It started with reflections. Not just any reflection but a double mirror reflection. Like when I looked at the reflection off a bus window in the glass of a shop window, into the bus window, into the shop window… I’m sure it has happened to most everyone. But it was then that I noticed that the reflections seemed to melt, deform as if in a wave of heat, at the corners of details. I told my girlfriend and she laughed at me, at my paranoia.
She was a ballet dancer. And as I waited for her to finish, in a corner of the studio with its mirrored wall, I angled my watch to catch the light off the wall in its crystal. Amid the scissoring of flamingo legs, the pirouettes, my mind focused on the details within the details. And that’s when I saw three gaping holes staring out of the corner of her armpit. I started for my girlfriend to warn her but stopped myself. A quizzical frown played on her peachy face.
At IKEA, She looked on impassively on as I picked up a dozen loose pieces of cheap wall mirror -for my experiment. Back at our apartment, I affixed them to the wall with tack. I adjusted the angles and put some more on the opposing wall, the same way. She left me to it, so I set up a wireless HD webcam in the middle, hanging it off the ceiling.
It was almost 2am when I dozed off at my PC from where I had been monitoring the reflections, zooming in on those details. I counted 3 Edvard Munch scream faces. All of them with fangs. I had locked the door while I sipped my coffee, tense.
The next morning, after my girlfriend left for her rehearsal, I poured myself more coffee and checked the reflections again, scrubbing over those I missed while asleep. I saw her bustle about our living room, disorganized, on her cellphone, eating her oatmeal standing up, rushing to get a dozen things done at once. In one of the mirrors, a gnarled claw reached out. Oh no, I held my breath, but she turned, whipped round as the monster thing in her shadow warbled into ripples of light from the sun streaming through the lace curtains.
Some inquiries and excuses later, I was able to procure a moderately powerful green gas industrial laser which I lashed to the stumpy, round floor sweeping drone. When my girlfriend returned, she found I had laid out a spread of new vegetables, fruit, and nutty Tokaji wine. What’s the occasion, she wanted to know. So I told her I had killed a demon, the one that had been following us -through the reflections.
What if it has friends? she asked, almost choking on the wine. Well… I started, we have to be careful. Some people avoid mirrors, she stated, almost bored. Why? I asked. They haven’t souls, she said, they’re… vampires! She bit into a blood red pomegranate while offering me her neck, coyly. That’s how it begins, she laughed. Make me one of your kind.
Maybe she was right. I was the monster afraid of sunlight. She was fast asleep by my side when I got out of bed, gathered the mirrors and stepped out into the early hours of wintery morning. There, a young delivery boy with a bagful of newspapers and rosy blood-filled cheeks. I tilted my head to bite, as my hands gnarled into claws.
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