CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Escape to Silence

“Come on, Glinty, time to be somewhere else,” said Little Tragedy, tugging Edie back through the mirrored arches, into the dark alcove beyond.

At the front door of the pub, she could see the Friar talking earnestly to whoever was on the other side. Being somewhere else seemed like exactly the right idea. The only thing was that once she looked around, she realized there was no door out of this cloistered space. It didn’t feel like a place of escape. It felt like a dead end. She suddenly felt like a rat in a trap.

As if reading her thoughts, Little Tragedy put his finger up to his lips and monkey-swung up onto one of the wall lamps and did something to the mosaic roundel in the ceiling. He dropped to the ground, nimble as a cat.

“Trust me. I know somewhere the Tallyman won’t find yer.”

He beckoned her to the parallel mirrors. Edie’s feet braked on the carpet. She had no intention of going back to the Blitz. Little Tragedy shook his head impatiently.

“’S all right. I changed the wossit in the ceiling. We ain’t going to the past, just somewhere else in the city, somewhere they can’t find yer. It’s an ’ouse, a safe one, don’t worry. Look, it’s nuffink bad.”

He pointed into the mirror. Edie let her feet take her close enough for a look. There was no conflagration on the other side of the mirror. There was just an empty gray room, bare gray walls meeting dusty gray floorboards. The only relief from the plainness silvering everything was the crisscross lattice shadow thrown across the floor by the window in the moonlight. There was nothing else in the room, and no shadows where danger might lurk.

She heard the Friar raise his voice in the doorway. She heard the words “walker” and “stone,” and that alone evaporated any misgivings she was having about reentering the mirrors.

She nodded at Little Tragedy. Her eyes slipped over his shoulder and were caught by the sight of George’s jacket hanging on the beer-pump handles. Little Tragedy saw what she was looking at and nodded.

“You’re right. Don’t want to forget the dainty, do we?”

He nipped out into the barroom proper, and quick as thought, had snatched the blazer and was back at her side.

“Ladies first,” he whispered.

Just before Edie stepped into the mirror, she hesitated.

What if—?

Before the thought could go further, Little Tragedy had clucked with impatience and pushed past her, into the mirror, tugging her arm as he went. She stepped in after him and felt the surface tension on the mirror stretch and pop as before, and then she was in the room beyond.

This time, instead of her ears being assaulted by a hellish barrage of noise, she experienced the opposite— complete quiet. It was the sound of a city at peace with itself. It was so silent that she could hear her heart begin to slow from the panicked tempo it had risen to when she had been in the pub only an instant before.

It wasn’t just the lack of explosions and fire that was different from the last trip she’d made into the mirror. It also wasn’t hot. In fact, it was the opposite. The air was still, so there was no draft, but it was not even warm.

“It’s cold,” she said, watching her breath plume as she turned to look at Little Tragedy.

“Sometimes it’s cold, sometimes it isn’t. It’s a funny old room,” said the boy. He was looking at her over the top of George’s jacket.

There was something in his eyes that she hadn’t seen before. He still had the cocky urchin’s grin, but his eyes didn’t match the look. His eyes weren’t grinning. They were saying something completely different, something not cheery, or chirpy, or cheeky.

They were saying sorry.

“’E’s not a bad man. ’E’s always looking after glints. ’E told me. ’E said no one looks after them better.”

Her heart froze and her hand was already in her pocket, closing around the well-worn disk of her sea-glass. Even as she pulled it out into the gray room, she knew what she would see, because it was already hot to the touch, already blazing with warning light. And as the light shone out and cast her finger shadows on the gray walls, she completed, too late, the thought she’d begun in the pub, just before Little Tragedy had pulled her into the mirror.

The thought was this: if the Friar had shielded her from a bomb blast and saved her from the Blitz, why wouldn’t he save her from the Walker? Of course, the answer was that he probably would save her from the Walker. Which raised the question of why the boy-imp had pulled her into the mirror behind the monk’s back, and why he was looking so wrong—

“You’re not talking about the Friar, are you?”

His eyes swiveled this way and that, anywhere but at her face, at the shock and rising horror in her eyes. He held out the jacket, as if making a peace offering.

“’Ere, take your coat. It’s chilly in here.”

Edie looked at the mirror behind Little Tragedy, calculating how she could get to it without his stopping her.

“Thanks,” she said slowly, taking the jacket. She knew how to do it. She’d take the coat and throw it over his head and jump past him in the confusion. She remembered the broken dragon’s head in the pocket and thought that she’d better take that with her, but suddenly she realized the heavy weight wasn’t in the pocket at all. She hesitated, confused for an instant, then looked up and saw it.

Little Tragedy had the broken carving in his hand. He took advantage of her shock to back up to the mirror in two fast steps.

“You can’t take that,” she said, her voice hoarsening. “Don’t do this.”

His smile was really just hanging on by a thread, and his eyes looked so sad peering out from the mismatched face, that he might have been a tragic boy wearing the mask of Comedy, rather than the other way around.

“Don’t leave me here,” rasped Edie, looking at the bare gray walls. Something moved slowly beyond the windows, and a new terror gripped her.

“’E’s not a bad man. ’E told me,” the urchin insisted. He put one leg into the mirror. He paused as if he wanted to be gone but his conscience wouldn’t let him make a quick exit, as if what he wanted was for her to tell him that what he was doing was right.

“Tragedy, no, please—!”

He shook his head. Something glinted in his eye.

“’E’ll be along in a while. You’ll be hunky-dory, no bother.”

As Edie leaped for him, trying to get in the mirror, he jumped back and out of the room, and she hit nothing but hard, cold glass.

Her first impulse was to smash her fists into the mirror, but sense took over and halted her in midpunch. For some reason she couldn’t get back in the mirror, but if she calmed down, maybe she could find a way.

She stepped back, trying to clear her head, pushing the panic and outrage at Little Tragedy’s betrayal down far enough so there was room for her to think.

She spun around. There was a door, four walls, and a window. The door was the obvious choice, but a thought was becoming more and more insistent at the back of her mind, and she didn’t want to open it or even touch it.

She crossed to the window and looked out. It was, of course, barred. The thing that she had seen moving beyond the window was still moving, and the warning bell it had triggered jangled louder and louder in her head.

It was snow.

The rooftops it was falling on were not the rooftops of the London she had just left. There were no sodium streetlights, no TV antennas, no satellite dishes—no lights or flickering from TV screens in the windows beneath. There was no hard-edged electric light out there at all.

It was quiet way beyond the fact that the snow was deadening every sound as it blanketed the city. There was simply no traffic noise. No cars, no buses, no whining motor scooters. There was a distant sound of a barrel organ, and the jingle of a harness.

She looked down through the bars. In the narrow slice of street that she could just make out, she saw a horse pulling an old-fashioned hackney cab, its wheels slowly cutting twin furrows through the deep snow. The driver sat on his high seat, cracking his whip at the horse’s hindquarters, a short top hat tied onto his head with a scarf, his legs swathed in a horse blanket. Then he was gone, leaving nothing but wheel marks in the snow.

She knew then that the imp had lied about more than one thing; she knew she was not in present London. She was in an older London, a London deadened with snow, an icy London where horses made wheel furrows through white streets, a London where it was cold enough for rivers to freeze over and for girls to be drowned in ice holes.

She knew, too, that he had lied about this being a safe house. This was not a safe house, because she could always tell if stones held sadness or anguish or horror, and this was why she didn’t want to touch the gray walls or even the door handle several feet away.

She knew all this even without hearing the distant sound of a woman sobbing, which came from a lower floor, beyond the door.

This was no safe house. This was the House of the Lost.