“Ah, the wayward traveler returns,” said Mr. Hawkins. “Just set those things down over there.”
As he put the manuscript down on the dining room table Simon’s eyes fell on the title again, and the question came tumbling out.
“Why is it called ‘Soul Catchers’?” he asked.
“Ah, so that’s it,” said Mr. Hawkins with a smile as he switched on the lamp by his chair. “Well, long ago, people believed that when they were born, a double of themselves was born with them. They believed this double accompanied them all through life. Normally, it was hidden from sight. But if they looked in a still pool or a piece of polished metal, it was the double that looked back. For these people, their reflection wasn’t just an image. It was a vital part of them—their soul, they believed. So mirrors, quite literally, were soul catchers.
“All over the world there were superstitions around mirrors and pools. People refused to look into a dark pool for fear the demon that lived there would snatch their soul and carry it under, and they would die. They believed it was bad luck, when visiting someone’s house, to look in their mirror, for fear that when you left, a part of you would be left behind, in their power.
“Most of the earliest mirrors that have come down to us were tomb mirrors, buried by ancient people with their dead to catch the soul and keep it from wandering. To this day, there are people who cover the mirrors in their house after a death, in the belief that the soul of the dead person lingers there for a time and may carry off the souls of the living reflected there. So too, in times of sickness, when the soul’s connection with the body is believed to be loose, people cover the mirrors in the sickroom, in case the soul of the sick person wanders off and fails to find its way back.
“Speaking of failing to find your way back, you really must hurry on home now or your mother will have my head. Start this old man talking about mirrors, and there’s no end to it, I’m afraid.”
As he crossed the road, Simon looked down the laneway that ran by their house and saw Dad’s car parked on the weedy patch of gravel by the garage. Most of Granddad’s things had been exiled to the garage—too much for the tiny house to hold, but too steeped in memory for Mom to throw out. With the garage full of Granddad’s things, there was no room left for the car.
Dad started early at the butcher shop and sometimes worked too late to eat with the family. He was eating his dinner in the living room, watching the ball game on TV, when Simon came in. He sat perched over his plate, still in his work clothes, his white shirt rolled up over his muscular arms, the top two buttons undone; spots of blood on the front of his shirt, shreds of sawdust on the cuffs of his pants.
“Hey, Simon. Everything okay with Mr. Hawkins?”
“Yeah, we just got talking,” said Simon. As he leaned to look at the score on the screen he caught the smell of the shop on Dad—the scent of sawdust and raw meat that worked its way into his very pores.
Simon carried the tray through to the kitchen. As he emptied the dishes into the sink, he caught sight of his face in the polished surface of the tray.
Soul catchers, he thought.
4
There were supposed to be four swings, but some yahoo had whipped two of them up over the top till they were wound tight around the crossbar, out of reach. If he’d been Supersimon, he would have shimmied up the pole and swung across to unwind them. But he wasn’t—so he waited patiently in line, hanging onto Babs’ hand so she wouldn’t run off and lose their place.
Babs didn’t like having her hand held. You could tell this right off by the way she kept squealing and tugging on his arm. The moms in line arched their eyebrows and murmured among themselves as their children stood meekly by their sides, watching the show.
He bent down and said, “Stop it right now, Babs. Do you hear me?”
“No, Dimon,” she wailed. “My wan dee Mamma.”
“Well you can’t see Mamma. She’s at work now.”
Granddad’s old house was proving to be a money pit. It was one thing after another. Now it looked like the furnace might need replacing. Dad was working long hours at the shop, but it still wasn’t enough. To help make ends meet, Mom had taken on some hours at the Busy Bee where she’d worked as a cashier before Babs was born—which meant that Simon had to take up the slack at home, minding Babs.
“And if you don’t stop your screaming, I’m going to take you home and put you to bed.”
This had an instant effect. She screamed twice as loud and tried to fling herself down on the grass. The line dissolved around them as, one by one, the moms whisked their children away before they picked up any pointers from Babs. Suddenly, there were two free swings. He plunked Babs down on one. She turned off her tears like a tap.
He pushed the swing in a shallow arc and watched her waggle her toes in delight. He pushed lightly against the small of her back, and away swung all the embarrassment and anger, and the park swung open around him. And the sounds of kids whirling on the roundabout and winding down the slide were stitched in with the steady creaking of the swing.
“Push more, Dimon.”
“Okay, but you hold on tight.”
Someone came around behind him and settled a little boy about Babs’ age onto the empty swing. Simon cringed. Babs wasn’t always good with swing partners. He worried how she might react.
“No, Max, you can’t have that swing. The little girl is using it now.” It was a girl’s voice, somehow familiar. “They always want the one they can’t have. It’s some sort of toddler law.”
She seemed to be talking to him. “Oh, hi,” he said, glancing over. It was the new girl at school. He couldn’t come up with her name. He began trawling through the alphabet, searching for it.
She’d appeared a few days after school started up—a small, quiet girl with glasses, who looked younger than the rest of the class. She sat at the back by the door, as if she wasn’t too sure she wanted to be there. He knew how that felt.
He’d seen her walking by the fence in the yard at lunch, her head buried in a book. She was a whiz at math and science, light-years beyond the rest of the class. Miss Court would call her up to the front to solve problems on the board. The other girls tittered in their seats over her frumpy clothes and funny round glasses. She didn’t pay them any mind. Her head was somewhere else.
“You’re Simon, right?” she said now.
“That’s right.” He felt his face flush. What was her name?
“I’m Abbey,” she said. “This here is Max, my little brother. He’s two. If he’s lucky, he might make it to three.”
While they were talking, Simon kept pushing Babs on the swing. Every time she swung past the little boy, she gave him a look.
“No,” she said, just to let him know how things stood between them.
“This is Babs,” said Simon. “And that’s her favorite word.”
“Hi, Babs,” said Abbey. “I like your name. Max, say ‘hi’ to Babs.”
“No,” said Max.
Abbey and Simon looked at one another and laughed.
Abbey started pushing Max on the swing. If Babs swung past him, he’d say, “No.” If Max swung past her, Babs would say the same. The only way to make peace was to push them at precisely the same time in exactly the same arc. It took a little doing, but Abbey was totally into it. In no time at all they’d mastered the art, and Babs and Max laughed and chattered away, while Simon and Abbey talked.
Actually, Abbey did most of the talking. She was one of those people who could talk without breathing once they got going. All he had to do was nod his head and throw in the odd question now and then.
It turned out her family had just moved to Caledon. Her dad had a job teaching at the college. There were no other kids—just Max and her. They lived in one of the big houses on the far side of the park. She was crazy smart. She’d skipped a grade and was a year younger than Simon
.
She had it all figured out: what university she was going to go to, what she was going to major in, what she was going to be—a microbiologist like her dad—where she was going to live, how many kids she was going to have, and when she was going to have them. Fifteen minutes of pushing swings together in the park and he knew her whole life—even the part of it she hadn’t lived yet.
“What do you want to be?” she asked.
He gave her a blank look. The truth was, he hadn’t much thought about it. As he scrambled for an answer the swing bumped into him, throwing off the rhythm.
“Maybe a butcher,” he said, for the sake of saying something.
As it turned out, it was the wrong thing. Abbey was a raging vegetarian—had been since she’d seen some documentary on TV when she was seven. Seven? He was watching cartoons when he was seven. Actually, he was still watching cartoons—with Babs, of course. Abbey had converted her entire family to vegetarianism. If there’d been more time now, she would have started in on him. But it was getting late, and once the swings went out of sync, Babs and Max began to “no” one another again.
Abbey and Simon quickly gathered up their things. They said a quick goodbye and started off in opposite directions through the park with the kids. They hadn’t gone far when Abbey turned and called after him.
“Simon?”
“Yeah?”
“I forgive you.”
“For what?”
“For being a carnivore.”
“Okay,” he said.
He looked it up when he got home.
* * *
After meeting at the swings that day, they smiled and nodded to one another in the hall at school. But he felt tongue-tied and shy with the other kids around.
As soon as the bell rang at the end of the day, she was out like a shot. Sometimes he managed to catch up to her, breathless from running, and they walked home together along the labyrinth of winding streets on the far side of the park.
They talked about this and that. She was easy to talk to. He told her about taking dinner to Mr. Hawkins, and about the old man’s mirror collection. He told her about the book on mirrors Mr. Hawkins was working on, what he’d said about mirrors being soul catchers. She was a lot smarter than he was in most things, but he knew more about mirrors.
“People used to believe that they were born double,” he told her. “When they looked in a mirror, they thought it was the double that looked back.”
“Wow, that’s interesting, Simon,” she said.
They parted in front of a large house with a pillared concrete porch with a little red wagon parked on it that must have belonged to Max. He wondered what she’d think of Granddad’s tiny house.
* * *
Once hockey season started, the guys at the end of the street switched from baseball to road hockey. When they learned Simon had a net, they were more than happy to let him play. He was pretty good at hockey. He used to play with a few kids in the laneway behind the old place.
But he always knocked off early to take dinner to Mr. Hawkins. He was learning more about mirrors than he ever thought he’d know. The old man was still a little forgetful after his fall. And at times he acted like Eleanor was still around. But generally he was doing okay.
Everything was going along fine. And then one day, late in October, a letter came for Mr. Hawkins—a handwritten letter on pale blue paper, with an airmail sticker and a foreign stamp.
After that, everything changed.
5
He plucked the letter from the old man’s mailbox on his way in with the dinner and put it on the tray. In the hall, he ran into Vera. She was just getting ready to leave, pulling her coat on over the pale blue smock she wore while she worked.
“Hello, Simon,” she said with a wink. “What do you have for me tonight?”
Vera had been the Hawkins’ cleaning lady for years. She wasn’t much younger than the old man herself, and not as spry as she’d once been. But she was a habit with Mr. Hawkins and knew his ways. Every Friday, regular as clockwork, she came by to clean the floors, vacuum the rugs, and chase the dust from the furniture and the books. She kept a small transistor radio in the pocket of her smock, and an earphone in one ear, and sang to herself while she worked.
Once a month, she cleaned the mirrors. She wore cotton gloves when she did, for the mirrors were old, and a fingerprint in the wrong place could cause corrosion. She used a two-handed technique; in one hand she held a soft brush that wouldn’t damage the delicate frames, while in the other she cradled the nozzle of the vacuum to suck up the dust. A soft chamois cloth was all she ever used on the glass; cleaning spray could damage the frames, or seep in behind the glass and corrode the coatings on the backs of the mirrors.
She took a peek now under the inverted plate that covered the meal Simon had brought. “My, that looks good,” she said—just loud enough for Mr. Hawkins to hear. “Yes, mighty good.”
“Don’t you be touching that, Vera,” the old man called from the front room.
She chuckled with delight and her ample body shook. She set her hat on over the wig she always wore, and headed for the door.
“You take care now, Simon,” she said. “Goodbye, Mr. Hawkins.”
Mr. Hawkins was sitting in his chair scratching at his leg above the cast when Simon came in.
“I’ll be glad when this cursed thing is off,” he said. “The itch of it’s driving me mad.”
“Won’t be long now,” said Simon, setting the tray down and wheeling the table round in front of the old man. He tried to sound cheerful, but the thought of it saddened him.
Mr. Hawkins noticed the letter on the tray. “What’s this?” he said, turning it over. “Odd—no return address.” He studied the postmark. “London,” he said, and laid it aside.
“Anything you need me to get from upstairs?” asked Simon.
“Yes, you could fetch these books for me from the study,” he said, handing Simon a slip of paper from his pad.
As Simon passed the mirrors on his way to the study, he looked at them differently than he had at first. Until recent times, mirrors were rare things, according to Mr. Hawkins. At one time, people seldom looked at themselves. And when they did, what they saw was a distorted, murky image. In those days mirrors were believed to be dangerous, almost enchanted things.
It wasn’t until the development of the modern mirror with its flawless reflections that mirrors became more widespread. Even then, for a long time they were a luxury only wealthy people could afford. It wasn’t till the mid-nineteenth century that mirrors became a common sight in people’s homes.
Late afternoon light filled the study. A breeze blew through the open window, rustling the papers on the desk. A few had drifted to the floor. He picked them up and returned them to their piles, then went to close the window.
It was jammed. As he struggled to free it he glanced down into the yard. Mom said that when Eleanor Hawkins was alive, the wide flowerbeds that bordered the yard were full of perennials and flowering shrubs. Now they were a haven for weeds. The bushes had grown rank and tangled, their branches launching nearly as high as the tall fence that bordered the yard.
As he looked there now he was surprised to see a large dog tucked in the ragged shadows of the bushes at the back of the yard. It was a lean, hungry-looking thing, its short, dark fur almost blending in with the shadows. It rested on its belly, perfectly still, its forelegs extended in front of it, its neck and head erect, its tall pricked ears twitching like antennae as it stared up at him. Its eyes were large and knowing. Even at this distance there was something in the cold unwavering gaze it cast his way that made his skin crawl.
Suddenly, the window yielded. The sash banged down with a shiver against the sill. He looked back at the bushes, but the dog had disappeared.
He began looking for the books he’d been sent for. He ran
his eyes repeatedly along the shelves, but all he kept seeing were those cold eyes. When he finally got down with the books, he found the living room empty, the food on the tray barely touched. The letter lay open by the plate.
Mr. Hawkins was in the kitchen, running water in the sink, his back to Simon. He reached up, took down a glass from the cupboard, filled it, and turned off the tap.
“You hardly touched your dinner,” said Simon. “Should I leave it?”
“Yes, would you?” he said and took a long drink.
“I put those books you wanted on the dining room table.”
“Fine,” said the old man. He sounded strange.
Shifting the letter aside, Simon transferred the dishes to the TV table from the tray. The news was over. It was a game show now. The babble might have been in a foreign tongue. A burst of laughter sounded somehow sinister. He walked over and switched off the set. He stole a quick peek in the bronze mirror on the way back. It was utterly still. For the first time, he noticed there was an eye inscribed on its face.
He said a quick goodbye to Mr. Hawkins and headed for the door with the tray. As he crossed the street he looked back twice to make sure the dog wasn’t following him.
6
One night the following week, they were in the kitchen eating dinner. Things were a little tight around the small table. Dad had gotten home early enough to eat with them, and after having spent the morning at Mrs. Pimentel’s daycare for the first time, Babs had decided she was a “big girl” now and insisted on sitting at the table with everyone else. Too tired to argue, Mom stacked two phone books and an old Sears catalogue on a chair and plopped Babs down beside Simon.
At the moment, Babs was putting up a fuss because her foods were touching. As Simon carefully shepherded her peas with his fork to the far side of the plate away from her “mast ’tatoes” he was listening intently to Mom’s conversation. She was telling Dad about her trip to the hospital that morning with Mr. Hawkins to have his cast removed. Things had not gone well.
The Egyptian Mirror Page 3