The bed was too short for the prisoner; claustrophobia induced more perspiration. The flashlight was at last discovered, yet it could not be coaxed into service. After several whacks of it against the wall, the useless object was flung to a corner.
Pinging answered his violence, leading Liam to pick up the torch and again strike the barrier; this elicited the same reaction. Was someone trying to communicate with him? Some other commiserating male captive?
“Hello?“ he cried.
When no reply came, the schemer began tugging at the heavy dresser, desirous to drag it under the overhead chute. To his dismay, it was bracketed to the wall; a large attached oval mirror shared these supports.
Liam’s fingers skittered over this substantial slab of glass and found its surface moist, perhaps owing to condensation from his lungs. Otherwise, no reflection was forthcoming in it.
The significance of furniture inside (what was essentially) a shipping container was unfathomable, particularly the inclusion of a cumbersome, fragile mirror. As this grouping was not seen from the tower, it grossly exceeded the requirements of a holding pen.
Liam’s exertion led him to consume the crackers and juice, and he withdrew to the bed to plot a better plan of escape. His attention necessarily returned to the slotted peephole through which he received the meal. A half hour of travail, and a crooked finger, succeeded in prying open this slotted door, but instead of seeing a corridor through the gap, the outline of another room was uncovered. The source of its illumination was thought to be a flashlight—and perhaps the flashlight he first possessed.
From the flattened, fanning shape of the beam, this light emanated from a corner below the bedrail of a bed; backlight placed a silhouetted figure on this bed. The individual lay in a quiescent state, which was consistent with what Liam observed from above. The room was a carbon copy of his. Yet what was more astonishing was that the lit flashlight, of which he claimed no direct view, bore, either as coincidence or design, a relationship to the unlit one in his room.
He again poked in the corner for his ejected torch, and changed its position. Returning to the peephole, the working flashlight accordingly changed its position in tandem. The silhouetted figure had not changed in any marked detail, as too little time was allowed for her to rise and move the flashlight and return to the bed.
This bizarre advantage was nevertheless exploited. His nonfunctioning lamp was removed from the floor and set at the foot of the bed facing its head; its entangled partner mimicked this action, and glared over the individual on the parallel bed at close quarters. The bare feet were female, and soiled consistent with walking barefoot out-of-doors. These were not the feet of a mannequin.
“Eva!” he called out hesitantly, but received no reply.
The plotter returned his flashlight to its original location on the dresser. The counterpart corresponded and revealed a new shadow: that the woman’s diaphragm, which appeared as a horizon against the far wall in the adjoining room. When her stomach distended with exhalation, the dark mound partially eclipsed the flashlight’s beam. The pattern of exaggerated breathing created a waxing and waning beacon through the compromised peephole; and as he could explain it no better, his breathing came to mirror hers.
He recalled his aunt’s bed, which he shared with Eva in the half hour before; this strangely mollified his fear. As each draught became deeper and of longer duration, the woman’s abdomen swelled to block out a greater portion of the light.
He retreated to his bed and studied the ceiling and outline of the deadfall over him, where his vision had improved. This adaptation made the light seeping into his room appear to intensify. Eventually it reached the opposite wall of his enclosure and, in its intrusion, pushed the silhouetted figure from the adjoining room ahead of it through the slotted panel. Where before the prisoner supposed this outline to be female, the form was now half-human and minatory. It took on the viscera of the mannequins in the floor, which were cobbled together about it. The entity was blacker than any corner of the enclosure.
Liam lifted a hand to rub his eyes, wishing to disperse its shape, but its inkiness was not diluted. Instead, the emboldened shadow graphed itself onto the shadow of his hand, and simultaneously something of the man’s will was wrenched away. It was like a curtain dropping down over his arm, where the indivisible shadow he confronted was borrowed from an astronaut’s perception: As no atmosphere intervenes in space, light cannot soften abject blackness. His limb was so completely absorbed into this opacity that it dissolved as a notion.
What was not drawn into this paralysis were his thoughts and lungs, which labored to move freely under the influence of the viscous substance.
A murmur emerged in the wall, which was not female in timbre. “Are you injured?”
“Howard? Is that you?“
His reaction rang as a clear declaration, but it garnered no reply equal to it.
The captive assumed sleep overtook him some minutes, long enough for a significant change to occur in the room: The flashlight’s glow no longer penetrated the narrow panel opening. He sprang to the slot and peered in. The light shown dimly, and barring that it had not rolled off the corresponding dresser to the floor and under the bed, there was only one place it was likely moved.
Liam brushed the ledge of his dark dresser and found it bare. Reasoning the two flashlights were still entangled, dresser drawers seemed a proper place to look. The searcher did not relish sticking his hand into unlit boxes; and there was something more, too, to explain his hesitancy:
As he sat anxiously on the edge of the bed, his body was squared with the oval mirror. Nothing was seen of it due to darkness, yet when he leaned in and stroked its plate-glass, a shiver climbed the pilose hairs of his forearm. He withdrew from this prick of iciness, and attributed his reaction to a creeping sensation of derealization, where something in the mirror’s reflection did not match his fingertips. If it was not glass he touched, then it must have been a cadaver mimicking his actions: What manner of specter could duplicate the pressure and position of his hand precisely?
Though his bodily movements were reproduced with fidelity, the same was not done for his body’s warmth. This contact resembled, too perfectly, a sheet of glass; and perhaps this was its sine qua non. Regardless, Liam had initiated a cause and received an effect consistent with expectation. Of every stage separating these junctures, no knowledge about this second ‘individual’ could be gained, only that it operated by its own means of locomotion.
The tester did not wait on his doppelgänger. One dresser drawer pull was grabbed timidly. When the squeaky wooden box slid forward, he glanced to the ceiling to see if any trace of strengthening light escaped the neighboring room. The next drawer yielded the desired result.
The working flashlight faced forward in the corresponding drawer. This meant the butt of his heavy four-D battery flashlight was turned toward the back of his tray. Reaching in to jostle it, the lens cap was tapped, rousing a flicker of light from his bulb. This flash surged with far less indecision when he took firm hold of it.
Instantly, the flashlight in his grip lurched backward from another hand—the figure presumed to be his mirrored reflection no longer moved in unison with him but was severed…
“Are you injured?” it asked.
Liam’s shriek preceded his dive backwards. The bed under him gave way like a second trapdoor, landing him solidly on a cold cement floor. He squinted up into the effusive light pouring over his face and exclaimed, “What!?“
The rescuer’s composure could not have provided more contrast at that moment. Unhurriedly the wrest flashlight was panned overhead. “It sounded like a nasty fall,” Jonah remarked. “I came running.”
Liam blinked up into trailing debris, which cascaded down through a series of misaligned holes. Pain rushed at his body—a headache pounded in his skull. These sensations placed his plunge mere minutes ago, where no trapdoor had closed behind him. He struggled for coherency. “There is a room next to me… Someone else fell through the hole…”
Jonah answered unemotionally, “You plummeted straight through to the basement. There is no other room.”
To underscore his point, he swung the light over the undisputed terrain of an undeveloped sub-basement. The light beam again ran to the confused man’s face, yet now was presented only as evidence.
The blind observer explained, “I found this lamp, and I cannot tell you if it was on of off when I picked it up, or if it is even working.”
“But someone was with me,” interrupted the other. “Up there…”
“I encountered no one else in reaching you.”
“But how did you know that I was in 1136?”
“I searched the main office after you left the building, and discovered where a flashlight was removed. I put two and two together. Do you need to go to the hospital?”
“No,” Liam mumbled weakly.
His guide led the way out through a crevasse in the foundation. Yellow caution tape followed this path, although its assistance was not required.
Every bead of perspiration ignited on Liam’s skin once the chilled night air was joined, and when the two men broke free of the brothel’s poisonous shadow, his bearings were regained. In his stunned state he said nothing when his rescuer put him in the back of a car and assumed duties as chauffeur. Directly the blind observer set off down the private road that connected to the state road.
The driver ‘looked’ in the rearview mirror, although this was surely a physical reflex of his conversational style. He sought to assuage panic when he proclaimed, “This is a self-driving automobile.”
The passenger nodded, as if the sunglass-wearing man in the front seat, whose head remained aligned with the rearview mirror, saw his gesture.
Little of the straggling nightscape availed itself of color or gradation, and when the vehicle turned due south, an assailing wind supplied a compass. Daybreak brightened behind them. The track, from there, meandered downhill, and on comprehending his dwelling from three sides in the sharp early hour, dread loomed on the one side still unlit.
“Are you sure you don’t need to go to the hospital?” Jonah asked again.
“I only need to sleep,” replied the passenger.
“It is not good to sleep if you have a concussion.”
No response was provided for this concern, and a grateful Liam stepped from the car to his front door; Jonah presently drove away.
The only turbulence perceived passed his stoop was a sealed cardboard box sitting on the kitchen table, which he did not recognize; the possibility of a concussion was reconsidered.
The box was left undisturbed, and the entrance was blocked with additional reinforcement, as ineffectual as this plan impressed him. This left Liam to stray into the bathroom and enlist a light—a smudge of blood lay across the sink basin.
He followed a disquieting line of thought back into the living room, up to the fireplace mantel and particle glow of snowglobes. Someone had stepped out of reach, where more blood stippled flocking and strung popcorn on the sorriest of his holiday trees.
No sooner had the full sun appeared on his windowsill than clouds reclaimed it. A half hour of twilight was added back, and Liam, seeking to alleviate his escalating distress, seized the easing contrasts on the counterpane to throw his etiolated body over it. His intention was one of waking up, or falling deeper, and inaccessibly, into sleep. He claimed no special vigil over the box in the next room. Nor over its unsettling questions. Each time he blinked at it, the duration his eyes were shut lengthened, and by the third or fourth blink, he might have been dreaming them open:
The box had overturned; its lid thrown to the floor. Noise was heard from the far end of the house: the unlit side. A sharp crack of timber emanated from pressure on the floorboards, and not from clapboards fending off resurgent wind.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.