All The Dark Places

38. The Rectory

    She woke to the sound of crows in the trees. Morning sunlight filtered through the barren windows of the rectory. Hours had passed, and she did not see Arnav. Picking up her bow, she nocked an arrow and carried it low.

"Arnav?" she called out softly, not wanting to yell. "Arnav, where are you?"

There was no answer, and a deep, guttural feeling of panic began to bloom in her stomach. Her water bottle was gone again. He was at the creek maybe. It was only a five minute walk away, and Arnav had trouble not bouncing off the walls if he tried to stay still for longer than a half an hour. He likely went to the creek. She tried to stay calm. If he was not back in a few minutes, she would go looking for him, but until then, she busied herself with exploring the rectory. The remains of a staircase looked far too unstable to consider climbing. She stayed on the first floor and rounded a corner into what might have been a large bedroom but had since been stripped of most of it's furnishings. A table carved with swans and eaten away by wood worms sat under a window webbed by spider silk. A sun-bleached patch of Turkish carpet was rolled up in a corner. Several broken alcohol bottles laid in pieces along with cigarette butts on the floor. She kicked broken glass aside and saw a wooden frame, painted with flecks of flaked gold paint. Bending to look closer, she saw a framed mirror that had long since broken into five large shards, one of which was loosely the shape of a dagger. She reached to the Turkish carpet and tore from the threadbare remains a length of fabric that she wrapped the shard in, making a makeshift handle to protect her hand. An old curtain tassel provided a fairly secure tie to bind it all together. Happy with her handiwork, she examined it, holding it up to look at her reflection.

"Ouch!" She snapped her hand back when she accidentally sliced her thumb on the sharp edge of the mirror, spilling a few drops of blood on the reflective surface. The mirror then fogged up, as if she had breathed on its glass. Speechless, she could do little more than gape for a long moment. She turned the mirror shard in her hands, and her reflection remained. It did not move out of sight as it should. Her face remained in the mirror.

"That's not possible," she muttered, then reminded herself that anything was possible now. She angled the mirror so that it should reflect the window, but she saw only her face, mimicking what she was doing. She stuck out her tongue, and so did her reflection. Her face was captured and alive.

Fascinated, she jolted when the light from the window reflected off the mirror and onto the stone wall of the rectory. There on the spot of light against the wall, she saw herself. A full replica of herself, as clear and seemingly tangible as she was. The same face, same body, same clothing. She held up one hand and wiggled her fingers, and the other Rosalind did the same. She spoke, to see what would happen, and the other Rosalind spoke with her. In this hollowed out chamber it seemed almost like an echo, rather than two people talking at once.

"So, what do we call this one, Arnav?" she mumbled, hoping the boy would show up soon. "This new spell I've got. Doppelganger? Evil twin?"

The sound of horse hooves beating nearby startled her and she tucked the mirror shard into her belt, seeing that the twin remained, mimicking her, though when Rosalind picked up her bow, the twin held something invisible. The bow was not part of the twin image. Rosalind heard footsteps coming and men talking. She backed up into a shadowy corner covered partially by a broken wall.

"...Looked everywhere for this bitch. We didn't look in the wine cellar, Noel. Why did we skip the wine cellar? That's where I'd hide. The wine cellar."

Noel Leeky's unmistakable voice replied,

"Because we've been searching all night, and we're tired, so we're making mistakes. Better find her because I'm not letting this upstart little tart ruin everything. Winston has a good plan and we all know damn well that Rosalind Pyrne is going to be a troublemaker that won't stop getting in the way. She's a cancer here, just like Winston said. She just took over, and nobody had the balls to tell her to fuck off. What do you do when you have a cancer, boys? You cut it out. You kill it, and you cut it out so it can't grow."