The Mirrors Read online

  “Everyone I’ve seen come through town ends up making arrangements to work their fee off. We’ll take the money that you brought with you as a down payment, of course. And you can sell things—all but your most essential belongings—to the company store. Then you can begin working until you pay off the rest. We certainly need people to work in the warehouses. But other … well … other fields are better compensated. Are you a good marksman? Can you tie a noose?”

  Dad started to stammer a response, but the lady continued.

  “Of course, there will be expenses deducted. Food allowance. Tuition for your little girl to attend the company school so that she can learn skills that are in demand. So that some day she can pay off her part of the fee. That sort of thing.”

  “So how much are we talking about? I mean … total costs.”

  She swiveled her computer monitor around so Dad could see it.

  “That’s not what the website said. Nowhere near what the website said.”

  The woman nodded. “Fair enough. Then I suppose you’ll be on your way?” She handed Dad’s license back to him.

  He tucked it into his wallet. Then he stood there for a long time, just sort of staring at something in the middle of the wallet. This whole trip had been creepy and sad, but nothing felt creepier or sadder than that stretch of time (a minute? five minutes?) when he just stood there, looking at the middle of his wallet, all bug-eyed. “No,” he said, finally breaking his silence. “It’s a high price. But, honestly, I think it’s worth it.”

  “We all do,” the lady said. “If you don’t mind my saying so, sir, it’s been about twenty-seven years since I first arrived. I only need to stay hired here another six months until I’ve worked off the fee. Then the company will take arms against my sea of troubles and by opposing, end them.”

  Dad nodded and smiled and ended up signing a lot of papers that night. Oodles and oodles of them. I ended up walking over to a bench and catching some zees. I realized the whole thing would go faster that way.

  The Choir of Beasts

  “… the logic of supernatural horror … is a logic founded on fear, a logic whose sole principle states: ‘Existence equals nightmare.’ Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure.”

  —Thomas Ligotti

  “Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”

  I left my hut at the first sign of darkness yielding to the incursion of day. I indulged the hope that sunlight and the sound of birds might help me forget the previous night’s disturbing dreams. It was a pleasant interval, in retrospect—a foggy, forgetful moment that served as an oasis between nightmare and waking nightmare. Then the day started in earnest, and I began to remember all the reasons I’d come to prefer troubled sleep to excruciating wakefulness; all the reasons I’d come to prefer blackness to the daytime, autumnal hues of gray and brown and—worst of all—yellow.

  For better or worse, a cloud-veiled sun still rose over Sultor. But birds no longer sang there. Most of them (just like most of the dogs and crostens and lugons and chickens and people) had been slain by the Pox. Instead of birdsong, I heard the buzzing of flies hovering ’round the corpses of my fellow villagers. So littered was the grass with dead creatures—human and otherwise—that it was as though a new topography of gore had replaced the old one of rock and soil. Only one fowl remained in the village proper: a quivering, emaciated buzzard that stood, as though dazed, atop a corpse in the middle of the road. It let out raspy, coughing screeches. Sores and scabs covered its swollen eyes. Thick yellow slime drooled out of them.

  Sultor had once boasted a population of thousands, but only three of us had escaped the scourge of the Yellow Pox. We were a motley assortment of men: Rontor the Blacksmith, Quintivius the Acolyte, and I, the Hunter.

  The acolyte had only been a semester into his studies when all his teachers acquired their first sores. He’d come to Sultor from the countryside, so that he could learn rites of prayer and propitiation. Instead, he only learned to dig graves (so many graves, he began to lose hold of his sanity).

  He was little more than a child. His young mind couldn’t absorb all the sights and smells of the Plague. He eventually refused to leave his dormitory on the temple grounds. Most days, he lay curled up in a corner of his tiny monastic cell, muttering to himself. “The flies,” he’d whisper, while trembling. “The flies.”

  Rontor took pity on the lad. This surprised me, as the blacksmith was known for his open irreverence toward the Gods and those who earned a living in Their service. Perhaps he’d come to think of Quintivius less as an acolyte and more as just a young boy. Perhaps he thought of the acolyte as a son, now that the Yellow Pox had stolen each of his seven children from him. In any event, the blacksmith spent an inordinate amount of time bringing the lad salted deer jerky to eat and trying to coax him out from the shadows of his lair.

  But we were running out of salted deer jerky. The leaves had begun to dry and brown on the branch, and winter would soon be coming. We needed food to keep our strength up, and our smokehouse supply of meat had begun to dwindle.

  For at least nine comings and goings of the moon, Sultor had been caught up in the Plague-induced crisis. We busied ourselves with the tasks of tending sick family and burying the dead. We busied ourselves with putting a halt to looting and, in general, perpetuating order. For as long as we could, we kept markets, temples, and academies going. We kept them going until there was no one left to run them and no one left to patronize them. In the end, dead merchants, priests, and teachers found themselves tossed into the same pile of yellow-oozing flesh as dead peasants, thieves, and whores.

  We hadn’t bothered restocking our food supply. None of us thought we’d live long enough to come close to exhausting it. But three of us did. In the middle of decay and putrescence, our job was to go on somehow.

  And so, go on I did that day. There were no more sick to tend (aside from the lad, sick of mind, and tended well enough by Rontor). There were, however, bellies to feed, and I felt a duty to ensure we’d have enough to eat through the winter.

  Before the Plague, I’d been Second-Chief Hunter. Back then, I cared about titles and honorifics. I took delight in my quick ascension through the ranks and the luxuries this afforded me. I had my pick of many a maiden, many a plot of land, and many a feast. My bow found the heart of elk and goddrel, my bow fed empty bellies and made men strong.

  After the Plague, I had no more Hunter’s Legion to command. The skins I’d worn as badges of honor from past kills meant nothing anymore: they were relics of a dead civilization. The bellies I’d fed had become first sunken and emaciated, and then had themselves become food for flies.

  I had an aching desire to see my arrows plunge into some gamey hide. I entertained a notion that the Plague had been confined to our village and hadn’t spread to the forest. I walked, that day, out toward the stable. I had a quiver of arrows slung over my shoulder, and my favorite bow in my hand. I endeavored to bring some small hope to the other survivors.

  Before, I’d always traveled to my hunts on horseback, but most of the livestock had breathed their last while still confined in barns.

  I commandeered an underfed, just recently Plague-stricken mule from land that had once been Gregor’s. (Or had it been Martin’s? It was difficult to recall the property dividing lines that had demarcated the old order.) The animal had weeping sores on its leg, but I rode him anyway. He carried behind him a cart designed to haul away whatever quarry I could find in the woods. I found myself much-delayed by the wretched animal’s pace—but I felt the need to keep him. I needed him to haul the cart, in case I slew a deer too large to carry back on my own. Had he not been so scrawny, I would have just slaughtered him for a few days’ meal.

  When I reached the forest’s edge, I tied the wheezing mule to a withered tree. Then I took an arrow from my quiver, armed my bow, and walked into the woods.

  Sultor lay in a fertile valley, with the Halator Rive
r to our south and the foothills of the Cravenbynn Mountains to the east. The hunting grounds weren’t in our ancestral lands, but had been won in the War with the Amberbynns. Nonetheless, I felt a connection to the land and its creatures—a connection surpassing even my link to the land of my forebears. I’d lived the happiest times of my life in that forest, away from the politicians and merchants. Living a real man’s life, in the hunt.

  Thus, when I first strode into the shade of oaks and found that the scent of death lingered there, just as much if not more than in the village, I despaired. All around me, all over the forest floor, birds and macaras and rabbits lay festering. I tried not to look, but there were just too many of them. They all bore the colors of their conqueror; that hideous shade of yellow, the hue of a pale, weak sun. The discharge seeped out of beak and snout alike. It was as though the autumn daylight itself had gone molten and malignant and leaked out of the animals’ mouths.

  As had been the case in the village, the flies alone had found a way to survive. Their buzzing replaced the birdsong. That’s all I heard for half a day—the buzzing of flies and my own footfalls on fallen leaves.

  Throughout the whole ordeal in Sultor, I had not wept. When I’d seen abandoned babies in the streets, unburied and rotting for days on end, I hadn’t wept. When the Baron’s messenger had come to my door with a notice that my land was to be confiscated for use as a mass grave, and the first cartload of bodies was already on its way, I hadn’t wept. When a sore had formed inside Father’s mouth, and he could no longer talk because the discharge had drained down his throat, then dried and hardened there, I hadn’t wept.

  It wasn’t until I was there in the wild—when I saw that life everywhere had succumbed to that damnable Yellow Pox— that I fell to my knees and sobbed and wailed and screamed. I ruminated on dark thoughts. I crouched and crawled to a tree, ignoring the stinging wounds inflicted by thorns I’d trudged through along the way. Did I happen to have a rope in the cart? Could I go back, fetch it, and manage to hang myself? The idea of depriving the Pox (or Its sister, Starvation) of the trophy of taking my life offered some solace. Perhaps self-slaughter was the only solution. But slaughter of the Gods Themselves seemed an even better idea. Slaughter of Them and the entire fractured world They’d sadistically brought into being. They’d admitted me, the acolyte, Rontor, the rabbits, the buzzards—all of us—into this gaudy festival of existence without our consent. I felt loathing and revulsion for the agonizing affair of birth, disease, and death. I wanted to sabotage the world. I wanted to bring the whole thing crashing down.

  I might have rested against the tree, fuming until sunset, had I not been distracted by a sound off in the distance. The fall of heavy hooves on autumn leaves. Ever louder. Approaching.

  It was a beast of great girth, whose massive shape shoved aside saplings and knocked older trees askew. I saw it had white horns, a white hide, and most unusual of all, white eyes of the sort I’d never before seen. A wild, white bull— apparently clean of the Pox. A huge beast; easily the weight of three men, I reckoned.

  I dried my eyes, readied my bow once again, and hoped it didn’t spot me. I stood no match against its speed, bulk, and horns. I had to rely on stealth if I were to make the kill. And, even assuming I did make the kill, I’d have to find a way to butcher him right then and there, as he might not even fit into my cart.

  The bull lowered his head, and I panicked. It had seen me, I thought. I braced myself for his charge. But then he kept lowering his head. Lower … lower … until his snout nearly grazed the dirt. I began to see the gesture for what it was. For some reason I couldn’t yet fathom, this made me tremble.

  He was submitting to me.

  He just lingered there in a clearing about ten paces away—waiting, cowering. I crawled out of my hiding place.

  The bull did not move. He just stood there and—I swear on the grave of my firstborn son—grinned.

  I drew my bow back and let the first arrow fly. I struck him in the side, from close range. I heard something like a roar and a sigh mixed together.

  Then the bull was no longer a bull, but a man.

  An odd, fat man with white skin, white shoes, and a white silken suit. During the course of the transformation, his white horns drooped and softened to become the silken points of a white jester’s cap. My arrow gave him a wound that in time would certainly prove mortal. He bled and bled, staining his suit and the ground around it.

  “I am slain!” the fat man cried. He sounded half in agony, half on the verge of laughter.

  I wailed, feeling nauseated and dizzy. I sensed my pulse in my ears.

  I’d not meant to murder, only to hunt. I feared that, in my grief, I was becoming as mad as the acolyte (no, madder, for even at the height of his melancholy the lad hadn’t committed any crimes). I ran toward my victim and began to examine his wound. I suppose, at this point, I should have offered the man my apologies. I should have done what I could to extract the arrow. Instead I knelt by him and looked into his white eyes. “Who are you?” I said. White eyes, not merely filmy like those of a blind man, but white. Old, alabaster skin, too. Pale and thin as the clouds. “What are you?”

  He gasped and coughed before answering in a weak, whimpering voice. “I am the Shaman of Cravenbynn, at one with all the creatures of these hills. Thank you for your kind act of murder. There is nothing more shameful than for a Shaman to outlive the animals in his forest.”

  He didn’t look like what I’d always supposed a Shaman would look like. I’d been taught they took on the appearance of demented wild men—though they were anything but. They were sages, loosened from the constraints of customary appearance. He, on the other hand, looked like one of the itinerant stage performers who once a year traveled through our region. The kind who performed pantomime and juggling. Not a sage, but a fool.

  Incredulous, I stammered. “K-kind act?”

  “I heard what you’d said. About the cruelties of suffering in this world, about the way the Gods are cruel to bring us into existence. I saw the decimation of the great City of Amberbynn on the other side of these hills. All that remains are three maidens, one of whom is little more than a child. She crawls in a corner and sucks her thumb like a babe. All three, left to fend for themselves. I’d held out hope that Sultor had fared better, just as I’d earlier held out hope for these woods. Then I’d overheard your comments on the matter. It’s all a— how did you put it, a garish festival? If life is a garish festival, than I am the Festival Fool, Hunter. For what else can you call someone who exists, but has no purpose for existence? I had no choice but to end my life.”

  I hadn’t said a word. The Shaman had read my thoughts (as, it is rumored, Shamen were wont to do) and mistaken them for words. Indeed, he must have been a very old Shaman. It’s said that once Shamen have lived to be over one thousand years old, they lose the distinction between thoughts and words altogether. To them, it is all just communication.

  “So you took the form of a bull and used me for the purpose.”

  I looked down into his white eyes and discovered a subtlety to the coloration I hadn’t noticed before. There was something of a glint to them. Somehow, the old Shaman had a twinkle in his white eyes, a shimmer not unlike crystals of ice in the midst of fallen snow.

  He nodded. Smirked.

  “Trickster!” I bellowed. “If you had to shapeshift, I can’t see why you couldn’t stay a bull. That way, at least, I would have had food for my people.”

  “I had to take my true form once again,” the Shaman said. “To repay you for your kind deed. Yes, I could have stayed in the form of the White Bull and provided a feast for those remaining in your village, but that would be a mere pittance compared to the gift I’m about to provide in recognition of the great offering you bestowed upon me.”

  “Offering?”

  He pointed to his chest and began to cough up blood. He smiled with blood-stained lips. “Your arrow. What a delightful offering it is!”

  I shuddered.


  “Now, while I still have time, I want to point you in the direction of your reward. In my hovel at the peak of Bloom Hill, you’ll find a table. On that table, you’ll find three extracts stored in flasks. One white, one black, one gray. You must first dip your arrows in the flask containing the gray potion. This will give them the power to strike God-flesh, not just animal-flesh. Then you must drink the white potion. This will make you, your clothes, and any equipment you carry invisible for as long as necessary. Invisible even to the Gods. Then drink the black potion. This will transport you to the Plain of Drau Meghena, enabling you to fulfill your wish.”

  “Wish?”

  “To murder the Gods, and in so doing, bring the whole world crashing down.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “The Gods … what do you think They are?”

  “Our Masters. We’re but Their slaves, subject to Their whims, be they cruel or kind. Most often, these days, the former.”

  A smirk. “Typical Hunter. No imagination. What do you think They look like? When you follow my directions to go murder Them, what are you going to be aiming at?”

  Nobody knew the shape of the Gods. It was a forbidden topic to consider. The priests taught that They were without shape, that They were beyond notions of shape. I’d never even considered the possibility that this might be a lie. I could offer no answer.

  “In their native land,” the Shaman said, “the Gods are a Choir of Beasts. Beasts the like of which you’ve never seen before, Hunter! Schrellnics with beaks, instead of snouts. Tigers the color of moss. Land-walking lampreys with fur. Each of them sings a song, Hunter. A song about each different type of creature that lives. A magick song that brings into being each creature that lives.

  “The moss-colored tiger sings the Song of the Antelope. The hairy lamprey sings the Song of the Fish. Always, the Predator sings the song of their prey. It’s the same song for each animal, actually, a little ditty called ‘Nightmares Making Nightmares.’ And when the Predator sings it, it creates the prey.