Best Horror of the Year, Volume 7 by Ellen Datlow

Author:Ellen Datlow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781597808293
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Published: 2015-07-12T16:00:00+00:00

A moment later he was back in. He had the penlight on his keychain out and was shining it at the gap between the top mirror and the bottom one. He pressed his eye close, but no matter where he looked, no matter where he shone the light, the mirror behind it looked whole and complete.

III.

At first, he lied to his girlfriend, claiming he had gone to Utah and to his father’s ranch for the reading of the will, but had received nothing. But then, when the box came, he finally came clean. It was an old box, starting to collapse, and smelled dank. It was very heavy. The words “Bernt’s Pittance” were written on the side of it in his father’s careful hand.

He left the box sitting on the table for a day and a half. The evening of the second day, they were both sitting in bed, both reading, when she asked him when he was going to open it. He had put the book down on his chest and had begun to talk. She had let him, had interrupted only once, and when he was done she had curled up beside him one hand touching his shoulder softly, and said nothing. That had surprised him—he thought she might be angry that he had lied to her. But if she was angry, she kept it to herself.

Of course, he told her, nothing was really going on, it was just my imagination. It was just an ordinary trip. I was just noticing the things that under normal circumstances I wouldn’t notice. But as he told the story, moved bit by bit across the landscape between Reno and the small town whose name he had never quite figured out, it was all he could do not to panic again. He didn’t believe it was a normal trip. He believed it was anything but. And he believed that, somehow, his father was to blame.

The hardest part was explaining why seeing that, seeing the one mirror placed atop the other mirror, had been the thing that had turned him around and made him drive back to Reno, made him stop and rent a hotel room and drink himself nearly blind until he ran out of liquor and sobered up enough to realize enough time had elapsed to give his girlfriend the impression that he had gone to Utah. There hadn’t, he had to admit, been anything really wrong with the mirrors—but that, somehow, had been exactly what was wrong with them.

That had been the one time she had interrupted him. “Was it like what you saw in the storm cellar?” she asked.

But what had he seen in the storm cellar? He still didn’t know, and never would. Was that like the mirrors? No, that had been a hole in the ground containing curing strips of dried meat. How could twinned mirrors be like a hole in the ground and strips of meat? No, the only thing they had in common was that he felt like he couldn’t quite understand what either one was telling him.

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