In the Looking Glass Read online

existence. Frank wanted to stop, but he couldn’t. It was like a drug, and he was addicted. The thought of simply getting rid of the mirror never even crossed his mind.

  After a while he stopped making excuses to Hayleigh about why it wasn’t a good idea for her to come over, or why he didn’t want to go out anywhere with her. Eventually he just stopped answering his phone, for her or for anybody. She came to the door three times, begging to know what she had done wrong. He never responded, just stood on his side for the door and listening to her plead. Her voice grated on him like fingernails on chalkboard. He thought it might drive him mad.

  The third time she came to his door she had shouted that she was going to call the police and have them check on him if he didn’t say something, anything to at least let her know that he was okay.

  “I’m fine,” he said on his side of the door. “Please go away.”

  His brother came once, undoubtedly responding to a worried phone call from Hayleigh. After banging on the apartment door for ten minutes, and with no response, Frank’s brother left; he did not come back a second time.

  Whenever Frank looked in the mirror when it was just a mirror he could see that his cheeks were beginning to take on a gaunt, sunken look. Some days he lost track and forgot to eat, and when he did eat his meals usually consisted of nothing more than some toast or crackers washed down with a glass of water. His cupboards, never exactly well stocked, were beginning to look bare. He didn’t mind. He sure as hell didn’t feel like making a trip to the store to restock his fridge. As long as he had the mirror he was fine.

  Because the mirror wasn’t a lying bitch. The mirror wasn’t a lying, backstabbing whore.

  The mirror had so many things to show him.

  Six

  At first Hayleigh sounded relieved when he finally called her. Then she remembered that she was angry at him, and her voice turned cooler.

  Why should she forgive him? There was something seriously wrong with him, didn’t he see that? She didn’t deserve to be treated the way he had treated her. No, she didn’t want to see him again.

  In the end she agreed to drop by his apartment. It didn’t mean that he was forgiven, and it didn’t mean that things would be the same between them just because he was sorry. But yes, she would come by. He told her to come around eight, and she agreed.

  When eight o’clock rolled around the Sun was already starting to dip below the horizon, ready to quit its vigil for the day. With the lights off the living room was dim but not dark, shadows at war with the red dying light of day.

  It was three minutes past eight and she wasn’t there yet. Frank’s hands were squeezed into tight fists. She was late. Only by three minutes, sure, but still late. It was disrespectful. Not that she had ever really respected him.

  When heard her coming up the steps he rushed to the door; he stopped himself just before opening it. He flipped the light switch just as she knocked at the door. Her knock was light; it was a tentative knock, nervous. As if she were unsure if she should have come at all, and was having doubts, was thinking about calling the whole thing off. He could picture her stalking back down the stairs and out of the building. He opened the door quickly, before the vision had time to become reality.

  “Hayleigh; I’m glad you came,” he said.

  She didn’t respond at first. She looked into his eyes, eyes that were so much hollower then when she had last seen them.

  “Jesus, Frank; you look sick.”

  “I’m fine. I guess I haven’t been eating much lately, but I’m okay.”

  Frank didn’t tell her that he couldn’t remember when he had eaten last. Two days before? Three?

  “Come in,” he invited.

  She looked just as unsure as her knock had sounded, but she did come in, taking off her jacket and tossing it on the couch.

  “It smells like a gym in here,” Hayleigh observed. “Like stale sweat and old socks.”

  Frank ignored that.

  She moved to a window and lifted it up, letting in fresh air.

  “I didn’t say that you could open my fucking window,” Frank whispered between clenched teeth.

  “What?” Hayleigh asked “I couldn’t her you.”

  Liar.

  “Nothing,” he said. “It was…nothing important.”

  Hayleigh took a look around the apartment. Frank had been cleaning with even less frequency than he had been eating.

  “Maybe…” she trailed off.

  “What is it?”

  “Maybe we should go somewhere. Get something to eat. You look like you could use it.”

  And you look like a fucking whore, my dear, he thought.

  “Sure,” he said instead. “Sounds like a good idea. I just want to show you something first.”

  “What?”

  “It’s in the bedroom. Follow me.”

  “It’s not the mirror again, is it? You already showed it to me, remember?”

  No, not the mirror. The mirror would never show her the things that it had shown to him. He was special.

  “Not the mirror,” he said. “Just come on.”

  He headed for the bedroom, not entirely sure that she would follow him.

  She did follow, however. In the bedroom Frank turned on a light. The mirror reflected Hayleigh as she entered the room.

  She will belong to the mirror soon. We both will.

  He didn’t know where the thought had come from. It sent a quick shiver up his spine. He shook the feeling off.

  “So, what is it?”

  “Huh?” Frank asked, confused.

  “What did you want to show me?”

  “Oh, yeah. It’s right over here.”

  Frank went to the dresser opened the top drawer. He took out a small cardboard box that had been tied shut with a tiny ribbon, then pushed the drawer shut. He set the box on the table by the bed, then came back to where Hayleigh was standing near the doorway. Now the mirror reflected both of them standing side by side.

  “Go look,” he told her.

  “What’s in the box?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Hayleigh looked unsure, but when she looked up at him and he flashed her a smile she couldn’t help but smile back. She started for the table. Frank followed after her, but stopped.

  The mirror wants to see.

  As Hayleigh picked the little box up off the table with her back to him Frank went to the mirror and moved it so that it was facing her. So that it could see. As she fumbled with the tightly tied ribbon Frank moved to the foot of the bed. He threw back the bottom of the coverlet, and as Hayleigh finally managed to get the ribbon free of the box Frank picked up what he had left under the coverlet, gripping it tightly in his right hand. He moved closer to Hayleigh--

  Hayleigh the liar, Hayleigh the liar, Hayleigh the liar, Hayleigh the liar!!!!!

  --and rested his left hand on her shoulder. She opened the box.

  There was nothing inside of it.

  “I don’t get it.” she said.

  “And you never will.”

  He raised his right hand high, bringing the hammer down against her head. She screamed, but her screams were cut off with more hammer blows. She fell to the floor, looking up at him with an agonized, pleading look in her eyes. A look that asked, why are you doing this?

  He hit her again and again. He hit her until she stopped moving, and then he hit her some more. Somewhere, in another life, perhaps another word, he could hear police sirens. They got closer. Some part of his mind that was still capable of rational though understood that someone must have heard Hayleigh’s screams and had called the cops. Some part of him knew that they were coming for him.

  Frank dropped the hammer; it landed in a spreading pool of blood. He turned and walked to the mirror. The mirror had watched it all. Frank looked at himself, saw that he was covered in blood. Whose blood? He couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter, anyway.

  The sirens were very close now. Frank walked to kitchen, and when he came back to stand in
front of the mirror he held a knife in the hand that not long ago had gripped a hammer. The sirens were right outside. They were coming. They would take the mirror away from him. Or they would take him away from the mirror. There was no difference really. Frank looked into his own eyes as he raised the knife to his throat and swiped it across. It was easier than he thought it would be.

  Seven

  “Love you, babe. See you tomorrow.”

  Brian hung up the phone. Before making plans to meet with her the next day at Otto’s he had told Jenn about the mirror he had found earlier that day. About how there had been no price sticker, but there had been a note tucked into the frame. He told her about the way the clerk at Seconhand Discounts had seemed puzzled by the lack of a sticker, and the presence of a note that read:

  I am free. Take me.

  “I know sometimes Jim gives stuff away when he can’t sell it and he’s sick of it taking up space,” the clerk had said. “But this doesn’t look like his handwriting.”

  “It says free,” Brian had reminded him. “Free means free.”

  The clerk looked unsure of what to do.

  “Maybe I’d better call Jim, just to be sure.”

  “Come on, man” Brian had said. “Look at this thing. It’s so dirty you can’t even see your own reflection in it. Plus the framed looks old, maybe even a little rotted. No one would pay money for this.”

  The clerk thought about it.

  “Yeah, okay. Just take it.”

  So Brian had.

  Now he stood admiring his mirror. His free mirror. He had cleaned it up, and now the surface was without dirt or grime, and without streak or spot.

  Brian started to turn away from the mirror, but stopped.

  What the hell?, he thought.

  He wasn’t looking at his own reflection any longer. He watched as a man led a woman into a bedroom. He watched as the man left frame for a moment, then came back to stand next to the woman. The woman left frame briefly, but the man hurried over to the mirror (for one disturbing second Brian thought the man was going to step right out of the mirror and into Brian’s home), repositioning the mirror so that Brian could see the woman once more. She was standing at a bedside table.

  Brian watched as the man moved to a bed, lifted the end of a coverlet and picked up a hammer that had been stashed there.

  Brian watched the rest.

  An hour later Brian was sitting on his couch, his third beer of the night in hand. He was thing about the mirror, and what he had seen in it. But he was also thinking about Jenn.

  Thinking about her made him angry.