by Fritz Leiber
“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 theater.”
When Giles Nefandor finished reading the clipping, he nodded twice and stood frowning. Then he got out 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 traveled 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 must be all sorts of interlocking dimensions in the Mirror World—slow paths and fast ones: if you traveled 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 would 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 face 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 color and the veil, her costume was the same she’d worn that fateful sixty minutes. If she’d only move, he thought, he’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, Skriabin, Domenico Scarlatti. He played over the classic chess games of Nimzowitch, Alekhine, Capablanca, Emanuel Lasker, and Steinitz. He lovingly scanned his favorite 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 fear. 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 color 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 stroke 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-knotted 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-iron chandelier above the landing strewn with glassy shards. It might have been longer than four days, except that 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, hooked, 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 signaled 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.
* * *
I’M LOOKING FOR JEFF
AT six-thirty that afternoon, Martin Bellows was sitting at the bar of the Tomtoms. In front of him was a tall glass of beer and behind the bar were two men in white aprons. The two men, one of them so old he was past caring about it, were discussing a matter—and while Martin wasn’t really listening, much of the discussion seemed to be for his entertainment.
“If that girl comes in again I won’t serve her. And if she starts to get funny I’ll give her some real eye-shadow!”
“Regular fire eater, aren’t you, Pops?”
“All this week, ever since she started to come in here, there’s been trouble.”
“Listen to him, will you? Aw, Pops, there’s always trouble at a bar. Either somebody makes a play for somebody’s girl, or else it’s two life-long buddies—”
“I mean nasty trouble. What about those two girls Monday night? What about what the big guy did to Jack? What about Jake and Janice picking the Tomtoms to break up, and the way they did it? She was behind it every time. What about the broken glass in the cracked ice?”
“Shut up! Pops is nuts, friend. He gets wild ideas.”
Martin Bellows looked up from his beer at Sol, the young working owner of the Tomtoms, and at the other man behind the bar. Then he glanced down the empty stretch of polished mahogany and over his shoulder at the dim, silent stretches of the booths, where the lights from behind the bar hardly picked up the silver and gilt. He grimaced faintly.
“Anything for a little life.”
“Life!” Pops snorted. “That isn’t what she’d give you, Mister.”
There’s no lonelier place in the world than a nightspot in the early hours of evening. It makes one think of all the guys who are alone—without a girl or a friend—restlessly searching. Its noiseless gloom is a sounding board for the faintest fears and aches of the heart. Its atmosphere, used to being pushed around by the loud mouths of happy drunks, is stagnant. The dark corners that should be filled with laughter and desire are ghostly. The bandstand, with the empty chairs sitting around in lifelike positions.
Martin felt it and hitched his stool an inch closer to the old man and the anxious, sharp-eyed Sol.
“Tell me about her, Pops,” he said to the old man. “No, let him, Sol.”
“All right, but I’m warning you it’s a pipe dream.”
Pops ignored his boss’s remark. He spun the glass he was polishing in a slower rhythm. His face, puffed by beer and thumbed into odd hills and gullies by a lifetime of evanescent but illuminating experiences, grew thoughtful. Outside, traffic moaned and a distant train hooted. Pops pressed his lips together, bringing out a new set of hummocks in his cheeks.
“Name’s Bobby,” he began abruptly. “Blonde. About twenty. Always orders brandies. Smooth, kid face, except for the faintest scar that goes all the way across it. Black dress that splits down to her belly-button.”
A car slammed to a stop outside. The three men looked up. But after a moment they heard the car go on.
“Never set eyes on her till last Sunday night,” Pops continued. “Says she’s from Michigan City. Always asking for a guy named Jeff. Always waiting to start her particular kind of hell.”
“Who’s this Jeff?” Martin asked.
Pops shrugged.
“And what’s her particular kind of hell?”
Pops shrugged again, this time in Sol’s direction. “He don’t believe in her,” he said gruffly.
“I’d like to meet her, Pops,” Martin said smilingly. “Like some excitement. Beginning to feel a big evening coming on. And Bobby sounds like my kind of girl.”
“I wouldn’t introduce her to my last year’s best friend!”
Sol laughed lightly but conclusively. He leaned across the bar, confidentially, glancing back at the older man with secretive humor. He touched Martin’s sleeve. “You’ve heard Pops’ big story. Now get this: I’ve never been able to notice this girl, and I’m always here until I close. So far as I know, nobody’s ever been able to notice her except Pops. I think she’s just one of his pipe dreams. You know, the guy’s a little weak in the head.” He leaned a bit closer and spoke in a loud and mocking stage-whisper. “Used weed when he was a boy.”
Pops’ face grew a bit red, and the new set of hummocks stood out more sharply. “All right, Mr. Wise,” he said. “I got something for you.”
He put the glass down in the shining ranks, hung up the towel, fished a cigar box from under the bar.
“Last night she forgot her lighter,” he explained. “It’s covered with a dull, shiny black stuff, same as her dress. Look!”
The other two men leaned forward, but when Pops flipped up the cover there was nothing inside but the white paper lining.
Sol looked around at Martin with a slow grin. “You see?”
Pops swore and ripped out the lining. “One of the band must have swiped it!”
Sol laid his hand gently oh the older man’s arm. “Our musicians are nice, honest boys, Pops.”
“But I
tell you I put it there last thing last night.”
“No, Pops, you just thought you did.” He turned to Martin. “Not that strange things don’t sometimes happen in bars. Why, just these last few days—”
A door slammed. The three men looked around. But it must have been a car outside, for nothing came in.
“Just these last few days,” Sol repeated, “I’ve been noticing the damndest thing.”
“What?” Martin asked.
Sol shot another of his secretively humorous glances toward Pops. “I’d like to tell, you,” he explained to Martin, “but I can’t in front of Pops. He gets ideas.”
Martin got off his stool, grinning. “I got to go anyhow. I’ll see you later.”
Not five minutes later, Pops smelled the perfume. A rotten, sickly smell. And his ears caught the mouse-faint creaking of the midmost barstool, and the tiny, ghostly sigh. And the awful feel of it went deep down inside him and grated on his bones like chalk. He began to tremble.
Then the creaking and the sigh came again through the gloom of the Tomtoms, a little impatiently, and he had to turn, although it was the last thing he wanted to do, and he had to look at the emptiness of the bar. And there, at the midmost stool, he saw it.
It was terribly indistinct, just a shadowy image superimposed on the silvers and gilts and midnight blues of the far wall, but he knew every part of it. The gleaming blackness of the dress, like the sheerest black silk stocking held up in near darkness. The pale gold of the hair, like motes in the beam of an amber spotlight. The paleness of face and hands, like puffs of powder floating up from a spilled compact. The eyes, like two tiny dark moths, hovering.
“What’s the matter, Pops?” Sol asked sharply.
