by Mark Morris
When the mirror war erupted, Alice sighed and submitted to the inevitable. The Dormouse and the Greens were ecstatic, gathering behind her; the Unicorn joined them. Although Alice smiled to see the Unicorn once more, her outlook was grim. There were creatures fighting for the Prime Minister she had not previously encountered, heaps of scrap metal, rusted hulks whose ranks advanced in rigid lock-step. Their thick feet crushed the Dormouse, trampled women and men. For all his ferocity, the Unicorn was hard pressed to defeat their armoured mass, while their crude blades splashed his ruby blood across the floors of the living rooms, churches, and department stores where they battled. What members of Alice’s forces survived the Heaps were attacked by drones whose propellers separated hands, arms, and sometimes heads from bodies with brutal efficiency. Once Alice had been steeped in blood, had waded through rivers of it, washed her long hair in it, worn its rich stink as a perfume. Now the copper reek through which she moved kept her every meal burning at the back of her throat. She was still capable of single-minded ruthlessness, but so was the Prime Minister, so was everyone else in this existence.
She had a single conversation with him, a week before what was to be the final battle of her failed war. They met at a coffee stand in Waterloo Station. Alice recognised the nervous proprietor as a former Numeral, a Six of Hearts, she thought. Security was heavy. The PM did not bother sitting at the wobbly table on which had been set a pair of china mugs, sugar bowl, and milk jug. Alice slid out her chair, sat, and prepared her coffee light and sweet. Behind her, she could feel the Unicorn tense as she brought the mug to her lips. She wasn’t concerned. Poison was far too sophisticated for the PM. The coffee was better than she would have expected from this sort of establishment. She looked at the proprietor (who had been a Six, yes) and nodded approvingly. He ducked as if she’d thrown something at him.
“I do hope you’re going to surrender,” the Prime Minister said.
Alice paused. “I was planning to say the same thing to you.”
“Whatever can you mean? You’re losing. Every time your forces have met mine, we’ve crushed you, we’ve slaughtered you. Your supporters are deserting you in droves. If you lay down your weapons now, ask forgiveness, I could pardon you. Perhaps. Anyway, at least no more of you would have to die.”
“I mean,” Alice said, “that you’ve done fundamental damage to this existence. You’ve loosened what was sealed with blood. I don’t know if it can be repaired. Even if there’s no fixing it, we should be able to prevent it from becoming worse. Yes, we. This is why I’m here, to ask you to lay down your arms and join me in finding a way to keep things from coming apart any more than they have.”
“But I don’t want to,” the PM said. “I like what’s happened. My friends like what’s happened. My followers like what’s happened. Why on earth should I want to change it?”
“Because it’s not sustainable,” Alice said. “Because what you’ve started is going to harm everyone.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.”
“I do.”
“Look,” the PM said, “will you surrender or not?”
“I will not,” Alice said.
“The penalty for insurrection is death,” the PM said, “I hope you understand.”
Alice finished her coffee, stood. “The way things have been going,” she said, “I’m not sure death is what it used to be.”
11
The final battle began on the streets outside and spilled into the aisles of Harrods. Mannequins that had not picked sides held up plaster hands in protest at this invasion of what was supposed to be neutral ground and were cut down by the weapons of both sides. Display cases were smashed, racks of clothing doused in blood. The fight was over depressingly fast. Through sheer force of numbers, the Heaps overwhelmed Alice’s troops, killing those they could not capture. Although she knew he wouldn’t be, Alice was hoping the Prime Minister would be there to witness his side triumphant. She entertained a fantasy of fighting her way to him and splitting him down the middle with her blade, Tweedle Dead. But he was nowhere to be seen, unless he was concealed in a back room, watching the battle through the store’s security cameras. Failing in her plan for the PM, Alice was hoping for death under the swords of her foes. This did not happen, either. In the end, she was borne to the bloody floor by the combined efforts of a quartet of the largest Heaps.
The inevitable show trial was mercifully brief.
12
The first blow of the heavy sword missed her neck and instead struck the top of Alice’s back. Pain blinding white detonated across her shoulders, robbing her of breath. She was able to recover her thoughts sufficiently to think, Naturally, he’d bollocks this, too, before the Prime Minister’s second attempt cut clean through her neck.
Alice’s blood sprayed across and down the sides of the wooden block into which the executioner’s blade had lodged. So pleased with himself was the PM (who was still bristling from that Tweedle Dee snipe) that he released the sword and reached for Alice’s hair. Her head weighed more than he expected. He lifted it until he was face to face with it. The eyes had rolled under the lids; the mouth hung open. Already, the head looked more like a prop from a movie and less a part of a living person. The PM licked his lips and said, “I’ve been reading about what happens to you after you’re beheaded – to your consciousness. Apparently, there’s some evidence it may hang about for a minute or two. Well. In case you’re still there, I wanted to let you know, I’ve decided I’m going to keep your head. I intend to have it mounted on the wall of my personal chambers, together with those of your principal co-conspirators. At the next Guy Fawkes, we’ll find a way to work your likenesses into the festivities.”
The head did not answer. Had the PM looked down, at the base of the block along whose sides Alice’s blood continued to drip, he might have noticed the pools into which it gathered quivering. Had he inspected them more closely, he would have been astonished to see tiny playing cards lifting themselves out of the red liquid and fleeing for the edge of the scaffold, in the direction of the sea.
For Fiona
The Mirror House
Jonathan Robbins Leon
“Did you see the one in the ball gown?” Edgar’s face was pink from laughing. Keeping one hand on the steering wheel, he wiped the tears from his eyes.
Stephanie remembered the woman in voluminous lavender satin, her sleeves almost as puffy and unfortunate as her bangs. Yet most of the women had been overdressed. They’d teased their hair and zipped themselves into floor-length taffeta, bows dangling from their shoulders, excited to have tickets to the new Performing Arts Centre.
Having opted for knee-length black satin with Kate Moss spaghetti straps, Stephanie felt acutely out of place. Wives clutched at their husband’s arms, thrilled at this access to culture right here in their little town. Stephanie, however, had grown up on museums, opera, and fine cuisine the way others had been raised on meatloaf and Andy Griffith. Nothing Durstville could offer impressed her much.
Still, it didn’t strike her as fair for Edgar to laugh at the locals.
“I thought the music was wonderful,” Stephanie said. “And the chandelier sweeping down like that was something.”
“Well, it’s not La bohème. But it was probably the first time those hicks have ever seen a play that didn’t star their dentist.” Unable to help himself, Edgar was chuckling again. Stephanie faced the window, not wanting to look at him.
He turned onto their quiet street. Queen Anne castles loomed darkly over large front lawns. Their money stretched further here than in Baltimore, but Stephanie missed their town home. She missed dinner parties and concerts, and she missed her students.
Edgar had begged her to transfer with him to Durstville, where he would be Department Chair at the private college. Stephanie still taught, but instead of lecturing on Gothic Literature, her soul’s passion, she dragged Durstville locals t
hrough Intro to Lit, a required course. Her new students struggled to understand The Yellow Wallpaper and bought CliffsNotes to shortcut Daisy Miller. Stephanie handed out C’s like Halloween candy. Most of them, she knew, would never pick up a book again after college.
“Edgar!” she screamed. Caught in the headlights, the man had seemed to appear out of nowhere.
Swerving quickly, Edgar just missed hitting him. The car came to a stop, and husband and wife had to catch their breath.
Edgar yanked on the emergency brake and got out. Turning in her seat, Stephanie shouted after him, “Edgar, don’t!”
It was the half-wit from across the street. Edgar had called him this so many times that it had become how Stephanie referred to him in her thoughts. Like always, he wore jeans, a white undershirt and boots. Always the same, but never dirty. His arms dangled limp from rounded shoulders, and in the middle of his slack-jawed face were those empty eyes.
Stephanie had gotten used to the sight of him, though his constant staring had unnerved her when they’d first moved in. “He stood out there during the rain,” she told her husband once.
“The neighbours say he’s harmless,” Edgar had said.
“But what is he staring at all the time? Hours, every day, he just stands there, looking in the direction of our house.”
“I don’t think he’s staring at anything.” Edgar knocked his knuckles against his forehead. “Empty up there, I bet. A vegetable.”
She’d never seen him in the street before. “You fucking retard!” Edgar screamed at the boy now.
Unbuckling, Stephanie got out of the car. The street had been dark a minute before, but a few neighbours had awoken from the commotion, turning on bedroom lights and opening windows to see what had happened. Stephanie approached the pair of men and laid a quieting hand on her husband’s elbow. “Let’s just go inside.”
“We could have all died because of this moron!” Edgar jerked his arm away from her. He came nose-to-nose with the boy. “Can you even understand me?” he said. “Do you hear me?” If he did, the moron gave no sign of it. His eyes were dull as a tarnished mirror.
A porch light snapped on, and a squat woman in a bathrobe came outside, hurrying over. This was the boy’s mother, Yolanda. “Please! Please, I’m sorry,” she said, her accent thick, blending the words melodically. She only came up to the boy’s shoulder in height, but she threw her arms around him in a protective embrace. “I must have forgot to lock the door. I’m so sorry.”
“He was in the street!” Edgar roared.
“I’m sorry,” Yolanda said. “Rafael is a good boy. He just likes to be outside.”
Stephanie had observed Yolanda and Rafael many times over the seven months she and Edgar had been Durstville residents, but she had never interacted with them. Wedged close to one of the larger homes in the neighbourhood, their house had been built as a separate kitchen in those days when cooking was drudgery and kitchens hot as engine rooms. It was little more than a shack, and the neighbours had informed her that Yolanda was renting. She wore a drab uniform when she left in the mornings, and it was assumed that she cleaned or something. Mother and son lived alone. During the long hours his mother worked, Rafael stood outside, a zombie tethered to the lawn by an invisible chain.
Close for the first time, Stephanie was surprised at his age. She had thought he was a teenager, but he looked closer to twenty-five. His skin was a brilliant copper, and his hair was an untidy ocean of black waves. If a magician’s snap could only have brought him out of his trance, he would have been handsome.
“Come, mijo,” Yolanda said to her son, pulling him away and towards their kitchen house.
“He should be in a home!” Edgar called to her back. Yolanda only repaid his fury with a wounded look before disappearing inside with Rafael.
* * *
Durstville seemed to have the worst of everything. The mouth-hot heart of summer gave way to the rainy season in late August. Stephanie awoke with a cold. She and Edgar usually rode to the college together, but today she begged off, asking her husband to post a notice on her door that classes were cancelled.
She could have been next to death before she’d have cancelled class at her last post. Those students, however, had been brilliant. Undaunted by the lengthy list of required texts, they showed up to class, their favourite passages of Walpole and Radcliffe highlighted, passionate notes scribbled in the margins. Their questions excited Stephanie. With them, it never felt like teaching, but rather like seducing, drawing them close, teaching them to love.
Today, Stephanie could not face the Durstville disappointments. In her current mood, she’d burn down the college if another student asked her if she’d read Memoirs of a Geisha or what she thought of The Joy Luck Club. At least once a day she was asked about her lack of accent. “Where are you from?” students loved to inquire. “D.C.,” she invariably answered, making her voice frosty as chilled glass.
The grey sky seemed ready to boil into a black storm. Thunder grumbled, and Stephanie decided to brew some Theraflu. After downing it, she trudged upstairs to bed and allowed sleep to drown her.
A crash of lightning woke her hours later. Her head felt heavy as a kettle bell. The room was solid black without the digital display on the VCR player. Outside, wind, rain and thunder played an Antheil symphony. It took repeatedly flicking the light switches on and off for Stephanie to understand that the power was out.
“Edgar?” she called. Fanning her arms, she got ahold of the banister and followed it down the stairs. Again she called for her husband, but there was no answer. She felt her way to the kitchen. There would be candles and matches in the pantry.
On reflex, she pulled the chain to the pantry light, but of course, nothing happened. Emergency supplies were kept somewhere in the back, but she wasn’t sure what shelf. She let her hands run over objects, discovering bags of sugar and flour, canned goods, and glass bottles that might be olive oil or liqueurs.
The house was still new to her, so she couldn’t recall if there was a shelf along the back wall. Holding her arms in front of her, she walked forward to find out. The pantry was deeper than she remembered. She’d thought it to be little more than a walk-in closet, but after three steps, she’d not yet found the end of it.
Feeling along the shelf to her left, she chanced upon the box of kitchen matches. She opened it and struck one. The pantry was no more than four-feet deep. Had she been taking baby steps? Theraflu, she reasoned.
She lit a candle and was turning to leave when the light glinted on something brass set in the back wall. It was a doorknob, and now she saw that the pantry didn’t terminate in drywall. There was a door.
It was unsettling to live somewhere seven months and not remember a door. The furnace or something must be behind there, something she’d not taken note of because it wasn’t interesting. Still, the jolt of this door appearing out of nowhere had her on edge. She needed to open it.
* * *
“Please, calm down,” Edgar cautioned.
“I’m telling you, there’s another part of the house!” Stephanie couldn’t get the words out fast enough. “Someone is living in it!” She was pacing Edgar’s office, her dripping clothes and shoes soaking his oriental rug.
“Stephanie, sit down.”
She did. Trying her best to be still, she said, “You’ve got to believe me.”
Edgar sighed and folded his arms over his chest. “Let’s think this through, okay? There’s a wall at the end of the pantry.”
“It’s a door!”
“Stephanie, I’m telling you, it’s a wall. And behind that wall is the utility room. You know that.”
She was silent. Rationally, she did know that behind the pantry was the utility room. They’d had a new washer and dryer set installed when they moved, and Edgar had hung a bar so that Stephanie could hang-dry her blouses. She spent more time in th
at room than she would have cared to and knew it to be directly behind the pantry.
But she could not reason away what she had seen. The door had been there, and so had those awful rooms. And the woman too.
“Maybe you got confused. It was dark. You came back into the kitchen, things looked strange to you, and—”
“It wasn’t like our house. It was…” How to describe it? The kitchen, with the same tiles as her own, but covered in what looked like ashes. Cobwebs clung to the cabinets, and the counters were coated in a fine veil of dust. What had disturbed her most, however, was that it was her kitchen, only everything was backwards, the fridge on the left instead of the right, the dining room also on the wrong side.
It wasn’t just the layout either. She came to the living room and saw her own couch, crusted with mildew. On top of the coffee table was the decorative bowl she’d broken and glued back together. It was all hers, only flipped around and soggy with decay.
She needed to know if there was a door into this place from the outside. She went in search of the foyer and found her waiting.
“There’s a woman in there,” Stephanie told Edgar. “She was just standing there. I screamed when I saw her, but she didn’t turn around.”
She’d run then. Having dropped the candle, she had to make her way in the dark, reminding herself to think of the reverse to find her way back. At last in the pantry, she slammed the door to the other house closed. There was no deadbolt, no chain. She couldn’t stay here alone with whatever was beyond that door. She grabbed her keys and made a mad run for the car in the driveway. Despite the rain, which fell as if from an open sluice, she drove to the college, bursting in on Edgar.
