Chapter 11 #2
“Thank you, Agnes,” he said, giving me a look that I couldn’t interpret. “No doubt I’ll see you again back at Rue des Hirondelles. I’m often in that neighbourhood.”
And with that, they departed.
I closed the door behind them and leaned against it, just in time to see Havelock reappear.
It was as if he’d come out from behind a curtain, its fabric made from the light and colours of the shop itself. There was a faint ripple, and he stepped sideways, brushing at his clothes as if removing dust.
I felt a wave of nausea, and there came a ringing in my ears.
I slumped to the floor before I passed out, though I think I did pass out, just for a moment.
When I opened my eyes, he was crouched at my side.
I didn’t like the way he was always darting about or appearing in unexpected places. It put me in mind of a spider.
“Hair full of spiders, eyes like twin fires,” I murmured.
“What?” he said.
“You need to help me with the cats,” I informed him—my voice was a little fuzzy, and felt as if it were coming from somewhere else. “Their breakfast is late, and I have to get on with the checklist.”
He wrinkled his nose. “Oh, of course—I’ll get right to it. You heat the water for their baths and I’ll pour the milk, and then you can send for an ambulance while I pass out on the floor, wheezing.”
“Cats don’t need baths,” I mumbled. My head was swimming dreadfully.
Havelock took no notice. “I must travel to the Rivenwood to gather the magic necessary for putting the shop back where it was,” he said, and frowned. “I was not planning to venture there so soon after my last visit, but needs must.”
“Why?” I said. “Will—will something happen to you?”
“I’m touched by your concern for my well-being,” he replied, a little too glibly.
He pressed something small into my hand.
Another coin. “Or I would be, if you hadn’t just sicced your Lilliputian panther on me.
Stay here until I get back. If Valérie returns, you can alert me by speaking the incantation I’ve inscribed in the metal—”
I dropped the coin as if it were a hot coal. “I’m not doing magic.”
He leaned back on his heels, adjusting his glasses at me.
“It’s a simple first-order spell. I would have thought you’d want some way to protect these miserable beasts.
” His words seemed to trigger a memory, and he cast a spooked look over his shoulder, but His Majesty was nowhere to be seen.
The slippery creature had hidden himself somewhere when he’d seen what we were doing to the other cats, likely viewing such alterations as an insult to his dignity.
“I have no intention of staying here until you return,” I said, and a sudden fear seized me. “You had better not lock me in.”
Perhaps if he were a little less distracted, and not so evidently preoccupied with whatever wickedness he was plotting next, he might have noticed that I was teetering on the edge of my sanity, but he only looked at me as if I were being deliberately ornery.
His expression hardened and something flickered in his eyes.
Something else, or possibly someone else—that’s the best I could describe it.
“I don’t have time to argue with you. If you care so little about your life, by all means go strolling about the city while Valérie is hunting you. ”
“Do not lock me in,” I repeated, because I wasn’t listening to him at this point.
My terrified mind had fixated on this, for some reason—that he would disappear and leave me trapped there like a maiden in a dragon’s cave, kept in store until its appetite returned.
élise would have no idea where I’d gone.
All I wanted in that moment, overwhelmingly, was élise.
He left me on the floor and strode to the middle of the room.
He started sideways, for Banshee had emerged from some corner and came towards him with her tail raised, mouth opening and closing.
This didn’t surprise me: given the cat’s unhinged nature and general witlessness where her personal safety was concerned, it was natural that she should mistake Havelock Renard for a friend.
“What a racket,” he said, or I thought he did; I must have misheard, for Banshee was making no more noise than she generally did—which is to say, none at all. “Out of the way, you ridiculous creature.”
The way of what? I had time to wonder, before his meaning became suddenly, horrifically clear.
A door appeared in the middle of the shop—I say door only for want of a better word.
Though roughly door-shaped, it was more like a gash in the fabric of the world, jagged and flickering.
Beyond the door was an ancient forest at night, colossal trees clothed in layers of moss and ivy.
I realized a heartbeat later that it wasn’t night, only the trees were so large and their canopies so lush that little light could slip through.
The air was cool and scented with rain and green leaves, and the forest floor was carpeted in flowers, mostly white, like scraps of lace, but there were wild roses, too, clambering up an oak tree, and a line of blue in the distance where the white flowers became something else.
I was drawn forward almost against my will.
There was something about that forest that made me wish to wade into it like a summer sea.
Through a gap in the trees I saw a glimpse of mountains, towering and snowbound.
Atop the nearest one was a stone ruin, too ancient and decayed for its purpose to be guessed at.
I realized another ruin lay only a few feet beyond the door—a pile of stones nearly consumed by moss, and what might have been a mosaic floor, broken and leaf-strewn.
I was shivering again, and the clean smell of rain and wildflowers no longer felt welcoming, but wild and inhospitable.
What was this place, and why had it been abandoned?
The longer I gazed at it, the more uncanny it seemed.
The boughs swayed too elegantly, as if the trees were composed of something more soft and slippery than wood, and the flowers were improbable in so shadowy a place, as if they were fed by the darkness.
Something—someone?—howled in the distance.
“Havelock,” I cried in sudden warning, because something was there, in the forest. I saw it darting behind one tree, and then another, as if it was trying to conceal itself.
It had only the vaguest shape of a man, and seemed made from billowing shadow.
Another shade lurked in a copse in the distance, or perhaps more than one—it was difficult to discern where the tree-shadow ended and the creatures began.
“It’s all right,” Havelock said. He was gazing into the forest world with a strange expression on his face: warily, but with a smile hovering around his eyes that suggested the place was not only familiar to him, but congenial. “Those are only spectres—weak ones. They won’t trouble me.”
He stepped through the door, and as he did, his human likeness was gone.
It did not seem to change into something else, but rather dissolved, as if it had been little more than mist or something equally insubstantial, which the wind could scatter.
In his place was the monster of shadow and flame I had glimpsed before, formless and terrible, and then he vanished into the forest.
Perhaps he closed the door behind him, or maybe it drifted shut. I didn’t see, for I had fainted dead away again.