Ordinary Souls

by J. S. Bailey

  George’s chest rose and fell with steady breaths—the only sign he wasn’t simply a wax figure dressed in a man’s tartan dressing gown and slippers.

  “Amanda, what’s happened to him?”

  Amanda gave a noncommittal shrug. “He went mad. He was coherent enough to sign some things for David, but after that? He’ll eat and use the loo and dress himself all on his own, but don’t try to get him to say anything because you’ll go mad with the effort.”

  “If the mirror is that bad, why didn’t you try to destroy it?”

  “Have you tried to destroy it?”

  “No.”

  A wicked grin spread across Amanda’s face. “I’d like to see you have a go at it.”

  “Never mind that. I just don’t understand how seeing the future could have done this to him.”

  “What do you mean, seeing the future?”

  “That’s what the mirror shows. My friend Marty—”

  “I thought you were Marty.”

  “—saw it too.”

  Amanda fell into a pondering silence. Then, “You want to know what I saw in the mirror? People dying. People I know and love, again and again and again. Granddad saw it first, of course, and told me to come look to make sure he hadn’t gone barmy. The look he had in his eyes… People dying is what he’s always feared the most. He just about gave up when Gran and my dad died. He stopped eating, stopped talking…took him months to pull himself together. So when this mirror showed him the one thing he fears above all else, he just broke.”

  “But the deaths you saw. Couldn’t they be future events?”

  “Not when half of them have already happened. Now go and get rid of that mirror before you end up just like him.”

  ELENA was pleased to find that the future the mirror chose to reflect when she got home did not feature herself—it simply reflected an empty bedroom, which meant Future Elena was likely downstairs or in the loo, or maybe even at work.

  She took the mirror down from its nail and carried it out to the garden shed. She laid it on the dusty floor atop an old bit of tarpaulin, then picked a hammer off its hook.

  “Bet you didn’t foresee this,” she said.

  She hesitated, the hammer still in her hand. I paid two thousand pounds for this. It would be madness to destroy something so valuable, even if it was true David had charged her nineteen hundred more than the McPhersons had paid for it.

  Or would it be madness to keep the mirror intact?

  She thought of George McPherson sitting vacantly in his dressing gown by his bedroom window and brought the hammer crashing down. The glass shattered with a glorious tinkling sound, and Elena gathered up the sides of the tarpaulin and shoved it all into a black bin bag.

  “There.” She brushed her hands together. “That should do it.”

  After depositing the bag in the dustbin, Elena mixed herself a glass of apple juice and added some of the vodka that had forced its way into her life, then took it out to the back balcony.

  “I think I handled that rather well, all things considered,” she remarked, gazing down over the garden wall to make sure none of the neighbours were out and about.

  The vodka in her drink began to make her feel lightheaded. “I wonder why George didn’t see the future.” She frowned as a flock of birds swooped by. “He saw his deepest fears, and Amanda saw them, too. It’s like…it’s like the mirror tailors its reflection to the owner.” Her thoughts swirled. She was onto something here. “When George owned it, it showed his fears, and when I owned it, it showed—”

  At once Elena remembered all the New Year celebrations that filled her with anxiety, all the birthdays she’d dreaded, all the nights she lay awake in fear of what the coming day would hold.

  Elena blinked and set her glass down on the small balcony table. “It showed mine.”

  ELENA raced down the stairs and out the door to the dustbin, wobbling a bit from the effects of the vodka. Not bothering to rationalise her thinking, she flipped open the lid and tugged out the bag in which she had so recently interred the mirror.

  The bag felt much too light in her hands. Feeling ill, she tore it open and beheld only tarpaulin.

  “Oh no. Oh no. Oh no.” Elena tripped over her back doorstep in her rush to get inside and caught herself by grabbing onto the doorframe. Her gaze roamed wildly over her kitchen and lounge. Seeing nothing amiss, she let out a curse and ascended the stairs to her room.

  The mirror hung impossibly in its spot above her dressing table, displaying no sign that it had ever been smashed to bits. It still didn’t show Elena’s reflection; just the bedroom and its associated furniture. Elena balled her hands into fists, and without thinking, slammed one of them into the glass.

  Tears sprang into her eyes as her knuckles stung from the blow. The glass remained unharmed. “You can’t do this to me!” she cried, feeling a sudden rage deeper than any she had ever known. She plucked a pewter candlestick off the top of the dressing table and swung it into the mirror with every ounce of force she could muster. A spider web of cracks spread across the surface, and Elena beat it again and again until little glass remained attached to the mirror’s backing.

  She hoovered up the smaller shards and put the larger pieces in a used grocery bag. After tending to some minor cuts on her fingertips from handling the shards, Elena loaded the vacuum canister, grocery bag, and mirror frame into her car and headed off.

  Tom would have yelled at her for driving with alcohol pumping through her veins with every heartbeat. Marty would do the same, but what her friend didn’t know was of little consequence.

  Elena turned into the car park of a local state school and jammed the bulky oval frame into a dustbin by the walkway leading to the school entrance. A group of passing students eyed her with suspicion and started to mutter amongst themselves. Face flushing, Elena hurried off.

  Half an hour later, Elena went down to Chelsea Harbour and dumped the contents of the vacuum canister into the Thames. She watched a moment as the dust swirled on the water’s surface and the current took hold, carrying it all away.

  Half an hour after that, Elena stopped along a street in Brentford and tossed the largest shard into a surface water drain. She checked the grocery bag and saw six more shards nestled inside.

  Six more stops to go, then.

  One shard went into a dustbin outside a department store, and another went into a drain on another randomly-selected street.

  “I’ve got to get out of the city,” she panted, starting the engine for what felt to be the hundredth time that day. “Maybe then the pieces won’t be able to find each other.”

  Elena had no real destination in mind as she drove out to the countryside, only knowing that the further she got from London and the mirror’s other components, the better. She checked her mirrors every few miles along the way to make sure she wasn’t being followed.

  By what, she didn’t know.

  The sun hung low in the sky by the time she felt it was safe to stop. She pulled into a petrol station, and while she filled up, she discreetly slipped a shard into the dustbin beside the pumps.

  Only three more to go.

  Her mobile let out a shrill ring as Elena drove down a narrow country lane, startling her so badly she nearly drove into the hedgerow lining it. She fumbled for her phone one-handed and pressed it to her ear. “Hello?”

  “Elena, where are you?” Marty asked, sounding frantic. “I just heard about Tom on the news and came by to your place to see how you were. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Elena didn’t answer. Didn’t know if she could.

  “Elena, are you there?”

  “I’m driving.”

  “Where?”

  “Oh, out and about.” Elena turned left onto another road, this one running past a freshly-ploughed field.

  She parked, picked up a shard, and tossed it out of the window into the exposed soil. It glinted like a jagged eye in the late afternoon sunlight, and thinking better of herself, she got
out and shoved dirt over it with her shoe. She stood there a moment longer, the wind tousling her hair as the distant whine of farm equipment carried across the open field. What was she, city born and bred, doing out this far, anyway? At least no one she knew would give her the misfortune of running into her.

  Marty was still talking. “—you need anything, let me know.”

  “Maybe a few prayers.” Elena climbed into the car and slammed the door shut. “I could use a few of those about now.”

  The sky had darkened entirely by the time Elena completed her mission. She stopped for takeaway Chinese in an unfamiliar village, then proceeded onward towards home.

  The windows of her house were black and foreboding when she arrived. She sat in the car, seconds ticking by, unsure if it would be wise to get out.

  “Don’t be silly,” she whispered. “Nothing’s going to hurt me.” The mirror was gone. It was physically impossible for it to have returned—the last shard she’d disposed of had gone into a bin more than a hundred miles to the west.

  Elena steeled herself against the unknown as she went to the door with her key in hand. She put it in the lock, turned it, and went inside.

  Nothing awaited her in the hall. She stepped through to the lounge, where dim outlines of furniture were visible in the faint light cast from streetlamps. The floor creaked as Elena took another tentative step forward.

  Her heart raced so fast she felt dizzy. “I have nothing to fear,” she said in an effort to convince herself of that fact. To prove it, she patted the wall for the switch.

  The room flooded with light. All appeared as it had prior to her departure earlier that day. She set her handbag down on the table beside the couch, poured herself a glass of water, and stood at the counter sipping it as if nothing anywhere in the world were amiss.

  The ceiling creaked as Elena set her empty glass down. Glancing upward, she said, “The ceiling always creaks at night. Probably creaks during the day, too; I’m just not around to hear it.”

  She moved towards the stairs but stopped. “If I stay down here, I won’t see if the mirror came back.”

  Then, “It can’t have come back.”

  She looked up at the ceiling. “Can it have? Of course not. You broke it into a million pieces.”

  Elena shook her head and continued up the stairs. Even though nothing in the house was amiss, her surroundings had taken on the surreal quality of a dream. Perhaps the angles of everything were off, or maybe the colours.

  Or maybe everything was normal and it was Elena herself who had changed.

  She entered her room, refusing to look at the wall above her dressing table. She changed into a dressing gown, opened her cupboard, and pulled a box off the shelf she’d not opened for many years.

  She opened it sitting on her bed and withdrew a music box in the shape of a carousel horse. She cranked the key three times and listened to it play a tinny rendition of “Memory” from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats.

  “She gave me this. Right before she died.” Elena ran a finger over the horse’s white body. “I remember, after the funeral… I thought back to what it had been like before. How I thought she’d live forever. And I knew, then, that the future is a terrible thing. It hides things from us. Monstrous things we’d never see coming. But the past? It’s my friend. It shows me everything eventually, and doesn’t lie.”

  The snippet of song ended. Elena set the music box on her bedside table and turned out the light.

  THE alarm woke Elena at six the next morning. She slapped the button to silence it, and with a groan, sat up and stretched.

  Without thinking, she looked at the wall above her dressing table…

  …right into the mirror.

  “No.”

  Elena stood.

  “No.”

  She still had no reflection. The bedroom in the mirror seemed eerily empty without her in it.

  “How can you be here?” Her legs drew her up to the mirror of their own accord. “I destroyed you. Scattered you all over southern England. I just…I don’t…”

  Something in her mind felt as though it were breaking, and she let out a sob. She wanted to smash the mirror, to obliterate it into a thousand separate pieces and then melt them down into glassy globules, but what good would that do when the mirror would simply reassemble itself?

  “Okay,” she said, doing her best to hold it all together. “You’re clearly trying to prove something to me. What is it? Am I supposed to face my fears by staring into you all bloody day? How does that even work? And where am I in there, anyway?” She peered into the mirror at different angles to see if she could catch a glimpse of herself over by the cupboard or near the bedroom door. Her reflection was nowhere to be found.

  “Fine, then. I’ll wait.” Elena went down to the kitchen and made some toast, which she then brought back up to the bedroom. She sat cross-legged at the end of the bed, picked up a slice, and began to eat.

  Time seemed to pass in the mirror at the same rate it did in reality. The shadows changed with the position of the sun, yet still no Elena emerged into view. Her mobile rang several times throughout the day, but she made no move to go downstairs and answer it.

  “I have to keep watching.” Her toast was long gone by now, and half the afternoon passed away. “I have to know where I am.”

  Eventually, after long, nerve-racking hours, someone appeared in the reflection. Just as Elena’s mind started to register what it meant, there came a knock from down below.

  Elena wasn’t about to go answer the door. If she walked away from the mirror, even for a moment, she might miss something vital. “Come in,” she rasped, just now realizing how parched she was. Had she drank anything today? No, of course she hadn’t. It was no wonder her head felt so funny.

  Keeping one eye on the mirror and its occupant, she retrieved the bottle of vodka from her bedside table, unscrewed the lid, and took a swig.

  The knocking continued, harder now. “Elena?” Marty’s voice was unmistakable. “If you can hear me, open up.”

  But Elena couldn’t open up because she needed to see what the person in her mirror would do.

  At last she heard a key turning in the lock (Marty had her own set) and a small gust of wind as the door opened. It occurred to her it was storming—she’d been so focused on the mirror she hadn’t noticed the thunder or lightning.

  Light footsteps crossed the hall into the lounge. “Elena?”

  Elena couldn’t bring herself to speak.

  “Elena, I know you’re here.” Marty paused. “Don’t do this to me.” More footfalls ascended the stairs, and then Marty was standing in the bedroom doorway, somewhat pale. Rain had plastered her short, dark hair to her head. “What are you doing?”

  “Look in the mirror,” Elena croaked.

  Her cheeks flushing, Marty’s gaze slid to the mirror, where Elena’s elderly father stood beside the bed in the manner of one who didn’t know exactly where he was. “What’s he doing in there? You haven’t talked to each other in years.”

  “He’s there,” Elena said, “because I’ve died.”

  Marty regarded her with a frown. “You look alive to me. Why are you still in your dressing gown?”

  Elena was only half-listening. “I’m dead. I know I’m dead. That’s the only reason he’d come here and mope about in my room, probably regretting every word he ever said to me.” A tear rolled down Elena’s cheek, and she took another gulp of vodka. “I don’t know when it’s going to happen. I don’t know how. I just know it will. I haven’t seen my reflection in here in days.”

  “Maybe you’ll be caught up at the office. And with Tom gone—”

  “Tom has nothing to do with this.” Elena’s heart ached. “What am I going to do?”

  Marty planted her hands on her hips, looking all business. “For one, you can start acting like a rational human being. There’s no sense in getting worked up when nothing’s even happened yet.”

  In the mirror, Elena’s father
sank onto the edge of the bed and picked the carousel horse music box off the bedside table. He twisted the key on the bottom, and though Elena couldn’t hear it, she knew the song played for him.

  Her father withdrew a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at his eyes.

  Elena refused to look Marty in the eye. “Right,” Elena said. “Shall I go and get dinner started?”

  ELENA and Marty picked awkwardly over plates of fettucine alfredo Elena had thrown together in haste.

  “What I’d do is continue on as normal,” Marty said matter-of-factly.

  “Easy for you to say. You’re not the one about to die.” Elena threw a glance into the mirror, which she’d carried downstairs against Marty’s objections so she wouldn’t miss any of the action. Her father had departed the room some minutes before, leaving the music box behind.

  “You’re not going to die, Elena. You’re in perfect health.”

  Elena slammed a fist on the table. “So was Tom! Anything could happen to me. I—I could get flattened by a bus if I go out.”

  “And you could die in a fire if you shut yourself away in here.”

  Elena’s stomach ached. Marty was right: no single course of action would guarantee her safety. “I don’t want this to happen.”

  “I don’t want it to, either, but there’s nothing in there—” Marty gestured at the mirror—“that says it’s going to.”

  “Everything else it’s shown me has come true.”

  “Hmph. I don’t know why you haven’t smashed the thing to bits yet.”

  In spite of herself, Elena let out a giggle, and suddenly she was laughing so hard that tears coursed down her cheeks. Marty gaped at her with her fork halfway between her plate and her mouth.

  “Why don’t you take the mirror home with you?” Elena managed to say. She dabbed her eyes on her sleeve. “Then you can smash it for me.”

  Marty’s eyes narrowed. “Are you sure you want that?”

  “I’m positive.”

  AS Elena applied her makeup in front of her ordinary, non-cursed bathroom mirror the next morning, it occurred to her she didn’t know what day it was. Tom’s funeral—was it today, or tomorrow? Had it happened already?