Night Monsters by Fritz Leiber

Author:Fritz Leiber [Leiber, Fritz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror, Science Fiction/Fantasy
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The next night he carefully timed his descent of the stairs, using his precision clocks in the cupola—with the result that (precision machinery proving less reliable than habit) the downstairs clock had already struck five strokes when he thrust himself breathlessly between the mirrors above the landing. But his greenish horrorstruck face was there—in the sixth reflection this time, as he’d fatalistically assumed it would be—and the slender black figure was there too with outstretched arm; this time he seemed to detect that it was wearing a veil or stocking-mask: he could distinguish none of its features, but there was a faint shimmering in the face area, rather like the pale gas front he had once again detected crossing the Horsehead Nebula.

This night he completely altered his routine, neither opening a piano nor setting out any of the chessmen. Instead he lay for an hour with eyes shut, to rest them, and then spent the rest of the night and morning investigating reflections of reflections in the mirrors on the stairs and in two somewhat smaller ones which he set up in the living room and tilted by the fractional inch to get the best effects.

By the end of that time he had made a number of interesting discoveries. He’d noted reflections of reflections before, especially on the stairs, and been amused by their oddity, but he’d never thought about them systematically and certainly never experimented with them. They turned out to be a fascinating little field of study—vest-pocket optics—a science in miniature.

Vest-pocket wasn’t such a bad designation, because you had to stick your vest and yourself between the two mirrors in order to observe the phenomena. Though come to think of it, you ought to be able to do the same thing with a periscope held sideways, by that means introducing your vision between the mirrors without introducing yourself. It might be worth trying.

But getting back to basics, when you stood between nearly parallel mirrors, looking at one, you saw first the direct reflection of your face, next the reflection of the back of your head in the mirror behind you; then, barely visible around those two, you saw the second reflection of your face, really just an edge of hair and cheek and hair; then the second reflection of the back of your head, and so on. As the heads grew smaller, you saw more of each, until the entire face became visible, quite tiny and dim.

This meant, for one thing, that the eighth reflection he’d seen the first midnight had really been the fifteenth, since he’d only counted reflections of his face, as far as he could remember, and between every two of those there was a reflection of the back of his head. Oh, this mirror world, he decided, was fascinating! Or worlds, rather—a series of shells around him, like the crystal globes of Ptolemaic astronomy in which the stars and planets were set, going out in theory to infinity, and in each shell himself staring at himself in the next shell.

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