Mirror of Shadows (7 page)

She didn’t even feel like she was crying as she thought of the funeral and how she’d never again hug her grandmother or hear her contagious laugh or her calling Ella’s name. The hot tears rolled down her face and puddled on her pillow as she thought about all things she would miss about her grandmother. Boo had been cleaning herself and purring away, but felt Ella’s tears and attempted to clean them away. Ella stroked the sweet thing and after a long while, sleep came to them both.

Strange, elaborate dreams bombarded Ella’s restless sleep—visions of violent fighting with her mother; her mother was trying to kill her, and her mother was wild with rage. Ella thwarted her deadly blows one after the other, jerking in her sleep with each dodge and block. Next she found herself watching a bar fight in a bar she didn’t recognize. Jeremy was beating the holy heck out of some bozo with red hair when Marlin came in, breaking up the fight, pulling Jeremy off the bloodied man. Jeremy’s victim barely moved. Jeremy spun out of Marlin’s strong grasp revealing to Ella a clear shot of his face. His lip was leaking blood from a large gash and swelling rapidly. Sweat poured from him, making his curls heavy, and his hair stuck to his face. Jeremy’s eyes were wild with what she could only assume was rage.

Swirls of black covered the image of Jeremy’s face, as if someone in the projector room of her dream was attempting to change the movie playing on the screen. There was the house—the house that was now Ella’s, as if time had peeled back the layers of muck and dirt and weeds. It was beautiful. Ancient oaks were nestled around it and their tremendous branches seemed to be reaching for the house as if to embrace it with love.

On the porch appeared a woman. Her hair was a golden red and she wore a simple but lovely flowing white gown. It looked gauzy but not revealing, and the skirt seemed to dance around her feet as she moved toward Ella. The woman looked concerned as she approached and when she was close enough for Ella to make out more detail, she found the woman’s eyes to be a familiar green color—a green she had only ever seen on one person—and that is when she realized the woman was a younger version of her grandmother Rose.

She started to speak to her. “My dear Ella.”

“Grandma, oh Grandma, I’m so sorry I wasn’t here before you died. I love you so much; I don’t know what I’m going to do without you.”

“Ella, don’t be silly, it was just my time. You have nothing to be sorry about. You will be fine without me. You’re strong, smart and amazing, but I didn’t come here to tell you that. I’m here to warn you, my dear.”

Like a skip or a jump in a movie film the scene in front of her flickered and started to fade.

“What? Grandma, what do you mean ‘warn me’?”

The picture became more faded and the whole scene seemed to be pulling away from Ella and filling in with black space until there was nothing to be seen. Before everything disappeared she heard her grandmother’s voice. It sounded garbled and far away when it said, “You’re in danger…,” then echoed and faded with each repetition until there was only silence.

*****

Another dream took the place of her grandmother’s voice—it was her new room in the house. Everything was washed in a dark blackish blue, but she could see. Something had awakened her; was it a voice? A noise? She wasn’t sure. She started walking as if she knew where she was going. She looked at the floor as her feet moved forward and she saw muddy foot prints. She seemed to be following these footprints. Down the stairs she crept, barely making a sound, to the hall where the mirror hung on the wall.

The footprints stopped in front of the wall as if the person who made the prints stopped to gaze upon the mirror then disappeared. Ella looked up into the reflective glass and saw once again a shadow forming at the perimeter of the mirror and moving towards the face that looked back upon her. She reached up to the glass to touch the shadowy surface. It reacted by moving away from her touch but not without first tingling her fingers with an icy sting that made her draw back her hand quickly.

The shadows grew and moved towards the center where her reflection looked back at her until it was all around her reflected head and all she could see was her face. It continued consuming her image like black ink until there was nothing in the mirror but black moving shadows. As Ella looked harder at the movement in the mirror a light started to appear from the center of the mass and a scene emerged.

She saw a woman in an old fashioned looking white nightdress—Edwardian, Ella thought. The woman’s shoulder length light brown curls bounced and waved behind her as she ran through the forest in her bare feet. The hem of her dress was black, soiled with mud and dirt. She seemed scared and running for her life. She moved agilely through the brush and fallen debris as if she was familiar with these woods. She kept looking over her shoulder for pursuers but at such quick instances that Ella never quite saw the woman’s face. With the next look back, the woman tripped on an unseen branch, throwing her forward into a roll and landing her in a pile of leaves and mud. The woman looked up quickly as if she had heard her attacker close by and for the first time Ella saw the woman’s face through sweaty locks of hair. Though dirtied with mud and marred with a fresh bloody cut, the face was all too familiar—it was Ella. As quickly as the woman had turned to face her attacker, the face disappeared into the black moving shadows.

Ella stumbled backwards, bumping into the wall behind her, feeling as though she had suddenly been ripped from another dimension. Next thing she knew, she found herself in her bed sitting upright, breathing hard and sweating. Trying to get a grip on what she had seen and realizing it must have all been a dream, she took a deep breath and looked around finding it was morning and the sun was just peeking over the mountains. Traces of rain that had run down the ceiling window sparkled in prisms like diamonds through the oncoming sunlight.

She pulled back the covers to get out of bed and a wave of panic pulsed through her body. She put her hand to her mouth, trying not to scream, as she found her feet covered in dry mud and her sheets soiled with dirt. Hadn’t it just been a dream? She couldn’t think. What had happened? Was she going crazy? She checked the floor but there were no footprints like in her dream. But how could her feet be covered in mud and not have tracked the mud into the room?

She reeled in fear and dread when a barrage of questions flooded her brain. She thought she was going to be sick and ran to the bathroom. A wave of nausea passed after she splashed her face with some cool water. When her breathing settled to a normal pace she took a long, hot shower and tried to wash away all the traces of the dream as she watched the dirty water swirl around the vortex of the drain then out of sight.

When she finally felt that reality might have come back, she turned the water off and dried off. As she started to get dressed she caught a glimpse of the sheets on the bed. Panic struck her again when she saw there was nothing on the sheets. No dirt. No mud. They were pristine, crisp white sheets. Her legs went limp and she fell to the ground in a boneless pile, weeping. Only half-dressed, she held her head for a moment, trying to make some sense of everything she’d experienced. It must have all been a dream—a terribly scary dream. Why had it carried into her wakefulness? She wondered if she was losing her mind. Had Grandma Rose’s death pushed her over some line into madness? She didn’t want to think about it, but at this point she thought it a distinct possibility.

Chapter 7

Ella moved through the day, pushing her dream out of her mind as far as she could. It rained all day, never really letting up, or getting any worse, kind of the way Ella felt—just a dull pain of grief and a sense of dread. She avoided the hallway with the mirror as if the plague were incubating there, but with the parade of trucks coming and going and depositing appliances and essentials to Ella’s new home, it was becoming a nuisance. Ella tried to rid her mind of the dream of her grandmother warning her of impending danger and the sudden flashes of her own terrified face staring back at her inside the mirror; it had burnt an impression on her brain that was not going to fade away any time soon.

Ella looked down at the counter seeing a hammer with blue tape around the neck of the handle. She grabbed it and headed for the hallway.

There were no delivery men to see her act of insanity as she approached the mirror, stood before it, and raised the hammer above her head. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and then swung the hammer down hard. The forward thrust of her arm was stopped with a strong firm hand at her wrist before the hammer made contact with the mirror. Before she could determine what had happened, a familiar voice spoke.

“What are you doing?” Jeremy asked, taking his hammer from her.

“I’m getting rid of this awful mirror. I hate it. It’s old, it’s gaudy, and it’s creepy.”

“Creepy? I’ll give you old and gaudy, but creepy?” he asked as he looked at their reflection within the mirror.

“Yes, creepy and if you make me explain, you’ll think I’m insane.”

“I already think you’re insane,” he said with such a straight face that Ella wondered if he was serious or joking. “You know, there are other ways of getting rid of things. This albatross is probably worth a fortune. Why don’t you just let me take it down and store it somewhere? Out of sight, out of mind,” he suggested.

“Fine. I don’t want to ever see it again,” she agreed.

“Fine.”

“By the way…what’s with the blue pin striping on your hammer?”

“It’s how I know what tools are mine. When you work a big job, your tools are bound to get mixed in with other contractors’ tools. The blue tape makes it easily identifiable,” he explained as he labored lifting the large mirror off the wall and setting it on the ground.

Ella tried not to look at it when she responded to Jeremy’s statement with, “Smart idea.”

“I thought so,” he said as he got a better grip on the mirror and lifted it again. Heading down the hall and towards the back of the house he said over his shoulder to her, “You’ll have to explain to me sometime why you felt it necessary to ‘kill’ the mirror.”

“Kill the mirror,” she repeated to herself. “Very funny.”

*****

Later that day, a knock came at the door. Ella had been loading the new washer with her seventh load of sheets that had covered the furniture in the house, and playing with Boo. She picked up the kitten and petted her as she made her way down the hall. She smiled as she passed where the mirror had been, now only an outline on the wall made from years and dirt. She was very pleased to have it gone and she stroked Boo as another knock came at the door.

“I’m coming,” she said as she approached.

She found Marlin on the other side greeting her with a smile.

“Marlin. Come in,” she said, opening the door wide.

“How are you doing? I see you survived your first night.”

“Mmm. Yes, I suppose I did,” she said thinking back on her strange dream.

“Rough night? These old houses make all kinds of moans and groans. It can take some getting used to,” he said, hoping to ease her mind.

“I suppose,” Ella responded uncertainly.

“You seem kind of shaken? Are you okay?” Marlin asked with concern as he sat down on an old Victorian chaise.

“Just a bad dream, I guess.”

“An imagination could run into over-time in a place like this,” he tried to reassure her.

“That’s probably it. It just seemed so…real…the mirror, the mud.”

“The mirror? What mud?” he said as he furrowed his brow.

“It’s nothing. I really don’t want to talk about it. It was just a bad dream,” she said trying to dismiss it again.

“Well, you have been through a lot in the last few days, with your grandmother’s death, the blow up with your mom, and moving into this old house. Cut yourself a little slack. Truthfully, I’m not sure how well I would fare sleeping in this old house by myself,” Marlin said, laughing a bit.

“Oh, but I wasn’t completely alone,” she corrected.

“I can see that. You’ve already found a little friend to keep you company,” he said as he reached out to Boo and scratched behind one of her ears.

“Yes. This is Boo. I found her in the house yesterday, but that isn’t what I meant.”

“Oh no?” he said, still petting Boo.

“Jeremy is staying here. He’s using the bedroom in the front of the house.”

Marlin stopped petting the cat and a look of fatherly concern washed over his face.

“I’m not so sure that is such a good idea, Sweet-pea,” Marlin said.

“Why? He doesn’t have a place to stay, and I’ve got this huge empty house. He’s going to be working here for quite a while, so it seemed only logical.”

“You’re a sweet girl, Ella, but you don’t know very much about him. He’s had some run-ins with the law. I just don’t think you should take in every stray you find,” he said as he stroked Boo again.

“He said the same thing to me, then he went on to tell me how you two met. He told me he’s made some mistakes. He’s been completely honest with me, so I’m willing to give him a chance.”