Afraid of angering her any further, Nora did as she was told. The mirror was even heavier than it had seemed to her as a child. She could barely lift it.
“Look.” The voice was closer now (the witch coming in for the kill).
Tears of terror and defeat slid down Nora’s face. She didn’t want to look in the mirror. Because when her sister had looked into it, the unvarnished truth had looked back out at them both.Gretel is soon to die,it had said, and a few days later she was dead. The mirror told the truth, unlike the enchantments of a powerful witch (or the fantastical stories conjured by a dying mind).
That was what made the mirror so heavy. She could feel it now, heavy in her hand: the true nature of all that had happened tonight after she broke into this place. All she had to do was look, but now Nora wasn’t so sure she wanted to know. Didn’t think she could handle it, and anyway (as it had slowly, painfully dawned on her) it was already too late.
She was too tired now to think. So maybe this bedroom or forest floor or whatever it was would be a good place to nap after all. It would have to be. She could hardly hold her head up anymore, much less this weighty hand mirror.
“Please,” the voice said, directly behind her now. The clear voice of a young girl. So close that Nora could feel her breath on the back of her neck, but she wasn’t afraid becauseit wasn’t the witch’s breath. And it wasn’t the witch’s voice. It was the voice of someone else, someone Nora knew.
“Listen to me!” The girl was pleading with her now, and Nora began to choke on her own breath. “Look into the mirror! Look! Look!” The girl was starting to sound panicky.
Nora’s tears of terror and defeat gave way to tears of awe. She made a real effort to turn around, not so easy when she felt this good, this heavy. This ready. She tried, with what little strength she had left, to turn back and see that face again, the one she had been missing all these years.
“No! Not at me—at the mirror! Look!”
Nora let out a sigh that poured warmly down her neck.
“Oh,please, Nora. Do it for me. Won’t you? Just look—look in the mirror, look—”
“Fine,” Nora exhaled without much force. If it really meant so much to her big sister, she would haul the mirror to her face and have a look.
And then she saw herself.
The moon had shifted ever so slightly in the sky since she had crept into Ms. Martin’s bedroom, and now there was a little more light filtering in through the curtains. Just enough so that when Nora dragged her eyelids up to see what the hell was actually going on here, she found she could see the whole room.
It wasn’t nearly as long as she’d thought; it had just looked that way because of how narrow it was. Maybe a few feet slimmer and a few yards longer than your average master bedroom, but otherwise not so unusual.
Behind her was the door she’d come in through, a door like any other. She had closed it behind her so the light fromthe window-lined hall wouldn’t follow her in and wake Ms. Martin.
Then there was the front half of the bedroom, the part where Nora now found herself lying on the shag carpet, vomit and tears running down her face. She struggled to think through the pain hammering her head and lungs. She couldn’t catch a breath. She was suffocating, the resiny smell of pine incense like a rag held to her nose and mouth, and beneath it, that horrible (killing) rot.
Her view of the far side of the room was hindered by an overstuffed armchair and the dozen or so potted plants carefully arranged around it and below the nearby window. She needed to sit up so she could see what was over there. But she found it hard to. The world spun as it had the few times she’d drunk too much alcohol, with that feeling she got just before throwing up. But worse. Her fingers clawed into the rug. Bile frothed from her lips. Clenching her teeth, she pushed down with every ounce of strength until she was up on all fours, peering over the chair’s overstuffed arm to the other side of the room.
Her wavy gaze slowly settled on the bed. Those tall posts and the ornate headboard she now recalled seeing just before she went down.
And on the bed, a body.
There were her feet, pale and wrinkled. The only part of the elderly woman sticking out from under the blanket. The rest of her nothing but a lumpy shape not much larger than a child. She wasn’t moving.
And just beyond the elderly woman on her bed, built into the far end of the room, into that wall Nora had briefly feared would never come: a fireplace. Its mouth lined with pretty ceramic tiles painted with patterns that were probably colorful when a fire was burning but just looked like scribblesin this light. And yet there was something about those scribbles that made her lean in, squinting. Something about the way they moved. Or no, not thewaythey moved but the fact that they moved at all.
Why were the designs on the fireplace tiles moving?
The question (the very air) felt so heavy that she lowered her head to rest on the soft arm of the overstuffed chair and think. And what a perfect pillow the arm was; she’d have loved nothing more than a nap.
But then it clicked: It wasn’t the designs on the fireplace that were rippling. It was the air itself. Like the air around the burner of a gas stove just before the spark ignites.
She would have gasped if there was fresh air to draw upon. Instead she heaved in a strangled, muted cry and army crawled as if through quicksand back across the shag carpet and to the door, which she pried open.
She pulled herself out into the hall. The long hall, swinging before her like a rope bridge over a chasm in high winds. Head down, she sucked in the relatively clean air just outside the bedroom but could feel the poison escaping alongside her as she inched her way toward a window.
She reached up and grabbed onto its sill, knocking a small fern to the floor, smashing its pot, spilling its dirt. She got herself back on her feet, pressed her palms to the cool glass, and pushed up as if her life depended on it, because it did. And when the window moved, she curled her fingers beneath the sash, hauled it the rest of the way up, and smashed her face, mouth wide, to the screen.
She gulped the air. Once. Twice. Then she punched out the window screen and leaned out into the wide night.
Breathed.
