Midnight in the Mirror World Read online

  Midnight in the Mirror World

  Fritz Reuter Leiber

  MIDNIGHT IN THE MIRROR WORLD

  Fritz Leiber

  As the dock downstairs began to clang out midnight’s twelve strokes, Giles Nefandor glanced into one of the two big mirrors between which he was passing on his nightly trip, regular as clockwork, from the telescopes on the roof to the pianos and chessboards in the living room. What he saw there made him stop and bunk and stare.

  He was two steps above the mid-stair landing, where the great wrought-iron chandelier with its freight of live and dead electric bulbs swung m the dull fierce gusts of wind coming through the broken, lead-webbed, dramond-paned windows. It swung like a pendulum—a wilder yet more ponderous pendulum than that in the tall clock twanging relentlessly downstairs. He stayed aware of its menace as he peered in the mirror.

  Since there was a second mirror behind him, what he saw in the one he faced was not a single reflection of himself, but many, each smaller and dimmer than the one in front of it—a half-spread stack of reflections going off toward infinity. Each reflection, except the eighth, showed against a background of mirror-gloom only his dark lean aquiline face, or at least the edge of it—from bucket-size down to dime-size—peering back at him intently from under its sleek crown of black, silver-shot hair.

  But in the eighth reflection his hair was wildly dis ordered and his face was leaden-green, gape-jawed, and bulging-eyed with horror.

  Also, his eighth reflection was not alone. Beside it was a thin black figure from which a ribbony black arm reached out and lay on his reflected shoulder. He could see only the edge of the black figure—most of it was hidden by the reflected gilt mirror frame—but he was sure it was thin.

  The look of horror on his face in that reflection was so intense and so suggestive of strangulation that he clutched at his throat with both hands.

  All his reflections, from the nearly life-size giants to the Lilliputians, copied this sudden gesture—except the eighth.

  The eleventh stroke of midnight resounded brassily. An especially fierce gust of wind blew the chandelier closer to him so that one of its black hook-fingered arms approached his shoulder and he cringed away from it before he recognized it for the familiar object it was. It-should have been hung higher, he was such a tall man, and he should have had the window repaired, but his head missed the chandelier except when the wind blew hard and after he'd been unable to find a craftsman who could work leaded glass, he had not bothered about either chore.

  The twelfth stroke clanged.

  When he looked into the mirror the next instant, all strangeness was gone. His eighth reflection was like the rest. All his reflections were alike, even the dimmest most distant ones that melted into mirror smoke. And there was no sign of a black figure in any one of them, although he peered until his vision blurred.

  He continued downstairs, choosing a moment when the chandelier was swinging away from him. He went immedi­ately to his Steinway and played Scriabin preludes and sonatas until dawn, fighting the wind with them until it slunk away then analysed chess positions in the latest Russian tournament until the oppressive daylight had- wearied him enough for sleep. From time to time he thought about what he had glimpsed in the mirror, and each time it seemed to him more likely that the disordered eighth reflection had been an optical illusion. His eyes had been strained and weary with star-gazing when it had happened. There had been those rushing shadows from the swinging chandelier, or even his narrow black necktie blown by the wind, while the thin black figure might have been simply a partial second reflection of his own black clothes—imperfections in the mirror could explain why these things had stood out only in the eighth reflection. For that matter the odd appearance of his face in that reflection might have been due to no more than a tarnished spot in the mirror's silvering. Like this whole vast house—and himself—the mirror was decaying.

  He awoke when the first stars, winking on in the sky of deepening blue, signaled his personal dawn. He had almost forgotten the incident of the mirror by the time he went upstairs, donned stadium boots and hooded long sheepskin coat in the cupola room, and went out on the widow’s walk to uncap his telescopes and take up his stargazing. He made, as he realized, a quite medieval figure, except that the intruders in his heavens were not comets mostly, but Earth satellites moving at their characteristic crawl of twenty-some minutes from zenith to horizon.

  He resolved a difficult double in Canis Major and was almost certain he saw a pale gas front advancing across the blackness of the Horsehead Nebula.

  Finally he capped and shrouded his instruments and went inside. Habit started him downstairs and put him between the mirrors above the landing at the same minute and second of the day as he had arrived at that spot last night. There was no wind and the black chandelier with -its- asymmetric constellation of bulbs hung motionless on its black chain. No reeling shadows tonight. Otherwise everything was exactly the same.

  And while the clock struck twelve, he saw in the mirror exactly what he had seen last night: tiny pale horror-struck Nefandor-face, black ribbon-arm touching its shoulder or neck, as if arresting him or summoning him to some doom. Tonight perhaps a little more of the black figure showed, as if it peered with one indistinguishable eye around the tinied gold frame.

  Only this time it was not the eighth reflection that showed these abnormalities, but the seventh.

  And this time when the glassy aberration vanished with the twelfth brassy stroke, he found it less easy to keep his thoughts from dwelling obsessively on the event. He also found himself groping for an explanation in terms of an hallucination rather than an optical illusion: an opti­cal illusion that came so pat two nights running was hardly credible. And yet an hallucination that confined itself to only one in a stack of reflections was also most odd.

  Most of all, the elusive malignity of the thin black figure struck him much more forcibly than it had the previous night. An hallucination—or ghost or demon— that met you face to face was one thing. You could strike out at it, hysterically claw at it, try to drive your fist through it. But a black ghost that lurked in a mirror, and not only that but in the deepest depth of a mirror, behind many panes of thick glass (somehow the reflected panes seemed as real as the actual ones), working its evil will on your powerless shrunken image there—that implied a craftiness and caution and horrid calculation which fitted very well with the figure’s cat-and-mousing advance from the eighth reflection to the seventh. The implication was that here was a being who hated Giles Nefandor with demonic intensity.

  This night and morning he avoided the eerie Scriabia and played only dancingly brisk pieces by Mozart, while the chess games he analysed were frolicsome attacking ones by Anderssen, Kieseritzky, and the youthful Steinitz.

  He had decided to wait another twenty-four hours and then if the figure appeared a third time, systematically analyse the matter and decide on what steps to take.

  Yet meanwhile he could not wholly keep himself from searching his memory for people whom he had injured to the degree that they would bear him a bitter and enduring hatred. But although he searched quite conscientiously, by snatches, through the five and a half decades over which his memory stretched, he found no very likely can­didates for the position of Arch-Hater or Hater to the Death of Giles Nefandor. He was a gentle person and, cushioned by inherited wealth, had never had to commit a murder or steal a large sum of money. He had wived, begat, divorced—or rather,, been divorced. His wife had , remarried profitably, his children were successful in far places, he had enough money to maintain his long body and his tall house while both mouldered and to indulge his mild passions for the most ethereal of the arts, the most
coolly aloof of the sciences,, and the most darkly profound of the games.

  Professional rivals? He no longer played in chess tournaments, confining his activities in that direction to a few correspondence games. He gave no more piano recitals. . While his contributions to astronomical journals were of the fewest and involved no disputes.

  Women? At the time of his divorce, he had hoped it Would free him to find new relationships, but his lonely habits had proved too comfortable and strong and he had never taken up the search. Perhaps in his vanity he had dreaded failure—or merely the effort.

  At this point he became aware of a memory buried in his mind, like a dark seed, but it refused to come clear. Something about chess? ... no ...

  Really, he had done nothing much to anyone, for good or ill, he decided. Why should anyone hate him for doing nothing?—hate him enough to .chase his image through mirrors?—he asked himself fruitlessly as he watched Kieseritzky's black queen implacably pursue Anderssen's white king.

  The next night he carefully timed his descent of the stairs, using his precision clocks in the cupola—with the result that (precision machinery proving less reliable than habit) the downstairs clock had already struck five strokes when he thrust himself breathlessly between the mirrors above the landing. But his greenish horror-struck face was there—in the sixth reflection this time, as he’d fatalistic-ally assumed it would be—and the slender black figure was there too with outstretched arm; this time he seemed to detect that it was wearing a veil or stocking-mask: he could distinguish none of its features, but there was a faint shimmering in the face area, rather like the pale gas front he had once again detected crossing the Horsehead Nebula

  This night he completely altered his routine, neither opening a piano nor setting out any of the chessmen. Instead he lay for an hour with eyes shut, to rest them, sad then spent the rest of the night and morning investigating reflections of reflections in the mirrors on the stairs and in two somewhat smaller ones which he set up in the living room and tilted by the fractional inch to get the best effects.

  By the end of that time he had made a number of interesting discoveries. He’d noted reflections of reflections before, especially on the stairs, and been amused by their oddity, but he’d never thought about them systematically and certainly never experimented with them. They turned out to be a fascinating little field of study—vest-pocket optics—a science in miniature.

  Vest-pocket wasn’t such a bad designation, because you had to stick your vest and yourself between the two mir­rors in order to observe the phenomena. Though come to think of it, you ought to be able to do the same thing with a periscope held sideways, by that means introducing your vision between the mirrors without introducing yourself.

  It might be worth trying.

  But getting back to basics, when you stood between nearly parallel mirrors, looking at one, you saw first the direct reflection of your face, next the reflection of the back of your head is the mirror behind you; then, barely visible around those two, you saw the second reflection of your face, really Just an edge of hair and cheek and ear; then the second reflection of the back of your head, and so on. As the heads grew smaller, you saw more of each, until the entire face became visible, quite tiny and dim.

  This meant, for one thing, that the eighth reflection he’d seen the first midnight had really been the fifteenth, since he’d only counted reflections of his face, as far as he could remember, and between every two of those there was a reflection of the back of his head. Oh, this mirror world, he decided, was fascinating! Or worlds, rather— a series of shells around him, like the crystal globes of Ptolemaic astronomy in which the stars and planets were set, going out in theory to infinity, and in each shell himself staring at himself in the next shell.

  The way the heads got tinier intrigued him. He measured the distance between the two mirrors on the stairs —eight feet almost to the inch—and calculated that the eighth reflection of his face was therefore 116 feet away, as if it were peering back at him from a little attic window down the street, He was almost tempted to go to the roof and scan with his binoculars for such windows.

  But since it was himself he was seeing, the eighth reflection was sizewise 232 feet away. He would have to scan for dwarfs. Most interesting!

  It was delightful to think of all the different things his reflections could be doing, if each had the power to move around independently in the thin world of its crystal shell. Why, with all those shell-selves industriously occupied, Giles Nefandor could well become the world’s most accomplished pianist, most knowledgeable field astronomer, sad highest ranking of all chess grandmasters. The thought almost revived his dead ambitions—hadn’t Lasker won the 1924 New York international tournament at 561— while the charm of the speculation made him quite forget the menace of the black figure he’d now glimpsed three times.

  Returning to reality somewhat reluctantly, he set himself to determine how many of his reflections he could see in practice rather than theory. He discovered that even with the best illumination, replacing all the dead bulbs in the wrought-iron chandelier, he could recognize at most only the ninth or perhaps the tenth reflection of his face. After that, his visage became a tiny indistinguishable ash-grey blank in the glass.

  In reaching this conclusion, he also found that it was Very difficult to count the reflections accurately. One or more would tend to get lost, or he’d lose count somewhere along the line. It was easiest to count the gilt mirror frames, since these stood in a close-packed row, like golden numeral ones—even though, for the tenth reflection of his face, say, this involved counting nineteen gilt ones, ten belonging to the mirror in front of him and nine. to the mirror behind.

  He wondered how he could have been so sure the first midnight that it was his eighth reflection which had shown the unpleasant alterations, and the seventh and sixth reflections on the two subsequent midnights. He decided that his shocked mind must have made a stabbing guess and that it very likely had been inaccurate—despite the instant uncertainty he’d felt. Next night he’d watch more carefully

  —and the fifth reflection would be easier to count.

  He also discovered that although he could at most count ten reflections of his face, he could distinguish thirteen and perhaps fourteen reflections of a bright point of light —a pencil flashlight or even a candle-flame held dose to his cheek. Those tinied candle-flames looked strangely like stars do in a cheap telescope. Odd.

  He was eager to count more reflections than that—to break his record, as it were—and he even fetched his best pair of binoculars and stared into the mirror with them, using for light-point an inch of brightly flaming candle affixed to the top of the right-hand binocular tube. But as he’d feared, this was no help at all, magnification fading out the more distant light-points to nothing, like using too powerful an eyepiece on a small telescope.

  He thought of making and testing out a periscope— candle attachment—but that seemed a touch over-elaborate. And in any case it was high time he got to bed—almost noon. He felt in remarkably good spirits—for the first time in years he had discovered a new thing in which to be interested. Reflectology mightn’t be quite up to as- fronomy, musicology, or chess, but it was an elegant little sdence all the same. And the Mirror World was fascinat- ing!—he looked forward excitedly to what he’d next see in it. If only the phenomena didn’t stop!

  It was perhaps his eagerness which got him between the Stairway mirrors next night several seconds before the clock began to strike twelve. His early- arrival, however, didn’t inhibit the phenomena, as he suddenly feared might happen. They began on the clock’s first twanging stroke and whatever may have happened on previous evenings, it was certainly the fifth reflection which was altered tonight The figures were only about 70 feet away now, as he’d earlier calculated, and so considerably larger. His fifth reflected face was pale as ever, yet he fancied its expression was changing—but because it had gone more than halfway into eclipse behind the massed heads
in front of it, he couldn’t be sure.

  And the black figure definitely was wearing a veil, although he still couldn’t make out the features behind it. Yes, a veil . . . and long black gloves, one of which sleekly cased the slender arm outstretched to his shoulder —for he suddenly realized that despite its height almost equal to his own, the figure was feminine.

  A gust of fey hard to understand went through him at

  that discovery. As on the second night he wanted to strike out at the figure to prove its insubstantiality—smash the glass! But could that effect a figure 70 feet away? Would smashing the single glass in front of him smash all the nine panes he calculated still separated him from the figures in the Mirror World?

  Perhaps it would—and then (he black figure m the Mirror World could come straight out at him . . . now.

  In any case the veiled figure, if she continued her approach, would be with him in five more nights. Perhaps smashing the glass now would simply end the horrifying, fascinating phenomena—foil the figure for good. But did he want to do that?

  As he asked himself that last question, the twelfth stroke came and the Black Lady in the fifth reflection vanished.

  The rest of the night, while he played Tchaikovsky and studied the chess games of Vera Menchik, Lisa Lane, and Mrs. Piatigorsky, searching for hidden depths in them, he reviewed the Lives and Loves of Giles Nefandor. He discovered that the women in his life had been few, and those with whom he had become seriously entangled, or to whom he had done possible injury, fewer still. The half dozen candidates were all, so far as he knew, happily married and/or otherwise successful. This of course included his divorced wife, although she had often complained of him and his "hobbies."

  On the whole, though romanticizing women, he had tended to run away from them, he concluded wryly. Perhaps the Dark Lady was a generalized woman, emblematic of the entire sex, come to be revenged on him for has faint-heartedness. His smile grew wryer. Perhaps her funeral costume was, anticipatorily, for him.