The Monsters of Rookhaven, стр. 20

‘Why thank you, Bertram. How very kind.’

Bertram grinned like a baby. ‘Not as beautiful as Rula, though.’ He bit into a carrot and gazed wistfully into the distance, chomping away, immune to its flavour. ‘Oh, Rula,’ he sighed.

Eliza shook her head and rolled her eyes at Mirabelle, who smiled in response.

‘Let’s go, Jem,’ said Mirabelle.

‘Where to?’ asked Eliza, her eyes narrowing, her tone surprisingly sharp.

Mirabelle beamed innocently at her. ‘Nowhere special, Aunt.’

Both Eliza and Bertram exchanged a glance. Bertram in particular looked worried.

‘You’re not going anywhere you shouldn’t, are you?’ he said.

‘Not down below,’ said Eliza. She fixed Mirabelle with a stern look. It was definitely not a question.

Bertram shook his head. ‘You can’t go down there, not with her,’ he said, looking at Jem, his voice a terrified whisper.

‘We can’t, we shan’t, we won’t,’ said Mirabelle.

Her uncle and her aunt looked at them both. Even Gideon’s ears were pricked as he paid attention. A definite air of disquiet had seeped into the room, and Jem suddenly felt uncomfortable with the attention.

Eliza eventually sighed and shook her head.

‘You really do go to great lengths sometimes to annoy your uncle,’ she said.

Mirabelle was still smiling. ‘I’m just giving Jem a tour.’

She grabbed Jem’s arm again, and they were back out in the hall before Jem had time to draw breath. Jem wanted to ask Mirabelle why her aunt and uncle seemed so uneasy with the idea of them going ‘down below’, but Mirabelle was already dashing on ahead. Jem followed her, rounding a corner just in time to see Mirabelle vanish into another room. Jem tensed in preparation for what lay inside, but nothing could have prepared her for what came next.

The dozens of glowing lights were hard enough for her to take in, but it was the sheer volume of portraits that lined the walls, and the walls themselves seemingly stretching on and on into forever, which overwhelmed her. Jem felt her breath catch in her chest as she looked up and realized she couldn’t see the ceiling.

It felt as if the floor had suddenly tilted, and she was finding it hard to stand up straight. Then Mirabelle’s hand lightly took her elbow.

‘This is the Room of Lights,’ said Mirabelle.

‘There are so many of them,’ Jem managed to gasp.

She had never seen so many colours – blazing pinks, muted golds, shimmering reds – all hanging in the air to form a burning tapestry.

‘What are they?’ Jem asked.

‘Enoch calls them the Spheres. They’re ways in to this world,’ said Mirabelle, smiling herself in wonder, as if she too were seeing the lights for the first time.

Ways in to this world. It seemed such a simple statement, but it set Jem’s mind reeling again. Ways in, but from where and for who or what? She was reminded of Jem’s talk of the mirror realm. Again she found herself trying to put strange new ideas into some kind of order.

‘There are places throughout the world, hidden places like this house, where there are gateways between your world and the Ether. Uncle Enoch says that House of Rookhaven has the largest amount of these gateways.’

Somehow Jem managed to peel her eyes away from the glowing orbs. Now she looked at the portraits. There was one large portrait of a creature that looked like a rhino. It had a horn where a nose should have been, but its face was brown and leathery, and it had three golden eyes. Its shoulders were huge, and it was dressed in what looked like a glossy brown dressing gown made of some kind of animal fur.

‘That’s Uncle Alfred,’ said Mirabelle. ‘One of the older generation. One of those who lived abroad.’

‘Abroad?’

‘In your world,’ said Mirabelle.

Jem frowned, wondering to herself how a rhino in a fur coat could live unseen in the outside world and how one could use the term ‘uncle’ to describe it.

There was another portrait of two boys dressed in Edwardian tweed sitting on a futon. Both boys were identical, right down to the arms that protruded from the sides of their heads.

‘Quentin and Richard Haxley. Very well-respected members of the Family. Very old and wise. They liked to juggle. I’m told they were very popular at parties.’

Jem’s attention was now taken with a large doughy-looking woman sitting on a bench. Two extremely tall spindly men stood either side of her with one hand on each of her shoulders. All three of them had mouths and nostrils, but no eyes. The mouths were curved into smiles, each one filled with pointed razor-sharp teeth.

‘Mavis Dibble and the Dibble twins. Notorious talkers and terrible gossips.’

Mirabelle pointed at a painting of a young woman with three heads. Each head was identical except one had green eyes, one blue, and one brown. Their matching fierce gazes seemed to burn through the picture.

‘Aunt Rula. She went travelling over a century ago. Uncle Bertram had a bit of a thing for her.’ Mirabelle frowned for a moment. ‘Well, for one of her heads, anyway. I think it was the middle one. The other two were rather jealous. He still pines after her, expecting her to come home some day.’ Mirabelle shrugged. ‘Perhaps she will.’

Jem glanced at another painting. It was of something that looked like a black gloopy substance contained in a jar. The black gloopy substance had two blue eyes, both surprisingly beautiful and filled with an aching melancholy.

‘Uncle Urg,’ said Mirabelle.

‘Urg?’ said Jem.

‘Urg.’

Jem started to laugh, Mirabelle joined in and Gideon started chittering too. Suddenly a wave of dizziness washed over her, and she began to find it hard to breathe. The room seemed to be getting larger with each passing moment. She flapped her hand at Mirabelle, and saw Gideon tilt his head towards her in curiosity, blinking his one eye as he regarded her.

Mirabelle took Jem back into the hall, and leaned her against the wall. Jem slumped there and took a few deep breaths.

‘It’s a lot to take in,’ said Mirabelle sympathetically.

Jem