Chapter 36
Steve looked up the dark stairway in horror. “What are you talking about? Why should we go up there? You said the witch’s rooms are up there!”
In another part of the house, nearer to the front door, unfamiliar voices were raised in loud argument. Tyler’s heart was beating hard: at any moment someone might walk in and find them. “That’s where the mirror is now,” he said with quiet urgency and pushed again, but Steve Carrillo was big enough not to be moved if he didn’t want to. “I’m serious! Mrs. Needle took it. Gideon’s wife Grace is stuck in there just like you were and we have to save her.”
“That’s totally different than what you said before,” Steve accused him. “You told me we had to stop Colin- that he had this Continnyscope thing and he was going to take over the earth or something if we didn’t get back here and stop him. That he could destroy time like some kind of supervillain.”
“Exactly!” said Tyler, shoving him again. “So we have to get Grace out of the mirror and then Gideon will… I don’t know… it’ll snap him out of whatever’s wrong with him! We need Gideon to get well so he can stop Colin.”
“What? That totally doesn’t make any sense at all! Forget it-I’m not going near that mirror. It’s crazy in there, and I felt like I was in there for years last time!”
“Nobody’s going to make you go in the mirror. You can wait for me.”
“Yeah, great. Wait around in the witch’s room in your big old scary farmhouse. Good plan. No way, Jenkins.”
“Look, if we stay here, the witch will definitely find us.” Thunder boomed outside, and as it died away Tyler heard the loud voices again. One of them sounded like Patience Needle’s. “There she is now. Get the hell up there!”
Steve Carrillo moaned in protest, but allowed Tyler to hustle him up the stairs. Tyler slipped in through the open door of the witch’s office, then turned to beckon Steve after him. The room was tidy, as it usually was, everything on the desk and in the tall stand of apothecary shelves neatly stacked, potted plants arranged along both edges of the desk in rows with each pot carefully labeled. The only thing that didn’t seem to fit was a pile of papers scattered carelessly across the desk as if a powerful wind had swept through the room and touched nothing else. On the far side of the little room stood the hand-carved wooden washstand and the tall, shiny rectangle of the mirror.
“It really is here,” Tyler breathed. He felt a kind of fierce joy, as if he had been rewarded for a stubborn defense of the truth.
“I told you,” Steve began, “I’m not… ”
All the lights went out.
“Wh-what…?”
“It’s okay,” said Tyler, but he was shaken himself. “I’m still here!”
“What’s going on?” Steve Carrillo sounded like he was working up to a major panic attack. “What’s happening?”
“The power went out, that’s all,” Tyler said. “We’ve got flashlights. It’s okay.” He flipped his on, swept the light around the room. The noise of the storm seemed louder now in the deep shadows, the witch’s room larger and even more unsettling. Tyler leaned over the desk, sweeping his light back and forth across the scattered papers, but they seemed mostly ordinary, bills and other business documents.
Bang! The muffled explosion from downstairs made them both jump.
“That’s a gun!” Steve said.
“Somebody knocked something over, that’s all,” said Tyler.
“You are totally lying, Jenkins! Let’s get out of here.”
Tyler also felt the very strong urge to bolt, but he had come too far to give up. “I can’t-I’m going in the mirror to get Grace,” he said. “I told you.”
“You’re not leaving me out here in the dark!”
“Then you can come with me.”
Another loud bang was quickly followed by a third.
Steve had just found his own flashlight. His eyes bulged. “Don’t try to tell me those weren’t gunshots…!” His eyes widened farther, until Tyler was afraid they would roll right out of his sockets. “I hear someone coming!”
Tyler started to deny it, but there was no doubt-they could both hear rapid footsteps coming up the stairs. “Oh, crap. Hide, quick!” He swung the flashlight around the room, but other than the dark space under the desk there was nowhere to go but into the mirror. Tyler knew he would never get Steve to follow him into it without a fight, so he grabbed the large boy’s arm and dragged him toward the desk instead. “Here!”
They had barely turned off their flashlights and crawled as far back under it as they could, wedged in by the backpacks they were still wearing, when the door of the room was flung open and crashed against the wall with a hollow thump.
“Traitor!” Mrs. Needle’s voice hissed, cold and sharp as a piece of broken glass. “I know you’re here somewhere. You can’t hide from me.”
The tiniest little whimper escaped Steve Carrillo’s mouth. Tyler grabbed his friend’s hand and squeezed it as hard as he could. Mrs. Needle had not moved, which meant she was still standing in the doorway, listening. A moment later she strode toward the desk and Tyler felt his body turn cold, as though all the blood had leaked out of him at once. He squeezed Steve’s hand again, as much to remind himself he wasn’t alone as to keep his friend quiet.
Mrs. Needle was right beside the desk now: he could hear the swish of her skirts as she moved. “If you can hear me, you had better come out,” she said. Only the fact that she didn’t seem able to see in the dark, like a cat or a fox, kept him from crying out in fear. He bit his lip until he tasted blood. “Come out, I said.” She raised her voice. “I know you’re here. You can’t hide from me.”
Steve was shaking, his body moving as though he were crying without sound. Tyler didn’t know what his friend was doing, but prayed he’d at least do it silently. At last Mrs. Needle moved away from their hiding place.
“If you are here and not answering me,” she said at last, “I will give you cause to regret it, Mr. Kingaree. I swear I will teach you a very, very painful lesson.”
She paused as if waiting for an answer, then turned and stalked out of the room, pulling the door closed behind her. Tyler heard her move down the hall and open another door.
Tyler flicked his flashlight on and dimmed the beam with his shirt. To his astonishment, Steve Carrillo was kneeling beside him holding a long metal spike in his hand.
“I couldn’t find my knife,” he whispered. “I was going to stab her with the tent peg.”
“If it’s not made out of silver it’d probably just make her mad,” Tyler told him. “Come on, we have to get out of here before she comes back.”
Steve put the peg in his pocket. “Where do we go? Downstairs?”
“Are you kidding? Didn’t you hear? She’s looking for Kingaree. That’s the slavery guy I told you about! He’s probably running around here with a gun, shooting at people.”
“Then where…?” He suddenly understood. “Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no.”
“Come on, dude. Do you want to be here when she comes back with a flashlight of her own?” Tyler pulled himself out from under the desk and climbed up onto the marble sink.
“No!” said Steve, tugging himself loose with a bit more difficulty than Tyler had. “Not going-no way!”
“Suit yourself.” Without even wondering whether it would work, Tyler threw himself forward into the mirror, which parted for him like vertical mercury.
He landed in a clumsy heap, his backpack twisted halfway around his shoulders and head so that he fell over trying to get up. When he finally got it straight and could sit up and turn on his flashlight, he was stunned to discover he was in a different room than the last time he had crossed through the mirror. For a moment it
