Leiber, Fitz - SS - Midnight in the Mirror World.pdf - Fritz Leiber - przemosta

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From Fritz Leiber’s

The Mind Spider and Other Stories

MIDNIGHT IN THE

MIRROR WORLD

Fritz Leiber

As the dock downstairs began to clang out midnight's

twelve strokes, Giles Nefandor glanced into one of the

two big mirrors between which he was passing on his

nightly trip, regular as clockwork, from the telescopes on

the roof to the pianos and chessboards in the living room.

What he saw there made him stop and bunk and stare.

He was two steps above the mid-stair landing, where the

great wrought-iron chandelier with its freight of live and

dead electric bulbs swung m the dull fierce gusts of

wind coming through the broken, lead-webbed, dramond-

paned windows. It swung like a pendulum—a wilder yet

more ponderous pendulum than that in the tall clock

twanging relentlessly downstairs. He stayed aware of its

menace as he peered in the mirror.

Since there was a second mirror behind him, what he

saw in the one he faced was not a single reflection of him-

self, but many, each smaller and dimmer than the one in

front of it—a half-spread stack of reflections going off to-

ward infinity. Each reflection, except the eighth, showed

against a background of mirror-gloom only his dark lean

aquiline face, or at least the edge of it—from bucket-size

down to dime-size—peering back at him intently from un-

der its sleek crown of black, silver-shot hair.

But in the eighth reflection his hair was wildly dis-

ordered and his face was leaden-green, gape-jawed, and

bulging-eyed with horror.

Also, his eighth reflection was not alone. Beside it was

a thin black figure from which a ribbony black arm

reached out and lay on his reflected shoulder. He could

see only the edge of the black figure—most of it was hid-

den by the reflected gilt mirror frame—but he was sure it

was thin.

The look of horror on his face in that reflection was so

intense and so suggestive of strangulation that he clutched

at his throat with both hands.

All his reflections, from the nearly life-size giants to the

Lilliputians, copied this sudden gesture—except the eighth.

The eleventh stroke of midnight resounded brassily. An

especially fierce gust of wind blew the chandelier closer

to him so that one of its black hook-fingered arms ap-

proached his shoulder and he cringed away from it before

he recognized it for the familiar object it was. It-should

have been hung higher, he was such a tall man, and he

should have had the window repaired, but his head missed

the chandelier except when the wind blew hard and after

he'd been unable to find a craftsman who could work

leaded glass, he had not bothered about either chore.

The twelfth stroke clanged.

When he looked into the mirror the next instant, all

strangeness was gone. His eighth reflection was like the

rest. All his reflections were alike, even the dimmest most

distant ones that melted into mirror smoke. And there was

no sign of a black figure in any one of them, although he

peered until his vision blurred.

He continued downstairs, choosing a moment when the

chandelier was swinging away from him. He went immedi-

ately to his Steinway and played Scriabin preludes and

sonatas until dawn, fighting the wind with them until it

slunk away then analysed chess positions in the latest

Russian tournament until the oppressive daylight had-

wearied him enough for sleep. From time to time he

thought about what he had glimpsed in the mirror, and

each time it seemed to him more likely that the disordered

eighth reflection had been an optical illusion. His eyes had

been strained and weary with star-gazing when it had hap-

pened. There had been those rushing shadows from the

swinging chandelier, or even his narrow black necktie

blown by the wind, while the thin black figure might

have been simply a partial second reflection of his own

black clothes—imperfections in the mirror could explain

why these things had stood out only in the eighth reflec-

tion. For that matter the odd appearance of his face in

that reflection might have been due to no more than a tar-

nished spot in the mirror's silvering. Like this whole vast

house—and himself—the mirror was decaying.

He awoke when the first stars, winking on in the sky of

deepening blue, signaled his personal dawn. He had al-

most forgotten the incident of the mirror by the time he

went upstairs, donned stadium boots and hooded long

sheepskin coat in the cupola room, and went out on the

widow's walk to uncap his telescopes and take up his star-

gazing. He made, as he realized, a quite medieval figure,

except that the intruders in his heavens were not comets

mostly, but Earth satellites moving at their characteristic

crawl of twenty-some minutes from zenith to horizon.

He resolved a difficult double in Canis Major and was

almost certain he saw a pale gas front advancing across

the blackness of the Horsehead Nebula.

Finally he capped and shrouded his instruments and

went inside. Habit started him downstairs and put him

between the mirrors above the landing at the same minute

and second of the day as he had arrived at that spot

last night. There was no wind and the black chandelier

with -its- asymmatric constellation of bulbs hung motionless

on its black chain. No reeling shadows tonight. Otherwise

everything was exactly the same.

And while the clock struck twelve, he saw in the mirror

exactly what he had seen last night: tiny pale horror-

struck Nefandor-face, black ribbon-arm touching its shoul-

der or neck, as if arresting him or summoning him to

some doom. Tonight perhaps a little more of the black

figure showed, as if it peered with one indistinguishable

eye around the tinied gold frame.

Only this time it was not the eighth reflection that

showed these abnormalities, but the seventh.

And this time when the glassy aberration vanished with

the twelfth brassy stroke, he found it less easy to keep

his thoughts from dwelling obsessively on the event. He

also found himself groping for an explanation in terms of

an hallucination rather than an optical illusion: an opti-

cal illusion that came so pat two nights running was

hardly credible. And yet an hallucination that confined

itself to only one in a stack of reflections was also most

odd.

Most of all, the elusive malignity of the thin black

figure struck him much more forcibly than it had the

previous night. An hallucination—or ghost or demon—

that met you face to face was one thing. You could strike

out at it, hysterically claw at it, try to drive your fist through

it. But a black ghost that lurked in a mirror, and not

only that but in the deepest depthy of a mirror, behind

many panes of thick glass (somehow the reflected panes

seemed as real as the actual ones), working its evil will

on your powerless shrunken image there—that implied a

craftiness and caution and horrid calculation which fitted

very well with the figure's cat-and-mousing advance from

the eighth reflection to the seventh. The implication was

that here was a being who hated Giles Nefandor with

demonic intensity.

This night and morning he avoided the eerie Scriabia

and played only dancimgly brisk pieces by Mozart, while

the chess games he analysed were frolicsome attacking

ones by Anderssen, Kieseritzky, and the youthful Steinitz.

He had decided to wait another twenty-four hours and

then if the figure appeared a third time, systematically

analyse the matter and decide on what steps to take.

Yet meanwhile he could not wholly keep himself from

searching his memory for people whom he had injured to

the degree that they would bear him a bitter and enduring

hatred. But although he searched quite conscientiously,

by snatches, through the five and a half decades over

which his memory stretched, he found no very likely can-

didates for the position of Arch-Hater or Hater to the

Death of Giles Nefandor. He was a gentle person and,

cushioned by inherited wealth, had never had to commit

a murder or steal a large sum of money. He had wived,

begat, divorced—or rather,, been divorced. His wife had

, remarried profitably, his children were successful in far

places, he had enough money to maintain his long body

and his tall house while both mouldered and to indulge his

mild passions for the most ethereal of the arts, the most

coolly aloof of the sciences,, and the most darkly profound

of the games.

Professional rivals? He no longer played in chess tour-

naments, confining his activities in that direction to a few

correspondence games. He gave no more piano recitals. .

While his contributions to astronomical journals were of

the fewest and involved no disputes.

Women? At the time of his divorce, he had hoped it

Would free him to find new relationships, but his lonely

habits had proved too comfortable and strong and he had

never taken up the search. Perhaps in his vanity he had

dreaded failure—or merely the effort.

At this point he became aware of a memory buried in

his mind, like a dark seed, but it refused to come clear.

Something about chess? ... no ...

Really, he had done nothing much to anyone, for good

or ill, he decided. Why should anyone hate him for doing

nothing?—hate him enough to .chase his image through

mirrors?—he asked himself fruitlessly as he watched Kie-

seritzky's black queen implacably pursue Anderssen's

•white king.

The next night he carefully timed his descent of the

stairs, using his precision clocks in the cupola—with the

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