Although Mary Alice never remembered these episodes, afterwards, some residue of rapture remained upon her body, her lips anointed by a smile unsummoned: a daydream lured her to its daisied field, where the sun laid strong and searing hands upon her neck, and the wind whispered rumours from exotic continents. It was pleasure, and it kept her sound and sane to entertain the necessary hope that her darling friend Melissa would not fail to count Three at the appointed hour.
III
When ‘the appointed hour’ arrived, Rowan was busy with a band-saw in the little workshop he had cobbled together over the years in the annex that his father had constructed soon after the start of their occupancy—probably for no other purpose than to create a cosy masculine refuge from the feminising bustle of arrangements and activities that his wife cultivated almost obsessively in the rest of the house. Rowan, himself having graduated to a similarly marginalised patriarchal status, found himself in sympathy with his father, even though at the time he had resented his father’s determined withdrawal from domestic events.
He took a break from constructing his birdfeeder after nearly severing his thumb and politely requested a bottle of beer from the mini-fridge, which the appliance supplied with a demure curtsy and a gracious whisper. His sister Melissa had passed away one year ago today. He sipped his drink and contemplated her, and it’s possible he wept, but there were no witnesses to speak of it. His gaze pirouetted aimlessly through the hazy mist of his vision before alighting on the Magic Pencil, which leaned with cool, hipster nonchalance among five peers (plastic) inside a cup (tin) on the cluttered shelf (aluminium) at the end of the workbench. He vaguely remembered putting it there last winter . . . he’d discovered and absently pocketed it in the hallway outside his daughter’s bedroom, resolving (but forgetting) to remind her that the mirror room was forbidden. The notion of Patty playing in view of that mirror troubled him.
Three days before her commuter train skipped its tracks, killing her and two others, Melissa had mentioned the mirror to Rowan on Skype:
‘Next year is Three,’ she said.
‘Three what?’
‘The mirror, silly. Mary Alice! Next year is when I have to count Three.’
A dozen years or more had gone by since their last discussion of the mirror and its longsuffering resident, and it took Rowan a comparable number of seconds to resuscitate the memory. ‘Are you serious?’ he said, ‘You’re going to actually do that?’
Melissa’s forearms jumped into the frame, then abruptly plummeted out of view, a Skype gesture to which he was well accustomed. ‘Of course. I promised her!’
‘Coast to coast. Just to say the word Three into a magic mirror.’
‘I might—might—fit in a visit to my nasty-hearted big brother and his delightful family!’
Rowan’s cheeks raised a cheerful toast, which his right eyebrow joined a few seconds later. ‘Maybe you could Skype it in? I’ll take the laptop up there and . . .’
‘No, duh. Come on, Rowan. Are you such a grumpy old man already?’
‘Chip off the old block.’
Melissa brushed a foraging curl from her forehead and leaned in, blurred and suddenly massive on the screen. ‘Dad wasn’t grumpy. Just distant. He laughed a lot, you know. He really did.’
‘I know, I know, I’m just joking around. He and Mom were a classic love story, right?’
‘That’s right. They were, always . . . and I’ll be counting Three next year, dear brother, you can set your clock by it.’
‘I’ll stick with Microsoft servers, thank you, darling.’
The misbehaving train had stopped her clock, of course, and it occurred to Rowan that as her executor he was perhaps obliged to count Three in her stead. Ridiculous, but all the same, the mist was difficult to see through, and he’d probably have to give up on birdfeeders for tonight. Why not do it? A simple task: just say Three. In honour of Melissa. Patty, Melanie and his mother were off on a transgenerational chick-flick-and-shopping spree: there would be no witnesses to speak of it.
Three minutes later, standing before the mirror (avoiding eye contact with the glass), he clad his fingertips in a tissue borrowed from his back pocket and gently swabbed a layer of dust from the frame. That would do for now. Perhaps he’d use chemicals later, polish it nicely. For Melissa. Dead so young, but her beloved mirror? Clean! There was no sense in events, just procession. So many days, and some of them whimsical, more of them sorrowful, most of them simply drab and indistinguishable from each other, neither terrible nor fantastic, but every now and then a day, a single day, for no good reason would shatter all the others; a life would end, a grief begin, a planet mockingly continue to revolve around a beautiful, ancient star.
‘What’s the point?’ he said to the mirror. Suddenly, he hated the thing. He threw the Pencil at it, stumbled downstairs and finished his beer in a swig so as to graduate to more advanced imbibing. After a few studious hours—summa cum laude in his chosen field—he found himself once more in front of the mirror, peering at a sequence of words scrawled across the exposed page of the notebook: Star Wars. The Empire Strikes Back. ————————.
‘Seeing things. . . . It’s my handwriting, but I didn’t write that. Mary Alice?’ Rowan bent nearly to a right angle over the dresser, fingertips fraternising maladroitly with the whiskey-wetted rim of a crystal tumbler. He aimed an ironic squint into the mirror. ‘You did, huh?’
His reflection smiled at him, and he realised he was smiling, too.
‘Seeing things? No. It’s your handwriting, but you didn’t write that, Rowan . . . I did. Ha!’
‘No, I can’t believe it . . . now I’m hearing things?’
‘Yes! You can believe it. Finally, you’re hearing things!’
He tapped the Magic Pencil’s eraser on the paper, contemplating the incomplete list. Well, yes, with a sigh, okay, you win . . . there were Three. Return of the Jedi. The least of them, really, but hey, I was a kid! It was good, trust me! Giggling drunk, hot and red, exasperated, needles prickling his hunch, Rowan brought his posture erect and turned an invisible crank next to his head to round his eyes and roll his lips into a Cheshire grin, while impatient beads of perspiration milled and muttered on his cheeks. ‘Three. Three. Happy? Three!’
‘Three! Three! Happy Three!’
Rowan rocked his head back. ‘Melissa, wherever you are, you’re welcome. I did it.’
‘Melissa, wherever you are, thank you! He did it!’
‘No! That’s enough!’ Rowan tossed the Magic Pencil on the dresser and stalked out of the room, both giddy and annoyed with himself. ‘I’m an idiot!’
The reply, issued to an empty room, entirely giddy and not the least bit annoyed: ‘Yes . . . that was enough. You’re a genius.’
***
Now that the counting was complete and her spell in the mirror guaranteed an end, Mary Alice began to comprehend that her likelihood of reaching it in a thriving state was small. She was an old woman, after all, in her ninth decade, with still Three decades more to see through before she might emerge from the mirror. How long could a person live? She recalled spans of life from the Bible that rendered her an infant by comparison, so there was hope for her, and yet this was not a Biblical time and a woman of her years should expect at any moment the swift, grim swish of the scythe and the terror of a senseless infinity. All for nought, then, her seemingly eternal endurance of this glassy prison . . . and there had been no daffodils for years and years. Rowan had never paid her much attention, not like Melissa. But then again, when it counted, he’d come through, and she harboured no unkind sentiments towards him.
Her mirror now her deathbed, did Mary Alice still think of Norbert? Yes, and so fondly! . . . She only remembered dancing with him, his smiling eyes gazing into hers as they circled the chamber, his posture erect and masculine, her body limber in his embrace, her sighs audible, sweet and tuned to his smooth, baritone humming, the music of their promenade.
They continued to dance. I
t was all she had left to reflect from her mirror: time itself, composed in steps, her memories. A memory, for example, of a young man who perhaps had been unduly stern, perhaps intemperate, perhaps . . . any number of unpleasant adjectives, but who had loved her in his own way. And here he was, no mere memory, returned to her so vividly after all these years. She was alone no more. Norbert, that man whose chest received her leaning cheek, that man whose arms held her firmly through the steps, that young man, though not a handsome one, yet beautiful for being so young, and loving her so terribly that he had put her in a mirror rather than share her with the world . . . and she (had she ever been otherwise?) young . . . both of them eternally their most vigorous and vital in the inviolable stronghold of their mirror, dancing for years in a dusty room at the end of the hall as they waited for their freedom to arrive.
Meanwhile, Rowan’s mother passed, Rowan and Melanie juggled responsibilities, Patty pubesced, visitors visited, deliverymen delivered, and the house remained always the cynosure of a vast rotation that was the life and love of a family in the world.
***
Entirely unaware of the history surrounding it, Patty occasionally visited the mirror room, and once found a strange note which she tore from the notebook and brought to her own room for inspection:
It seems Our Lady’s life was not long enough to gain her freedom. Your kind efforts were not wasted, however; she was given hope to last her through the time—as was I—and that is no small thing.
I trust you do not mind: I have joined my Mary Alice in the mirror. She sends her love and wishes to remind you: Please try to keep things tidy, and do bring back the daffodils.
Norbert
The girl puzzled over these words for a few minutes before slipping the paper between the leaves of her Visual Encyclopaedia of the Human Anatomy, after which she quite forgot about it (her habit of mind more musical than visual).
A few years later, her mother Melanie packed the book, among others, in a box labelled ‘Give’.
THE TAXIDERMIST’S TALE
Tara Isabella Burton
George was never alone. The birds were in their places, their feathers stretched all above him, and on the racks and the shelves were the smaller creatures: the ferrets that stuck up their noses at him as he passed, the chipmunks and dormice that smelled sweeter now than they ever had done. George loved them; sometimes he stroked them; sometimes he even gave them names. There was no light in the back of the shop: the bulb had gone out once and he did not dare climb the ladder to replace it, but he lit candles, and the reflection of the light returned to him in their eyes.
His favourites were the big ones. These were the ones that would have cowed him in life, the ones that would have made him sweat and giggle and shove his knuckles in between his teeth. Now he could touch them. He petted them and whispered to them names of his own invention, the stories of their deaths and their remaking. He kissed them between the ears, sometimes, and sometimes he heard the purring in their throats.
His was the only taxidermist’s shop in New York. The others had shut down decades ago. George had never doubted that his would survive, outlive Millmann’s on Sixth Avenue with the snakes dangling from the window; outlive Benjamin Gleeson’s where the ferrets had gone stale.
Millmann and Gleeson had seen only the parts of things. They sawed the skin with their eyes; they considered the shape and angle of bones; they sliced vertebra from vertebra and their spines shivered when they put them back again.
But George gave them life! When he looked at a bear, at a hound, at a raven or a strangled fox, he saw them as they must have been, once, and as he never could have seen them. He saw the raven’s wings searing through the sky; he saw the bear running and rearing; he felt their hearts pumping beneath his fingers, felt his wrist gallop too.
He would not have dared—no, he would never have dared! He was pale and his cheeks were round and he made high whirring sounds when he sneezed or saw a spider, and he had not left the shop or the creaky bedroom over it since he was an apprentice of sixteen. But with his pack he sped through the forests of the Hudson River Valley; with them he reared and roared; with them he flew.
With them, he was never alone.
It was December. The taverns spilled over into the street and into the snow. George put some candles in the window—fixed the candelabra in the mouth of a fox—and felt that he had done his part. Passers-by would see his little light in the window and they would know that he meant to celebrate with them. They would press their noses against his glass and fog it with their faces; they would smile at the bears and the birds and the fox on whose head he had placed a little festive red cap; from the shadows, where they could not see him, George would smile back at them.
Five days before Christmas a man brought a white wolf into the shop.
‘I’ve killed this,’ he said.
He was dressed for dinner, in that high-backed and impeccable way men dressed when going out into the world with women on their arm. He was young and his lips curled back towards his nostrils, and they hardly moved when he spoke. His cravat had come undone, and from where it hung George could see the flush of his veins, and the spatters of the blood on his neck, on his sleeves, under the rubies in his cufflinks. He wore juniper cologne. He was the most beautiful man George had ever seen.
He slid the wolf onto the slab and waited for George to recapture his breath.
‘Just now?’ It was all he could think to say.
‘I want you to stuff it.’
George gave a high giggle that turned into a hiccup and fumbled with the inkwell until it overturned. ‘Name? Your name, I mean. . . ?’
‘Enstone. How long will it take you?’
George sliced his fingers on the calendar pages. ‘It depends, of course, on so many factors. You realise it’s never an exact science, not really . . . she’s heavy. . . .’ It was his customary voice, squeaking and strange and as unnatural as the rest of him.
Enstone tapped his fingers on the slab and waited.
‘I’ll have to take a mould—it depends what you want for the frame, and of course, the question of the stuffing . . . please, don’t touch her!’
Enstone was stroking the wolf between the ears. He looked up without stopping ‘It’s mine, isn’t it?’
‘I only meant—you want gloves, don’t you?’
‘Not when I killed it.’
Of course he had killed her—George bit his lip and looked down. There was blood on Enstone’s shirt, on his skin at the neck. Blood congealed beneath his fingernails. He had done it, that thing which could not be undone and which George never would have dared to do. Stared into its eyes and felt the beating of its heart and made it his.
George tried to imagine it; he hiccupped and apologised and snapped his gloves onto his wrists so clumsily that he made bruises, and as he took measurements he pretended that he was not trying to work out where the bullet—had it been a bullet?—had struck through, not trying to feel the scars and the lacerations that might indicate life.
‘You want to know how?’ Enstone asked, and now at last he smiled. ‘Don’t you?’
He acquiesced, softly and silently, and swallowed down his heart. ‘Yes.’
‘Yes,’ said Enstone, and waited.
George tried to slow his heartbeat, to silence the intrusions it made in that great and putrefying silence of the room; he felt the wolf’s chest unmoving beneath his rubber fingertips, and then it was no use. Enstone had heard it; Enstone heard it now; he leaned on the countertop and watched, unblinking, George’s hesitation, George’s shame.
‘We were coming down from the country’—George could breathe again!—‘My sister and my fiancée and I. Down from the Adirondacks, speeding in time for dinner. Nine o’clock. I needed a cigarette; I made them stop for me; went out a few feet into the snow to get clear of them; there’s things a man can only do, you know, out of sight of women.’
‘Of course,’ said George too quickly.
�
��I didn’t see it, at first, because of the snow. It was white and the snow was white, and I heard it before I saw it. Horrible sound. I looked down at it, and it looked up at me, and I knew then that I had to kill it. It was that or run, and I wasn’t going to run. You understand how it was, of course.’ He waited for George to react. ‘With my bare hands.’
A hysterical giggle escaped George’s lips.
‘I don’t mean it,’ said Enstone. ‘I had a gun.’
‘No, of course you did. I’m stupid—stupid for believing . . .’
‘Did you know?’ Enstone had already moved on. ‘There are only three wolves left in New York State?’ He placed the palm of his hand between its teeth. ‘Now there’s two.’ He looked up at George. ‘You will stuff it for me, won’t you?’
Enstone needed him; it was enough. It was coaxing; it was feigned; George did not care. The wolf was white and wild and blood had bubbled up and dried on her lips. Enstone had stared her down and felt her heart beat savage and strong in unison with his, and together they had reared and roared, and Enstone had won.
‘Well?’
‘I promise I will.’
‘How long?’
‘Three months.’
Strange Tales V Page 21