The Mirror

by Marlys Millhiser

  Rachael stuck her head in first. It was just dark. The musty smell was so deep now it reminded her of when she’d broken open a mushroom.

  Something inside gave back a beckoning glow. Didn’t it?

  I’m not going in there. I’m not scared. I just don’t like it, and that’s different.

  Rachael walked backward to the path and stood in a spot of sun to get warm. Her skin was still hot but she felt cold inside.

  A whooping sound like Indians made in the movies at Shorty’s picture house sliced through the trees and she swung around. It came from somewhere ahead and Rachael moved toward it, looking behind her only once to make sure nothing came out of the cave and followed her.

  Jerry Garrett and all his bones crouched near a wooden box in the ground. The box’s lid was broken and sat slantwise against a rock. Something that looked like a piece of one of Thora K.’s saffron cookies sat on the lid.

  Rachael slipped behind a tree to spy on Jerry. Maybe she’d jump out when he least expected it.

  His cupped hand swooped toward the cookie but instead of picking it up closed on air. He shook his fist next to his ear like Uncle Lon did a pair of dice. He worked with something between his fingers and put it into the box. Bringing his nose down to the box’s edge, his rump aimed at the sky and his elbows sticking up like a cricket’s, Jerry Garrett stared inside. A moment later he jumped up and let out another whoop.

  Mystified, Rachael stepped out from behind her tree.

  Sullen eyes watched her approach. They were liquid brown instead of golden-flecked like her dad’s. “How long you been hiding behind that tree, kid?”

  Rachael ignored the insult. “That is a cookie.”

  “So what?”

  “So what are you doing?” She peered into the square box. Its bottom was wet stones sticking above rusty water. And along its upper edges feathery cobwebs threaded the corners together. “Are you an Indian? You yell like one.”

  “Yeah and I’m going to cut your hair off starting down at your eyebrows, brat.”

  She turned to run, but he had a hold of her dress. It ripped at the waist.

  “Wait. I’ll show you. But you got to promise not to make noise and not tell anybody. It’s a secret. An Indian secret that only Indians know.”

  Rachael wanted to go back to the cabin, and she wanted to know what he was up to.

  Jerry Garrett knelt as he had before and gave her a warning glance. His hand rested on the edge of the wooden lid.

  A fly landed, and then another. Rachael counted seven flies before Jerry’s cupped hand swooped across the lid.

  There were now six flies either by or on the cookie and his hand was shaking dice again. He opened it to expose the stunned seventh fly lying on its back, still buzzing and kicking its legs. He pulled its wings off.

  “Ich!”

  “Shut up.” Putting the bug on a cobweb in the box, he wiggled the web with his finger.

  “I’d never marry you.”

  “Who the hell asked you?”

  Rachael craned forward as the biggest spider she’d ever seen darted from nowhere, pounced on the amputated fly and retreated. Jerry shook the web again. The spider returned, struck, retreated, waited and then came back to wrap the fly in fine-spun web. The feeble struggle stopped. The sun went down behind a ridge. Rachael shivered and swallowed back the sour juice coming up her throat. Jerry grinned ghoulishly and whooped.

  “That’s nasty. You’re nasty.” She wanted to cry for the poor fly, but he’d never know it.

  “Little girls are just scaredy-cats, that’s all.”

  Rachael brushed off her skirt and for once was proud to straighten to her full height so she could look him eye to eye. “Little boy” – she swallowed again for the fly but pretended to pause – “I can show you something a lot scarier than that.”

  He laughed. Rachael squared her shoulders with a sniff and walked away.

  “What?” His hand on her arm jerked her to a stop. “You can’t scare –”

  “Don’t touch me. You’re all dirty.” She walked on but he followed.

  Rachael pointed to the door in the hillside from the turn in the path. “There’s an evil genie in there. I bet you’re too coward to go in.”

  He stalked to the door. Hinges creaked and wood splintered as he yanked it open as far as it would go. He disappeared inside.

  Rachael waited for him to come out. But he didn’t.

  If she went in after him he’d probably jump at her or something. He was staying so quiet in there to do just that. There wasn’t anything dangerous in that cave but Jerry Garrett.

  With the door standing wide open, Rachael could see some dim but interesting shapes inside. She was too far away to make them out.

  She scratched a mosquito bite on the calf of her leg with the tied laces of the shoe on her other foot. Still no sight or sound of Jerry. Maybe he was feeding more spiders.

  Rachael moved hesitantly toward the dark hole. She’d just look in from the outside so he couldn’t play a trick on her.

  It wasn’t as dark as she’d thought. She could see him standing motionless toward the middle of the cave, only his face in shadow.

  A tall shape standing alone and to one side caught her attention. The light from the doorway glowed off a slender hand with long pointy fingernails. “Is it gold?” she whispered.

  “Don’t come in here.” Jerry sounded like he had a pillow over his face.

  But Rachael was already in. “Why, it’s a mirror.”

  It had many hands all holding each other as its frame. And wavy glass like in some of her grandmother’s mirrors in the Gingerbread House.

  “It must be very old.” The awe in her voice came hollow on still, stagnant air. Why would Thora K. keep such a valuable thing in here?

  “I think you better go get your ma, Rachael.”

  “Why? And how come you’re talking so funny?” He hadn’t moved since she’d come in and he was staring at the floor. “What’s the matter with you?”

  A pile of clothes and a long-handled hammer like the ones miners used in their contests on the Fourth of July lay on the floor between them. “It’s just some old clo …” But she didn’t finish. A human hand lay next to the hammer and was connected to the pile of clothes by a wrist.

  Rachael blinked and stepped around the huddled mass to stand next to Jerry.

  There was a face on this side, a dark swollen face with eyes popping out of it.

  “It’s Mr. Pemberthy,” her voice said, and then it started making squeaky, screaming noises that wouldn’t stop.

  4

  Thora K. watched Doc Seaton’s ancient Model T rattle off down the road and turned back to the Maddon car. Brandy sat next to Rachael, who slept in the back seat. She stroked her daughter’s hair. Doc had given both children something to quiet them.

  Poor Tim. No wonder he hadn’t told them about the Garretts renting the place. All her family gone and most of her friends and now Tim. It was becoming harder to ignore the speed of passing years.…

  Thora K. pushed the specter from her thoughts. “Well, there be a ranch ’ouse full of ’ungry men and us with no mite a supper started.” Bless Brandy for sharing her family with an old woman.

  But Brandy took the radiator blanket from the floor of the car and shook it. “She’ll sleep till we get back.” She handed Thora K. the flashlight. “We have things to do.”

  “Can’t it wait?” She followed Brandy around the house and toward the path to the cave. “Tomorrow the men can bury it or –”

  “What if Jerry wakes up in the night and decides to go back?”

  Thora K. remembered the stupefied expression of the boy as he dragged a hysterical Rachael into the house. “’Ee won’t go near after seein’ Tim.”

  “He might. Kids are funny.”

  The cave was dark enough now that Thora K. turned on the flashlight and was met with an answering flash from the mirror. It settled into rings of light one within the other, as if the glass
had a depth of its own, the rings deformed by the age of the glass.

  Tim had pleaded with her to destroy it when he’d helped her store it here those many years ago, but she’d been against it. Brandy might need to use its magic again and see into the future. But she hadn’t consulted it in all this time, so she must be able to see her visions without it.

  Although Thora K. had never quite understood how the mirror worked, she could no longer doubt Brandy’s predictions. Even that Jerry and Rachael would one day marry. “Do ’ee believe ’twould ’urt the boy?”

  “I’m not taking any chances. It’s dangerous.”

  Thora K. bent to pick up the double jack that had been pushed aside when Tim’s body was removed. Memories of Corbin caught in her throat. “Wot do us do with it then?”

  Brandy knelt to untangle the rope from the decaying quilt that once covered the mirror. “Move it to the Brandy Wine for now.”

  “It be some heavy for we. I got a better idea.” She raised the big hammer and almost toppled over backward. “Stand back, you. Edden going to be a danger when I’m finished with it.” And she swung.

  “No!” Brandy grabbed her arm and the double jack dropped to the ground, only an edge of it pinging harmlessly against an ugly claw. “What do you think Tim was trying to do when he died?”

  “Wot be ’ee saying, woman?”

  “I know that mirror exists unharmed except for a crack in the glass in 1978,” Brandy whispered, as though the thing could hear. “The mirror survives. You don’t.

  “The door has rotted. Tim probably figured it wasn’t safe anymore with only a sick woman and her child living here. The cabin hasn’t been rented to anyone with children for years. They wander and explore, especially little boys. So Tim hunted up his double jack and came out here to make sure it wouldn’t harm Jerry. You know he thought it was responsible for his niece’s losing her mind.”

  “Be ’ee tellin’ me this ’ere mirror kilt poor Tim? ’Ow could it?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m willing to bet Doc Seaton decides Tim died of a stroke, just like John McCabe. They found him on the floor in front of the mirror too.” She threw the radiator blanket over it and wound the rope around tight. “No one succeeds in destroying it. But I think it may well take care of anyone who tries. We’ll have to hide the mirror where no one’ll be tempted to fool with it.”

  They started for the Brandy Wine, the mirror between them, Thora K. at the front end where the load was lightest trying to hold it and the flashlight where her hands met underneath, a clawlike finger poking through the blanket into her armpit. That whole side of her body throbbed with the effort and tingled perversely with her excitement at the deadly magic of the thing she carried.

  Night creatures rustled just out of sight.

  Except in the tree shadows, the darkness was lighter here.

  Thora K. nerved herself to ask the question that had haunted her since they’d found Tim. “Do ’ee know when I’ll go? Be it this year? Or the next?”

  “No, I don’t know.” Shadows softened the deepening lines on Brandy’s face and blurred the contrasting streaks in her hair. “If I did, I wouldn’t tell you. I’ve learned that much at least. I just know you’re not alive in 1978. And you haven’t been for a while.”

  “Should ’ope not. I’m in me seventies now. Don’t seem proper you’d be neither.”

  “I’ll be too old to really know it, and Hutch … We’d better hurry. I don’t want Rachael to wake up before we get back.”

  Thora K. held the flashlight while Brandy tore boards away from the opening of the Brandy Wine.

  “This is too easy. I’ll get the twins down here in the morning with more boards. And I’ll come along to make sure they don’t go inside.”

  “I’m feelin’ so weak as a robin. Shouldn’t wonder if I don’t make it back to the car.”

  “I’ll bring it around.” Brandy ripped away the last board needed to slip the mirror through. “You can wait down by the road.”

  Thora K. worried about Rachael alone in the car as she lifted the horrid thing one more time. Her rheumatism was acting up. Would she have the strength to help get the supper on? All she wanted now was a strong dose of tonic and a warm bed. She knew shame at the weakness with which age had burdened her. Thora K. didn’t want to die this year but she was glad she wouldn’t live to Brandy’s 1978. The world was already getting ahead of her. Women shamelessly baring their legs, bobbing their hair, kissing and worse with men in automobiles, and drinking alcohol. It was a mystery to Thora K. how there would be a world left in 1978, the way the next generation of mothers was being raised.

  Struggling with a last effort, they set the mirror up in the mouth of the mine and ducked back outside. “Tez but a thing. Not alive. ’Ow could it ’urt anyone?”

  “I don’t know. I wish it never existed. But then there’s so much I’d never have known …”

  “Might be us could drop it down a shaft and run, quick-like.”

  “Thora K., you don’t understand. Everything’s already happened. If that mirror is destroyed, if it can be – would time change back and none of this have happened?”

  “But ’ee don’t look into it no more.”

  “I’m afraid to mess with it now. I don’t know what effect it would have. I’m so confused … and I’d been doing so well.”

  “Would ’ee become yer young granddaughter again then?”

  “No, I’d probably be Shay Garrett at fifty-one in a world years removed from the one I knew, if she’s even lived that long. She may be dead.”

  Rachael didn’t remember much of that afternoon. And she didn’t remember the drive home, but merely awoke there the next morning. However, she would never again come near a cave or a dark hole without knowing panic. Her childhood nightmares would be filled with monstrous black spiders emanating from forbidden dank caverns.

  Everyone seemed overly concerned with that day and Doc Seaton asked her into his little house after school to talk about it. She repeated the details of Jerry Garrett’s feeding spiders until she tired of it.

  Her parents took her into Denver several times to talk to another doctor who didn’t even flatten her tongue with a stick and tell her to say “Ahhhhh.” He asked her the same questions as Doc Seaton had. This was all confusing because she didn’t feel sick. One night she awoke to overhear her parents and Thora K. talking of “trauma” and “leaving it be.” Whatever a trauma was, Thora K. pronounced it a blessing.

  Whenever Tim Pemberthy was mentioned everyone would glance at Rachael and look worried. She’d been told he’d died. It wasn’t too surprising since he was an old man. But she didn’t really want to think about it. So she didn’t.

  There were more serious concerns in the household.

  Dan received a letter from Joe Tyler in California. His grandmother, when she was alive, had been a great friend of Thora K.’s. Joe had a job “trucking cabbages” and thought he could get Dan one too. Dan wanted to go and everybody but Brandy was against it. One night he left without telling anybody.

  Her dad was quiet after he read the note Dan had left on the table. Then he picked up a chair and broke it across his knee. “Cabbages, Jesus!”

  He’d always been two people to Rachael. The one who loved her and the other one who could hit back at Uncle Lon and knock the twins’ heads together when they needed it.

  “Hutch, take your temper outside.” Her mother was sad but dry-eyed. “I told you –”

  “You said used cars. And I didn’t even want to believe that.”

  “He’ll be there when the need arises. You can’t keep a grown bird in the nest.”

  “But the ranch –”

  “Is going downhill fast and you know it.”

  Her parents stood holding onto each other, excluding Rachael. They didn’t even notice her tears.

  Uncle Lon led her to the door. “Let’s saddle up and take a ride.” Then he said over his shoulder, “Can’t bring him back, but if you want to stake m
e to a game or two in Denver, I might rustle up some cash.”

  “Get out of here,” her dad snarled and lowered his face back to her mother’s hair.

  Things settled down some when Uncle Lon returned from Denver. But then Remy started seeing her teacher, Miss Hapscot. He even had her out to dinner, and Rachael sensed more changes coming.

  Rachael didn’t like changes.

  She missed Dan and didn’t care for Miss Hapscot sitting in his place at the table.

  To her the changes seemed to correlate with the arrival of the Garretts in Nederland.

  Jerry had avoided her since that afternoon at the Strock cabin. But one day when snow scudded across the road to fall into frozen ruts and Rachael was making her solitary way past Doc Seaton’s, swinging her lunch pail, he came up beside her.

  He slowed his pace to match hers. “How come you don’t ride the bus like the other kids who live out of town, brat?”

  Rachael decided the two of them had an understanding. They didn’t like each other. “Because the bus only comes to the road. If I walk that far I might as well walk all the way. I do sometimes in the mornings.”

  He reached into the ditch for a handful of snow and tried to form it into a ball but it powdered away between his mittens like sugar. “Do you ever have dreams about Mr. Pemberthy?” he asked casually.

  “No. Why should I? He just got the stroke and died.” Rachael thought stroke must be something like measles or mumps.

  Jerry stepped in front of her so she had to stop. “My ma says I’m not supposed to talk to you about him.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “The mirror’s gone,” he whispered, as if telling a secret. “It was gone the next day. I looked.”

  “What mirror?”

  “The one in the cave.” He sounded frightened and Rachael was trying to figure out why when Dorothy Kinshelow walked by with Mary Powers.

  “Rachael’s got a boyfriend,” they chimed in unison and ran down the hill laughing.

  “Dorothy says your ma’s a witch.” Jerry turned to walk ahead.

  “And you’re just dumb enough to believe her.” Rachael’d never been accused of having a boyfriend before. And she thought she’d caught a look of admiration on Dorothy Kinshelow’s face.