I finally reached it. The shadowy tower of stone blocks rose into the air above the fetid, muddy swampland. Twisting and turning as it rose, it was covered in moss, vines, and slime, and deyed a sickly verdigris by something I didn’t even want to imagine. It stood in solitary midnight watch over the noxious, dark pools, and tiny, weed encrusted isles of the mire. I trudged my way through the final stretch of dirty water before stepping up to its massive, rotted, wooden door, and giving several enthusiastic raps. I heard nothing in response, and after giving ample time for anyone who may have been inside to answer the knocks, swung the door open myself.
The air inside was stagnant and dead, stinking of mildew and mold. My lantern shined on nothing but cobwebs and heavily dusted furniture arranged against the walls. The place was abandoned and had been for decades. I still gave the courtesy of a knock on the off chance that someone may have squatted within the place, but apparently that was not the case. The tower had belonged to my family, and both my father, my grandfather, and his father before him had inhabited the place. Upon my father’s death last year, ownership of the decrepit tower fell to me. I didn’t really want anything to do with it, to be completely honest; but I still came out to see if anything of interest remained inside after all of these years.
It was a week-long trip between the two locations, and I was admittedly fairly disappointed upon seeing the state of the place. What excited me, though, was the discovery that the place was still completely full of the possessions that had once belonged to my family members. Every container and cupboard were completely full to the brim. I began opening cabinets, cases, and boxes like some kind of burglar. Books, cooking-ware, and various tools were stored on the first floor. The second, entered via a weaving stone staircase, contained mostly clothes and shoes. The third floor, up yet another flight of stairs, was full of decorations, retired furniture, and other household objects. The fourth floor was the only one still arranged as it probably was back when the place was still inhabited; it was a simple communal bedroom with 6 beds lined up across from each other, Three to a wall. I felt defeated after tearing through the place and finding nothing in terms of both sentimental and monetary value, but just before I was planning to descend the tower and leave, I noticed a rope hanging from a hatch in the ceiling that indicated another floor— I had thought that the building looked taller from the outside, and was right.
The top chamber in the tower was somehow even dustier than the rest of the edifice, which suggested that the room was already scarcely entered even during the times when the rest of the building was lively. The two objects contained within the room— a tall vertical mirror and a well-crafted hardwood desk— were coated in a thick, sandy film of grime. The room was quite small, maybe only a third the size of the others, but it was by far the most intriguing. Within the drawers of the desk were items the likes of which I was hoping to find interspersed throughout the rest of the house. Notes and manuscripts belonging to various ancestors, trinkets and keepsakes of a more personal nature, and old paintings and photographs. One thing caught my eye the most out of the group relics, though; a truly bizarre piece of writing composed by my great-grandfather, Hemlock II. To give the full effect of this note, I am going to relay it in its entirety. That’s the only way to experience even a sliver of the uncanniness that I felt upon seeing it while standing in that withered old tower next to that terrible inky mirror.
#
I could not tell you what I saw, for you would not understand. I apologize. It pains me to my very soul to lie to you, but know this, Wilhelm; I withheld this information purely for your safety and sanity. You will one day know what I know, but I wish to keep your innocence untainted for as long as I can allow. Whether you find out from this note, or on your own, I think you will be ready (more so than I was, at least) when the time eventually comes.
I’m sure that you have noticed the unorthodox nature of our family and have questioned our isolation from not only other people, but from nature itself at times. It bothered me when I was young too. But I see that necessity of it now; it’s because of this mirror.
I knew about it from my earliest years, but I only came to understand the full context of its functionality after my mother passed on when I was only a year or two older than you are now. I ascended the tower, entered the attic, and found her lying dead in front of it; her hands still clasped around its stand, as if she was trying to pull it somewhere.
It was a deeply traumatic moment for me, as it would be for any young boy, but that was only the first of many horrors that I experienced in a brief period. After that, it was just me, my father, my grandfather, and my sister living in the tower. Life was joyless after that moment. We never even held a funeral. Father buried her outside somewhere and never said another word about it to us. We avoided the topic like a sin and avoided each other the same. For around a year, that went on. Eventually, all that tension built and came to a head, and our silence turned to violence and rage. We screamed at each other all day long, for any reason we could find. This attic became my escape from that. My horrific memories of the place were still better than the present conflicts of the rest of the house— at least I thought that at the time. Just a week after I began frequently visiting the room, the mirror revealed its secret to me. I’m confident that it will show you too. Do not be afraid. What it displays might be hard to endure, but do not be afraid. Go where it guides you, and you will find peace.
#
After reading that, a feeling of dread came over me I had not yet experienced in adulthood. It was something that I thought I had left behind. Chills ran up my legs and arms, and I physically shivered. I stepped to the mirror, wiping away the dust and filth from its screen. Something about it was strange— in a way that I hadn’t expected. It wasn’t even really a mirror at all. The thing was pitch black, and I mean that in a literal sense. It was darker than the night sky; darker than any cave; darker than even dreams. It was pure shadow. Even my lantern did nothing to increase its brightness. The color made it difficult to make out any reflections on its surface, but it clearly worked to some extent. I could vaguely see the distorted form of myself, but the background was pretty much nonexistent. For the following hour or so, I experimented with the mirror hoping to find the mirror’s ‘secret’, but after discovering nothing, gave up and poured through the rest of the belongings inside of the old desk. There were more varied artifacts and papers, but nothing of a similar oddity to the manuscript written by Hemlock II, and I eventually resigned for the night after reading 4:32am on my watch. I climbed back into the bedchamber below, closed the hatch with a rattling bang, and slipped into the covers of a rank, sour smelling bed.
I was half expecting to be awoken by a bump in the night or the howl of a beast, but my sleep passed without incident. It was what happened in the false security presented by the morning that made me sprint from the tower.
#
I ascended back into the attic after waking to further examine the curious mirror, only to find that it had changed. It was no longer the void of blackness that it was last night; it was now a soft blue that contained a subtle orange. That was when I realized that it was not intended to be a mirror. It was a window. It showed a view as if one was lying flat on his back in a field, staring up at the sky. I felt the mirror for any sign that this might have been some form of illusion or trickery, but there was none. It was real. I sat staring at it for a while, theorizing possible explanations, but even that analytical side of my mind couldn’t explain it.
As I continued to fiddle with it, my foot slipped, the mirror tipped, and it slid down to a 45-degree angle while leaning against the wall. That was what made me realize what I was really looking at. The mirror’s movement not only changed the position that I was viewing the glass from, but it changed the perspective of the image inside. Now, instead of the sky, it pointed down at the horizon, off a cliff overlooking the sea. The only problem was that this cliff was the cliff upon which I had built my house just a few years before.
I was too stunned to move for a moment, but I eventually lifted the mirror and began to move it around to see the rest of the scene (not without a large amount of latent hesitation). Everything was as it was when I left. The wood that I had just chopped to expand the fence was piled next to the door, my son’s newly assembled swing shuddered in the wind, and my wife sat in her chair on the porch, sipping a cup of tea. It wasn’t displaying the future or past like some kind of children’s tale; it was a perfect image of the present. Why did it show my house, though? That was the question that nagged at my mind while I watched my home reflected in the unnatural mirror. What purpose could this possibly have? And how does it even exist in the first place? I would never find those answers, and I would never return to further investigate my family’s history, or that mirror again after the thing that I would soon see within it.
After some time spent watching the display in the mirror, a new person entered the frame. I didn’t recognize him for a moment. He walked up onto my porch and sat down in my chair next to my wife. They began to have a conversation, and were chuckling and smiling all the while. I still couldn’t make out who the man was, because I was only viewing him at an odd profile, but he eventually turned his gaze towards the cliff where my vision was situated. The man was not some unidentifiable stranger, or someone who had come to defile our marriage. It was so much worse than that.
For a moment, I did not know what to do, as my body hadn’t exactly caught up with what my brain was seeing. Finally, though, after stalling out for a solid 20 seconds, I released a scream louder than every noise I had ever made combined. Pure and unbridled fear sank into my very soul, and I fled. Without bothering to gather any of the items or heirlooms that I found inside the tower, I jumped through the hatch and into the bedroom, sprinted down the trio of staircases that led to the door, and ran out into the filthy bog. Through mud and tangled foliage, I ran, and I didn’t stop running for an hour before I finally calmed myself somewhat and caught my breath. I just had to get as far away as possible from that cursed ruin of a building before collecting my thoughts.
What I had seen in the mirror was something that I don’t think anybody would ever believe. I saw myself.