The patch rippled slightly in response and Mirabelle heard Eliza’s voice in her head, the words gentle as butterfly wings beating on a window pane.
Allow me to make myself presentable and I’ll be there in a moment.
Mirabelle nodded and closed the door.
She felt a strange pressure fill the air, and she tasted the tiniest hint of iron on her tongue as a familiar magic was being worked. She turned and smiled at Odd, who now stood before her, his portal by his side already shrinking to a black dot before finally winking out of existence.
Odd was the same height as her, and like her he looked no more than twelve years old, but he of course was far, far older. He was wearing a bulky seal-skin coat that stretched right down to his ankles, heavy mittens, a cap, and goggles. He pushed the goggles up his forehead and brushed snow from his sleeves.
‘Where were you this time, Odd?’
Odd frowned. ‘Somewhere far north. Plenty of snow and ice.’
‘I can see that,’ said Mirabelle, her eyes sparkling.
Odd smiled. ‘You know, then?’
‘Uncle Enoch told me. We’ve got to go to—’
‘The Room of Lights.’ Odd nodded. He’d taken a mitten off and had a finger in the air, as if testing it. ‘Not long now.’
‘Tell the twins.’
Odd made a face. ‘Do I have to?’
Mirabelle was already running down the hall. ‘I’ll find Uncle Bertram.’
Odd shouted after her. ‘Whatever you do—’
‘Don’t tell Piglet – I know.’
She slowed down as she reached the yawning opening to her left that led down into the bowels of the house. She crept towards it, one eye on the incline that led deep into the dark. She fought the urge to whisper, ‘Piglet.’ She remembered the words Uncle Enoch and the others were so fond of using.
Piglet is dangerous.
She turned to go to the entrance hall and out through the main door. Her excitement was building. There was a constant fluttering in her stomach. She ran down the steps and stopped in front of the bushes. Something was snuffling in the undergrowth, something huge and hulking rooting at the soil.
‘Uncle Bertram.’
The snuffling stopped suddenly.
‘Uncle Enoch wants us all in the Room of Lights.’
She saw red glimmering among the leaves and she heard a grunt. Her job done, she turned and went back into the house.
She followed the hallway around, passing the dining room on her right, before stopping in front of a pair of impossibly tall double doors at the end of the corridor.
She pushed the doors open and stepped into the Room of Lights. The towering walls of the cavernous room were covered in dozens of old portraits that seemed to stretch upwards into infinity. Mirabelle’s neck hurt to look up at the topmost ones, and even then she couldn’t make them out clearly. The ones she could see were stunning in their variety and strangeness. There was a painting of a man in sixteenth-century dress, his collar a huge white ruffle. He would have been unremarkable except for the three large eyes that took up most of his face. There was a painting of two Victorian ladies in billowing dresses, both of them with four arms. There was a small boy in a white robe, his black eyes expressionless orbs, and four twisting horns on his head.
But most amazing of all were the dozens of orbs of light of varying brightness and colour that hung suspended in the air at differing intervals and heights.
Enoch called them the Spheres. These were throughways for their people into this world, passages in from what they called the Ether. Uncle Enoch had described this to her as: ‘The place where we are created, where we sleep before birth. A place we have no memory of, but which haunts our dreams.’
Mirabelle didn’t quite understand it, but she’d read in a book in the library about a place called Heaven which humans believed was a place they went to after death, and she supposed maybe it was something like that: a grand mysterious idea, unquestioned. She liked the idea of magic, of miracles that couldn’t be explained, even among a family as miraculous as hers.
Enoch was already standing before one of the orbs. Dotty and Daisy, the twins, were with him, their blonde ringlets spilling down over their shoulders. They looked like dolls in their matching blue-and-white pinafores.
‘Hello, Mirabelle,’ said Dotty, smiling, her voice timid and quavering.
‘Hello, Mirabelle,’ Daisy sniffed haughtily.
Mirabelle smiled sweetly.
They were interrupted by the sound of the double doors crashing open as Uncle Bertram huffed and puffed his way into the room. In his changed aspect Uncle Bertram was very tall and fat. He wore yellow pinstriped trousers, a red cravat, a mustard-coloured shirt, a purple smoking jacket and a green waistcoat. His large bearded face twitched with excitement.
‘How long?’ he panted.
‘Not long,’ said Enoch without taking his eyes off the orb. It was a greenish gold, and mist swirled in it, and within that mist was something grey and spindly. Sometimes it would look like it was coalescing, then it would become smoky and vanish altogether, reappearing again seconds later.
‘Oh my, oh my. Imagine if Aunt Rula were here to see this,’ said Bertram, cramming his knuckles into his mouth in an effort to stop himself from squealing.
Enoch gave a good-humoured sigh. ‘Yes, imagine.’
Aunt Rula had lived in the house long before Mirabelle had arrived. Like Odd, she hadn’t been very fond of being stuck in one place. One day, she’d decided to go out and travel the human world – and she’d never come back. Aunt Eliza once confided in Mirabelle that Bertram had been heartbroken. He’d had a soft spot for Rula, Eliza said, and had pined for her for ‘a hundred years or so’. By the sound of it, he was still pining.
The doors opened again, and in swept Aunt Eliza, fixing her hair and patting her long red dress.
‘I hope I haven’t missed anything,’ she said, speaking aloud
