The Door in the Moon Read Online Free PDF Page B

huge hand took hold of his jaw. Strong fingers pushed into his cheeks, squeezing them together.
    â€œShut your mouth, cocky little
monsieur,
or I’ll see to it you’ll be missing a few teeth to talk through. Deliver you whole, she said, but a bit of damage in transit wouldn’t be my fault. Get that?”
    He nodded.
    When the hand withdrew he sucked his cheeks in, still feeling the bruising grip. As the carriage rattled on, he thought about that single word.
    She.
    Who was she? Summer? Was this the Summerland after all?
    Conserve energy, he told himself. Watch, listen, stay alert. He was suddenly so hungry his stomach churned, but no one spoke to him again, and as the coach turned corners and rumbled under archways, he sensed that they were crawling deeper and deeper into the dense mass of the city, into its packed and stinking heartland, the filthiest slums and alleys.
    Jake swayed beside the morose men.
    He was in a lot of trouble here.
    And this might just be the start of it.

    Sarah sat wearily against the wall among the waxworks. She felt sick, a little giddy. A point of pain was beginning behind one eyebrow. She had been invisible too long.
    Back in the Lab, there had always been stories and rumors about the children who died, about the early failed experiments, when Janus’s scientists had been inexperienced and the powers he had designed untested. She remembered too the terror of the white blankness creeping over her whole mind, as if her whole personality would somehow vanish away if she let it.
    Two hours—two and a half at the most—was the safe limit. She might be over that already. With a sudden panic she raised her head, terrified even as she made it that the
switch
might not work anymore, that she might have to stay like this forever.
    But her arms and legs and feet and hands were there. She gazed at them in relief.
    She felt better at once.
    There was no way out. The building was a locked tenement, empty and derelict. The main door was firmly bolted. So she just had to . . .
    Something clanged.
    She leaped up and darted into the crowd of waxworks.
    With a rattle of keys, two men hurried in. Ragged, dirty, roughly dressed in soiled aprons and breeches, one big and one stooped, they walked between the waxworks, talking loudly and laughing boldly, as if to keep away the silent stares of the still figures.
    Sarah’s eyes watched them. These men were nervous, in a hurry to get out.
    They hurried to the three automata, dragged out a wooden packing case lid and fitted it over the Conjuror, carefully, then lifted it on two poles and staggered out with it, locking the door behind them.
    After a few minutes they came back for the Dancer, the case wobbling as they lifted it.
    One of the men glanced around, clearly scared.
    â€œHear that?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThought I heard something. Like breathing.”
    Standing among the crowd of waxworks, Sarah let her eyes go still and vacant. She stared ahead, fixed.

    When the men came back for the third time, the big one gazed at the waxwork crowd uneasily. “Bloody glad to be out of this lot,” he muttered.
    The stooped man cackled. “Tell that to the contessa.”
    Over the third figure, the Scribe, they placed the wooden lid, carefully, wary of its waxen face, its poised fingers holding the plumed pen. A corner of the purple velvet cloak got snagged in the packing case; the men shoved it in, impatiently.
    Then they lifted the heavy wooden box.
    â€œLot heavier, this one,” the smaller man complained.
    Awkward, they staggered out with it.

4
    On the final, terrible night of the Kebron expedition, halfway down the glacier, when the men were in the last stages of exhaustion, one of them looked up and thought he saw a woman, small and slender, walking beside Venn on the top of the ice, and talking to him. She wore summer clothes and was barefoot.
    He knew he was hallucinating. The temperature was 30 below