The Mirror

by Simon Whitechapel

“What I say three times is true.”

She didn’t forget and at lunch she popped down to the depot. She couldn’t remember ever having been there before. No, she definitely hadn’t. Rose-bay willowherb nodded over the low wall that separated the road from some quite extensive wasteland. Why it never been developed? It looked like an old, overgrown bomb-site, willowherb, buddleia, nettle, some yellow flower she didn’t recognize. Something chinked like a little hammer from one of the thickets and she shivered involuntarily, remembering an illustration in one of the books she had owned as a child. A dwarf working gold for a princess. But it was a thrush breaking a snail on a stone, she thought. No dwarf. No gold.

Inside the depot she produced her card at the undelivered-mail counter and a gloomy-looking middle-aged attendant went away with it. Counting the days till his retirement, she thought. When he returned, her eyes widened in surprise. He was carrying a triangular package with a hand on each of two sharp corners, with the third and final corner tucked under his chin. She had the impression that that his body had vanished behind the package, so that only his head and legs and shoulders and hands remained.

He reached the counter and slid the package flat, the apex sliding down his body between his breasts and over the bulge of his belly. His entrails. The package was strong, well-taped cardboard and was obviously padded, with the address sellotaped to it on a rectangular white card.

“Okay, love?”

She nodded distractedly. What was it? A painting? Even if it was a mistake she was going to take this home and open it, explain later, if she ever had to. But when she looked at the address, it was hers, in big, loose-looped handwriting she didn’t recognize.

“Yes, thanks,” she said, and looked up. But the attendant was gone. Forgetting him, she bent forward, looking for the postmark. It was smudged but she could make up the date, 19^th July, two days before, and the letters xet. The name was too long for Exeter. Uttoxeter? Wroxeter? But who did she know there? She reached out and pulled the package towards her, relieved to discover that it was much lighter than it looked. Than the way the attendant had carried it made it look.

But maybe... No, when she slid it off the counter and held it as he had done, a hand on two corners, the third corner under her chin, it felt awkward but not heavy. She could easily get it back to the office, though she’d feel a little foolish getting it to the third floor and everyone would want to know what it was. She turned and carried it towards the door. Ow. The point under her chin was digging into her a little. She shifted her head to one side, resting the apex on her shoulder. Yeah, that was the way. But carrying it down the road past the wasteland, she stumbled on a rough patch of pavement. Concentrate, she told herself. You don’t want to drop the bloody thing. But she realized that part of her attention was flowing sideways, into the wasteland, waiting for another hammer-like chink. A thrush breaking a snail on a stone. That’s what it was.

By the time she had passed the wasteland she had reached her decision. She wasn’t taking it back to the office. She couldn’t face it. Everyone would want to know what it was and she’d look foolish or secretive if she said she didn’t know or pretended she didn’t want to tell. She thought she’d end up opening it too, surrendering to the curiosity of her colleagues, and God knew what might be revealed. Maybe a joke. Maybe something malicious. No, she wouldn’t take it to the office, she’d take it home and open it in privacy. There was a phone-box at the end of the road. She left the package propped up against it as she phoned, on the side opposite from the high street and its pedestrians.

The door closed solidly, sealing her in. The air inside smelt hot and stale and there was a bluebottle buzzing feebly on its back on the wooden strut of one of the windows. She slipped her 10p into the slot and dialled, idly reading the graffito scratched into the glass above it. Must have been a sharp knife. No, a diamond. On a ring. FAITH HOPE CLARITY, it said.

“Hi, Marj,” she said when her manager came on the line. No, not CLARITY, CHARITY. Of course. “Look, I’m sorry about this but can I... Yeah... Yeah, the usual... Yeah... Thanks, Marge... Yeah, no problem. ’Bye.”

She replaced the handset, having to shake it into position, and the fly buzzed again, as though disturbed by the movement. Dirty bloody thing. But she didn’t like the thought of it dying in the enclosed heat. Forcing down her disgust, she picked it up between thumb and forefinger and carried it out, having to push hard with her shoulder at the door. Outside she dropped the fly on the palm of her other hand. It lay with its legs waving in the air for a moment and then dragged itself upright. Oh, it wasn’t a bluebottle after all. Looked more like a beetle, somehow. The cooler air outside the phone-box was obviously reviving it quickly. She puffed on it and then jerked a little with surprise.

Because it had gone, leaving her palm almost too fast for her eye to follow, but the buzz of its wings, much higher-pitched in flight, lingered in her ears, making them feel curiously full. Like coming back from the swimming-pool as a kid with water trapped there. Waiting for the pop and the warm little gush. She picked up the package and carried it to nearest bus-stop, hoping no-one coming back to the office late from lunch saw her. Marge was easy-going and good about time off, but there were limits. Still, if the package were something good, even a row would be worth it. It wouldn’t go down on her file, after all.

On the bus she bought two tickets and propped the package against the window before sitting beside it on the aisle. At the three stops before she got off she watched all the incoming passengers carefully, but only one of them glanced at the package. Just for a moment, and he didn’t sit near her. Now it was her stop. She glanced back, but he wasn’t getting off. Stop fussing, she told herself. Or someone will read your body-language and think you are carrying something valuable. But then maybe she was.

Only thirty yards to her front door, then twenty seconds while she propped the package against the wall and got out her keys. Then she was inside, sighing with relief, and setting the package down on the hall table under the mirror and locking the door behind her and walking, almost trotting into the kitchen for her strongest pair of scissors. The air in the kitchen felt hot, reminding her of the phone-box, and she made a mental note to water the flowers on the windowsill. But not just yet. There’s a package to open and inspect.

Absurdly, her heart was beating faster as she went back into the hall. She snapped the scissors ahead of her, trying to cut the thread of tension, telling herself not to get her hopes up. It was a joke or a mistake after all, a wrong address. Her name wasn’t that uncommon, after all. But her heart was still beating fast, making her a little breathless, when she reached the package again and set to work with the scissors. There was no obvious place to start opening it, so she cut into one of the corners, then along an edge, then tugged the strip of cardboard away.

There. The package was open, but whatever was inside had been wrapped in newspaper. Maybe that would give her a clue to where it had been posted. She cut into the newspaper, tore a strip of it away, and a fingerslength of dark wood was exposed. She tore more of the newspaper away, exposing more dark wood. The frame of a painting? Would the thing slide out still in its wrapping? She tried and grunted faintly with satisfaction. It slid out of the package easily, almost sweetly. But she wouldn’t learn anything from the newspaper: it seemed to be a national, The Sunday Spectator. Now the thing was fully out and her heart was beating fast again. All she had to do was tear the newspaper away and she would know what it was.

But she denied herself a few moments longer, looking up at the mirror above the table and sticking out her tongue at the look of interest and excitement on her face. A comma of hair was stuck to her forehead, and she pulled it loose. Well? She worked her way through the full thickness of newspaper with her fingernails, took a good hold, and tore a big strip away. For a moment she couldn’t understand what she had revealed, then she laughed. It was a reflection of the ceiling. Yes — she tore more newspaper away — a reflection of the ceiling, because what she had been sent was a mirror. A triangular mirror in a dark wooden frame carved with blossom-laden branches along one edge, fruit-laden branches along another, and bare branches, with one withered leaf, along the third. Spring, summer, winter. Or maybe autumn.

How old was it? Was there an eccentric millionaire out there, mailing priceless antiques to strangers? She leaned over it, looking down into its depths, moving her head forward and back, left and right to test it for flaws, so that the loosened comma of hair shook on her forehead. Nothing. Very carefully she lifted the mirror and turned it over, looking for a date or a hallmark it whatever it was mirrors had, and discovered that in the paler wood of its reverse there were recessed legs and oh, an envelope held to the wood by sellotape. She pulled it loose. It had her name on it, Valerie, in the same handwriting as the address on the package.

She shook the envelope a little, then carefully opened it. There was a slim booklet inside with a picture of the triangular mirror on it above the words TALESEN. Nothing else. She opened the booklet and leafed through it, noticing that the pages opened easily, as though it had been read many times before. She didn’t recognize the language, but the booklet seemed to be instructions for using the mirror. The pictures were clear enough, though, at least towards the beginning, where a series of three showed how to put the legs up so that the mirror was standing upright as an inverted triangle, tilted backwards a little. She looked at the pictures carefully, then set to work. If she pulled that leg out first and then adjusted it to meet that one, then... yes, that was it... then adjusted that one and lifted the mirror so, yes...

And now the mirror was standing upright in front of her, tilted backwards a little so that her face looked up at her out of it, faintly flushed with excitement, the heat of the day, and her earlier exertion. A triangular mirror. That was unusual, if nothing else was. But now the face in the mirror frowned a little. There was writing on the frame along the top among the fruit-laden branches. She leaned closer, trying to make it out. The script was stylized and looked nineteeth-century. Full of curlicules and arabesques. Hard to read. But she thought it was JADOPEK. No, JADOREK. She looked along the other edges and sure enough, among the blossom-laden branches she found INUTEMA, and among the bare branches VANAPOL.

What did the words mean? She looked at the instruction booklet again. Oh, there was a picture of the mirror with little arrows pointing to the three edges. The arrows were marked JADOREK, INUTEMA, VANAPOL, and other arrows seemed to indicate that the mirror could turn to bring any of the edges to the top. She tried it, pushing at one sharp corner, and the mirror swung clockwise to bring the INUTEMA edge to the top. There. With a click it was done and she smiled and shrieked. There was no face in the mirror any more: just the wall and part of the ceiling. She leaned close, heart pounding, leaned back, waving her hands, shifted the mirror from side to side. The reflection moved serenely, correctly, completely, but for the fact that she wasn’t in it. She tried to turn the mirror on to VANAPOL, but it wouldn’t move, so she turned it back to JADOREK, and click, there was her face again, flushed deeper and looking scared.

The sight of it helped calm her. It must be some sort of joke, some game someone was playing with her. A trick mirror. Wasn’t that a standard part of magic? Trick magic, not the other stuff. Because the other stuff wasn’t real. She tried to turn the mirror anti-clockwise (widdershins) to VANAPOL and it moved easily, but the click as it locked into place blew her face out like a candle. Only wall and ceiling again. She swallowed, trying to feel calm. It must be a trick mirror. Maybe it didn’t reflect what was closest to it. She stepped away from it, waving her hands in front of her, but when her back hit the wall nothing had appeared. And now that she looked...

She came forward again to peer closely into the reflection in the mirror. The light was different. Dimmer. She looked behind herself at the wall and ceiling, then back into the mirror. The shadows were the same size and shape, but less pronounced. Because the light was different. She tried to turn the mirror on to INUTEMA, but it refused and she had to turn it back again, seeing her face spring back at her with the click of JADOREK, then snuff out again with the click of INUTEMA. And yes, here too the shadows were the same but the light was different, though more subtly so. Not dimmer, she thought, but slightly stronger.

Magick, a voice said inside her head. Yes, a trick mirror, she told it. Magick, the voice insisted. Her stomach lurched and she had to cram her fist into her mouth and bite on it hard to stop being sick. Magick, the voice said again, then was silent. The reflection in the mirror stared back at her innocently, serenely, obscenely. She wanted to turn it back to JADOREK, but couldn’t make herself move. The thought of touching it made her stomach lurch again, and this time she had to turn and run for the bathroom.

After she had finished being sick into the lavatory, she started to push herself back to her feet, wanting to wash her face at the sink. But when she was back on her feet she stopped where she stood. A mirror sat above the sink and she had the thought that turning the triangular mirror on the hall-table had... infected all the mirrors in the house. So that this one too no longer reflected sanely. She stared at its foreshortened rectangle, trying to read the light in it, then advanced, holding a hand out in front of her. The wave of relief as she saw the hand appear in the mirror, then her arm, then her frightened face, streaked with tears, almost made her throw up again.

She ran cold water and washed her face, the skin crawling on the back of her neck as she wondered whether she would raise her head to find that she had vanished from the mirror. She turned off the tap and raised her head cautiously. Ah, no, there her face was again, a wet oval in the mirror, looking less frightened now. She dried her face on a towel, happy for once with its cheap roughness, because the sensation somehow sewed her back into reality. Then she slowly returned to the triangular mirror in the hall. Her heart was thumping as she approached it, but she felt that she could touch it now.

Yes, she could. She turned it back to JADOREK and there (click) was her face again. She had an explanation for the emptiness of INUTEMA and VANAPOL now. If the mirror was magick — she paused a moment, but the voice in her stayed smugly silent — well, if it was magick, then they were reflecting different times. The shadows were the same but the light was different because INUTEMA reflected a day into the past, JADOREK reflected the present, and VANAPOL reflected a day into the future. That’s why you had to turn the mirror through JADOREK to get from one to the other. Because you can only get from the past to the future by going through the present. And vice versa. She laughed. The mirror was worth a fortune, because all she had to do—

She screamed a little. The phone was ringing on the table beside the mirror. She picked it up.

“Hello?... Oh, Marge, you gave me a shock... Yeah... yeah... Oh, much better, thanks... Yeah, should be... Okay... Thanks... You too. ’Bye.”

She put the phone down. She’d have to be back in work again tomorrow, but if her theory was correct, at a quarter past six today she would see herself in the mirror when it was turned to VANAPOL. She went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea, smiling at the contrast with what sat on her hall-table. Making tea with a magick mirror in the house. She took the cup back to the mirror and stood in front of it, sipping. If her theory was correct, she was on the verge of making a huge fortune. All she had to do was hold up the football or racing results one day and read them in the mirror the day before when it was turned to VANAPOL. Any sports results. She could make perfect bets time after time — but no, that wouldn’t be sensible. She’d have to do this carefully, so as not to create suspicion.

She put the tea down by the mirror and turned it to VANAPOL, wanting to see the light and shadow of tomorrow again. But with the click she had to throw her hand in front of her face, even with her eyes closed. The mirror was blazing with harsh silver light, almost stabbing with it, painful even through her closed eyelids. What was wrong? She turned her head away and groped for the mirror, taking hold of it and turning it back to JADOREK. The silver light of VANAPOL clicked out and there was her face again.

What had gone wrong? Maybe she’d be able to work it out from the booklet. She picked it up and took it with her tea into the living-room. The presence of the triangular mirror seemed to fill the house like a scent or the hum of a powerful motor and as she leafed through the booklet, trying to work out what all the pictures meant, she kept looking up at the ordinary mirror over the fireplace, checking that the light in it was right. At ten past six she went back into the hall and cautiously turned the mirror to VANAPOL, keeping her head turned away. That’s when she’d come home tomorrow with a paper, to test... Ow. The silver light sprang out at her again, stabbing her eyes through closed eyelids. What was wrong? Was it going to be impossible to take advantage of the mirror?

Even as she thought it, the silver light dimmed. She opened her eyes a crack. Was it going to work now- No, ow, the light was back again, blazing as fiercely as ever. Maybe it would be impossible after all. And with the thought the light dimmed again. She realized what was happening. The mirror would let her see the future if her purpose was pure. But what if her purpose were pure... and then she changed her mind? As though in answer, a picture near the middle of the booklet came into her mind. The mirror was shown cracking, showering splinters of glass. And that was the answer: if she cheated, the mirror would crack.

She opened her eyes a little again. The silver light was dimming and now she could see the mirror. How strange and beautiful it was! And how many owners before her must have resisted cheating, to allow it to come to her! The stabbing silver light was dimming further, and now she could see faint shapes and outlines through it.

“I promise,” she whispered. “I promise not to cheat. On my... on my mirror’s life.”

And now the reflection was almost free of the silver light, showing the wall and ceiling of her hall. She breathed out, realizing she had been holding her breath.

“I promise,” she whispered.

Now the reflection was clear and true, but suddenly she flinched. It had brightened again, but not with the silver light. Her door had opened and she had come home tomorrow. And there she was, coming into the reflection. But she felt her stomach lurch again at what she saw: she could only recognize herself by her body and clothes, because her head was an uneven sphere of the silver light, glittering sharply. Sometimes the silver light broke out on her body too, obscuring the outline of her body, breaking out on a breast or shoulder, and when the figure in the mirror lifted the newspaper it carried and held it up in front of the mirror its hands were infected with the light. Something was still wrong, even though she had promised not to cheat, but she could read the headline in the paper. UNION WARNING ON PAY DEAL.

She turned the mirror back to JADOREK and went back into the living-room. If only she could understand the writing in the booklet. Was it Turkish? Albanian? Before she went to bed, she copied three lines onto a slip of paper and the next day (“Much better, thanks”) at lunch she popped down to the library near the office.

“At a guess, love,” said the middle-aged female librarian, “I’d say Finnish. But just wait and I’ll ask Mr Halbeck. He did Latin or something, you know.”

But Mr Halbeck, despite his Latin, was unable to identify it either, though he was certain it wasn’t Turkish or Albanian or Finnish.

“Where is it from?” he asked her. “That might help pin it down.”

“Oh, I, uh, I got a new washing-machine the other day. This was one of the languages in the instruction booklet. I just wondered what it was.”

He nodded and looked down at the slip of paper.

“‘Cool wash for coloureds’,” he said. “‘Do not overload’. Something like that, eh?”

She nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “Something banal.”

“Yes. Something banal. In something exotic.”

“Yes, that’s exactly it.”

“Well, if you’re a member of the library, I can recommend a book. J.B. Pearson’s your man. The World’s Languages, with short sample texts. You’d soon turn it up in that, I fancy. In the linguistics section. Dewey classification 410 or thereabouts.”

Oh, so this was why she had been late home, in the mirror. She hadn’t used the library for weeks but she had a couple of cards in her handbag.

“Thanks very much,” she said. “I don’t have time to look now but I’ll pop back after work.”

When she went back after work she couldn’t find the book he had recommended but John May’s Concise Linguistic Atlas seemed the same sort of thing. And she wanted to get a book on mirrors. Antique mirrors. She found one and hurried out to catch her bus, just remembering in time to buy a paper from the stand outside the library. She had been thinking about the silver glittering during the day and thought she knew what caused it. If she had seen her face, she would have known what expression she would be wearing before she wore it. But that knowledge would affect the expression she wore. It wouldn’t be precisely the same, couldn’t be. The same thing would happen, though to a lesser extent, with her body: the way she moved and stood. Even though she had promised not to cheat, by the mirror’s life, the silver glittering still had to veil part of the future.

As she was putting her key into the lock of her door at twenty-past-six, another thought struck her and she paused a moment. A paradox. She had seen herself yesterday (today) come in today (tomorrow) now (then). So what if she decided not to? What if she decided to wait five minutes and come in at half-past six? Then yesterday (today) she couldn’t have seen herself come in today (tomorrow) at twenty-past six and her memory of it would be false. She laughed. No, that would be cheating too. She turned the key, pushed the door open, and went in to stand in front of the mirror and hold up the paper she carried. UNION WARNING ON PAY DEAL.

A month later, after three increasingly fraught “little chats” with Marjorie, she was sacked. The mirror was dominating her mind too much, she couldn’t concentrate on her work any more, and didn’t want to concentrate. Her life away from the mirror seemed necessary only to the extent that it kept her alive for the mirror, like the ugly roots that kept a flower alive. She had never deciphered the booklet, but she thought she had worked out most of the instructions. The mirror was in the living- room now, sitting on the table where the TV had once been, and she could send it freely back or forward through as many centuries as she chose, though much of the earth’s history was denied to her, because the site of her house had been or would be deep beneath water or earth. At other times the mirror’s reflection came from some point high in the air, and sometimes even submersion or interment did not always mean that she had nothing to see.

Twenty-six thousand years in the future, for example, the mirror showed her a cave lit by some fluorescent mineral in whose unflickering light stalagmites and stalactites gnawed upward and downward from the wet gums of the cave’s floor and ceiling. In the spring thaw, the cave’s floor was inundated by a fast-flowing stream and the mineral’s light partly drowned, so she could not entirely make out the outlines of certain organic shapes — whether of plants or animals, she could never finally decide — carried on the stream. But twenty-six millennia was merely a step from the front door of the twentieth-century: at other times she had run marathons from the back door and from the front, throwing the mirror back or forward many millions of years to see the earth incandescent in its extreme youth or hoar-frosted in extreme eld under a black sky where stars — she often tilted or swung the mirror to catch extra details of the scenes it brought her — blazed without twinkling.

After such sights, the civil war that would overtake England thirty years into the future, in which her house was destroyed by gunfire or rockets, held little interest for her and she barely bothered to watch the past and future inhabitants of the house, like a naturalist bored with the familiar flora and fauna of home after an expedition to the Amazon or Antarctic. She herself, she had learnt, would have left within a year and she had already begun to prepare for her departure, wondering whether to return home to Huddersfield, where the dregs of her savings would last longer while she found another job.

There was no warning of the end: one day she came down to the mirror and found that turning the mirror to VANAPOL brought a fixed scene of the future: a room rather like her living-room, but obscured by a card sellotaped to the mirror to display an address:

Catherine Kilbeck,
98 Silverside Gardens,
Totnes TN3 8PY.

Ah. She understood another section of the instruction booklet now, and prepared a card of her own, sellotaping it to the mirror when it was turned to INUTEMA. That was the last time she used the mirror until, a week later, she peeled the card away and turned it back to JADOREK, gazing at her own face for a few moments before she began readying it for its dispatch to its next owner. She had another paradox to ponder as she slipped the booklet into an envelope, wrote Cath on it, sellotaped to the back of the mirror, then began to wrap the mirror in newspaper before she packed it in cardboard. The paradox was: Who or what chose the mirror’s owners? She had been sent it because the previous owner had seen her address sellotaped to the glass, but she had only done that because she had received the mirror. So who or what chose her and all the owners before her and after her? Later in the day, she took the triangular package to the post-office and paid for first-class inland delivery.