The Egyptian Mirror

by Michael Bedard

He lay down on the cushions by the crib and held her hand through the bars until it grew slack in his own and her breathing came slow and deep. He would gladly have stayed there with her all night, but with nothing to cover himself with, it was cold on the floor, and every time he closed his eyes he was back in the mirror world again. Finally, he got up and tiptoed back to his room.

  He lifted the pillow off the mirror and, summoning all his courage, looked down into it. But the vision had vanished, and it was just his own frightened face that looked back. He wished he’d never touched the mirror, but it was too late for wishing. He tucked it back under the mattress. His one hope was that what he’d seen had not been real, that Alice Loudon hadn’t actually seen him in the mirror.

  He stole to the window and lifted the edge of the curtain. The old house sat dark and still. There were no lights on in the front bedroom, no hint that anything out of the ordinary had occurred. He drew a deep breath. He’d been foolish to work himself into such a state. The vision had no more substance than a dream. But he’d been reckless to look in the mirror, all the same. He would take it with him when he went to see Cameron—and good riddance if he never set eyes on it again.

  As he turned from the window he heard a sound. It was a sound he knew well, and it sent a shiver through him. He looked back at the Loudon’s porch. The swing was cloaked in shadows, but he could clearly hear its faint rhythmic creak as it swung to and fro.

  Si-mon, Si-mon, it seemed to say in its creaky voice.

  Suddenly a match flared in the dark, illumining Alice Loudon’s face as she lit a cigarette. The same strange earrings he’d seen in the vision dangled from her ears. The same necklace hung about her neck. As she leaned in close to the flame and blew it out, he could have sworn she cast a quick glance his way.

  Part iii

  The Mummy Room

  By providing a home for the double in the tomb, the mirror prevented it from wandering off into the world and causing mischief among the living.

  –Randall Hawkins, Soul Catchers

  30

  Bright and early Saturday morning, Mom and Dad headed off with Babs to spend the day at the beach. It was a Labor Day weekend tradition: a day in the sun, wedged blanket to blanket on the hot sand with all the other families who had the same idea—like a catch of cod laid out on a dock to dry. They looked forward to it all summer long. It would be well after dark before they were back.

  Simon had convinced them he wasn’t feeling well enough to go. The jolting and jarring of the hot car made him sick to his stomach at the best of times. Dad didn’t need much convincing. Last summer, locked in traffic on the steamy highway on the way home, Simon had rolled down the window and spewed down the side of the car.

  It was just a day trip, but Mom packed like they were heading off for a week. As Simon ushered Babs out to the waiting car that morning, he heard Dad muttering under his breath as he fought to fit the stroller into the crowded trunk. Mom sat quietly in the front seat with the picnic basket on her lap. As Simon buckled Babs into the car seat, pail and shovel by her side, Mom looked up in the rear view mirror at him.

  “You be good, Simon,” she said. “We shouldn’t be late.”

  No sooner were they out of sight than he set to work. After the incident with the mirror earlier that week there was no way he was going to simply walk out the door with it undisguised. He thought about tucking it down the back of his pants and wearing a jacket over it. But it was too hot to be wearing a jacket, and even with it on, the edge of the mirror showed below, and it looked like he had a dinner plate shoved down his pants. Besides, he couldn’t stand to have it up against him now. It felt somehow alive.

  He considered putting it in a bag, but every bag he tried felt transparent. He was convinced Alice Loudon would see straight through it and know instantly what he was up to. Then he remembered the old canvas rucksack he’d had with him the night they found the mirror. He fetched it from the garage and slid the mirror into it. And suddenly it felt safe. All the same, when he went to meet Abbey in the park at noon, he left by the back door and stole away along the lane.

  As they hurried off along the winding streets, he cast an occasional look back to see if they were being followed, but it seemed they’d managed to slip off without arousing suspicion.

  Soon, the walk began to take its toll. The museum was on the far side of town. For a healthy Simon it would have been a brisk forty-five minute walk. But for sick Simon it was a different story entirely. He was totally wrung out before they were halfway there.

  By then they’d left the shady side streets behind and were walking along a sweltering midtown street in the midst of a crowd of Saturday shoppers. Abbey steered him over to a bench by a bus stop and sat him down. She went to check the schedule posted on the pole. A crosstown bus that would take them steps from the museum was due by soon. She sat down beside him while they waited for it to come.

  A guy with a guitar was busking on the corner across the street. He had his guitar case open in front of him and a black and white terrier with a red bandana around its neck on a blanket beside him. Abbey kept looking over at him.

  The bus came at last. They headed straight for the back, where they could be alone. As the bus drove off, Abbey stood staring out the rear window at the corner where the busker was playing.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “For a moment I could have sworn I saw Alice Loudon’s dog sitting there beside that guy, looking over at us. But it’s just some little dog with a bandana around its neck.” She sat down and shook her head. “Just seeing things,” she said.

  Since the incident with the mirror, Simon had been doing nothing but. In every reflective surface he encountered, he saw Alice Loudon looking back at him as she had that night. He had to cover the mirror in his room again so he could sleep.

  “So what was that with your mom the other night?” said Abbey.

  “I think she was listening in on my call with Joan Cameron,” he said. “And then when you called right after, she picked up again.”

  “But she always answers the phone, Simon. And you never do.”

  “Maybe, but since she started those piano lessons with Alice Loudon, she’s different somehow. And she’s not the only one. The kids look like zombies when they shuffle back and forth to lessons. A few days back, one of them stepped off the curb right into the path of a car. He just missed being hit, but there was no reaction at all. I’m telling you, Abbey, there’s something strange going on. It’s like the life has been drained from them.”

  “What did Joan Cameron have to say?”

  “She thinks I might be able to help her with something about the mirror,” he said. “She wants to show me a photo she found.”

  “She doesn’t know you have it, then?”

  “No, but I decided to bring it along,” he said, tapping the knapsack. “To tell you the truth, I’ll be glad to be rid of it for a while.”

  He told her about his experience with the mirror: the shadowy form he’d seen standing in the doorway of the Hawkins’ bedroom; its slow, terrifying transformation into Alice Loudon as he watched through the mirror; her sudden awareness that he was there.

  “Geez, Simon, that’s about the scariest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said.

  The bus passed under a bridge. As the outer world went dark his reflection loomed up in the bus window beside him, with Abbey’s next to him. But now, from the far end of the reflected seat, another passenger peered back. As he spun around to look, the bus plunged back into day. The seat stood empty in the light.

  “Everything all right, Simon?”

  “Yeah.” He began rummaging through his pockets. “I found an old photo while you were away. A picture of a woman playing a piano. It fell out of the sheet music Alice Loudon loaned my mom. It looks exactly like her.”

  “Probably is,” she said. “It’s her music, after all.”<
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  He found the photo and handed it to her. She took a long look.

  “That’s her, all right.”

  “Check out the date on the back of it,” he said.

  She flipped it over and looked. “That’s not possible, Simon. It’s over eighty years old.” She turned it and studied the photo again.

  Simon looked up and saw the museum go by. He reached up and yanked the bell cord. The driver swung into the curb and came to a jarring halt at the stop. He glared up in the rearview mirror at them as they hurried out the rear door.

  31

  It seemed like all the families in town that hadn’t gone to the beach had wound up at the museum. As Abbey and Simon came through the doors into the foyer they found themselves in the midst of a noisy crowd lining up to get in.

  The museum was a monument to an age of grandeur that defied the busy rush of time. It looked down with a cool, granite gaze on the mob milling about its figured marble floor. High above the bustle, dust motes drifted lazily in the tinted light of the stained glass windows set in the wall of the foyer, and the ghosts of time past leaned over the rails of the upper galleries and looked silently down. Here time had stopped, as surely as the large block of magnetite in the Mineral Room would stop the watches of unwary visitors who ventured too near.

  Abbey craned her neck to peer up at the vaulted ceiling as Simon paid the harried young cashier. Rather than wait for an elevator, they started up the shallow marble stairs. Flight by flight they climbed, slowly circling the echoing stairwell that pierced the building from top to bottom like the hub round which it turned. Pausing on a landing between floors to catch their breath, Abbey took a long look down.

  “You sure you know where we’re going, Simon?” They had already passed three floors without pausing, and were now the only ones left on the stairs.

  “I’m sure,” he said, peering up the well. “We’re nearly there.”

  It felt as though the higher they climbed, the farther back in time they went. So that when they stood finally at the top, facing the arched entrance to the Egyptian Gallery, the day-to-day world had faded to a dull murmur far below, and they had been spirited back to ancient times.

  A hush fell over them as they slipped past the solemn stone figures flanking the entrance. Although it was a busy day at the museum, there were only a handful of visitors here. Most families were drawn to the glitzier galleries on the lower floors with their towering dinosaurs and their interactive displays. Few families ventured as far as the upper floor, except to see the mummy. Here things had remained unchanged for years.

  The gallery was a set of three high-ceilinged rooms. The outer walls of the first two were pierced by tall lancet windows that cast spears of sunlight on the wooden floor. The third, and smallest, was the mummy room. It was windowless, cast in constant shadow to safeguard its delicate contents.

  Three display cases ran lengthwise down the center of the first two rooms, with four more down each side, set sidewise in the space between pillar and wall. As Abbey and Simon drifted by, their reflections slid on the surface of the cases alongside them.

  It was one of those places where everything that had ever happened seemed somehow present still, preserved in silence like the ancient artifacts in their cases: vessels of stone and clay, statues of wood with inlaid eyes, amuletic jewelry of gold and semi-precious stones, miniature clay figures meant to serve the needs of those with whom they’d been buried in the afterlife. Ranged on their glass shelves in glass cases, they seemed to float on air.

  Approaching the mummy room, Simon felt the same unease he’d felt here as a child: the sense that he was seeing something he shouldn’t, that he was violating the repose of the dead and would in some way be punished for it. It was all he could do not to turn and flee down the echoing stairs, out into the daylight world again.

  Dr. Cameron was nowhere in sight. As he lingered in the doorway waiting, Abbey entered the room and approached the mummy case. She bent low to study the ancient figure asleep behind the glass. Seeing her lent him courage, and he too ventured in. They stood on opposite sides of the case, peering in at the mummy and, past it, at one another.

  It lay there in its painted wooden coffin. The lid had been removed, raised up on four thin wires, so that it hung suspended above the mummy and cast its shadow over it. They had to lean close to the case to see clearly—as close as three confidantes conversing in a crowded room. But here it was an intimacy of silence spanning the centuries.

  The figure was swaddled tight in its cocoon of fragile cloth. Only the bandaging that covered its face had been removed. The skin was dark and glossy, like polished leather stretched tight over the skull. The lips were drawn back thin and taut from the teeth, the eyelids sunk deep in their sockets. The nose was thin and horny like the beak of a bird; the hair like wisps of cotton wool, the color of ochre. It was a dreadful, drawing thing.

  Simon was reminded of the shadowy figure at the vanity in his vision. He had a sudden, almost palpable sense of Alice Loudon’s presence.

  “I’m just going to walk around a bit,” he said and fled the shadowed room and the aura of unease that hung over it.

  Sunlight spilled through the gallery windows, glinting off the cases. He kept seeing Alice Loudon looking back at him from the glass. Suddenly, he stopped in his tracks. He slowly approached a tall case tucked behind a pillar near the mummy room. It contained a life-size waxwork figure of a woman in Egyptian costume applying her makeup.

  She sat at a table on which various pots and jars of cosmetics were arrayed alongside small brushes and tapered sticks. They looked like those he’d seen on the vanity table in his vision. The mannequin held a mirror in her hand. It was only a model, but mounted on the wall behind were three ancient bronze mirrors, each covered in a dull green coating of corrosion.

  A figure came up quietly behind him while he was lost in thought. He saw the dim reflection in the glass of the case and swung around.

  “Sorry, Simon. I didn’t mean to frighten you,” said Dr. Cameron. “I see you’ve found our mirrors. That one’s quite like the Hawkins mirror, isn’t it?

  Abbey had wandered over from the other room. “I’d like you to meet my friend Abbey,” he said. “Abbey, this is Dr. Cameron.”

  “Please, ‘Cameron’ will do just fine. It’s what everyone here calls me.” She extended her hand. “Pleased to meet you, Abbey.”

  “While we’re alone for a moment, I’d like to show you something,” she said and led them to a case on the far side of the room.

  “The items on display here were discovered in the late nineteenth century by Edmund Walker, during the course of excavating an ancient Egyptian town that had housed a workforce of pyramid builders. He found them hidden in a hollow under the floor of one of the houses.”

  Several artifacts were arranged on a bed of sun-bleached velvet in the case. There was a pair of ivory clappers carved at the tips into the shape of hands, half a dozen small glazed animal figures, and the tattered remains of a painted canvas mask with a bright red mouth, wide encircled eyes, and a lion’s mane.

  As he looked at the mask, Simon was suddenly reminded of the whirling figure in his dream.

  “These things likely belonged to a magician,” said Cameron. “Ancient Egyptians used magic as a means of protection against the many dangers they faced in their world. These clappers would have been used as part of a dance performed by the magician to frighten off demons. These animal figures represent the forces at the magician’s disposal and were animated by means of a spell. And this mask was likely worn by the magician, acting in the role of the god, while performing magical rites.”

  “As you can see, there’s an item missing from the case,” said Cameron.

  A long, thin silhouette was clearly visible on the velvet cloth.

  “It was a bronze snake wand, a potent instrument used against evil forces. It disap
peared some months back. Since the case showed no signs of being tampered with, I assumed it had simply been removed by a curator, or sent on loan to another institution and the paperwork had somehow been mislaid. But then, two weeks ago, another item went missing.”

  She led them to a case over by the entrance to the mummy room.

  “The trove of objects from the magician’s kit was a remarkable find. But less than a month later, it was overshadowed by the discovery of an undisturbed grave by a team excavating the large cemetery that lay just outside the town.

  “This was the cemetery for the workers and their families, and consisted of simple graves dug in the desert sand. Humble graves like this were overlooked by grave robbers, who concentrated on the rich graves of the wealthy that were cut in the rock of the surrounding hills. But in this particular grave, a shaft grave cut down to the bedrock in the sand, a painted wooden coffin containing an astonishingly well-preserved mummy was found, with a very fine necklace about its neck, and several large amulets tucked among the linen wrappings. Those items were displayed in this case. As you can see, the necklace is missing.

  “Now, one missing object could easily be an accident, but two is something different. I contacted the police at once and went back through the acquisition records of both to gather as many details as I could about them. And there I stumbled upon an even greater mystery.”

  She swept her eyes around the room. “This place no longer feels safe to me since these strange disappearances. I suggest we talk in my office.”

  She walked them back briskly through the gallery and onto the balcony overlooking the busy foyer below. Leading them over to an old elevator with ornamented brass doors, she pushed the button. The sweep hand over the doors jerked in fits and starts from floor to floor until it reached theirs. The doors slid open, and they went in.

  The small old elevator creaked and groaned as it carried them down into in the depths of the museum. An eerie silence had settled over them, broken only by the light ping of the elevator as it descended past the other floors and lurched to a halt at the lowest level.