8:14
“Bird book rose painting mirror; mirror painting rose book bird. Bird book rose painting mirror; mirror painting rose book bird. Patti.”
Patti stepped out of the window with the bird, shoving her hands through her hair. Sass, perched on her shoulder gave her the eye when her hand almost disrupted the mouse’s perch. Patti wrinkled her nose. “Sorry, Sass.”
“Peep!” Sass said to that. It really did sound like the mouse was responding. Maybe it was and Patti just, still, didn’t speak its language. Maybe someday. Maybe not.
Patti propped her shield against the wall next to the window and walked over to where Kim sat on the table in the center of the black-and-white floor.
“I need to borrow your eye.”
A mischievous twinkle appeared in said eye. “But, I need it.”
“Funny.”
“Yeah, you say that until you don’t have any depth perception and then, whooo.”
To this Patti just gave her a look. Her frustration and confusion must have been apparent in the look because Kim instantly straightened, pushing off the hands she was resting back on to sit upright.
“What’s up?”
“I’ve been in that damned room for a bell and I can’t find the stupid piece of the lamp.”
“A bell?”
“Yeah, a bell. That’s what you took out of that?”
Kim shook herself, like she was brushing off a thought, and shrugged. “Yeah. So, no piece?”
“It’s a really big area. Bigger than it looks from the outside.”
“Sounds vaguely familiar.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” Patti curled her shoulders in and sighed. “Can you help?”
“Don’t see why not. For a meros or whatever passes for it.” With that cryptic statement Kim pushed off the table, popping onto her feet and straightening the legs of her cargoes. “Lead on.”
And Patti did, lead on that was, towards the open window she’s just exited.
“Do you mind if I go first?” Kim asked.
Patti eyed her. “Uh. Sure.”
“Cool.” Kim dusted off her hands then curled them around the window frame and the protruding edge of the window. “Hate to knock you over.”
And the cryptic statements just kept on rolling. Patti watched Kim pull herself up to the frame and then the reason for that statement, not so cryptic maybe, became clear as Kim was sucked through the window before her second foot had really touched the frame. There was, in fact, a popping sound as Kim appeared on the other side of the window.
Well, okay. Weird but what else was new with this group?
Patti grabbed her shield and hauled herself up to the window’s sill then pushed her way through the resistance separating the aviary environment from the room at the center of the maze. Almost instantly her ears were assaulted by bird song. As she’d noted when she first entered the space there was something about the song. It rose and fell, the birds singing in complimentary rhythm so the song was more A Song rather than song. Yeah, it was hard to explain.
Kim was standing, hands on hips, head tilted back, staring at the towering trees and the birds swooping among their branches or nesting in the crooks where branch met trunk.
“It’s so big.”
“That’s what she said.”
Kim snort and turned to look at Patti, who bit her lip and tried to stifle her laugh.
“Sorry. I thought the same thing when I came in here. And it seems to get bigger when you walk in.”
Kim took a few steps, tilted her head to the right. Then tilted her head to the left. Then took another step, this time to the side. “Weird. Its like forced perspective.”
“Forced perspective?”
“Yeah.” Kim turned back to look at Patti, then her gaze shifted to her shoulder. “Hey, Sass!”
Sass peeped and waved the paw not clinging tight to the bottom of Patti’s hair.
“Sorry.” Kim shook herself and refocused on Patti. “Forced perspective is a a technique artists use to make objects appear further away or larger or smaller. Its an optical illusion.”
“Yeah.” Patti propped her shield against her leg and looked around. “It’s an optical illusion all right. I’ve been searching a bell and I swear I haven’t gotten beyond the first five trees.”
Kim squinted. “You said that before. A bell.”
“Yeees,” Patti drew the word out, like it would maybe draw the explanation for Kim’s statement out with it.
“You’ve been gone fifteen meros, round about, for me.”
“I swear its been a bell.” Patti dragged out the small sundial she wore on a chain around her neck and held it up to the sunlight filtering through the glass panes of the arched ceiling. Confirming what she’d seen earlier, she waved the sundial at Kim. “Totally a bell.”
“Oh,” Kim nodded. “I believe you. I think this place dilates time. By my reckoning Ben and Ivan were running through the maze for at least fifteen meros. They swear it was about three. And I know I was gone for days after I was abducted, my physical state seems to attest to that, but Siobhan told me you all responded within meros and, at most, spent several bells looking for me.”
“Huh.” Patti flopped the longer part of her undercut over her head so the soft breeze in the aviary – and, yes, she knew there couldn’t be a breeze inside but there was so… Magick – played over the hair cropped close to her scalp.
Kim shook her head and waved her hand like she was sweeping away the thought. Sometimes it was hard to follow the train of Kim’s thoughts but the longer Patti was around her the more she got that Kim got to the destination eventually even if she made a few detours along the way. “It’s interesting but not super relevant. So, what have you found?”
“Birds. And trees. Bushes. Grass.”
Scrunching up her mouth, Kim nodded and then tracked her gaze over the area again. “This place is too big to find a small piece of glass. Unless that wasn’t the point. And I really hope it was. So, maybe we aren’t expected to search.”
“Okay.” Patti must have put enough of her “what the fuck?” in her tone because Kim turned to look at her again.
“Like, maybe there’s a trick to it.”
Patti curled her lip. “That does seem to be the case a lot.”
“Yep. You said, birds, trees, and various other outdoor things. Is anything made of glass?”
This time Patti let her expression ask “what the fuck?” for her.
“Humor me. I’m spit balling here.”
“Nothing I’ve found. It all looks like its made up of what its supposed to be made up of. You know, trees made of trees. Grass made of grass.”
Gaze pinned to the sky, Kim offered in a distracted voice. “Birds made of birds?”
Patti squinted at her. “I guess. But that sounds gross.”
Kim turned from contemplating the birds and returned Patti’s “what the fuck?” look. Patti expanded. “Like someone took a bunch of birds, smooshed them up or something and made others birds out of them?”
“That is gross.” Kim returned to looking at the birds. “Are you sure they are birds?”
So, at this point there were apparently no stupid questions. Or weird ones. Patti pasted on a supportive smile. “I don’t know. They look like birds. Fly like birds. Sing like birds. Why?”
Kim jerked a glance at Patti. “You hear them singing?”
“Don’t you?”
“No. But, I digress.” She poked her tongue into her cheek. “I don’t think they’re birds.”
“Again. Why?”
“No shit.”
Was that an answer to why? Seriously, how did people have conversations with Kim and not want to grab her by the shoulders, shake her, and ask What The Fuck She Was Saying? Having it about up to here, with here being somewhere around her eyebrows, she curled her nose at Kim. “What?”
Planting her hands on her hips, Kim looked around, very distinctly stopping to stare at the ground, the trees, the grass, the occasional rock protruding from that grass. “There is no shit.” She lifted her gaze to look at Patti. “No poop. Birds don’t have sphincters. They pretty much poop all over. And I’m not seeing any poop. Have you seen poop?”
Sass straightened on Patti’s shoulder, tugging Patti’s hair as it did so, and very clearly craned its neck to look around. Oh yeah, that mouse understood things. No doubt. Not that Patti had much after living with Sass for some time but, yep, that was… Sass was definitely looking for poop. Just like Patti found herself doing. She looked up at Kim, frowning. “No. I don’t.”
Kim cocked her head to watch the swooping birds for several mikros. “You hear them singing?”
“Said so already.”
“Have you tried singing to them?”
Well, crap. “No.”
Kim shifted her gaze from the birds and waggled her brows at Patti. Like, actually waggled. “Want to try?”
Patti looked at the birds for a mikro. “Yeah. I think I do.”
Which song? Or, rather, which Song would fit? Patti flipped through the song catalog in her head, relaxing her thoughts and letting her Magick take the lead on the selection. That was often how she got the best results.
The songs flipped through her mind, guided by her Magick. It was like watching someone thumb through a box of old vinyl albums, only at about one hundred times the speed, so the selection became a blur out of which a single Song rose, like it was being lifted on a single sustained chord. She nodded. Good choice.
Filling her lungs and centering her Magick she sang the first line of Corinne Bailey Rae’s Put Your Records On.
As it always did she felt the Magick flow from her throat to her lips to the air, like honey on a hot day, liquid and sweet. Times like this she understood she was just the conduit, the lucky one who the Magick had picked to be its voice. The Song drifted out and up, guided by the Magick. Patti couldn’t see it wrap around the birds drifting in the air but she could feel it when the Magick contacted them, flowed around them, flitted until it selected one to seep into. And still she sang.
The bird the Magick had selected drifted away from the others. Corralled by the Song, it flew slowly down, spiraling on the air as Patti leaned into the next line. The bird’s progress was slow, smooth, like the Song Patti sang.
As she sang the repeat the bird shifted its trajectory, its soft spiral flattening out as it drifted just above Patti’s head. Instinctively Patti put out her hand. Inside her head she knew the bird’s claws would cut into her skin, but that didn’t deter her. The Magick was directing her as much as it was the bird.
She sang the line about finding yourself and the bird alighted on her hand, so soft she barely felt its talons curling around the edge of her fingers.
“That is not a bird,” Kim whispered, cocking her head to look at the bird but not stepping any closer.
Patti was almost afraid to stop singing. Carefully she trailed off, “somehow.”, ready to pick the Song back up if the bird made the slightest move to flutter away. It did not. Instead it settled its weight on Patti’s hand. She frowned. It had to way a pound which really wasn’t in keeping with the sparrow it appeared to be. Patti wasn’t a birdologist, or whatever they were called, but she knew that birds weighed a lot less than a pound, especially one this size. Kim’s assessment could be right.
Yet, it looked like a sparrow. It had pale brown and gray feathers, barred on the wings. Its head had darker brown streaks starting at its shoulders and carrying down its upper back. Lighter feathers made a stripe from the base of the gray beak to above its bright eyes.
“It looks like a bird,” she shot quietly from the side of her mouth, voice low to not startle the bird.
“It does.”
“Then why are you saying it isn’t a bird?”
“It doesn’t move like a bird.”
“You study a lot of birds?”
“No. But Air does. And-” she cocked her head again, gaze going distant for a mikro as her hair lifted on a non-existent breeze, “Air says it doesn’t move like a bird.”
Patti left off staring at the bird when it seemed to be content to remain perched on her hand and shifted her gaze to Kim. “That’s freaky.”
“What is?”
“You saying the Air talks to you.”
“It does.” Kim shrugged. “Doesn’t your music talk to you?”
“Not like that. Not conversations.”
“That’s too bad.” Kim chuckled. “You’re never alone when you talk to the air.”
“Yeah, because people think you’re crazy and leave you alone.”
Kim snorted. “Valid. Can you get it to shift?”
“I don’t know. Maybe?” Patti stared at the bird. It stared back at her. Sass shifted on her shoulder, peering at the bird. The bird did not peer back. It, in fact, did not move at all. Not a wing flutter. Not a blink of its bright little eye.
She focused her intent on reaching the bird with her Song, walking the fine line between getting the bird to hear and forcing the bird to hear. The bird turned its head, opened its beak, and in a high clear voice sang the next line, encouraging Patti to relax.
Patti about wet herself. No really. You have a bird sing, actual words at you, and not have a similar response. Clenching her sphincter – because of course now she was thinking about that – she flashed a look at Kim who was looking wide-eyed at the bird with a look that could only be described as awed. “Nifty.”
“Yeah,” Patti said through gritted teeth, “Really nifty.”
Kim lifted a hand towards the bird, stopping just shy of prodding it. “I think it might be a construct.”
“Okay.”
“Maybe we need to control the birds? Maybe that’s the puzzle piece we’re missing to find the lamp piece?
“You got me.”
“Could you make it do something you wanted it to?”
“If it was a real bird, I could. But, I wouldn’t.” At Kim’s questioning look Patti expanded. “That would be taking over another living thing’s will and that’s just wrong.”
“It is?”
Patti squinted at Kim. “Was that rhetorical?”
“Yeah. Sorry.” Kim frowned. “I know it’s wrong to force another to your will. Just what would make you do that? If you did do it.”
Why did it feel like there was something there, lurking in the depths of Kim’s eyes, less a question and more a prodding of a sore spot. “A lack of a soul.”
“Oh.” Kim looked down then up again, nodding. “Good. That’s- Yeah. That’s good.” There was a mikro’s pause where Patti thought Kim was going to let this go, but then she said, “But you made Gryphon stop. And you’ve put people to sleep. I’ve seen you put people to sleep.”
Damn it. Couldn’t let it rest, could she?
“I didn’t stop Gryphon. More like… The way he is now he isn’t communicating on a rational level. But music is-” Patti paused, working on the right words, “music speaks to us on a different level than language. Or maybe its a language in its own that everyone understands.”
“That makes sense.”
“As for putting people to sleep. I don’t really do that. Its like hypnosis. You know how they say people won’t do something under hypnosis that they really wouldn’t do? Like you can’t make someone murder someone else by hypnotizing them?”
“I’ve heard that.”
“Right. It’s the same thing. Sort of. When I sing a lullaby I lull someone to sleep. It’s right there in the word. Lullaby.” When Kim just stared, like she heard but wasn’t quite getting it, Patti sighed and then tried to explain better. “It’s like you know how white noise can put some people to sleep but other people are just fine?”
“Yes.”
“It’s like that. White noise, from what I’ve read, doesn’t put people to sleep. It blocks out the noises that keep them from sleeping. Then their body does what it wanted to do all along.”
“Oh.”
“So, a lullaby kind of works the same whether you have Magick or not. It distracts your brain from what is keeping it from sleeping and then,” she tilted her head to the side, pressed her hand to her ear, and closed her eyes. “Just a Magick lullaby has more oomph.”
A light dawned in Kim’s eyes. “Got it. Makes sense. But, wouldn’t your Magick work the same with the bird as it did with Gryphon? Like that universal language thing?”
Patti stared at the creature perched on her hand, like she could see through its feathers and skin to the heart of it. “No. Maybe? I don’t think so.” She stumbled along, working it out, “It doesn’t have a brain to communicate with. Or maybe, better, it doesn’t have a soul?”
“But your Magick called it to you.”
“You know, I’m not sure it did. Maybe it just responded to the sound it heard. Like maybe it’s programmed to respond to sounds? Like part of a security system? Because, my Magick can’t affect something that isn’t alive.” She said it with conviction, quashing the residual feeling of dread left over from when the bird had sung the next line in the song.
Like it could hear her thoughts – fuck, no, she wasn’t going there – the bird cocked its head at Patti and then took wing, pushing off her hand and flying into the branches of a tree a short distance from them. To prove her point Patti sang another line from the Song, focusing her Magick through it, attempting to lure the creature back.
When the bird remained perched in the tree, clearly turning its face from Patti, she waved a hand at it. “See?”
Kim pulled at her lip in thought. “I think you need Ivan at this point, not me. He could probably tell you if its a construct. I’m just guessing it is.”
“Okay.”
“I am curious though. If your Magick didn’t affect it, why did the bird sing back to you?”
Patti suppressed a delicate shudder at the memory of the bird singing the next line of the song. Not parroting like a parrot. Singing the next line of the damned song. That was some kind of messed up. “Fuck if I know.”
“Hold that thought. I’m going to duck out,” Kim jerked her thumb at the window they’d entered through, “and try to get Ivan. He just went into a window with Ben so I’m not sure how quick it will be.”
“How ’bout I come with?” Patti didn’t need to say she was feeling weird. She could hear it in her voice.
Kim scratched her jaw beneath the ear, her attention on the bird where it sat in the tree looking like a bird, doing what birds did, except apparently pooping. “Works.”
Patti kept her eye on the bird too, the sensation of ‘no’ still sitting on her nape and clenching her spinal cord. “I’m just going to-” she jerked her thumb towards the window, then started backing towards it, keeping her attention focused on the bird just in case it made any quick moves or started singing again.
Kim shrugged and followed her, turning and giving the bird her back. “You should go first.”
Patti groped behind her until her hand came into contact with the window frame. “You don’t have to tell me twice.”
Focus still trained on the bird, she stepped back onto the window sill and then back again and down onto the black-and-white marble of the room at the center of the maze.
From the other side of the window Kim waved her hand, indicating Patti should move and Patti was glad she did as Kim took a running leap and threw herself through the window, her hair being yanked back and her clothes rippling like the air was trying to pull Kim back into the room.
“Whee!” the crazy woman yelled as she cleared the frame, then brushed the legs of her cargoes down. “Well, that was fun.”
“Yeah. Big fun.”
Kim sang a line from the chorus of Put Your Records On, clicking her fingers as she bebopped her way over to the table in the center of the room. Pausing she slanted a look at Patti. “What? It’s a good song.”
Grudgingly Patti agreed. “It is.” Walking over to the table she leaned against its edge and braced her hands behind her. “Not that I want to hear a bird sing it to me.”
“I still think it was kind of neat. I mean, if its a construct, its a pretty cool one.”
“Yep.” Patti put the wealth of how ‘not cool’ it was in her, “Real cool. The coolest.”
*
“Well, that’s cool.”
Careful of where he placed his feet, aware with his size it would be easy to take up too much space, Ivan eyed Ben as his friend leaned over the abyss at the edge of the platform and considered how Ben would take him grabbing his belt just in case Ben was less careful of where he put his feet and went flipping ass over head into the black stretch of nothing.
Considering Ben carried a lot of knives – a lot of knives – Ivan kept his hand in his pocket and rocked back so his shoulders were firmly pressed against the wall. “Real cool. How about you step back over here and, uh,” Ivan cast about for something that would grab Ben’s attention, “figure out what these dials do?”
Ivan sidled along the stretching from one end of the platform to the other. It was the first, and only thing, they’d encountered after climbing the seemingly endless staircase. That and the drop Ben was fearlessly fucking with. Mounted on the wall over to the left, about two-thirds down the length of the wall, was a mirror in an ornate frame. It was the size of those mirrors people mounted over their fireplaces, around the size of a large portrait or a decent sized window, hanging closer to the top of the wall than the bottom. Beneath it were two dials. They looked like drain valves from an outdoor hose, white, vaguely round with spikes coming off a center pin, they protruded from the wall about two inches, their placement keeping them from blending into the white of the wall.
Sticking out like that they should have cast a shadow on the wall but the light, which came from everywhere and apparently nowhere, was so bright it ate whatever shadow might have fallen. It was so bright that it messed with perspective, making it hard to tell where the wall ended and the floor started. Such was not the case where the floor met the abyss.
That line was very clear, picked out by darkness as dark as the consistent light was light. The effect of the light on the white of the walls and the white of the floor caused an optical illusion that had Ivan feeling like the floor was tipping away from him. If Ben was equally as effected he didn’t show it, perching on the edge of the abyss without teetering. Which was good as there was no rail or even a wall between the edge of the platform and the abyss, nothing to catch hold of should Ben lose his balance and topple forward.
Ivan swallowed hard and placed a hand flat against the wall, drawing reassurance from its steady plane. The wall stretched to the left, its line unbroken until it came to the edge of the platform some five hundred feet from where Ivan stood.
Ben looked back over his shoulder. “That’s what you’re here for.”
With that Ben pulled something small out of his pocket and dropped it over the edge of the platform. Like he’d done three other times. Because this time maybe something different would happen besides the darkness swallowing it up.
Ivan was all for scientific method. He really was. But, he’d be more for it if Ben stepped back, say, a foot from a never-ending fall. There was science and then there was curiosity that killed the cat. And Ben had many talents but Ivan was pretty sure he wasn’t going to land on his feet if he toppled off the platform. And Ivan was fast, but he wasn’t taking a bet he could grab Ben in time where Ben’s life was the forfeit.
“Just come over here and help me.”
“Fine.” Ben shrugged and shoved his hands in his pockets, strolling over to the picture frame with its mirror. He focused on the placard next to the frame. “What do you think that means?”
“The dark and the light, they exist side by side.” Ivan read aloud, working the words through his brain as he did. “Sometimes overlapping, one explaining the other. The darkened path is as illuminated as the lightened. Raven Davies.” He smoothed his goatee, buying an extra meros to think. “I think what Raven Davies meant probably had philosophical or theological context, like you can find purpose and meaning while walking a darker path, but in this case it’s probably a clue.”
“Probably.” Ben stared at the empty frame. “Pretty fancy mirror. Probably pricey. What do you figure?”
Ivan shrugged. “I’m the wrong one to ask that. You’re the import export guy. I’m just a lowly public servant.”
“Lowly, right.” Ben scoffed, lifting his brows in emphasis. “As a lowly,” he emphasized the word, “public servant you’ve spent a lot of time shmoozing with pretentious rich people who buy antiques to impress their pretentious friends. This frame has to be a hundred cycles old.”
Ivan scoffed at that. “Friends, yeah.” He leaned in so his nose was an inch from the glass. His face reflected back at him, the brightness of the light around them forming a halo behind his head. He held a finger to the mirror then pressed down. “Huh.”
“Huh?” Curious as always Ben leaned in to peer at the mirror.
“I think this is part of the wall.” Ivan knocked on the mirror gently. A hollow sound emitted from the glass, rather than the thunk that would happen if the mirror had a backing. Testing a theory he pulled one of the fireflies from his pocket and held it to the mirror. There was a very slight gap between between the firefly and its reflection. Nodding, he rolled back on his heels, pulling back from the mirror.
“Its a transparent mirror.”
“Come again?”
“A one-way mirror. Like in a police station?”
Ben rubbed his jaw. “Huh. Yeah. Never seen one of those.” He grinned wide when Ivan fake coughed into his fist. “Bullshit.”
“Sounds like you got something in your throat, there.”
Ivan lifted his brows and gave Ben a censorious look. “Mmmhmmm.” He couldn’t hold the look for more than a mikro, ending up joining Ben when he started laughing.
Waving off the humor, he said, “A better image would be one of those buildings where the windows reflect during the day but at night you can see through them. Because during the day the outside is darker than the inside, but at night-”
“Its darker outside,” Ben interjected, turning to read from the placard next to the mirror. “One explaining the other.”
Ivan could practically see the light bulb go off over Ben’s head. He finger gunned Ben, confirming he’d been thinking the same thing or close enough.
“So.” Ben swiveled his head, taking in the bright light surrounding them. “If I make it dark maybe we see through it?”
“I’d make book on it.”
With no warning besides a quick look at Ivan, Ben held his hands out, like he was cupping a sphere about the size of a balance ball, and breathed out. Darkness blossomed from his palms, forming a bubble that expanded rapidly to engulf the mirror, the picture frame, and a good portion of the wall.
As the darkness engulfed the mirror a room was revealed behind it, dimly lit. “That’s good. You can stop now.”
Ben gritted his teeth. “No. Actually can’t.”
The bubble of darkness expanded, bleeding over his hands and wrapping to engulf him, Ivan, and then the entirety of the area, swallowing the light and leaving the area in total darkness. It reminded Ivan of the yawning abyss a short distance behind them. Ivan’s knees locked, driven by a spurt of primordial dread, the fact it would be too easy to stumble through Ben’s darkness and go tumbling into the yawning throat of the abyss seizing his imagination.
While he couldn’t see Ben he could feel the movement of air as he pulled his arms in. He muttered under his breath, a litany of sound more than words, then pounded his fist against the wall next to the mirror turned glass, the gesture clear in the dim light. “The darkness is hungry.”
Ivan rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, that’s just great.”
“Yep.”
“Is it going to eat us?”
“Seems happy enough just eating the light for now.”
“Well, that’s-” Ivan tapered off, searching for the right word. Finding none, he switched from the thought. “What do you think?”
Ben leaned forward into his arm braced beside the glass and peered into the room beyond. “Looks like a lab. Like one of those psychology experiments.”
Ivan bent towards the glass to look. “How so?”
“See there?” Ben reached across Ivan’s face to tap the glass near the right of the frame.
“The light?”
“Yeah. And there?” This time he stretched to tap towards the top of the glass towards the left. A piece of glass slanted diagonally across the left far corner of the room. There was a slight glint to the surface of it.
“It could be a mirror. Hard to tell at this angle.” Ivan tracked his gaze over the walls in the room. There was nothing else there to look at. No furniture. No light source beyond the light Ben pointed out on the right wall. It was similar to a clip light, the bulb set in a reflecting dish. Instead of being clipped the dish fit into a bracket set in the wall.
Testing a theory he lowered his hand to one of the dials set beneath the mirror. He gave the dial a gentle spin. While nothing happened to the light something did happen to the dial. It tipped beneath his hand, leaning a little towards the wall. He crouched down, tipping his head to look at where the dial met the wall. “Huh.”
“Huh?”
“Its on a pivot. Not mounted flat. So it doesn’t just turn, it also tilts.”
Ben eyed the wall. “Okay.”
Ivan rose up from his crouch and turned the other dial, careful to only spin it and not manipulate it on the pivot. Inside the room the bracket shifted, the light shifting in the direction Ivan twisted the dial. Ivan grinned and turned the dial to the left. The light shifted in that direction then further as he kept turning the dial past the initial point.
“What does the other dial do?”
“Probably the piece of glass. I don’t see an obvious mount but maybe its mounted on a rotating arm that’s hidden behind it.” Testing that, Ivan focused on the piece of glass in the left corner and turned the second dial to the left. The glass shifted, its surface turning towards the window, reflecting an image of the wall and then the rectangle of the window back in its mirrored surface. Ivan gently pressed the dial forward and the top of the mirror tilted back, reflecting where the wall met the ceiling above the window.
Ivan clapped his hands together. “Now we need to figure out what we’re supposed to do with the light and the mirror. Look for a target.”
“A target?”
“Yeah. Mirrors are used to direct lasers to hit targets. What we have here is something like that with the mirror mounted to rotate and the light to do the same. So, makes sense there should be a target. I don’t know what the target does but we’ll figure that out when we find it and hit it with the light.”
“What’s a target look like?”
Ivan shrugged. “A target.”
“Excellent description.”
“Ideally its will have at least a few concentric circles. They might be crossed with lines. Think the sight on a gun. But it could also just be a single circle.”
“But probably a circle. Any color?”
“Doesn’t have to be a specific color. A lot of the ones I’ve seen in pictures for lasers are red. But I’ve also seen green and just white with the circles in black. If it is a colored field it has the circles in white.”
“Well, that’s something.”
“Unless its transparent.”
“Unless its transparent. Again with the encouraging.” Ben and Ivan peered through the window, each taking a side of the room without having to consult on it. “What if its in the wall the window is in?”
“It probably won’t be.”
“Why?”
“Because it would blind us. If it was a laser, it would.”
“Well, let’s hope its just a light and not a laser then.”
“I still think its probably won’t be where we can’t see it. If the goal is for us to use the dials to adjust the light and the mirror to hit a target they’d put the target somewhere we could see to aim for.”
“Unless they were screwing with us.” Ben stated the, hopefully not, obvious in a dry tone.
“Unless they were screwing with us,” Ivan echoed.
When Ben announced “I think I see something,” Ivan asked, “Where?”
Ben pointed towards a point about dead center of the height of the far wall, over to the right, about a foot from the side wall. Ivan narrowed his eyes. “Maybe?”
Ivan shifted to grab the bag he’d placed next to the wall beneath the frame upon first reaching the platform. Routing around, he found the binoculars he’d shoved in ‘just in case’.
He threw the strap of the bag over his head, settling the weight of it on his back then rose and leaned towards the right of the window, lifting the binoculars to focus on the point on the wall Ben had found. Touching the wheel in the center between the lenses, he activated the enchantment he’d set into the instrument. The lenses immediately started focusing on their own, zooming in to a minute level that standard binoculars were incapable of. Then an IR illuminator emitted an infrared light on the wall, bringing the darkened wall into clear definition.
“Good eyes. That’s a target. Here,” he thrust the binoculars at Ben. “Can you see it?”
Ben lifted the binoculars to his eyes, swinging them slightly then nodding. “Yes.”
“Okay. Keep your eyes on the target. I’m going to use the valves to adjust the mirror and the light.”
“Why not just turn the light until it hits the target?”
“Because,” tapped the glass to the left where the light was, then moved over to the vicinity of the target. “The target is placed at a sharp angle from the light. Almost at a backward angle. See?” He manipulated the dial that moved the light, adjusting the beam to hit the back wall, then making minute changes to show the sweep of the light. The valve stopped moving, unable to adjust back any harder, with the light stopping a foot or so short of the target.
“Well, all right then.”
“So,” Ivan turned the valve so the light was pointing back towards the mirror in the left corner. “When I start to get close let me know. I can’t keep the binoculars on the target and do the valves too.”
“Got it.”
First Ivan adjusted the light, aiming it towards the corner of the room the mirror was positioned across. Bouncing off the mirror, the light reflected back almost directly at the source. Need to adjust the mirror towards the left, Ivan thought, doing just that. As he did so the light hit the mirror at a different angle,
What he needed was a sharp angle of incident, leading to an equally sharp angle of reflection which would, if he did it right, bend the light so it hit the target. He grinned, thinking of how Kim would probably be holding her finger up to the air and saying, “Physics!” about now. He considered doing it for her, but Ben beat him to it.
“Physics!” Ben pulled his eyes from the binoculars to look at Ivan with a grin.
Ivan nodded. “Physics. Too bad Kim is missing this.”
“I could get her.”
“Uh, no. We’re good.”
Ben pressed his eyes back to the binoculars. Ivan set about minutely adjusting the mirror and then the light, as there was only so far the mirror would pivot on its mount. Ben directed him with the subtle adjustments, announcing, “More to the right. Down more. Just a little bit up now.”
Finally, after what felt like meros and meros, the light hit the mirror just right, bending to hit the target. Ben didn’t need to announce the hit. A bright rectangle of light, either a door or portal, opening at the far end of the platform to the left announced it clearer than Ben could.
Ivan looked at Ben. Ben looked at Ivan. Then as one they dashed towards the entry. Ivan didn’t even consider the drop yawning behind them. The thrill of discovery was on him and there was no fear, or even existential dread, that was going to hold him back from it.
“Sucker!” Just as they both hit the entry point, Ivan planted a hand against Ben’s shoulder, shoving his friend stumbling back along the wall and freeing up the entry for Ivan.
Ben scrambled to follow, barely a mikro behind Ivan despite the sabotage. “I’m going to tell Prairie!”
Ivan chuckled, undeterred by the threat. He was much more deterred by the drop to his left. Another yawning pit. Or more of the same. Ben’s darkness did not flow into this new hall so once more they were faced with near blinding light and the odd optical illusion formed between the white floor and the pristine white wall to the right. Trailing his hand along the wall, careful to stay clear of the drop, he grinned. “What? That I’m better than you?”
Ben didn’t hesitate to go for the jugular. “That you like her.”
“Are we in grade school?”
“I don’t know. Did you just shove me so you could get on the jungle gym before me?”
There appeared to be another mirror or window mounted to the wall further down, in almost the same position as the first one. Ivan headed towards it. “I did that to you once. Let it go, Elsa.”
“I will never let it go. I will have my vengeance. You have been warned.”
“You’ve been promising that since we were, what, six? Let me hold my breath while I wait for that, m’kay?”
“Why am I still friends with you?”
“Fuck if I know. Now come over here and make it dark.”
“Ask nicely.”
“I did.”
“Nicer.”
“Ben. Oh, awesome majestic, Ben. Will you please come over here and make it dark so we can get through this thing and find the piece of the lamp?”
“Fine. But just because I want to find the piece of the lamp.” Ben walked over, darkness already pooling in his hands. “And because I am majestic. And awesome.”
Enter The Woods 