In the Looking Glass Read online

his bedroom the rest of the afternoon. He took a walk around the neighborhood, reasoning that some fresh air would do well to clear his head.

  At a quarter to six he started on dinner. When Hayleigh showed up a little past seven Frank put on a smile that wasn’t quite genuine.

  “Something smells good,” she said.

  “Yeah. Listen, could you…before we eat, I want to show you something.”

  He led her to the bedroom and for a moment they stood together, Hayleigh looking at Frank questioningly. Then she noticed the new addition to the room.

  “Where’d you get the mirror?” she asked.

  He told her about finding the mirror, and the slip of paper making it clear that the mirror was free to take. He did not tell her about the strange scene that had played out for him in the mirror’s surface earlier that day.

  “Does anything about it look strange to you?” he asked her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just look into it. What do you see?”

  She did as he asked.

  “Oh,” she said in an awed voice. “I see it.”

  Frank started.

  “What do you see?” he asked.

  Hayleigh reached up and ran a finger down the glass smooth surface of the mirror.

  “I see…I see…my weird boyfriend standing next to me.”

  She laughed. Frank didn’t.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, seeing the sour look on his face. “I don’t know what you want me to see.”

  “Never mind. It’s nothing.”

  They ate dinner, which they both agreed that Frank had actually done a good job on. As hard as he tried to be present for Hayleigh that evening, his mind kept wandering back to what he had seen in the mirror. If Hayleigh noticed his distance she didn’t let on.

  “Want to stay over?” Frank asked after the food had been eaten and the dishes washed.

  “Oh, I wish that I could,” Hayleigh said. “But I have paperwork I have to get through tonight. Sorry.”

  Was that a reminder that she had a job and Frank didn’t?

  It was a ridiculous thought. Hayleigh wasn’t cruel that way. Still, the idea had occurred to him.

  “Thank you for a lovely dinner,” Hayleigh said as Frank saw her out the door.

  She gave him a peck on the lips.

  “Want me to walk you to the car?” he asked.

  “No thanks; I’ll be fine. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  As she turned to leave a twinge of anger flashed inside of Frank.

  She’s lying about having paperwork, he thought. She’s a lying bitch!

  The thought shocked him. The pure heat of it.

  “Bye, baby,” Hayleigh called back as she started down the stairs outside Frank’s apartment door.

  “Huh? Oh, yeah; talk to you tomorrow.”

  Franke shut the door and bolted it. He stood for a while, his back against the door. One thought echoed over and over again in his mind:

  She’s lying. She’s lying. She’s lying.

  Three

  The next day Frank took a walk to the newsstand on the corner of Sixth and picked up a newspaper. He didn’t find what he was looking for on the front page of the Cedar Falls Review. Standing near the newsstand he paged through the paper, looking for something, anything. He checked the police blotter. Nothing there either.

  There were no headlines proclaiming MURDER, about a GRIZZLY DISCOVERY. There were no interviews with neighbors talking about how the people in the house at the end of the block had always seemed like such a sweet couple. He found no photograph of a man being led away from his home in handcuffs, and no smiling photo of a woman that had been taken before she became a TRAGIC VICTIM.

  There was some relief in this. It seemed to him that his inability to find any story about a woman being murdered the day before was further confirmation of what he knew. You can’t see a murder happening by using a mirror as some sort of window into some stranger’s home. That type of thing might happen in a movie, but not in the real world.

  The thought occurred to him that he could have seen something that happened in another part of the world, somewhere far outside the boundaries of concern for the Cedar Falls Review. But it was easier to just accept that the murder of the woman by the bay window hadn’t happened at all.

  Frank tossed the paper in a trash can and walked back to his apartment.

  In the bedroom he studied the mirror for a time. Part of him expected to see the scene play out again: the woman walking to the window; the man entering the picture and moving over to her; the man resting his hands on the woman’s shoulders before reaching into his pockets; the necktie; the struggle; the end of the struggle.

  All Frank saw was his own reflection.

  Four

  Three days passed before the mirror revealed itself to Frank again. In those three days Frank was able to convince himself that whatever had happened was a one-time occurrence. Whether it had been a hallucination, a momentary rip in the fabric of reality, or spacemen from the furthest reaches of the galaxy beaming images down into his brain as an experiment, it would not happen again.

  But it was not a one-time occurrence.

  When the mirror showed that it was something more than a mirror for the second time, Frank didn’t feel fear so much as relief. It wasn’t until the moment that he realized that it was happening again (whatever “it” was), that he admitted that some deep, secret part of him had been expecting it all along. Had even been longing for it.

  He almost missed it. There was a flicker in the corner of his eye, and when he turned toward the mirror he saw a new scene. It wasn’t the living room with the bay window; instead it was as if he were watching from the backseat of a car as it was driven down a street at night. As the car passed a streetlight the cabin of the car would be momentarily lit up, and then the streetlight would be behind them, and the interior of the car would return to shadows, the lights from the dashboard softly aglow. There was a man behind the wheel and beside him, in the shotgun seat, a woman. Frank could tell that they were speaking to each other, but again he could hear nothing.

  The experience was somewhat disorienting. Aside from the fact that he was watching a silent movie being played out in his mirror there was the added weirdness of the apparent motion clashing with the reality that he was standing absolutely still. It made him a bit queasy at first, but after a few minutes he acclimated and the feeling passed.

  Frank wondered where these people were headed, and if he would get to watch until they got there. Every now and again the woman would turn to look at the man as he drove. Frank thought she looked upset. Her eyes were puffy and red, like she had been crying recently. The man never turned to look at her, even for a second.

  After some time the car came to a stop. They were parked at a spot overlooking a body of water, possible a lake or a bay. Cold moonlight left an elongated reflection across the surface of the water (which looked almost like a mirror). Neither the man nor the woman appeared to be saying anything. They sat looking out at the water. For a minute they stayed just like that, and Frank began to think that nothing more was going to happen. For some reason he felt disappointment.

  The man reached down, appeared to be searching for something under his seat. As he came back up the woman turned toward him and started to speak, but she never got the chance to finish whatever it was she had intended to say. The man moved quickly, reaching over and jabbing at the woman with his left hand.

  Frank flinched. He thought the man had punched the woman. The woman looked shocked at what had happened. She looked down at the spot where the driver had struck her, which was out of Frank’s view. She lifted one hand to the spot and brought it up to her face. There was blood.

  The driver struck out again, and then again. Moonlight glinted on metal and Frank realized that the man was not punching the woman; he was stabbing her. The woman tried to defend herself, attempting to block the blows with her hands, her back pressed up against the passenger d
oor. He face was a writhing portrait of agony and fear. She turned and tried to open the door.

  The door is still locked, Frank thought. She’s too shocked to remember that she has to unlock it before it will open.

  The man kept thrusting the blade into the back that was turned to him. His face was contorted with purest rage.

  The man stopped. The woman was still, slumped forward against the door she had been unable to open. The man looked out over the water. He was calm.

  And just like that the mirror was a mirror again. The scene in the car hadn’t faded away, like when a movie fades to black. It was there one second and the next Frank was staring at nothing more than his own pale face in the reflective surface of the mirror.

  He left the bedroom. In the living room he sat down on his couch in a room made dark by twilight. For some reason he wasn’t thinking of what he had just seen in the mirror. Instead he was thinking about Hayleigh. Thinking of her had once made him happy. Now all he felt when he thought about her was anger and a sense of betrayal. He couldn’t understand it. Maybe it was beyond his understanding.

  Frank thought about what she might me doing at that moment. And all the while, he thought to himself:

  Bitch. Liar. Bitch. Liar. Fucking lying bitch.

  Five

  Over the next five weeks Frank continued to watch as the mirror showed him more of these scenes. There was always a woman and a man, except for one time when the act was played out between two men. It was always the same, more or less. It always ended with an act of violence, with one human being erasing another from