Black Mirror II

Mosaic Piece 1

You can go after the first piece of the mosaic directly. The raven’s nest is atop the well near the stables. (You can reach this either by going left from the portico or out the kitchen door.) Take the ladder to the left of the stable door and use it on the well.

However, the raven’s going to fight off any attempt to get at its nest and you’ll have to distract it first. 

Remember your conversation with Ralph. It likes shiny things. You don’t have anything shiny, but you can take a teaspoon from the counter in front of the cupboard at the right side the kitchen. (Use the right exit from the main hall.)  

The spoon can’t be used directly on the raven. You’re going to have to secure it somewhere to keep the critter occupied while you retrieve the mosaic piece, and you don’t have anything suitable for this purpose. 

Eleanor does. She was knitting before your earlier conversation. Either in the full-room scene or the closeup, simply left-click twice on the knitting basket at her feet to secure a bit of yarn (“thread”) with her blessing. Use the thread on the spoon and then the “Spoon on thread” on the stairs to the right of the big stable door. The bird flies down to grab at the spoon and Darren now can climb the ladder to the nest and mosaic piece without further obstruction.

Mosaic Piece 2

You’ll find the clue from Angelina’s note ( “Maximillian Mortimer Gordon”) engraved on the stone plate on the pedestal at the center of the main hall. Presumably the mosaic piece is behind it. But Darren doesn’t have the tools for this operation — you can try the knife from the lighthouse, but it’s not sturdy enough — and in any case he can’t go to work with the two old ladies in attendance.

Distraction? Distraction. Enter the kitchen . On the stove in the far corner, you’ll find a teapot. Left-click on it twice and, provided you’ve checked out the plaque in the main hall, Darren will suggest ringing for teatime. As you may have intuited from the tea table in the library (through the main hall’s left exit ), the ladies have their cup in there. 

But a third left-click with a view to taking the pot is greeted with alarm by the maid Sally, who lets drop in the process that fact that Bates has gone into Willow Creek for some fresh tea. Darren won’t be able to claim the teapot until Sally is out of the kitchen. 

Distraction? Distraction. If you’ve been upstairs, you doubtless noticed the highly polished bathroom floor. Look at it and Darren marvels at the work required. What if you were to get it dirty? Take the rubber boots beside the kitchen’s rear entrance and use them on the muddy patch beside the base of the ladder out at the stables. Then take the muddy boots upstairs and use them to foul the bathroom floor.  Now tell Sally about it (via the “dirty bathroom” topic). She runs off and Darren can take the teapot. Drop the pot on the tea table at the left side of the library and Darren hatches a plot to venture into Willow Creek for some tea — first luring the Order to the hotel. Phones were notable in their absence from the castle in the original The Black Mirror, but now there are two — one on the right side of the library and the other on a bureau in the upstairs hall. Use either to call Murray with the news that Darren will be checking out.  

Odds & ends: In the library, reached via the left exit from the main hall, take a picture of the Gordon family tree at the far right to unlock picture #12.

Then off to the village — both to spy on Bates and to collect the tea. The spying part is automatic. Darren arrives near the museum, spots Bates coming from the library — not exactly a likely source of fresh tea — and follows him  to a rendezvous with Tom outside the Three Kegs Inn. Tom’s off to find Order leader Valley.

Which is convenient, because Darren now needs to get into Tom’s locked pub — the only place in town likely to have anything resembling tea. Use Tom’s own lockpick on the door — ah, the mocking laugh of fate! — just as you did on the lockboxes back at the hotel and take the tea from the table nearest the window. When you leave the building, you’ll jump straight back to the castle gate. Return to the library, use the tea on the tea table and, despite the reference to the missing hot water, pop back to the kitchen to ask Sally to announce that tea is served. When Darren returns to the main hall, he’ll find the ladies absent. Time to get to work.

You’ll quickly discover that, even with the old ladies off guzzling caffeine, you can’t do anything with the slab. It does seem as though the low fence around the globe must play some part — the cursor remains red even after you elicit its description — but no explicit hint is provided for your next step. 

However, if you’ve already been meticulous in your inspection of the castle, it stands to reason that the hint will appear in connection with some new feature — i.e. something activated by Darren’s having distracted Sally. 

That’d be in the bathroom. Left-click on the mirror for a vision of Samuel’s ghost and a second time after Darren smashes the mirror to verify that Samuel was holding a book and pointing at a particular tile on the opposite wall. 

Darren can’t dislodge this tile on his own, and you’re going to have to go looking for tools. Bet you have an idea where to find them. On each of our visits to the stables, we’ve found Louis working under the car — presumably not entirely with his bare hands. Sure enough, just right of the rear of the car (and almost invisible in the rain) is a toolbox. Inspect it and Darren grabs a hammer. Use this on the tile and Darren knocks it out, automatically reaches into the gap behind it and pulls out a page of William Gordon’s diary with some annotations by his grandson Samuel. 

Look at the page. The only part we can see is a drawing of six little pyramids — the second, fourth and fifth from the front crossed out. These correspond to the ornaments atop the little fence around the pedestal. Return there and click on the fence to discover that the pyramids can now be depressed. Darren automatically does this to the nearest one. That’s not among the ones pictured, so left-click on it to raise it again, depress the three crossed out on the diary page, activate the stone slab with a left-click to open it and reach inside to claim the second mosaic piece.

Mosaic Piece 3

The diary reports that Darren has no idea where the third piece is hidden.

But you do by now, don’t you? If you tried the locked double doors in the lower left-hand corner of the main hall while the ladies were present, Victoria warned you off. And if questioned about them, Sally reports that Bates angrily told her off when he caught her listening at there. Twenty-four years after the fire, this all speaks more to a hidden secret than an actual danger.
  
The diary pushes you toward Bates, who has retired to his room on Victoria’s instructions. You can question him and get a lot of good background info. But he’s loyal to a fault on the whole “fire damage” story and you’ll get only the party line. 

Instead, just decoy him out of his room. Head for the bathroom, take the head of the mop Sally left behind, stuff it in the bathtub drain and turn on the water. Then tell Bates and Sally (in either order; it doesn’t matter) the bathroom is flooding and enter Bates’s room, 

Left-click twice on the bedpost above the medical gear on the bed to extract a small key. Use it on the top drawer of the dresser in the corner. You’ll find a locked metal box that uses symbols in its combination lock, another photo of Darren’s mother outside Black Mirror’s gate (this one taken of a slim young woman in December 1969 — two months before Darren’s birth) and documents that include transfers matching the ones in Ms. Michaels’s bank book, Right-click on the documents to extract a four-part memory-aid for the combination to the box and again on the memory-aide to read it. It consists of four references that Bates used to remind himself of the correct symbols.    

“The nymphs’ numbers:” We’ll start here because it’s where Darren starts after his exit from Bates’s room.

Voluptuous naked women make four appearances at Black Mirror and each is now numbered. The painting in the upstairs hallway is marked with the Roman numeral XVIII (18) while the three statues at the gate (from left to right) display numerals for 20, 19 and 1. 

Once you’ve left-clicked on all four locations, Darren weighs the possibilities and finally translates the numbers into the letters A, R, S and T which, rearranged, spell out “Star.” (Shame we’re not allowed to do it ourselves.) 

“On Sir Egmont’s portrait:” The “portrait” part is bound to confuse. The castle is full of pictures. But none of them have anything to so with an “Egmont.”

Sally, now back in the kitchen, is  your contact on this one. But she won’t help you until “Inspector Falk” has helped her brother with his speeding tickets. Darren figures he can just pretend to help Rupert Wood and put one over on her. 

It’s a little tricky. At this stage, a call to directory assistance (only available via the upstairs hall phone) will establish that there are 18 Rupert Woods in England. Naturally, you’ll want to narrow that down and here Bates is your man. He’s now on the sofa at the upper side of the main hall and, at one remove from the original question about Sir Egmont, it’s fine to talk to him on this topic. Ask him about “Speeding ticket” and he says Sally’s family has a farm in Sussex.

Armed with this info, use that upstairs phone to reach the Sussex Rupert directly. With a bit of deception, Darren establishes that his age is 34. 

Back for another chat with Sally. Darren’s knowing Rupert’s address and age convinces her “Falk” has done as she asked and she reveals that Sir Egmont’s is a a brand of breakfast cereal — its emblem a small cross.

“The builder’s eldest sister:” Victoria can get you started on this.  Go see her in the library and ask about “Builder.” She’ll offer that the builder most responsible for Black Mirror’s current appearance was Frederic Arthur Gordon. Then check the family tree on the room’s right side and left-click on the centrally-located pairing of Frederic Arthur and Andrea to learn that the oldest of Fred’s four sisters was named Rose.  

“My Christian name:”  Tough one. No one seems to know it — not Victoria, not Eleanor, not Sally. (She loathes Bates and suggests “Lucifer.”) Asking isn’t an option with Louis and of course you can’t ask Bates himself. 

The diary suggests the name might be written down. Did you notice the mailbox between the two gates at the entrance? Empty before, it now contains a letter. The envelope is addressed simply to “Mr. Bates” but the contents — a bill for a gravestone (as the medical gear in his room suggests, Bates is dying) — reveal that his given name is “Edward Bartholomew.”

Darren’s unclear how that will translate itself into a symbol, but Victoria knows the story of the apostle St. Bartholomew — a martyr who was skinned alive and whose symbol is thus a knife. 

With all four symbols now noted in the diary, get back up the Bates’s room, left-click on the box on the dresser and plug in the symbols — starting at the top with the cross and working clockwise with rose, knife and star. Inside, a key and half a locket containing a picture of Darren at 3 or 4. Only it’s marked “Adrian ” (of which “Darren” might be a glaringly imperfect anagram).   

The large key opens the double doors in the lower left corner of the castle’s main hall. (Bates has vanished from the hall and seemingly from the game.) Darren enters automatically and follows the corridor beyond to a large disused room with a spooky mirror frame at the far end. A second left-click reveals a mechanism at the bottom that seems to want a small ball. 

No such ball here. However, you can take a “wooden plate” from the floor beside the covered picture leaning against the right wall. When Darren picks it up, he suggests it goes with a game and reports that “Ralph” is written on the back. 

Odds & ends: Take a picture of the mirror to unlock picture #11 — a shot of Darren and Samuel that appears nowhere in the game. (It was used in early promotional materials.)

Return to the Academy and talk to Ralph about the plate. He’ll turn over the rest of the game and say he received it from a “a nice lady.”  “I couldn’t recognize her,” says Ralph, “but Mr. Bubby says she is ‘a holy one’.” 

Odds & ends: “Couldn’t” being the operative word.

The game is unplayable in its broken condition, but use the plate on the sliding tile puzzle and it proves to be the missing piece. Darren automatically sets about solving it.

The Sliding-Tile Puzzle

This is a different type from the one that unlocked the roll-top desk back in Biddeford. No picture. And no randomness. Here you arrange 15 pieces — eight silver ram heads and seven golden lion heads — so that the designated numbers of silver pieces appear in each column and gold pieces in each row.

It’s actually quite simple and can be completed in three discrete steps. Part of the solution (the left column) is already in place at the start and the remaining portion of the puzzle can be solved by simply rotating the pieces counter-clockwise in ever-smaller formations.

1) The top row must be all silver heads. Simple rotate border of the  the 4 x 3 array (i.e. the four right most out the golden heads here and bring in three silver heads — two from the rightmost column and one (when a vacant space appears above it) from the second row.

Afterwards, the puzzle should look like this:

2) With the top row and left column now in place, you’ve solved almost half the puzzle. Now we’re just going to rotate counter-clockwise the pieces around the rim of the 3 x 3 unsolved region to complete the second row.

Stop when the puzzle looks like this:

 3) Finally, just rotate counter-clockwise these five pieces ….

… until the puzzle looks like this:

When you move the final gold head into the third row, you’ll see you’ve exposed a recess beneath the square in the lower-right corner. Within, a small steel ball. Take it, use it on the mirror in the castle old wing and left- or right-click on the mirror to kick off a second puzzle.  

Ball Maze Puzzle

Here, you just have to enable the ball to reach the center of the five-ring maze by pressing the side buttons to lower the walls between rings at the appropriate times. This is beyond easy and gravity will do most of the work.

Press the round button at the lower left to release the ball. It’ll rotate clockwise between the two lowest openings between  the fifth and fourth  rings. 

You want to break up this go-nowhere cycle, so, as the ball approaches the entrance to the fourth ring, press the uppermost button on the left side of the maze. This lower the third wall from the center and changes the ball’s course. It now goes over the top of the maze, down the right side and then toward the middle. 

As the ball approaches the entrance to the innermost ring, press the lowest button on the right. The ball drops down the hole at the center and the mirror slides back to reveal an entrance. 

Use it to enter what appears to be the well-kept up room of a young girl. Left-click on the left drawer of the desk at the right to retrieve a music box and the third mosaic piece.

Odds & ends: Take a picture of the music box to unlock the final mini-game (#4: “Turning Discs”).

Your natural inclination will be to return to the Academy and insert the mosaic pieces in the plinth — and you can’t. Try and Darren says “This room … it holds the answers:” Something remains undone. Left-click on the music box. Darren has a fit of some kind and falls into a restless sleep.