The Egyptian Mirror

by Michael Bedard

  Part ii

  Stricken

  People believed that the souls of the sick were loose and could easily wander off. The mirror in the sickroom was covered, lest the soul of the sick person take flight and fail to find its way back.

  –Randall Hawkins, Soul Catchers

  11

  Simon took another sip of ginger ale from the plastic cup. It was warm and flat and sticky-sweet, but it gave him something to do. Across the room, Mom and Dad were making small talk with the neighbors and friends who had come. Vera was there, along with the Glovers, the Pimentels, Mrs. Logan the cat lady, and old Miss Walker next door. It was strange to see them together in the same room.

  On the far side of the room, there was a woman he’d seen before, but couldn’t place. She stood out in the sparse group that had turned out for the memorial, and he found his gaze kept drifting her way. She was tall and solidly built. Her hair, threaded with grey, was drawn back in a loose bun.

  She stood looking at the board of photos Mom had managed to cobble together from Granddad’s pictures. The Hawkins’ albums were sealed in the house, along with everything else, while the search went on for the old man’s will. In the absence of a will, and with no known next of kin, the funeral had been delayed for weeks.

  Simon stood near the door in his stiff Sunday clothes, beside a table where coffee, tea, and soft drinks had been set out alongside plates of cut sandwiches and store-bought cookies. Now and then a woman in a pinstripe jacket would creep up behind him over the plush carpeting to replenish the plates. Occasionally, a lost mourner would poke their head in at the doorway, realize they were in the wrong place, and drift off down the hall to the next sad room.

  He took another swallow of the warm ginger ale. He was not feeling at all well. Part of it was the place: the awful hush that hung in the air, the rank scent of cut flowers. Part of it was the clothes: the tie too tight about his throat, the woolen jacket and pants so hot he thought he might faint.

  But it was more than that. Something strange and frightening was happening to him. Great waves of dizziness kept washing over him. He was barely over one when he sensed the next starting up like a faint swell on the horizon. He could feel it surging as it neared, and tried to brace himself against it before it flooded over him. But nothing seemed to help. Each wave left him feeling more battered and drained than the one before, and full of helpless dread as the next began its slow crawl toward him.

  There was something terribly wrong with him, and he didn’t know what it was. He hadn’t felt right for a while. Several times that fall, he’d been home sick from school with fevers and chills. But he could pinpoint to the day when the sickness had hit him in earnest. The day the living room had been repainted and the new carpet laid. The smell had made him queasy, and there’d been a weird chemical taste at the back of his mouth. The next morning, he’d woken up feeling dizzy and nauseous, so tired he could barely get out of bed.

  But in the dark weeks since Mr. Hawkins died, it had grown much worse. Mom and Dad put it down to a reaction to the old man’s death. But it was far more than that. It was as though the earth had opened under him and sent him hurtling into an abyss.

  Another wave hit him now, rocking him on his feet. He reached out and gripped the edge of the table so hard his knuckles turned white. The room spun and his stomach pitched as some vast malevolence took and shook him till he went as limp as one of Babs’ rag dolls.

  He felt a sudden dampness down his leg. He looked down dully and saw that he’d crushed the plastic cup he was holding, draining its contents down the leg of his pants and onto the carpet. He felt far too unsteady on his feet to stoop down to clean up the mess. Glancing across the room to see if anyone had noticed the accident, he saw the woman at the picture board staring back. She began walking briskly in his direction.

  “Damn fool things, these flimsy cups,” she said as she came up to him. She urged the shattered cup from his clenched hand and dropped it into the wastebasket, scooped up a handful of napkins from the table and blotted the spill on the carpet.

  “I’m Joan Cameron,” she said. “And you’re Simon, aren’t you? I passed you on my bike one day when I was leaving Hawkins’ house.”

  So that’s who she was—Mr. Hawkins’ friend from the museum. The one he’d shown the mirror to after he bought it.

  “Hawkins thought the world of you,” she said. “Went on about what a fine lad you were, and what a help you’d been to him since his fall. Shall we sit down?” She steered him over to a chair and handed him some napkins to dry his pant leg.

  “I hate these things. Always have to force myself to come. Still, it’s the least one can do for an old friend. It’s a terrible shame. I was speaking to him just a few days before he died. He seemed right enough—except for this notion he’d gotten into his head that there were prowlers on his property. He was convinced someone was after that Egyptian mirror of his, though heaven knows why. We both agreed it was a fake.

  “He said he’d decided that the only way to keep it safe was to hide it. Well, he must have hidden it pretty well because the trustee couldn’t find a trace of it when he searched the house for the will.”

  “Hidden it?” said Simon, stunned. He’d never even considered the possibility. On that terrible day he found the old man dead and saw the wall empty where the mirror had hung, he’d presumed it had been taken by the woman Winstanley had warned him about in his letter. But what if it hadn’t? What it he’d hidden it?

  He had the strangely disembodied feeling one has when waking from a dream. He felt like he might faint. He had to get some air.

  “Excuse me,” he said, and stood up.

  But before he could stir from the spot, another wave of dizziness struck him full on, rocking him on his feet. He saw Mom look over in alarm.

  The room began to spin like the shadows around the rim of the mirror. The floor dropped away from under him, and he was whirled down into the darkness.

  12

  He was taking dinner to Mr. Hawkins. The dinner was all but hidden beneath the stack of mirrors he was carrying with it on the tray. He tramped up the walk to the old man’s house. It had begun to grow dark, and there were lights on inside.

  He set the tray down on the wicker table so he could ring the bell. Peeking through the curtains, he saw Mr. Hawkins sitting in his chair. His shoes were muddy; the carpet was stained where he’d crossed it.

  He rapped on the window, but the old man didn’t move. He rapped again, so hard he shivered the glass. Mr. Hawkins stirred and stretched. Turning to the window, he motioned for Simon to come in.

  “No need to knock so hard, lad,” he said as Simon stepped into the room with the loaded tray.

  “I knocked and knocked and you didn’t move,” said Simon. “I thought you were dead.”

  “Dead? Hardly. More alive than I’ve felt in ages, actually. Just having a little nap, that’s all. I’ve been working hard in the garden with Eleanor, cutting and weeding and planting. The place has all gone to rack and ruin, she says.” He examined the perfectly ordinary little mirrors Simon had brought from his house, as if they were precious artifacts.

  “But I thought Eleanor was dead.”

  “You seem to think everyone is dead, Simon. Are you sure you’re feeling quite well? You look a little peaked.”

  A sound of clattering came from the kitchen.

  “That’ll be Eleanor washing up,” said Mr. Hawkins. “Why don’t you take these in to her?”

  Simon gathered up the mirrors and carried them to the kitchen. Eleanor stood at the sink. She was wearing a wide-brimmed sunhat and gardening gloves. All the mirrors in the house had been taken down and were heaped on the floor and table and countertop. She was washing them one by one in the sudsy water and setting them on the dish rack to dry.

  “Hello, Simon,” she said, turning to him with a smile. “My, how you’ve grow
n. Just set those things down over there. These old mirrors have gotten so dingy you can barely see yourself in them.

  “There now. Nothing a good cleaning won’t cure.” And up out of the water she pulled the Egyptian mirror, and held it dripping in the air.

  He gasped in shock, and the mirrors slipped from his hands and fell crashing to the floor.

  * * *

  Simon woke with a start, the sound of shattering mirrors still loud in his ears. His heart raced, and his breath came short and sharp. Muted light seeped through the drawn curtains. A sheet lay draped over the dresser mirror. The dream seemed infinitely more real than this shadowed room he’d woken to. If he hurried to the window he would find the lights on still in the Hawkins house.

  But sleep wrapped its leaden arms around him and urged him under. He had surfaced countless times like this since they’d brought him home from the memorial service and put him to bed—rising briefly to a sound, a light, a face hovering over his, a hand upon his forehead, a voice speaking his name, then sinking back into that dark embrace like a stone dropped in a bottomless pool. Christmas came and went. They put a tiny plastic tree in his room. The lights flickered like beacons on an unapproachable coast.

  Never had he felt such fatigue. Fatigue so profound that simply to turn his body from one side to the other in the bed demanded more energy than he could possibly muster; so profound that breathing itself was an effort, keeping his eyelids from fluttering closed an impossibility. He began to think he would never wake up again.

  He fought against it now, forced himself to sit up and swing his legs over the side of the bed. The room did a slow spin around him. His head throbbed, and his throat was sore. When he reached up to feel his neck, he found the glands swollen and tender to the touch. Every muscle in his body ached.

  The floor was ice against his feet when he went to stand. The cold surged through him like an electric current and set his teeth to chattering. His legs could barely support his weight. He took two unsteady steps, clinging to the bed for support. Step by tentative step he made his way to the window and drew back the curtain.

  The shuddery old window was rimmed with ice. The world, shrunken down to shadow and dream, swelled with substance before his wondering eyes. He felt as if he’d returned from a long, dark voyage. Everything seemed new and strange. The fresh-fallen snow lay shimmering like diamonds over all, each tree branch delicately frosted as if by hand.

  The snow was scored with tracks all up and down the street, but around the Hawkins house it lay unbroken still. Time and again in his dreams he had visited the old house. His wandering soul had worn a path to its door. But in this waking world it stood solitary and still. No smoke plumed from its chimney. No lights shone inside. The snow draped the roof like a pall.

  Mom came into the room, amazed to find him up. She emptied the old wingback chair that sat against the wall and drew it over into the bay of the window.

  “It’s so good to see you up, Simon,” she said. “We’ve been worried sick about you. It’s been over two weeks now you’ve been in bed. Now you just sit here and soak up some of that lovely sun while I strip the sheets and change the bed.”

  She talked nonstop as she tidied the room and changed the sheets, while he sat shivering with cold, staring out the window. He found the talk too loud, the words too quick to cling to. He let it flow over him as if it were another language.

  “I’ll just take this old thing off here now, shall I?” she said and was about to slip the sheet off the dresser mirror.

  “No, don’t. Please,” he pleaded.

  The distress in his voice made her stop. “Okay. We’ll just leave it for now, shall we?”

  She chatted on, but there was a note of unease in her voice now. All was not as well as she’d imagined. When she was done, she helped him back into bed, drew the curtains closed as he’d asked, and closed the door quietly behind her as she left.

  He lay exhausted in the shadowed room as the silence settled back over things, and his whirling thoughts came to rest.

  His eye fell on the dresser mirror. It was quite safe now that it was covered. But one day, in the timeless time since illness struck, he’d woken in the dim room to find the mirror emptied of its reflections, and a faint, familiar form huddled in the shadows by the dresser, peering boldly back at him through his own eyes. He’d screamed out in terror and frightened it back into the mirror where it belonged.

  When Mom came rushing into the room to see what was the matter, he’d been unable to settle until she covered the mirror with a sheet. There it had stayed, and there it would continue to stay until he felt well enough to take it down.

  13

  By January, with still no sign of improvement, the family doctor was summoned. He examined Simon, drew blood, ran tests, tried to unravel the riddle of his illness. He said his white blood cell count was high, his iron low; it was clear he was fighting something, though he couldn’t say what.

  He set up appointments with specialists. Over the next few weeks, Mom ferried Simon around in taxis from one to the next. They pricked him and poked him, palpated the tender nodes on his neck, noted the weakness in his muscles.

  They took urine samples, drew countless vials of blood, ordered X-rays, ultrasounds, ECGs, MRIs. They eliminated the likely candidates—hepatitis and mononucleosis. Ruled out the direst possibilities—Lyme disease, leukemia, and multiple sclerosis.

  But whatever lay at the root of his illness was a mystery to them. He showed no clinical evidence of infection or disease. Some were confused, others skeptical. One specialist wondered aloud about “a possible psychological cause” underlying his symptoms. Had there been some recent trauma or emotional shock? When Mom mentioned Mr. Hawkins’ death, he nodded knowingly. A few weeks rest and Simon should be back up and running, as good as new, he assured them.

  “Now, don’t drive yourself too hard, young man,” he told Simon.

  Drive himself too hard? It had taken him ten minutes that morning to make the short trip from his room to the taxi waiting out front. He returned from the appointment utterly exhausted, crawled back into bed in the dim, silent room, and slept the sleep of the dead the rest of the day.

  Convinced her son was now on the mend, Mom swept in cheerfully the next morning with a big breakfast on the silver tray. She threw back the curtains to let in the light, and opened the window a crack to air the room. But the light hurt his eyes, and the icy whisper of wind through the crack chilled him to the bone. As soon as she left he hauled himself out of bed and went to close them both.

  Trying to be helpful, Dad carried an old portable TV up from the cellar and hooked it up in his room. He was pleased with how many channels he could bring in. But the frantic dance of images, the din of voices, and the manic onslaught of ads left Simon dizzy and dazed. Within minutes of Dad’s leaving, he switched it off. A few days later, tired of looking at it lingering expectantly at the foot of the bed, reflecting him in its great glass eye, he draped it with his dressing gown and banished it to the corner of the room.

  They brought him books—but to read was unthinkable. His eyes could not negotiate the page; could not complete the perilous crossing from left to right, the hazardous descent from summit to base. They inched uncertainly along the narrow ledge of words, tumbled repeatedly from one line to the next, tried desperately to scramble back, and lost all sense of meaning in the process. The books sat unread on the shelf by his bed and merged swiftly into the landscape of the room.

  Days flowed into weeks, with little sign of recovery. School by now was a distant memory. His major accomplishment each morning was to make the arduous trek from his bed to the window, where he’d sit in the wingback chair for several hours a day.

  It was the end of January—the dead of winter in Caledon. Frost etched the edge of the windows with fractured patterns. The frigid wind snaked its way in through the cracks. He wore a pair of wool
en socks under his slippers, a toque tugged down over his ears, a heavy hoodie zipped up tight over his pajama top, dark sunglasses against the painful glare of light.

  Time had slowed to a sluggish crawl. Watching the neighbors shovel their walks was gripping drama now. The appearance of the postman at the end of the street to walk his round was a notable event. He gazed in rapt attention as a scruffy tomcat with a torn ear crossed the street and sauntered down the side of Miss Logan’s house in quest of the scraps she laid out for the neighborhood strays.

  He watched kids striking off to school in the morning, straggling back in the afternoon; saw Joe Pimentel carefully shepherding the school age kids from his mom’s daycare back and forth. One little girl stopped to make snow angels on the Hawkins lawn. She saw Simon sitting at the window and waved.

  January slipped into February. Despite what the doctor had said, he was no more ready to return to school than fly to the moon. The farthest he’d been in weeks was to the bathroom at the end of the hall.

  Each day was a mystery. One day, he’d wake up feeling clear and invigorated, only to crash when he pushed himself the least bit beyond his narrow bounds. The next, he’d wake up dull and mired in brain fog, the bed sheets soaked with sweat, every muscle in his body aching.

  The doctors didn’t think his condition was contagious, but just to be on the safe side around a child with an undeveloped immune system, Babs was not allowed in his room. Not that he was anywhere near being able to keep up with her at the moment, anyway. It took all the strength he could muster just to hold the spinning world still.

  But several times a day, she toddled up the stairs and along the hall to his door. She fiddled vainly with the handle, then flopped down on her belly on the floor and called to him through the crack under the door.

  “Dimon, Dimon,” she’d say, reaching her pudgy fingers under the door as far as they would go. As she peeked with one eye through the crack, he’d creep up out of sight and pounce upon her waggling fingers. Squealing with delight, she’d snatch them away. Then, very slowly, she’d start to ease them under again—plucking them back time and again in trepidation.