The Egyptian Mirror

by Michael Bedard

  They each delighted in the narrow gap beneath the door dividing them. They’d lie on the floor talking to one another as if it were the most natural thing in the world. She’d slide pieces of paper to him through the crack and roll crayons after them. He drew pictures and fed them back to her. She drew “picters” and passed them to him. He taped them to his side of the door, until the door was decked with Babs’ pictures top to bottom. They rustled when the breeze caught them, fluttered and fell silent when someone entered or left the room.

  One afternoon, he was lying across his bed reading the same paragraph for the third time in one of the books he’d plucked from the shelf when he heard Babs chattering away as she came along the hall. She gave her ritual twist of the door handle, then dropped to her belly and called to him under the door.

  “Dimon,” she giggled with stifled glee.

  “What’s up, Babs?” he said. He crossed the room and lay belly-down on the floor by the door. As he squinted through the crack he was startled to see two sets of eyes peering back.

  “Dimon,” squealed Babs excitedly, “Abbey.”

  And sure enough, there was Abbey, lying on the floor, peeking through the crack.

  “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever done this before,” she said. “How are you feeling, Simon?”

  “Better,” he said. And he really did feel better because of seeing her.

  “Abbey, go like dis,” said Babs, and she reached her fingers under the door and waggled them, till Simon tickled them and she squealed and snatched them back.

  Abbey reached her fingers under the door and waggled them as instructed. She giggled when he tickled them, but didn’t draw them back. They looked at one another one-eyed under the door.

  “I brought you something,” she said. “Don’t get too excited. It’s schoolwork. It seems Miss Court was talking to your mom. Now that you’re starting to feel a little better, she thought it would be a good idea to send a bit of work home to you, so that you don’t fall too far behind. Since I live nearby, she asked if I’d mind bringing it.”

  She slid a couple of his notebooks and some handouts under the door.

  “It’s pretty straightforward,” she said. “If you have any trouble with anything, just give me a call.” She passed him a piece of paper with her name and number on it.

  “Thanks, Abbey. How are things at school?” It felt like asking how life was on the dark side of the moon.

  “Oh, same old game—hammerheads versus teachers. The hammerheads are winning. You couldn’t give me enough money to be a teacher.”

  She reached her fingers under the door and brushed his hand. “It’s good to see you, Simon. I should probably be going. Max will be wondering what happened to his favorite sister. I told him I’d take him tobogganing in the park when I got home.”

  “Max,” said Babs.

  “Yeah. Would you like to see Max again, Babs? I could maybe set you up.”

  They got up and headed hand in hand along the hall, Babs babbling nonstop all the while. Simon lay watching their feet through the crack, until they turned and disappeared down the stairs.

  14

  He was sitting by the window in the wingback chair. Abbey had pulled the desk chair up beside him. Her book bag stood propped against it. Her math book lay open on her lap.

  “Okay, Simon, I need you to concentrate. I’ll read it again: ‘It’s a stormy winter day. The school has decided to close early. The parents of all the children who go to the school need to be notified. The school has set up a system to do this. One parent calls three other parents. Then each of those calls three more. The pattern is repeated until all the parents have been informed of the early closing. How many parents will be called during the fourth set of calls?’”

  Simon looked down at the worksheet. The diagram on it showed a pyramid of phones. The large phone at the top branched into three smaller ones beneath it. Those three branched into nine, smaller still. Those nine branched into a long row of tiny phones. He started to count them with his finger. Abbey reached out and lightly rapped his knuckle with her pencil.

  “It’s not about counting the tiny phones, Simon. It’s about trying to find the pattern.”

  The problem was he couldn’t find the pattern. Couldn’t find the pattern to the pyramid of phones any more than he could find the pattern that had once held thoughts together in his head. It was all a jumble, like the inside of his closet—full of things pitched in at random. You opened the door and were never quite sure what might spill out.

  Abbey had started dropping by for a while each day on her way home from school. She brought the homework Miss Court had prepared for him, along with the corrected work from the day before. He looked forward to her visits all afternoon. As kids began to drift by on their way back from school, he’d station himself at the window and wait for her to round the corner at the top of the street.

  The first couple of times she ventured into his room, she wore a surgical mask her mom had given her so that she ‘wouldn’t catch whatever it was he had.’ But he could barely make out her muffled words, and she could barely breathe. She finally ripped it off and tossed it in the wastebasket. She said she’d sooner die from whatever he had than from asphyxiation.

  Her visits marked a turning point in his recovery. He was able to sit up a little longer each day in his chair; able to read a page or two without tumbling off the lines. For the first time in well over a month, he got out of his pajamas and got dressed.

  Mom took it as a sign. Babs was allowed to come into his room now. They’d do puzzles together. Babs was a wiz with her puzzles. She had to show him where the pieces went. But after half an hour of doing puzzles with Babs, his head would start to spin. He’d have to shoo her from the room and lie down quietly in the dark until it stopped.

  While he’d been sick, his room had quietly come undone. After the incident with the mirror, Mom didn’t even bother trying to tidy it anymore. She just made a little whimper whenever she came into the room.

  He tried straightening it up a little now himself, but the connections between things had been cut and reconfigured in strange ways in his sick mind. He found himself tucking the silver tray away in his sock drawer, hanging books up on hangers in the closet. He put some things away so well, he couldn’t find them for weeks afterwards. In the end, he gave up and let chaos reign. The piles mounted unmolested around the fringes of the room.

  He slipped the sheet from his dresser mirror and studied the gaunt stranger in the glass as he brushed his tousled hair. Sickness had stamped itself on his face. His eyelids drooped a little now and his mouth hung slightly open, giving him a kind of bewildered look.

  “So one parent calls three others,” said Abbey. “Those three each call three more, and the same pattern is repeated until all the parents are called. So—how many are called on the very first call?”

  He peered down at the pyramid of telephones on the handout sheet and tried to focus. “Three?”

  “Good,” she said. She could tell it was a guess, but tried to be supportive. “And how many on the second?”

  He ran his eyes over the second row of phones, counting under his breath.

  “Those first three each call three more,” she prompted.

  “Nine?”

  “Yes,” she said, so loud he jumped. “And that’s called three to the power of two. This is a problem that’s supposed to teach us about powers, you see. Now how many are called on the third call?”

  He looked down at the long row of tiny telephones running across the handout sheet. He was tempted to try and count them again, but she already had her pencil poised to rap his finger if he tried. As he stared down at the tiny phones they broke loose from their moorings and began to drift around the page. He looked out the window to steady himself.

  Across the street the Hawkins house stood empty and still. Fliers were wedged
in the porch rail. Mail bristled from the box. One of the gnarled limbs of the wisteria had broken loose in the big storm and hung in a slack festoon between the porch pillars, laden with snow. The wind chime stood mute, as if in mourning.

  It saddened him to see the place coming slowly undone. He wanted to run across and tidy it up, return it to the way it had been before death passed by.

  Inside, the house was just as it had always been. Part of him walked there still, fetching and carrying like an unquiet ghost. The cot still rested by the dining room table, the two chairs still sat side by side in the front room. The TV stood on its wheeled stand against the wall. The mirrors that filled the walls in the silent old house were still in their places. All save for one. He saw it in his mind’s eye now, lying on the dining room table as the old man told his incredible tale.

  Where is it now? he wondered again.

  * * *

  The math book lay facedown on Abbey’s empty chair. She was standing with her back to him at the dresser, her face reflected in the mirror.

  “You do that a lot, Simon, you know,” she said. “Phase out. Wander off. Whatever you want to call it. One minute, you’re here with me in the room. And then suddenly—you’re not. I mean, you’re still sitting there. Your eyes are open and everything, but you’re gone. Where do you go? Where were you just now?”

  He couldn’t lie. “Over there,” he said, nodding his head in the direction of the Hawkins house. “In the old house across the street. I’m there a lot.”

  She studied him in the mirror. “Is that the house where the old man lived?”

  He nodded. “You see that photo there, in the corner of the mirror?”

  “This one?” She pointed to the picture of the two boys on the porch steps.

  “Yeah. That boy on the left is Mr. Hawkins.”

  “Who’s the other boy?”

  “My granddad.”

  “Wow—you look like him,” she said, plucking the photo from the frame.

  “‘The spitting image,’ Mr. Hawkins said.”

  She tucked the photo back in the frame and returned to her chair. She sat there quietly looking out the window, the math book open on her lap.

  “How did he die?” she asked.

  “Heart attack, they said.”

  He told her how Mr. Hawkins began to believe there were prowlers on his property. He talked about him phoning the house at night, his dad going over with the flashlight to look for them. But he didn’t tell her about the letter.

  He told her about the terrible day after the storm, how he’d been unable to get in touch with Mr. Hawkins to make sure he was all right, how he’d finally gone over with Babs and the lemon pudding cake and seen him through the window, sitting in his chair, still as stone. But he didn’t tell her the most important thing—the thing that lay at the heart of it all.

  It had taken Mr. Hawkins a long time to tell him about the Egyptian mirror. If the old man hadn’t noticed he was able to see things in it, he might never have said anything at all. Simon understood now why it had been hard for him to talk about it. He understood his fear of seeming crazy.

  When he was finally done talking, it was time for Abbey to go. She left the math problem with him. He figured out how many parents were called on the third call by counting the row above the tiny phones. But after that he was on his own. As he settled into bed that night, he still had no idea how many parents were phoned on the fourth call.

  15

  At the heart of the stillness surrounding the Hawkins house lay the missing will. It was clear there had been a will. At the memorial service, Joan Cameron told Mom that when she visited Mr. Hawkins a little more than a month before he died, he asked her to bring down the box of papers with the will in it from the desk in the study. He made some changes to it, and she witnessed his signature.

  Later that day, Simon himself had put the box back in the desk. But when it was found there after the old man’s death, the will wasn’t in it. The court-appointed estate trustee went through the house with a fine-tooth comb hunting for it, but failed to turn it up.

  In the absence of any known next of kin, the trustee posted a notice in the classified section of several regional and national newspapers over the next two months, asking that anyone related to the deceased, or with any knowledge of an extant will, contact the trustee at once. Weeks went by, and no one came forward. Then, at the end of February, a rumor started up on the street that a relative had been found. For a long time it was simply a rumor.

  Meanwhile, winter wrapped the old house in its cold white arms and rocked it to sleep. Simon began to think it would never wake up again. It would sit there empty and still as the seasons rolled over it, and become the abode of ghosts.

  * * *

  Babs’ scream jolted Simon from his sleep. He hurried down the hall to her room. The nightlight cast its pale beam on the wall by her bed. She was standing in her crib, one leg flung up onto the rail. He could hear the fear in her wailing.

  Mom’s sleepy voice straggled up the stairs. “Is she all right, Simon?”

  “Another bad dream,” he said. “I’ll settle her.”

  He switched on the lamp and saw her eyes, wide with panic. She looked right through him as he approached her. He eased her leg down off the rail.

  “It’s all right, Babs,” he said. “It was just a bad dream.”

  But no words he said could reach her. She was somewhere else. Between them lay the unbridgeable chasm of dream. He could not cross to her, or she to him. Her body stood here in the crib, but her soul had wandered, and was caught in the grip of a nightmare.

  He picked her up and patted her back as he walked her up and down the room. Sometimes, when she got like this, she wouldn’t even let you hold her. She’d arch her back, scream and flail, and no amount of comforting would calm her. If you tried to reason with her, her only response was a wild-eyed look. If you lost patience, her panic spiraled even further out of control.

  She was cutting her two-year molars. Her gums were sore, and her sleep was shallow and unsettled. She would surface suddenly while in the midst of a dream and only seem to be awake.

  Simon could understand that. At the worst of his sickness he’d spent weeks straddling the border between sleeping and waking, never quite sure which country he was in. Half-awake while sleeping, half-asleep while awake, the boundary between the two hopelessly blurred.

  He paced up and down the shadowy room. Gradually, her breathing grew calmer. She laid her head on his shoulder and tucked her thumb in her mouth. He lowered her into the crib, covered her, switched off the lamp, and tiptoed toward the door.

  Suddenly, she sat bolt upright in the bed, muttering something about the “woo-woo,” the “bad woo-woo.”

  “It’s all right, Babs,” he said. “The bad doggie’s all gone.”

  She looked over at him—for the first time truly looked at him. “Aw gone,” she repeated and lay back down. He stood by the door till her breathing deepened and she dropped off.

  An hour later, he still hadn’t managed to fall back to sleep. Babs’ fright had loosed the floodgates of memory and brought the incident with the dog back to his mind. Every time he closed his eyes he found himself back in the Hawkins’ yard, poking at the bushes with the handle of the hoe, then suddenly feeling his blood run cold as that low growl sounded from the shadows.

  The sound merged now in his mind with the rumble of a car stereo outside. He waited for it to roll on by. When it didn’t, he slipped out of bed and went to the window to see what was up. A sleek black car had pulled up to the curb across the road. It sat there with its headlights dimmed and music pulsing in the darkened cab.

  Suddenly, the sound died and the lights went dark. For a long minute there was nothing but silence. Then the door opened on the driver’s side and a lean figure stepped out, took a quick look around, and then went round to
the passenger side and opened the door.

  A woman emerged. She was tall and thin and had on a fur coat and matching hat. Though it was the middle of the night, she was wearing dark glasses. She took the lead as they proceeded slowly along the street and turned up the walk to the Hawkins house. They moved with a light, liquid gait. Though she wore heels, there was no sound.

  The wind chime—silent till then—started up its broken song as they stepped up onto the porch. She looked up at it and said something to her companion. He reached up and with a quick yank plucked it down, walked over to the rail of the porch, and dropped it into the garden below.

  She turned and took a long look up and down the street, running her eyes slowly over the houses. Though it was dark in his room, Simon slunk back from the window and didn’t stir until he heard the Hawkins front door opening. He peeked out and saw them disappear into the house and close the door behind them.

  A light winked on inside. He pictured them standing in the hall, felt the soft tread of their footsteps on the worn runner, imagined them turning into the front room, then saw another light as the lamp was flicked on. He felt their footsteps as they moved about the room, imagined their gaze falling on the sections of manuscript, the drift of books he had carried down the stairs.

  He felt them slide silently up the stairs to the second floor. A light came on in the front bedroom. Their shadows flitted ghostlike on the curtained window. A few minutes later, the light came on in the study at the rear of the house, spilling its glow down onto the snow in the yard below.

  When they emerged half an hour later, the man was carrying a cardboard box. She locked the door behind them and went back to the car. He dumped the box in the back and got in behind the wheel. The engine started up, and with it the low throb of the stereo. It hung in the air like a heartbeat as the car drifted off slowly down the street.