Topsy-Turvy

 

The Case of the Echoing Mirror (Part 2)

The pressure in the luxury bathroom did not snap with a violent crash; it dissolved like sugar in boiling water.

Suddenly, Detective Inspector Arthur Vance could breathe again. The cool, crisp air of the hotel room rushed into his lungs, carrying the sharp, medicinal scent of the peppermint his reflection had just crunched. His fingers, still wrapped tightly around the cross-hatch grip of his service revolver, felt stiff and impossibly heavy.

In the oval glass, the other Vance casually dusted a microscopic speck of lint from his lapel. The silver revolver in his hand remained perfectly level, pointed directly where Vance's throat met his collarbone.

"You always did take too long with your tea, Arthur," the reflection said. The voice didn’t travel through the glass. It drifted out from the porcelain bathtub behind Vance, hollow and wet, as if spoken through a long, metallic pipe. "The mints are getting stale. The ice is melting. And the committee hates to be kept waiting."

Vance did not look back at the bathtub. He kept his eyes locked on his own face in the mirror—or rather, the face that used to be his. He noticed a detail he had missed before: the reflection's silk necktie wasn't tied in his usual double-windsor. It was tied in a complex, overlapping knot that resembled a hanging noose.

"A charming knot," Vance said, his voice remarkably steady, though his knuckles were white. "But I don't believe I've introduced myself to a committee."

"Oh, they know you intimately," the reflection replied with a polite, terrifyingly thin smile.

From the bedroom outside, the chorus of pleasant voices called out again, closer this time, their tone dripping with flawless, hospitality-industry warmth: "Inspector Vance, the water is perfectly boiled. Do come out."

Slowly, the heavy mahogany bathroom door began to creak open.

Vance didn't look at the real door. He looked at the reflection of the door in the mirror. Through the gold-leaf frame, he watched as a dozen pale, flawlessly manicured hands slid around the woodwork. The fingers were long, completely devoid of knuckles, moving with the fluid, unnatural grace of sea anemones. They gripped the brass handle, pushing the door wide.

But when Vance finally forced his neck to turn, looking away from the glass to face the actual, physical bedroom behind him, his breath caught.

The hotel room was gone.

There were no velvet armchairs. There was no crackling hearth. Through the open bathroom doorway lay a vast, echoing expanse of absolute nothingness. The floorboards of the bedroom terminated sharply at the threshold, giving way to a sheer, endless drop into a subterranean cavern lit only by the pale, pulsing glow of millions of ticking grandfather clocks. The sound of their synchronized pendulum swings—tick, tock, tick, tock—vibrated through the soles of his boots like a collective heartbeat.

Suspended in the empty air above the chasm, sitting on invisible chairs around a massive, floating mahogany dining table, were twelve figures. They were dressed in immaculate, high-society evening wear, their white gloves resting politely on their laps. But where their faces should have been, there were only smooth, blank panes of polished silver mirror, reflecting the ticking clocks below.

The figure at the head of the floating table raised a porcelain teacup toward Vance.

"We've been waiting for forty years, Inspector," the head figure said. The voice didn't come from the cavern; it came directly out of Vance’s own mouth, his jaw moving entirely against his will. "Your seat is getting cold."

Vance lunged backward, his back hitting the marble sink. He raised his pistol, aiming it straight through the bathroom door at the faceless dinner party. But before his finger could find the trigger, a soft, deliberate tap sounded directly behind him.

He froze.

He slowly turned his head back to the mirror. The reflection was no longer standing inside the bathroom. It had stepped forward, pressing its face and its hands flat against the inside of the glass, distorting its features into a horrific, flattened mask. The cold blue light inside the mirror was fading rapidly into pitch blackness.

With a sickening, glassy schlich, the reflection's arm—still holding the silver revolver—began to push through the solid surface of the mirror, the silver barrel emerging into the real world, inches from Vance's nose.

"Be a gentleman, Arthur," his own voice whispered from the bathtub. "Don't make them use the good silver."

The barrel of the gun touched the center of Vance's forehead, ice-cold and smelling of oil. In the distance, the millions of ticking clocks suddenly stopped. Every single pendulum froze mid-swing. The absolute silence was deafening.

The finger on the silver trigger began to squeeze.

[To Be Continued in Part 3...]