Through the Mirror

by D C Tullis

  As I cruised down the street, I glanced briefly at the statue of Pierre Dugua that the state had donated back in some time like the 50’s. It stood there resolute through the ages - glaring defiantly at any passerby who got too close. Park benches lined the area surrounding the park’s two fountains. Sometimes I went to relax and eat lunch at the park, and it was here where Ben had first told me about the symbol. It was almost like two half moons, one larger than the other, which surrounded a weird little eye right in the middle. Recalling it now, the strange thing is that that symbol happens to be all over Eastmouth. It was on a select few of the cast-iron manhole covers by the port, on other landmarks such as on some mausoleums in the graveyard behind St. Gabriel’s, and it was even engraved on the porch of the town hall. My mind had been drawn to it in the past, but I couldn’t find anything when I searched for info about it online or even when I inquired within the library, so I let it go. My brother would have known. He was always interested in uncovering conspiracies and strange mysteries.

  I continued my ride, passing the familiar Georgian houses and trying not to make eye contact with the elderly mowing their picture-perfect lawns, they all turned to wave anyway. Onward I headed, past the Oak Creek Lutheran Church and into The Burns.

  There was a rumor that some kid back in the 80’s, boosting his hot rod with a nitrous oxide injection system, sped through it so fast he left the street aflame. I’m not sure if any of that is true though. I definitely can’t as well ask the guy since he died in a crazy storm in the early 00’s, but that’s supposedly how it was named. The adults have Main Street, anyone under legal drinking age has The Burns. It’s an intersection housing The Renaissance: a theater. Noodle Time: the chinese restaurant. Slice of Life: the pizza joint. Eastmouth Library: the... well… library. Pinhead: the bowling alley. And finally, Computer Repair Shop: the brilliantly titled computer repair shop run by my uncle Maxence. Most of the area looked pretty worn down. This was likely due to the fact that it hadn’t been renovated since it had received its nickname.

  I continued heading west as I navigated through a bit more housing and then the park, until I finally reached John Mason High. I stopped briefly to give it the dutiful middle finger before again kicking off and heading towards my house just north of the school. My house was located beyond the stone path which gradually tightened as the pine trees became more dense. The further one wandered down that path, the more isolated it became. The trees eventually even seemed to swallow the path whole before you would finally end up at my home. Or more realistically, Uncle Maxence’s home.

  It was a sprawling mansion in a mixture of Colonial, Georgian and Victorian styles as it had been expanded over the centuries. The color scheme was a striking interplay between sable, grey, and violet which could make it damn near impossible to see at night. Architecturally, it was massive. It was two stories high, minus the attic, and was large enough that the opposing ends of the house were referred to as the east and west wings. The pine trees enclosed the area like the walls of a cavern, and it still had a little rickety well in front of it just to remind you that the house was old enough to be haunted. It was a shame I didn’t get to live there as a kid since it would have been a heck of a lot of fun to explore. Even now it still was. Since Maxence had never hired any help, some sections of the house were left completely abandoned. I was finally getting the chance to explore because he had been using my summer break as an excuse for cheap labor.

  ✽✽✽

  The sun was beginning to gradually lower when I put my bike away and finally entered the home. It hadn't been more than a second that I was home before Maxence near tripped over me as he was rushing out.

  “I’ll be late, I’ll be late,” he repeated before realizing he had collided with another person. “Jason, my dear boy, before I return tonight can you begin cleaning the second story west wing? I’ve been thinking and I want to turn one of those useless old rooms into a secondary lab of sorts. It’ll be perfect finally having that void of space cleared up.”

  “Hello to you too,” I sarcastically replied.

  He looked at his watch again before the urgency returned to his face.

  “Gotta go, gotta go, I’ll see you later tonight Jason.”

  I tried to send him a nod of acknowledgement, but he was already out the door.

  ✽✽✽

  It had taken me a good bit of time making a sandwich and then cruising through a novel on my phone before I finally decided to start cleaning. Such is the struggle of summer boredom.

  I hadn’t been to the second floor west wing in a while because unlike the east wing, it wasn’t directly connected to the second floor of the main house. I had at times pondered why an architect would be stupid enough to block off a significant portion of the house with a wall just to build a secondary staircase. I never came to a conclusion.

  I slid down the massive oak stairs and headed towards the master suite at the end of the first floor west wing before taking an abrupt detour and climbing up another, smaller set of stairs. These lead into the essentially abandoned second story west wing. A small section of the house comprised of the billiard room at the end of the hall, which hadn’t been used once since I moved here, and a number of forgotten rooms lining the hall. None of these rooms seemed to have any sort of direct purpose. I believe that was because they used to be guest rooms in the 1800’s, but whether a shady recollection of my Uncle’s drunken ramblings held any weight or not was beyond me. I hopped around the rickety banister and opened the first door to my right. This decision was met with immediate regret as a sneeze came on with the force of a thousand lightning bolts. The place was a museum. Its drab beige walls were lined with boxes, and those boxes were lined with dust. I briefly considered grabbing an industrial breathing mask from the garage but scratched that idea out of pure laziness.

  I spied a bed in the corner covered with crumpled woolen sheets and a desk table beside it. There also might have been a very old television buried somewhere back there too, but it would have required a great effort on my part to find out so I moved along eager to see else what I might find. The next two doors on this side of the hall were more of the same. Just a bed, a desk table, and some boxes. One even had a lamp. This was a welcome improvement.

  It wasn’t until I reached the final door on right side of the hallway that I became interested enough to go in. From behind the crack of the door, I could spy an ancient grandfather clock buried behind the clutter of dust-ridden boxes. Its shell appeared ornately detailed with brilliant and strange carvings depicting two furious lions snarling at each other in a sort of yin-yang proportion. The glass was dusty, and behind the dust I could see a golden pendulum hanging still. I tried to push the door aside, but it felt caught on something. No matter, I still had some muscle from the boxing my father taught me during my freshman year. I should certainly be more active but I was no pushover either. Maxence had allowed me to setup a hanging heavy bag from a joist in the garage when I first moved here. Lazy as I am, I still managed to find time to bang out some aggression every once in a while.

  I leveraged my right foot against the banister and shoved with every bit of strength within my body. At first nothing budged, but then it slowly began to give way little by little. Until at last I heard a crack. This crack was not the good sort of craaack, like when you crack open a lobster claw, more the bad sort of crack that happens when you break the banister you’ve been putting too much of your weight on. Yeah….

  Maxence probably wouldn’t be too happy about this. I bit at my thumb and realized that honesty might be the best policy. He’d certainly find out eventually, and when he did he’d probably prefer me to be upfront about the damage that I had caused to his house. Even still… it might be best to wait until he was at least a little less than sober. He was quite often lately, so I figured that I wouldn’t have to wait too long.

  I had shoved the door just enough that I could squeeze through the crack. Piled high behind the door were a wall of
boxes towering damn near eight feet high which had evidently fallen from their stack at some point and ended in a makeshift barricade. The room didn’t look to have been used in quite a long time, or at least it initially appeared so. Despite the clutter of boxes and the dust lining the floor, there was an unmistakable set of footprints lodged right in the dust. There were no proceeding footprints and wherever it had once led was hidden by a stack of boxes, but it was visibly there. This room had been visited more recently than the others.

  I moved around the rest of the room and found only one other object, a wooden rocking chair. Spooky. I’d once seen an awful horror movie on TV with my brother as a kid. There was this scene which just stuck out in my mind. A wooden rocking chair slowly swinging back and forth on a porch. There was no one in the chair, so it was supposed to be frightening of course, but instead it was just silly since you could see the string moving it. There didn’t appear to be any string on the legs of this one, but you could never be so sure with all the dust and such.

  Beyond that, there was nothing of real interest about the room. It appeared to be just as forgotten as the other ones I had searched. This was of course only one side of the hall, so I headed over to search the rest of the rooms. I quickly found myself in a circumstance of minimal luck. Two of the three doors on the other side were locked, and the other was just empty. I figured if I was going to be cleaning, I might as well as enjoy the hypnotic lull of the grandfather clock. I returned to that room and climbed over the boxes burying the clock, opened the glass face, picked up the key and wound the clock, and then started the pendulum. After that, I got to work.

  ✽✽✽

  The sun had dropped from the sky and been replaced by a silvery imposter. I wiped the sweat from my neck and resolved to finish up soon. In my efforts I had gone through the room with the grandfather clock in its entirety and unpacked the boxes. Many of the boxes were actually full of packing supplies or trash, so they were repacked and shoved into the hallway. The other remains were a split between technical gizmos, which likely had arrived when color TV was the new fad, and old photos. I recognized none of the people within them and was actually quite surprised at how some of them dressed. Flowing robes, suits of armor, a vest of some mesh similar to Kevlar in appearance, and a dude with a weird, futuristic headset that looked to have been ripped from one of the awful Robocop sequels Ellie had shown me. I knew my uncle was eccentric, but I didn’t know he had friends like this. It was like an amateur renaissance faire or some sort of convention.

  The room had been cleared just enough so that I could freely move through it. Only one section of boxes remained stacked high against the east wall, so I headed over to finish the job. A few feet from the wall I felt my hold on the ground give way as I slipped on a dust patch and tumbled into a tall stack of boxes. My first concern was that I had definitely heard some glass break, but that was immediately swallowed whole when I had realized what I had done. Moments before there had been a large whale-bone white wall with boxes stacked against it, yet now only a hole remained. I coughed as the drywall filled my nostrils causing me to gag and furiously rub my eyes. When my vision returned, I let out an excited shriek.

  “Holy hell,” I muttered.

  I had fallen into what must have been a secret room of sorts. There had been no clear indication of a doorway where the boxes had hidden, but that made no sense. After all, what idiot builds a room with no way to enter into it? I rubbed my eyes to validate that I hadn’t inhaled some asbestos or something and wasn’t just vividly hallucinating.

  The room itself was all brick, a sharp contrast to the suffocatingly plain white walls of the clock room. It was certainly small enough to be concealed within the floor plan yet also large enough for a few people to enter. It was roughly the size of the large walk-in closet in Maxence’s room.

  The only thing in the room beneath a window so high up it looked to have belonged in the attic was a mirror. That mattered little because the mirror was odd enough. It was massive to say the least. It was easily nine feet high, and it was furnished in a base of cherry redwood that looked at minimum a few centuries old.

  I don’t quite know what it was about that room, but I felt a wave of adrenaline jolt through me just by standing inside of it. I walked towards the mirror and felt my palms begin to sweat as I ran my hands gently down its meticulous sides. Oddly enough, I felt a continuous pull in my chest to touch the mirror, but after close examination I couldn’t find anything about it which made it different than any other mirror.

  I had always found my uncle a strange character even before moving in with him, but the findings of the day seemed to further cement that idea. I also realized that I now had something else to discuss with him when the alcohol loosened him up. However, given how well hidden the room was, it was all too possible he had had no idea that it even existed. It was a really old house, so who knew what other secret things lingered behind the walls and under the cupboards.

  I was done for the day, but I now had a renewed interest in cleaning the second floor. And it didn’t involve my lust for breaking more of my uncle’s things. That was separate.

  ✽✽✽

  It was half past ten when I glanced up from my book and took out my earphones, the sound of some Japanese shoegaze band still blaring through the ‘buds. I decided to hunt down my uncle. He’d most likely have been in the library for a good hour, so the time felt right to act. It didn’t take me long to reach the massive gold rimmed library doors and confirm my suspicions. There sat Maxence, half a bottle of whiskey on the table to his right, curled in an expensive velvet bathrobe. The man was only modest when he wasn’t home.

  “Hello there, Jason! Please, please come in,” he beckoned as he shut the book he’d been reading. “I had the absolute strangest day today. I was continuing my work on the quantum computer I’ve been building, as you know. Well, I think Ernie knocked a can onto one of the processors or something of the sort because I heard a little bang from that area. When I went to check on it however, no one was there. I mean the damned thing can’t just up and break itself. Well, I mean it can, I suppose… but that would have required...”

  “Strange,” I replied, interrupting his ramblings.

  “Yes, yes,” he said. “As I was saying though, I thought it might be Ernie just fooling around or something. The thought angers me a little, but even then it is forgivable for him. But when I went to search for him he wasn’t anywhere in the shop whatsoever. And then when I began to think it was some childish prank he had pulled or that he had fled because he was too frightened to reveal himself, he arrives. He apologized for being late and all, something I’m not all too concerned about. After all, who isn’t late at times. I know I certainly can be. Anyway, what boggles me is that when I questioned him about it he denied everything. Stranger even, he didn’t look to be lying. Sometimes people oust themselves by being poor liars. The few times he has it was like that. Eyebrow twitch and all, but he had none of those giveaways. Frankly I can’t tell if I’m going insane or if someone broke into the shop, but that idea just seems so far fetched. Who’d break into a computer repair sho…” He paused to hiccup. “S’cuse me.”

  He stopped his rant to reach over and pour himself another glass of whiskey.

  “Maybe it was the Martians,” I wryly declared.

  His expression turned to one of mild offense. “No need for that now,” he replied.

  Maxence cleared his throat before continuing, “So what is it that you wished to discuss then? Generally you don’t grace me with your presence unless to ask for advice or… did you maybe do something wrong?”

  I hid the sheepish grin which tried to claim my face. I figured it better to mention breaking the items in the boxes and the banister after the story. It might save me from some extra housework.

  “So, Maxence… are you aware of any secret rooms in the house?” I asked him.

  His face suddenly shifted its tone ever so subtly. I could swear it became just a bit
more grim, but Maxence was never very easy to read. “None that I am aware of, Jason. Did you happen to find one?”

  I paused for a moment to choose my wording carefully, “Are you aware of a secret room on the farthest right guest bedroom in the second floor west wing?”

  If he was aware of the room, his eyes were trained in hiding it. I didn’t know Maxence to be a serial liar, but honestly I hadn’t spent anywhere near as much time with him as my brother had. That hadn’t particularly changed even after I had moved in.

  “Not until now, if there is one that is,” he replied.

  “As I was cleaning that room, I happened to lose my balance and shove some boxes through what I thought was solid wall. My understanding was wrong.”

  His eyes noticeable sharpened at this. Maybe he was less drunk than I thought. Maxence rubbed his chin for a moment before downing the rest of his glass and capping the bottle. He removed a handkerchief from the front pocket of his robe and began to wipe his lip.

  I continued, “Behind the wall there was a room with nothing in it but an old mirror. And it was a giant one at that. Must have been nine feet or so.”

  Maxence interjected, “I was unaware that some secret room lay hidden there. I’ll certainly check it out, but I must urge you not to go snooping around too much, Jason. This is an old house after all, and my family was certainly strange enough to leave other such passageways…” He ended his sentence abruptly. “It is probably just best that you don’t go exploring. It’s an old house after all, and they can be dangerous. I doubt you know this, but I once crashed through a banister in that same wing and broke my arm on the stairs below it. Promise me you won’t continue snooping once you’ve finished cleaning?”

  I would’ve replied, but a smirk spread across my face instead.