The Dickens Mirror by Ilsa J. Bick Read Free Book Online Page B

reality will assert itself. His life will be what he forces.
    Or … he’s the reflection, and what passes for his life will happen to the boy behind the mirror as he emerges into whatever world lies beyond the looking glass.
    It really comes down to which of them is the boy in a box.
    “Or you might just be kind of insane,” he says, and twists the knob. The tongue slips back with a
click
. The hinges let out a very soft and mousy
squeee
. A balloon of cooler air pillows into the room, chilling his face. Condensed steam rains, falling in a gentle patter onto his head and shoulders. The mirror instantly fogs again, leaving only a narrow strip of silvered glass low down near the faucet. The staring boy disappears.
    Teetering on the brink between this box and what lies beyond, he waits. For a split second, there’s nothing. No
kak-kak-kak
at all. And he thinks,
God, what if it’s really true? What if this is a different Merit where my mom isn’t
—
    “Honey?” His mother’s voice is as faint as a cloud dissolving under a hot sun. “Is that you, sweetheart?”
    For a second, he feels an absurd sweep of disappointment.
Shit
. It’s the same. His mom’s dying. God’s an asshole. Nothing has changed. So much for reality.
    “Coming, Mom,” he calls. “Just a sec.”
5
    IF THIS WERE a book, this would be the moment he wakes for real and the clockwork of his life resumes ticking. At that second, in fact, the name of the phenomenon he’s been searching for comes to him:
false awakening
. Or
double dream
. And of the two types he’s learned in abnormal psych, he’s having a Type 2: things are eerie, uncanny, terribly out of whack.
    But his eyes don’t snap open for the third time. He doesn’t awake in bed with his covers bunched around his ankles, sheet creases stenciled in the drool on his cheek, and his hair in corkscrews. Yet what he does is kind of what you might expect, given the situation. Given that mirror he’s cleared for the very first time that he can recall.
    Even so, he hesitates. Thinks about the ramifications and the reality he might be forcing if he does this. Because what if …
    If I see something weird, I’ll just close my eyes. It’ll be like the book where that black guy, the cook, tells the kid to shut his eyes and whatever he sees in that spooky hotel’ll go away
.
    So, he snatches a look back at the mirror.
6
    BIG MISTAKE .
    Because you know what they say about curiosity, and the cat.

TONY
    His Side of the Glass
1
    THE ENTIRE BATHROOM , from the walls to the ceiling to the floor, wavers. The room ripples and shimmies as if he’s standing atop a pond, still as a mirror, into which someone’s just dropped a stone.
God
. Poised on the threshold, he feels the wobble in his chest. His eyes drop to his hands, where wave after wave chases over his skin and deep in his bones, through his mind. The air crinkles with odd glimmers that, if he didn’t know better, actually might rip and pull apart to allow something on the other side
    (other side of what? what’s going on?)
    to crawl through,
    (crack the lid, take a peek)
    and suddenly, he’s not sure he’s even real anymore.
    By the time he registers all this, everything has firmed up again. It’s taken only the blink of an eye. He is solid and so is the room …
    In which he now sees something he shouldn’t.
2
    THE SHOWER STALL’S tucked in a far corner to his right, with the toilet squatting beside it, closer to the door. His sink is kitty-corner to the left. This means that the mirror offers a partial view of the shower stall, and a nice full frontal of the commode. This new scrim of fog hasn’t lifted quite yet, although that narrow ribbon of silver is wider now, slowly peeling back like an eyelid reluctant to admit,
Yeah, crap, another damn day
. A third of the mirror is clear. He can see the entire toilet and that he hasn’t put down the lid, but screw it: this is his bathroom, and he’s got decent aim. Half the shower stall