The Mirror in the Attic
By Karen Frost
Copyright 2014 Karen Frost
Table of Contents
Chapter One–A Rainy Afternoon
Chapter Two–The Mirror in the Attic
Chapter Three–Devorian
Chapter Four–The Fox's Tale
Chapter Five–Rescue
Chapter Six–Morlach
Chapter Seven–Race to Tarah
Chapter Eight–The Heart of a Dragon
Chapter Nine–Out of the Frying Pan
Chapter Ten–The Beasts' Council
Chapter Eleven–Pursuit
Chapter Twelve–Reunion
Chapter Thirteen–Homegoing
Chapter Fourteen–The Hall of Heroes
Chapter Fifteen–The Immortal
Chapter Sixteen–The Last Unicorn
About the Author
Chapter One
A Rainy Afternoon
The snows are melting. I can feel it in my bones and in the air like water before a storm. We have run out of time. Soon, too soon, she will awaken. And then what?
Stuff and nonsense. The spell that holds her will last for several eternities and more. Magic that powerful can’t easily be broken, you know.
The eternal flame is dying, Shamaraan; the snows are melting. The darkness gathers under every rock and in every hidden corner. The spell was not strong enough. The spell will not hold.
Well. It is best not to talk of these things. Even the trees have ears these days, it seems.
We stand on the edge of a great chasm. I only hope that we find the strength not to look down.
The streets were wet and miserable with the afternoon’s rain and so the children sat inside playing checkers. In the streets outside, cars endlessly sloshed past one after another, splashing the sidewalk with waves of water that made a steady slapping sound which, if the children shut their eyes, sounded almost like the rush of the ocean against the beach. The angry red taillights of the cars looked like the blurry eyes of demons, and the curtain of ever falling raindrops softened the hard lines and edges of the world. The tall, stately streetlamps lining the street battled valiantly to cut through the white mist that pressed itself against the ground and bring light to the darkness, but their shafts of weak yellow light were battered and then swallowed up entirely by the blackness of premature night. Inside the small row house at 321 Baker’s Row, a small fire snapped and danced in the fireplace, creating a protective circle of light against the encroaching dark outside. The children drank hot chocolate--real chocolate that had been melted into whole milk and ate small cookies as they lay on their stomachs warming their faces by the fire.
Mary Jane had just been out in the rain and her hair was drenched through. Now it clung like strings of red seaweed to the sides of her freckled face and dripped tiny droplets of water onto her red sweater. When she had entered the house, she had hung her yellow rain jacket on a peg near the door, and now it slowly dripped a pool of water onto the wood floor below it. Having removed her yellow rain boots as well, she joined her brother and sister before the fire, rubbing her hands together and scowling at the red and black checker pieces on the board before her. Her brother Jack, who had been inside the whole afternoon, was not watching the board but was instead looking out the large bay window and watching the steady stream of people running past it with their black umbrellas held before them like shields, trying to fight back the rain. He had been waiting for her to make her move. Maude, the youngest, paid them no attention, as she was busy reading a thick book with many words and no pictures.
It was early in the spring—still late winter, really—and the rains were especially bad. This seemingly endless rain had followed a particularly cold winter, and practically everyone in the city was irritable and bored after having been stuck indoors for so long. Jack, who several hours before had complained that he had never been so cold and unhappy in all his life, wore his thickest sweater and bright blue wool socks that his mother had knit for his last birthday. It did not help matters that the house was particularly draughty as a result of having been built in the early 1800s, when houses were insulated by straw stuffed between the brick walls. The sum of these factors was that the house's small library, where the fireplace was located, had recently become the children's favorite room, and the place where they spent the majority of their time when not at school.
In fact, the house itself did not commend itself particularly well to children's games. Located in the city, where space was rare and thus all houses squeezed into the most preposterous shapes and sizes, it was narrow, with three stories piled haphazardly on top of each other with little evident thought to aesthetic or functionality. On the first floor were the parlor, the kitchen, the dining room, and the library. On the second floor were the children's parents' bedroom, the bedroom shared by Mary Jane and Maude, and Jack's bedroom. The topmost floor was the attic. The attic was hardly ever used and had only one room, where the children’s mother kept boxes of old knickknacks and unused furniture that had been in the house since long before they had moved in--which meant, according to Mary Jane, that its age was somewhat older than the discovery of the wheel but still younger than dinosaurs.
The game of checkers had not been exciting enough to attract more than tepid interest from either of the two players. Jack had won the past several games and Mary Jane had all but decided to forgo any attempt to continue the game, hence why she had left to slosh through a few puddles. She had been gone just long enough to come back soaking, but not long enough that her brother would inform on her to their mother. This was a common pattern in their games. Jack, the more strategic thinker, would withstand Mary Jane's early tactical victories in order to devastate her kings later in the game.
The two siblings were twins, but not the identical kind. Jack had his father’s thick black hair and dark, dreamy eyes. Twelve years old, he was just barely shorter than his sister, but lanky, with ungainly long arms and legs like a newborn foal. His hair, cut short to his head when he was younger, grew down now almost to his eyes. Mary Jane, in contrast, had her mother’s red hair, a sort of gold red that made her pale skin look even whiter, and eyes like pools of silver. Apart from the striking effect of her hair and eyes, however, she had no other distinguishing characteristics to speak of, being neither thin nor thick, tall nor short. The youngest of the three children, Maude, was a smaller version of her brother. Her black hair hung to her chain, where it was cut in a straight line that matched the equally sharp line of her bangs on her forehead. She was small and delicate, but her dark eyes glinted with a sharp and unsettling intelligence. Her brother and sister both felt very protective of her since they were older. Jack won another game, then pushed the board away and rolled towar the fire to warm his hands.
“I’m tired of this game," he complained.
Maude looked up at him curiously from the old red leather chair in which she was sitting. Mary Jane began to pack up the checkers, folding the board carefully and putting the box away on a shelf where they had made a space among all the beautiful leather-bound books that Mr. Shenstone, their father, kept. Jack stood and walked to the window to peer out again. It didn't seem possible, but the rain was falling even harder now. Fewer cars braved the roads, and all the half-drowned pedestrians had retired to some place warm and dry. The old grandfather clock in the hallway struck four with its usual solemnity. Maude sighed softly and closed her book, hopping off her father’s chair and returning it to its proper place on the shelf. It was one of her father’s history books, and she had to stand on her tiptoes in order to reach high enough to tap it back into place. Mary Jane gently took the book from her and put it away for her, then joined her brother at the window.
&n
bsp; “Any more rain and we’ll have to build a boat. We'll never get to school with several inches of rain in the streets,” Maude observed, worming her way between her siblings and putting her chin in her hands. Her short black hair was held back from her round face by two little barrettes in the shape of daisies. Together, the faces of the three children just fit in the window, and they looked like three moons peering out into the night sky. Jack patted Maude on the top of her head and moved back to his place in front of the fire.
“Well I hate the rain,” Mary Jane announced. “It ruins everything. There is nothing to do when it’s raining.”
“When it stops, we can go play in the park,” Jack suggested.
"Everything will be wet," Mary Jane replied, making a face.
"Would you rather keep sitting inside?" Jack asked.
“It’s never going to stop raining,” May Jane said glumly. She made a face at the rain now, sticking her tongue out at it like a small child.
“It has to,” Maude said matter-of-factly. “It can’t rain forever. Besides, I like rain. Without rain, the plants can’t grow and they die.”
“What time will Mother and Father return?” Mary Jane asked impatiently.
Their parents had ventured out in spite of the rain to a small party hosted by one of Mr. Shenstone’s university colleagues. Mr. Shenstone, being an esteemed professor of some quaint, obscure classical subject, was occasionally invited to such kinds of parties and he, being fond of the champagne and small dainty appetizers made of smelly cheeses frequently found at these types of events, did not often refuse. Mrs. Shenstone, of course, accompanied him, and thus it was that the children were left to care for themselves for the afternoon.
In truth, the children did not mind being left alone. In fact, it was perhaps for the best that they had such liberty at home. Nature, after all, had not intended Mr. Shenstone to be the sort of father who dedicated his free hours to the careless play of children. It was more accurate to say that Mr. Shenstone, for all his wondrous knowledge and keenness of insight, did not understand the concept of children. They did not fit into his world of dusty tomes and crumbling ruins. Mr. Shenstone could no more understand the three young creatures who bore an intriguing physical resemblance to him than he could understand why skirts were to the knee one year and to the ankle the next. It was not that he didn’t love his children, for he did. Instead, it was that he simply didn’t know how to handle them. He spent his life absorbed in books, and to him the knowledge they contained was more real than the nose on his face.
As a result, the task of raising the children had fallen entirely to their mother, Mrs. Shenstone. She was one of those thoroughly modern women who volunteered to work at a soup kitchen, campaigned for political issues, and sternly but lovingly raised her children in between hair appointments and lunch dates. She had once read in a book that children should be treated as small adults, and this became the philosophy by which she raised her three children. Because she was away so often helping the destitute or chairing the neighborhood watch, the children had learned to keep themselves busy without her, as they did now.
“I'm sure Mother and Father will be home for dinner,” Jack replied.
His stomach rumbled at the mention of food. He was a growing boy, and felt hungry most of the time no matter how much he ate. Now he was cold, too. The wood almost all gone, the fire was slowly seeping back down into the embers, something like a greedy dragon settling over its hoard of gold. Without the fire to chase it away, cold air snuck in through the door and swirled down the chimney. Mary Jane wrapped her arms around herself and sat on her legs to keep them warm.
“Jack, what do you think Egypt is like? Do you think we could ever go? I want to ride a camel and see the pyramids,” Mary Jane said suddenly, changing the subject.
Jack frowned, a thoughtful line creasing his forehead between his eyebrows.
“It's probably all desert. And hot. We could only go out for a few hours each day in the sun, and Mother would spend all her time worrying that we would get bitten by a mosquito and catch malaria. I guess it would be no fun at all, really,” he said seriously.
“But just think of what it would be like! Us, riding across the yellow sands of the desert into the Valley of the Kings. King Tut's tomb!” Mary Jane said, her imagination running wildly.
“You can ride a camel in China,” Maude suggested. “Of course, it’s not the same. It’s a Bactrian camel and not a Dromedary. That means it has two humps, not one, and it's shaggy like a dog.”
“I wouldn't like to ride between two humps,” Jack said with a frown.
“I would much rather ride a pony,” Maude agreed.
Because the family lived in the city and always had, Maude had only seen a few horses in her life, and these were the brown, ewe-necked hackneys hitched to the decorative carriages that took revelers and lovers through the park at night. Maude added, “A white pony, with a long mane and tail and a red bow on its head.”
“One that could bow and do circus tricks,” Mary Jane finished with a laugh. Maude smiled, the corners of her mouth curling up like Cupid's bow.
“Well, I have an idea,” Mary Jane announced. “There are dozens of boxes in the attic just full of old clothing. Maude, why don't we open some and dress you up like a little princess?”
“I hate the attic,” Jack groaned. “It’s musty and full of cobwebs. I’ll be sneezing all night from the dust if I go in it.”
“Then Maude and I will go and you can stay down here. Come on Maude,” Mary Jane said, reaching for Maude’s hand.
Maude put her tiny hand in her sister's and followed her out as Jack watched. At last he sighed loudly and got up to follow them. On the balance, he found the idea of staying, alone in the library, more undesirable than the stuffy attic air and the whisper of invisible spider webs against his cheeks. He jogged to catch up to his sisters and together the three walked up the two flights of stairs to the attic. At the top of the narrow black stairs was the attic door. Mary Jane turned the knob, and as the door swung open a terrific flash of white lightening burst across the small round window to their right and all the lights in the house went out. Maude screamed shrilly and grabbed her brother’s legs. Jack in turn tripped and fell, toppling the two of them to the floor.
Mary Jane shouted, “Don’t move! I’ll go and fetch something from downstairs so we can see again.”
Mary Jane carefully felt her way back down the rickety old stairs and into the kitchen, where by running her fingers over the counter tops and in drawers she eventually found two wax candles. In another drawer was a book of matches, and she struck a match to light the candles. The light was faint, but it would have to do. Coming back up the stairs again, she handed the larger of the two candles to Jack as he sat beside Maude on the floor. Jack held it before his face and looked around. Although the light painted his face a flickering orange, it did not penetrate far into the black room. Mary Jane stepped past her siblings and moved boldly further into the attic.
“We should go back down,” Jack said unhappily. “It's too dark to see anything now."
Standing, he waved his candle around in the air before him to show how futile it would be to continue poking around in the dark. Mary Jane, however, was not listening. The pale light of her candle, which appeared to be suspended by invisible hands in midair since she herself was shrouded in darkness, swept across the walls and over row upon row of boxes and newspapers. The room was full of old trunks piled against and on top of each other, tilting at funny angles. Mary Jane stubbed her toe against a trunk and hopped and cursed for a moment.
“Where are all of these trunks from?” She wondered aloud. “They can’t all belong to Mother and Father.”
“They must have belonged to whoever lived in the house before us,” Jack said.
He remembered that their parents had mentioned something about buying the house from a strange little man with tufts of wiry white hair growing from his ears, but that was as much as they had eve
r said about the house’s former owner. Jack walked over to a greenish trunk and pushed open its heavy lid. He immediately began to cough as years of dust exploded like a miniature bomb from inside it.
“Everything in them is probably moth-eaten anyway,” Mary Jane mumbled, mostly to herself. “They must be decades old.”
“Look!” Jack exclaimed, illuminating a picture with his candle. Mary Jane moved closer to look at it, peering over his shoulder and struggling to make out the forms in the picture.
“That’s Mother and Father!” She gasped. “They look so young!”
The picture showed two smiling young adults standing together in front of a lake. The man's black hair fell carelessly into his eyes behind round glasses with thick black frames. He was dressed smartly, but his tan pants were rolled at the bottom and he was barefoot. The woman was thin, with her hair curled at the bottom and held in place on her head by a single white clip. She wore a plain, pale blue dress with thin straps. Jack wiped away a thick layer of dust off the glass in order to see the picture more clearly. Mary Jane sighed, “She looks so beautiful.”
“She looks so happy,” Jack added.
“And Father looks so…” Mary Jane started to say.
“Like Father,” Jack finished with a laugh. Indeed, the young version of their father wore the same expression of confusion and distraction that he did in the present. Jack gently put the picture back down in the trunk and shut the lid. Neither Jack nor Mary Jane noticed that Maude had wandered off.
“I can’t imagine why they’ve kept some of these things for so long,” Mary Jane said. She had opened a box and was holding up an unidentifiable piece of brown clothing that would never be worn again. She wrinkled her nose and threw it back down, though it just missed the box and instead landed on the floor. She continued pawing through various boxes and crates for a few minutes, then sat down on one of the trunks and watched the light from Jack's candle create fantastic shadows out of the objects in the room. Finally Jack, too, gave up his investigation of their parents' old things and came to join her, coughing from the thick dust they had stirred up by moving around the room.
“Where is Maude?” Jack asked. Mary Jane tried to peer through the blackness to the far corners of the attic, but the light from their two candles illuminated only the space a few feet beyond them.
“Maude?” Mary Jane called out. There came no reply, and she realized she couldn’t hear Maude’s small feet on the wooden floor either. She stood and began to thread her way through the room, calling out to her younger sister and holding the candle in front of her.
“I’m here,” Maude called back finally, as if from a great distance.
Mary Jane dismissed the idea as foolish, however, and decided that the effect was actually an echo, as the attic was not so very large. She hurried to her sister, Jack a few steps behind. Maude was standing in front of a large oval mirror, peering into it. Mary Jane was surprised that Maude had found the mirror at all in the darkness, but there was a hole in the ceiling above her and through it Mary Jane could see that the rain had stopped and been replaced by a slowly sinking sun, some of whose rays found their way through the hole in the form of a spear-like shaft of light. This sunbeam provided just enough light for Maude to see her own reflection in the mirror. Jack shivered with cold and looked up out of the hole.
“At least it’s stopped raining,” he said, “but we should tell Mother and Father that there’s a hole in the roof. No wonder it’s always so cold in the house.”
“I think the hole is new,” Mary Jane said, picking up the piece of the roof that had fallen in. It was approximately the size of her palm.
She continued, “You see? It still feels wet, but it must have fallen in the last few minutes or else there would have been a pool of water on the floor from the rain falling through the hole. It's a good thing the rain stopped, too, or else a good deal of water would have come through. I wonder what made the hole? Still, it’s a good thing we found it or else who knows when we might have discovered it. Maude, is this how you found the mirror? From the light coming in through the roof?”
Before Maude could answer, Mary Jane continued, “I guess it’s a nice enough mirror, but it looks old. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a mirror like it. Unless it was in a museum, perhaps.”
The mirror was had the dignified, shabby elegance of something that had once been quite regal but had long ago fallen into disrepair. It stood hidden away between a brown trunk and a sagging pile of yellowing newspapers. Two thick wooden legs supported its oval, mirrored surface, which was bordered by a twisted wooden frame that had been painted gold to look like a golden rope. The paint had dulled with time and in some areas had begun to flake or chip away, revealing the darker wood beneath. The light from the outside sky was not enough to fully illuminate the mirror, and Mary Jane and Jack could see nothing in its black face other than the flickering orange light of their candles despite their curious peering.
“Come on, Maude, let’s go back downstairs,” Jack coaxed. “I’m sure Mother and Father will worry about us if we’re still in the attic when they come home. How did you find your way to this old thing? It will be hard enough to get back to the stairs without falling over all the boxes and trunks.”
“I heard something,” Maude replied in a voice so soft that Jack barely heard her. “Singing. I heard singing and followed it until I found the mirror.”
Neither Jack nor Mary Jane truly listened to what their sister told them. They began to pull at the sleeves of Maude's white dress to lead her away, but she shook her head and continued staring at the mirror.
“Come on,” Jack urged, “it’s just a mirror. You have one in your room. It’s not even all that pretty, really.”
Maude shook her head slowly, and one of the barrettes fell unnoticed to the floor.
“No, Jack, I did hear it. I heard it singing. But it wasn’t the mirror singing, exactly. Everyone knows mirrors don’t sing. It was something in the mirror.”
“That sounds like something from a book, Maude,” Mary Jane said sternly. “Have you been reading Alice in Wonderland again? You shouldn’t confuse what you read with real life. Let’s go downstairs and we can color in one of your coloring books if you'd like. Would you like that?”
Maude nodded, but unhappily, and followed behind her brother and sister as they led her back to the stairs, her mouth pressed into a firm line. When she looked back, she could still see the shaft of pale light from the outside shining on the mirror. And in the mirror, she thought she saw a flash of movement, but it was only a cloud passing over the roof.