She crossed over the streetcar rails, and kept going, before finally diving into the store bearing the sign:
GLAZING – MIRRORS
The scarf closed the door, discreetly, behind them. The store was pretty much deserted. The storekeeper was on the telephone with a client. On the counter, the radio was playing a well-known old song—Ophelia could never remember its name:
The bird you meant to surprise
Flapped its wings and flew away
Love’s far away, you can wait for it
You stop waiting for it, and it’s here
There were no more echoes to break up the melody; that was a rare occurrence now. As Ophelia walked along an aisle of mirrors, trying, above all, not to break anything, her image was endlessly duplicated. The Wrong Side was the reflection of the Right Side, but what if her own Right Side was someone else’s Wrong Side?
Still on the phone, the storekeeper hadn’t noticed her. That was preferable. Ophelia reached the back of the store, where he wouldn’t be able to see her. She then moved toward the largest mirror, almost twice her height. She looked pretty strange, with that fat turban on her head, her twitchy scarf, her gown mended by her sister, and gloves impatiently wiggling at the end of her arms, animated by her feverishness. Hands that were incapable of grasping, incapable of reading objects. Incapable of holding on to Thorn.
Ophelia looked deep into her own eyes, but what she was looking for was far beyond them. Behind behind.
“You let go of my hand on purpose, didn’t you?” she whispered. “You didn’t want to drag me over to the other side with you.”
Thorn, Lazarus, the Genealogists, Mediana, the Knight, Ambrose: they had all remained in the Wrong Side, because they had entered it through the Horn of Plenty. Such people weren’t included in the counterpart; they had never been implicated in the deal between Eulalia and the Other. They were now out of reach, neither really dead nor totally alive.
As soon as Ophelia had been able to get out of her hospital bed, she had dived into the mirror in the bathroom. She had immediately returned through the one in the corridor. She had tried again, and again, wanting to slide into the in-between, but no longer managing to. It was as if the frontier between the two worlds was avoiding her. The nurses had finally attached her to the bed, to oblige her to rest. As soon as she had left the hospital, Ophelia had gone back to the basement at the Deviations Observatory, but, as she had expected, the Horn of Plenty had disappeared. Her echo had swallowed it to allow her, and her alone, to reinvert herself.
There was no longer a path to the Wrong Side, no more communication between the two worlds, for better, or for worse.
Thorn had given humanity its dice back, but who would give his own dice back to him?
“Us,” said Ophelia. “You and me.”
It wasn’t a promise. It was a certainty. She would never give up. And if she had to pass through all the mirrors in the world, she would do so. There was no more past to understand, no more future to conquer. It was in the here and now that she would find Thorn again.
She closed her eyes. Breathed. Rid herself of all expectation, all desire, all fear. Forgot herself, as she did when reading an object. The final reading of them all.
“Because we are mirror visitors.”
She plunged into her reflection.
A little more than that, even.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to you, Thibaut, for having lived with me—sometimes with even more strength than I—the whole story surrounding this story, to the final period; and beyond. You are there behind each letter of each word of each sentence that I write.
To you, my precious and inspiring families, in France and Belgium, of flesh and quill, of silver and gold. You are a more intrinsic part of my books than their own pages.
To you, Alice Colin, Célia Rodmacq, Svetlana Kirilina, Stéphanie Barbaras, for all that you have taught me and brought me through your words.
To you, Camille Ruzé, who so delighted me with your drawings, and your humor, and without whom this final volume wouldn’t be what it is. A little more than that, even.
To you, Evan and Livia, for being who you are. Emotion in its purest form.
To Gallimard Jeunesse, Gallimard, and all my interfamilial editors, for having carried the Mirror Visitor from ark to ark.
To you, Laurent Gapaillard, for having sublimated my settings.
To the whole Clique de l’écharpe, for the incredible creativity and inimitable good humor that you cultivated around the Mirror Visitor.
To you, Emilie Bulledop, Saefiel, Déborah Danblon, and to every bookseller, librarian, researcher, teacher, columnist who has passed on, and passed round, my mirror.
To you, Carole Trébor, for your friendship, and for your books.
To you, Honey, for having created Plume d’Argent, and for having believed in me.
To you, Laetitia, who was the first to encourage me to write.
To you, dear reader, for passing through my mirror, and sharing this adventure, page by page.
And finally to you, Ophelia, for having accompanied me so closely, from the first mirror visit to the last. I’m missing you already.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christelle Dabos was born on the Côte d’Azur in 1980 and grew up in a home filled with classical music and historical games. She now lives in Belgium.
A Winter’s Promise, her debut novel, won the Gallimard Jeunesse-RTL-Télérama First Novel Competition in France, and was named a Best Book of the Year by critics and publications in the US, including Entertainment Weekly, Bustle, Publishers Weekly, and Chicago Review of Books. A Winter’s Promise was named the #1 Sci-Fi/Fantasy title of the year by the editors of the Amazon Book Review.
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