Utility Company (Book 1): Blink

by Swardstrom, Will

  He sat up and looked down the hall and decided he needed to be a lot more open to what was happening in the mirror. RepNika hadn’t popped through with a machete or anything. This phenomena deserved curiosity, not fear.

  Nik stood up and folded the blanket. He determined he would go back in...after lunch.

  One Way Journey

  The next morning, Agent Smith and Dr. Anna drove up to a house in a suburban neighborhood in the Grand Rapids area. It looked as if all the houses had originally been constructed sometime in the 70s or early 80s. The house they drove up to looked like any other perfectly normal house in a thirty-five or forty year old neighborhood. It was a light brown two-story with a dogwood in the front yard.

  There were service vehicles of various kinds all over the street. A local officer removed a barrier to let their vehicle through. There just happened to be an open parking spot in the driveway, so that was where Smith parked.

  Smith and Dr. Anna were met in the driveway by Agent Johnson‌—‌the one who was a woman. Smith did not know whose idea it was to pair Johnson with Johnson. Probably whoever thought to pair Smith with Wesson. It didn’t matter. The names weren’t real, but assigned by the agency to retain a level of anonymity for the agents.

  Smith and Dr. Anna opened the car doors and got out. “It’s good to see you Johnson,” Smith said. “It’s been a while.”

  “Yes sir. It’s good to see you too.” She smiled with a bit of a wink. Smith might think she was flirting if he didn’t know she was very happily married. “If you’ll follow me,” she said, “I’ll show you around.”

  The small but solid agent turned and went in the direction of the house. She led them up to the front door where the stain of some sort of exploded device marred on the front steps. “This is where we caught him, before he got in.”

  Agent Johnson turned and looked at Smith. “It’s not the first time we tried to get him, but it was the first time we were successful.” She pointed toward a disheveled bush next to the nearby window. “That was where they threw the gas in when SWAT stormed the place. They were sure he went in, but they couldn’t find anything once they went in.”

  Smith bent over to look. “There’s no sign of entry here.”

  “That was my call. I had just come on at the time. We knew he kept coming here. There were at least three different sightings to confirm that. However, nobody had ever seen him come out. My best guess was that if the place looked as normal as we could make it, he might come back one more time. So we put it all back together as best as we could. It worked. We disabled the lock and gassed him before he could get inside. It turned out to be pretty easy.”

  She opened the door and went in. Smith and Dr. Anna followed, taking in the view. There was a living room on the immediate right of the door, a stair going up to the left, and Smith could see a man handcuffed to a table through an archway into the kitchen dinette area.

  She pointed at the man at the table, “That’s him, but he’s useless. All he does is mutter the same four phrases over and over. What we can’t figure out is where he went after coming in here.”

  Agent Smith glanced over at a large wall mirror in the living room and walked over to it. It certainly looked like a reflection. He did a check of his surroundings and looked again. There. A flashlight on a table in this room was missing in the reflection. He went over, picked it up and walked back to the mirror. Johnson watched with a strange expression on her face. Anna looked fascinated.

  Smith tipped the flashlight toward the mirror while the reflection simply reached out his empty hand. When the flashlight touched the mirror, it didn’t stop. There was a little resistance, and then the flashlight was being pulled. It was his reflection pulling. In reflex, Agent Smith pulled back and ended up with half the flashlight in his hand. He looked down at it and back at the reflection and he could see the Smith on the other side mouth the words, “One way”.

  Dang! Smith wondered at that moment why he hadn’t thought to question his own reflection the past few minutes. The last time he encountered this guy, he almost became a target. Admittedly, they were bad shots. Smith knew that he himself was a better shot than that. Perhaps the other one missed on purpose?

  The reflection was already walking toward the kitchen on his side. Smith thought about shooting him in the back, but decided he wasn’t in the mood for self-annihilation. At least not yet.

  Smith turned to Dr. Anna. “Did you catch that last part?”

  “One way? Yes. That means our suspect in the other room came in another way. I should be able to track that as well. Can I look at the flashlight?”

  Smith handed it to her, careful to avoid some leaking battery acid. “Here you go. See what you can find.” She turned to go to the car to get her equipment. Smith turned back to Johnson, “Anything else?”

  “Yes, in the back yard. I’ll show you.”

  They detoured through a dark dining room and into the kitchen. They were about to walk through the dinette area when the guy at the table saw Smith.

  As soon as he saw Agent Smith he started screaming incoherently, frantically backing into the corner and pulling at his handcuffs hard enough to cause bleeding. Two agents rushed over and grabbed him to keep him from crawling up the wall.

  Johnson and Smith stopped not only out of curiosity but also to avoid any fallout from the freakout. Smith leaned down on the table and looked the other man in the eye. The suspect was gaunt, as if he hadn’t eaten a good meal in quite some time. His bright red hair (orange, actually) was completely disheveled. A good week or two of scruff covered his face and neck.

  “You know me?” Smith asked.

  The man pulled his body as far back into the corner as he could and everything he said sounded like babble, “Y y y you Agent! You y y y you stop! Stop! You, you stop! The the the things the way the first the NO! The same samesamesame SAME!”

  Smith shook his head. “I am not the same. Are you?”

  He hugged his arms as tightly as he could and shook his head. “SAME! Samesamesame no no no No! Janie sister sister friend. In the mirror mirror end. Janie sister...”

  He had turned away and was now just repeating himself. Smith stood up and told the closest agent to find an audio recorder and record everything he said. Then he asked Johnson to lead on.

  A Sign From the Other Side

  After coming to the realization that the mirror phenomenon was something to be studied and learned from, not an object to be feared, Nik made a tuna on rye and chased it with some jalapeño cheddar chips and a grape soda. He took one last swig of the soda, wishing it were something stronger and eyed the chair across from him in the dinette. He stood, grabbed the chair, walked back to the master bathroom and set up to camp out there, facing his mirror.

  He had already come to the conclusion that the phenomena was restricted to his own mirror. His forehead even looked normal in Penny’s mirror. Weird, but true. When he finally discovered it, he spent several minutes looking back and forth between the two mirrors. The forehead was normal in hers, dry in his. Blue towel in her mirror’s reflection…green in his. That settled it. There was something going on with his mirror that was...different. So he sat back in the chair and not knowing what to expect, waiting for whatever might come.

  Nik watched the mirror. RepNika watched right back. It got tedious after a while, but again, his eyes drifted to other aspects of the room. The longer he sat, the more he noticed differences. It was like those old side-by-side pictures in the Highlights magazines from when he was a kid. Oops‌—‌missing towel bar here, extra deodorant stick there. By the time it was mid-afternoon, Nik had found a half-dozen differences.

  He had given up on the mirror universe as some kind of evil place. It was harmless and watching himself...watching his RepNika...was simply like watching an obscure and strange cable channel.

  Nik went about the rest of his day, trying to put it out of his mind and go on with life. It wasn’t going to help anyone to be obsessed about a mirror
. Nik left the bathroom and got his best night’s sleep in days.

  But the next morning, Nik walked into the bathroom and found the other Nik staring back. He had been waiting. He knew. Nik might have just shrugged it off, except for one thing: the mirror Nik was holding a handmade sign that read “EM PLEH”, which Nik struggled with for a few seconds before he realized it was “HELP ME,” written backwards. It was a mirror, after all.

  At this point, it was ridiculously clear that whatever was hanging on the wall was no mirror, but was rather some sort of viewer to another universe.

  Nik was flummoxed at first. He stood there, not holding anything except a cell phone while RepNika held up a plea...a plea he had no idea how to answer or do anything about. If this was a glimpse at another universe, how would one go about making actual contact with someone else from there? Did the mirror act as a portal of sorts where he could just push through? Would that even be advisable? Nik had seen enough science fiction flicks to know meeting himself in an alternate timeline or universe wasn’t always a good idea. You know...the whole ripping apart of the universe or the space-time continuum and all that.

  He couldn’t help himself. Nik reached up and laid his hands on the surface of the mirror. RepNika did the same thing, just a split second after. It seemed perhaps they were still tied together somehow, but the timing was off. Nik tried waving his hands around a bit and the delay continued. Shrugging, he put his hands back on the mirror. The face of the mirror was cold and smooth...normal. He felt only the seemingly perfect glass and definitely not RepNika’s hand pushing back in any way on his.

  Nik felt a sense of relief for the moment. At least he didn’t need to worry about unleashing some alternate reality unwittingly on his own. The boundary seemed firm enough...for now at least.

  He took a step back and tried to motion to his other self. Nik shrugged and the mirror-Nik shrugged back. Nik waved, and so did RepNika, all while he held the sign. The other Nik held the very thing that was so markedly different between the two of them. They wore the same clothes‌—‌the flannel pajamas Nik had worn to bed the night before, but something felt different. In the previous times Nik had been looking at the mirror, or window, or whatever it was, he hadn’t noticed unusual behavior from RepNika, but then again, there were times he wasn’t keeping eye contact and of course the times he wasn’t even in the bathroom.

  Nik tried to talk to his double, but sound didn’t seem to go through. He decided whatever it was could wait until after school. He already had missed one day of school this week because of the mirror, and that was enough.

  “Daddy!”

  Nik couldn’t ignore Sisco. He headed out of the bathroom and found the boy outside the closed door of the other lavatory. “Whatcha need, Sisco?”

  “Kira’s hogging the bathroom and I need it!”

  “I am not!” a voice called from the other side of the door. “I just got in here and he decided he needed to pee just because I was here first.”

  Sisco looked up and before Nik could even say anything, Sisco launched into his own argument as only a seven year old could.

  “It isn’t fair. She got the last cinnamon roll at breakfast and the last of the orange juice. She’s got a field trip to the museum today and I have to stay at school. It isn’t fair. And then she got to the bathroom first,” Sisco said without taking a single breath. “I just wanted to pee first.”

  In a strange way, Nik understood, but he couldn’t let chaos win.

  “Sisco, you have to let your sister finish up. You can hold it. And one day you’ll be big enough to get the last cinnamon roll and you’ll go on cool field trips.”

  “Promise, dad?”

  “I promise.”

  The boy was relieved...a little. “Can I use your toilet, dad?”

  Nik’s heart skipped a beat. He’d gotten lucky with Penny not noticing the mirror, but kids were often more perceptive.

  He banged on the bathroom door. “Kira, you have one minute to get out so Sisco can use the toilet. After that, he has my permission to break the door down.”

  Nik walked back through his bedroom to the bathroom, content in his ability to keep his kids out of the bathroom and the unknown mystery that awaited in the mirrors.

  The other Nik was still standing there, holding the sign. But Nik didn’t have time for it. He tried to ignore his doppelganger and used Penny’s mirror as he got ready for school. But thoughts of mirror-Nik plagued him all day long. It was extremely difficult to concentrate on anything with those thoughts swirling around in his head.

  It was just so confusing and he didn’t know what to do. He wanted to help, but he didn’t have the first clue where to start. What was a high school history teacher supposed to do with an Interdimensional Physics problem? He turned his attention to his family and job and tried to put it out of his mind for the next several hours.

  Frank in the Hole

  Agents Johnson and Smith walked through the family room and out the back door. Outside, two large canopies had been set up over three shallow graves in the process of being excavated.

  Johnson stopped at the edge of the patio right by two of the shallow graves so Smith could have a good look. “We believe this is likely the family who lived in this house. It was three-person family so this matches what we know. We also believe the last time they were seen alive was about four weeks ago. We’ll have to use dental records or DNA for identification.”

  Smith agreed. The condition of the corpse in front of him was not exactly ideal for a visual identification.

  He turned to Johnson. “What specifically did you want me to see out here?”

  “It’s in the yard of the house behind us. Follow me.” She walked up to an old fence with some loose boards and squeezed through an opening someone had already made. It led into another backyard.

  She walked up to an outdoor garage/workshop behind the house. A driveway led to the street. Opening the door, she gestured for Smith to go inside.

  Inside, he could see two more technicians and the other Johnson, a tall lanky guy who didn’t for a second look like he belonged in a top government agency. The female Johnson tapped him on the shoulder as he was peering intently into a hole in the floor. He glanced up and smiled a slow smile towards Smith. “Good to see you, Smith. You’ve gotta see this,” he said eagerly, “This one’s pretty cool.” He gestured at the other two, “Why don’t you guys take a break for a few minutes. I gotta show my boss what’s going on.”

  They left and Smith came in closer. Johnson was standing on the edge of a large square hole in the floor of the garage. Down below there were four bodies in the process of being excavated.

  “I’m pretty sure this is the beginning of everything here and I’ll tell you why in a moment. First, an observation: It looks like he was quite organized and efficient in the beginning. He is completely incapable of this kind of sophistication now, so what happened in the last twenty-eight days to change that?”

  Johnson stepped into the hole and peeled the cover off the largest body. Instantly, Smith could tell that this could be a twin of the man chained to a table next door. It also begged a question. “I can see he’s not very decomposed, but you think he started here about a month ago. Tell me more about why you think that.”

  In reply, Johnson simply asked, “What do you smell?”

  Smith sniffed. “Nothing.”

  “Exactly. No matter if it’s hours or days or several weeks as we think it is, there should be some decomp and the smell to go with it. I believe the bodies have been prepared in some way to not draw attention to this house from the smell. As of yet, we don’t have any ideas on that front.”

  So the bodies were prepared in a way to prevent decomposition, wrapped and buried where nobody should find them. Johnson was right. There was no way the guy they had in custody could be this organized.

  “So this guy, tell me about him,” Smith said, pointing at the guy in the hole. That one looked remarkably similar to the guy at the t
able, except the hair was shorter, there was no scruffy beard, and the dead part.

  Female Johnson took over. Agent Smith thought of her as Ms. Johnson when the two Johnson agents were together. “He’s Frank Caplan, carpenter and amateur inventor.” Smith looked up and around the old garage, filled with gadgets and power tools. It seemed to fit. “He was married to Janie Caplan and had two kids, thirteen and ten.”

  Smith stopped her. “Janie. The guy back there mentioned her name.”

  “Yeah. That’s one reason we thought that was weird, other than the obvious.”

  “I assume you’ve searched the house. Anything strange with any mirrors?” Smith asked.

  “Yes,” she answered, “But not in the house. There’s a small bathroom in the back of this building, and the mirror in there is shattered.”

  “All right, and you think this is the site of origination because…”

  “Well, our guy in the house back there likely wanted to take the place of the guy in the hole. It appears as if the Frank in the chair was posing as Frank in the hole in public until about four days ago, when the trail of bodies out there started getting connected to him. From there, it was a matter of catching the slippery guy. Thanks to you, now I know why that was so hard.”

  Mr. Johnson perked up, “What?”

  Smith looked at the message on his buzzing phone and answered Mr. Johnson, “We’ll have to tell you later. Keep at this. Let me know if anything else comes up.”

  Smith turned to Ms. Johnson, “You’re with me. We’ve got to take a drive downtown.”

  Going Downtown

  Smith had Ms. Johnson drive as she was more familiar with the local geography. She loaded Dr. Anna and Smith into the back of her agency black SUV. Anna wanted to update Smith on several things as they drove.