Page 46 of Hemlock & Silver

Was there something I could do to prevent anyone from using those? Locking the door should help at night, in theory, but what about the rest of the time?

What I really needed was some way to check if there was anyone around me in the mirror-world. Which was easier said than done, of course.

How could I watch what happened in the mirror-world?

There were only a few mirrors on the estate that I could actually fit through.

Lugging one of those around with me didn’t seem workable.

(What was I going to do, have Javier and Aaron follow me around, carrying it between the two of them?

It’d get broken before the first hour was up, and we could kiss any hope of keeping things subtle goodbye.)

Although…

I tapped my finger against my lips. I didn’t need to walk through it, I just had to be able to see through it.

That only required a mirror large enough to put my face through and open my eyes.

It didn’t even have to fit over my entire head—if it was mobile, I could literally just turn in a circle and see if Snow’s reflection suddenly popped up.

I turned around, retraced my steps, and went downstairs to ask the housekeeper if I could borrow a hand mirror.

The hand mirror was easily acquired. Unlike the big, dramatic mirrors from Silversand, this was a plain wooden frame with a handle and a small square set into it.

The maker’s mark was from Four Saints, which was oddly comforting.

I went to my room and dropped the hand mirror on the nightstand for later use, then sat down at the desk and tried to figure out what I was going to do now.

Sadly, I hadn’t had any great epiphanies when I heard a light knock at the door.

I jumped up and stepped into the mirror. Even if it was just the maid, I didn’t have the energy for a conversation right then. If it was Nurse coming to ask what exactly I’d said to her charge, then I really didn’t have the energy.

The familiar cold tingle washed over me as I passed through the silver.

A moment later, the maid with the carnivorous hair entered the room.

(She had told me her name that first night, and I promptly forgot it in the haze of exhaustion.

Then I’d been distracted by a lot of other things, and now it would be too awkward to ask.)

I sagged against the wall, relieved, then straightened up hastily, rubbing my arms against the cold.

I had to remember to bring a coat next time, or they’d find me frozen to death on the…

hmm, actually they wouldn’t find me, would they?

I’d just be bones quietly decaying in a corner of the mirror-world, unless Javier came through and dragged my bones back to the real world.

I wondered how many missing people who seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth had found their way through the silver instead?

What a happy thought. I’m so glad that I had it.

The maid straightened up, fluffed the pillows, and turned her attention to the nightstand. I watched the half-and-half gray reflection reach out and pick something up in her hands.

Everything suddenly went ghostly. I don’t know how else to describe it. The section of the room in the band of mirror-light went strangely insubstantial. Objects sprouted haloes that doubled and tripled their sizes, like visual echoes. And the maid…

Half of her, unseeing, turned the object this way and that, apparently admiring it.

The other half, the gray half, began to shudder and jitter back and forth.

Something erupted from the back of her head, a band of flesh like a sharp-edged tumor, and then another one beside it and another, and then she turned even further and her face broke into two pieces that slid along each other until one eye was half an inch above the other one, and then one of those pieces broke and she had three eyes and then it broke again and again—

The maid tossed the mirror onto the bed and went to get fresh towels.

The haloes faded from around the mirror-furniture, though it took a moment.

The mirror-woman didn’t snap back so quickly.

Her reflection dragged to the edge of the mirror, out of the light, then stood shuddering in the grayness, a tragic and monstrous figure with a dozen faces layered over her head like a succession of blocky-edged masks.

She swept her head slowly from side to side, her neck sagging under the weight, and lifted an arm with a dozen hands to touch it.

I had stopped breathing some time ago. Why…? How…?

The mirror. She picked up the mirror on your nightstand and angled it to catch the other mirror’s reflection.

We had done it a hundred times as kids, though our mirrors were much smaller than the enormous one on the wall.

You held two mirrors at just the right angle and saw yourself reflected infinitely, the angle changing just a fraction every time, and when you moved, a thousand versions of yourself moved with you.

Except that there was only one world inside the silver, and one reflection breaking into a thousand versions of herself, and the mirror-world tried to keep up, splitting that reflection into more and more selves, like a piece of meat cut into thinner and thinner slices…

The woman vanished, presumably as the real one changed out the towels in the washroom. But not all of her vanished this time. I jumped back, startled, as the bands of eyes and hands and fractions of a face calved away from emptiness and crashed to the floor.

I expected them to turn to dust, the way that mirror-stuff did in the real world.

But they lay on the ground like slabs of clay from a frustrated sculptor, and then the hands reached out and went creeping over the floor, dragging sections of arm behind them.

The faces lay tumbled across each other, in a pile that blinked and twitched and moved, the corners of mouths working madly as if in pain.

Two hands met in the center of the floor.

They circled each other, then hooked their thumbs together and stood up on their fingers, swaying against each other like drunken spiders.

Together they lurched across the floor, their gait growing rapidly more confident, until they reached the pile of broken faces.

Half a mouth, attached to a cheekbone and a single eye, bit on to one’s fingertip.

The spidery hands stopped, then began twisting and turning, until they could heave the half face up between them. The gray eye blinked.

No. No, that is not right. That should not be a thing that happens. I backed up, looking around wildly for something to climb on, as if I were a silly child frightened by a stray mouse.

Something touched my foot. I looked down and saw another of the hands up against my sandal, the fingers feeling blindly across my toes, as if trying to figure out where they were and what they might be touching.

It was too much. I let out a horrified squawk and kicked it away.

The hand dropped to the floor like a deformed spider, the fingers still flexing as it fell.

I did not stay around to see if it survived the fall, but scrambled and leaped over the flailing mirror-stuff and lunged out of the mirror so fast that I didn’t remember to close my eyes.

“Oh, Miss Anja!” The maid came out of the washroom, her arms full of towels. “I didn’t hear you come in. I’m just finishing up.” She smiled at me, while her hair eagerly enveloped one of the hand towels.

“I just got in,” I said, breathing heavily through my nose.

She paused, her smile fading. “Are you all right? You seem out of breath.”

I just watched you split into pieces, and those pieces are still crawling around on the floor half an inch of glass away. One of your hands just tried to latch on to me. And I can’t explain any of this to you because I’ll sound completely crazy.

“I’m fine,” I said, clearing my throat. My voice came out almost normal. “Everything’s fine.”