The Wonder Tales

2-1

2

De Courcey.

There could be little doubt that Ghislain was some connection of Margot’s, though whether Margot herself was aware of his existence or not was impossible to determine. She had certainly never mentioned any missing relatives, as far as Florian could recall; did that mean that this Ghislain had nothing to do with her, despite the coincidence of his surname? Florian longed to return to Argantel and question Margot on the subject at once, and to this end he did his best to find his way back down to the bottom of the house, and the mirror that had brought him through. But the thick, syrupy light that drenched Laendricourt confused his perceptions. His eyes ached and watered, pierced by the brutal glitter of bright golden light off cold, hard glass. Doors blurred, shifted and vanished before he could reach them, or when he did manage to hurl himself over their inviting thresholds he never found that the rooms beyond resembled the chambers he’d glimpsed through their inviting archways.

He went towards a grand bedchamber hung about with dappled drapes and panelled in wood, but ended up in a glass-walled conservatory abundant with trumpet flowers. He thought he saw a stone-walled storeroom, once, through a high archway, and tried to go in, for he had travelled deep and down and hoped this might carry him back into the cellars. But it melted away as he approached, and he stepped out instead into a ballroom so heavily grown over with roses that he could see little of its walls or ceiling. He turned and went back the way he had come, but the corridor beyond was gone and he came out instead into a room full of mirrors.

The room had too many sides, and the quantity of mirrors made it impossible to gauge its proportions. Everywhere he looked he saw an infinity of depthless glass stretching endlessly away; the effect was dizzying. Florian instantly decided it would be best not to linger long in there, but when he tried to retrace his steps he found that the door had once again slunk away, and there were no more in evidence anywhere. Everything was mirrors, and he was trapped.

Moreover, none of the mirrors showed his reflection; only each other’s.

‘All right, then,’ said Florian to the empty room, and sat down cross-legged in the very centre of the floor. Someone had inset a mosaic impression of a rose just there, and traced its edges in shadow. It gave him an obscure sense of satisfaction to sit on it. ‘I have never met a more ill-natured property,’ he said with great indignation. ‘All a person can reasonably expect of a house is that it should carry one in the proper manner through a sequence of the usual kinds of rooms, but this is beyond you! If you must be so dreadfully inconvenient then I shall simply sit here and read.’ So saying, he drew the little blue book out of his pocket and opened it up.

His performance was only partly bravado. It had actually struck him, as he wandered unproductively through the maddening house, that some of the places he found were not unfamiliar to him. Riffling quickly through the book, he soon found the first familiar scene: those red trumpet flowers against hazy glass walls, playing some unheard melody. And there, several pages later on, was the boot-room, its painted complement of boots and shoes different, no doubt, from the ones he had seen, though just as disorganised. There was the ballroom grown over with roses, and the scullery piled high with dishes; the music-room, the greenhouse… they were all in the book.

He began to turn over its pages with a greater interest, wondering whether all of the paintings contained therein reflected actual rooms in this unfamiliar version of Landricourt. He was soon strongly persuaded that they did.

Who had created such a collection? He was no longer convinced that it was Pharamond’s work; perhaps his master had bound the paintings up into a book, but how could he have painted them? For that matter, supposing even that he had not painted them — how had he come by the pictures at all?

Moreover, why had anybody gone to such trouble? For these were no slapdash sketches. The tiny paintings had been created with great skill, each chamber of Laendricourt brought to life in mesmerising detail. Florian paused at a rendition of a small library, through which he remembered passing himself at one point earlier in the day. It looked almost as he remembered it, complete to the stacks of books overflowing from the bookshelves and piled upon the floor.

How he should like to go to one of these places, and make a direct comparison! The matter intrigued him greatly, for he began to feel that the book was not a mere curio, done for art’s sake. The detail was too intricately rendered, the colours too vivid, the collection too comprehensive. Could any book about such a strange, slippery place as Laendricourt ever be mundane?

What a pity it was that he had foolishly got himself trapped. Energised, he sprang up from the floor and marched upon the nearest of the mirrors, a great, oversized article towering far over his head. It was a narrow, skinny thing, and when it finally consented to display his reflection he found that he looked narrow and skinny, too, and a bit stretched around the neck. A disconcerting image. He examined it for some time, optimistically pressing his hands to its cold, inflexible surface in case he should fall through it, as he had done late under the Gloaming of last night. But it would not oblige him, and neither would any of the other mirrors — each different in size, proportion and arrangement to the next, as though it offended them to be too similar to their neighbours.

‘Well,’ said he aloud when he had at last given up on that idea, ‘I never met a more stubbornly unhelpful set of mirrors either.’

They made no reply.

‘I suppose I cannot persuade one of you to turn back into a door?’ he tried. ‘I cannot quite recall which one it was that I came through, but that need not matter. Any door to anywhere will do.’

They made no reply to that, either.

He took up the book again, hopeful that it might contain some clue he had hitherto missed — and, upon flicking through it, found a painting of the very room he was standing in. He had somehow failed to observe it before, and that fact made him suspicious, for he had, he thought, gone through the collection with great care. How could he have failed to discover it, if it had been in the book all along?

‘I hope,’ he said sternly, ‘that you were not hiding yourself from me before. That would be very rude, would it not?’

The painting vouchsafed no response either, and Florian began to feel that he was come among a highly standoffish bunch. He turned the book around in his hands, examining the painting of the mirror-room from every angle, for it seemed to him that the image blurred oddly as he looked at it, and could not be relied upon to hold to any consistent configuration. Flickers of colour blossomed, wavered and vanished, and would not hold themselves still for his perusal.

‘There,’ he said suddenly, and pinned something within the painting with the tip of his forefinger. It squirmed beneath his touch, but this time it did not slink away, and he was able to observe that it was a book. A rendering, in fact, of the very same book he was holding… the book slithered and wormed its way through its own pages, did it? ‘Now, what are you about, tricksy thing?’ he wondered.

He saw it all, in a flash. The book was there, indubitably, but it was there in reflection. Inspired, he released the painting of the little book from his grip — only half watching as it spun away — and turned the page over. On the other side was that orangery again, the one that seemed filled with naught but trumpet flowers. That would do. He held the book up, allowing the painting to reflect in the nearest mirror.

It did not quite work as he intended, or hoped. The reflected image spread to fill the mirror edge to edge, and from top to bottom, but the mirror’s proportions did not allow of an accurate representation of it; the room came out looking too wide at the corners, and waifish in the middle. He tried again through a succession of mirrors until at last he arrived at a handsome, moderately-sized thing clad in a carved, gilded frame. The painting of the orangery filled the mirror just nicely, and everything there looked restored to its proper proportions.

Steeling himself against another disappointment, he walked forward. As he had hoped, the mirror was no longer a mirror, but a door; he encountered no glass, no barrier of any kind, only empty air; and when he had passed through the frame, he found himself in the orangery itself, his nose filled with the pungent perfume of the flowers.

When he turned back, the mirror-door was gone, and the room of reflections had slunk out of sight.

‘Interesting,’ he declared to the empty room, and stuck the book back into his pocket. His theory, then, was confirmed, and the fact that the book had been in the possession of Pharamond Chanteraine began to interest him very much. And he had not forgotten that his master had tried to deliver it into Oriane’s hands. What had he been about? What secrets was the Master of the Emporium hiding? Another theory began to take dim shape in Florian’s mind, and if his enigmatic master had been standing right before Florian at that moment, he would have had some pointed questions to answer. Or, as was more likely, avoid answering, for it was never his habit to take his shop boy into his confidence.

Florian permitted himself a moment’s dissatisfied reflection upon this point, and then dismissed his unworthy feelings. No doubt Chanteraine had his reasons.

He strolled around the hot-house for a little while, experiencing a mild reluctance to leave it again, for it was pleasantly warm in contrast with the biting cold that permeated the rest of the house. But it was no good to linger there long; he would find no way home that way, nor discover anything more about the mysteries that increasingly occupied his mind. It required a few moments’ diligent searching to discover a way out, but at length he found an abbreviated glass door hidden behind a tangle of trumpet-flowers, and opened it at once. He had to bend almost double to fit through, for it was barely half the size of an ordinary door.

On the other side was the music-room.

‘Aha!’ said he. ‘I remember now.’ And he took up the book again, thumbing through its pages until he found the painting of that very room. It soon occurred to him that the painting was not only accurate, but eerily so, for it reflected the room in which he was standing down to its very last detail — even the single red rose, plump and fresh, standing in a porcelain vase atop the gleaming piano; the violet-spun rug upon the floor, one of its corners turned up by a careless step; the pearl hat-pin lying, dust-covered, upon the window-sill.

Florian bent and straightened the rug, ensuring that all of its four corners lay once again flat. When he looked again at the painting, this new configuration of the carpet was accurately reflected therein.

‘Quite interesting,’ he declared. ‘I like you after all, book. I think we will rub along charmingly together.’

There was a mirror here, too, though he did not know if it would answer his purpose, for it did not reach the ground; it spanned the wall from corner to corner, hanging elegantly over the mantel above the fire. Nonetheless, still determined to retrace his steps to the original mirror if he could, he chose a page from the book that depicted a cellar-room filled with huge wine-jars and held it up.

The reflection spread to fill the mirror, just as it had in the mirror-room some minutes before. It was become a doorway, there could be no doubt about that. But how could he go through it, when it hung four feet off the floor?