“Okay. Since this is my world, maybe it would be better if I did it this time,” he said.
Nicholas walked towards the portal, which Nik still called a mirror in his own mind. Across the way, his master bathroom was empty. Nothing seemed out of place. He refocused his eyes on the pane itself, and saw that there were still cracks stemming from the corners. Nicholas touched one and broke his skin, dropping some blood onto the event horizon. Nicholas put his hand on the wall by the mirror.
There was a shift in the room. It was as if someone opened a door from across a large building. There was a sense of a change in pressure, but it was not apparent why.
“I think that did it,” Nik said.
_____
“Okay boss, we’ve got ten minutes,” Wesson said. “We should move the vehicles. I’d hate to damage them.”
Just like Agent Smith, Wesson was ultra-conscious of the vehicles acquired to transport them to and from these incidents. These were by far the nicest vehicles the two had ridden in for some time. It wouldn’t look good if Smith’s team happened to return them with scratches and dents.
“You got it. Ford and his team have already warned the surrounding houses in the neighborhood. They put together a cover story about a gas leak in one of the incoming lines. Once they got word out that one of their homes may be exploding, everyone decided it was a good time to eat lunch out,” Agent Smith reported back.
Smith was sitting in the driver’s seat of the lead SUV. Dr. Anna had moved up to the shotgun position, while Barney, Tinker, and Schwinn moved the other SUV’s. They took them in front of the house Wesson had been camped out on earlier; Agent Smith sent Tinker and Schwinn to Wesson’s former spot to observe from the high ground.
They were going to blow up Nik Davidson’s house.
While the team strung the explosives and the wiring around Davidson’s house, Smith made another call to Wall—the second one in two days.
“Wall here,” the voice on the other end answered.
“This is Smith.”
“Go ahead,” Wall said.
“Sir, we were unable to capture Nik Davidson. We suspect the situation may be similar to that of Frank Caplan in Michigan, but we have turned up no evidence to support that. His property is clean, and Davidson does not own any other land nearby. We checked the neighborhood, but the locals insist Davidson doesn’t go out much, other than to go to school.”
A beat of silence. “So, Nik Davidson may not be Caplan.”
“Correct.”
“But, then again, if he is adept at using the portal, perhaps he is more clever than Caplan and hid the evidence on the other side.”
Smith rubbed my hand over my chin. “Also possible, sir.”
“What do you suggest, Smith?”
“The collateral damage would be fairly minimal if we just eliminated the portal on this end. Quick and easy and all that’s lost is Nik Davidson, his wife and two kids. If they’re all still alive, that is,” Agent Smith added.
“I assume you are already putting your plan into motion,” Wall said. He knew his lead agent too well.
“Yes sir. I figured I better get moving. If you said no, it would be easy to take it all down. If you said yes, I wanted to get it done and over with as soon as possible.”
Smith heard a few clicks on Wall’s computer at the other end of the phone.
“Your plan is a go, Smith. Get it done, and then get your ass to Arizona. We’ve got to get to the bottom of this, and Arizona appears to be the epicenter,” Wall said.
“Yes sir,” Smith said, but Wall had already hung up before Smith uttered “sir.”
_____
“Yep,” Nicholas said. He reached up with the butt of his shotgun and pushed on the portal. Expecting a solid front, Nik was surprised when the gun proceeded to pass through the ostensible surface of the mirror-portal. Presumably, if someone had been watching from Nik’s master bath, they would have witnessed a shotgun emerging from the mirror on that end.
“I should go first, in case you coming through closes the window, like it did when I came here,” Nik said.
His mirror twin simply nodded and Nik hopped up on the counter and pushed through. He immediately found himself back in his own bathroom. He scrambled off the counter and looked behind him where Nicholas was coming through, a little bit more confident in appearance than Nik had felt on either trip through the looking glass.
_____
Wesson certainly knew his way around a pile of C4 and some detonators, so he was the one tasked with the job. From there, the team simply waited. The clock continued to count down, from ten minutes all the way to zero.
Agent Smith was fully prepared for an explosion in less than a minute, and decided to get out of the SUV to stretch his legs. Just as soon as he’d stepped out, Dr. Anna jacked her door open and called out to him.
“Smith, you need to see this,” she said.
“Something wrong with the bomb?” he asked.
“No...something wrong with the mirror. Davidson is back...and he’s got someone with him,” Dr. Anna said. She swiveled her tablet around, keyed into the closed circuit camera in the bathroom, and sure enough, two men, virtually identical, were standing between the shower and the sink, seemingly getting their bearings.
Immediately, he grabbed his phone and called the number he had just a few hours before.
_____
The last time Nik was in this room, Smith’s SWAT team was trying to keep Nik on the right side of the glass. No one was there this time, but something did catch his eye. As he approached the back corner of the room to see what it was his phone rang, startling both Nicholas and Nik.
Nik took it out of his pocket and looked at it. “UNKNOWN CALLER,” the phone screen said.
“Should I answer it?” Nik asked.
_____
“Hello? Nik?” the voice on the other end of the line asked.
“Hello again, Mr. Smith,” Davidson said. “Fancy you calling so soon after I returned.”
Smith looked back at the screen, and saw him leaning over one of the bombs. He couldn’t see the readout from the angle on the screen, but I knew they had less than a minute.
“Nik? Mr. Davidson, you need to get out of your house right now. Sorry, I don’t have time to explain—get out!”
_____
He inched closer to a black box in the corner of the bathroom. There was a digital read-out on the screen, counting down...38...37...36…
Understanding dawned quickly. Nik grabbed his mirror-self by the shirt collar and jetted out of the bathroom, hoping they could clear the house before the entire structure exploded.
_____
Agent Smith held his breath until the two men burst out of the front door seconds later, diving to the ground. In a Hollywood movie, the house would have exploded right in that very moment. In real life, the timer seemed to wait until everyone had virtually given up on it, and then reached zero. Nik and...Nik had been on the ground, but looked up at the house behind them in time for a piece of siding to fly by, clocking them both in the heads.
They were unconscious. Agent Smith looked around. The house was gone, and he had no idea what to do next.
Jones
Sedona, Arizona
Agent Jones stood outside the target house, looking at the vast emptiness in nearly every direction. Red rocks and desert shrubs of different shapes and sizes filled the desert landscape, giving color to an otherwise drab environment. A large red rock—not quite the size of a mountain, but very large nonetheless—dominated the landscape just beyond the next hill. In the immediate foreground was a golf course community with expansive homes and grounds dotting the edges of the greens.
Jones pulled out his no-longer mint-flavored toothpick and tossed it aside. That was the downside of a lifer quitting smoking—you never feel comfortable without the stick and you sure miss the flavor. He pulled out another one and stuck it between his teeth.
“Lis
zt,” he growled, “Are you ready for this?” The analyst was busy poking at some equipment, carrying three bags of various items and taking his sweet old time getting himself together.
The analyst hesitated. “I, I, uh, Agent Jones, I can’t pinpoint the source of the signal inside the house. It’s as if it’s coming from several locations all at the same time. I’m trying to narrow it down, but…” He began mumbling something and checking his equipment again.
“Has that improved at all since we got here twenty minutes ago?” Jones asked, checking visually to see where his supporting agents were. Quincy was just returning from a perimeter search, sweat on his brow even though the weather was a bit cool and blustery on this January day in Arizona. James was closing the lid on the outdoor electrical box on the corner and nodded toward Jones.
“Um, ah,..” Liszt banged on the side of his gadget, He sighed in frustration and looked up. “No, sir. No change at all. I can’t clear it up no matter what I do.”
Jones pulled out his newly mashed toothpick and tossed it aside. This was a time for the gum. Just one piece on the tongue and, breathe...breathe... “James, Quincy,” his gravelly voice called out, “Ready.”
There was an obvious change in the demeanor of the other agents. James seemed to appear on the right of the doorway as if by magic, weapon held at the ready while Quincy sidled up to a ready position on the other side. Jones pulled out his own piece and checked the action.
Jones looked pointedly at the tech. “You. In the car. Now.” Liszt opened his eyes wide and scrambled for the relative safety of the car.
Jones nodded to James, “Go.”
The house had been empty for a month. The previous owners had disappeared, leaving little trace of their whereabouts. After a few days, the locals had investigated, and finding nothing, locked up the house with an electronic lockbox. Since then, nobody had been in or out of the house. Agent James keyed in the code and opened the door.
James drifted through the doorway and went right, followed by Quincy moving purposefully to the left.
Jones went in last, going straight. Quincy was already on the other side of a large living area, well lit by the natural light pouring in the floor to ceiling windows and glass doors stretched across the entire back wall. James was stationed just beyond a stair, waiting for Quincy to come around the large living room so they could begin clearing the kitchen and beyond.
Jones waved them forward. “I’ll wait here by the stairs. You go ahead. The junior agents started through the kitchen and disappeared around a corner.
Jones looked around while they were out of sight. The place appeared to be a monument to the vanity of the missing homeowner, a slender and admittedly attractive woman with jet-black hair. There were pictures of her in various settings on the grand piano, in frames atop two cabinets and large pictures above the mantle and next to the entryway.
But that wasn’t all. The photos were not quite ubiquitous—in addition to all the pictures, there were mirrors everywhere.
The Closet
As Jones surveyed the contents of the room he stood in, his phone chirped. It was Dow, one of the two agents checking things out in town. He was picking up to answer as Quincy and James came back through. Jones waved them toward the stairs.
“What’s up, Dow?”
“Jones, this town is weird,” Dow answered. The junior agent hesitated for a brief moment and continued. “And, not because of the artists or hippies. It’s something else.”
Sedona, Arizona was well known as a place for the New-Age crowd to really stretch their new-age boundaries. Something about red rocks and the water and Indian legends. Whatever it was, a certain kind of people were attracted to the area, aside from the rich nuts who wanted to own a home in a scenic location. It didn’t take much of a drive through the town to see there was an interesting culture in the area.
Jones chomped on his nicotine gum and tried to let his nerves calm down. “Tell me more, Dow. What’s going on?” He gazed at a picture of the raven-haired beauty over the mantel. It looked like it was taken on one of the large rock formations over the next hill.
“Well, the people here, some of them act like they know us, Edwards and me. They’ll try to talk to us about something that happened two or three weeks ago, and some seem to avoid us. Go out of their way to not talk to us or see us.”
“Weird. Have you confronted anyone about it?”
“No. We’ve been busy trying to connect with the sheriff, but we’re getting the runaround.”
Jones noticed Quincy beckoning from the top of the stairwell. “All right, check in with the postal worker assigned to this neighborhood, maybe try the sheriff again later and,” he noticed a gold imprint of a photographer in the bottom corner. “See if you can find Steve Hall Photography. I think he knew this homeowner really well.”
He hung up and started up the stairs. The narcissistic theme continued with pictures of the black haired woman climbing mountains, skiing, out on the town in Vegas and more. There were also three more mirrors in various frames on the way up.
He reached the top of the stairs. Quincy pointed down the hall. “This, you’ve got to see.”
Agent Jones entered the master bedroom, the quintessential homage to the black-haired woman with two large portraits on either side of the picture window and mirrors next to the door, behind the bed and on the ceiling.
“You’ve got to see the closet, Jones,” Quincy said. The warning bells should have been going off with ferocity, but Jones was ignoring them. What was the worst that could happen in a vacant house?
Instead of fleeing the house entirely, Jones nodded and walked in, wondering what they might find in a closet that could be the source of the signal that Dr. Anna and Liszt detected. Jones squinted in the dim light. It looked like Agent James up ahead. He went in, marveling at the surroundings once again. The woman’s clothes closet was the size of another entire room, with corridors for every kind of garment. He rethought that—it probably was another bedroom before some recent remodel. There was a window off to the right.
Agent Jones reached the end of a corridor of shoes and turned and saw it. An entire passage of mirrors leading to a small room with ceiling to floor mirrors on every side. It was a room that took the concept of the dressing room mirror to the nth degree.
Jones looked around, wondering where Agent James went. Was it the room down there? He certainly didn’t see anything.
Jones glanced quickly back at Quincy. He was scratching a red mark on his face. Was that there earlier? Quincy gestured towards the room, “Down there, sir. We thought you should see it.”
Jones walked down the corridor of mirrors into the room, a room in the shape of an octagon. Stepping in, he could see his reflection from seven different angles.
Jones turned back to Quincy, a question on his lips, “What did you want me to…” A door closed between Jones and Quincy, mirrored as were all the other surfaces in this room.
The door had no handle and was latched from the outside. Jones pounded on the door. “Quincy! This isn’t funny!”
The image across from him in the mirror began to shimmer. Jones blinked at what he saw. It looked like he was looking at his own back. He whipped around to see his own partially turned body looking the other direction.
“What the…” he said.
Agent Jones turned back, aimed for the place the door handle should have been and fired. Nearly immediately there was an unbelievable pain in his left thigh and he dropped to the floor. He saw in the mirror a large gaping hole spurting blood from the back of his leg.
Fighting to stay conscious, he called out. “Quincy! Agent Quincy! Can you hear me?” he called, “Agent James? Anyone?” There was nothing from the other side of the mirror.
Another voice, oddly familiar spoke in the silence. “They can’t hear you. Not anymore.”
Jones whipped his head around to the left and saw, unbelievably, his own image staring down at him from the mirror in tha
t direction.
“Who…what…are you?” his voice cracked.
“I’m you. Kind of. Not of your world. Mine is in trouble and unfortunately for you, I have a job to do.”
That’s when Jones noticed it. The unmistakable image of Agent James lying on the floor a few feet behind his own doppelganger. Another pair of legs was twitching off to the right. He started to reach for his phone.
“It’s too late for that. The transmission won’t reach Smith from here. You’re between worlds.” The other Jones reached up towards something on the side of the mirror. “I must tell you this is the strangest sensation. I’m very sorry about this.” The other Jones pushed on something and the mirrors began to fade. There were only a few moments and then all images, including his own, were gone. Jones looked down toward his leg and saw the size of the blood pool. Either way it didn’t matter. All sight faded to nothing, faded to black.
Waiting in the Car
Liszt waited in the vehicle, but he wasn’t bored. There was too much going on for that.
Blaring through his earbuds was a virtual Top 20 chart—if he had traveled back to the 1950s or 1960s and enjoyed sitting in dark, dank jazz halls. Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Count Basie. The big band jazz was great, but it was really the next decade or two beyond that where Liszt found the most enjoyment. In many ways, he felt as if he had been born a half-century too late. His fingers tapped along with the rhythm of the A Train as he tried to understand the readings on his tablet.
His mother must’ve felt he was born a half-millennia too late with the name she saddled him with—Franz. He shook his head even now thinking about it. He wasn’t even from Hungary, Austria, or Germany. He couldn’t even trace his roots back to Europe until the early 1800s and even then, it was to places like Ireland or Belgium. He usually went by Frank, but when he signed up to be an analyst for the Agency, the boss, Director Wall, saw his real name and gave him the pseudonym of Liszt.
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