Midnight in the Mirror World

by Fritz Reuter Leiber

  He thought, oh the human infatuation with guilt and retribution! The dread of and perhaps the desire for punishment! How ready we are to think others hate us!

  During this search of his memory, the dark seed stirred several times—he seemed to be forgetting some one woman. But the seed refused to come clear of its burial until the clock struck its twelfth stroke next midnight, when. Just as the now clearly feminine figure in the fourth reflection vanished, he spoke the name, "Nina Fasinera."

  That brought the buried incident—or rather all of it but one crucial part—back to him at once. It came back with that tigerish rush with which memory-lost small .incidents and encounters will—one moment nonexistent, the next recalled with almost dizzying suddenness.

  It had happened all of ten years ago,, six years at least before his divorce, and he had only once met Miss Fasinera—a tall slender woman with black hair, bold hawklike features, slightly protruberant eyes, and rather narrow long mobile lips which the slim tip of her tongue was forever wetting. Her voice had been husky yet rapid and she had moved with a nervous, pantherine grace, so that her heavy silk dress had hissed on her gaunt yet challenging figure.

  Nina Fasinera had come to him, here at this house, on the pretext of asking his advice about starting a school of piano in a distant suburb across the city. She was an actress too, she had told him, but he had gathered she had not worked much in recent years—just as he had soon, been guessing that her age was not much less than his own, the Jet of her hair a dye, the taut smoothness of her facial skin astringents and an ivory foundation make-up, her youthful energy a product of will power—in short, that she was something of a fake (her knowledge of piano rudimentary, her acting a couple of seasons of summer stock and a few bit parts on Broadway), but a brave and gallant fake nonetheless.

  Quite soon she had made it clean that she was somewhat more interested in him than in his advice and that she was ready—alert, on guard, dangerous, yet responsive— for any encounter with him, whether at a luncheon date a week in the future or here and now, on the instant

  It had been, he recalled, as .if a duelist had lightly yet briskly brushed his cheek and lips with a thin leather glove. And yes, she had been wearing gloves, he remembered now of a sudden!—dark green ones edged with yellow, the same colours as her heavy silken dress.

  He had been mightily attracted to her—strange how he had forgotten that taut nervous hour!—but he had just become re-reconciled with his wife for perhaps the dozenth time and there was about Nina Fasinera an avidity and a recklessness and especially an almost psychotic-seeming desperation which had frightened him or at least put him very much on guard. He recalled wondering if she took drugs.

  So he had courteously yet most coolly and with infinite stubbornness refused all her challenges, which in the end had grown quite mocking, and he had shown her to the door and closed it on her.

  And then the next day be had read in the paper of her suicide.

  That was why he had forgotten the incident, he decided now—he had felt sharply guilty about it. Not that he thought that he possessed any fatal glamour, so that a woman would die at his rebuff, but that conceivably he had represented Nina Fasinera’s last cast of the dice with destiny and he, not consciously knowing what was at stake, had coldly told her, "You lose."

  But there was something else he was forgetting—some- thing about her death which his mind had suppressed even more tightly—he was certain of that. Glancing about uneasily, he stepped down onto the landing beneath the low- dipping chandelier and hurried down the rest of the stairs. He had Just recalled that he had torn out the story of her death from a cheap tabloid and now he spent the rest of the night hunting for it among his haphazardly-filed papers. Toward dawn be discovered it, a ragged-edged browning thing tucked inside one of his additional copies ,of the Chopin nocturnes.

  FORMER BROADWAY ACTRESS DRESSES FOR OWN FUNERAL

  Last night the glamorous Nina Fasinera, who was playing on Broadway as recently as three years ago, committed suicide by hanging, according to police Lieutenant Ben Davidow, in the room she rented at 1738 Waverly Place, Edgemont.

  A purse with 87 cents in it lay on top of her dresser.

  She left no note or diary, however, though police are still searching. Despondency was the probable cause of Miss Fasinera’s act, according to her landlady Elvira Winters,. Who discovered-the body at 3 A.M.

  "She was a charming tenant, always the lady, and very beautiful," Mrs. Winters said, "but lately she’d seemed restless and unhappy. I’d let her get five weeks behind on her rent. Now who’ll pay it?"

  Before taking her life, the 39-year-old Miss Fasinera had dressed herself in a black silk cocktail gown with black accessories including a veil and long gloves. She had also pulled down the shades and turned on all the lights in the room. It was the glare of these lights through the transom which caused Mrs. Winters to enter the actress’ small, high-ceilinged room by a-duplicate key when there was no answer to her knocking.

  There she saw Miss Fasinera’s body hanging by a short length of clothesline from the ceiling light-fixture. A chair lay overturned nearby. In its plastic seat-cover Lieutenant Davidow later found impressions which matched the actress’ spike heels. Dr. Leonard Belstrom estimated she had been dead for four hours when he examined the body at 4 A.M.

  Mrs. Winters said, "She was hanging between the tall mirror on the closet door and the wide one on her dresser. She could almost have reached out and kicked them, if she could have kicked. I could see her in both of them, over and over, when I tried to lift her up, before I felt how cold she was. And then all those bright lights. It was horrible, but like the theatre."

  When Giles Nefandor finished reading the clipping, he nodded twice and stood frowning. Then he got put maps of the city and suburbs and measured the straight-line distance from the rooming house in Edgemont to his own place across the city, then used the scales on the maps to convert his measurements to miles.

  Eleven and a half, it came out, as nearly as the limits of accuracy would make it.

  Then he calculated the time that had elapsed since Nina Fasinera’s death: ten years and one hundred and one days. From Mrs. Winters’ statement, the distance between the mirrors between which she’d hanged herself had been about eight feet—the same distance as between the mirrors on his stairs. If she’d entered the Mirror World when She died and been advancing toward this house as she’d moved the last five nights—two reflections, or sixteen feet, each time—then in ten years and one hundred and one days she’d have traveled 60,058 feet.

  That figured out to eleven miles and 1,978 feet

  Eleven and a half miles, or close to it.

  He puzzled, almost idly, as to why a person could travel only such a short distance in the Mirror World each twenty-four hours. It must depend on the distance between the two mirrors of your departure and also on the’ two mirrors of your arrival. Perhaps you travelled one reflection for each day and one for each night. Perhaps his theory of shells like the Ptolemaic ones was true and in any shell there was only one door and you had to search to find it, as if you were traversing a maze, to find the right two doors in the crystal maze in twenty-four hours could be a most difficult task* And there roust be all sorts of interlocking dimensions in the Mirror World—slow paths and fast ones: if you travelled between mirrors set on different stars, you might travel faster than light.

  He wondered, again almost idly, why he had been chosen for this visitation? and why of all women it should have been Nina Fasinera who had had the strength and the will to thread purposefully the glassy labyrinth for ten years. He was not so much frightened as awed—that an hour’s meeting should lead to all these consequences.

  Could undying love grow in an hour? Or was it undying hate that had flowered? Had Nina Fasinera known about the Mirror World when she’d hanged herself?—he recalled now that one of the things she’d said lightly when she’d tried to storm his interest had been that she was a witch. And she woul
d have known about the mirrors on his stairs matching those in her room—she’d seen them.

  Next midnight when he saw the black figure in the third reflection, he instantly recognized Nina’s pale gauntly lovely race behind the veil and wondered why he had not recognized it at least four nights before. Rather anxiously he glanced down toward her black-stockinged ankles, which were slender and unswollen, then quickly back to her face again. She was gazing at him gravely, perhaps with the ghost of a smile.

  By now his own reflection was almost wholly eclipsed behind the ones in front of it. He could not even guess at his expression, nor did he want to. He had eyes only for Nina Fasinera. The impact of his years of unfelt loneliness shook him. He realized how desperately he had been wishing someone would search him out. The clock twanged on, swiftly marking time forever gone. Now he knew that he loved Nina Fasinera, had loved her since the one only hour they’d met. That was why he’d never stirred from this rotting house, why he’d prepared his mind, for the Mirror World with chess-squares and singing wires and the stars. Since the hour they’d met . . . Except for colour and the veil, her costume was the same she’d worn that fateful sixty minutes. If she*d only move, he thought, be*d faintly hear the hiss of the .heavy silk through the five thick panes of glass remaining. If she’d only make-that smile more certain ...

  The twelfth stroke twanged. This time he felt a terrible pang of loss as her figure vanished, but it was swiftly replaced with a feeling of surety and faith.

  For the next three of his nocturnal .days, Giles Nefandor was happy and light-hearted. He played the piano music he loved best: Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Scriabin, Domenico Scarlatti, He played over the classic chess games of Nimzowitch, Alekhine, Capablanca, Emaneui Lasker, and Steinitz. He lovingly scanned his favourite celestial objects: the Beehive in Cancer, the Pleiades and Hyades, the Great Nebula in Orion’s sword; he noticed new telescopic constellations and thought he saw the faintest crystal paths ...

  -Occasionally his thoughts strayed eagerly yet guiltily,as if to forbidden fruit, to the mazy crystal corridors of the Mirror World, that secret diamond universe, and to his thousand wonderings about it: endless rooms and halls ceilinged and floored by transparency, and all the curious mirror-lost folk who lived adrift in them; piercingly sweet music; games of glass; revels and routs at a thousand levels; the tinkling of a million glittering chandeliers; diamond pathways to the farthest stars—

  But he would always check these thoughts. There would be time enough for them, he felt certain. Experienced reality is always more satisfactory than imagination and illusion.

  And often he would think of Nina and of the strangeness of their relationship: two atoms marked by one encounter and now drawn together among all the trillions of trillions of like atoms in the universe. Did it take ten years for love to grow, or only ten seconds? Both. But he checked these thoughts too—and struck the keys, or moved the men, or re-focused the ’scope.

  There were moments of doubt and rear. Nina might be the incarnation of hate, the jet-black spider in the crystal web. Certainly she was the unknown, though he felt he knew her so well. There had been those early intimations of psychosis, of a pantherine restlessness. And there had been that first glimpse of his face, sick with horror . . .

  But they were moments only.

  Before each of the three remaining midnights he dressed with unusual care: the black suit newly brushed, the white shirt fresh, the narrow black necktie carefully knotted. It pleased him to think that he had not had to change the colour of his suit to match that of her dress.

  The first of the three midnights he was almost certain of her smile.

  The next midnight he was sure of it. Now both figures were in the first reflection and he could see his own face again, scarce four feet away. He too was smiling gravely—the horror was gone.

  Nina’s black-gloved hand resting on his shoulder, the black fingertips touching his white collar, now seemed a lover’s gesture.

  The night after that the wind came back at last, blowing with more-and more violence, although there were no clouds, so that the stars flickered and streamed impossibly in his ’scopes. The gale seemed to fasten on and shake their beams like crystal stalks. The sky was granular with wind. He could -not remember such a blow. By eleven it had almost driven him from the roof, but he stuck it out although the wind increased in frenzy.

  Instead of daunting, it filled him with a terrific excitement. He felt he could leap into the air and be blown light- swift anywhere he willed in the diamond-dazzling cosmos -except that he had another rendezvous.

  When he finally went inside, shaking with the cold, and took off his fleece-lined coat, he became aware of a rhythmic crunching and crashing below, with rather long intervals between.

  When he went down the stairs, they were dark and the crashes were louder. He realized that the great chandelier above the landing must be swinging so far that it was hitting the lead-webbed windows beyond, breaking their remaining panes—and had long since burst all the electric globes it carried.

  He felt his way down by the wall, keeping close to it to avoid the chandelier’s murderous swings. His fingers touched absolute smoothness—glass. Then the glass rippled for an instant, tingling his fingers, and he heard husky irregular breathing and the hissing of heavy silk. Then slender arms were around him and a woman’s slim body was pressed against his and hungry lips met his lips, first through a faintly astringent, dryish, tormenting tantalizing veil, then flesh to flesh. He could feel under his hands the ribbed smoothness of heavy silk and of pliant, lightly fleshed ribs under that.

  All in utter darkness and pandemonium. Almost drowned in the latter, midnight’s, last strokes were twanging.

  A hand moved up his back and suede-cased fingers lightly brushed his neck. As the last strokes twanged, one of the fingers turned hard and stiff and cruel and dug under his collar so that it caught him like a hook by the collar and the tightly-knitted tie the collar covered. It wrenched him into the air. A terrible pain stabbed at the base of his skull, then filled it to bursting.

  It was four days before the policeman who nightly patrolled beyond the gate discovered by a stab of his flashlight the body of Giles Nefandor—whom he knew by sight, though never a sight like this!—hanging from the wrought chandelier above the landing strewn with glassy- shards. It might have been longer than four days, except a chessplayer across the city, contesting a correspondence game with the well-known recluse, spurred the police into action when the move on his last postcard had gone ten days unanswered. His first queries were ignored, but an evening phone call got action.

  The policeman reported back the unpleasant condition: of the body, the black, booked, wrought-iron chandelier- finger thrust under the noose of collar and tie, and the glass shards, and several other matters.

  He never did report what he saw in one of the two mirrors on the stairs when he looked at it closely, his powerful flash beside his chest as his wristwatch signalled midnight. There was a stack of reflections of his own shocked, sharply shadowed face. But in the fourth reflection there were momentarily two figures, hand in hand, looking back toward him over their shoulders—and smiling impishly at him, he thought. The one figure was that of Giles Nefandor, though looking more youthful than he recalled seeing him .in recent years. The other was that of a lady in black, the upper half of her face veiled.

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