The Mirror That Would Not Let Go

There is a custom in Vyshenka. When the dead of night before the winter feast comes, people gather at my inn, put out the lamps down to one, and ask me to tell a story. Not one of my own - someone else's. Because another man's fear doesn't cling to your house the same way. Sit closer. This story was left to me by a glassblower from Bohemia. And since he left it, I keep not a single mirror in the house.

That glassblower was walking across half of Europe and got stuck with us for three days, because it was snowing hard. His hands were covered in small scars from glass, and his eyes were like those of a man who hadn't slept in a long time. On the third night he told us why he had fled his town. In Bohemia, he said, there was a master who made mirrors you were afraid to look into twice.

The town stood between the mountains and was famed for its glass across the whole land. And the finest master made special looking-glasses - so clean that people said: you look, and it's as if beyond the glass there is another room, exactly the same. Only in that room it is always a little darker. And the candle burns a little lower than yours.

Rich men from all over the land bought those mirrors. And the master set one condition: never hang the glass facing a window, and never - never - facing another mirror. Whoever asked why, he simply wouldn't sell to. In one house a merchant's daughter didn't listen. She hung the new mirror facing the old one, her grandmother's, so she could try on dresses and see herself from every side.

And on the very first evening she noticed: when she stepped away from the glass, the reflection stepped away a moment later. Only just. As if it were in no hurry to follow her. Then it got worse. At night, in those two mirrors that looked into each other, a long corridor of reflections appeared. Hundreds of rooms going deep. And in the farthest one, barely visible, someone was standing. Not her. Someone who, with every night, was one room closer.

The girl stopped sleeping. She draped both looking-glasses with cloths. But one morning a cloth fell down all by itself. And in the glass she saw her room - empty. She herself was not in the reflection. And on the pillow, in that mirror bed, someone lay and smiled at her from there. They sent for the master. He looked and went pale. He said one thing: a mirror does not show, it lets through. And what has already come in so deep cannot be turned back.

He covered the glass, carried it outside and smashed it into fine splinters. And then he ordered every shard to be wrapped separately and buried in different places, so they would never come together again. They did as he said. The girl seemed to recover. But the glassblower, who had seen it all while still a boy, kept recognizing that smile for years afterward - now in a puddle, now in a windowpane, now in a polished kettle. One shard, it seems, they never finished burying.

That is why he went off wherever his eyes would carry him, far from that town. All the way to our Vyshenka. He left at dawn, and to me he left a looking-glass the size of a palm, wrapped in three kerchiefs. He said: keep it with you, but do not unwrap it. As long as it is with me, the thing that is looking for the last shard looks at me, and not at you. That is the story. And now, off to your houses.

And when you get home, do me one kindness: go up to your mirror and slowly step back one pace. If the reflection stepped back with you - sleep in peace. But if it lingered even for a moment - do not lie down with your back to it.