The Mirrors Page 22

  To clear your mind, you drove to the outskirts of the city. It still wasn’t clear, so you kept driving into the country. By then it was sunset. Orange light flickered off a farmer’s pond. Lots of land, and not another soul in sight. You pulled over, got out, and wriggled through the rusty barbed wire and into high, rustling rows of corn. The country air reeked, and you chalked it up to all the fertilizer. Undeterred by the stench, you kept walking in the direction of the water. You heard buzzing. When you arrived, you discovered the pond’s surface was covered with dead fish and flies.

  “Been like that since the first day.”

  You turned around and saw a scrawny farmer resting against a dead tree. From a distance, you must have mistaken him for just another gnarled root. “Reckon ’em mirrors don’t like the competition. Jealous gods, don’t you think?”

  You nodded, clenched your fists, bit your lip, returned to your car, and kicked the driver’s side mirror off. You worried afterward that such blasphemy might only make things worse. You drove farther away from the city. You stopped along the road to sleep. For the first time, you began to notice you smelled bad. A heavy rain rattled the car’s roof.

  The sixth day, you drove until you saw the sign (handmade and stenciled on wood—as many were this far out in the boonies).

  SALVATION FOR THE UNREFLECTED

  A spray-painted arrow pointed down a dirt road. You’d never before put stock in words like “salvation,” but felt heartened by the word “unreflected.” You felt this a more respectful term than “undeserving” or “condemned.”

  The uneven road made the trip feel as though it were being made on sea rather than land. Your car wasn’t made for this terrain, and your muffler was one of the casualties. It dragged and scraped against the soggy clay, but you persisted.

  After too long a drive, you arrived at a clearing occupied by several large tents of the types used for outdoor festivities. A weather-beaten wooden cross—at least twice your own height—stood in the midst of them. Perhaps this had been the staging area for a wedding reception, a particularly low-rent circus, or, more likely, the site of an annual summer revival meeting hosted by the local Baptists. Last night’s storm had by then exhausted itself. The barest hint of drizzle beaded your windshield. Disheveled men shambled toward your car. They all wore bloodied bandages around their eyes. The youngest (in his early twenties) spoke up.

  “Welcome to the land of blessed blackness.”

  You kept your mouth shut, locked the doors, and shifted gears into reverse.

  “Have your eyes caused you to sin? Gouge them out and throw them away. Better to enter eternal life without eyes than to worship the demon, Reflection.”

  You made a quick sweeping turn, kicking up mud and forcing the loose muffler free. Your engine roared.

  A naked figure ran out of a tent. “Don’t go!” the woman hollered. A wisp of a woman—tiny, thin, and milky-pale, her blonde hair shorn to stubble. You shifted gears into park. She jogged toward you and paused to catch her breath. “Let me greet the newcomer, Jacob. I think this is just someone who’s a little lost.” In the distance, the blind men grunted and shrugged. They took stumbling steps backward, then continued milling around the field.

  “Are they hurting you? Do you need to get away from here?”

  “No,” she said. “I work for them.”

  Your stomach churned. “Of your own consent?”

  She sighed. “It’s not what it looks like. The minister blinded all the members of his flock, but then they needed someone from outside the congregation to come in and blind the minister. The idea revolted me, but with, well, all the recent changes, I don’t have many options as far as making a living. Besides, if I didn’t perform the operation he’d find someone else who would. So I did it. Now I just cook and clean for them. They tolerate nonbelievers who are willing to help.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I’m lonely. They’re not much in the way of good company, as you can imagine. But they’re a wealthy congregation. In exchange for my duties I’m well compensated.”

  “I’m sorry I made assumptions. It’s just, well, with you being …”

  She lowered her voice into an even quieter whisper. “Naked? Please don’t say anything about it. They wouldn’t like it if they found out. It’s just that the weather has been warm, and I always have my tent to duck into if it rains, so why not? Same thing with the hair. They’d freak if they knew I cut it all off. But it’s just so much easier this way. It feels right.”

  “They don’t know?”

  “When I blinded them, I wore clothes and had hair down to my butt. That was a few days ago.”

  “But those bandages, still bloody. That can’t be sanit—”

  “They refuse to let me change the dressings. They believe that only blood will serve as sufficient testimony to their sacrifice. At first I debated it with them. I mean, I’m no doctor, but everyone knows they need to keep those things clean to avoid infection. They said infections only happened to those with lapsed faith. Then I realized it’s crazy to expect self-mutilators to give a damn about hygiene.”

  You felt yourself smile for the first time in days.

  She smiled back. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

  “I live—well, used to live—in the city. How did you know?”

  “You followed the sign. Nobody from around here would have followed it. Everyone discounted them as lunatics, even before the changes.”

  “And you are from around here?”

  “Not originally. I moved here to teach science at the county high school. I haven’t been here all that long, but long enough to know that even the hardcore fundamentalists thought these folks were a little nutty. But you never know … I suppose this little cult’s theories about what the mirrors are up to make as much sense as anyone else’s.”

  “They think they have it figured out?”

  “Like everyone else, they filter the events of the last week through their pre-existing worldview. They say the Prophet is the False Prophet from the Book of Revelation, and that the force controlling the mirrors is a satanic one, of course. All the usual bells and whistles of end times fear-mongering. There is one part of their dogma that actually makes sense, though. They think that it was all brought on by vanity. They say that as the human population has grown, and the number of mirrors has multiplied, and the time spent in front of mirrors has risen exponentially, we’ve given them power over us. Oh, they drape it in the language of their own fanaticism—say that by ‘worshipping false idols’ we’ve ‘displeased God,’ allowing ‘Satan an opening’—but even in their madness, there seems to be a kernel of truth.”

  You asked about food and fuel. She said the congregation had long ago stockpiled both for the end times. You offered to pay. She took the money, but said that if you stayed on to help her take care of the others, room and board would be free. The tents were heated, she added. They had a generator.

  You felt exhausted from running and assumed you didn’t have a job still waiting for you back home. You decided to trust her, at least for the night. You told her you’d sleep on it.

  You didn’t want to do another night in your car, but the blind men banned you from spending the night in any of their residence-tents. They explained these were reserved only for dwellers of the blessed blackness. They said that, as a nonbeliever, you were likely still contaminated with vanity. They offered you other places—perhaps you could reside, just for the night, in the surgery tent? You tried it, but couldn’t get to sleep. It was too close to the generator’s growl. Besides, you thought you smelled the coppery scent of blood still linger in the place.

  You found only one tiny tent left available to you. Light glowed inside of it, and one of its flaps remained open—perhaps offering invitation, or else indicating a sort of carelessness that you found oddly charming. The woman lived there. It looked as though she’d fallen asleep reading.

  You didn’t want to wake her. You put out her lamp and took a seat o
n the grass, just under her cot. You weren’t the kind of person to invade someone’s privacy. You weren’t the kind of person to feel this close to a total stranger either. But times change, and maybe the kind of person you were was changing with them.

  That night, you heard her let out a soft moan in the warm dark. You heard the bones in her back crackle and her cot squeak.

  The seventh day, you woke to find that she’d gotten on the grass with you, that she’d put a hand on yours. When she saw that you’d wakened, she whispered. “Please don’t leave me. I need a friend, someone who isn’t insane.”

  A trail of sunlight filtered into the tent, giving the grass its green back. You gazed at her. Her eyes gleamed. You looked into them, past the pale blue irises, into the depths of the pupils themselves. You saw ghostly hints of yourself inside them. Colorless, spectral reflections—distorted by the curve of cornea. Neither clear enough to groom by nor crisp enough to provoke the jealousy of mirrors. They could only provide assurance that you were, indeed, there—face to face with her.

  You decided that was good enough.

  Story Notes

  BROKEN MIRRORS

  “The Truth, as Told by a Bottle of Liquid Morphine”

  There is, perhaps, no more desperate place than the intersection of poverty and terminal illness. I know this because, during my previous career as a social worker, I worked with families who faced both simultaneously. While this story isn’t inspired by any one particular case, I’d say that it’s deeply influenced by the overall flavor of the hospice work I did with the rural poor. The events are entirely fictional, obviously. Yet, the shady-goings-on at the funeral home don’t seem (to my jaded sensibilities, at least) completely outside the realm of possibility. I have to believe that, somewhere in the world, there’s a crooked mortician up to such nefarious hi-jinx.

  This was one of those rare stories that essentially wrote itself. The entire plot (beginning, middle, and end) came together in my brain one night as I was resting in bed. The next morning I sat down and wrote the first twothirds of the tale. The rest was finished shortly thereafter.

  At the end of the story, the morphine bottle sounds pretty gung-ho about suicide. This is probably a good place to state what should be obvious (simply from the fact that I’m here to write this sentence): any opinions expressed by the morphine bottle are the morphine bottle’s, exclusively, and do not reflect those of the author.

  “The Cat in the Cage”

  This story was inspired, in part, by Jack Ketchum’s Stoker-winning tale “Gone”. At the time I wrote the story, I wanted to write an ending that stated certain horrors and left other (even worse) horrors implied. (Just like Ketchum had).

  I find that some folks who read this story grasp all of the horrors on the first read, but others need to read it twice before they understand the full magnitude of the tragedy (that two lives, not just one, will end with great suffering).

  “The Orchard of Hanging Trees”

  If I recall correctly, this story made the rounds to eleven or twelve different markets before finding its original home on Pseudopod (the weekly horror fiction podcast). Once it debuted there, though, some listeners shared that they thought it was one of the better stories Pseudopod had featured that year. It also received a fair bit of positive attention when it was reprinted by DarkFuse Magazine.

  Why was it rejected so many times? I have to think it’s because it’s an odd duck. It has elements of extreme horror, elements of philosophical horror, elements of surrealism, and elements of good old-fashioned morality-driven EC Comics-style horror. Not a cocktail to everyone’s taste, to be sure. But I wouldn’t change a thing about it. It’s my mutant baby!

  “The Fourteenth”

  This tale was born out of grief and despair. In reviewing my records, I see I sent this one in to editor D. F. Lewis just a little over two months after my friend Sara J. Larson died from inflammatory breast cancer. At around the same time, my father barely survived a pulmonary embolism. My mother told me that he’d fallen with such force that he knocked a hole in the wall. I became obsessed with my mental image of the hole he’d made in the wall. The hole worked its way into the story.

  There are two other ingredients that were essential to the writing of this story: Dmitri Shostakovich and his Symphony No. 14. After watching the Shostakovich biopic Testimony, I found myself wanting to know everything I could about the man. After my friend Sara died, I played it over and over and over. It is, to this day, my hymn of grief–a fine secular substitute for a requiem mass.

  “A Catechism for Aspiring Amnesiacs”

  On one level, this story is my temper tantrum against southern Indiana. On another level, this story is my temper tantrum against life. Obviously, I think it’s a relatively well-written temper tantrum. But yeah, at its core, that’s what this is. A scream. A flailing about on the floor.

  Oh, and one other thing: there really is a place in southern Indiana called Rose Island and it really was a former depression-era resort that got wiped out by a flood. Up until recently, it really was pretty fucking creepy, too. But then, do-gooders had to go and clean it up, thus ruining a perfectly good wasteland. (Note: I’m pretty sure “a perfectly good wasteland” is a phrase Thomas Ligotti used in one of his interviews. Just giving credit where credit’s due).

  “White Flag”

  I’ve never been homeless, but I’ve had reasonably close acquaintances in my personal life who’ve been homeless. This story was born, in part, from my conversations with one of them–a rough-around-the-edges gal who was blatantly honest about what her life in a shelter was like. I suppose another inspiration for this was my professional life. When I was a social worker, I frequently worked with the homeless.

  Despite periodic surges of interest in ending homelessness, it’s a problem that doesn’t seem to be going away. It seems perfectly reasonable to assume that, a hundred years from now, there will be homeless shelters. And yet, I don’t know of any writer who has addressed this possibility in speculative fiction. (Maybe other authors have, but I’m not aware of them.)

  Anyway, science fiction films are rife with flying cars. But I think I’m the first person to imagine homeless people throwing themselves off of flying buses. I take a sort of sick pride in imagining something that bleak.

  “The Company Town”

  This story first appeared in the Thomas Ligotti tribute anthology The Grimscribe’s Puppets. And, in some ways, this makes all the sense in the world. It has so many qualities that dovetail with Ligotti’s frame of reference. Suicidal ideation? Check! Bizarre corporations? Check! A town that has long ago “gone to seed”? Check!

  But in other ways, it’s really not that much like Ligotti’s work. After all, in this tale, grief and loss are the portals to the Liggotiesque state of mind. Ligotti’s characters need no such portal to arrive at their unholy city. But this is another example of how we’re quite different from one another: as much as I might seem to despise the other members of the human race, I’m interested in them enough to find loss a worthy topic to explore. (And, the truth is, grief and loss reverberate through this book like the tolling of a bell).

  “The Choir of Beasts”

  Here’s the secret history of “The Choir of Beasts”: it, too, was originally written for The Grimscribe’s Puppets (but was rejected in favor of “The Company Town”). And so, it made its way to publication as one tale in a three-story chapbook published by Dunhams Manor Press (likewise called The Choir of Beasts).

  Here’s how the story came about: I had a daydream of the Plain of Drau Meghena and the singing beasts while my husband and I drove through the rural Indiana countryside. For some time, these were visions that just knocked around in my head (with no story to contain them). The morning I found out my friend Sara Larson died, I took a walk in my favorite stretch of woods and the story began to assemble itself in my brain. As I recall, I started work on it immediately upon returning home.

  “All I Really Need to Kno
w I Learned in Piggy Class”

  This is one of the earliest stories in this collection. When I got the email from John Skipp telling me he was buying the story for his anthology Werewolves and Shape Shifters: Encounters with the Beast Within, I engaged in no small amount of celebration. I’d sold short stories before, but never to a publication with that level of distribution.

  The story was inspired, in part, by a scene in Ligotti’s My Work is Not Yet Done , in which a man is transformed into a pig. What if, I thought, an entire society depended on the transformation of people into livestock. What are some of the ways that society already treats people like livestock? These are the questions that motivated the story.

  “The Last Kid Scared by Lugosi”

  A few years ago, I went to see a showing of the original ’31 Dracula at Louisville’s Palace Theater. I was appalled at how many people were laughing at the film. So this story is my love letter to the classic monster movies of Universal Studios. It’s also a reflection of my concern that–in my lifetime–they may begin to fade into obscurity.

  Of course, given enough time, we all fade into obscurity. No matter how large a mark we make on the world while we’re alive, the sands of time will eventually erase it.

  “I Am Moonflower”

  Originally this was a parable told by a character in a much longer work. That much longer work didn’t hold together very well, and was sent off to the virtual scrap heap. But I was able to salvage this little piece of it. Sometimes I’ll do that. I’ll salvage a worthwhile nugget from a story that doesn’t otherwise work, and use it for a new project.