I'VE SEEN THEM

I’VE SEEN THEM

“They live in the mirrors.”

My brother Justin and I looked at each other, made our eyes roll, lips curl the way bystanders do when they see or hear what hints of madness or at least a loose screw or two loose in the head.

“I know,” George went on. “I’ve seen them!”

Though both of us were linemen for Pensacola Light, we took on the role of psychiatrists as we repeated, “Continue, George. Describe what you saw.”

George Fillmore hesitated. His right hand visibly shook. A tic pulsed away in his left green eye. Had we not known him well, we would have said George was experiencing the DT’s, but Fillmore was a devotee of H2O. He never drank the bubbly sodas Justin and I lived on nor did he ever demonstrate the slightest leanings toward an imbalance in the upper story.

Then George waved his hand toward his bathroom and we led the way until we were standing before the mirror. “Look!” he said. “Those three men!”

"Those three men are us, Georgie Porgie,” said Justin, but when the three men in the mirror turned around to face us, we clearly saw they weren’t us at all. Their distorted bodies, their faces expressing features not our own. “George,” I said, like a man who finally sees the light, but is hard-pressed to know what to do with it.

Justin made the horrid mistake of touching the glass. The screams that followed were his as reluctantly he dove into the mirror. We saw now that he had transformed one of the three into himself. The screaming stopped. Justin seemed content inside the mirror, beckoning us to follow. “Just dive in,” he said.

I turned around toward George. He had left the bathroom and returned with a hammer. “It’s the devil’s work,” he said as he raised the hammer. “We need to destroy the mirror before it drags us both into whatever Hell is in there.”

“What about my brother?” I asked. “We destroy the mirror and Justin’s gone forever.”

But George was not going to reconsider. He swung the hammer. The mirror shattered into shards of glass.

The two of us heard Justin calling us from a sharp sliver of broken glass. George again raised the hammer and smashed the mirror jigsaw piece into shiny grains. Justin was gone.  

The investigation was brief. Without my brother’s body, there was no case. He was somewhere out there, which was true enough, but I was convinced there was no way I’d see him again.

After burning down his house, George disappeared as well.

I wrote all this down. Why I don’t know. Who would believe it?

They say if you break a mirror you’re in for seven bad-luck years. What is there to say about me? I destroyed the mirrors in my apartment. I avoid gazing into one, though I suspect one day, accidentally, I will. Justin, maybe even George, will stare back at me with that come-on look and I will succumb.  

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