Through the Mirror

by D C Tullis

  BRRRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIINNNNNNGGGGGGG!

  “I’m coming already. Jesus,” I called out as I rapidly changed clothes and scrambled to the front door as I pulled on my jeans.

  As I came closer to the front door, I realized it was pouring outside. Though there was no thunder, the rain was as vicious as if there was. It was my type of relaxing Saturday.

  I held onto that thought as I opened the door. Outside, a half drenched Ellie stood with a bag over her shoulder and a massive transparent umbrella.

  “Hey…,” I said as I reveled for just a moment in that fact that she had chosen to wear a white t-shirt. “Oh, um… come on in.”

  She collapsed her leaky umbrella as I shut the door behind her.

  “So what’s up?” I asked. “You could’ve texted me first. I mean, the doorbell might not have woken me up.”

  “Check your phone,” she replied.

  As I pulled out my phone, I almost shouted.

  “Wait.. what?”

  ***

  (6) Missed Calls - Ellie

  (11) Unopened Text Messages - Ellie

  ***

  It was also 3:30 in the afternoon. Those pills really must have knocked me out. Explains why Maxence always goes to work so late. You’d need a taser to awaken someone from that deep a slumber.

  “As you can see, I did try to call you. You can guess how much luck I had with that,” said Ellie.

  “Yeah…,” I replied awkwardly. “I may have taken a few too many of Maxence’s sleeping pills.”

  “Jesus, dude,” she replied as she shook her head. “You don’t wanna mess with that stuff. But that’s beside the point. I knew neither of us was working and my power’s out, so I didn’t really have anything else to do. Your power working?”

  “I don’t know… No, it’s gotta be. Doorbell rang after all.”

  “Oh god, that’s perfect. I’m gonna take a shower. It’s raining like a motherfucker out there, and I am wetter than a prom queen during a coked-up after party,” she snickered.

  Before I even had a word in edgewise, Ellie was scaling the stairs like Godzilla stepping over Tokyo. God, her love of film was infectious. I sighed before following her up. Who else has to deal with situations like these?.

  “Hey, can you toss me some fresh clothes,” she shouted through the bathroom door right as she turned on the shower.

  “Yeah,” I replied.

  What in the hell was I supposed to give her? She’s half a foot shorter than me and easily forty pounds lighter. I mean, I’ve got some plain gym shirts, some socks, and a set of sweatpants, but that’s about the only thing that might work.

  “Yeah… J… you’re gonna have to get me a towel too.”

  I grumbled a bit before gathering the gear, knocking on the door, and throwing them through the crack. I resisted the urge to peek at the mirror, and when I mean resisted I mean put myself in a chokehold and wrestled myself away from the bathroom door. That may have been the toughest thing I had done all week.

  When I was done fighting my inner gladiatorial deathmatch, I collapsed back on my bed. For a moment I was at peace. Just laying on the bed, and absorbing my senses. I picked up my acoustic from the wall holster next to my bed. I ran my fingers lovingly down the phosphor bronze strings, plucking ever so lightly. I caressed the mahogany frame for a moment before I pulled from memory and began to gently serenade the room with notes from The Smashing Pumpkins. I laid there playing for a few minutes before I saw the edge of Ellie’s smiling face standing in my doorway.

  “Do these pants make my butt look big?” Ellie asked as she mockingly posed for me.

  I gave her the thumbs up, and she grinned a bit before coming over and plopping down on the opposite side of the bed.

  “Okay dude, so I couldn’t really sleep last night, so I did a little bit of research,” she announced.

  I turned my head. My interest now fully directed in what she was saying.

  “So… it turns out that the forest is the private property of someone in Eastmouth. It’s under the ownership of someone named Frederic Bertrand. I’ve got no clue who that is, but he’s probably a local.”

  I paused to think a moment before replying, “Yeah. Isn’t he one of the members on the Town Council? I swear I’ve seen his name on a plaque or something.”

  “Maybe,” she replied. “Anyway, he claimed the land in 1959. It had been considered abandoned before.”

  “Wait…? He claimed it? As in, he was old enough then to claim it and is still alive now?”

  “Yeah… unless it’s screwed up online, and his father bought it or something.”

  “Jesus,” I replied. “That bunker is probably hiding the fountain of youth.”

  She giggled.

  “Oh, but yeah Jason… where’s Ben’s journal? I want to take some pictures for further study, oh, and I also totally want to see the secret room. I’m actually kind of excited about that.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I grudgingly replied. “Making me move my legs and shit...,”

  I got off the bed and fumbled around for his journal before finally clasping its leathery frame.

  “C’mon,” I declared as I beckoned her towards the door.

  We headed down the central stairway and made our way around the foyer, through the living room, past the dining room, and past the laundry room until we were both at the foot of the stairs leading to the second story west wing.

  “I’ve been to your house plenty of times before, but I’ve never been up here before,” said Ellie.

  “Yeah, neither Maxence nor myself go up here very often. You’ll see here in a minute that it’s mostly just dusty guest rooms.”

  We floated up the stairs, and I opened a few of the doors at the top to prove my point.

  “It’s a whole lot of nothing,” I finally said.

  And I really wasn’t wrong. The guest rooms were pretty much just storage at this point, so I shrugged and lead her into the main attraction. The secret room.

  The grandfather clock stood resolute in its deathly stillness.

  “No way dude, that’s so cool,” were the first words out of Ellie’s mouth when she entered the enclosure. She surveyed the room before pointing out something I had failed to notice earlier, “Hey, J, what’s with this switch?”

  She was pointing to a lightswitch that I hadn’t noticed before in my previous explorations of the room. It was a dusty little thing lodged a foot away from the opening to the room. Naturally it wouldn’t rouse any attention as it was just a lightswitch, but without any form of lighting in the room it did have a bit of mystery going for it.

  “Why don’t we find out?” I announced to her as I flipped it on.

  Immediately the hole in the wall began to swing out and to the left. Our jaws dropped at this discovery. The room hadn’t in fact been drywalled up, it merely had a secret door instead. One that I... unintentionally destroyed. Yet if it was meant to be opened, why hide it in the first place? This was just another question I was gonna have to ask Maxence when he got back from work.

  Ellie shot me an awestruck look and then headed towards the mirror.

  “Wow, so this was all completely walled off?” She inquired of me.

  “Yeah, there was no sign of it before I came crashing through it,” I replied.

  She shot me a humorous glance as she continued further into the room and began examining the mirror.

  “I don’t know why anyone would build a room and then wall it off, especially if there’s something in it. This house is kind old though s-”

  Ellie cut off my speech when she pulled me over to the mirror.

  “Dude, do you feel this heat? Is it coming from the mirror?”

  I shrugged and headed over to her.

  I raised my hand toward the mirror and slowly ran it around the rim. She was right. The mirror seemed to be emanating heat from its ancient wooden frame. As I lifted my hand across the mirror to the other side, I paused, noticing something else. The glass of the mirror was emit
ting a strong icy chill. I couldn’t immediately sense it, but after exposing my hand to the heat I felt it. I brought my hand gently down upon the glass, and then through the glass…

  “Holy fuck…,” I shouted as I tried to pull my hand back from inside the mirror.

  It wouldn’t budge. Ellie saw what was happening and leaped up to pull my other arm with all of her force. It wasn’t working. Instead, the opposite was happening as my arm was being pulled through the mirror quicker and quicker until it was up to my elbow. My arm felt cold and ticklish through the mirror. It was a strange feeling that rocked the border between uncomfortable and terrifying.

  Suddenly, the room began to rumble and foreign winds burst free from their glassy constraints. It was as if a miniature tornado had found a way into the room. The temperature dropped to what must have been nearly thirty degrees and any remaining light dispersed from the enclosure’s constraints.

  “C’mon Jason, use your legs,” Ellie called out from behind me.

  “I’m trying,” I yelled as I leveraged my legs against the mirror frame and pushed with all of my strength.

  In retrospect, maybe a few more days of squatting at the John Mason gym would have helped me. Hindsight being 20/20 after all.

  “What the hell is going on?” Ellie shouted back.

  “You ask if I know why I’m being pulled into a fucking mirror. This right here is the goddamn highlight of my life.”

  In the heat of the moment, maybe the questions such as ‘how is this mirror not falling over under the weight of my legs’, or ‘how is my arm being sucked through a space vacuum in my Uncle’s mansion’ didn’t seem very important. The mirror kept pulling, and no matter how hard I tried, I kept giving. My shoulder slid into the chilly abyss, and then my chest. Everything was becoming just too much for me to bear. The strain on my body’s resistance was overwhelming. The last thing I remember before I blacked out was the feeling of Ellie’s hand tighten around my ankle as I was pulled fully though.

  ✽✽✽

  Violet light flowed all around me coalescing into zipping rays of energy. I was falling. No, we were falling. Falling at furious speeds I might add. Wherever we were zipped around us as I reached down and pulled Ellie up to where I could hold her. It was like falling into an infinite abyss that drove like a rollercoaster. The violet stream raced down yet zigged and zagged at random intervals. I immediately felt nauseous.

  I looked down at Ellie to see she had passed out. I gripped her tighter and tried to remember what had just happened. We had been examining the mirror in Maxence’s home until somehow I got stuck in it. And then so did Ellie.

  It felt like a volt of electricity burned through my skull when I tried to remember. When I tried to think.

  I looked below to see if there was an end in sight. At first, there didn’t appear to be anything, however, the purple was gradually receding into a glowing white flame the farther down we went. We kept speeding up, and speeding up, until finally the white light all around us became too bright to behold... and then I felt a gentle thud.

  “Dirt,” I sputtered.

  I spat the dirt out of my mouth and tried to pull myself to my feet. I turned my gaze upward and immediately regretted my decision as the sun scalded my eyes from over the horizon. I recoiled and rubbed my them.

  “Where the hell are we?” I asked aloud.

  The sky was a silvery-grey fog lining the horizon in every direction. Beyond it lay a fuschia colored sun and two rouge-tinted moons.

  This was definitely not Earth.

  The landscape radiated the same infusion of colors as the sky. The only exception being patches of green forestry fusing with the dead hues of withered trees and dusty mountain peaks. Around us lay three circles of some kind of stone, inner, middle, and outer. They sat at about a foot high each and gave the appearance of a ruin. Some of the stones had what appeared to be circuit diagrams inscribed into them, while others were bored with holes rimmed with metal. On the edge of the structure was a large metallic stump that looked like it had held something in the past. The whole structure looked like something out of a science fiction film set on top of a hill.

  I kicked at Ellie gently.

  “Wake up,” I called. “I think we may have stumbled into wonderland.”

  Her eyes shot open, and after a few grunts she pulled herself onto her feet. She took a moment to gather her senses and analyze our surroundings before she finally spoke.

  “What the hell just happened?” she asked me.

  “Good question. A question I have absolutely no answer too. I’m guessing this is connected to the mirror,” I replied.

  “Who’d of thought that Maxence has a goddamn portal in his house,” she said.

  I didn’t reply, instead I merely shrugged.

  Ellie turned away from me and began to climb over everything in the area. She looked as if she was searching for something.

  I pulled out my phone and raised it to see if by some stroke of absurdly good luck I’d have a signal. Alas, it was not to be.

  “See anything?” I called out to her.

  She took her time to reply.

  “I think so. I’m using the zoom on my camera, and I think I can see a stream down there way off by that patch of green forest,” Ellie called back from the peak of a very tall boulder.

  “Good thinking,” I yelled. “Now get back down here before you fall off.”

  “I’ll be fine...,” she called back. “You worry too much.”

  I shook my head, feeling an awful lot like a concerned parent.

  Once she returned to the ruins and had taken a few pictures to chart our discovery we headed down the hill towards the stream. We made sure to take a less vertical path in our descent as we twice saw chunks of rock slide down the hill-face onto shards of grey crystal below. The scenario was breathtaking and equally bizarre. As we made our way to the stream, we crossed over various strangely formed hills, dunes ripe with spiky grey sand, and massive, curved indigo thorns jutting out in all directions. After what must have been two or so miles, we finally reached our destination. The stream ran out of a living patch of emerald forest which stretched out for near half a mile in each direction.

  “Finally,” Ellie said as she bent over to drink from the stream. “I wish I’d been wearing some shoes before we fell through, man.”

  “Could be worse,” I replied as I bent down to take a drink as well. I wiped away the remaining dirt from my body with the stream waters when I was done.

  Despite the mass of ground that stretched out in every which way, I had not once spied any life. Human, animal, alien, or other. Nothing. It was the strangest sort of feeling to realize that you are all alone for miles on miles.

  “Hello?” I shouted in the hopes of receiving some sort of answer.

  At first everything was silent, but then an answer came. It just wasn’t the answer we wanted.

  Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr went a low snarl from a dense area of overgrowth.

  “Oh, what the fuck...,” Ellie said under her breath as she inched closer to me.

  From behind the treeline emerged three creatures that were clearly not of earthly origin. They looked as if some mad scientist had mixed the bodies of wolves with the heads of alligators. A deadly and horrific combination.

  “Could they be friendly?” Ellie asked me, clearly unassured.

  One of them snarled directly at her, almost as if in response.

  “Back,” I shouted to Ellie as I stuck my arm out in front of her and then moved backwards several steps. “They’re still gonna have to cross the stream, so create some distance.”

  She did as I told her. Even as far as moving completely back up to the treeline that was behind us. As she did, I frantically searched for some kind of weapon. It wasn’t much, but I eventually found a thick branch and snapped in half, making a sharp tip in the process.

  The creatures had crossed the stream and were continuing their snarling ascent towards us. They moved forward carefully, tre
ading every bit of ground as if it might have landmines underneath it. And then all of sudden, they exploded in our direction. Two hurled themselves at me whereas one continued a menacing crawl towards Ellie. I smashed the skull of one as it thrust itself towards me, throwing it back in the process; thank god for little league. This allowed the other to close the distance and lunge on top of me. It overpowered me immediately and began ferociously snapping its jaw back and forth inches away from my neck. I maintained a deadlock against it. Somehow I was sufficiently managing to keep it from crushing my brain beneath its iron jaws with the stick lodged in its mouth until I heard the screams of Ellie from behind me. In a sudden flurry of rage and fear, I felt the adrenaline course powerfully through my veins, and I managed to throw it off of me and onto a cluster of jagged rocks to my right. It let out a primal wail of pain as one pierced a leg, but the creature didn’t look wounded in the slightest. I leapt to my feet to see if Ellie was okay and saw the creature that had targeted her was violently convulsing. Through its left eye stuck a sharp indigo thorn. Blood and mushy bits of brain gushed from the wound on its face and leaked through the blades of prickly grass below its corpse. The body seized for a few more moments before succumbing to the wound and collapsing into a limp heap of flesh. My excitement was short lived as the beast I had first thrown off leapt from some hidden patch of overgrown grass and caught my left leg with the tip of its teeth.

  I bit my lip violently to keep from screaming.

  The pain stitched through my leg as if someone was rubbing a cheese grater through my blood vessels. It stung like an absolute bitch.

  Instinctively, I took my makeshift spear and using all of my force began smashing its sharp tip into the clutching parasite's head. The first blow drew blood which in turn only caused the beast to hold on harder. The pain was overwhelming now, yet I smashed harder and harder and harder until all that was left of the beast’s skull was a mound of hairy flesh and pointy shards of skull. Even in death though, the bastard still clung onto my leg. The fucking thing wouldn’t come off even as I continued to mash the lifeless corpse.