The Curious Case of the Cursed Looking Glass Read online

  The Curious Case of the Cursed Looking Glass

  by

  Constance Barker

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  The Curious Case of the Cursed Looking Glass (The Curiosity Shop Cozy Mysteries, #4)

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  All rights reserved.

  Similarities to real people, places or events are purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  “It is no use to blame the looking glass if your face is awry.”

  —Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

  Chapter One

  I struggled with the effort to breathe. It was desperately hard. Nearly impossible. It didn’t help that it was so hard to see, surrounded as I was by an uncomfortable, yet soft light. I was awash in it. Everything was bathed in that uncomfortable light making it amorphous, unfocused, shapeless.

  Then, gradually things came into focus. I slowly woke, but as I regained consciousness I was left feeling nauseous and weak.

  I didn’t need to look at my clock to know it was still early, that there were hours to go before dawn. This wasn’t the first time lately that I had found myself lying in my own bed, in my own apartment, trembling with fear. No, that was wrong. My trembling was due to the memory of fear, not real fear. In my dream, I’d been in extreme, heart pounding, adrenaline pumping danger.

  Of course, waking that way, gaining my wits in my own bed, was enough to remind me that I was safe... at least reasonably so. The threat was left behind in the dream world. So, if I really was at home in my bed, and awake, then I was as safe as I could be these days. The danger lurked, ever-present inside my seemingly endless, yet fragmented dreams. All I had to do (all!) was let the fear go.

  I thought about the fear—tried to identify it. If I could see it, visualize it... But nothing came. It was vague and as insubstantial as it was terrifying. I wasn’t in fear of anyone around me in this world. Not really. And there was no one in the apartment. I saw no broken windows and the single door that led out, which I could see clearly from my bed, was securely closed and bolted.

  “Hush, Cecilia, it was just the dream,” I whispered to reassure myself. It was the dream and nothing more; or at least one of the dreams. Another of those damn dreams that haunted me more anxiously than my personal ghost did—they simply wouldn’t leave me alone and unlike Edgar, they couldn’t be locked away in a box.

  Oddly, there was nothing particularly scary about the dreams when I was awake in my bed, safe and trying to remember them. The irony of that wasn’t lost on me. If I wanted to tell anyone what I could remember from my dreams, they’d chuckle. I’d sound as if I was making something of nothing. Mountains from mole hills.

  Sure, when I was in that sleep world I found myself thrust into some awkward, possibly dangerous situations, but then real life had gotten to a point that it did that sometimes too. In these dreams, I was aware that I was in some other world—a world that wasn’t real. After all, Enid was there with me, and she seldom left home. And people who were dead, like my Uncle Mason, were there too, with everyone acting as if that was how it should be. But none of that mattered. In the dream, whatever was going on terrified me.

  I couldn’t even really say what we were doing or trying to do in those dreams, other than sneaking around in a nebulous world that bore little resemblance to anything outside of the Grand Storehouse.

  Yet they scared me. In the dream I was scared. I woke up scared. I didn’t want to go back to sleep, back to that world. I switched on the light on my nightstand and looked across the room to where a man in Victorian dress sat reading a book. In the shadowy light cast by the lamp, he looked pale, almost translucent. He lifted his head. “Oh, is it morning already?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “I just can’t sleep.”

  “I never can myself,” he said. “I can’t remember what it’s like to sleep.”

  “You are a ghost, Edgar,” I said.

  “First of all, we assume I am a ghost, since none of us is sure. Second, who says ghosts don’t sleep?”

  He was right, of course, on both counts.

  He stretched. “So now what?”

  I pulled back my covers. “I do what I always do when I can’t sleep. Get up.”

  I got out of bed, turned on lights and, ignoring Edgar, got dressed. I’d gotten oddly used to him always being around, and it wasn’t like I could send him away. There were certain complications in my life that I’d adapted to without totally accepting them. And even though dressing with Edgar around didn’t bother me, getting dressed somehow made me feel safer. It made no sense and I felt silly for feeling that way. It wasn’t like clothes were any protection against whatever dark forces I needed protection from—assuming that they were dark forces and not just indigestion affecting my dreams.

  I wondered why being dressed made me feel better prepared to face those uncertain things. Usually, you like to know what you are preparing for and, as Enid would put it in that quaint way she had of expressing things, I had no earthly idea what was bothering me. And maybe it wasn’t earthly at all. Not in the normal sense, anyway. Whatever normal meant now.

  The dreams were coming more frequently now, sometimes waking me up several times in the night. That was bad, but the nights I didn’t wake until morning and the dreams seemed to go on forever were even worse. I’d be exhausted.

  I tried to remember them, but the details were always sketchy in the morning and jumbled. Unfortunately, during the day they’d often trickle into my consciousness, mixing with reality. Recently Clarence and I had gotten our brains jumbled badly enough by a cursed dagger that had us simultaneously living in this time and in the time of Caesar’s death, with me thinking I was Caesar and he Brutus. Naturally, he’d tried to kill me. Fortunately, history didn’t repeat itself, but once we were home again, I found that it had rattled me. The dreams that seemed to plague my nights were just about as crazy and not helping me get past that frightening episode.

  We'd gotten the danger neutralized and the artifact was secure now. Still, I think that being exposed to its effects had changed me somehow, but I couldn't be sure. Knowing what some of the artifacts were capable of and that there were others out there that did things we didn’t even know about had gotten under my skin. So my overactive brains used my dreams to conjure up all manner of potent artifacts, as well as people, living and dead and twisted them into all sorts of outrageous schemes, but recent history had taught me that whoever said “anything is possible” was being conservative. In my world, our world, as I shared it with a group of people, that insane anything turned out to be as much likely as simply possible.

  So if my dreams were unsettling, I’d have to say that my waking hours sometimes were too. Unfortunately, it’s harder to wake up f
rom a bad life than a bad dream.

  In that early morning, I didn’t feel like fixing anything to eat. I didn’t feel like reading, and I seldom felt like watching television, so I wandered downstairs, heading to the Curiosity Shop below my apartment with Edgar trailing behind.

  I own the shop—I inherited it, the apartment over it, and this insane life I was living or at least coping with, from my Uncle Mason. I’d sort of inherited Clarence too. He’d run the shop for Uncle Mason and stayed on, doing the same for me. He was a good guy and I’d gotten to like him. I hadn’t at first, but over time I got to know his good qualities. We’d been through a lot together, which tends to either push people together or drive them apart. So now, even though there wasn’t anything sexual going on between us, he was about as close to a boyfriend as I’d ever had.

  I suppose that closeness was one reason that remembering him trying to kill me, well, trying to kill Caesar and thinking I was Caesar, was so unnerving. It wasn’t at all his fault, just that damn artifact, and it had been partly my fault, I suppose. I mean, at the time I had been trying to conquer the world, after all. Still, we’d come close to murder.

  I’m not sure what prompted me to go downstairs that morning other than edginess. Maybe being alone with Edgar was as unsettling as every other ambiguous aspect of my life. It certainly hadn’t been a conscious decision. And if it was me acting on instinct... well, I’ve given up examining my instincts and hunches too closely. That tends to be counterproductive. It assumes logic is operating and that things are controlled by magic and diabolism. As a way of operating, relying on instincts can be good or it can be deadly. The trick is figuring out which one it was at the time and that wasn’t a skill I’d mastered—if it could be mastered.

  I do know that wandering around among the odds and ends that made up our inventory was often soothing. That didn’t make any sense to me whatsoever. I’m not big on collectibles. I have no idea why a collection of other people's’ castoffs and things they’d left behind might be soothing, but it was. Alone in the shop, I could pick up objects and feel their history as a warm and tangible thing. You don’t get that sense from newly manufactured things. I guess that’s what made it soothing, a sense of life that was inside inanimate objects. But like I said, I’ve learned not to think too much about that sort of phenomenon or I might come to the conclusion that everything that another person has touched and lived with became imbued with their spirit is, in some way, forevermore a cursed artifact. Or, enchanted, as Enid prefers to say.

  I’m not keen on the subtle distinction between enchanted and cursed. Not anymore, and thinking that way only leads... somewhere dark, I suppose.

  And it was still dark, not yet dawn when I took cautious steps down to the shop. I went in the back door and found the lights in the shop on. Someone was there. Memories of our break-in, when we came in to find that my ex-fiance and his thugs had stolen an assortment of artifacts that Uncle Mason had collected and stored in the back room of the shop, swept over me, making me shiver.

  Then I smelled the wonderful aroma of coffee. The smell of rich, dark, coffee made me relax. Clarence was here; he'd gotten to the shop ahead of me. He hadn’t been much for coffee when I’d arrived, but my enjoyment of good, dark French roast coffee had intrigued him. Now he was as addicted to it as I was. He’d arrived and made some and the smell beckoned me. I didn’t see him at first; assuming he was in the back room, I went to the coffee maker and filled my mug. Just the realization that he was around was comforting. But, I reminded myself sternly, Clarence wasn’t my boyfriend. I wasn’t sure how he felt about me—he’d never indicated any serious affection towards me. And even if he had, I only had to look at how the romance between my Uncle Mason and Enid had worked out. From everything I had heard, and judging by what Enid said, they’d loved each other intensely. Despite that, the hunt for artifacts had come between them, driven a wedge between them. That had to have been painful. From where I sat, that looked like an avoidable pain if I used some common sense.

  And yet, emotionally, I was as close to Clarence as I’d ever been to a man.

  “Good morning,” he said as I took that first, mind-clearing sip. I turned and saw him sitting at the desk. The top was covered with miscellaneous papers—invoices, single sheets, and, ominously, a ledger.

  “You are working early. Is anything wrong?”

  “You are up early too.”

  “Just couldn’t sleep.”

  “Same here.”

  “Are those our books?”

  He nodded. “So, to answer your question, whether anything is wrong depends entirely on your ideas of right and wrong. The numbers are right, in the purest sense, just not good.” He sounded frustrated.

  “Can I help?”

  “Help? Well, the fact is that the business is hurting. It’s reasonable, I suppose. With all we’ve been doing, running after artifacts, we keep irregular hours and aren’t often open. That doesn’t give customers confidence, or even a willingness to come by. The only way I could see you helping is if you could think of a way to hunt the artifacts and still keep the store open.”

  “Could we hire someone?”

  He laughed. “That would require more money, money we don't have. And it would take a lot of time to interview candidates, find the right person, train them... We spend so much time traveling around, which isn’t cheap, chasing down the fool things... and that means I’m not here to buy or sell curiosities. No one is. And sales, Cecilia, the difference between what we pay for curiosities and what we sell them for is how we pay the bills. Or how we used to pay them. Right now they are piling up. I don’t even have time to hit the estate sales and places I used to locate new inventory.”

  The way he said that made me extremely nervous. “Is the store...?

  “Bankrupt? Not yet. But it’s in trouble. We are sinking slowly. And that’s no surprise. For months now, the outgo has exceeded the income. It’s a downward spiral that we have to reverse. But how can we do that when new artifacts seem to pop up every day? We are spending all of our time chasing them. The Cabal is making running a business hard.”

  The whole idea of the curiosity shop as a real business was still something of an enigma to me. The truth was that business itself was something I had never tried to understand, so it was my fault if I was having trouble grasping it. Not that I couldn’t get my head around the idea... it had to be reasonably simple. We bought things that people didn’t want and sold them to people who did. That I got. And with so many people doing it with varying degrees of success, I knew I could do it if it interested me. But unlike Clarence, I found the entire idea of keeping business records, analyzing trends, mostly annoying... like taxes... I was that way with almost anything that had to do with money. Which was, I suppose, why I hadn’t ever had any until Uncle Mason left me his.

  And the shop.

  And the apartment.

  Clarence, however, believed the profit and loss stuff to be important and interesting. Important, I could understand. And bless him for shouldering the burden that I was unable or unwilling to carry.

  “Can I do anything at all?”

  He looked up at me, then drank his coffee. “I don’t suppose you could deposit a really large sum in the bank account?”

  “Not today. I’m slightly short on small sums, much less large. I was thinking more along the lines of kind words I could offer, or sage advice you could ignore.”

  He held out his mug. It said, “I brake for antiques,” on it. “I have just the task for you then. If you would refill my coffee then I wouldn’t be forced to interrupt this wonderful session of angst, dismay, and sheer agony.”

  “Now there is something I can do.”

  As I got him coffee, once again that sense of being comfortable around Clarence wrapped its arms around me. It was a warm feeling and I pushed it away. Mason and Enid, I reminded myself. They were a team, and lovers, but this business, the artifacts, drove a wedge between them. There was no point in setting
myself, or Clarence, up for a fall. Taking any more risks than we already took on a regular basis was just foolishness. It was far better not to think about him that way. Keep him at a colleague’s arm length.

  But how do you stop feeling things about a person?

  “I need to go see Enid,” I said.

  He stared at the window. “At the crack of dawn.”

  “She’s an early riser.”

  He nodded toward the coffee maker. “Take a thermos of coffee with you or you’ll be drowning in chamomile tea.”

  “Good point.” There were, naturally, certain dangers in facing Enid alone and chamomile tea was one.

  Chapter Two

  “Oh, Cecilia,” Enid said, clapping her hands when she opened the door and found me standing on her front step. “What a delightful surprise. At least I hope it’s delightful. What brings you to my house on this beautiful morning? Are we hunting down a new one?”

  Amid all that enthusiasm, she was pumping me for information about artifacts, of course. We always consulted her before chasing one down. So much of the knowledge about artifacts, especially the specifics of what they were and how they worked, was stored in people’s heads that when one appeared, it made sense to find out if anyone had heard of it, knew its powers or how they might be controlled. Enid and Beatrice had been in the game a long time and often gave us insights, although these days Enid seldom left home and wasn’t a lot of help in the actual hunting. Still, when Clarence and I had to separate, she often coordinated things.

  “I came to see you,” I told her as she swept me into her cluttered parlor. As always, I found the massive array of kitschy knick-knacks overwhelming. They annoy me and I know she adores them, each and every one.

  “Not that I’m not delighted to see you,” Enid said as we sat down, “but you’ve seldom come to just visit. I assume there is something specific bothering you.”

  I nodded. She had gotten straight to the heart of the thing. “We talked about this after the episode with the dagger,” I said. “The dreams I started having...”