The MirrorWorld Anthology Read online

  Introduction

  When writing a book series as expansive and fantastical as MirrorWorld, the full extent of characters and contextual details born in the process can seldom be contained within the books themselves. Entire volumes worth of observations and stories do not make it into the original publications, but rather remain suspended in the creative ether, without form or voice. Some don’t even make it into the author’s conscious mind, as they are held by the characters alone....

  ... Unless the author decides to go looking for them....

  This anthology contains the rewards of such an exploration: Cornelia Funke has revisited her novels Reckless and Fearless, the first two in her MirrorWorld series, to bring you further enchanted tales and treasures from the characters whom she knew had so much more to tell us. The resulting works are divided into two parts: short stories first, followed by an appendix of additional archival materials from MirrorWorld.

  These backstories and insights have been conceived and published in a remarkably unrestrained and undiluted fashion – straight from the author’s heart, deep in the forest. We hope you enjoy the discovery.

  The MirrorWorld Anthology

  Stories:

  Chapter 1:

  The Mirror

  Chapter 2:

  The Treasure Hunter

  Chapter 3:

  The Beginning

  Chapter 4:

  Hopes & Dreams

  Chapter 5:

  The Spell of a Fairy

  Chapter 6:

  How the Tailor Came to the Hungry Forest

  Chapter 7:

  The Yearning

  Chapter 8:

  One for the Other

  Chapter 9:

  A Bad Substitute Father

  Appendix

  Child Eating Witch Recipes

  The original folios from which these recipes have been translated and transcribed were discovered inside an abandoned gingerbread house in the Hungry Forest.

  Mischievous & Miraculous Plants of Austry & Lotheraine

  A botanical guide, by F.G. Ozwalt, highlighting some of MirrorWorld’s most fiendish, but unassuming residents.

  Journal of Ogres

  The tragically unfinished field journal of MirrorWorld naturalist Heinrich Eichholz.

  The Silent Sabre

  The definitive manual on self-defense and gentlemanly conflict, by MirrorWorld’s greatest swordsman and chivalry practitioner, Sir Willard Wallace III.

  A map showing the regions traveled by Jacob Reckless and Albert Chanute.

  The Mirror

  Semmelweis. John Reckless had often wondered whether he would have noticed Rosamund if she’d had a different surname. He always gave himself the same answer: not likely. Rosamund did not possess the kind of beauty he liked to adorn himself with. When it came to his own character, John had no illusions: he was aware of his self-centeredness, his vanity and his craving for fame and success, despite knowing that he wasn’t half as talented as he made others believe…

  No.

  He wouldn’t have noticed her.

  Rosamund was almost painfully shy, and she despised everything he found entertaining – parties, travel... she didn’t even like New York, despite the fact that one of the city’s buildings was named after her family.

  The Semmelweis Building was better known for its bizarre stone sculptures than for its architecture. Though Rosamund’s family still owned two of the apartments in the building, they were no longer as rich as when her great-great-grandfather had built the giant brick block. Ignaaz Theodor Semmelweis had been a chemist – and a millionaire, who had gained his fortune under somewhat mysterious circumstances.

  Rosamund had been unveiling a plaque commemorating her family’s efforts in promoting science and technology at the university where John was a mediocre engineering student. She’d worn a dress that didn’t suit her and had barely managed to utter a word.

  But the name.

  Rosamund Louise Semmelweis. It had gilded her ash blond hair and made her shy gracefulness as precious as her address.

  What had he hoped for? That wealth would get over his disappointment that he was nowhere near the genius he so wanted to be?

  Rosamund’s parents of course warned her of the ambitious nobody. But she’d been so in love that their admonitions only made him more exciting. And he had loved what she saw in him. For a while her love actually convinced him that he was the wonderful and endlessly talented man she believed in.

  John still felt that way when their first son was born. Jacob looked so much like him that John felt as if he were looking at a mirror made of flesh and blood. And Jacob didn’t just resemble him in appearance. John soon noticed the same restlessness, the same hunger for more and still more. The fearlessness, however, was all Rosamund’s. John had soon discovered that beneath all her shyness she was much stronger and smarter than he, and knew much better who she was.

  Still, Jacob followed his father around, not his mother. And John explained to him the workings of steam locomotives, car engines and revolvers, relishing the unquestioning admiration in the boy’s eyes, which were as grey as his own. Rosamund’s adoration, on the other hand, was soon replaced by the same doubts John had always had about himself, until he found nothing but disappointment and helpless love in her gaze. But his son kept seeing the man his father so longed to be. John loved him for that so fiercely it sometimes scared him.

  They spent hours painting model airplanes in his study, or disassembling the old pistols he had started collecting after Rosamund had given him two dueling pistols that had supposedly once defended her great-great-grandmother’s honor. They loved riding the elevator together, all the way down to the basement, pretending they were breaking into a king’s tomb, to steal his golden death mask, or the sword that had made him invincible. It sounded so much better than the truth: gaining his wealth in his wife’s bed.

  They lost themselves in the dusty trunks and antique chests, looking for magic treasure and laughing about the heirlooms of Rosamund’s illustrious family, until John nearly managed to convince himself that he’d liberated her from all that. It’s very easy to feel noble and fearless by the side of an eight-year-old.

  Of course it was Jacob who found the Mirror. It was wrapped in a heavy blanket, and when John untied the cord that held it, a swarm of moths fluttered out of the dusty wool. They made Jacob jump back in fright, but when he saw the Mirror he was back at John’s side. The faces they saw in the dark glass were at once strange and familiar. As if their twins were staring back at them from another world.

  Jacob reverently touched the silver blossoms on the Mirror’s frame.

  “What do you think?” John asked. “Does this mirror deserve to be stuck in a basement gathering dust?”

  Jacob ran his fingers over the glass as though stroking the delicate feathers of a bird. Then he shook his head. No, it didn’t.

  It took the strength of three men to move the Mirror. The old elevator groaned ominously, but it carried all that silver and glass up to the seventh floor. The three men groaned even more, for they had to take the stairs. Jacob skipped ahead of them like an excited puppy. He was always moving. As though he was afraid that if he stopped his limbs would turn to stone.

  John had wanted to hang the Mirror in the bedroom, but Rosamund didn’t like the distorted face it showed her. Not even the opulence of the silver frame could make up for that. So John had it brought into his study. Maybe things would have been different, if....

  ... If what exactly? If Rosamund
hadn’t left him alone with the Mirror? If she had continued to see the man he would never be? How often he’d later try to assign her at least some of the blame.

  He found the piece of paper a few weeks later. It was tucked inside one of the old chemistry books that had been in Rosamund’s family for generations. Maybe it had belonged to her famous ancestor. John never found out for sure. Rosamund had asked him to move the books into his study to make space for books that were more entertaining. The slip of paper dropped out as if it had been waiting for ages to escape the yellowed pages. The handwriting was of an era long bygone. Chemical formulas. A drawing of a sun, two moons, a peacock.... John couldn’t make any sense of it.

  He turned the paper over, and read:

  The Mirror will open only

  for he who cannot see himself.

  “Jacob…”

  The boy was standing in front of the Mirror, as he had done so often over the past weeks, scrutinizing his distorted face.

  “Go and see whether you can help Mum with anything. I have to work.”

  The boy didn’t want to leave. But he did. Reluctantly, as always when John sent him away.

  The Mirror will open only

  for he who cannot see himself.

  John locked the door and approached the dark glass. He stared at his reflection.

  ... for he who cannot see himself.

  He always saw just himself. His own desires. His own shortcomings. As though the whole world was nothing but his mirror. Even in his son’s eyes he found only his own image.

  He pressed his hand over the reflection of his face, tired of seeing the weariness in his eyes, those first tired lines around his mouth, traces of an age that had come upon him without the years ever yielding to him what he had hoped for.

  A single gesture that changed his life… John stared in disbelief at the grey stone walls he saw in the Mirror. The carpet beneath his feet was gone, as was his desk. He stood on dusty floorboards, and when he turned around a raven returned his glance through fixed beady eyes. The bird was perched on a weathered window ledge. When John approached, it let out a hoarse caw and fluttered off.

  He stood at the window and looked down at wooded hills under a pale blue sky, with white clouds drifting across like pollen. He would carry these first images with him forever: the outlines of the church towers in the distance, the red-roofed houses, like patches of clay scattered amidst the green. And the scorched walls beneath the window.

  Impossible.

  His mind could only find this one helpless word to describe what he was seeing. Nothing he’d ever learned could explain it. All he knew was that this was everything he wished for:

  Another world where he could forget the man he’d seen in the Mirror. A place where he might reinvent that man.

  The Treasure Hunter

  How to find work when you’re only twelve and don’t speak more than a few words of Austrian?

  In truth, no one cared that Jacob barely found his way through a complete sentence. First he tried the stables. He was afraid of the horses, but he would have to get rid of that fear anyway if he wanted to live in this world. Coaches, carts, ploughs… horses moved this world. There was no way around them. After a few weeks he had learned to not get kicked or bitten. There was even a stallion who liked him and let him climb on his back when Lucas, the main stable hand, wasn’t watching. Saddles and bridles… mysterious things for a boy who had been raised in a city that was ruled by concrete and cars. His hands had just stopped growing calluses from the shovels when the owner fired Lucas, because he had caught him with his daughter behind the coaches. The new hand was friendlier than Lucas and not as foul-mouthed. Balthus Gans never stole the others’ wages and food, as Lucas had done when he’d spent all his money on girls and beer. But Balthus Gans liked young boys. He liked them so much that Jacob lay awake at night to listen for his steps. He liked Balthus, but not that much. So no stables anymore.

  For a while he slept behind the railway station and earned a few coins carrying suitcases and bags. One morning he woke with a constable’s boot on his rather empty stomach. Titus Pferdschlaechter had quite a reputation in Schwanstein for kicking drunks and arresting men whose clothes or haircuts he didn’t like. The constable had broken a strike of the workers at the weavery singlehandedly by waiting in front of their houses and frightening their children and wives. Yes, Pferdschlaechter took his duties very seriously. He covered Schwanstein’s walls with the pictures of anarchists, burglars and highwaymen, and suspected every troll or dwarf to be a criminal. He was suspicious of every foreigner who came to Schwanstein and he was six feet six tall, with shoulders that barely fit through a door and hands the size of frying pans.

  “Listen, you skinny little rat,” he hissed at Jacob while dragging him away from the doorstep by the neck. “I don’t know where you come from. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but something is. I smell it. So don’t let me catch you lurking around in the streets again, or I’ll deliver you myself to the workhouse. Understood?”

  Jacob had learned enough words at the stables to understand very well. And he had heard about the workhouse, filled with the poor, with orphans, cripples, and madmen.

  “Try the factories,” said the grocer who hung dead Thumblings in his shop window to prevent the street urchins from stealing his food. But the factories meant twelve hours of work per day getting deaf from the noise of the machines. Not exactly what Jacob had come to find behind the Mirror.

  The Innkeeper paid even less than the stable owner. Jacob wiped tables that stank of beer and cheap wine, got little sleep, and could sometimes barely breathe the smoke filled air. But within a few nights he learned more about the MirrorWorld than he had learned during all his weeks at the stables. You cannot listen while you learn to saddle a horse or clean up behind their hooves. But oh, the stories he heard while clearing away dirty glasses and scrubbing spit and vomit from the floor! He heard soldiers talk about battles against the armies of Albion, and about hunting the Goyl. He heard salesmen curse the cunning of Dwarves, and describe the riches of Lotheraine and Lombardia. Men sobbed into their beer because they had dreamt of a Fairy. Hunters brought prey from the Hungry Forest, weird creatures that killed a man with one sting or whose claws were worth a solid gold coin. A tailor from Vena described the Empress’ robes. A man whose face was covered with scars described the dangers of hunting for the glass hair of Genies in the north. Women, as beautiful as Fairies (well, they were not, but he found that out much later) climbed onto the counter and sang songs of Nymphs and Lorelei while the drunken men threw coins and themselves at their feet.

  Oh, he loved it. He didn’t mind the smells, the dirt and the sleepless nights. Maybe he knew already that one of these nights would change his life and grant him everything he’d hoped to find behind the Mirror.

  It was almost midnight when Albert Chanute walked into the Schwanstein Inn. There were not many guests left in the dark bar room, just a weaver who had lost his job and didn’t dare go home and tell his family, the old postman who couldn’t sleep since his mail coach had been attacked by brown wolves, and three men who came almost every night to play cards until one of them left in his underwear.

  When Jacob saw Chanute’s ugly face emerge from the night, he first thought that he’d finally met his first troll. He had just heard about them and had painted a picture in his mind that came quite close to the man who walked in with a Goyl rifle in his hand, a brown wolf’s pelt around his shoulders, two pistols and a knife in his silver belt.

  Chanute gave Jacob a shrewd smile when he walked past him. He loved to be admired and stared at, as Jacob would soon find out. He loved to hear that he was the best, the toughest, the most cunning man in all of MirrorWorld, and he heard it quite often in those days — his glory days — even from the Empress of Austry. That night he’d come from the Hungry Forest where he’d sear
ched for a magic ring whose bearer had last been seen riding into the forest, never to emerge again.

  “I’m sure he’s a pair of pants by now,” Chanute growled while he threw a golden coin onto the counter. “I cursed the Tailor’s name a dozen times and yelled that he should show me his workshop so that I could search for the damned ring among the remains of his victims, but he wouldn’t show. Well, no one wants to mess with Albert Chanute.”