by Ayse Hafiza
“Why not?” she smiled.
Frank gasped he would have jumped up and punched the air if he was alone. She liked him, and she was willing to have a drink with him. His clever mom had been right.
“Call me,” she said as Lizzy came back in with a tray, tea cozy covered tea pot along with her finest cups and saucers.
Frank tried hard to concentrate on the conversation, but his heart was busy skipping a beat whenever her eyes flitted across to her.
She took her time to drink her tea and when there was no other way to keep her with them, she stood to take her leave. Frank wanted to take her for a drink right now, but he knew he would need to go through all the paperwork that she had brought with mom. He would show her out and thank her again. Maybe at the door they would be able to have another private conversation.
She pulled on her jacket and held her hat in hand as she wished Lizzy goodbye, and then turned to look at Frank. Jane had the same thought in her mind, he knew she was inviting him.
He followed her out of the room, along the hall. Near where the mirror sat on the floor. Frank had closed the door to George’s room and walked slowly behind Jane admiring her figure as they made their way toward the front door.
She reached it first and turned to face him.
The mirror was next to her. He should have stopped walking a foot in front of her, but he didn’t. He walked until he was in her personal space, reached his hand behind the bob of her sensible hair he tilted her head upward. He moved fast planting a deep magical kiss on her lips.
She didn’t stop him, she snaked her arms around his back and pulled him closer. He closed his eyes to savor the moment until he felt his lips move against thin air. When he opened them, she wasn’t there! Frank looked around the hallway, where had she gone? How had she gone? Movement in the mirror drew his eye, the image of Jane pounding her fists from inside against the surface and screaming inaudibly made him step back.
“Mommmm!” he screamed.
Lizzy rushed out of the room, her face white with shock, she was speechless. She knew she hadn’t heard the front door close, making her way to where her son stood Jane inside the mirror caught her eye.
Lizzy knew exactly what happened.
“Oh love!” she said, the pity of her tone told him all he needed.
“Do something, do something. . .get her out,” Frank said pounding his fists on the surface of the mirror. The glass was strong.
Lizzy tried to pull him away from it.
“I’m so sorry love. . .the mirror has claimed her now.”
“What does that mean? Get her out!” he sobbed louder as despair overtook his face, and his eyes welled with tears. Janes eyes brimmed with tears that overflowed from her lower lash line, her jaw dropped open again with a silent scream. She looked as white as a ghost.
“I wish I could. If I could I would,” said Lizzy rubbing his back. “Oh Frank, why didn’t you listen. I asked you to put the mirror back on the wall. It had a spell on it, which blinded it and would have stopped it being so effective. But you moved it and that must have broken my spell.”
Frank glanced at his mom. Then back at Janes panic ridden face.
“No!” he sobbed as he beat his fists on the surface.
Lizzy took a step away from him and composed herself.
“Why didn’t you listen to me and put it back. I wanted you to like her, but I didn’t realize that you could fall in love so quickly. The mirror must have picked up on that, Frank did you love her? You must have loved her?” asked Lizzy.
Moms words were a revelation to him, he would never have called it love, not when he was just starting to care about her.
“I don’t know,” Frank confessed through tears.
“That’s why you’re going to fall in love with this mirror. Because it will claim those you love. She’s lost to it now.”
“There must be a way?”
“No, it will preserve her, you’ll be able to see her sometimes when you are its caretaker. If I’d have known that both your feelings were growing like this I would have cautioned you, told you all that I knew.”
“Surely if I break it. . .”
“It will be back together tomorrow morning in one piece,” said Lizzy finishing his sentence.
“You’ll only be able to see her through the glass.”
The image of Jane began to lose color as it started to fade and with tears streaming down Frank’s face he touched the surface, he could swear that he could feel the heat of her fingertips on the surface.
“I’ll find a way,” he promised as her image faded further.
Frank picked up the mirror carefully and placed it back on the wall.
It was three hours later that Inspector Barry arrived asking about Jane’s whereabouts. Lizzy dealt with him, keeping a poker face. She had, after all, years of practice at it.
7
The Curse
After Inspector Barry left, Frank sat on the stairs staring at the mirror, unsure of what to do. He was waiting for it to give up its secrets and trying to catch a glimpse of Jane.
Lizzy understood what he was going through, she had lost Arthur to the same portal. Lizzy sighed, she didn’t like to think about it. Having tried hard to resist him, she wondered why she hadn’t gone to France like he’d requested. She knew she couldn’t trust herself around him, which was partly why she wanted George to come with her. Not taking no for an answer Arthur had turned up at their house unannounced and uninvited when George was at work. Foolishly Lizzy had made the same error, and kissed him in front of the mirror.
That was the point at which she knew for certain the family curse her mom had told her about was real. She recalled opening her eyes mid-kiss and seeing the metal seep out of the mirror and lock itself around his shoes, it traveled up his body until it coated him. It had been so quick, and she had been paralyzed unable to do anything to protect him. Arthur was taken away from her and locked in its grasp. It was all so unfair considering she was being punished for an ancestral misdemeanor of which she knew nothing.
Lizzy had disliked her mom and had a fractious relationship with the matriarch, so she hadn’t really listened to the story the woman had whispered to her. She was sick of being told she was special, Lizzy hadn’t wanted to be special she had wanted to be like any other girl. George had been an escape and that was all, but she had jumped from one trap into another.
Now the traps were moving on, including the mirror. If she could, she would have taken it back, taken the burden of it away from her son. She would do anything she could to protect him. She was his mom.
As years passed every now and then, Lizzy caught a hint of Arthur’s essence in the mirror, but after she turned forty, it had become easier for her to see him.
Although her son took after her for abilities, Lizzy didn’t use the drugs of a shaman to alter her reality, the only thing she had access to was alcohol and that was only on occasion. It was painful for her to remember, and many times she had tried to get rid of the mirror by breaking it, selling it, covering it but it came back the next day as if it had used Arthurs passion as a magnet to reach her.
Her family had come from the small village of Salem in Llandelio, Wales until they were chased out with flaming torches and pitchforks. They settled in Scotland after, where there had been talk of them being descended from North Berwick originally, but they settled in the remote isles. A house still remained there that belonged to their family, although she didn’t doubt that by now it was a shack. Lizzy hadn’t expected Frank to notice the mirrors awesome power, but now the mirror had made a choice and was moving on. It was going to claim Frank through the love that Jane had so quickly developed for him. ‘Young women these days were so forward,’ Lizzy thought to herself chiding Jane for the family curse that had claimed her as a prisoner. She knew it was going to be hard for Frank, and for the first time since George had died, she felt useful again. Her mission would be to help her son cope with the loss of his one true love.
Lizzy gave it some thought. If she had realized how quickly Frank and Jane would have ignited the flame of love, she would have told her son to keep their relationship outside the house and away from the mirror. But if Jane was his true love, it would have claimed her at some point. The curse was one of the strongest Lizzy had ever known but wasn’t that the purpose of a curse? To offer death or perpetual misery through the removal of love.
That was the saddest thing. Lizzy couldn’t offer her son any happy news. As she tried forcing his gaze from away from the mirror,
“We need to break the curse. We need to get her out,” he repeated to her.
“How son?” asked Lizzy. She knew Frank needed to run through these questions.
Frank sat on the stairs mesmerized by the object, how could it have known what he didn’t even know. That he had started to fall in love with Jane. He recounted that he was only beginning to have feelings for her, but the fact that it had decided to claim her and curse him. Made him powerless to a curse that plagued his ancestors. He sat there for days, unmoving. Lizzy put a blanket around his shoulders, and he leaned his head against the wall as he wondered at the mysteries of the golden framed cursed mirror which had claimed generations of their family’s lovers.
Lizzy took control of the funeral arrangements, she couldn’t lean on Frank right now.
The funeral had been an emotional day. Very few well-wishers came to pay their respects. Only a few of George’s old colleagues, ones who dared to venture out in the rain. They spoke fondly of him, probably wondering why he had done it. But even Lizzy couldn’t answer that question, he may have been her husband of fifty years, but that didn’t mean she knew everything about how his brain worked.
The pension company gave her a payment and as the days passed Lizzy felt as if nothing had really changed from the days when George left the housekeeping money on the kitchen countertop. Lizzy may have consigned her husband into the ground, but as she walked over to the window which overlooked the back garden and garage, she wasn’t sure what to do with his spirit. He was still hanging around in there. George hadn’t really passed on. With Frank’s grief at losing Jane, the woman he had known for two minutes, Lizzy didn’t want to lean on him.
Frank could have communicated with his father, he could have asked him to pass on and follow the light or whatever it was that was meant to happen when a veil split the living and the dead.
It made her uncomfortable, but it wasn’t going to take away from the joy of her new found freedom. Lizzy was finally free of all the bonds that had controlled her. Her mom, her husband, and finally even the cursed mirror.
Frank joined her in the kitchen the morning after the funeral. He had dark rings under his eyes, and allowed a beard to root. She stood looking at him, her son was a fragile shadow of the man she had once known. Lizzy needed to figure out how to support him, but she knew this was a form of grief too.
“I don’t even know her song Mom,” Frank said as he started to breakdown tears streamed down his face.
Lizzy understood his meaning, he had explained it to her, a shaman must know the song of a spirit to summon it. She took Frank in her arms and let him rest his cheek on the top of her head.
She could feel his tears wet the crown of her head.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. She genuinely was. Lizzy knew her son had never really been in love before, sure he had been with women but never really loved any of them and the one promise of love had now been prematurely stolen from him. It was unfair.
“Can we go?” Frank asked referencing a conversation where Lizzy told him about their family roots.
“Go where? To Salem?” Lizzy moved away to cup his face in her hands. “That’s a wild goose chase.”
“We’ve got to do something, we’ve got to offer the mirror something else so that it releases her.”
“And if we managed it and we could get her out, she won’t be the same,” lied Lizzy. She knew nothing of this for sure, but she knew the questions that tormented her son. She knew them because she had asked them herself.
“You need to tell me all that you know, all that Nanna Hamilton told you.”
Lizzy knew then how hard her son had fallen for Jane. It made sense why the mirror had moved on.
“What is there to tell? Your Nanna passed it onto me, and I lost someone to it as well.”
“Who did you lose?” asked Frank curious.
“Your father's friend, Arthur,” whispered Lizzy. She put her hands on the counter aware she was telling all her secrets now.
“So, Jane is stuck in there with someone from your past?” asked Frank.
Lizzy could feel the guilt of her indiscretion and looked again at the window of the garage, in the daylight she couldn’t see his spirit as clearly as she could at other times.
“Yes. But I don’t want to talk about it.”
“We need to talk about it.”
Lizzy gestured to the window of the garage. “We don’t want to upset him. Right now, he’s just watching, we need to do something about him, get him to move on.”
Frank lent with his back against the kitchen wall, he was tired. . .tired of his mom. He had always thought that his father was the problem and now he knew she wasn’t as innocent as he had thought. He didn’t care about the dynamics of their relationship, he just wanted to work out how he could get Jane out of the mirror.
Over the days and nights that he had spent as a vigil in front of it, he had seen her face appear and the briefest hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth. He had seen the sunlight glinting through the strands of her hair. He had fallen in love with her again and again in the days that he sat on his mom’s stairs. He needed to do something other than watch. He needed to break the curse.
“You need to tell me everything you know,” said Frank again tired of the old woman’s excuses. He had worried about her for so many years, and yet she was not the victim he had thought her to be. His mom, the woman who kept secrets.
“I don’t know much, but we really do need to get your father’s spirit to move on,” said Lizzy.
“Why?”
Lizzy lied again. “Because if we try and pull anything out of that mirror, and if by accident that is your father’s old friend, then your father is going to start a war in this house. The living and the dead and other spirits that live in the mirror are going to be its casualties. It’s not safe,” said Lizzy, using the red flag that had always been her ace card should she need to use it. The one that made him worry about her safety.
Frank leaned back and listened to his mom. He was more like his dad than his mom had even given him credit.
“Why did you make him so sad?” asked Frank.
Lizzy stood up straight as she listened to the question which was more of an accusation. He had always had a default reaction when she mentioned the word ‘safe’ to Frank. It always inspired a protective behavior in him, it had made him never question her, and put her desires first. This time Frank wasn’t playing ball.
“I knew if he was sad that he would leave me alone.”
“Well, you’ve got what you wanted Mom. He has left you alone. Till death do us part, guess what? You’re single now.”
“But he hasn’t Frank, can’t you see that. He’s still here!”
“Yes, and that’s your problem. Not mine.”
“How could you be so selfish?” Mom asked repeating the words she heard George use to describe their son.
“I could ask you the same question. I want to get Jane out of the mirror and you won’t help. Instead, you are asking me to protect you from your dead husband.”
“It’s not that I won’t help. It’s that I can’t help,” confessed Lizzy. With tears in her eyes, she turned to look at her son. “If I knew anything, or if there was any way that I could help I would have told you.”
“You’re a rubbish witch and an even worse liar,” said Frank. “All you’ve told me is that I will never know real love in my life because whenev
er I do that person will be claimed by that antique mirror.” He took a glass of water from the tap, Lizzy could almost hear his heart beating.
She was losing him, and that was unexpected.
“Frank, please listen to me. I don’t know how it works, don’t you think I would have done my best to break the curse if I did?”
Frank looked at her. He could see her aura, he knew she was telling him the truth. She didn’t know how to break the curse, but she had a problem, one created by his angry father. Maybe his witch instincts hadn’t kicked in yet, maybe he couldn’t see his father in the garage as clearly as she could, but he could sense him.
Frank walked away from his mom, and the next sound she heard was a loud crack. The glass of water had been thrown at the mirror, and it lay in pieces on the carpet with water droplets covering it.
“What did you do?” asked Lizzy.
“I blessed the water. I had to try something!”
Frank stood with his stride widened waiting for the mirror the defend itself against him. It did nothing, it just lay on the floor in pieces. He walked upstairs and sat on the bed in his father’s bedroom. Wanting to evoke a reaction from the mirror, wanting to find an opportunity to get her back he clenched his fists and crashed them down by his side into the mattress. Frank had a lot on his mind.
The next morning, to Frank’s dismay, he came downstairs to find the mirror back in perfect condition hanging on the wall. Broken pieces from the drinking glass lay on the carpet, the water had long since evaporated. He sighed as he walked into the kitchen where mom was preparing breakfast.
“What happens if I burn it?” he asked.
“Nothing, it’ll be back there tomorrow, just as it is there now.”
“If I sell it?”
“It’ll be back there tomorrow.”
“If I cover it and put it in the attic?”
“It’ll stay in this house. It’s attracted to the negative energy in the house.”
Frank nodded; ate his toast and eggs and drank his tea. When he finished his breakfast, he took the mirror off the wall and carried it upstairs into the attic. He placed it next to the box of his mom’s keepsakes then covered it with a canvas. He kissed his lips with his fingers and touched the mirror, that was the last time he saw Jane.