Chapter 4

Mira avoided being alone with Lorien for the rest of the week, hoping that once classes began, he'd be too distracted to remember the book. It was a dumb hope. The story had its hooks in him. He was just too polite to push.

She was torn between insisting Lorien read it immediately so that she wasn't alone with the story, and trying to process her reaction to it. The story was about a scholar from medieval England, but set at a school at Blackmere Lake. But Blackmere Academy was in America, and had been built in the 1800s, way after the medieval period. But the way it was described -- it was her lake, not a mythic one.

After a few days of wandering the lake and avoiding her friends and reading and re-reading The Lady of the Lake, Mira decided that she had to talk to someone. But not Lorien, not yet. She had to talk to Professor C.

She tracked him down in his classroom, looking tweedy and British and not like a man who'd written a gothic medieval romance. He looked like he was stuck in the 1940s -- not the 1700s.

Professor C’s office smelled like burnt sugar and old paper, the air still thick from whatever experiment he’d been conducting. A line of brass teapots whistled faintly on the windowsill, all in different keys.

“Miss Thorn,” he said without looking up from the parchment he was writing on. “You’ve either come to hand in an assignment from last semester or to confess something catastrophic.”

“Neither,” Mira said. “Though give me time.”

That earned her the faintest twitch of a smile. “Then what brings you to my door, on the last day before the term begins?”

She hesitated. The words I think I found your book felt ridiculous out loud. “Do you—uh—remember assigning a reading list for the break?”

“Indeed I do. Though based on precedent, I assume you didn’t read it.”

“Rude, but fair,” she said automatically. “No, this is something else. I found a book. It’s called The Lady of Blackmere Lake. The author’s name is Professor Norman Caldus."

That made him pause. The scratch of his pen stopped. “Miss Thorn, much as I appreciate your sense of humor --”

Mira carefully pulled the book from her pocket and handed it to him. He stared at it a moment. His eye twitched, and he stood so suddenly that his chair scraped the floor. “Where did you find this?”

Her stomach dropped. “In the library. It was just—there.”

“Show me.”

They were silent as they navigated the stairways to the library. Mira had been slightly worried to find Lorien there, not sure how she'd explain to him that she'd given Professor C the book before him, but the library was dead empty. Even Ms. Wynn had stepped away from her desk, again.

 Mira led the professor through the stacks she'd been wandering through just a few days before. Toward the very back, near the restricted section, stood a pedestal with an enormous dictionary open on it. Above it hung a painting of a glen with waterfalls and fairies.

"It was right here," Mira said, pointing to the dictionary.

But Professor C. was more interested in the painting. It was pretty enough, Mira thought, with the fairies flitting here and there, and the unicorns languidly eating grass and lapping at the water, but the library was full of paintings just as beautiful. The whole mansion was. She waited, a little perplexed, while Professor C. studied it.

"This isn't a painting," Professor C. said. "This is a portal."

"Sure," Mira said. Many of the mansion’s paintings were portals to other worlds or alternate universes. That's why the depictions were so realistic. But even the advanced students who could unlock them without permission couldn’t actually go through—most were too small to fit a person, and besides, they were all locked from the other side.

"It's unlocked on both sides," Professor C. added.

Whoa. Mira didn't know how to process that. She watched the professor study the painting. "So some ambitious senior opened it from this side, and it was already unlocked from the other side?"

"No," Professor C. said. He pointed to a part of the frame, then stopped himself. “The mechanism on our side is still in the locked position.” He stuck his hand through the portal, startling a fairy who chittered at him and then flew away, angrily. "Sorry," he called after it. 

"Someone overrode the mechanism on our side," he told Mira.

"How?" Mira asked.

"I don't know," he said. He held up the book. "But I think they did it to send us this."

"Woof," Mira said.

"Woof, indeed," Professor C. said.

Mira took a deep breath. "You're going to take the book, aren't you?"

Professor C. looked surprised. "Yes, of course. Why else did you bring it to me?"

"Oh," Mira said. "I was just hoping you could explain to me the purpose of the book before I gave it back to Lorien."

Professor C. nodded, smiling slightly. "Of course Lorien is already involved." He frowned. "Well, let me examine it to make sure it's not dangerous, and, of course, read it myself, and then I'll give it back to you."

Mira was troubled. "How long do you think that will take?"

The professor smiled. "I'll do it right now. Even a complex device of this sort shouldn’t take more than a few hours."

Mira breathed a sigh of relief. It was mid-morning. If everything was okay with the book, Lorien would have it by early afternoon.