The Man in the Mirror

The darkness did not stay dark for long.

It was Elowen's own doing, and she hated that she noticed it. The ember she had thrown against the wall was still burning under her skin, a slow, stubborn heat in her wrists and the hollow of her throat, and wherever that heat leaked out through her breath and her fingertips the black around her took on a faint amber stain. A floor came first, polished and pale and so smooth that her boots slid when she shifted her weight. Then pillars, rising out of it like frozen trees. Then, far above her head, the underside of a vaulted ceiling that went up and up, farther than the lamp-light of any cathedral she had ever stood in.

Everything she could see was glass. And everything glass was a mirror.

They covered the walls from floor to ceiling in panels as tall as barn doors. They were set into the pillars. They lay under her feet. She turned her head and a hundred Elowens turned with her, each one a little smaller, a little paler, a little more worn about the eyes, stretching away in two long rows toward a vanishing point she could not find. Each of them clutched a hand to her breast pocket. Each of them was bleeding from the palm.

She made herself lower the hand. The reflections lowered theirs.

Good, she thought. You can all count.

"Do not flatter yourself," said the voice. "They are only copying you. It is the one trick they have."

It came from everywhere at once. That was what made it so hard to bear. It was not loud. It was low and clear and amused, the voice of someone speaking in a quiet room to a person standing close at his shoulder, and yet it seemed to ring off every pane in the hall together, so that the words arrived from the left and the right and above her and out of the floor at the same moment, a little out of step, like a stone dropped into a still pond.

Elowen swallowed. Her mouth was dry and tasted of copper where she had bitten her lip in the fog.

"I'm sorry about the door," she said.

"You are not sorry about the door."

"No," she admitted. "I'm not. I was freezing."

"You were, in point of fact, about eleven minutes from becoming a very decorative lump on my front step." A pause. "I counted. It is rare that anything arrives here with so little sense and so much noise. I wanted to see how it would end."

"How kind of you not to interfere."

"I never interfere. It is a house rule."

She almost laughed. That frightened her more than the voice did. She pressed her thumb into the burn on her palm, where it hurt cleanly, and kept her eyes moving.

There. In the third mirror to her left, a shape that did not belong.

It was not a reflection of her, because it was too tall. It was a smear of shadow standing a little behind her image, the faint dark outline of a man's shoulders and head, as if someone were leaning over her from behind and the glass had caught him out of the corner of its eye. She whipped around. The hall behind her was empty. When she turned back, the shape had slid two mirrors along and was watching her from the next pane over, quite still.

It moved when she moved. But never at the same time.

She tried it once, to be sure. She lifted her left hand and watched the shadow lift its right a hair's breadth late, the way a bad actor follows a prompt. She took one step to the side. The shadow took its step a moment after, and its edges blurred and shivered as if the glass could not decide how much of it to hold.

"Stop that," said the voice, sounding put out. "It is rude to stare."

"You're staring at me."

"I am the host."

"You're a smudge."

A silence followed that was so complete she could hear the faint dry ticking of glass snow settling on the roof, many stories above. Then, from every direction at once, something that might, on a kinder day, have passed for a laugh. It was short and soft and almost startled, as though the person doing it had not meant to, and it ended too soon.

"A smudge," the voice repeated. "Three hundred years, and no one has ever called me that."

Three hundred. She filed the number away behind her teeth, where she kept the things she would take out and look at later. Aloud she said, "Then they were all too polite. Who are you?"

"I asked first."

"You asked what business I had on your doorstep. I haven't answered that either. Which do you want?"

"Both. In order. Begin with the name."

"Elowen."

"Elowen." He turned it over, tasting the syllables. "Pretty. Rustic. Your mother had ambitions. Elowen what?"

"Elowen of Scenery Chalk." It came out harder than she meant. "I don't have a hall to my name. I have a father and a plum tree."

"And you have walked up my mountain on those credentials. Through the Tunnel, on foot, in winter, with that in your pocket." The shadow in the third mirror tilted its head. "Do you know what the Tunnel does?"

"It eats your memory."

"It nibbles. The Tunnel is a courtesy, a sort of porter. The snow does the eating. A hundred paces into this valley and a stranger forgets the name of his street. Five hundred and he forgets his wife. Two days, and generally he forgets he ever had a wife, or a street, or a reason to have come, and we find him sitting in the drift with a very peaceful expression, as clean and smooth as a skating pond." The voice dropped. "Did you lose something coming through?"

She said nothing.

"I thought so," said the voice. "Everyone does. What was it?"

"A dog's name."

"A dog's."

"Mine." She heard how small it sounded and lifted her chin. "He had a small white scar on his right ear, from the time he fought a hedge and lost. I had him for eight years. I used to shout his name across the whole of Calder's field and he'd come over the wall like he'd been fired from a cannon. I can see it. I can hear myself shouting it. It's just that there's nothing in it."

She had not meant to say so much. Her voice had gone odd on the last word. In the nearest pane the Elowen with the bleeding hand pressed her lips together and looked furious at herself.

For a moment, the hall was entirely quiet.

"I am sorry," said the voice, and it was a different voice. It had no edge in it. It was barely more than a breath. "That is how it begins."

She stared at the smudge in the glass, and the smudge, if shadows could look uncomfortable, looked uncomfortable. It drew a little back from her, into the dark of the pane, and the pane clouded gently over like a window on a cold morning.

"You still have not answered the second question," he said, after a moment, and the edge was back, polished and ready. "What brought you here?"

"My sister."

The word dropped into the room.

She had expected nothing. A shrug, perhaps, a sneer. What she got was a sound so small she nearly missed it: a faint, bright tick, high in the vault, like a fingernail rapping glass. She looked up. Away to her right, in one of the tall panels set into the pillar, a hairline of white had appeared in the silvering. It was no longer than her thumb. It had not been there before.

And the shadow in the pane beside her had gone absolutely still.

It did not slip out of step with her this time. It simply stopped, with its head turned toward the crack, as a man might stop in the middle of a stair when he hears his own name spoken in a stranger's house.

"Your sister," said the voice. It was careful now. Every word was set down on the floor with great delicacy, like a man crossing ice. "Say more."

"Elodie. She's two years older than me. She came here in the spring. She left a letter saying she'd seen a door, and the answer to everything we ever wanted was on the other side of it." Elowen drew a breath. "I need to find her. I need to know whether she's alive. I don't care about your snow, or your house, or your three hundred years. I'll go home the moment I know."

"Home," the voice echoed.

"My father's blind from weeping and my mother won't leave her bed. Home's a bit worse than it was."

"People who come here do not generally go home."

"Then I'll be the first."

"You will be the first to try," said the voice, "and very probably the last." Yet the crack in the high pane did not widen, and she thought that, for the first time, she had said something he could not find an immediate answer for. It gave her a strange small flush of pride, which she disliked, since she could not think what she had done to earn it.

"Do you know her?" she asked.

"I know of every soul who has crossed that threshold," said the voice. "That is not the same thing as knowing them. It is a very large house, and I have been very bored. If I tried to tell you what became of one traveler in the spring, I should be telling you a story, not a fact. And I do not tell stories to people I have known for a quarter of an hour."

It was a lie. She was almost sure of it. She had grown up with a father who could not tell one to save his life, who went pink from the collar up and talked too fast about the weather, and she knew what a lie did to a voice. This one was too smooth, too tidy, too well oiled.

But she was also standing in a hall of mirrors on a mountain at the end of the world, bleeding, in the dark, with no door, and she did not have the leverage to say so.

"Then tell me this," said Elowen. "Why did you let me in?"

"I did not. You melted my wall."

"You said you never interfere. You watched me for eleven minutes. You could have opened it from your side."

The shadow regarded her.

"That," said the voice, in a tone of reluctant approval, "is a better question than the ones you came in with."

…

He made her wait. It was a deliberate cruelty, and she knew it, and she stood in the middle of that cold bright floor with her arms wrapped round herself while the shadow drifted from pane to pane, conferring with itself in whispers too faint to catch.

At last it came to rest at the far end of the hall, in the largest mirror of all, a great oval of dark silver that took up the whole of the end wall. It seemed to have chosen the place for effect. The glass there showed her nothing but a pale girl and a long room, but the shadow stood behind that girl's reflection like a man standing in a doorway, and for the first time she could make out something of him. A height. A straightness of back. The set of the shoulders, which was proud, and a little tired, and rather too still.

No face. Where the face should have been there was only a place where the light bent oddly, as it does over a hot road.

"I have a proposal," he said.

"Do you."

"It is a good one. You will want to sit down."

"I'll stand."

"You are going to fall down in a minute, and that would be very inconvenient for the floor." The shadow made a small gesture. Behind her, with a soft chiming noise, a chair unfolded itself out of a pane of glass. It was a plain, high-backed chair of faintly blue crystal, and there was a rug, if you could call it that, spread beneath it: a dense thick weave of something white and soft and, she thought with a dizzy sense of relief, warm.

She sat. She hated how good it felt.

"Here are the terms," said the voice. "You stay. You eat. You sleep, and you are not forbidden any room you do not wish to enter, save one wing, which Perrin will describe. In return, you will do something for me. Each night, after dark, you will walk the halls of this house and use that dreadful, wonderful, ill-mannered fire of yours to warm them."

"Warm them."

"Warm the glass." A pause. "It does not like the cold. It cracks. For some years, now, it has cracked rather more than I like, and I have been looking for someone who could do something about it."

"A glass castle in a land of glass snow," said Elowen, "and it's the cold that's the problem."

"The Land's cold is natural. It keeps. The cold that comes from being unwatched, from being unloved, from being a very large empty house for a very long time, is of another kind. You know the difference. I could hear it in your voice when you spoke of your sister. It is the cold of someone going to bed without a candle." He said it quite lightly. "I do not require much. A song. A lamp. A little of that heat of yours, spent on my walls rather than on my front door."

She looked into the mirror. The Elowen in it was ragged and sunburned with frostbite and sat very straight.

"What do I get besides a bed?"

"Time to look for her. The freedom of every floor but one. And," said the voice, with an odd stiffness, "protection from the snow, so long as you remain within these walls. Your memory will go more slowly here than in the open valley. Not never. But slowly."

"How slowly?"

"I do not know," said the voice, and for once it sounded honest. "No one has stayed to be measured."

She thought of the dog. Of the one ear that stood up. Of the whole of Calder's field, green and bright in the summer sun, with a gap in the middle of it the exact size and shape of a word.

"Why me?" she said.

"You came in. That is a great recommendation in itself."

"That's not an answer."

"It is the only one that is mine to give." The shadow took a step forward in the glass. It did not seem to walk so much as arrive. "You are right to be suspicious. I would think less of you if you were not. I will say this once. I do not wish you harm. I find myself, to my considerable surprise, with a disinclination to see you turned into a skating pond. The rest, I am afraid, will have to wait."

"For how long?"

"Until you have earned it."

"And if I say no?"

"Then the door will open, and you will go back through the Tunnel, and you will be a girl with a hole in her head and an empty pocket and a very long walk home." The voice was kind about it. That was the worst of it. "I do not think you will say no. But you are welcome to try."

She looked down at her hands. At the music box, pressed so hard against her heart that the lid had printed a six-petaled snowflake into the skin beneath the wool. Elodie's hands had held that. Elodie's thumb had worn the little dent in the winding key.

What did you see in here? she asked her, silently. What on earth did you see?

"Yes," she said.

"Yes?"

"I'll do it. I'll warm your house." She looked up and met the dark shape in the glass as steadily as she could. "But I want it understood. I'm not doing it for you. I'm doing it for her. And the moment I find out you've lied to me about anything, I'm walking out of that door, and I'll melt a bigger one on the way."

"I do not doubt it."

"Good."

"I should like it noted," said the voice, with a delicate, fastidious relish, "that you have just made a contract with a stranger in a dark room on the strength of nothing but your own temper. Your mother's ambitions would be crushed."

"My mother has never been in a dark room in her life."

"That is the first thing I have heard tonight that I envy."

It was said so quietly, and so plainly, that for a moment she thought she had imagined it. The shadow in the great oval had changed. It still stood in the same place. It still had no face. Yet it seemed to have slumped, very slightly, the way a man does when he has been holding himself upright in a room for hours and has just heard the door close behind the last guest.

Oh, she thought, with a pang as startling as it was unwelcome. You're lonely.

She shut the thought away at once. She had been told, in a hundred stories, what happened to girls who felt sorry for the voice in the dark.

"You still haven't told me who you are," said Elowen.

The shadow straightened. "No."

"It's only fair. I gave you my name and a dead dog."

"Not dead. Lost." A pause. "You are right. It is only fair." It lifted what might have been a hand. In the great oval, the light thickened about the dark shape like breath on a cold pane, and for the space of a heartbeat she thought she saw it: a line of jaw, the angle of a cheekbone, the lashes of a closed eye, drawn in silver by the glass as a frost draws a leaf on a window.

"Casimir," said the voice. "That is what I am called."

She opened her mouth.

And every mirror in the hall went out.

It was not a flicker. It was like the stroke of a snuffer on a hundred candles. The silver drained from the walls, and the pale gleam from the floor, and the smeared amber light that her own skin had cast across the room. The pillars melted into the dark. The ceiling vanished. The chair under her gave a small, chiming sigh, like a wet finger run round the rim of a glass, and was gone, and she dropped a hand's breadth onto the rug.

"Casimir?"

Nothing.

"Casimir!"

Her voice went up into the black and did not come back. The glass snow whispered on the roof. Somewhere a long way off, a single drop of water struck a floor and rang like a bell. She sat, quite alone, in the heart of the Glass Castle, with the whole of the cold coming up through the soft white rug, and her hand pressed to the box over her heart.

It was not until some minutes had passed that she noticed what else was wrong.

Her palm had stopped bleeding. The burn had faded from raw crimson to a pale pink, and the glass beads of snow that had stuck in her sleeve were melting off her, one by one, into small bright drops. The rug, she realized, was a good deal warmer than any rug had a right to be.

He had said he never interfered.

Elowen looked into the dark where the great mirror had been, and for the first time since she had left her father's house, she felt something that was not fear.

It was nearer to curiosity, and she knew perfectly well that was worse.