Haunted
by A.M.Kirkby
copyright 2014 A.M.Kirkby
Other titles by A.M.Kirkby:
Kasbah Cat
Sword of Justice
A Ghost Story of the Norfolk Broads
Pagliaccio the Opera Cat
Green Land
Doppelganger
Walsingham Way
The Tin Heart
Sacrifices
Egerius
Wake the Dragon
Rise Above
Not a Ghost Story
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Cover photo by Forsaken Fotos on flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/55229469@N07/12465863505
I never liked that house.
It was creepy. You know, when I turned up with the realtor, I nearly turned tail. It wasn't the way the fence had started to rot away under the peeling white paint, or all the windows were blanked with cobweb and grime; it wasn't the Gothic feeling of the little iron spikes on the roof – "pinnacles, not spikes," the realtor said, but I knew what was what. It wasn't the overgrown garden or the tombstone for 'Rex, a faithful friend' with the faded cloth flowers, or the fact that a paving stone tipped under my foot and splashed filthy water up my white trousers.
That kind of thing is par for the course when you do renovations.
It was the feeling that...
No, not that I was being watched. That's what people always say. No, it was more the feeling of a silent malevolence, the kind that comes when you have an argument with your spouse and they just sit, and hate you silently, and you can feel the silence thick with the unspoken words, I hope you die, I hate you, I hate you.
I ignored it of course.
Work got under way. We had to strip the place; old partitions, rotten timbers, a couple of old mattresses that burst and snowed feathers all over and made us cough, and took hours to sweep up. There were a couple of worthwhile things left there, though most of the house had been stripped; an ornately framed mirror, with the dapple and depth of good old silver-backed glass, a couple of gold coins that had slipped through the floorboards, an ancient wardrobe that I got a good price for from a local antiques dealer. And then the house filled up with people and noise; rewiring, reglazing, repainting.
But still I felt that thing. Still, I thought, three months and I'll have turned this house around. I'm not staying here; sell it off. And out.
In six weeks we'd turned the house from Gothic monstrosity to cookie-cute. New stakes in the fence, which was painted white; sparkling windows, a little iron cockerel turning in the wind on top of the topmost pinnacle, a gravel path replacing the old paving. I dug up that pet tombstone, smashed it up, and chucked it in the skip.
I took the mirror home. The gilding on the frame came alive under my fingers; the glass was the old, thin kind – when I put my finger to it, there was no space between my finger and its reflection. It was almost as if it was swallowing me up. I found a space for it in the spare bedroom; I'd have to move the bed a bit to accommodate it, but it was worth it for such a nice piece of work.
There must have been something about my first impressions that was accurate, for I've never had such difficulty selling a house. Plenty of people came and looked; the price was competitive, the district was a good one. They came, they looked, and they went away, and I never heard from them again.
For some reason I didn't much like waiting alone in the house. Now the tradesmen had all gone, it was too quiet, and more than once I turned round, certain my prospective purchasers must have found the door ajar and come in, but there was no one there. I started to wait in the garden, instead, though I told myself that was just to be friendly and give the purchasers a good impression.
And eventually, I managed to sell the house, to an investor who planned to rent it out. "Visit it? I'm far too busy for that," she said; "I've a portfolio to run. No, just send the papers over to my attorney." That, as you can imagine, suited me just fine.
And that was that, till, a few weeks later, I needed to go into the spare bedroom to fetch some old paperwork I kept in the closet there. As I turned round again with the file in my hands, I had a sudden chill feeling something was wrong. I couldn't work out what it was till I looked in the mirror; and then I saw. In the mirror, I was standing in a dim room with the furniture under drapes, the windows blanketed with dust.
I clutched the file hard to my chest and rushed out. Downstairs, with a whisky in hand, I started rationalising. I must have imagined it. Mirrors always reflect a room darker than the room actually is. I'd disarranged the sheets on the bed getting to the cupboard and that gave me the idea of dust sheets on the furniture. Rationalising didn't help. The whisky did.
But when I went to put the file back, the room was quite normal, and the reflection in the mirror was exactly what it should have been.
That was last summer. It wasn't till Christmas that Stuyvesant came to stay; an old college friend, who'd hardened with age into a slightly crusty lawyer who took his patrician roots too seriously. Still, we'd shared a lot together, and after his wife divorced him, he'd ended up spending a lot of time with me. We toured the smaller towns, visiting historic houses and museums, and occasionally an antique mall, and he abused me from time to time for being an aesthete, which he always had, but particularly after he'd learned I was gay.
We drank – always bourbon, with Stuyvesant, who was something of an expert on it – and we went to bed late, and not always very sober. But we both cope well with drink, so I was surprised when one night he came back downstairs, shivering.
"There's someone in my room. I think," he said, and I could see he was having trouble putting his words together.
"Did you leave the window open?"
He shook his head, very quickly, as if his neck was stiff.
I volunteered to go up and take a look. I poured him a whisky before I went; he necked it. I poured him another.
When I got up there, of course, there was no one in the room.
"You're sure you saw someone?"
"Of course I'm sure," he said frostily. "I said so."
"Where were they?"
He thought. Something was worrying him. "By the closet, I think."
"You think?"
"Well," he said, "it's odd. I saw them distinctly in the mirror. But if they'd been there, where I thought they were, I should have seen them there, too..."
"They're not there now," I said rather shortly, and he went up.
He left a day early, saying he'd had a phone call from a client in New York. I think he felt he'd made a fool of himself.
I was getting a bit worried about that mirror by now. I googled 'mirrors and occult'. It wasn't much help; I found links to Victorian portrait photographs of the dead with their families, and neo-pagan magick sites, and an Aztec obsidian mirror used by an Elizabethan magician. But there were no more … phenomena. Nothing uncanny. I had another property to restore, a lovely wooden Colonial house out in the country, and that occupied my mind.
My attorney was, strangely enough, a little help. I mentioned to him that I'd taken a mirror from the house in Salem.
"The one you couldn't sell?" he asked. I nodded. He laughed.
"You're going to tell me you've seen weird things in it, I suppose."
I rather bridled at that, but to my surprise his face was perfectly serious.
"And if I did?"
"Dream of the Red Chamber," he said, unexpectedly.
I had no idea what he meant, till he pull
ed a book from one of the shelves and pushed it across his desk to me.
"One of the classics of Chinese literature," he said. "Though most purchasers are after one particular chapter. It's the kind of book you find second-hand with certain pages dog-eared and rather well thumbed. Well, most Chinese novels of its time are fairly overt in their discussion of sex. It's not as florid as the Golden Lotus...
Anyway, there's a famous passage in which a Taoist monk creates a magic mirror. You reminded me of it. The mirror reflects truth on one side, and lies on the other. Or good on one side, and evil on the other... the emperor looks into it, and sees a corpse decaying."
"Thanks," I said. "I'll sleep easier at nights, knowing I might see my own cadaver in the mirror."
He shrugged. "Well, that's the story, but the point is that mirrors, for the Chinese anyway, hinge on to another world."
"So what do I do about this mirror?"
"Get rid of it," he said. "Or don't. Your call."
All right for him to say. For him it was just an interesting reference from one of those old books he collected. For a week, I dreamed of corpses reaching out of mirrors at me. The level of the Talisker in the bottle fell rather fast that week.
The tyranny of the mirror ended last week. I'd brought a casual conquest back home, breaking one of my usual rules; he was cute, I was a bit drunk, I called a late night taxi. We used the spare bedroom – fell in the door, and into bed, and I had my mind on other things than the mysteries of that mirror, and if it reflected anything, it should be ashamed of it.
The next morning, I surfaced to the sound of singing. He was shaving, singing some bit of Italian opera, I think, in a rather sweet tenor. I wondered whether I'd be given the chance to get used to it; I could, very easily.
"You want breakfast?" I called, and he broke off for a moment, and said "Yup," and went back to singing.
Bacon, pancakes and maple syrup is what I need after a night like that. The oil in the pan was sizzling and just beginning to smoke when he came down; perfect timing.
"That mirror of yours is a bit strange," he said.
"Oh?"
"It must be very old glass, or something."
"It is. Nineteenth century, I think. Maybe earlier."
"It's weird. Sometimes it reflects everything just right, sometimes it all seems to be out of kilter. There must be some flaw in the glass. Like, when I got up this morning, it seemed perfectly normal, but then I looked again, and though I could see me, it didn't reflect you at all."
"That's... strange."
"Well, when I came back, it was perfectly okay. Except the room seemed darker in the mirror. As if – well, it's odd, but as if the room in the mirror had the curtains drawn, and the sun wasn't shining at all. Still, if it's old glass, perhaps that's just the way it is."
"Yes," I said, "That's the way it is."
Later that morning, I broke the mirror. I went in the bedroom, I closed my eyes, and took the fossil sea urchin I use for a paperweight – forty million dense and polished years cupped in my hand – and threw it blind, and heard the glass smash. Then I spent an hour cleaning up the remains.
And that, I hoped, would be the end of the story.
I did get the chance to get used to Robert's singing. He hasn't moved in, and I'm not quite sure whether I want to invite him to, but I take him on my antiquing trips, and sometimes let him choose the paint colours when I'm working on a refurbishment, and he makes me healthy smoothies when the morning doesn't seem to require bacon and maple syrup pancakes.
This morning I was shaving, and I saw Robert come into the room behind me.
"Did you put the coffee on yet?" I asked.
He said nothing. That was odd. I turned around.
He wasn't there. And yet I'd clearly seen him in the mirror.
Then I remembered. He'd gone to New York for the weekend.
I looked back in the shaving mirror. Again I had the impression of someone moving behind me, but when I looked round, there was no one there.
I took the shaving mirror out and dumped it in the trash.
Since then I haven't looked in a mirror. Robert tolerates my beard. I don't drive, any more, because I'm afraid of what I might see in the rear view mirror, and I make sure the blinds and curtains are closed as soon as night falls, so there's no reflection in the window glass.
And I'm drinking more, again. I noticed, tonight, my hands were unsteady when I poured that last one – what was it, my third? My fourth? and I'm generous with the measure – and the cut glass sparkles a hundred tiny reflections...