The Mirror (34 page)

They must be nasty because they were never discussed.

Her observations of animals at certain periods of the year did not reassure her.

Curiosity had led her to examine her body in the bath, using her fingers to feel what she couldn't see. The result had led more to confusion and guilt than to illumination.

Scarcely aware of the high-pitched but quiet hum at her back, Brandy went on with her tortured reasoning.

Were the strange sensations that sometimes attacked her body connected to this cleaving? Did they happen to others or just to her?

How could these experiences she feared be so terrible when many timid women went through them calmly, happily?

There were times when certain gentlemen seemed most attractive to Brandy. . . .

But not Mr. Strock. And not in a forced marriage. This was the twentieth century, if only the beginning, and . . .

The hum grew in intensity, broke into her thoughts.

Brandy turned to see the wedding veil float to the floor in a billow of lace. She bent to pick it up, realizing the mirror was preparing to do its magic.

Standing back to look at the glass, she saw not her reflection but dark gray twisting clouds that made the entwined hands surrounding it glow faintly green.

Brandy didn't understand. It wasn't storming.

She dropped the veil and put her hands over her ears as the humming tried to pierce her head. It had never seemed so loud before, or so threatening.

Brandy started to back away, but the clouds seeped from the base of the mirror to swirl across the floor and imprison her.

A sickness worse than the typhoid clamped upon her body.

A cracking sound ripped the air and she was thrown down, submerged in the horrid cloud. There was no floor beneath it.

Brandy fell into a blackness filled with the sound of harsh guttural screams.

2

The awful screaming ended. Brandy knew she had died.

She rose through silent layers of black. Sickness heaved inside her. Was she rising toward heaven after all? She'd imagined it to be a more pleasant experience.

She whirled in slow sweeping circles that stopped suddenly. Had she arrived?

No. The web of the wedding veil's lace lay in a jumble around her face. Brandy pushed it away and gagged.

Why would a veil go to heaven? Perhaps it was an angel's gown.

Perhaps she'd merely swooned and imagined the rest.

But she lay on a cushion of some kind with red and pink figures that her blurred vision couldn't identify.

Brandy raised herself on her hands. Nearby on the cushion lay a long crumpled shape. She blinked and focused on the wizened face of an ancient woman . . . with the sightless stare of death in her eyes.

Brandy swayed and fell back to the floor. The dizzy swirling began again.
This isn't heaven, but a dream. I must waken to he rid of it.

She fought the sickness and the suffocating texture of the cushion to push herself over onto her back.

The wedding mirror loomed above her, looking immense from her position. How did it get here?

Because this is a dream. Wake up, Brandy McCabe. Wake up.

"Do you think lightning struck the house?" someone said far away.

"Shay? ..." A man's voice, closer.

Brandy raised her head to see a white-framed doorway. A rush of movement and a lady and gentleman entered together, bumping against each other in their haste.

"Shay?" The man knelt next to Brandy. "What happened?"

"Mom? My God!" The lady fell to the floor beside the ancient woman.

"Not Shay. Brandy," Brandy explained to the man through the sick dryness of her mouth. His hair was fluffy and so long it covered the top half of his ears.

"Do you think . . . well, okay. Lie still, honey. I'll get it." He rushed from the room.

Brandy clamped her eyes tightly until colored lights played across the inside of her eyelids. But when she opened them the dream hadn't ended.

"What was it? An earthquake?" the lady asked Brandy. "It must have frightened her to death." Her face crumpled as she drew the dead woman to her breast and wept into snow-white hair, rocking back and forth.

These people spoke so rapidly Brandy had trouble separating the words to make sense of them. At least they spoke English.

The man returned to hold a glass to Brandy's lips. She realized that her hair was loose and down. But before she could wonder how or when it had happened, she'd swallowed some of the liquid in the glass. It wasn't water. It exploded on her tongue to burn down her throat. She sat up gasping. Tears blurred the room away.

"That was brandy!"

"Well, that is what you asked for. Here, let's see if you can stand," the man said gently. "Rachael, stop that. Help me with Shay."

Dizziness forced Brandy to cling to him as he drew her to her feet. "Can you tell us what happened, Shay?"

Brandy could only stare at her bare legs and feet. Both pairs seemed too long and thin. She wore a gossamer garment that stopped at her . . .
Dear God, I'm all but naked.

She looked up at the man in astonishment but he seemed to notice neither her embarrassment nor her exposed state.

And then, in the wedding mirror, she saw it wasn't her he held but the young woman with the pale hair and darkened skin Brandy'd seen in the same looking glass at the Gingerbread House. But where he clasped the woman in the mirror, Brandy felt the heat of his hands on the same place --on bare skin, for the garment had no sleeves either.

A jagged crack ran slantwise across the top of the mirror, where none had been before. It slashed the strange face in two.

Brandy swayed and so did the woman with the light hair.

"Shay? God . . . Rachael, will you help me here?"

But Rachael moaned and continued rocking her lifeless burden.

He guided Brandy to a ruffled bed, set her on the edge and picked up a shiny white object.

Turning it over, he poked square buttons and put one end to his ear. He sat beside her taking her hand in a familiar way. "It's all right, honey, I'm calling the twins."

Brandy, too stunned to pull away, sat half-naked on a bed with a strange man holding her hand.

"Hello, Remy? Jerry. I've got bad news. Your mother died . . . just now. Sorry to break it like this ... on the floor in Shay's room ... I don't know. Did you feel an earthquake out where you are? No? Must have been a sonic boom or something, I don't think lightning would do that and there's no fire. Anyway, it shook us up here and broke a few things. Might have frightened your mother into a final stroke . . . yeah, we'll never know. Listen, Remy, could you and Dan get back here quick? And bring Ruth and Elinore. I've got two hysterical women on my hands and need help."

"That is a telephone," Brandy announced when he replaced the ear-and mouthpiece all in one.

"Yeah . . . uh . . . listen, we better get you and your mom out of here, huh?" He lifted a strand of her hair, as she imagined a lover might, and drew it out away from her shoulder.

The hair he held gleamed pale blond but she could feel the pull on her scalp as it moved through his fingers.

I'm in the body of another.
That was why these people could know her when she didn't know them. She studied the ring on the body's finger, a lone diamond set in a plain setting. It caught the light and cast dazzle spots across the ceiling. "This is madness."

"Hey, it's going to be all right. Your old dad can handle this." He didn't look old enough to be the father of a grown daughter.

"You're shivering. You look like you're in some kind of shock. What a night for the old lady to kick off." He actually patted her bare leg as he rose from the bed.

This room was very much like hers in shape, but smaller, more crowded. The closet from which he brought a robe was in the same position as her own. The robe, a quilted thing of powder blue, had matching fuzzy slippers.

"Here, these'll warm you up."

Brandy was grateful not so much for the warmth as for the more modest covering.

This body was named Shay. These people were Shay's parents. The dead woman was Shay's grandmother. These facts whirled about her in the confusion.

Where is Brandy?

"Rachael?" He lifted Shay's mother to her feet.

She turned in his arms and hid her face against him. "Oh, Jerry."

"You knew this had to happen soon." Jerry stroked Rachael's hair. "She was ninety-eight. Now I want you two to go down and make some coffee. Shay, come help your mother."

Shay's head throbbed and Brandy felt none too steady on the new legs. But she didn't want to stay in this room.

When Brandy took her arm, Rachael leaned against her. As they left, Brandy turned to see Shay's father pick up the strange telephone again. What she'd thought was a cushion was really a rug that fit to the baseboards. It continued into the hall.

Rachael stopped at the head of a staircase and lifted a framed picture from the floor. "At least it isn't broken," she said dully. "Must have been an earthquake. What else would knock things off the wall that way?" She held it up. Tears streamed down her face. "Oh, Shay, she's gone forever."

Brandy stared. It was a picture of herself, Brandy McCabe, and a man she'd never seen. A photograph she'd never sat for.

This dream fascinated her more and more. Would she remember when she woke? As if . . . as if instead of watching the entertainments in the wedding mirror she was now a part of them . . . living them. Did its magic extend this far?

Jerry came up behind them. "Girls, I thought I told you to go to the kitchen."

Her thoughts in a turmoil but her senses painfully acute to her surroundings, Brandy descended a staircase with the same curve as the one at home. But here the steps were cushioned with that figured rug and the walls papered with the same design, tiny red and pink flowers gathered into nosegays. The air was close in this house.

Brandy stopped at the foot of the staircase. The buffet was unfamiliar, but the entry hall, the coat tree . .

She ran a hand over the balustrade. Black walnut inlaid with rosewood, just as Grandfather McCabe had ordered it made when the house was built.

"Is ... is this the Gingerbread House?"

The people turned to stare at her. They looked so lifelike.

"I'm in a dream. You are not real."

"Oh, baby," Rachael said. "I've been upset. I didn't realize ... I mean, you were there. Jerry, I'm worried. Look at her eyes."

"That's what I've been trying to tell you. The brandy didn't work. Let's try some coffee, quick."

"Is that what you do for shock?" Rachael drew Brandy around the base of the stairs and into the kitchen.

"Hell, I don't know."

The kitchen was where it should be, its windows and doors in their proper places, the cupboards had increased in number, but the strange and gleaming objects . . . the floor covered with small bricks that were really one piece of linoleum made to look like bricks . . . white walls . . . red and copper tones ... a strong shielded light set close to the ceiling.

This is the Gingerbread House in a future time.
Brandy's excitement grew. The wedding mirror had outdone itself.

She and Rachael sat at a table with a booth arrangement for seating. The man, Jerry, made coffee. His pants and shirt fit shockingly close to his body.

Rachael's gown clung to her slender frame with no sign of stays beneath, her face was painted, her lashes darkened. Traces of red lip rouge lined her mouth.

The planes of Rachael's face were similar to Sophie McCabe's, her hair thick and with the same red tints but without the streaks of gray. Was this woman a descendant of Elton's perhaps? The Gingerbread House would go to her brother on the death of her parents.

The coffee was made quickly and tasted like it--all the bitterness without the rich flavor and smell.

"I forgot, you'll want milk in that," Shay's father said when Brandy made a face.

"I don't like milk."

"You don't like milk?" He slid into the booth next to his wife. "Then tell me why the milk bill's gone out of sight."

"Perhaps you lost it."

"This is the strangest night I've ever lived." Rachael rubbed her forehead. "Next you'll be telling us you don't like chicken

"I'm not terribly fond of it."

Rachael took a paper package from a pocket in her gown and shook out a prerolled cigarette. It was the longest cigarette Brandy'd ever seen.

The man makes the coffee and his wife smokes the cigarette!

"Jerry, we have a problem here," Rachael said through a cloud of tobacco smoke. "Do you think we should call a doctor?"

"Nobody'd come to the house. We'd have to take her into the emergency room. This isn't physical anyway. I'll talk to Gale in the morning if she isn't more like herself. Shay, drink all that coffee."