The Medici Mirror

by Melissa Bailey

  ‘Hmm. I like this,’ Tara said, tapping her fingers over the drawings. ‘I remember Richard working on a project a couple of years ago that used similar ideas to maximise the roof light.’

  ‘Was that the launderette conversion in North London?’

  Tara nodded and smiled.

  I, however, grimaced. ‘I really hated that project. The place was unbelievably dismal.’

  ‘Not by the time you’d finished with it.’ And she winked at me before looking down again at the drawings. ‘You could also use some light tunnels from the top floor to bring light down to the first and ground floors.’

  ‘Yeah. I thought about that. They’re a great feature. And the lower floors have windows running along the outer walls on both sides so light really shouldn’t be too much of a problem.’

  Tara turned towards me, smiling. ‘I really loved your Suffolk country-house extension, by the way. I heard that light really was a big problem there.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, surprised that she knew about it. ‘That was a few years before you joined the practice, wasn’t it?’

  Tara nodded. ‘Richard took me to see it recently. I think he’s incredibly proud of your modern glass cube. And that it sits comfortably next to a very traditional turn-of-the-century farmhouse.’

  I stared at her for a moment, trying to work out if Richard routinely took all our associates on forays into the English countryside to view our past projects or whether, as was far more likely, it was just Tara. Uncomfortable, I decided to skip over the confession, if that was what it was. ‘Of course, the design was born out of practicality as much as aesthetics. The house was in shadow for the whole of winter because the sun didn’t climb above the top of the forest that lay behind it. So we needed to steal as much light from outside as we could.’

  ‘Well, it’s very beautiful,’ she said, looking down at my notepad on the table. ‘Who’s Ophelia, by the way?’

  ‘What?’ I said, shocked by the question.

  ‘Ophelia,’ Tara repeated, tapping her finger against a pencil doodle of the name on my notepad. I stared at it for a moment, stunned. Then I saw next to it, on the corner of the sheet, the pencil sketching I’d made the day before of the lettering on the mirror in the underground room – the intertwined T and M and the ornate H. I really needed to get a grip on my unconscious drawing habit. ‘Who is she?’

  ‘A fashion photographer,’ I replied, deciding that it was probably better to give Tara something than have her question fruitlessly and therefore speculate.

  She mouthed a mocking ‘Wow!’ at me and then smiled.

  I couldn’t help but smile back.

  ‘And I take it you met her recently?’

  I nodded and filled her in with the sparsest of details about how we met.

  ‘Hmm,’ she said again, the sound embodying scepticism.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Well, nothing good ever came from hooking up with someone you met in a park.’

  ‘It didn’t?’

  ‘Nooooooo. Definitely not.’ Tara paused. ‘She’s not a weirdo, is she? Hanging around green spaces, giving out implausible stories to strangers about lost camera lenses and waiting to entrap the most hapless of them into futile searches.’

  I smiled and her laughing eyes smiled back.

  ‘Well, so far she doesn’t seem to be a freak,’ I said.

  ‘That sounds promising. But you wait. When you least expect it she may morph into just the lunatic you didn’t expect, fucked up by all her parents’ failings.’

  I laughed but even as I did I remembered the story of Ophelia’s mother and father. As she had said, their loss had affected her in a deep, painful way and its repercussions could still be felt. It was just that I hadn’t so far been privy to those repercussions. But no doubt I would be in the future.

  ‘Another coffee?’ Tara called over her shoulder. She had turned and was walking back towards her desk, already moving on.

  But the thought she had awoken sat uncomfortably with me for the rest of the day.

  11

  THE FIRST THING I became conscious of was the darkness, a blanket of heaviness around my shoulders. I was standing upright, that much I was aware of, but beyond that I couldn’t tell. I turned from one side to the other, trying to see. But the blackness was total. I had no idea where I was. I tried to remember the last thing I had done, the last place I had been. But my mind was a blank.

  It was then that I heard the sound. At first it seemed to come from far away, a faint noise, an echo of a woman’s laugh. It moved gently around me and then disappeared. A moment later, it returned. Louder and nearer. Then it vanished once more. Seconds, minutes perhaps, passed in silence. I reached forwards into the darkness before me but I could feel nothing. Where was I? Fear had just begun to form a hard knot in my stomach when a faint light became visible. I blinked, unable at first to make anything out. But gradually it became clearer.

  I was in a small room, with a low ceiling and an earth floor. A man was sitting in an armchair in the corner of the room. A candle, resting on the floor beside him, lit him from beneath. His head was inclined downwards, face obscured, his attention absorbed by what he held in the fingers of his right hand: a leather shoe with an ankle strap. Its style was old-fashioned, its leather dark green, the pointed toes matching the arc of the heel. It might have been embroidered with a paler thread, but as the light was dim I couldn’t see for sure. For I don’t know how long, the man sat in silence, his gaze held fast by the subtle movement of the shoe as he rocked it gently back and forth. Back and forth, back and forth, marking time in the half-light. Suddenly he hunched forward in the chair and cupped the shoe easily in his palms. I looked at him, at his large, rough hands softly cradling their precious cargo. But nothing about him was familiar.

  Turning to my right, I caught sight of a doorway in the corner of the room leading away into pitch darkness. I couldn’t remember coming through it or walking down the passageway beyond. So how had I come to be here? I looked down at my feet, at the earth floor beneath them, as if somehow they could provide me with the answer. Nothing came back but silence and the subtle smell of the damp ground.

  I shivered, suddenly cold. Something about this place didn’t feel right. Turning towards the doorway, I caught sight of a large mirror on the wall next to it. The silver glass was mottled with age, dark cobwebbed scars spreading out below its surface. Taking a step towards it, I searched for an image of myself through the darkness. Nothing. I took a step closer and looked deeper. But I couldn’t see anything.

  A sudden thud behind me made me jump. The man had dropped the shoe to the floor where it lay on its side in the dirt. To the left of the shoe, I now noticed the corner of a bed. Upon its mattress, I could see a pair of woman’s legs from the calves down to the feet. Moving to my right, I tried to get a better view of the woman. But no matter how much I turned, how much I moved, the perspective didn’t change. I could see only her calves and feet and only from a certain angle. I stepped backwards, confused. It didn’t make any sense. If I moved one way or the other, I ought to be able to see more to the left or right. I tried again. This time the candlelight flickered and suddenly the middle section of the bed was revealed. I could see a pair of pale thighs, the tops of which were roughly covered over with a white slip. I took another step forwards and as I moved the perspective changed again. The woman’s torso came into view, the white slip tight over her stomach and breasts with tiny straps over her shoulders. It lay in folds at her armpits and her right arm fell, loose yet unmoving, off the bed to the floor, where her fingers grazed the dirt. Her left arm was flung backwards, seemingly behind her head, although I couldn’t see that far. Her neck was slender and her collarbone stood out in the candlelight casting shadows over her pale skin. Something else, long and dark, was hanging loosely around her neck. But it didn’t look like a necklace. It was too plain and the way it fell in cascades over her skin was too much like the folds of material. I looked harder, lean
ed in towards her, and realised that it was a green velvet ribbon.

  As I was poised to take a final step forward, before I saw the woman’s face, I looked back at the man. He was mumbling to himself, wringing his hands, and growing increasingly agitated. Suddenly he looked up. His eyes were puffy but catching sight of me they grew narrow and hostile.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he said. His voice was low, indignant, the lines at the edges of his mouth hard. ‘You’re not supposed to be here.’ He looked for a moment to his right, at the woman’s feet. Then his gaze returned to me. ‘What are you doing here?’ he said again.

  I opened my mouth to speak but then closed it. I didn’t know how I’d got here, what I was doing or indeed where ‘here’ was. A cold sense of dread gathered at the base of my spine.

  The man stood up. He was tall, much taller than me, his head almost grazing the low ceiling. He was dressed in an old-fashioned black suit, the trouser buttons of which were undone. He fastened them hurriedly and rearranged his waistcoat and jacket. Then he began to move towards me. His big hands swung casually at his sides as he walked. The movement was innocent enough and yet I felt a jolt of fear. Sweat beads pricked my upper lip as he drew level with me.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ His dark eyes looked at me searchingly. Their irises were almost black.

  I shook my head and turned away. I saw the doorway once more and regret ricocheted through me. I should have tried to get out of this place when I had the chance.

  ‘You know I can’t let you go,’ he said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’ He was so close to me now that his hot breath stuck to my cheek. ‘It would be foolish of me, wouldn’t it? After everything you’ve seen.’

  I tried again to speak but still the words wouldn’t come. I wanted to tell him that he was mistaken, that I hadn’t seen anything. But the words caught in my throat, unspoken.

  I took a step backwards and my foot hit the wall. My body followed and my head came to rest against the surface of the mirror.

  ‘Going somewhere?’ he said and then laughed.

  Fear escalated inside me. I drew a deep breath, closed my eyes and tried to clear my mind. I knew there was a way out. There had to be. But the knowledge tumbled uncaught through my mind.

  I heard the man’s quiet words close to my ear. ‘There’s only one place you’re going.’

  And then I felt it. The intense struggle to breathe. I gasped, felt the pain in my chest as my lungs fought for air. I was suffocating in this darkness, in silence. As my body shuddered and everything around me turned black I experienced the sensation of falling. But I couldn’t be falling, I thought, the wall was behind me. And yet I fell, consumed by the mirror, the room, and the darkness. So this is it, I thought. I am falling backwards towards the earth, falling towards death.

  As I was about to hit the floor I felt the man’s breath on my face once more, waited to hear his words close to my ear. But instead of his voice another pierced the darkness. Unexpected, dulcet. A woman’s.

  ‘Johnny,’ it said quietly. ‘Wake up.’

  I opened my eyes, took a staccato breath and then sat upright. It was still dark around me, the day not quite having broken. But I could feel without seeing it that my body was drenched in sweat. It took me a moment to place where I was. But then the memories of coming over to Ophelia’s the night before flooded back. I turned towards her body, lying beside me, convinced that it had been her voice that had woken me. But her silent, unmoving form told me otherwise. The alarm clock on the table beside her was flashing six o’clock. I breathed in and out deeply and lay back down. Then I heard Ophelia stir.

  ‘You okay?’ Her voice was groggy with sleep, not at all the clear voice that had brought me out of my nightmare.

  ‘I’m fine. Just a bad dream. Go back to sleep.’

  She was silent for a moment. Then she rolled towards me and propped herself on her side. ‘What kind of bad dream?’

  ‘A strange one.’ I stared towards the ceiling. ‘I was in a small room, dark and claustrophobic. It was the underground room at the factory, I’m pretty sure. I was watching a man play with a green shoe in his hands. I don’t know what the significance of that was or if in fact there was any significance at all.’ I paused for a moment, wondering if the shoe was, in fact, one of those from the factory. Old-fashioned, green. Most likely it was. ‘Anyway, when the man caught sight of me, he got really angry. I was clearly not supposed to be there. And because I was there, I knew that I was going to die in that room.’ My words were sucked into the dark, hovering silence. ‘I felt tightness in my chest, something like suffocation, and then I was falling to the ground, to my death.’ The intense pre-dawn quiet seemed to shift up a notch. I could hear my own uneven breath; Ophelia’s was light and regular beside me. ‘Then I woke up.’

  Pause. ‘So you didn’t actually die in the dream?’

  ‘No. I didn’t die. But I knew that I was going to.’

  Ophelia was silent.

  ‘And to make matters worse, I couldn’t get out of that place. In short, I was fucked. It was the typical nightmare scenario.’

  Ophelia quietly put her hand on my chest. I could feel my heart beating fast against my ribcage.

  ‘And this man from the dream – did you know who he was?’

  ‘I’d never seen him before. But there was something about his eyes, something dark, unnatural. That was one of the things that was so terrifying about it.’

  Ophelia shivered slightly by my side and shifted closer. I felt her legs brush against me, then her feet touched mine. Suddenly, I remembered.

  ‘There were feet.’

  ‘Feet? Well, that doesn’t sound very scary.’

  I smiled for the first time into the darkness. ‘I could see a pair of legs on the edge of a bed, from the calves down to the feet. For a long time, that was all I could see. Just feet and legs, disembodied. Then, eventually, they panned out into a woman. But I couldn’t see her face.’

  Ophelia was quiet for a second.

  ‘Was there any reason why the feet and legs in particular should have been in the dream? I mean, did they have any relevance?’

  I tried to remember if there was anything distinctive about them. But I couldn’t recall anything. I shook my head. ‘No.’

  ‘Then perhaps the legs were just a hang-up from our conversation the other night – about my work and Bourdin and that sort of thing. The cropped fashion legs. Maybe it’s that?’

  I nodded slowly. Now that I thought about it, it made sense. Still, it didn’t help dispel my underlying sense of unease. I tried to breathe the vague anxiety away. But I couldn’t. So instead I turned onto my side and faced Ophelia.

  ‘It sounds to me as if this dream is a collage of the things that have been bothering you,’ she said. ‘The underground room and the things in it, the shoes and the bed, the images you saw at my flat. It got stored in your subconscious, jumbled up and played out in this way. Don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure you’re right.’ I closed my eyes once more. But after a moment the man’s face formed again in my mind. I opened my eyes, blinked, and the image evaporated. ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ I said again, as much to myself as to her.

  Unwilling now to encourage sleep, I watched the dawn slowly breaking, transforming the bedroom into a twilight world of shadow. Long stealthy fingers of light crept underneath the curtains at the windows, mottling the walls as they shifted and dispersed the darkness. As I watched the moving patterns of light and dark I remembered the mirror.

  ‘Anything else you want to tell me?’ Ophelia’s voice was a whisper.

  I hesitated. Should I tell her that the mirror in the factory was also the mirror from my dream? Surely that would only pique her interest, make her even more desperate to see it. I made a snap decision. ‘No,’ I said, kissing her on the lips. ‘There’s nothing else.’

  A couple of hours later I was heading back to the factory, feeling a little more like myself. But my mind r
emained unsettled by the nightmare. It was still early when I unlocked the doors of the dispatch room and the inside of the factory was dismal and dark. I switched on the lights and watched the fluorescent tubes flicker to life, dispersing winter shadows. I put my bag down on my desk and pulled out my work camera. It was a simple digital one that I used to take photographs of spaces before, during and after renovation. I turned the dial to the feature that would give good results in dimly lit conditions and slung it round my neck. Then I dug out two candles from the storage cupboard where Tara had left them and looked once more for the concealed door. I pulled it open, hearing as I did the soft groan of escaping air. It possessed the same fustiness as it had the last time. I looked down the staircase, into the utter darkness beyond, and considered abandoning my plan. But that would be ridiculous, I told myself. There was nothing to be afraid of. I took a step forward and began my descent.

  A couple of minutes later, the candles were positioned on the floor at each end of the mirror and my eyes were growing accustomed to the dim light. No doubt about it, I thought, as I turned around and surveyed the room. This was the scene of my dream. My stomach formed a tight knot of disquiet.

  I walked over to the edge of the bed and pressed down on the mattress. It was about half the thickness of the contemporary style and there were no signs of any box springs. I was sure it was Victorian, in keeping with the early history of the building. I looked more closely at the edge of the bed which had supported the legs in my dream. Now all that was visible there were ancient signs of rust upon the mattress, the same markings as those that were present on the metallic stand. I sighed and sat down. Despite its appearance and apparent dilapidation it actually felt quite sturdy. I bounced a couple of times on the frame and let out a short, quiet laugh. I looked around me, taking in the dilapidated nature of the room, the flaking paintwork on the wall beside me behind the armchair, the expanse of crumbled plasterwork on the wall below the mirror, exposing the wooden laths beneath. What the hell was I doing down here? The sooner I got this over with the better.