MIRRORLAND Carole Johnstone Copyright The Borough Press An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk HarperCollinsPublishers 1st Floor, Watermarque Building, Ringsend Road Dublin 4, Ireland First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2021 Copyright © Carole Johnstone 2021 Carole Johnstone asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780008361389 Ebook Edition © 2021 ISBN: 9780008361402 Version: 2021-02-09 Dedication For Lorna Epigraph ‘When you compare the sorrows of real life to the pleasures of the imaginary one, you will never want to live again, only to dream for ever.’ The Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas ‘It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living or get busy dying.’ Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption Stephen King Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Map Prologue Part One Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Part Two Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Epilogue Acknowledgements About the Author About the Publisher Map PROLOGUE September 5th, 1998 The sky was pink. Which was better than red, El said, when we started to get scared again. Grandpa had always told us, Red sky at night, sailor’s delight; red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning. And he used to be one. The wind was cold, getting colder. El’s face was still streaked with tears, and her fingers twitched. I couldn’t stop shaking. We held hands and followed our noses, until every street of high, crowded tenements and terraces blurred into one looming dark house where the murderers of children lived and lurked and watched. But we saw no one. Heard no one. As if we were in Mirrorland again. Safe and scared. All that changed was the smell of the firth, getting stronger, nearer. The harbour was grease and oil and metal and salt. Seagulls were waking up, crowing like cockerels. We stopped next to a wooden warehouse, stripped and wet-dark. In front of it, a crane that dangled a hook on the end of rusty chains and a stony slope that soon disappeared underwater. High tide. The only time to set sail for the high seas. El gripped my hand tighter as we looked out at all the bobbing round buoys, the long pontoons. We saw yachts, white and smooth with rattling metal masts. And out beyond the estuary, a tanker on the horizon. None were what we wanted. None were why we were there. I searched through my rucksack until I found Mum’s powder compact. Started to press its pad against El’s cheeks. ‘Your eyes are all red inside,’ I whispered, as she pretended it didn’t hurt. ‘You’re still bleeding,’ she whispered back, hoarser than I was even though I had done more screaming. ‘What are you two lassies doing out at this time of night, eh?’ His torchlight made me blink, but when I could look, he was just like Mum said he’d be: leathery and gap-toothed, a white and bushy beard. An Old Salty Dog. ‘I’m Ellice,’ El said. I felt the points of her nails against my fingers, but her voice was still like the harbour water. ‘And this is my twin sister, Catriona.’ ‘Aye?’ He came closer then, and when he staggered, I could smell rum. My heart beat faster. I squared my shoulders. ‘We want to join a pirate ship.’ The light from his torch bounced dizzy white circles that made my eyes squint and water. And then he said a curse word – one of Grandpa’s, but not one of his favourites – and began backing away from us, eyes wide like the Grebo masks of Côte d’Ivoire in Grandpa’s encyclopaedias. ‘Stay right there, all right? Don’t be going nowhere. All right?’ ‘But is there a ship due soon?’ El tried to shout, as he disappeared back into the shadow of the warehouse. We heard its door creak open and bang shut, and El turned to me, made a choked sound, let me go. ‘Oh no! Your jumper. We forgot to take off your jumper!’ I suddenly felt something worse than just scared. As if I’d been swimming deep down in the cold and black and someone had reached in and pulled me out, and I couldn’t remember how to breathe again. I dropped my rucksack, pulled off my coat, and even though I hurt all over, even though El’s fingers pinched and scratched, I got my jumper off over my head, and dropped it on the stony ground as if it were crawling with spiders. I could smell it then, sour and warm. ‘What’ll we do with it?’ El said, and her voice wasn’t still or calm any more. ‘He’ll come back. He’ll come back!’ She ran around the warehouse, picked up a broken mooring ring flaked with rust. We tied the jumper’s arms around it in fisherman’s knots, our hands cold, teeth chattering, and then we ran back to the choppy water beyond the harbour, threw it as far in as we could. The splash was loud. By the time we’d run back to the stony slip, we were out of breath, both trying so hard not to cry it sounded like we were choking. When the wind suddenly turned, pushing us back from the edge, I thought I could smell the blood again: sour and dark. But
