Читать книгу Mirrors: Sparkling new stories from prize-winning authors - Wendy Cooling - Страница 7

Lesley Howarth MIRRORS DOT COM

It started four days before Samantha Lamb’s birthday.

You know there’s a Year of the Rat, a Year of the Pig, the Dog, the Horse, in the Chinese calendar? They knew more than we did, the people who started that stuff.

I know about that stuff now. Did you know there’s an animal – a secret self – hidden in your reflection? Oh, yes. And the way to see it is—

But I’d better start at the beginning.

My friend Sam’s birthday was coming up, so I searched the Internet for these mirrors. Sam likes stuff for her room, and I knew she’d just broken one. Finally I found a site selling mirrors. It took an age to download the graphics. But when they popped up, I was gobsmacked.

They were pretty amazing mirrors. Twisted spirals of silver around shapes that looked like wolves’ heads. Mirrors like the shields of knights in battle. Gilt ‘chimney glasses’ crested with eagles. Copies of Roman hand-mirrors shaped like the sun. Unbreakable mirrors of polished metal. Used by explorers, the site said. And all at pub/mirror.com. I didn’t know mirrors like that existed. I’d never seen anything like them.

I actually never meant to order it.

Those mirrors – especially the glaring wolf’s head with the burning ruby eyes – seemed to jump out at me, to make me click on them and order them. I’ll never know why I put the wolf-mirror into my ‘shopping trolley’. Next thing, I’d OKd Mum’s credit card number and the wolf man was on his way.

He actually turned up in the cat flap next day. The postman pops parcels through the cat flap whenever there’s no one at home. When I saw the package labelled PUB/MIRROR WORLDWIDE in the darkness of the garage, I felt very slightly sick. As though his burning ruby eyes could read my mind through the bubble-wrap already, and he knew that he wasn’t wanted.

‘And where are you going to put that?’ Mum’s reflection looked back at her disgustedly from the silvery depths of the wolf-mirror.

‘I’m not. It’s for Sam’s birthday.’

‘Good job. He gives me the creeps.’

He gave me the creeps, too, actually.

The wolf man curling around the mirror glared down at me before I went to school. His grinning face, resting on the top of the mirror and hanging down over the edge of it, glared down at me when I came home. His silver paws hugged the sides of it and glinted in the moonlight that leaked in at night around the sides of my blind, and felt like they’d like to hug me too, and not in a friendly way. I got up and put him outside.

I forgot about him until I fell over him on my way to the bathroom next morning. He toppled over on to my feet and lay looking up at me, still creeping around his mirror like some twisted mythical beast.

I don’t even like you. Get off me!

Three days until Sam’s birthday.

Why didn’t I send him back?

You know in fairy stories, there’s always a forbidden thing, something the person in the story mustn’t do, and then they always go and do it? DON’T forget to go home at midnight. DON’T go into the woods alone. DON’T forget to drop the enchanted nut into the sea for your magic griffin to rest on, all that stuff? I began to wonder about the mirror man, the more his ruby eyes got to me. What did he do, to be stuck there like that, hugging his mirror and hoping someone might want him over the Net?

‘Did you get me something?’ Sam asked.

‘Something?’

‘A birthday present?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ I said. ‘I got you a present. I got you a present, all right.’

I tried to send him back that night, but Returns weren’t optioned at all, and pub/mirror.com came up with some boring looking pub mirrors, as if that was what they were selling. ‘What happened to the wolf-mirror?’ I mailed them.

‘Gothic Series Sold Out’, was the only reply. No Returns even mentioned, not even a PO Box to send them to.

I was stuck with him, and I knew it. Two more days, then Sam would have to have him in her bedroom. Some birthday present. I knew, even then, I should bury him under the noodles and cans in the dustbin and buy Samantha Lamb something else.

But by that time it was too late.

It had come to me as I was lying in bed waiting to go to sleep. I’d just seen ER and my mind wouldn’t stop. You know the feeling. Not good. The moonlight always came in around the side of my blind, and that night it silvered the claws of the wolf-mirror and made a pale glow in its depths.

I got up and turned him to face the wall.

Then I got back into bed.

I could feel the power in his red-eyed glare, even with his back to the room. The moonlight flooded in anyway, and suddenly I knew what the forbidden thing was, as certainly as if it had been chalked on the back of the mirror, where his silver claws appeared around the backing.

Don’t look into the mirror by moonlight, or you’ll see what animal you are.

I sat up in bed. What animal you are?

I got up and moved the mirror, very carefully, out of my room.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ Dad wondered, coming up the stairs to bed.

‘I don’t like him in my room at night,’ I told him sheepishly.

‘I’m not surprised, it’s hideous. I thought it had four legs.’

‘It has.’ I checked him. ‘There’s one at the back.’

‘Night, then,’ Dad said.

‘Night, night.’

Sweet dreams, I almost added, except I didn’t get any, myself. Instead, I had the moonlight leaking in around the blind and the feeling that grew and kept me awake until it was driving me mad.

Two feelings, actually.

One was the certainty that if I got up to go to the loo and had to walk past the wolf-man I wouldn’t be able to stop myself looking into the mirror by moonlight.

The other was the certainty that he’d had all four legs wrapped around the front of the mirror, and no leg down the back.

In the end I had to get up.

I made it past the mirror to the toilet, though his ruby eyes scorched my ankles. I made it back as far as the bedroom door before I let myself see, through half-closed eyes, the place where the wolf-man had been.

His mirror glared down the stair-well, reflecting the outside light that leaked up the stairs in the darkness; a plain, silver-edged mirror, so ordinary you might even have ordered it from pub/mirror.com, or from any shop selling candles, or any department store.

The wolf-man was gone, I didn’t like to think where.

I must have knocked him off his perch in passing; probably he’d rolled down the stairs. Probably if I looked I’d see him, forlorn and glinting, in the hall.

But I didn’t look.

Instead I slept on the landing in the sleeping bag I found in the airing cupboard, too scared to go into my room.

In the early hours, a flash of silver seemed to tumble into my dreams. The glare of ruby eyes reminded me, over and over again, of the one thing I knew I mustn’t do.

Dad fell over me at seven o’clock.

‘Lisa! What on earth—?’

I turned over. ‘Dad.’

A hammering headache filled the whole of my brain. Those burning eyes had drilled into the back of my head. They saw what I really was, reflected in their own fiery depths.

‘Where’s that—’

‘Mirror?’ Dad set it straight. ‘Must have fallen over in the night.’

There he was, but he didn’t fool me.

So the mirror-man was back on his mirror, with his wolf-legs folded around it as if he’d never been gone. Flashing around like a slip of silver all night. He’d changed his position, anyone could see. What did he think, we were stupid?

‘Why aren’t you in your bed?’ Dad bleated.

‘Doesn’t matter, does it?’ I said, turning over. ‘Leave me alone,’ I growled.

The next night was Friday night, and we went to the cinema for Sam’s birthday treat, as her party was going to be only part of her birthday, as Sam gets everything she wants. The film was OK, not great. We spilled a whole tub of popcorn over the floor, plus these stupid boys kept annoying us, but anyway, it was all right.

When I got home I remembered him. The mirror-man upstairs. I delayed for as long as I could. But finally I had to go to bed.

It was the worst night yet. I finally got off to sleep all right, which I don’t usually after a Jumbo Cola and a giant bag of Pik ’n’ Mix, which was pants, as they had the wrong prawns and massively big worms, so you have to pay five quid to get one.

So at last I was just drifting off. I don’t know, I may have been asleep – when I thought I saw him running round my room. Quick as quicksilver, the mirror-man, wolfing my slippers and flashing over my desk, his red eyes burning, his tongue slavering, his quick tail flicking and whipping.

Who was he? The reflection of someone’s secret self, the last person to look into that mirror in the moonlight, after they’d ordered it by mistake? That mirror, that mirror, that mirror. Had been the cause of it.

I started up in fright and launched myself at that mirror.

In the moment before I smashed it, I saw what animal I was. The wolf rolled off the top of it and raged and boiled on the carpet, changing shape as I watched into the animal that was me, until I put my pillow on top of it, and another pillow on top of that, and my dressing gown and a pile of books, and everything I could find to weigh it down and stop it, that reflection of my secret self…

‘Happy birthday!’ Sam wishes herself, her head around Lisa’s bedroom door on Saturday morning. ‘I let myself in, all right?’

Sam waits, but nothing happens; no move to get her her present. Instead, Lisa puzzles over the pieces of a mirror. Not a very nice mirror, either.

‘What are you doing?’

‘What does it look like? I just have to piece it together. Then I can send it back.’

Sam picks up a twist of silver. ‘What’s this?’

‘What does it look like?’

‘A dragon?’

‘It was a wolf, but the wolf-man’s gone.’

Sam looks at the dragon’s curved limbs, at the shape it’s designed to hold, its tail licking clean round an oval. ‘What’s this meant to be for?’

‘He sits on top of the mirror,’ Lisa supplies. ‘When he’s not—’

‘What?’

‘Broken,’

‘You said, alive.’

Lisa’s eyes flash. ‘I said, broken.’

Sam looks at her friend. ‘About my party tonight—’

‘Mind if I take it back?’ Lisa scratches Sam very slightly as she reached up to grab the figure. Blood wells up on Sam’s hand, in a ruby-red spot on her thumb. Lisa watches her eyes, and Sam gets the strangest feeling she’s looking into the mouth of a—

The dragon in Lisa’s eyes smiles. ‘Thanks.’ Her fingernails close over the silver figure and place it over the top of the mirror-puzzle.

‘It’s my birthday.’ Sam sucks the scratch on her hand. ‘This isn’t supposed to happen.’

But Lisa has eyes for no one but herself, mirrored in the scattered pieces of glass that make up a jigsaw on the floor. ‘Ever look into a mirror at night? After I mend it, you can put this in your room and see what animal you are.’

Sam Lamb knows already. She leaves the bedroom, unnoticed, as downstairs Dad logs on to the computer and finds pub/mirrors.com offering ‘Reduced Gothic Mirrors at a Fraction of their Former Price’, over the search he makes for a book.

‘Lisa! That dot com company’s got those mirrors again!’ Dad yells up the stairs as a range of extraordinary mirrors appear when he clicks on them without meaning to. ‘Like that weird mirror you just got!’

His voice washes over Lisa, guarding her broken mirror upstairs, seeing her fragmented face in it.

Me and not me. Who am I?

For a moment, I can see a reflection of myself as I might be. The girl in the mirror is me. Me, and not me, at the same time. I’m not sure I wanted to know, but I did what I knew I shouldn’t…

I can hear Dad downstairs, ordering a mirror. I want to stop him, but I can’t. He will release his inner self. What animal will he be? A pig, a rat, a rabbit?

Dad’s voice comes up the stairs. ‘You know, these mirrors aren’t bad – ‘Gothic Mirror in Gilt’ – I think I might – oh, I have clicked on it, what a stupid donkey I am, I think I might have just ordered it…’