He collaborated with his wife Melanie on the chapbook Beautiful Strangers, and contributed three new stories to the solo booklet, Decoded Mirrors: 3 Tales After Lovecraft.
“Mirror Man” comes from the latter and, as the publisher’s blurb reveals: “The sources of horror in Steve Rasnic Tem’s fiction are not monsters, but moments of revelation and self-discovery, when characters find their deepest doubts and fears reflected in the world around them . . . Through its powerful evocation of personal alienation, this triptych of ‘tales after Lovecraft’ reminds us that Lovecraft, in teaching us new ways to view our world, also taught us new ways in which to view ourselves.”
By way of a coda to that insightful evaluation, the author explains that, “ ‘Mirror Man’ was the reason I did the Decoded Mirrors chapbook—I actually wrote it several years ago, liked it, but couldn’t sell it anywhere (most everybody didn’t like the Lovecraft angle in it). So when Necronomicon Press started up their chapbook line, a Lovecraftian trilogy seemed to be in order.”
We are delighted to present Tem’s disturbing story to a wider audience . . .
JEFF LIKED TO THINK OF THE white hairs in his ears as signs of maturity, although he suspected they were really the first outcroppings of old age. He hadn’t even noticed them until they were a half-inch or more long; that bothered him. They were pale and looked slightly rubbery, like the hairs on some mutant onion. Once he knew they were there he spent hours examining himself for any new phenomena. Sometimes he would use Liz’s magnified makeup mirror. He was convinced that his face was changing every day, but other than the somewhat dramatic ear-hairs he had found nothing to confirm this.
In the mirror, silvered fog turned to beads, then rivulets that bent his flesh and attempted to drag his face into the sink. He wondered if Susan would still love him if he were deformed. Adults were mutants—he could think of no better way to define the accretion of distortions as children grew into adults.
He remembered his embarrassment over his own father—the man’s appearance, his views about race and nationality. During his teen years he had sought a theory to explain his father’s condition—the brain parasite, the secret society, his father’s hidden lizard face.
Some day Susan would find him hideously embarrassing. That was why he had to take her on this trip with him. The time when she was uncompromisingly proud of him was fast approaching an end.
Liz had stopped loving him years ago. There must have been a final day when she’d passed beyond her love for him into whatever indifference or resentment she felt now, but he’d been unable to pinpoint it. There was a kind of unspoken pact between them that they not speak of it, perhaps the ultimate in the series of unspoken pacts which had characterized their marriage. But it had been so obvious, so stupid and banal. He’d continued to love her even after that, in that youthful love-sick and inarticulate way he always had, until that too was gone one day, maybe the same lost day he’d first become the adult mutant, when he’d started growing hair in his ears.
An area of cleared mirror containing a section of his left jaw and earlobe fogged over again beneath his breath. His face had fractured in the mirror, broken out into a collage. Some of the layers of his face were as young as his first memories (his lost tricycle half-buried in a pile of coal behind the house, his mother’s breath smelling like warm bread), and others were far older than he was. In fact some of the layers of the mirrored face, he was convinced, didn’t even belong to him.
“Are we ever going, Daddy?” He saw Susan in one corner of the mirror, dolled up in her party dress, ready for the trip out. Liz had done up her hair in a mass of tight curls—it must have taken hours. “Well, are we?”
“Just give me a few more minutes, honey. I want to look good for the reunion, haven’t seen some of these people in a very long time.” He couldn’t make himself turn around. The mirror was much safer. If he looked at his daughter directly he would want to hold her all the time, until that day she stopped breathing.
Sometimes she made him want to cry—out of some strange sadness because he was growing older every day or because he loved her so much or because he’d recently realized she was the only person in the world he really did love, and even there he wasn’t sure he was very effective at it. As he’d grown older he seemed so frightened and suspicious, so inept at loving. So he contented himself with staring at her reflection, admiring the light she cast. “We’ll be leaving real soon, honey. I promise.”
Liz was waiting in the bedroom when he walked in. “She’ll be bored to tears, Jeff. I really don’t understand this.”
Her shadow rippled across the wall as she paced the room. That flicker of grey reminded him of a small bird that had been trapped in the house one night. They couldn’t quite see it, they were just aware of its grey wings beating and beating against the light’s reflection on the glossy wallpaper. In the morning they had found torn feathers, spots of blood on the bed. He spoke to Liz’s shadow as it moved across the wall. “None of my old classmates or teachers have ever met my daughter. I want to show her off. I have a right—I’m proud of her.”
“Providence is a long way to drag an eleven-year-old. Just to stroke your vanity.” Her shadow danced a graceful ballet across the wall. It was a terrible irony that adult mutants cast the delicate shadows of children.
He’d always believed that saying things more than once was pointless. And during the course of an unusually verbal marriage he’d said about everything possible. It was like looking in the mirror every day: if things did change it was too gradual to notice. But if he didn’t say something, she’d embrace him with silence until he’d left the house. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t think that’s what I’m doing.” The words cracked in his mouth from all the years of repetition. One day they’d degenerate into another, far more primitive language. Some sort of eldritch, decadent phrasing. If he didn’t do something. If he was still capable.
There was the expected pause while she decided whether there was going to be an argument this morning. Jeff found himself holding his breath in anticipation of her decision, and that made him resentful. Some mornings that would be enough to make him say the little more which would guarantee an argument, but not today. Today he was going to take his beautiful daughter down to Rhode Island for that ten-year reunion. Everyone from the graduate school was going to know that he’d had it in him to have a family, a normal family like other people. With a beautiful daughter, a daughter who depended on him and who called him Daddy.
He heard the agitated beating of grey wings in his head, but he tried to ignore it, moving about the bedroom getting dressed as quickly as he could, waiting for Liz to say whatever she was going to say. He wanted to ask her what ties he should take, if his grey corduroy jacket with the elbow patches would take one more important wearing, but first he had to know if there was going to be an argument or not. If there was going to be an argument he thought he might never be able to ask such questions of her again.
He caught her reflection in the dresser mirror as she sat on the bed, staring at his half-full suitcase on the other end. She looked so unhappy he wanted to go over and sit beside her, take her in his arms, but then she would tell him all that he had done to make her feel the way she did, and that would start the argument he could not have this morning.
In the mirror he saw the silvering in her long black hair. He’d never noticed it before, looking at her every day, watching her eat breakfast before she left for the university. Again the mirror provided him with secret, arcane knowledge. But then she always wore her hair up for work, and she was usually in good humor—she actually enjoyed the work she was forced to do. Sadness brought out the silver in her hair. Not for the first time, Jeff realized how difficult he must be for her to live with.
“You used to be so impressive,” she began softly. “You were the only person I’d ever met who early on decided what kind of person he was going to be, and then became that person. You used to make me feel so good about m
yself.”
Her reflection stared at him, talked to him. Liz had learned where to look if she wanted to look into his eyes. Her image in the mirror was so clear, so direct, that Jeff thought he might be loving her again, if he had ever in fact stopped loving her. The room’s reflection around her image looked vaguely warped, shimmering with distortion. The contrast between the room’s distortion and Liz’s clear image brought a tremor of anxiety into his hands struggling with the tie, and he wondered vaguely at the physics involved. There appeared to be dark pockets where the vertical lines of the room’s image warped or broke. There appeared to be distant movement behind Liz where the reflected colors of the room bled. Liz’s face was singular and unwavering, her eyes fixed on him, even as the rest of the world appeared chaotic with layers, the room about to dissolve around her, peel away revealing . . . what? He could see in the mirror that she was silently crying now. But if he didn’t turn to look at her directly she was not crying at all. If she was sad only in his mirror, he had not made her sad at all. In the mirror her eyes begged him for the first time in years. Jeff looked away, embarrassed, and fumbled again with his tie, trying to imagine it tied.
“I’ll . . . talk to you about it just as soon as we get back tomorrow. I promise.”
“Okay, Jeff. Whatever. Whatever you say.” When Jeff looked back up at the mirror she had left it. The lines of the room moved jaggedly, the furniture blending with increasing speed, as if the world of the mirror was being heated.
Susan was good in the car. It made him proud when Susan was good. “Am I going to meet your friends?” she asked.
“Old friends,” he said.
“But are they still your friends?”
He didn’t know what to say. He pretended to busy himself with the rearview mirror, adjusting it in order to view as much of the landscape behind him as possible. Early in their marriage Liz would kid him about his habit of fiddling with the mirror, as if something was following him. He had never laughed, and eventually she dropped the joke. “I don’t know, honey,” he said now. “Adults don’t always know who their friends are, I guess. It’s simpler at your age. Friendships get complicated when you’re an adult. You get set in your ways, and then you forget how to make friends.”
Liz nodded solemnly in his rear-view mirror. Jeff stared at the mirror until his wife’s face vanished and Susan’s reappeared. He adjusted the mirror both to expose the maximum amount of receding landscape and to see as much of Susan as he could, while limiting her view of his own mutating expressions. He had to keep an eye on her, he had to keep her safe—that was his responsibility as a father—and yet he didn’t want her to feel that he was spying on her.
“Why won’t you look at me, Daddy?” Obviously he had the mirror adjusted correctly. She hadn’t asked the question in a long time.
He licked his lips. But he couldn’t see himself in the mirror now, so he had to wonder if he was in fact licking his lips. “I’m driving, honey. I can’t look at you and drive at the same time.”
She nodded again. “That’s why I can’t sit in the front seat with you. That’s the rule.”
Every few months she seemed compelled to check out his expectations. He hated it when she called them rules. He preferred to think of them as guidelines which held reality in place. Mutants needed as many of these mini-strictures as they could generate, just to get through the day. Jeff didn’t bother to tell Susan about all of them, thinking that if she knew them all it would hasten her evolution into mutancy. So he had always told her strictly on a need-to-know basis. “When you sit in the front seat, it distracts me, honey. And when that happens things aren’t so safe any more. I guess you distract me because you’re so pretty.” He laughed but Susan did not laugh with him. “Driving is serious business,” he continued. “Daddy has to concentrate.”
“Someday I still want to sit in the front seat, Daddy.”
“I know.” And someday soon, he knew, she would no longer accept his interpretations of what was safe.
They passed through Attleboro on Highway 123 before connecting with 1–95 which would take them south out of Massachusetts and down into the heart of Providence. Jeff had taken the long way out of New Hampshire, avoiding Concord, Portsmouth, the entire Boston area. He hadn’t exactly planned it that way. He drove as he always drove, allowing himself plenty of time, constantly referring to the map so he would have some vague idea where the roads led. Vague because maps lied—he’d discovered this a long time ago—taking you into all manner of locales not even hinted at by the pale colors and wandering veins etched into the paper.
He never chose the shortest route. You couldn’t tell anyway because traffic and road conditions were never indicated, and the nature of the driving experience itself was beyond the scope of any map. He avoided the interstates as much as possible—he was scared of not seeing those hidden taints in the bypassed towns.
He preferred to feel his way through the landscape, watching not only the road but also the ambient architecture and the local residents, constantly checking his mirrors for the backward look that often revealed all—the secret faces, the unconscious expressions.
Then he would find the next road on the map, and, if the drive had been pleasant, he would choose routes which he sensed would somehow maintain the experience. But if the look of the buildings or the people or even the particular rake or curvature of the road disturbed him, he would search the map for the quickest, most likely release.
But the indigenous inhabitants were most important. They were the ones who built and maintained the buildings, who landscaped the environment. Even the most neutral of settings would reveal some sort of signature.
They stopped for gas in a small New England town which had somehow escaped the urban sprawl. Perhaps no one had ever noticed it was there. It was tucked away beneath one edge of the highway, a faded green sign hanging askew on rusted bolts pointing to a narrow exit lane. Jeff took the lane past a row of dilapidated houses to a one-pump station.
The boy appeared suddenly at the driver’s side window. His dark skin was mottled by patches of pink and grey peeling away beneath his eyes, like poorly-applied makeup. His eyes were narrow and dark. The phrase melting pot came to mind. Jeff’s father used to talk a great deal about a “melting pot” when Jeff was a child. The phrase had filled him with unease.
“Gas you?” The dark spaces of the boy’s eyes betrayed no life. Jeff found himself grunting an affirmative. The boy nodded, replying with a series of expressions, gestures, even simple looks Jeff could not fully understand. It made him uncomfortable. So perhaps he wasn’t so different from his father at all, only marginally better-educated. Educated enough to feel the guilt.
In Jeff’s mirror, Susan was layered in shadow and light, her deepset eyes unreadable. But he suspected she felt it, too. He’d always wanted to blame his own father for teaching him such profound unease. But he suspected it wasn’t upbringing. Unease was bred in the womb.
He tipped the boy much too generously and hurried back to the main highway. He passed through several similar villages. He changed routes several times, and still the worn out houses and patchwork faces continued, the accumulation of them sloughing off his mirror into memory.
In Jeff’s rearview mirror shadowed faces appeared in backwards perspective, layer after layer of them in grey doorways and open windows and behind polarized windshields. But what disturbed him more than the faces themselves were the eyes they held—as a bare setting might hold its jewel—too small to see and yet which themselves might see so much. Thousands of eyes glittering with dark color, moving slowly, scanning, telescoping, perhaps jittering a wild, drug-induced dance within the ravaged face within a ravaged hovel. The eyes his rearview mirror could not catch in the act.
He knew such things weren’t safe to talk about. Early in his graduate history studies he had been interested in the writings of such American nativists as Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard, and H. P. Lovecraft. He’d wanted to know if they had had ce
rtain perceptions, and if perhaps they’d so misunderstood these perceptions that their rather bizarre racial theories had come about. He’d wanted to know what they saw when they looked into the mirror.
Regularly he checked on Susan in the mirror. She slept off and on, slumped against the right-hand door. Now and then she would wake up and gaze into the mirror with bewildered eyes, as if this were something she had never seen before, as if she had seen her adult self, her mutancy, her lone animal self. Then she would nod off again. Children were blessed with an expansive capacity for sleep, because the world was too complicated a place for them to take in all at once. Now and then she would wake again and look, and as it grew darker outside the car there came a time when Jeff could not see her eyes in the mirror, although he sensed their heat.
It was night by the time they’d reached the outskirts of Providence. But not the complete dark he would have experienced at home, surrounded by open fields and with the nearest streetlight miles away. This was the brown dark that surrounded large cities, diluted by chemical smoke and exotic lighting.
He’d always found driving at night to be disorienting. Each vehicle was a bubble of dim light, a marginally sufficient and self-contained ecosystem. You wandered up and down grey ribbons of highway you could barely see, seeking clues as to your route. It was a wonder any one of you reached your destination. Night driving seemed a matter of blind and ancient instinct, aided by appeals to the gods of luck.
He remembered being lost one time and driving with the window down, seeking some sort of guidance from the local smells: wet salt, cedar smoke, or a thick, treacly plasma that seemed to cling to his clothing. He’d read somewhere that smells often had a powerful impact on people’s moods, especially the moods of children. He wondered how many sociopaths had grown up with stale, evil fragrances.
Now he rolled the window up tight, cursing himself for exposing Susan to the air of the highway. He searched for her in his rearview mirror, eventually finding her curled up against the right-hand door, the top half of her face eaten by shadow. “Susan?” She didn’t move. He spoke it again, louder, and still no response. He felt her panicky, screamed name rising swiftly up his throat, but held it back. He should have been watching her all the time. Then she stirred in her sleep. He was relieved, and then suddenly a little irritated with her. He needed to have her alert and charming for his reunion. He pulled off the road and into a small convenience store on the northeast edge of the city.
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