MIRRORS

The clock on the wall behind Doctor Friend's desk had stopped. I noticed it the moment I sat down, the way you notice things that confirm what you already know. Time is a lie that the living tell themselves. Tick tock. The hands frozen at 3:03.

"How are you feeling today, Sam?"

Friend looked older than his thirty-five years. His hair had receded early and gone grey, and those deep brown eyes tracked me as I settled into the chair on the opposite side of his antique mahogany desk. The kind of man who would stare at his own reflection in the mirror and smile. A dangerous habit.

"How should I feel, Doc?"

"Are you evading, Sam?"

"It's a rhetorical question." I kept my tone flat, indifferent. "You have to ask how I feel. It's in your notes, your process. Are you asking for effect, or do you genuinely want an answer."

Friend adjusted his glasses and sat forward. "You know, Sam, recovery is not a linear process. The medication can manage symptoms, but it won't make the illness disappear. I can't help you, though, if you won't let me in."

His empathy was almost disarming. He wanted in, and he had no idea what he would find there, crouching in the dark.

"At our last session," he continued, consulting the file, "we discussed some of the dreams. The nightmares."

I allowed myself a thin smile. "Those nasty glimpses into the dark." I lowered my eyes, then raised them again and held his gaze until the silence became uncomfortable. "Like looking into a mirror and then walking down a street that feels familiar and yet wrong. Distorted buildings, keystoned, leaning into each other, foreboding and utterly silent. And as I walk along this street, a shadow appears on the far side of the road and it begins. Tick tock. Tick tock."

I stopped. Behind Friend's head hung a reproduction of Dalí's Persistence of Memory. The melting clocks. A private joke between me and the universe.

"And then I wake up," I said. "Strange thing is, I can't move. And that shadow from the dream is standing right there, in the corner of the room."

Friend scribbled something in his notebook. "Tell me about the mirrors, Sam."

I shifted in the chair. The tapping of my foot against the floor began without my permission and I stilled it. "How do you know about that?"

"Your wife mentioned it. Before she died. She was concerned, Sam. She said you'd been breaking them. Every mirror in the house."

I let the grin come. Just a ghost of one, enough to make him wonder. "What can I say, Doctor Friend. I don't like mirrors."

His brows furrowed. He crossed his arms. "And what is it, exactly, about looking into a mirror that frightens you?"

I leaned forward. Let him see my eyes. Let him look and look and still not understand.

"It's not about looking into them, Doc. It's about what's looking out."

***

Hannah was in the kitchen when I came through the door, standing at the window with her back to me, watching the last of the daylight drain from the garden. The boy's drawings were spread across the table, bright wax shapes on white paper, and I glanced at them as I set down my bag. Houses, trees, a yellow sun. And in each one, standing in every window, a tall dark figure with no face. She did not turn when she heard me. She had stopped turning months ago.

"He said it again today." Her voice was flat and careful, the way a person speaks when they have decided that what they are about to say will not be believed but they are going to say it anyway. "He told his teacher that the man in the mirror looks like his daddy but isn't his daddy."

I set down my bag and crossed to the bureau and poured a scotch. The kitchen was cold. The heating had been on all day and the kitchen was cold and Hannah did not seem to notice.

"He's six years old, Hannah. He has an imagination."

"He's afraid of you." She said it without inflection. A statement of fact, delivered to the window. "He won't say it, but I can see it. He flinches when you come into his room. He sleeps with the covers over his head so he doesn't have to look at the door."

I drank the scotch in one swallow and poured a second. Through the doorway I could see the hallway mirror, or what remained of it. She had covered it with a bedsheet three weeks ago and I had not removed it. Every mirror in the house was the same, draped in white linen, and the house looked like a place where someone had died and no one had told the furniture.

"And the mirrors," she continued, her fingers tightening on the edge of the counter until the knuckles blanched. "I covered them because you broke them, Sam, but that's not why I keep them covered." She turned then, and her eyes were red and the skin beneath them was dark with sleeplessness and when she looked at me it was with the guarded, searching expression of a woman who was no longer certain that she knew the man standing in her kitchen. "I keep them covered because of what I saw. Standing behind you. Looking out."

My hand tightened on the glass.

"Tick tock," the boy said from the doorway.

I turned to find him standing there in his pyjamas, his eyes wide and fixed on something behind me that I couldn’t see or chose not to see. Hannah crossed the kitchen and picked him up and held him to her chest and carried him away without another word.

I stood alone in the kitchen with the scotch and the cold and the covered mirror in the hallway and the sheet hanging still and undisturbed over the glass beneath it.

***

Steam curled towards the ceiling and the tiles wept with moisture. The shower dripped behind me as I reached for the towel and wrapped it around my waist.

I wiped an arc through the misted glass with my fingers and stared at my reflection.

Only for a second. Then I turned away.

You can do this, I told myself. There's nothing there.

I raised my eyes again.

They were there, sly shapes at the margins of sight, sliding into the periphery, growing closer, and the whispers came with them. At a tree near the river, there's a hole in the ground. Tick tock, tick tock.

My fist hit the mirror before the thought completed itself. The glass fractured into three clean shards and the whispering stopped.

"Shit." I turned on the tap and ran cold water over the blood until it ran clear. My hand was shaking. I looked at the fractured glass where three separate versions of my face looked back, none of them quite the same, none of them quite right.

I went downstairs and poured scotch and drank until the trembling stopped. The house was quiet. Hannah was asleep, or pretending to be, and the only sound was the tick of the hallway clock and the faint creak of the floorboards settling under my weight as I sat in the chair in the dark with the glass balanced on my knee.

The thought that kept circling was this: the mirror did not break because I was afraid.

It broke because something in the fractured glass had smiled at me, and I had smiled back.

***

I woke at 3:03. The clock on the bedside table said so before the digits flickered and died and the hallway light went black and the house fell into a silence so complete that it had weight.

Hannah's side of the bed was cold. I lay still and listened. Something moved downstairs, a creak of floorboard, the soft brush of bare feet on wood, and then the boy's voice, small and clear in the dark.

"Mummy, the mirror's talking."

I rose and crossed to the door and stood at the top of the stairs and listened. Below me the hallway was black save for a pale glow from the living room where the sheet had slipped from the mirror and lay pooled on the floor like shed skin. The glass beneath was bare and luminous in the dark and I could hear it, a faint sound beneath the silence, a tick tock tick tock that might have been the hallway clock and might have been something else entirely. Hannah stood before the uncovered glass in her nightgown, the boy pressed against her leg, and she was staring into the reflection with the rigid, trembling focus of a woman who could not look away from what she was seeing.

I descended the stairs. My bare feet made no sound on the wood, none at all. Hannah didn’t hear me until I stood behind her and my reflection joined hers in the uncovered glass. She heard me and turned. When our eyes met the expression on her face was one I had never seen before, or perhaps had seen a thousand times and had never learned to read. Fear is a language I have heard spoken on every mortal tongue and I have never once understood a word of it.

"There's something wrong with your reflection," she whispered. Her voice broke on the last word. "Sam, there's something wrong with your reflection."

I looked into the mirror. My face looked back. And behind my face, deeper in the glass where the hallway should have continued in faithful reproduction, something shifted in the dark. Something tall and featureless, wearing a long coat and a broad-brimmed hat. It raised one hand as if in greeting, and I raised mine. Our palms met on opposite sides of the glass, and the glass was cold and wet beneath my fingers.  

The boy buried his face in Hannah's leg and would not look.

I turned away from the mirror. "There's nothing there," I said. "Go back to bed."

She did not go back to bed. She took the boy into his room and locked the door.  I heard her weeping through the walls, muffled and wretched and afraid, until the dawn came grey and thin through the curtains and the weeping stopped and the house was quiet.

***

"I still see her," I told Friend at our next session.

"Your wife is dead, Sam. You need to let her go." He let the pen slip from his fingers. "Is that who you see in the mirror?" he asked, and there was something in his voice that had not been there before. Something careful.

"At first she was just a shadow," I said, and I met his gaze and held it. "At the very second of her death. I didn't recognise it for what it was, no more than you would notice a shadow on a sunny day. And the voices whispered. I tried not to listen, just like you said."

I paused. Let him lean forward. Let him think he was getting somewhere.

"She was a shadow in the mirror until one night it moved and reached its arms towards me. A cold hand pushed through the glass and gripped my wrist. I stumbled back and saw her outline on the wall, her hair dishevelled as it had been the night she walked into the river. I closed my eyes. It's just a shadow, I told myself. And when I opened them, she had slipped back into the glass, and I heard her scream. I thought it was a nightmare. Then I saw the puddle of water on the floor beneath the mirror."

Friend cleared his throat. "Sam, I think you may be suffering from sleep paralysis. People often experience hallucinations during these episodes. It's not uncommon with the kind of trauma you've experienced."

"More pills, Doc?"

"It's treatable, Sam."

I sat back and let him see the grin I had been holding in reserve. "I thought it was a nightmare too, until I saw her in the daylight." I watched his face. I watched the way his hand stilled over the page. "She had no shadow, Doc. Everyone has a shadow. Unless they're dead."

Friend closed the file. He removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose and when he put them back on and looked at me there was something new behind those deep brown eyes, something that had been growing session by session and that he had been too professional to name. He was frightened of me. He had been frightened of me for weeks, and the regression therapy he had designed to peel back the layers of my grief and find the broken man underneath had not found a broken man at all. Each session he dug deeper and each session the thing at the bottom of the well shifted and turned in the dark and looked up at him through my eyes, and he could see it now, the way Hannah had seen it, the way the boy had seen it in his crayon drawings, and he did not have a word for it in any of his textbooks. His hand was trembling as he gathered his notes.

"I think that's enough for today, Sam," he said.

I watched him leave. The door closed softly behind him and I sat in the chair and I smiled because he was right. It was enough. The therapy had done its work, though he would never understand how or what he had accomplished. Each session a crack in the mask, each memory he pried loose a bolt drawn back from a door that should have stayed shut. He had wanted in. He had no idea what he had let out.

***

I walked home through the empty streets as the light failed and the sky turned the colour of old iron. The house was dark when I arrived. It had been dark for a long time. The neighbours had left food on the porch in the first weeks and it had gone untouched and eventually they stopped coming and the curtains stayed drawn. The garden grew wild and the house settled into its grief the way houses do when the living leave them, slowly and completely, until even the walls forget what warmth was. Hannah's coat still hung by the door. The boy's shoes were still lined up beneath it, small and precise, the laces still tied the way she had tied them the morning before I took them to the river.

I went upstairs. I stood in the dark on the landing and I could hear the house breathing around me, the creak and settle of timber, the wind pressing at the windows, the silence where a woman's voice and a child's laughter should have been. I went into the bathroom. The mirror I had shattered was whole again. It was always whole. I uncovered it and I stood before it.

I looked, and what looked back wore my face. Beneath my face was the dark. Beneath the dark was something older than this house and this street and this city and the river into which I had called them, and watched them walk until the water closed above their heads.

And I would wait.

That is what we do, those of us who come through. We wait. We have waited a very long time, in the dark places behind the glass, in the cold space between reflections, watching your world through every mirror and every window and every still pool of water where the surface holds a face that is almost yours. The woman called Hannah understood, at the end. She covered every mirror in the house and told the doctors that the demon had come through, and they wrote it down as a symptom and gave her pills and told her she was ill. And when the pills could not silence what she knew to be true, they found her in the river with the boy still in her arms. I wore my grief the way I wear everything. Borrowed. Well-practised. Convincing enough to fool a man like Friend into believing he was treating sorrow when he was sitting across the table from the thing that caused it.

The man whose name I wear knew what I was. The real Sam. He came home one evening and found me standing in the hallway mirror where his reflection should have been. He stood in his own hallway with his coat still on and his keys in his hand. He stared at the thing in the glass that wore his face but wore it wrong, and the glass was cold and wet, and when he reached out I reached back. The mirror swallowed him whole. I stepped out wearing his skin and his name and the warmth of his blood and drew breath with his lungs. His wife called from the kitchen asking if he wanted tea, and I said yes, and no one ever knew the difference.

Mirror, mirror on the wall.

Tick tock.

There are more of us than you think. We are patient and we are quiet and we are everywhere the glass holds a reflection. Every mirror you have ever looked into has looked back. Every darkened window, every puddle, every polished surface where your face assembles itself from light and angle and the fragile assumption that the thing staring back at you, is you.

It’s 3:03 in the morning. Go and look in the mirror.

I dare you.