'deprive a mirror of its silver and even the tsar won’t see his face. -Russian Proverb
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Fallowdell looked into the mirror and saw a man. Silver-limned, long-faced, wide grey eyes glazed, watching - it wasn’t him. But it never had been. Quietly, he pulled crumpled-crepe draping over the glass and left the room. It didn’t matter that his features were blunt, wide cheekbones and deepset eyes. It didn’t matter - it had never been him.
In the hall, he carefully avoided touching either baseboard or papered wall, cringing from patterned flame as if it might burn, burn its paper and singe his sleeve. The corridor wound round the house’s inner rooms, and fell into a spiral stair. He hesitated on the lip of the first step. The dark wood seemed too dark, and its stain ages past into hours of dreams and nights that might not wake to dawn.
He was used to these things. He patted his waistcoat pocket, just at his heart, reassuringly. The pen was still there; but it was the heartbeat he paused to feel.
Somehow, he saw things. Paper-thin shades and the flames in the manor’s flickering papered walls. Severino had said it was a gift, a lovely thing. Like rose, Fallowdell knew he had asked, like a flower to tend?
Ah well, something of the sort, had said Severino.
But what he meant with ambiguity was no. No, like he had intended to say when Fallowdell asked about the silvering in the mirror, and no, as he had meant when Fallowdell asked about the whereabouts of the manor and no, when he had wondered aloud whether the limp shadow near the garden shed was a lost man or man’s lost soul. Yet the shadow still hung, listless and fading, near the shed’s eastern corner. The manor remained, somewhere or other, among the northern hills and trailing moor below. With all of his seeing, some things were fog.
Severino never came now. In the beginning, he had. Like flame wicking up oil, thin and quick and slate-eyed, he came with the wind and told stories and asked questions. Oh, but was the manor quite warm now that Autumn was coming to winter? Oh, and had he seen the mirror? Oh, and would he mind gathering certain leaves during a certain hour and watch the far hill - yes, that one - for shadows?
Oh, but he had endless questions; endless tales; endless no’s.
Whether he were two-thousand and old as Christ or a fool of twenty, Fallowdell never cared to guess. His features, tight and somewhat frayed, seemed ageless - lineless, for he looked. But his eyes had lines; all the small, granite-crack threads of death laced his gaze, lighter in the slate blue and grey. When he watched closely, he even thought they grew, fissured when a certain anger or dejection flicked through them. But then, keen sight or no, the light within the manor could be deceiving. He felt, at times, that Severino was merely deception - a length of naughts and beneath -
It made him cringe, as from the paper’s painted flames.
For all his watching, there was something he never saw. The dissolving girl on the landing; she stood, a dust-mote to the gaze. He felt her stare when he passed. He dismissed it as ill-sleep or foolishness or the jumping of a man too used to silence to understand the whisper of another human being. Sometimes, he thought it the other in the mirror; he had the nightmare sense some nights that when he left the mirror, the man followed, a threadbare shadow and growing eyes treading noiseless down the hall behind.
Of course, that he had to dimiss as fearful rambling of the mind. He checked the mirror once at dawn and once in the evening, as Severino had said.
But Severino had forgotten Fallowdell. The days had drawn on from crystalline summer to the ice-rim of winter, through winter to spring, summer, stumbling into the beginnings of a wary Autumn again.
So Fallowdell checked the mirror - and the man - and watched curiously for the limp shadow by the shed. It kept distractions away. Why he did it, he had dropped. Severino’s no’s were adamant enough; and it was comforting, in a sallow sort of way, to have one’s tasks to do and tasks finished.
That was all until the mirror began appearing in his dreams. Its silver, he found, staining his palms; and its reflection - not his - crouched at the end of his bed.
Ragged-edged and fearful, he changed rooms. He closed his eyes and wondered if it might be a gift, to some, to be blind.
But the dreams kept on, sharper, more vividly and the silver stung his palms.
‘Severino!’ he called from the border of the grounds. Beyond the labyrinthine wall of climbing vine and shrubs, the road crept, a thin sliver of ash winding towards the South and the city. ‘Severino? I’m still here.’ His voice sounded too hoarse. And not even the wind answered - after all, Severino had always come with it.
With unwilling fear, he cursed the bond he’d given to stay. He tapped the the top-pocket in his waistcoat and felt his heart, halting, beat beneath.
‘Severino…’ he murmured, wandering through the house, head bowed. ‘Severino, Severino…’
That night, he slept propped against the head-board, one hand stuffed between half-buttoned waistcoat and his shirt, the other tangled in the sheets. No mirror-man crept into his dreams. He heard his heart, all night ‘til dawn, beating silence away.
He woke, staring into silver and dawn’s light, brilliant reflected. Grey eyes.
