The House of Blood and Mirrors

The house rose before me, its red brick and white paint faded and covered in molds and mildews and overgrown vines. No one in their right mind would have thought of entering. No one from Gatesville anyways. Not after what happened last year. But desperation had driven me near to madness, like that little rhyme from The Magician’s Nephew echoing in the back of my head: “wonder till it drives you mad what would have followed if you had”.

Witches aren’t real, they say, laughing as they dress their children in costumes, sending them out to do exactly that which they have always been instructed not to do – take candy from strangers. Halloween is just fun for kids, just innocent costumes. But everyone in Gatesville knew better.

I should never have let Niko go trick-or-treating. But Aunt Olivia was insistent. Look at the cute little knight’s costume I bought him, she crooned, assuring me she’d bring him home safely. Niko was ecstatic. St. George & the Dragon had always been his favorite story.

But all it took were five seconds. Five seconds when her head was turned. Five seconds for my whole world to be shattered.

And so I stood in front of the house. The one place I could think to look. The one place they might have taken him. The house where they had found the bodies of the children last year. The house with the altar where the witches had sacrificed the children to their demons on Halloween night. The coroner had declared their time of death at exactly midnight. Which meant I only had thirty minutes left.

The glass panes in the front door mirrored back the light of my flashlight and my reflection, just a teenager in ripped jeans and her high school sweatshirt, sporadic strands of hair sticking out of her messy bun. Turning the handle of the door, I gave it a shove away from me. To attempt to be stealthy or no? How much time did I have to waste on tiptoeing around?

The door made that decision for me, creaking on long-neglected hinges as it opened onto the dark room beyond. My light shone on filthy marbled floors and a staircase covered in cobwebs. A gust of wind swirled around me, and a few leaves danced past me onto the rug that could hardly be called a rug anymore. I followed the light, stepping cautiously despite my internal screaming to hurry, to run, to hide, to flee, that Niko could be killed at any moment.

The same gust of wind that had swirled past me left just as suddenly, slamming the door behind it. I jumped as the sound echoed through the house. Sounds of scurrying and scrambling, flapping of startled wings, echoed back in response.

Somewhere, a clock chimed, reminding me that time was slipping away from me. Twenty minutes till midnight.

Skirting around the staircase, I crossed to the other side of the room and through the large arched doorway on the other side. The room was much the same as the one I had entered by, with a large double door and a spiral staircase, a twin to the one in the front room.

Waving the light wildly around, I went to the pair of doors at the other end of the room, identical to the doors I had just entered the house through. But as I reached for the handle, my hand bounced off of a solid surface. I slammed my hand against it, but I could not grip the brass doorknob.

As I turned back the way I had come, I froze. My mind screamed with confusion at the fractured reflections surrounding me. An infinite series of images of me standing in front of the doors. I raced across the room to where I thought I had come from. Unforgiving cold silver walls stopped me. Whirling around, I stared at the pale reflections. My eyes darted from one cold gray image to another.

All the hair on my neck stood on end when the shiver of laughter echoed through the house. The clock chimed again. Fifteen minutes till midnight. Time was slipping away. I stepped through the room, trying to determine where the laughter was coming from. But each time I thought I knew, I smacked into yet another mirror.

As I held my hand against the cold hard surface of my reflection, I raised my eyes from where my reflection’s palm and met mine and was startled to see the reflection of someone just behind me. The cashier from the CVS down the street, smiling back at me with an evil seductive smile, her eyes glowing as she laughed again.

I spun around, hands outstretched to grab at her. But I couldn’t find her. There she was in my reflection, here and then there. Not in all the mirrors. Only some of them. The laughter continued, buzzing in my head. Now there she was in the mirror, directly in front of me – with Niko! She held his hand and walked backwards away from me.

I turned, leaping at whatever was behind me, only to bounce once again off of the cold hard surface of a mirror. Roaring in rage, screaming for Niko, I pounded with my fist against the mirror. Then jumped back, tripping over something on the floor and falling, startled at my blood-stained reflection. I looked down at myself in a panic. There was no blood on me. My gaze landed on the item I had tripped on – the sword at my feet. Niko’s sword.

I picked it up and watched the blood dripping from the blade. Niko had always preferred things to be real rather than pretend, so I had given him my Ren Fair sword to wear with his costume. The stainless-steel blade was a tad heavy for an eight-year-old, but the blade was plenty sharp. Looking back up at the mirror in front of me, I realized this was no trickery or illusion or magic. The blood splatters were on the surface of the mirror, not in its reflection.

Rising to my knees, I swung the sword with both hands. Silver shards flew through the air, scraping my cheeks. Above the sound of breaking glass, more shrieking maniacal laughter rang out.

I saw another figure reflected in the slivers of silver scattered across the floor that crunched beneath my feet. Niko’s reading teacher? The woman that had wormed her way into the lives of her students with lies of pretending? In her black gown, she walked up the staircase, holding Niko’s hand and taking him further away from me.

I tried to run after her. But the empty black space where the mirror had been only made the infinity of reflections around me more dizzying. But if walls and mirrors were breakable, so were reflections. Lunging forward, I drove my sword into the image in front of me. A spider’s web of cracks spread across it from where my sword had pierced it. I spun around, striking at each of the surfaces in turn. Silver slivers rained around me, marred with red blood. Mine from where the sharp flying pieces of glass had sliced my skin. And the blood which marred the blade of the sword. I didn’t want to think about whose blood it could be. It looked as though the mirrors themselves were bleeding.

At last, only one image remained. The reflection of the room where I had first entered the house. I raced towards it, swinging my sword in front of me. But it whiffed through thin air, and I landed on the rug on the marble floor at the foot of the staircase. As I paused panting, my eyes followed the trail of blood leading up the marble stairs where they had taken Niko. Time to find my knight in shining armor.

I raced up the stairs two at a time, racing against time, against my fears, spurred on by the adrenaline coursing through my veins even as they leaked the blood trickling across my skin. The shadows of the room seemed to close in, surrounding me once again with cold hard silvery reflections. And there in the room at the top of the stairs – firelight.

The light of a thousand candles, their wax dribbled across the floor in lines and in circles around the marble slab set into the middle of the floor. Their reflections danced in the thousands of mirrors the surrounded us. And lying on the slab, my poor sweet Niko, pale and unconscious in his fabric suit of armor. Armor that couldn’t protect him from anything. The three women stood around him in their black gowns. The cashier. The teacher. And the woman from the library, reciting words from the open book in her lap. In their hands, they held knives of stone, black obsidian flickering in the light of the candles.

The clock struck twelve. The three witches raised their knives.

I lunged forward, the blade of my sword sliding beneath the tips of their knives, mere inches away from Niko’s heart. Sparks flew as the metal and stone scraped against one another. Sweeping their blades to the side, I hovered protectively over my brother. The librarian in front of me merely laughed.

Fiery pain shot through my back. A gasp escaped my lips as the witch jerked her blade out of my flesh and raised it again. I swung my sword at her with what strength still remained in my body, knocking the stone blade from her hand and shoving her over backwards. Hot sticky blood poured down my side, but I wasn’t done yet. I caught the stone knife from another witch with my left arm and drove my sword into her with my right.

I could barely see the third witch standing over me as my vision swam and my sword dropped limply from my hand. I collapsed onto Niko on top of the marble altar. Her dark form loomed over me. Thousands of her dark and shadowy reflections raised their knives in mirrors surrounding us, dancing in the light of a thousand candles.

If she wanted to go to hell, I’d send her on her way. But she wasn’t taking my brother with them. With one last ounce of strength, I shoved a hand forward, tipping over the candles on the edge of the altar, sweeping them into her. Strange how easily her dress caught fire, as though the fires of hell themselves had come to claim her. She wanted to send a sacrifice to the Devil, and he was ready to accept her. The fire was spreading now. The intensity of the light reflecting off the mirrors was almost too bright.

As flames licked up the curtains and along the walls, I leaned over Niko. I needed to get him out of here. Away from the flames sucking the oxygen out of the air, away from the smoke clogging the room, the suffocating heat. I had no strength left. But I could not let him die upon this altar.

I stared down at his limp form, the tattered blood-stained white tabard over his suit of armor, and the red cross emblazoned across it. The cross. The last, the final sacrifice. The only thing that could truly save us from the devils and demons that danced around us in the flames. Grasping it and holding it aloft, I prayed. I prayed for the cross’s protection. And as I clenched it in my blood-stained fist, I watched it shimmer with a brilliant pure white light. It was streaming through me now, pouring out of the gaping hole in my arm where the witch had stabbed me. And the pain in my back, that terrible pain from through which I could feel the life draining out of me. The pain wasn’t so bad now. I felt I might just have the strength now to get us out of here.

Taking Niko in my arms, I scooped him off of the stone altar. We slid, more than walked or crawled, down the marble staircase. And then onto the threshold of that once beautiful house that was now aflame. Sparks were lighting up the night sky like stars as the building crashed and burned behind us. Here in the cool clear night air in the middle of the street, I breathed deeply and shivered in the folds of the cloth that I wrapped around the two of us, safe in the protection of the cross.