The Shadow in the Glass JJA Harwood (book recommendations for young adults txt) 📖

floor, after their rooms had been damaged in the rain. No one heard the staccato beat of Eleanor’s shaking fingers against the bucket as she climbed the stairs.

The moment she was through the library door, she dropped her cleaning supplies and slammed the door behind her. The key slipped out of her fingers twice before she could get the door locked. There had to be something in here to get her out of the deal.

Ignoring the bucket still rolling on its rim, she snatched up the copy of Faustus and flipped through the pages, so fast that they tore. Magic circles, spells, confessions written in the margins – there had to be something. But there was nothing except the demon on the frontispiece, hiding under layers of old ink. Who’d scribbled it out, all those years before?

She flipped to the end – nothing there except Faustus’s downfall, and her stomach swooped to read it. Would all those creeping, crawling things come for her in the end too? No, she thought. She couldn’t let herself think such nonsense; it would not serve her. She peered down the length of the spine, in case there was something hidden there – nothing. She held the book up by a corner of the cover and waggled it, in case anything fell out. A piece of paper drifted to the floor and she seized it.

MEPHISTOPHELES: Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it. Think’st thou that—

Nothing. Nothing! Eleanor threw the book across the room, tears prickling in her eyes. It smacked into a bookcase and she regretted it at once. She checked it for damage, half-expecting to see the black-eyed woman glaring at her when she turned around.

There must be something else here that could help her.

Eleanor tore through the bookshelves. She rifled through the family Bible, scanning the passages about demons and witches. She snatched up copies of Daemonologie, the Malleus Maleficarum, a record of the witch trials in the sixteenth century. Was this what the woman had made her? Had all those witches who’d been burned and hanged been as desperate and hungry as she was?

Nothing, still nothing. Eleanor sank to the floor, her hands covered in paper cuts. Little smears of blood spotted every page she’d touched. Oh God, she thought. What if she’d summoned something else? How many other creatures were lurking between these pages?

Eleanor listened carefully. The rain beat against the window and trickled down the chimney. Beyond the glass broughams and hackneys rolled past, their iron wheels muffled by mud. Somewhere above her head, a floorboard creaked.

She cleared her throat. ‘Hello? Are you there?’

The shadows shifted. A knot in the side of one of the wooden bookcases became a pitiless black eye and the woman emerged, smiling. It was the only human thing about her face. Without that smile her face might have been a mask, waiting to be lifted off.

Eleanor held out the copy of Faustus. ‘I don’t want it.’

‘That book is not yours, dear.’

‘That’s not what I meant!’ Eleanor snapped. ‘I don’t want to be a part of this deal any more. You didn’t tell me what the wishes would do! I didn’t ask for this!’

Eleanor could hear the whine in her own voice. The woman was looking at her with an unbearably patient smile on her face, her eyes two pits.

‘But you did,’ the black-eyed woman said. ‘You sold me your soul in exchange for seven wishes. You knew the price you must pay, and yet you paid it.’

‘You didn’t tell me that people were going to die! If I’d known that—’

The black-eyed woman cut across her. ‘I asked for your soul. Really, my dear, what did you expect?’

Eleanor’s fingers were stained with black dye, from where her sweating hands had gripped the book’s cover. ‘I want it back,’ she said, in a very small voice.

‘But you have already made two wishes,’ the black-eyed woman said. ‘The contract might have been broken earlier, but now we are bound together by laws far bigger than you or I. Repent all you like, but how am I to return your soul in parts?’

The sky darkened, the rain beating ever harder against the glass. Beneath the black-eyed woman’s feet, shadows sprawled and squirmed across the floor. Eleanor scampered out of their way, heart hammering.

‘What do you suppose you would be, with only five-sevenths of your soul?’ the black-eyed woman mused. ‘Do you think you could still laugh, for example? Perhaps all the love you have would be desiccated, leaving your heart filled with dust. Perhaps all the beauty in the world would be flattened for you, and every time you heard a nightingale’s song it would be as meaningless as the shriek of a factory bell. Perhaps you wouldn’t feel anything at all. A question for the philosophers, I suppose.’

The black-eyed woman came closer and patted Eleanor’s hand. Her eyes had no shine. When she stood in the light those empty eyes stole it, not even leaving a glimmer. With a jolt, Eleanor realized she was not sure if the woman had eyes at all, or if those dark pits were holes in her skull.

‘There is no turning back, dear,’ the black-eyed woman said. ‘You sold your soul and received your wishes. The bargain has been struck. You have only to decide how to use it.’

The first week of September passed in a haze of rain. The damp patch on Eleanor’s ceiling was spreading, reaching out like a malevolent hand. Every time she got into bed she stared at the ceiling and imagined the black-eyed woman staring out of the deeper patch of darkness. She buried her head under her pillow and screwed up her eyes, whispering prayers that turned into a litany of please please please over and over again.

Mrs Fielding noticed the dark circles under her eyes and assumed Eleanor was grieving for Lizzie. Her solution was to keep Eleanor busy, and with Charles’s return drawing near there was more than