What the Dead Want(11)

“Be careful,” her aunt said sharply, then seeming to catch herself, mumbled, “it’s very old.”

“It’s incredible,” Gretchen said, still uneasy about what she’d seen or not seen in it, and the obvious strangeness of the mirror having been pulled from some kind of wreckage.

“It will be hard to move,” her aunt said. “But you must take it with you. It can’t be left behind. I’m sure Hawk Green can help you lift it. You know Hawk? Course you don’t—you just got here, what am I thinking? He lives up the road . . .”

“I can’t possibly take this anywhere,” Gretchen said. “Why don’t you sell some of this stuff, Aunt Esther? I can help you list it on eBay or we can contact a collector.”

“You can do what you think is best,” Esther said. “I’m out of here.”

If Esther’s tone hadn’t been so easy and forthright she might have thought the woman was scared of something, or that she only had a few weeks to live.

“Don’t worry,” Esther said, as if reading Gretchen’s mind. “I don’t have a disease or anything like that. I’m not contagious.”

Gretchen turned back to the mirror, touched it, and then drew her hand away quickly. It was freezing, as if it were made of ice.

She looked more closely at the ornate faces of little girls carved into the frame; some of them were smiling, but some of them seemed, indeed, to be screaming or to be devils and not little girls at all. The vines were wrapped around their necks, tangled in their hair. Gretchen thought the mirror must be from the Victorian era. Her mother had taught her all about the Victorians. Back then, women wore necklaces woven from the hair of their dead loved ones. People displayed photographs of the bodies of their recently dead relatives—sometimes sitting up in chairs with their eyes wide open—on their mantels. They held séances and played with Ouija boards as commonly and casually as people watched Fresh Prince reruns and played Scrabble today.

She peered into it again, looking for what she might have seen. Then she stepped back, looked at her own mottled reflection. Her hair was a mess from having the window down on the drive and it looked very punk-chic, coming out of the topknot. She leaned in closer and it seemed another face was rising to the surface of the glass, just as she had imagined. Like it was rising from deep within a well, she watched the face open its mouth as if to scream.

Startled, Gretchen stepped back quickly; she had not opened her mouth or spoken a word. She whipped her head around to see what the mirror might be reflecting. Nothing there.

“See something?” Esther asked, squinting. “That’s a funny old mirror, isn’t it?”

Gretchen told herself she was just tired. It had been a long trip and she needed to eat something and then call Simon, maybe take some of the money Janine had given her and go book herself into a hotel. She’d yawned, was all, had opened her mouth without realizing it. She’d been scared of nothing but her own tired reflection.

Esther pointed through the door across from the mirror.

“Here’s your room,” she said. “The others are more . . . cluttered. This used to be the library.”

A new moldering smell—this time more bookshop than thrift store. The room was astonishing. Bookcases from floor to ceiling on three walls held thousands of books, old hardcovers, but contemporary-looking titles too—bright covers and paperbacks and dusty leather-bound tomes, a heavy oak table covered with papers and books and boxes of old photographs. Surrounded by three chairs, all carved in the same manner as the mirror. In the corner by the window there was an ornate four-poster bed with a quilt made of red and pale-blue triangles. A mosquito net hung delicately down over it and an old Persian rug sat at the foot.

“For the wasps, not mosquitos,” Esther said.

“I thought you said they didn’t sting.”

“I said I never got stung,” Esther said. “There’s a difference.”

Dingy moth-eaten lace curtains hung before leaded glass windows, facing the west, and sunlight was pouring through—maybe the door had been open a crack and the orange sunlight had reflected in the mirror and caused some trick of the light in the mirror. Gretchen was embarrassed she’d been scared by the mirror, embarrassed that she still felt scared, could feel the chill of the glass as if it had penetrated into her bones.

“I hope you’ll be happy here,” her aunt said. She stepped over to the wall, and pointed to two sepia-tinted portraits framed in black. “These are your great-great-great-great-grandparents, Fidelia and George Axton.”

In the portraits they were very young. Fidelia had dark eyes like Gretchen’s mother and the same shape face; it was uncanny how similar the expression was, amused but reserved, thoughtful. But her hair was certainly not the same as Mona’s wild curly mane. She’d had it combed down painfully straight and pulled back.

“Fidelia,” Gretchen said. “Was that a popular name?”

“I don’t know,” Esther said.

“My mother gave me an old journal by someone named Fidelia Moore, when I was a kid.”

Esther laughed. “What a coincidence,” she said playfully, looking at Gretchen like she was a little slow. “That happens to be your great-great-great-great-grandmother’s maiden name. And she kept plenty of journals. Years’ worth.”