A House Without Mirrors (4 page)

“T
homasine?”

I opened my eyes. The bedroom was white with moonlight, but it was empty. I had been dreaming about Wilma, that she was buried under snow and was calling to me. Was it her voice in the dream that had woken me up?

“Thomasine, are you asleep?”

No, I was awake. The whisper came from a tiny little form among the shadows by the door. A ghost?

“Signe?” I whispered back. “Is that you?”

The outline of the little figure took a step forward and trod straight into a moonbeam. The face was almost as pale as her white nightgown, and if it hadn’t been for the smile Signe could easily have been a ghost.

“Come on,” she said, reaching her hand out to me. “Come on, I want to show you something.”

I turned my head and saw that the radio alarm showed 03.48.

“It’s the middle of the night, Signe,” I whispered. “Can’t it wait until—”

“It’s a secret,” Signe interrupted. “You mustn’t tell Erland. Nor Dad either.”

She still sounded weird, just like she had at dinner. Like a completely different child. This Signe didn’t seem in the slightest bit afraid. When I reached out my hand to stroke her face, she grabbed hold of my index finger.

“Come on, get up!” she said again, pulling me from the bed. “I’ll show you where I was hiding.”

I sighed and placed my feet on the floor.

Signe was still holding on to my finger as we tiptoed down the corridor outside my room. Henrietta’s house was even quieter at night than during the day, and the thick carpet under our feet absorbed every sound. You probably could have stomped up and down without anyone hearing.

“Have you been to sleep at all, Signe?” I yawned. “Sometimes it helps if you read a book.”

Signe looked up at me, surprised, and giggled.

“But I can’t read, can I!”

That was true, of course. I felt dense and stupid, and I couldn’t work out where we were going. It wasn’t until Signe stopped in the octagonal room where I’d found her after the game of hide-and-seek that I began to wake up. The room looked the same as it had that afternoon. The same empty floor and piles of cardboard boxes and bags of clothes, the same wardrobe doors.

“So you were in here after all,” I said. “Were you hiding behind the boxes?”

Signe giggled again and shook her head.

“In the wardrobe,” she said. “The one with all the mirrors.”

I blinked until I could see her quite clearly.

“What do you mean, mirrors?” I said. “You know there are no mirrors in this house.”

“No, ’cause they’re all in the wardrobe,” she said, pointing towards the middle door. “Someone has put them all in there.”

It didn’t sound like the kind of thing you’d make up. At least not the kind of thing a five-year-old would make up. I walked across the cold floorboards, and suddenly I saw it: in the wardrobe door, which had been locked, there was now a key.

“Did you take the key, Signe?” I said, trying to sound stern. “You mustn’t do that. It’s dangerous, you may get yourself locked in and—”

“I didn’t take it!” Signe said. “She gave it to me, she did!”

Her little face looked angry and something in her eyes told me that she was telling the truth. Perhaps Kajsa or Wilma had really given her the key to play with. I stroked her tousled hair.

“All right, but you must never lock it from the inside,” I said with a yawn. “Can we go back to bed now? I’ll tuck you in, if you like.”

Signe’s face turned smooth and childlike again. She looked disappointed.

“But you have to go inside!” she said. “You can’t see anything out here, can you?”

I sighed and looked at my empty wrist. My watch was back on the bedside table.

“Just a quick look, then.”

Signe beamed and tiptoed up to the door. She didn’t touch the key, but watched in anticipation as I turned it in the lock.

“Open it,” she whispered eagerly. “Open the door, Thomasine!”

I pulled open the wardrobe door, and the first thing I saw was that somebody was in there. The skin on my back instantly grew prickly with fear.

A moment later I realized who the stranger in the wardrobe was.

It was myself. Or rather, an image of myself, lit by moonlight from the window and reflected in the dark glass of a mirror.

“Shit,” I giggled. “Shit, that scared me!”

Signe looked perplexed.

“Why were you scared?” she said, taking my hand. “There’s nothing to be afraid of here, Thomasine.”

She stepped over the threshold, and pulled me with her. With my legs still shaking, I let myself be led.

Moonlight filtered through the half-open door, and when my eyes had grown used to it I discovered that the wardrobe was larger than I had thought, almost like a little room. Mirrors glinted everywhere; uneven, fragmented glass surfaces in stacks against the walls.

“Wilma should see this,” I said. “Is there a light switch somewhere?”

Signe shook her head.

“Okay, we can check it out tomorrow,” I said. “This was really cool, Signe, but we have to go back to bed now if we…”

Even in the gloom I could tell that Signe’s face was growing cross again.

“You don’t get it!” she said. “You have to keep the door closed and stand still. Or it won’t happen!”

I sighed.

“Okay, okay, close the door, then,” I said. “But only for a bit.”

I was fully awake now, and I didn’t mind standing in the wardrobe with Signe for a while. I was actually rather proud that it was me that she had chosen to share her imaginary game with. The very first day when Uncle Daniel and the kids turned up at the house I had realized that Signe was similar to me. When I was her age, before Martin was born, I had lived in a world of my own. I didn’t have anyone to play with either, and just like Signe I had invented my own games. Slow, dreamlike afternoons when the floor turned into an ocean of imaginary water for me to swim through, or where the clouds passing by outside the windows were magnificent cities with towers and walls.

I felt a tug inside when I thought how lonely I had been. But I hadn’t really understood that back then. Something had been missing, but I didn’t know what it was. Then, when I was six, Martin turned up and everything was supposed to get better. But then he disappeared, and I was all alone again.

“It’s happening!”

Signe’s whisper made me blink. My eyes had got used to the dark in the wardrobe and I could see the mirrors clearly now. There were at least thirty of them. There were free-standing mirrors, wall mirrors, simple bathroom mirrors and mirrors in gilt frames; big ones and small ones, round ones and square. It probably wasn’t possible to find a use for them all, but Wilma would at least get her make-up mirror. I would tell her after breakfast.

“What?” I yawned. “What is supposed to happen?”

Signe pulled at my finger so that I turned towards the door.

“It’s already happened,” she said. “We can go out there now.”

“Good.”

I pushed open the wardrobe door with my free hand and let Signe pull me out into the room. The
night outside the window had grown lighter, but not enough for me to make out the colours of the carpet and the furniture in the octagonal room. The light looked more like an overcast afternoon than dawn. How long had we actually been in there?

“Hello?” Signe called, quite loudly. “Little girl?”

I panicked and put my hand over her mouth.

“Quiet!” I hissed. “Have you gone mad? Daniel’s bedroom is right below us!”

Signe looked up at me. Her eyes were completely calm when she removed my hand. Maybe just a little surprised.

“Dad is not here,” she said. “He’s back on the other side.”

A shiver ran down my spine. My lungs stopped breathing and I felt as if I were falling. Signe’s calm voice alone had probably been enough to scare me stiff, but now there was something else.

At once I realized that the octagonal room, which had been messy and empty when we came in, was now tidy. It also contained furniture. A strange sofa that only had a back at one end, two long rails of clothes, a white table with a mirror in a gilded iron frame, and rows of perfume bottles and glass jars.

“What have you done, Signe?” I said, my voice small and pathetic. “Where are we?”

Signe looked at me again, baffled, and in the weak light from the windows her face looked ghostlike.

“You can ask her,” she said, nodding towards the door to the corridor. “She lives here.”

I couldn’t answer. All I could do was stare at the little girl in a sailor dress who was standing in the doorway.

“T
homasine?”

As soon as I opened my eyes I knew I had a secret. It possessed my entire body, like a fever, or maybe happiness. I had dreamt a wonderful dream. Was I even awake?

“Thomasine, sweetheart?”

Dad was standing in the doorway, his face grey in the dawn light coming through the window.

“I had such a weird dream.”

Dad rested his hand on the old-fashioned switch by the door. “Let’s put the light on,” he said. “So you can wake up.”

I sat up so that I could lean my back against the wall and pulled the duvet up to my chin.

“I’m awake. Just let me get used to the light.”

Dad looked as if he was about to say something,
but after a couple of seconds he just nodded silently and turned around.

“Dad?”

He stopped, and turned towards me again.

“Dad, what’s the name of that room at the end of the corridor?”

One of those rare smiles flashed across his face then disappeared, as quickly as a flat stone skims across a surface of water.

“Are you sure you’ve woken up?” he said. “What room?”

“The octagonal one where Henrietta’s mum kept her clothes,” I said. “You told me once that she had a special name for it in English.”

Dad’s face showed concern, as if I’d asked him something really difficult.

“You mean Granny Adelaide,” he said. “She was my dad’s grandmother, so I never met her.”

I wrapped the duvet closer around my drawn-up knees.

“Yes, I know that,” I said. “But what did she call the room?”

Dad thought. It was a long while before he answered.

“The changing room?” he said at last. “She used to change her clothes in there, for dinner and when she was going for a walk, that sort of thing. Was that what you were thinking of?”

“Yes.”

Dad looked at me, his brow still furrowed. That was how he often looked of late. As if no answer, not even the right one, was enough. He didn’t say anything else, and after a while he disappeared up to Henrietta’s room.

The changing room. Such silly dreams.

I lay on my back again and knew straight away that I would not go back to sleep.

The dream had started playing like a film inside my head, but I was fully awake.

Signe had woken me up—or, I had dreamt that she had—and together we had walked up to Granny Adelaide’s dressing room. The changing room. It must have been the name that started it all. I saw it all clearly before me, almost as if it had happened. Signe, who walked beside me through the darkness. The wardrobe that was full of mirrors, the door we closed behind us, the room that had changed when we opened the door again.

A little girl had been standing there. A strange girl in a sailor dress.

I rolled over on my stomach and pressed my head into the pillow. My heart had started beating again. The images of the dream behind my eyelids felt real, as if I could reach out and touch them. How could they be so real?

Signe had called the girl Hetty, and together they had run on ahead.

They seemed to have met before.

I had followed them through the house from room to room decorated with furniture and pictures I’d never seen. It was Henrietta’s house, but at the same time it wasn’t. A bit like something familiar that becomes something strange when you look at it in a mirror.

I turned onto my back again, inhaled deeply, and breathed out. It had only been a dream, but I would tell Signe about it. She would find it amusing and perhaps we could…

What was that?

Something glinted at the corner of my eye, and I turned my head.

A mirror.

In the middle of the bedroom floor sat a little mirror in a gold frame. The glass itself was oval and framed in squiggles of cast iron painted gold, and it looked completely real.

At the same time I knew it couldn’t be. It was the same mirror that had been sitting on the dressing table in my dream. Cautiously, I stretched my leg out from under my duvet and let my big toe touch the frame.

The metal was cold and hard.

Real.

“Do you still like it?”

Signe was standing in the doorway that Dad had left open. She was fully dressed, and someone had plaited her hair. Wilma, probably.

“What do you mean, do I like it?” I said. “Where does it come from?”

Signe rolled her eyes.

“From the wardrobe, of course,” she said. “You took it yourself. You said you were going to give it to Wilma.”

I was quiet. Two worlds had collided inside me, and I was no longer sure what was possible and what was impossible. Being inside the wardrobe
had not been a dream; the mirror was proof. I now remembered how I had carried it back to my room. It had been heavy and I could feel the cast-iron frame cold against my chest through my nightgown.

“Signe, what happened last night?” I said quietly. “It feels as if we were somewhere else. Was there another house?”

Signe looked at me without answering.

“And that girl?” I said quietly. “The one you called Hetty? Was she real?”

Signe didn’t answer, but her eyes turned light and dreamy. I had reminded her of something she liked to think about, even if she didn’t want to talk about it.

“Hurry up and give the mirror to Wilma,” she said in the end. “If Erland sees it he’ll blab to everyone. Then it’ll no longer be a secret.”

I sank down onto the pillow again.

“Yes,” I said, pressing my hands against my eyes. “I will.”