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As you can tell, things were going weird for me before I'd even gained the suitcase. But it was only when I was staying with my sister that I realised things were more fucked up than just being my overactive imagination.
I remember being a kid, I was scared stupid by mirrors. Now, back with Jackie in our parent's old house, it was all coming back to me.
"You look seriously fucked," Jackie had said.
"Thanks! You look great too, lost weight and everything."
"Cheek, you know what I mean... What happened to you?"
"Looks like Steph found herself another bloke. Big guy, too. Could have broken me in half with his eyebrows. Nice thing was, she didn't actually tell me. I come home, he's there with their friends, like it's all normal and I'm the fucking weakest link. So I bailed. Just walked. I can't even remember how I got back here. I just feel so tired."
"Well, you know where the spare room is. Your old room. Sleep, sort your head out. You can stay as long as you like."
Walking up the stairs, the old dresser in my parents' room was still in the same place as I remember it. A huge, deep brown, wooden monstrosity, with one of those vast three panel mirrors above it. As you turn the corner at the top of the first flight of stairs, you see yourself face on, climbing to the landing outside the rooms. As a kid, I remember seeing myself in that mirror in the half light of imminent sleep, and being convinced that my face looked wrong, or that the reflection would do something different. In sheer terror, I'd climb the stairs to my room, come to that first corner, and make a giant leap to the opposite wall. I'd climb the last few steps and walk the landing towards that room clinging to the wall so I couldn't be seen by the mirror.
Not so that I couldn't see myself in the mirror, so the mirror wouldn't see me. Like it was some sentient thing, some mass of reflective intelligence, or something sinister. The room beyond, a false and evil reality that would attack or distort.
Climbing those stairs, I was seven years old again. No matter how many years may have passed, the same tingling sweat mounted as I approached my parent's room.
Jackie had these cats. Marv and Martha. M&M as she called them. Two fairly docile black cats. The kind that used to follow each other around and sleep in the same basket. Sitting on that old dresser was one of them. Christ knows which one it was, they're both just black cats, but there was one of them, staring at itself in the mirror.
"C'mon, man... you can do this," I said to myself and mustered up the courage to face my old fears. Taking a deep breath, I went into the room and stepped closer to the dresser and to the mirror. The cat was mesmerised by its own reflection. Its head twitched from side to side, almost trying to see around its mirror image into the backwards room beyond. That was when I noticed the reflection. It wasn't keeping up with the cat in the room, it started to move independently. The reflection cat turned to look at me, and I realised it wasn't a mirror image, it was the other cat. Marv or Martha was within the mirror, its sibling still in our world wondering how to get them back.
Looking closely, I could see the collar of the reflected cat. varM. Martha pawed at the other, the surface of the glass bending slightly as her pad touched it.
I wasn't there. Not in the mirror. It was just the mirrored room. I shoo'd Martha away, brushing her onto the floor, where she skittered away and hid under my parent's old bed. The mirrored Marv stared at me, and mimicked his sister in pawing the glass from the other side. I had to help, and reached for the surface of the mirror. It seemed flexible, soft, almost a pool of gelatin with a thin film on the surface. I forced my hand further, hoping to grab Marv by the scruff to pull him back to where he belongs, but instead the cat was scared, lashing out at me.
The room swam, a wave of nausea.
Falling to the floor again. I seem to spend a lot of my time crawling on the floor. I remember seeing Martha scowling at me under the bed, ears back and hissing. The pain in my hand where mirror-Marv had bitten and swiped at me. The smell of carpet as I crawled to the stairs that lead up to the childish safety of my old room. The strange silver coating on my little finger, throbbing.
It would be possibly the best thing that I'd loose that finger (and the one adjacent) to the lawn trimmer wielding thugs that were hunting Miles.
