The Antique Mirror

The old lady looked furtively from side to side and then said, “I’ll sell it cheap. I just want rid of it.”

“My dear madam,” he protested, “I can’t buy it right away. An item of this caliber needs to be authenticated and have some restoration work done and–”

“Take it now or it goes to the dump!” she said grimly. “I’m tired of waking up–”

And she closed her mouth, and not another word would she say.

He paid her two hundred fifty dollars for a mirror that, if it proved to have been owned by whom she claimed, could have been worth many times that.

He could never explain why he took it home with him.

*********************************

I’m tired of waking up. . .

The moon was full, and he had his usual trouble going to sleep under its influence, so, when the clock in the hall outside his room boomed three o’clock, he woke with a muffled curse.

After a moment, he realized that it hadn’t actually been the clock that had startled him awake; it was a light from the old lady’s mirror. He had hung it on the wall at the foot of his bed, and the moonlight–

No. That light was not moonlight.

It came from the mirror itself, a blazingly bright oval, contained within the frame.

What the–

He sat up, just as the light was broken by a shadow in front of the mirror.

The shadow was shaped, roughly, like a woman: not very tall but so thin she looked taller, and draped in a shapeless garment, darker than the dark surrounding it.

He slipped out of bed, more curious, in his still sleepy state, than afraid. He moved toward the figure, coming up behind it on its left side.

He could not see his own face in the mirror; he was at the wrong angle. But he could see the face of the shadowy figure beside him.

It was a woman’s face, old before its time, thin white hair straggling around skeletally thin features, eyes that had obviously once been a vivid blue now sunken and red-rimmed, skin gray and wrinkled.

Below her chin, a great weeping red slash ran across her throat.

He stepped back, horrified.

The face in the mirror suddenly stiffened, as if its owner realized she was being watched. She began to turn her head toward him.

The reflected image wobbled dangerously, as if the head were about to tumble off the neck.

He flung himself backward over the foot of the bed, scrambling toward the headboard, his one thought an absurd one: the covers. . .I’ll be safe if. . .

The head never turned, though; the light from the mirror suddenly flared red, as if a great wash of blood had obliterated its clarity.

And light and shadow were both gone.

He spent the rest of the night sitting bolt upright with every light in the room blazing.

*********************************

In the morning, he grimly began seeking documentation of the old woman’s story, and very shortly, found it: not in a portrait, but in a sketch of a woman about to die on the guillotine.

The woman was, as the old woman had said, a queen: Marie Antoinette of France.

He never was able to find, ultimately, if the antique mirror had actually belonged to the silly, frivolous girl who had died a sick, tormented, dethroned queen on the guillotine. He did find a few rumors in letters and estate documents that indicated that tradition had it that the mirror had once hung in her chambers at Versailles, and that the old lady who sold it to him–not to mention he himself–were far from the only ones who had been frightened witless by the spirit of the woman who had once been reflected in it.

He told the story only to one or two friends.

To those friends, he said that yes, he did know the old superstition that to break a mirror meant seven years bad luck, but he would rather chance the bad luck than risk another such visitation himself, or subject another owner to it.

He smashed the mirror and frame with a sledgehammer and put them out with his garbage one fine morning.

Not long after, reports began to come from the nearby landfill that workers coming in early to dump and sort garbage were startled, a few times, by a thin shadow, like a woman in a dark, torn garment. The shadow, however, always disappeared when approached.

*********************************

Last night I was watching Antiques Roadshow on PBS, and happened to remember the Appalachian tradition of the manabee–a spirit attached to some object, who will haunt any owner of the object until it’s passed on to another owner or destroyed. Couldn’t help but wonder if any of the appraisers have ever experienced any such phenomena. . .

So this little story is based on that speculation.

An ill-favored thing, as Shakespeare would put it–but as nearly as I can figure, mine own.

Copyright 2011 by Faire Lewis.