Spell of the Highlander
Page 6
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She glanced at her watch.
She hadn’t gotten the professor’s room number and suspected that if she called the main desk, they’d never put her through at this hour. Though he’d insisted he wasn’t badly hurt, she knew the doctors wouldn’t have kept him if he hadn’t been seriously injured. Hospitals these days spit people out as fast as they took them in.
Would the professor be more upset if she opened it—or if she refused the delivery and it cost him a fortune to have it reshipped?
She sighed again, feeling damned if she did and damned if she didn’t.
In the end it was the constantly-broke college student in her who flipped the coin and made the call.
“Fine. Let’s do this. Open it up.”
Twenty minutes later the deliverymen had secured her wearily scribbled signature and were gone, taking the remains of the crating with them.
And now she stood, eyeing the thing curiously. It wasn’t a sarcophagus after all. In fact, most of the packaging had been padding.
From deep within layers and layers of cushioned wrapping, they’d unearthed a mirror and, at her direction, propped it carefully against the east wall of bookshelves.
Taller than she by more than a foot, the mirror’s ornate frame was a shimmery gold. Shapes and symbols, of such uniformity and cohesion to imply a system of writing, were carved into every inch of the wide border. She narrowed her eyes, pondering the etchings, but linguistics was not her specialty, and the symbols were nothing that, without searching through books or notes, she could identify as a letter, word, or glyph.
Inside the gaudy gilt frame, the outer edges of the silvery glass were marred with a cloudy, uneven black stain of some sort, but aside from that, the glass itself was startlingly clear. She suspected it had been broken and replaced at some point and would ultimately prove centuries younger than the frame. No mirror of yore had achieved such clarity. Though the earliest artificial mirrors discovered by archaeologists dated back to 6200 B.C.E., they had been fashioned of polished obsidian, not glass. The first glass mirrors of significant size—roughly three-by-five-foot panels—hadn’t been manufactured until the 1680’s by Italian glassmaker Bernard Perroto for the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, commissioned by the extravagant Sun King, Louis the XIV. Exceptional glass mirrors of the size of the one before her—an impressive six and a half feet tall—generally proved to be a few hundred years old, at most.
Considering this one’s pristine silvering, it was likely less than a century in age, and no one had gone mad or died from slow mercury poisoning making it. Hatmakers, or “hatters,” hadn’t been the only ones to suffer from the toxic fumes of their trade (though, for some reason Jessi’d never been able to figure, the idiom “mad-as-a-mirrormaker” had never quite caught on).
Eyes narrowed thoughtfully, she scrutinized it. The archaeologist in her itched to know the piece’s provenance, wondered if the frame had been accurately dated.
She frowned. What did the professor want with a mirror, anyway? Such an item wasn’t at all in keeping with his usual tastes, which ran toward replica weapons and reproductions of ancient timepieces such as the sixteenth-century German astrolabe adorning his desk. And how could the professor possibly afford something worth “boo-koo bucks” on his teaching salary, anyway?
Fishing the key from the pocket of her jeans, she turned to leave. She’d done as he’d asked. Her work here was finished.
She flipped off the light and was just stepping through the doorway when she felt a chill. All the fine hair at the nape of her neck lifted, tingling as if electrified. Her heart was abruptly pounding against the wall of her chest, and she felt the sudden, terrifying certainty that she was being watched.
In the manner that prey was watched.
Flinching, she turned back toward the mirror.
Dimly illumed by the pale blue glow of the computer’s screen saver, the artifact looked positively eerie. The gold appeared silvery; the silver glass, smoky, dark and deep with shadows.
And in those shadows something moved.
She sucked in a breath so fast she choked on it. Sputtering, she groped for the light switch.
Overhead light blazed down, flooding the room.
She stared into the oblong glass, a hand pressed to her throat, swallowing convulsively.
Her reflection stared back.
After a moment, she closed her eyes. Snapped them open. Stared into the glass again.
Just her.
The hair at her nape continued to bristle, icy chills rippled up her spine. The pulse at the hollow of her neck fluttered frantically beneath her palm. Eyes wide, she glanced uneasily around the room.
She hadn’t gotten the professor’s room number and suspected that if she called the main desk, they’d never put her through at this hour. Though he’d insisted he wasn’t badly hurt, she knew the doctors wouldn’t have kept him if he hadn’t been seriously injured. Hospitals these days spit people out as fast as they took them in.
Would the professor be more upset if she opened it—or if she refused the delivery and it cost him a fortune to have it reshipped?
She sighed again, feeling damned if she did and damned if she didn’t.
In the end it was the constantly-broke college student in her who flipped the coin and made the call.
“Fine. Let’s do this. Open it up.”
Twenty minutes later the deliverymen had secured her wearily scribbled signature and were gone, taking the remains of the crating with them.
And now she stood, eyeing the thing curiously. It wasn’t a sarcophagus after all. In fact, most of the packaging had been padding.
From deep within layers and layers of cushioned wrapping, they’d unearthed a mirror and, at her direction, propped it carefully against the east wall of bookshelves.
Taller than she by more than a foot, the mirror’s ornate frame was a shimmery gold. Shapes and symbols, of such uniformity and cohesion to imply a system of writing, were carved into every inch of the wide border. She narrowed her eyes, pondering the etchings, but linguistics was not her specialty, and the symbols were nothing that, without searching through books or notes, she could identify as a letter, word, or glyph.
Inside the gaudy gilt frame, the outer edges of the silvery glass were marred with a cloudy, uneven black stain of some sort, but aside from that, the glass itself was startlingly clear. She suspected it had been broken and replaced at some point and would ultimately prove centuries younger than the frame. No mirror of yore had achieved such clarity. Though the earliest artificial mirrors discovered by archaeologists dated back to 6200 B.C.E., they had been fashioned of polished obsidian, not glass. The first glass mirrors of significant size—roughly three-by-five-foot panels—hadn’t been manufactured until the 1680’s by Italian glassmaker Bernard Perroto for the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, commissioned by the extravagant Sun King, Louis the XIV. Exceptional glass mirrors of the size of the one before her—an impressive six and a half feet tall—generally proved to be a few hundred years old, at most.
Considering this one’s pristine silvering, it was likely less than a century in age, and no one had gone mad or died from slow mercury poisoning making it. Hatmakers, or “hatters,” hadn’t been the only ones to suffer from the toxic fumes of their trade (though, for some reason Jessi’d never been able to figure, the idiom “mad-as-a-mirrormaker” had never quite caught on).
Eyes narrowed thoughtfully, she scrutinized it. The archaeologist in her itched to know the piece’s provenance, wondered if the frame had been accurately dated.
She frowned. What did the professor want with a mirror, anyway? Such an item wasn’t at all in keeping with his usual tastes, which ran toward replica weapons and reproductions of ancient timepieces such as the sixteenth-century German astrolabe adorning his desk. And how could the professor possibly afford something worth “boo-koo bucks” on his teaching salary, anyway?
Fishing the key from the pocket of her jeans, she turned to leave. She’d done as he’d asked. Her work here was finished.
She flipped off the light and was just stepping through the doorway when she felt a chill. All the fine hair at the nape of her neck lifted, tingling as if electrified. Her heart was abruptly pounding against the wall of her chest, and she felt the sudden, terrifying certainty that she was being watched.
In the manner that prey was watched.
Flinching, she turned back toward the mirror.
Dimly illumed by the pale blue glow of the computer’s screen saver, the artifact looked positively eerie. The gold appeared silvery; the silver glass, smoky, dark and deep with shadows.
And in those shadows something moved.
She sucked in a breath so fast she choked on it. Sputtering, she groped for the light switch.
Overhead light blazed down, flooding the room.
She stared into the oblong glass, a hand pressed to her throat, swallowing convulsively.
Her reflection stared back.
After a moment, she closed her eyes. Snapped them open. Stared into the glass again.
Just her.
The hair at her nape continued to bristle, icy chills rippled up her spine. The pulse at the hollow of her neck fluttered frantically beneath her palm. Eyes wide, she glanced uneasily around the room.
