why?”
“Most of the things the Builders made are powerful or scary or both. Their real names have power, a kind of … beckoning. So we call them by other names. Ordinary names. Absurd names. The more ridiculous the name, the better.”
“Well, anyway, here it is.” He pulled the Wobble out of his trouser pocket. This time round it looked more like a tiny black colander with silver rubber bands across, as if it didn’t want Alice to know what it really looked like.
Alice looked stunned, as if he’d pulled a live platypus out of his pocket instead.
“Where did you get it?” Accusatory.
“I’ll take that as a yes, then? This is definitely the Wobble?”
Dr. Lambshead had called it “the ultimate problem solver” in his letter, “even more than the bird-children.”
It might as well have hypnotized Alice. She stared at it in an unfocused yet intense way.
“Keep it safe,” Dr. Lambshead had written. Now, seeing the hungry look in Alice’s eyes, he wondered if he’d meant “leave it where it is.” And could he be sure it didn’t do more than Alice said it did?
“I’ve been searching for ages in that accursed basement, the grounds, everywhere. And here you’ve got it.” A wry disgust with herself, but also a tension behind it, a real need. “You should give it over to me. The Wobble’s meant to be used by the Order.”
“Am I not part of the Order? By birthright? Besides, Dr. Lambshead said it would only work for me. He also said I shouldn’t give it to anyone else.”
He was trying to sound confident, but a feeling had risen up in him, as if the events of the day had finally conspired to overwhelm him. He was convinced something was scrabbling inside his skull. A frantic dark fluttering that drew close, and this version of the mansion would provide no defense.
Alice was trying to appear calm, but she continued to look at the Wobble like cats looked at catnip mice. Or just at mice.
“Dr. Lambshead was a loyal and valued member of the Order, but I think you’d find he was mistaken in that detail, Jonathan. There are work-arounds. You really ought to give the Wobble to someone more experienced.”
“It’s what he said in his letter. ‘Blood of the maker, blood of the user.’ ” He dared not think too much about what that might mean about his family. About his father.
“Show me.”
“I destroyed it. Memorized it and then burned it.”
“So I just have your word.”
“And I just have your word on everything else.”
Everything else. The smooth blue simplicity of the ghost mansion was actually so complex. The strange swifts stitching their way through the window. Crowley. Aurora. The Builders. He did not want to believe it. Any of it. This did not seem like the kind of thing that ought to be believable. Perhaps it was the kind of thing that if you believed, it only then became real.
“Leave now if you want to get out,” the carrot said again to him.
“They’ll kill you,” the potato said in its gorgeous voice. “They’ll kill everyone.”
The whole world, and another besides, and an infinity of worlds beyond that. It all began to kaleidoscope and collapse. Again.
“We’re both English,” Alice said, almost pleading.
“Not the same England,” Jonathan said.
Alice took a different tack, and he didn’t appreciate it any more than the head-on approach.
“Listen, Jonathan. We need the Wobble to contain Crowley. We need it to help preserve everything the Order stands for.”
True, he didn’t even know what the Order stood for. Not really. But he knew what orders Dr. Lambshead had given him.
“Then you need me. It won’t work for you. I’m keeping it. If you want to try to take it from me, Alice, I promise I’ll put up a fight.”
Alice stared at him with a new sort of appraisal in her eyes.
“Do you really have what it takes? Is it possible?”
“I guess you’ll have to find out.”
A sigh from Alice—of surrender or resignation? “It is true I never thought you’d get this far this fast. And Dr. Lambshead thought you had special powers. I don’t see it, but I don’t know everything, Jonathan. Do you have special powers?”
“I pushed a ghost. You said that’s impossible. So let’s assume I do.”
A creepy flamelike feeling moved across his scalp. A soreness around his eyes, almost a burning. He looked down and saw that the half moons of his fingernails had turned sooty.
The fallen beast’s jaw moved, and they both stared at it in horror.
But it was a warning only, that reflexive movement.
For now the Emissary was rising up out of him, where it had hidden, in his skin, his flesh, through all the doors they had traversed.
It was rising up and up to the ceiling and curling down at them in all its shadowy strength and Alice was shouting at him to come clear of it and that seemed grim and funny both, for how was he to come clear of something that had so thoroughly curled up inside him?
Because Jonathan was wrong—he hadn’t pushed the wraith away after all, but absorbed it.
Embraced it.