Looking for Jake and Other Stories

had given him. He spoke obliquely and hinted at things he could not tell them. He spoke with righteous anger. He felt contempt for himself, for this act, but he felt pride under that, because he was trying to save them. When he finally bellowed at them that he would go alone, he used all the authority they had ceded to him, and they were shocked and silent.

Sholl walked away from them, stepped out of the broken window of the shop and stood alone in the street, in full view, without weapons. He showed the soldiers what only he could do.

It was deep night: the moon silvered him. Sholl turned back to his companions in the darkness of the shop and muttered something to them: it was meant to be conciliatory and warm, but he saw only betrayal on their faces. You don’t understand, he thought, and raised his hands in an attitude of the most vague, the most uncertain benediction, then turned and walked away quickly, crossing Russell Street, passing through the threshold of the museum’s gates and onto its drive, past the lawn where the ruins of public sculptures were bruised with verdigris. He was in the grounds, he was in, and he walked faster toward the steps and the doors that were open and very dark. He had never been so afraid or excited.

As he began to ascend the stairs, Sholl heard quick steps on the gravel behind him. He spun, horrified, crying out go away before he had even seen who was following him. It was the commander, and most of the soldiers. You don’t go in alone the officer was screaming, his weapon held so that he could have been threatening Sholl, or protecting him.

Sholl began to run back toward him. He was not surprised by the soldiers’ decision, and he felt shame.

They were still approaching him when he saw their faces change. Their expressions were blasted suddenly wide, staring at what was emerging from the museum. Sholl heard something bursting out behind him, but he did not turn back. His run faltered as forces overtook him. He came to a stop at the bottom of the stairs, and spread out his arms as if he would hold back a tide, but the imagos swept past him, in a frenzy like he had never seen, and descended on the soldiers.

The imagos were dressed in a flickering, a strobing sequence of forms, of people, of the people throughout history, staccato aggregates of their own oppression. They were a wind of flint-axe chippers, of pharaohs, of samurai, of American shamans and Phoenicians and Byzantines, helmets with placid faces and splinted armour, and tooth necklaces and shrouds and gold. They came down in a vengeful swarm, and the soldiers fired with tough and stupid bravery, ripping apart moments of flesh and blood that only folded in and refocused and became again. The bodies of the imagos were shredded endlessly as they came but these were not vampires—these were the unfettered fauna of mirrors, for which meat was an affectation.

No one could have expected this. It was like nothing imaginable. It would have been reasonable for the soldiers to pass the museum’s threshold thinking they had at least a chance of retreat. They screamed as the imagos reached them. Stop! screamed Sholl, but the imagos did not obey him. They would only not touch him. They ignored him and continued. Stop! Stop!

One by one the soldiers were taken. After five, six of them had died in blood, or been pushed into space that was folded away to nothing, or frozen and made gone, Sholl turned away. It was not callousness that made him walk stolidly back up the steps, with the massacre going on behind him. He could not turn round, he could not watch what he could not stop, for shame.

He had not been shocked to turn and see the soldiers there. Guilt blasted him. Why did you let them come? it spoke. Company? Protection? Sacrifice?

Sholl shook his head violently and tried very hard not to think of what was happening. He was trembling almost too much to stand. He pushed at the museum’s half-open door, and the motion was timed precisely with a wet screech behind him, that sounded like the commander. Sholl hovered at the museum’s threshold. I didn’t know. I told them not to come, he said inside him. He had been right not to learn their names.

His face creased as he walked into the darkness, leaving the gunfire behind him, and the imagos playing.

It was not far, through the dark. In the echoes of his footsteps, and the faint sounds from the fight outside. He knew where the Fish of the Mirror must be.

He passed the south stairs to his left, crossing into the enormous pillared hall, where signs for toilets and cafes were still intact on the walls. Sholl discovered he was crying. It was just here, now, he was here, ready to face the power of the imago forces, the controller, the Fish of the Mirror. He drew breath, focused on his plan. The Reading Room was ahead, and after deep breaths, Sholl entered.

The Reading Room. The round chamber that had been at the heart of the British Library, and then remade into a pointless focus for the museum. Its dome was way overhead. Most of its shelves had long ago been stripped: they housed only ghost books. The massive room was lit by the moon through the skylight, but that was not how Sholl could see every edge of everything, every curlicue of detail in the chamber. It was all etched in shadow on shadow, and he could see it all, in the black sunlight that poured out of the presence hanging in the room’s centre, like a darkling star, invisible but utterly compelling, evading deliberation, not quite seen, insinuating its own parameters, patrolling the moiling cylindrical space with feline, piscene ease. The Tiger. The Fish of the Mirror.

Its vast, unsympathetic attention turned slowly to Sholl. He felt himself becoming more precise as it considered him, more exact. He bristled from its thoughtful application.

He could not breathe.

Will you touch me? he thought.

Enough. It was like pushing through ice, but he made himself move. Step forward through his awe. This was what it came to. He had not come here, unarmed, to stare. He had a plan.

They must have known. Without any doubt, they must have known the truth. So was it a game? Did they not mind me?

For a long time after the jailing of the imagos, their world was nothing like yours. Except where there was water, things were shaped in very different ways, in other dimensions. For a very long time. But the imperialism of the tain, earth’s specularisation, meant less and less space for the other world to be other.

Places of imago aesthetics grew smaller and fewer. The mimicked land spread.

Ways were found to minimise the hurt. When one woman tilted one looking glass in Rome, must the whole imago universe pitch like an unstable ship? Where one man faces thirty windows, did thirty imagos have to be lashed powerless? Solutions were found. There are strategies, even in prison.

Let the mirrors, the tains themselves, let them move, pitch between the worlds. Let them bend space, so that one imago may seem fractured, but will always match one of you. From caprice to precision.

The prison’s rule went from one of great freedom with occasional, arbitrary and greatly cruel punishment, to one of structure and limitations and no freedom at all. With the imperialism of mirrors, all this became necessary. I see this now. I’ve understood it. I didn’t know, before. Faced with the mindless dynamism of the mirror, a new strategy was found, and it gave the imago world a certain shape.

When I came through, I burst through the tain, and hurled onto steep slopes. I rolled with momentum, afraid that gravity would take me back across, and leave me bobbing in the water back on the other side.

I stopped and breathed mirror air. I shook.

I made my way up a path, amazed by the feel of earth underneath me, by the colour of the night sky, by

the trees. I walked very slowly. I was afraid of what I might find. I gripped the ground with my feet, I listened to the wind. I emerged from the woods and set out for the city, Right is left, here, and left right, so the signs say

and

but the city is in every other way the

same. There was no tiny part of the world that was safe from mirrors, so the imagos finally gave in, and made a reflection.

I held my breath for so long when I came here—when I came back, I want to say,