The Egyptian Mirror

by Michael Bedard

  16

  There were good days. There were bad days. They were completely unpredictable. But from the moment he opened his eyes in the morning, he knew which it would be. When he woke the following morning, there was a sharp, coppery taste in his mouth and a dull throbbing in his head that stirred the memory of the car in the night. When he sat up, the room whirled. It was definitely a bad day.

  He got dressed and made his way slowly down the stairs, gripping the handrail. He felt as fragile as the old mirrors gathering dust in the Hawkins house.

  Mom was rushing around getting ready for work. She was going to drop Babs off at Mrs. Pimentel’s on the way, and was trying to coax her to put on her shoes. Babs was a creature of routine, and this definitely wasn’t part of her routine. She was supposed to be sitting watching her cartoons with a bowl of dry cereal and some “appa dew” in her sippy cup, as she usually did at this time in the morning.

  “Don’t you want to go see all the kids at Mrs. Pimentel’s?” said Mom as she tried to wiggle the shoe on over Babs’ scrunched-up foot. “Luca will be there, and Lizzie. It’ll be lots of fun.”

  Babs wasn’t buying it. Going over to Mrs. “Pim-tel’s” from time to time was all right, she supposed, but no one had consulted her about missing her morning shows and spending the whole day there. But now that Mom was working full days at the Busy Bee to cover for a cashier on maternity leave, there wasn’t much choice.

  Mom finally managed to wiggle the shoe onto Babs’ foot. She gave her face a wipe with a wet cloth and scooped her up. “You’re sure you’ll be all right here alone, Simon?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”

  “Okay,” she said with a sigh. “Remember, Dad will be here around noon to take you to the appointment.” She gave him a peck on the cheek and was out the door with Babs on her hip.

  He shuffled into the living room and lay down on the couch. Their things stood awkwardly around the edges of the redecorated room like boys at a school dance: the small wooden bookcase bristling with paperback romances and drugstore thrillers, the tattered couch, the coffee table ringed with stains where Dad set down his drink when he watched TV.

  The remnant of Granddad’s things helped raise the tone: the china cupboard with its glass doors and fancy dishes, the full-length mirror in its frame, the old upright piano that stood against the wall opposite the couch. As he stared dully across at it now, his brain mired in fog, he saw the shade of a younger Simon sitting there on the bench while Granddad guided his fingers over the ivory keys. Ghostly music filled the room.

  * * *

  Shortly before noon, Dad arrived to take him to the appointment. One of the regular customers at the butcher shop was a doctor at a nearby clinic. The subject of Simon’s mysterious illness had come up in conversation, and the doctor suggested that Dad bring him by to see him.

  It was well into March now, and the recovery that the doctors had predicted for Simon had not occurred. The school authorities were becoming concerned over his extended absence, and Simon could see questions starting to creep into his parents’ eyes. Was he really sick, or was it something else?

  The waiting room at the clinic was too crowded, the fluorescent lights too bright, the TV hanging in the corner too loud. He retreated to the quiet of the hall until Dad came to tell him the doctor was ready to see him.

  The doctor was friendly and informal, and had something of the rugged good looks of a young Mr. Hawkins about him. Several mountain pictures hung on the walls of his office. Dad had said he was a professional climber and had been a member of several expeditions on some of the world’s highest mountains.

  He had a thick file on his desk with the results of all the tests Simon had already had. As he leafed through it he glanced up at Simon.

  “Looks like they’ve been ’round the block with you,” he said.

  After he finished going through the file, he gave Simon a thorough examination—shone a light in his eyes, looked in his mouth, felt the tender nodes in his neck, took his blood pressure, asked countless questions about his sleep and his ongoing struggles with fogginess and fatigue. Finally, he sat down on the edge of the desk, folded his arms over his chest, and gave him a long look.

  “You sure you haven’t been climbing any mountains lately?” he said.

  Simon couldn’t help but smile as he shook his head.

  “Because if I didn’t know better,” he went on, “I’d say you were suffering from hypoxia—what people call altitude sickness. It’s marked by a feeling of profound exhaustion, coupled with a sense of confusion and disorientation. It’s caused by a lack of oxygen, and is usually cured by administering the gas from a tank, and descending to a lower altitude as quickly as possible. It looks to me like you’re climbing some nasty internal mountain, Simon.

  “I don’t know what’s causing your sickness, but I suspect it’s a virus of some sort. Viruses are invisible invaders. They can hide, mutate, combine, and elude detection. They can lie dormant in the body, waiting to be set off by sudden stress or some environmental trigger or other. This looks a lot like mononucleosis to me. The tests say it’s not—but I suspect it’s likely related. Now, mono can take a long time to get over, and I think this might, too.

  “I’m going to run a couple more tests,” he said to Dad. “But I’m pretty sure they’re going to come back negative like the others. It looks unlikely to me at this stage that Simon will get back to school before the fall. I’ll write a letter with my diagnosis for you to pass along to the principal of the school. I’m sure they’ll be open to continuing the arrangement you’ve made to have work sent home for him.

  “I want you to be sure you eat well, and get your rest, Simon. Do what you can, but don’t push it. The last thing you want is a relapse.”

  17

  “Altitude sickness? That’s interesting,” said Abbey when Simon told her later that day. She said she’d be happy to keep bringing work home for him till he managed to get down the mountain.

  They were sitting by the window in his room. She was trying to explain the science homework to him. He found it hard to concentrate on what she was saying. As he looked across at the Hawkins house, his mind kept replaying the events of the night before.

  “Okay, Simon,” she said, knuckling her glasses back up to the bridge of her nose, “you’re supposed to look at this forest scene and the various plants and animals in it. Then you have to answer these questions here.”

  “Someone was at the Hawkins house last night,” he said.

  She looked up from the text. “Pardon?”

  “Two people came by late last night in a car—a man and a woman. They went into the house, went all through it. They were there for quite a while.”

  “Must be those relatives they found,” she said and turned back to the homework. “Okay, so the first thing to do is look at the picture and divide the things you see into producers and consumers. So, for instance, the pine tree there is a producer. That wolf over there is a consumer. It’s dead simple.”

  “They were strange,” he said.

  She closed the book on her finger to keep her place. “Strange how?”

  “I don’t know, just strange. It was midnight—and she was wearing shades. And there was something weird about the way they walked.”

  “Weird how?”

  “They didn’t make any noise. It was like they were floating.”

  “Floating?” She gave him a long look over the top of her glasses.

  “They were in there for nearly an hour; just moving from one room to the next—like they were looking for something.”

  “Looking for what?”

  “I don’t know. Something.” Something like the Egyptian mirror, he wanted to say. But that was the part of the story he hadn’t told her.

  “Don’t you think you may be imagining things? They were probably just seeing what the place
looked like.”

  “Maybe,” he said doubtfully.

  He tried to pay attention as she explained how a sudden decline in the wolf population due to overhunting could affect the balance of the entire forest ecosystem. But all he kept seeing when he looked down at the page was the woman in shades standing on the porch, scanning the houses along the street.

  * * *

  The visits went on. Several times a week, late at night, he’d hear the rumble of the car stereo and slip to his window to watch as the dark car drew up in front of the house. Often, they had a load of empty boxes with them. They stayed about an hour, usually. Periodically, the man came out carrying a box. Sometimes he’d put it in the car, sometimes add it to the mounting pile on the porch.

  Simon would have given a lot to know exactly what they were up to as they moved methodically through the house; exactly what was in those boxes accumulating on the porch. They sat there stacked against the wall in all weather. When a freak snowstorm blew in at the end of March, they were blanketed in windblown snow for several days. He was tempted to go over and brush them off so that whatever was in them wouldn’t be ruined. Abbey said that would not be a good idea.

  Speculation swirled on the street as to who the new people might be. Someone had heard from someone else that it was Eleanor Hawkins’ niece, but for now it was all just speculation.

  One night at the beginning of April, on the eve of garbage day, the car came by a little earlier than usual. This time the guy was alone. He didn’t bother going into the house. He just went up onto the porch and hauled all the boxes that were stacked there down to the curb for the morning collection. Then he got back in the car and drove off.

  For a long while Simon looked at the boxes sitting by the curb. Finally, he went and plucked the piece of paper with Abbey’s number on it from the mirror frame and picked up the phone.

  “Hey, Abbey,” he said when she answered. “I had a question about the science homework.”

  “Nice try, Simon. What is it?”

  “I need to ask you a favor.”

  “Do you have any idea what time it is, Simon?”

  “Sorry, but this is important, Abbey. I need your help with something.”

  “What is it?”

  “Well—you know those boxes that have been piling up on the Hawkins porch?”

  “You can’t take them, Simon. We’ve been over this before.”

  “No, listen. The guy came by tonight. He put them all down at the curb for the garbage collection tomorrow morning. They’re sitting there now.”

  There was a pause—a long pause. “You’re completely insane. You know that, don’t you, Simon?”

  “Yeah, I know. Hey, could you maybe bring Max’s wagon with you?”

  She swore into the phone and hung up. He wasn’t sure she’d come. But twenty minutes later, he heard the bumpity-bump of the wagon coming down the street.

  He quickly pulled on his things and opened the window wide enough to climb out. Once, in the summer, when he was playing ball with the guys, Joe had hammered a ball that came down on the porch roof and lodged in the gutter. Simon had to scale the old trellis anchored to the porch post to fetch it.

  He crept across the roof now, took hold of the top of the trellis, gave it a shake to make sure it was secure, then scrambled down in the dark, praying the rickety thing wouldn’t break.

  Abbey came padding along the street in her slippers, pulling the little wagon behind her. She had her jacket on over her pajamas.

  “Don’t say a word, Simon—not a word. You might find this hard to believe, but some people actually sleep at night.” She looked over at the boxes piled at the curb. “Let’s get this done,” she said.

  The boxes were heavy. There was no way he could have moved them alone. They loaded four onto the little wagon, then hauled them across the street and down the dimly-lit lane to the garage. He pulled and she pushed, the wagon creaking under the weight of the boxes, the wheels juddering over the loose stones in the lane. He thought about how the guy had plucked them up off the porch and carried them down to the curb two at a time as if they weighed nothing.

  With the first load safely stowed away inside the garage, they went back for the second. They were lifting the last of the boxes into the wagon when he heard a low distant rumble. He stiffened like he’d been shot. The box slipped from his hands and dropped with a thud into the wagon.

  “Take it easy, will you, Simon? If someone sees us and calls the cops, we’re going to have a whole lot of explaining to do.”

  “Shhh,” he said. “Do you hear that?” His eyes panned nervously up and down the street.

  “Hear what?”

  “That low pulsing sound.” Off in the distance he saw the twin beams of a car’s headlights piercing the darkness like a pair of luminous eyes.

  “Yeah, it’s called a car stereo. Honestly, Simon, you’re starting to give me the creeps. Let’s just get this stuff into the garage, okay? I’ve got to get back home before my folks miss me.”

  He took one last look down the street. The lights winked out. The music died.

  “There,” she said. “Satisfied?”

  He glanced back at the house. “Hang on a sec.” He scooted up the walk and fished around blindly in the garden in front of the porch. He pulled out the wind chime, and came tinkling down the walk with it.

  Abbey rolled her eyes. This time she pulled the wagon, while he pushed from behind. The wheels jumped and jived along the lane. Somewhere down the shadowy corridors of his mind he could still hear the low, sinister pulse of the stereo.

  Satisfied? No—not by a long shot.

  18

  The lock hung loose in the hasp as he’d left it. Inside, the rescued boxes sat in two piles on the packed-dirt floor. The wind chime lay across one. Scrambling on top of an old dresser, he hung it from the rafters on a rusty hook, then scattered the boxes among Granddad’s things till they blended in.

  Over the next few weeks, while he was home alone during the day, he hauled them, one by one, up to his room. As he finished with each, he marked the box, returned it to the garage.

  The work was slow and taxing. His store of energy was measured out in meager doses. The added exertion drained him, leaving his body limp and his mind muddled. His muzzy brain was like a busy bus depot; thoughts arrived at random, stopped over briefly, departed abruptly. He’d think of something he wanted to tell Abbey, and then forget it entirely as it boarded the next bus out of his brain.

  He began writing notes to remind himself. The words came out fractured, the letters back to front. Soon the room was strewn with scraps of scribbled paper. He’d come upon them and stand over them, trying to puzzle them out. He reminded himself more and more of Mr. Hawkins with his cryptic notes, his conviction that things were not as they seemed, his belief that something sinister was afoot—and it all somehow had something to do with the Egyptian mirror.

  Each box was a revelation. One especially heavy one proved to be packed with the Hawkins photo albums that had sat on the low shelf in the living room. Mr. Hawkins had said Eleanor was a demon for photo albums. The albums were painstakingly arranged, the photos annotated in her small precise script, their life together meticulously chronicled. He kept thinking of how close they’d come to being lost forever.

  One afternoon, Abbey arrived to find the bed covered in stacks of paper arranged in orderly rows, and Simon flitting from one to another, a sheaf of loose pages in his hand.

  “You won’t believe what I found in the box I brought in today,” he said as he fanned through a pile and slid a few of the stray pages home.

  She put down her bag and wandered over to take a closer look. “What is it?” she asked.

  “Mr. Hawkins’ book,” he said excitedly. “He had it laid out in piles like this in his study upstairs. I used to bring down sections for him to work on. I think
it’s all here. Do you know how long he’d been working on this book? Years and years, and they were just going to toss it all in the trash.”

  Abbey picked up a section and fanned through it, pausing to read a paragraph or two. “Looks interesting. What are you going to do with it?”

  “Read it, to start with. Then, I’m not sure. Maybe there’s some way to get it published.” He felt a little lightheaded suddenly, and went to sit down.

  “You’re working too hard on this, Simon,” said Abbey. “Remember what the doctor said. You need to take it easy.” She pulled her chair up next to his and began rooting through her bag for the homework sheets.

  Simon looked across at the old house. The spring sun had melted most of the snow from the lawn. The grass lay limp and pale. As he looked at the stretch of the yard running along the side of the house he saw the hoe still lying where he’d dropped it the day he went looking for the dog. The memory surged back in all its terror. He had to tell her—tell her now.

  “They’re not who they say they are.”

  Abbey looked up, surprised. “Who?”

  “The new people. Think about it, Abbey. If you’d just inherited a house from your uncle, would the first thing you’d do be to throw out the manuscript of a book he’d been working on for years?”

  “Maybe they didn’t know what else to do with it.”

  “Or maybe they didn’t care. And what about those photo albums? If she were Eleanor Hawkins’ niece, there’d be photos of her family in there. Why would she just chuck them all out like that?”

  “Who are they then?”

  “There’s something I didn’t tell you,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “There was this mirror in the Hawkins house—”