Mirrors

They will tell you about the haunted mirror right away.

They know that you know about it.  They know that it is the reason bookings for that particular room keep their otherwise struggling hotel afloat.  But still they must, as a precautionary measure, advise you that the room you will be staying in has a haunted mirror. 

You will nod your thanks, take your one small bag (for no one ever stays in this room longer than one night), and board the elevator in the lobby.  The elevator will take you up the necessary number of floors before it stops to let you out.  You will exit the elevator, look at your key card (though you don’t need to, for everyone knows the number of this room), and make your way to the door.  You will open the door.  Once inside you will set down your bag, find an angle on the bed from which you cannot see your reflection in the mirror, and begin to stare at it. 

It doesn’t look haunted at all, at least if the markers of haunting are age and decay.  The silver of its frame glitters as if newly polished.  From your angle you can tell that the glass has been cleaned lovingly by some unfortunate soul, or one who is fortunately blind.  You can see the opulence of the mirror, and you understand why everyone’s eyes would at first be drawn to it. 

But you know what will happen if you get up from the bed and stand in front of it.  Everyone knows. 

You will at first see only your familiar reflection, showing back to you whatever expression you have shown to it.  Your smile or your frown, your bright eyes or dull, your hands on hips or snug in your pockets—all of this will come back to you just as you expect. 

The change will at first be small, starting at your mouth.  You will see in your reflection a sudden grin that you did not will to be on your own face.  At first this will be a grin of mischief, as if you and your reflection are in on some spectacular joke.  Slowly, though, you will find yourself cut off from this grin.  Slowly, it will seem as if your reflection is holding from you some devilish secret that you cannot root out.  Then, as the grin begins to expand, you will see teeth that are not yours—teeth that are sharp and animal, perfect for tearing into warm meat or soft flesh.  As the grin begins to widen, the mouth will begin to move and from it will start a procession of noises.  They will be the noises of a beast, and they will rise and rise until you find yourself staring at your own face caught in a frenzy of howls, a crescendo of gnashing teeth and savage, bloodthirsty cries. 

If you wait out this show of beastly histrionics, if you do not run screaming from the room to seek the sunlight outside, sunlight that will offer you no warmth, you will find, at the end, that your reflection calms itself and comes to rest staring directly into your eyes.  But your eyes in the mirror will not be the eyes that you know, of whatever brown or blue or gray that they have worn since your birth.  They will be bottomless inky wells, pits of darkness in which there is no glint or glimmer, swallowing all the light from windows or lamps.  These ocular abysses will tell you that your most cherished thoughts—that you are decent, that you do your best, that you are capable of love—are lies that you can no longer peddle to yourself or to the world.  And you will despair.

Everyone knows about this mirror.  Everyone talks about it.

No one talks about the other mirror, the one on the opposite wall.  Few can wrest their gaze from this mirror long enough to notice that other one.

If the first mirror draws all eyes to itself through its pristine opulence, this other one escapes notice through its simplicity.  A small wooden frame surrounds a glass that is foggy, as if all the polishing of a careful hand could only lift its obscurity enough to cloud whatever is reflected by it in a faint mist. 

The face that you see in this mirror will not at first seem to be your own.  In fact, you will have difficulty making it out.  Man or woman, young or old, full of joy or full of sorrow—at first it will seem to be none of these things distinctly, or it will seem to be all of these things at once.  On this face, whether it wears a smile or a frown or a look of blank attentiveness, you will, however, see something very clearly, though you won’t at first be able to name it.  It may look like pity, or it may look like longing, but whatever it is, it is different from the grin you saw in the other mirror in one way.  It is inviting, it wants to bring you in, to enfold and envelope you in its immensity.

As you gaze at this mirror, though the clouds in the glass remain, you will find that the face reflected in it grows clearer.  It will become your face, but not your face.  It will become your face wrapped and enfolded in this other face, the faint one, which will itself become clearer and clearer.  And if you look closely, you will see that the other mirror, the silver one, is also reflected in this mirror.  But through this reflection you will not see the monster that wore your face when you stood in front of the silver mirror.  You will instead see the same face, the one that gazes at you from the simple wooden mirror, reflected back upon itself in an infinity so large as to swallow up the room.

If you gaze at this mirror, you will leave the room to walk out into the sunlight.  The sunlight will warm you, the blue sky will pierce you, and everything that you see will rush to greet you, embrace you, and call you by a name you never knew you had.

The strange thing about the second mirror, though, is this:  It will only show you these things if you have first looked into the haunted mirror.