The Mirror (2 page)

Rachael sank onto the cedar chest at the foot of the bed and stared at Shay. Her face had gone as pale as Grandma Bran's. "How did you know?"

"That's getting to be pretty standard for a night-before-the-wedding talk."

"Not when I was a girl. She . . ." Rachael turned to the woman in the bed, who appeared to be sleeping, and dropped her voice, "she gave a talk on the birds and the bees."

"Wouldn't it be cool to know what her mother told her?" Shay laughed softly, switched off the light and sat beside Rachael. "Look, you're exhausted. I've tried to keep the wedding as simple as possible, but there's been a lot for you to do. There's your work and worrying about Grandma and the big dinner tonight."

"To which your husband-to-be didn't show."

"I told you about the bachelor party."

"He could've come to dinner and then gone to his party."

"What don't you like about Marek?"

"I don't dislike him. I don't even know him." Rachael stood and walked to the door. "It's just. . . just that you don't love him."

Jerry Garrett collected the remaining glasses, carried them into the kitchen, where the dishwasher rinsed its second load of the evening. On his way back he struck a hipbone on a coiner of the buffet in the hall.

"Damn thing doesn't belong in a hall anyway," he muttered to the house. But the dining room had two buffets already and no room for more. They all had some family history which Rachael could rattle off at a moment's notice. Both he and his daughter had tuned that out long ago.

He sat in the one comfortable chair the house could manage and surveyed the white-and-silver wedding bows on the glass-fronted antique cabinets whose shelves were lined with knickknacks and Rachael's cobalt-blue-glass collection. This room was too little even for the small ceremony to be held here in the morning. All cut up, with its many rooms overcrowded, the Gingerbread House was suited more for tiny fluttering old ladies like Bran than for full-grown males.

"I wondered where you were." Rachael glided in with a soft swish of her hostess gown and sat in the wooden platform rocker.

"I've had the strangest feeling all day." She glanced at the corners of the high ceiling.

"That's only natural." But he'd noticed it too. So had the dinner guests. His brothers-in-law hadn't bothered to tease each other. Ever since he'd carried that crappy old mirror down from the attic and gone to collect Bran from the nursing home, he'd had uneasy sensations in his middle. "Well, did you talk to her?"

"More like she talked to me." Rachael lit a cigarette, blew smoke at the chandelier. "She didn't admit to anything."

"Is she angry with us?"

"No. She just laughed in a nice . . ." Her lips trembled and she took a deep breath. "A nice condescending way. Why, Jerry? Why?"

"She's just bored. I hear it's all the rage." He wanted to cross the room, hold her. But he didn't. "Just bored. She always has been. But Jesus, marriage. That's like jumping off a bridge to scratch an itch."

"And she's twenty years old. There's nothing we can do." Rachael

stubbed out a half-smoked cigarette. "I suppose these days we should be

relieved she's marrying, not just moving in with him." She stood and
started for the doorway. "Mom didn't say any more, maybe it was just a ......."

Jerry was staring over the rim of his glass at the figurine of a shepherdess on the mantel, but his mind was seeing the willowy shape of his daughter, the long pale hair, the contrast of a summer's suntan, the sudden flashes of kinky wit that would light mischief in otherwise solemn, indifferent eyes . . .

When someone screamed upstairs. When the figurine toppled, to crash against a bellows below. When the Gingerbread House shuddered to its gables with a strange explosive impact. . .

Shay sat beside her grandmother after Rachael left. The rain had stopped but wind still lashed leaves around the streetlight and shadow silhouettes flickered across the bed.

"Mother's hopelessly old-fashioned, Grandma Bran," Shay whispered to the sleeping form. "Love! I've got to make a change sometime."

A hand moved on the coverlet and lids lifted on faded eyes that looked through Shay. "Book," Grandma Bran said, the bed shuddering as her body joined the struggle to say more.

And again Shay had the sensation of being drawn out of herself. She slipped off the bed and rubbed bare arms. Hearing even two spoken words after years of silence made her skin crawl.

If mind and speech were returning, would it be a blessing for someone almost a hundred years old?

Mercifully, her grandmother subsided into sleep and Shay tiptoed out, crossing the hall to her own room, where the flowered carpeting and wallpaper continued from the hallways both upstairs and down. If she never saw another pink-and-red printed posy in her life, Shay vowed, it'd be too soon.

Rachael'd decorated this room "little girl pretty." The frills and flounces left small space for Shay and her belongings. And with her wedding gift sitting in the middle, it was almost too cramped for air. She leaned over stacks of L.P.'s that blocked the heat from the baseboard heater in winter and opened the window. Rain and wind had brought the clean pine scent down from the mountainsides.

Shay turned to inspect her wedding gift. "Yuk! I remember you now."
Mother, I was fascinated by this monstrosity because it was so horrid, not because I liked it.
She wondered what she and Marek would do with it.

A full-length glass with a ragged crack running diagonally across the top. The crack would always cut across her face unless she stood on her head. But the worst was the frame, bronze molded in the shape of hands, long, slender but masculine-looking hands that slithered and entwined about each other like snakes, and all with talonlike fingernails. The base was a pair of hands turned downward, the mirror's weight resting on the thumb, forefinger and little finger on each hand.

Just looking at the thing gave her the shudders. After slipping into filmy baby-doll pajamas, she lifted the veil Grandma Bran was said to have worn at her wedding from its perch on a lampshade and tried it on. Another of her mother's treasures. How could Shay see well enough through the lace to descend the staircase? She giggled at a vision of herself in a heap of satin and lace at the foot of the stair, while embarrassed guests tried not to notice.

But she laughed aloud at her image in the wedding mirror. Even through the veil and the crack in the glass, her bare legs and straight hair dripping beneath the lace looked a comical mixture of time periods.

"No!"

The harsh voice startled Shay as she lifted the veil to see her grandmother swaying in the doorway, her shapeless nightgown and milky skin ghostly against the darkness of the hall.

Grandma Bran's eyes were locked on the wedding mirror.

"Grandma?"

"Corbin!" the old lady screamed.

Goose bumps prickled on Shay's arms. "No, Grandma, it's a . . ."

As their eyes met in the wedding mirror, the mirror began to hum. Waves in the glass undulated into the room on a sea of mist and swamped Shay in a sweating sickness. A cracking sound ripped the air with such force she was thrown to the floor. The carpet gave way beneath her and Shay fell in a blacked-out world filled with an old woman's screams.

3

The screams ended. Shay thought some disaster, natural or otherwise, had befallen the Gingerbread House.

She rose through layers of silent black. Sickness heaved inside her.

She whirled in sweeping circles that stopped when she reached the hardness of floor. The web of the veil's lace lay in a jumble in front of her face. Shay pushed it away and gagged.

She lay on a floor of varnished boards that smelled of oil and dust. The carpet with its gay posies had disappeared.

Pulling her knees under her, Shay raised herself on her hands. No stacks of L.P.'s, no baseboard heater. Just a foot-high baseboard stained dark brown instead of white. She swayed and fell back to the floor.

Footsteps, excited voices in the hall. . .

"What happened?"

"Sounded like dynamite. But I don't see anything's been blown up."

"Help me," Shay tried to shout, but it came as a whimper.

Blackness threatened her again and she twisted on the slippery floor to find something solid to hold to stop the swirling. Her hand met a cold talon at the base of the wedding mirror.

"Brandy?"

"What's wrong with her?" The voices were in the room now. "She must have fainted. You men go check the rest of the house. I'll unlace her. Brandy?"

"Just some water please." Shay felt a loosening around her ribs that allowed her to breathe deeply. "What's happening?"

"I don't know. Knocked pictures off the walls and broke dishes, but we can't find what or where it exploded. Here, I'll take out your hair." A constriction eased at the base of her skull, hair pulled as pins were removed. Who'd put pins in her hair? Hands rolled her over and she looked up into the face of a stranger.

"Lie still now. I'll get some water." The woman rose and brushed off the skirt of a gown that had a narrow waist and puffed at the bodice and sleeves. She closed the door and Shay was left staring at a queer-shaped lightbulb in the ceiling, its glass clear, its filaments visible.

The hideous mirror towered above her with all its entwined hands. It seemed to be the only familiar thing left in the room.

The chocolate-brown door that should have been white opened and the woman returned with a glass and a cool washcloth for Shay's forehead.

In profile, this stranger resembled Rachael. The same rich auburn hair, but this hair was braided and wound around the head, had a streak of gray on each side of the part.

"Mother?" Shay asked in sick confusion and tried to sharpen her focus.

"Yes, dear. You'll be all right." She placed the back of her fingers against Shay's cheek. "You're not fevered. But drink all of this."

When Shay'd finished the odd-tasting water, the woman helped her to stand.

Clutching the cold hands of the mirror, she swayed and looked down at an unfamiliar dress. It extended to the floor. The hair that fell over her shoulder reached to her waist. It was dark and curled at the ends. "Oh, my

God. . ."

"Brandy!" The woman helped her back onto a narrow bed and began to remove layers of clothing, her eyes avoiding Shay's body.

"But my hair--"

"We'll brush it extra in the morning."

"Sophie?" A male voice from the hall.

"Wait." The woman pulled a scratchy nightgown over Shay's head.

"You can come in now." Sophie tucked covers around her.

Two men entered, dressed like museum pieces in baggy trousers and shiny vests. It was like watching a movie and suddenly finding oneself a participant instead of a spectator. But there were no cameras. Had she struck her head?

"Can't find much damage inside or out. Must have been an earthquake, but I never heard they made a noise like that," the older man said in a precise drawl. "And I never heard of one happening around here."

"Heavens. Do you think it's over?" Sophie asked.

"I hope so." He moved to the foot of the bed, fingered his beard and peered at Shay over tiny wire-rimmed glasses. "And you, miss, had better have recovered from your fright. Whatever happened tonight makes no difference to tomorrow. You marry in the morning, Brandy McCabe, if I have to hold you up to the preacher myself."

Sophie turned the clammy washcloth over on Shay's forehead. "John--"

"Enough's been said on the matter, woman. You two have your little talk, and to bed." He motioned to the younger man, who'd been standing just inside the doorway with a halfhearted smile. "Come along, Elton, we'll have a nightcap to celebrate the wedding."

"Brandy McCabe," Shay said when the door had closed. "I don't believe this."

"I'm afraid you had better. I can't talk him out of it. Heaven knows I've tried. Sit up now and I'll braid your hair." A brush pulled through hair that wasn't Shay's and fingers began to twist it.

Shay breathed deeply, trying to thwart the remaining dizziness and her bewilderment at being recognized easily by odd people she'd never seen. She threw away a brief thought that her parents had hired actors to play this terrible joke on her to keep her from marrying Marek. That was as ridiculous as what was happening.

Sophie flopped the loose braid over Shay's shoulder, pushed her back and drew the covers to her chin. There were tiny crumbs or grains of sand where Shay's feet met the sheets.

"Now." Sophie sat ramrod straight on the edge of the bed, folded her hands in her lap and swallowed. "There are some things you must know before tomorrow. I have no idea how much you've learned from your friends but most of that is probably in error." Sophie looked about the room, looked at her hands but not at Shay. "When a man and woman marry, the man has certain . . . privileges ... of ... of the marriage bed."

Sophie stood and stared at the ceiling with her back to Shay. "There is a very slight pain on the wedding night, but not after that, and . . ." She'd been speaking slowly but now she blurted out in a rush, "and all you have to do is to relax and Mr. Strock will know what to do." She turned to the bed and, with tears in her eyes, took Shay's hand. "Always remember, Brandy, to be brave, and God will be watching over you. Someday he'll reward you with children."