WRITTEN AND OWNED BY KRISTEN REID
It’s a vision. It’s something undeniably concrete in your mind yet sticky and gummy in your fingers when you try to bring any solidity to it. Was it real? Was it something that you wanted to have in reality but that only existed in some forgotten plane of the mind that teetered on the edge of remembered memory and fabricated delusion? How many memories can one recall plainly with exact details and precision of recounted dialogue and action? Is there any truth to them, undeniable truth? Is the memory forgotten to the abyss of time that only exists in that plane of knowledge being withheld from the truth, because it’s just that… a memory? I’m not much for the ever-changing realities, and yet, I suppose I am. I both am and am not yet. I am a contradiction of myself, and very well, I contradict myself. I am large… the universe contains multitudes.
There was something odd about that singular day. There was this feeling of heavy static permeating the area, and I remember the hair on my arms and the back of my neck standing out when I entered the living room. I was about to leave to head to work, but unusual in my manners, since I was not one to care much for my looks, I stopped in front of the large antique mirror in the living room to check myself.
It had come with the house as it was already attached to the old walls. Frankly, the thing had unnerved me ever since I had bought the house, to which my deceased wife Kathy had always found humorous. The fact that Kathy had looked into the mirror years ago kept me away from it the most.
She had gone missing out of nowhere with not a single trace of how or why or where. She was just gone. I had wanted to sell the house after a year of her absence, but I kept holding onto this delusion in my head that if I did, when she returned, she wouldn’t be able to find me again if I left it. I suppose it is also due to the fact that I somehow feel her presence in that mirror, as unsettling as it is in the house.
I stood in front of the mirror, examining my button-up, blazer, and all of the rest of my features. I was just about to walk away and out the front door when I felt something in my bones grow like a mad, confusing fever. My reflection didn’t feel like me. It was this unknown, frightful aura that overcame me, that made me want to run away at the sight of myself, but instead, I remained in my place… staring. I reached out involuntarily to touch the reflection and met the glass sheet with a single finger. It didn’t feel like glass. It was like I was touching someone’s finger with my own. I retracted it and felt my skin turn to ice, the blood rush out of me to my toes, but kept my sights set on my reflected image. It blinked when I blinked. It rubbed its eyes when I rubbed my eyes. Confused and a little unsettled, I started to turn away to resume my path to the front door, but then a disjointed whisper of a voice sliced through the silence of the living room, halting me. My hand lifted and pushed flatly against the glass. It felt as if I was pushing against another hand. My reflection smiled brightly, while my mouth remained set in a straight line.
“H-- h-- hel-- hello!” the voice echoed quietly from the mirror. I stepped back away from it, watching as the top right corner cracked ever so slowly and only about an inch in length before stopping. A sharp ringing filled the room, and inch-by-inch, pieces of a man came through the mirror with ease, like he was being pulled from it through some sort of an invisible liquid instead of sharp glass. When the whole of his body had emerged, he bent over to dust off his pants and then his blazer of whatever unwanted material he assumed was on his clothes. He stood straight up and met my eyes with a harsh coldness that made me want to recoil.
The man was not just any man. He was not just some stranger. He was me.
What stood before me was myself… but as a horribly replicated wretch. He had all my similar features, except he looked as if he had crawled up from the very depths of hell itself. From his mouth, ears, and eyes -- if they could be called such -- ran a black, oily liquid like some foreign form of blood. He wore a black blazer, white button-up, and dress pants, just like me. My brain ran wildly with fear and questioning, and I felt dizzy. What the hell was I on?
“What is-- who are you?” I asked in a breathy whisper, “am I still dreaming?”
“Dreaming… what are trivial dreams really, old friend?” he said. In that moment, my eyes focused on the worst thing about the terrible man… his eyes. They were completely red, but not as if they were bloodshot or that they were anything even able to be normally explained in the reality of the universe. It was as if his natural eyeballs had been pulled from their sockets, yet the sockets had something red stuck into their place. His eyes were like two blood red morbid cherries stuck into the black holes of nothingness. They held nothing to them except the unnerving power within their emptiness that created a fear of not knowing exactly what object they were focusing on at a time. He could be staring at me while I thought he was staring at something to my right. The lack of pupils offered no movements of human observations.
“I’m Ethan,” the man said with an unduly cheerful fluctuation in his voice. He looked me up and down a few times without blinking as he stood there. His overly etched smile dropped slightly.
“So, what is your name, buddy?”
“Umm, Nate Cowen,” I said with a break in my voice that for some reason I immediately wished could have been taken back. Just by looking at him, I felt as if my feet were balancing on hundreds of eggshells that were going to break and stick me right into the heels to make me bleed. My feet ached at the mental image, and as if he was listening to my thoughts, Ethan smiled again.
He laughed shrilly, clasping his hands together. “Nate! Oh, that right there, ‘Nate’… that is fun isn’t it? Just think about that for a moment.” He raised his arms to rake a hand though his black hair, and I involuntarily felt myself doing the same thing. Ethan stepped around me, examining me from all angles.
“Wow, look at that! You are the missing piece of the binary soul that appears to exist in both of us. Although, I suppose we aren’t that binary, and since that is fact, then I suppose you aren’t the exclusive missing piece to this flummoxing brain maze in question. Ooo ooo!” he said while jumping in place, “Flummoxing MIRROR maze in question, oh, isn’t that fun?” He giggled with a wide grin, and his teeth reminded me of honed knives when they were touching each other like that. Everything he said was calculated, sharp, and had a tone of complete enamored joy in each syllable that he spoke. He said all of his statements and questions as if he already knew the answers to them deep within his mind. It was like he was playing some sort of game that only he found amusing.
Ethan dropped his hands to his sides, and I noticed a few loose teeth fall to the ground from his sleeves, like part of him was made of rotted old teeth hidden up underneath his clothes. I swallowed hard and watched him closely as he made his way back over to his original spot by the mirror, just standing there with his smile. All of this felt familiar in some way, like almost as if it had been a distant dream, yet I couldn’t truly place any of it as something that held concreteness in my memories. Was it a nightmare I had had already? Was I actually asleep right now? A vivid dream that had gotten a little too vivid? I pinched my arm in an attempt to wake myself up, if I was in fact asleep, but I felt the sharp sting. The odd man was still there. His eyes were still daunting. I cleared my throat and said, “I’m sorry, I just, I don’t understand.”
“Well, of course not! That’s why I said ‘flummoxing’?”
“You understand this?”
“Weeeell… I suppose I do, but then again, I don’t really,” he said rubbing his chin with a hand and staring at me unnervingly before continuing, “This right here, my dear friend, is the age-old cosmic question of doubles. The prolific form of unnerving possibility in the universe that keeps it ever expanding… quintessence… what lies within that void in space of impenetrable walls outside of that which existences exist? Beyond the glass that which you are sealed from? That which I am sealed from? Yet, here we are, existing on the same sides of which we have always been sealed from. You over here, I over here as well, us, together, in the same reality… let me ask you something, Nate. Do you believe in the paranormal?”
“I-- no, no, I don’t.”
“Oh, well that’s a shame. I don’t either, you see, but I wish I did. It could explain a good number of things if all of it were truly true. I remember hearing about a nifty little piece of something once that talked about this very cataclysmic event shuffling around before our very eyes as of now! I don’t remember much about it in connection with mirrors, but it could all very well be within mirrors. I mean, what do us silly humans know really? How much of the unknown can we tread through claiming that we know what we are talking about before that unknown swallows us whole with our ignorance? After all, it’s just a machine crafting its thinkers only to consume them back into itself -- to eat. Ah, yes… there are realities out there beyond our imaginings, beyond our doubts, existing in that very quintessence of the universe… I’m rambling, am I rambling? No? No, I am being very forward with you, Nate, because I like you, Nate. You seem like a guy with his, um, head on his shoulders, with his face facing forward, with his eyes on the prize! Oh, loveliness exists in truth and in the diversions of the truth that the mind narrates to itself, right? Right. Do you know the truth of the quintessence of doubles, Nate? Do you? Do you know who I am in contexture with who you are?”
Ethan was stock still grinning with his hands clasped together, as if in some silent prayer, but his eyes were open wide, never blinking, awaiting some answer he knew but I did not know. I matched his silence and felt my hands become clammy and tacky with sweat. Ethan breathed in slightly and continued his speech with the same fervor.
“You are, we are together, the simulacrums, the anthropomorphisms of the aboriginal Nate, or Ethan, or Neat, or Etan, or Tane, or Thena -- whatever the true name -- of all the conglomerations of who we are. I am the cat of Schrödinger’s questioning mind as your mirror is the box holding that cat in its confines… I both am and aren’t until you look at me, view me as something more than what is beyond concealed, but, in the same way, you are the cat and my mirror is the box. Except my cat, when I look in, well he exists, but does he remain existing or does something there nick the cat from existence? I like you, Nate. You’re different from the others. I tell you, my copied companion, I like you.”
I couldn’t follow him. Not necessarily because he was full of this uppity, crazed speech, but, because I couldn’t keep up with any singular thought within my own self at the time, let alone keep track of his prattle. “Any particular reason why you speak in these merry-go-round riddles?”
Ethan laughed. “Merry-go-round riddles! Yes, but riddles are fun, aren’t they? Oh, well how else should I talk, Nate? I’ll try dumbing it down if that’s what you need. Simplified for the simple man.” I got annoyed with his passive aggressive talk but kept quiet.
Ethan continued, pointing over to the mirror from which he had come, a few more teeth falling from his sleeves as he raised a hand. “That mirror there, you never thought much of it, no? Well, me neither! Why would we? It’s simply a glass sheet of reflected appearances. Well, we ended up thinking much, didn’t we? We simultaneously thought much, and through our thinking, we reached through the realities there. We sought after something that was there, yes, but that could never exist alone on its own side away from other thinkers. Without me, it would have just remained a mirror to you. Without you, it would have just been a mirror to me. We broke it. The mirror shifted our realities into one, and yet, here we both stand. We stand in front of each other as a mirror without a mirror, you see. I existed and did not exist simultaneously, until you looked into Schrödinger’s box, well, Schrödinger’s mirror I suppose… then to this world, to you -- this version of us -- I existed. There is no denying that we are indeed an enigma of the infinite reality of physics, and oh that is something!”
“You’re saying that the mirror allowed us to see two sides of it that when accessed right and within the perfect opportunity lets one go to or see other realities of our worlds?” I asked him, stuttering through some of my words. Ethan’s harsh scoff grounded me back down to the earth as I had started to feel my head spinning right off the top of my neck with everything that I had just tried grasping within it.
“Well, pfft, phooey, what’s fun about saying it that way? You always talk in this way, my friend? How drab. How utterly unthinking to let your words spill out like lackluster bits of muck,” Ethan said turning around from me and waving his hand as he did so. I still had no idea what he was talking about or this bizarre way of crafting his thoughts, which only unnerved me more so. There’s something in talking to a mad man who is so sure and knowledgeable in their own garble that takes the sane man by surprise -- by a horror that one cannot explain or find a way out of if they were to try to delve into the madness with him. I was afraid that if I even blinked the wrong way or asked the wrong question, he would devour me… devour me with those knives in his mouth that dripped black venom down onto his button-up.
I glanced back at the mirror, feeling a cold chill rise up my back, and grabbed a white sheet from the closet in the hall and draped it over the mirror, covering it to avert my stare from the reflected images of myself appearing there more than once. I heard Ethan giggle slightly as I did so. I knew I had to ask something, to bring myself somehow into this insanity with him.
“Why do we differ? Why are your eyes… like that and mine like this? They aren’t the same. You drip… horrible blackness from your eyes and mouth and ears. If we are the exact same then, why do we look slightly different?”
“Look different, silly? We are exactly the same you and I!” Ethan came over and touched my face with his cold hands, tapping at the bone structure of it, and then pushed his hand through my hair. “Exactly alike, you and I… we have a few differentiating commodities, but that is of course a given with the infinite products of our soul. In my world things are not quite how they are here. I was met with some… minor inconveniences over the decades… but no matter! In another truth, perhaps, we have blue hair, oh, that would be strange wouldn’t it?” He laughed, and I noted again his frightening, absurd appearance before reflecting on the blue hair version of myself. Yes, how odd that would be.
He smiled and held his hands together in front of himself. He hadn’t blinked those red eyes yet… not once, and I repeated what he had said about minor inconveniences in my mind.
“What do you mean things are not the same there as they are here? What happened to you or that other place?”
Ethan finally stopped smiling and withdrew his hands, letting them hang limply at his sides. He tilted his head but then shook it profusely. “Ah no no no no no, Nate,” he said in a sing-song voice, “There shall be another time for such trivial banter and for answers to questions that are best left in the mind before they are allowed to leave those clean lips of yours.” Ethan cleared his throat and shook his arms letting more teeth fly out of his sleeves before rolling them up slightly.
“I need help, Nate,” he said, huffing a sigh and dropping his grin slightly to a somber grimace, “There are more of you and me in there. Some are no more. Some are yet to be discovered. I can’t even fathom the amount! Oh! Isn’t it something to think about? A hundred Nates! NO, a hundred thousand Ethans! Haha!” He clapped his hand together excitedly, and the thought made my skin crawl like bugs were scampering around under it, threading their way all up and down my veins. “Let’s find more. Let’s find all the possibilities of ourselves, Nate! My memories, they’re a bit hazy, so I need to find more. It will help, I think. Won’t you help me discover this quintessence of the universe lying just beyond that sheet-covered mirror? I stand in front of it, you stand in front of it, and what do you know? The other possibilities, the other anthropomorphisms of me can be known!”
“Anthropomorphisms… you said that before, but that doesn’t really make sense. You mean, like, you aren’t huma---”
“Shh shh shh shh, Nate. Let us not reveal what is not yet needed to be revealed. Who is the aboriginal of such simulacrums? Ha! Shall we find out?”
Ethan skipped over to the sheet-covered mirror and pulled it off in one sweep of his arms. I joined him at his side, not entirely sure if I was about to force him back in somehow or to personally delve into that other unknown of which I felt a strong pull towards. Ethan’s smile held sturdy on his face, and I wondered if it was actually horrifying enough to break the glass. We were a mirror before a mirror. A reflection outside of the confines of the laws of reality and physics that constructed that glass sheet in its old, wooden frame. I closed my eyes, because I felt, in that moment, as if thousands of people were staring back at me, and an intense pain of non-existence started to pierce my being. Sadness, fear, and knowledge not yet acquired endured beyond the glass… but these weren’t the emotions that only belonged to me as I stood there. I felt them from others, from others in another life.
“Nate, who is that?”
I turned my attention in the direction of where Ethan was now facing, towards a picture hanging on the wall. It was of Kathy. Ethan walked over to it and touched the glass that it sat behind in the frame softly. For a moment, I saw the black oiliness around his eyes drip down his face, like some macabre form of tears falling ever so slightly. In that instant, he was lost to the world he had found himself in. I was too, I had to admit. Ethan sniffled and took the picture off of the wall.
“Hey, don’t… don’t touch that,” I said, feeling anger rise in me that I didn’t really understand.
Ethan whipped his head around to me, the smile gone now, dragging his mouth into a saddened scowl like a horrible caricature. He kept the picture in his hands for a moment and looked at it again, as if confused of what it meant to him yet heartbroken at its sight.
He returned it to its place on the wall, and stroked it again as he spoke in a shrill whisper, “Nate, have you ever had déjà vu?”
I was way past the point of growing tired of his little game of twenty questions. I had surpassed it completely, but I refrained myself from causing any problems in that moment, because, frankly, he scared the hell out of me, and I didn’t want to anger him, lest he hurt me, or I don’t know, eat me? That man’s agenda was a mystery.
“I, uh, I don’t really think I---”
“You’ve never had déjà vu… something in context with this picture right here?”
I swallowed hard. I thought about the day that I had seen the cops at my front door telling me that they had no luck with finding her, that she was still missing with not a single trace. I remember I had felt in that moment, in those utterings of their words, in the immense pain at hearing the reality of it all, that it felt familiar. It felt like an old pain that I had already experienced. It felt as if I had already heard them tell me the same exact thing. I had felt dizzy, but that was that. I had had déjà vu, a cruel, heartless, horrifying instance of déjà vu that day, but I didn’t tell Ethan. I didn’t want to. He knew something. I knew something. Did we both really know what we knew? Ethan turned to me then and walked back over in front of the mirror.
“Let me be brutally, purely, clearly, plain with you, Nate,” Ethan said resting his hands on my shoulders. I almost chuckled at that statement since it had been preceded the entire time by convoluted crap that kept his speech turning around like a wheel made of delusion and confusion. “You know that feeling, that-- that feeling deep inside your bones and skin that comes bubbling up with a fiery heat that makes you think your body is going to melt right off of your bones leaving them silky, smooth white? You know what I’m saying, Nate?” he asked as a few sweaty, loose pieces of hair fell in front of his face. I felt a sickness creep up from my stomach to my throat.
Ethan cocked his head sideways, as if he had wished I had responded, but then shook his head frantically and brushed off the question with a wave of his hand before continuing in a mad fervor.
“You know, you know, it’s whenever you feel like you’re a little speck of dust drifting wherever you are meant to be blown by the universe? But then you think, gee whiz, the universe? Ha, the universe!? You aren’t just a speck anymore. You are a thousand specks, but you aren’t even the biggest speck of them all! There are thousands of yous, thousands upon thousands of others that just make you… less than a speck, you see, Nate? You see? And you hate it! You hate it! You want to be the one that has beautiful green eyes, or the one that has skin the smoothness of your bones once the skin has melted off from your rage! Ha, ha, ha, I never should have known of such mixings of such realities beyond my own capable imaginings. I never should have known of the gallimaufries of me, the never-ending Ethans that had those things, that had a home, that had a wife! Ha, oh, Nate, you look frightened… do calm down, my friend. Nothing to… fear. Nothing at all! Is Kathy doing fine here? Does she have eyes here? Why of course, she must, I-- I-- I-- I-- mean you have eyes, then she must have beautiful blue ones. Oooooh, it’s not fair! Not fair, not fair, not fair, but I’m not angry, Nate! Ha, see me smile? Do you see me smile? Does she smile, Nate? Did I-- someone take her smile? Did I-- did I-- do you know where she is?”
Ethan had me pushed up against the wall, holding onto my shoulders and shaking me with his frenzied, pleading questions. His eyes were as wide and dead as they had always been, and yet they held something inside them in that moment that made me want to curl up into myself and scream. He was something very, very wrong. Something that I no longer felt somehow connected to. He was something that I knew would claw me to bits and eat me right there. I swallowed hard and shook my head ‘no’.
“Oh, you know… you know! Nate, do not lie to me my dear friend, dearest part of my soul. Do. Not. Lie.” He realized that he was gripping me too tightly and that I was frightened, so he let go with a breathy laugh before running a hand through his hair. I felt myself doing the same thing.
“I just want to know where Kathy is.”
“Why do you want to know where she is?”
“Just-- just-- is she alive here?”
“No.”
“No!? NO!? How is she dead?”
“I mean, I don’t know if she is dead. She-- she went missing years ago and no one could ever find her again. There’s just… nothing left of her to find. Now it’s just the violent knowledge of an unknown last goodbye left in place of where she is supposed to be. I-- I don’t know what you want, or what you want of Kathy or why, just... why?”
“Oh... oh.” Ethan’s black trails around his eyes ran darkly down his face again, and he wiped at them with his shirt sleeves, turning them from white to a sickly dark mush. “Kathy, I--” He rubbed his eyes and cheeks with his fingers, matching them with the color of his tears. He stopped his crying then, removing his hands from his face, and became completely stoic and serious. He met my eyes with his red ones. “How did I miss you last time? I’m not sloppy, I-- I know where I’ve been… you don’t remember any of this? Of me? Déjà vu, my friend?”
“I mean, no. I feel… like I should, but no. Just tell me, what-- what is this? What do you want, Ethan?” My anger with the fact that I knew just as much as I had when he first emerged ran through my words, and I could tell that it took Ethan aback. He sniffled as he stared at the ground.
“You are getting quite impassioned, my friend! It is enjoyable to see.” He grinned wryly and met my eyes. “Time is a funny thing. Not necessarily a fun thing, but a funny thing, yes? It appears that our time has matched yet again. I must’ve really liked you, Nate. I mean, aha, I do like you extremely well now! Is it fate? Do you believe that the universe gives fate to the things drifting about in it? Or is it an omnipotent being that is quite objective and cold, indifferent to those that it makes only to swallow them whole again?”
“I don’t know,” I said coldly through gritted teeth.
Ethan smiled wide, inhumanly wide, and got right in my face. He looked me up and down with a menacing glare.
“Well, I understand the universe, you know, in the ‘wanting to swallow those whole of which it has made’ kind of way. And me, Nate… I’m starving.”
Ethan grasped the sides of my head with his hands that now appeared to be more like long, clawed fingers rather than human ones. He screeched loudly as he threw me back against the mirror, causing me to hit my head so hard that I thought I had cut it open. I recovered from the fall as Ethan jolted towards me. I tried to evade him, but he grabbed me and stabbed a sharp finger deep into my neck, twisting it as it went in all the way to the knuckle. As he withdrew it, black liquid seeped darkly out of my wound, and he threw me clear across the room. I wrapped my hands tightly over the wound in my neck, desperately trying to stop the bleeding, but when I did so, there was nothing there. It was like it hadn’t even happened. Like I had imagined it. I shot my eyes up to Ethan as I heard him laugh frivolously.
“The mind is such an intoxicating playground, Nate. Tread lightly through it.”
I grabbed the sheet from the floor and rammed into Ethan, catching him off guard and pushing him forcefully against the mirror. Clawing and screeching in protest, he slipped back into it like it was an open door, and I threw the sheet back over top of the mirror. I slammed a fist against the mirror, feeling the sudden sturdy stop of glass and sighed with relief. He was gone. Surely, that was it. He was gone.
I stood in front of the bathroom mirror the next day after what had happened, drowning my face with cold water and still feeling a thick knot of gunk tie my intestines into a mangled, garbled mess like a string of yarn pulled out and twisted into a pile on the floor. I didn’t meet my eyes in the mirror, and I knew it was stupid to think that way, but after last night’s events, how could I not? But it was ridiculous… to be acting this way… he was gone, right? Right.
I lifted my head slowly to the mirror, keeping my eyes closed. I breathed in sharply and gripped the sink edges with white knuckles. I knew that I couldn’t keep my eyes closed, because, honestly, what is worse than actually seeing something truly terrible that you know frightens you standing before you? It is the notseeing. It is the not seeing that makes your mind become the holder of all possibilities of things that are much worse than reality. With your eyes closed, you do not know if something is or isn’t… until you look.
I forced my eyes open, feeling a bead of sweat trail down my forehead. I saw only myself in the mirror, a reflection and nothing more, but there was something in just seeing my reflection that made me even sicker than before I had looked. It was no longer a reflection to me… I mean, yeah, it was me, but all thoughts of what thateven meant flooded my mind. Am I Nate? Am I really, truly, just Nate? I watched its copied movements of my own and chuckled uneasily before breathing out a long sigh.
“Uh, hello, my parallel ectype.”
My heart stopped. No, no, no. I kept my eyes glued to myself in the mirror, seeing nothing unfamiliar in that exact moment. I had heard him, yes, I had heard him, but...
I shook it off, thinking of my paranoia and how it had risen to an uncontrollable, quite unsettling degree, and, in hopes of disproving it, I opened my mouth to speak.
“Nate… Nate, you are Nate.” I watched as my lips moved with the words, heard the rise and fall of each syllable pronounced from my own mouth, and rubbed my face, seeing my hands follow suit in the mirror. I breathed out another long sigh.
“Oh, yes, I know. I am Nate,” my reflection said in a cheerful manner. My lips had not uttered a word.
I tried to move but felt as if my feet had been cemented to the floor, and there was a heaviness in all of my limbs. I was stuck staring at myself. I had to watch as my reflected image opened its mouth as wide as it could, even more so than normality would have allowed. My own mouth widened without my control, and I watched in silent horror as the reflection rolled its tongue across all of its teeth before pushing at them one by one until each one popped out of its jaw. I felt the sharp, pressured pain with each one that fell out of the mirror image’s mouth, but what was happening was not happening to me, just to the reflection. Each tooth in its mouth was lifted from its socket, and I watched stuck still, feeling such intense pain in my mouth that I screamed… my eyes never being able to blink or to look away. When each tooth had been pushed out, the reflection stared at me with its mouth still wide open, only now it was a toothless, gummy mouth.
The reflection joined my scream, causing a cacophony of screeching noise that shattered the mirror, and I watched helplessly as its hand reached through the shattered glass into my world, scraping its skin and slicing it into bloody strips until it had grasped me by the neck. Ethan’s upper half emerged from the bloody shatters, his lifeless red eyes rimmed black and oozing their oily liquid. He put his forehead to mine and stopped screaming, as did I. He was covered in a mess of blood and black oil.
“Oh, I have missed you so, Nate! Oh, so much!” he nearly screeched with joy, “I didn’t think I would be able to figure out how to purposely come back here.”
I regained something of myself in that moment, and there was a rage inside me that I had never before felt. Grabbing him by his neck, I pulled him from the shattered glass and threw him down onto the bathroom tile.
“Wow, Nate! Oh, you are very strong, you---”
“Shut up! Shut up!” I screamed at him, and Ethan’s sharp grin morphed into a deep frown; his eyes wide. “Why-- why are you doing this? Why? What do you want?”
Ethan, obviously shaken from it all, cleared his throat and straightened his blazer collar before standing up from the ground. He brushed a hand through his hair to fix its unkemptness in the aftermath of sliding violently out of broken glass. He clasped his hands together. “Well, friend---”
“I am not your friend.”
Ethan stared at me intensely before shaking off my comment with a short, breathy laugh. “That isn’t important. I’ll be very clear with you, Nate---”
“You are never clear with me, damnit. Just tell me what this is all about.”
“Oooooooo language, Nate! Language,” he said laughing uneasily. I reached over to the shattered pieces of the mirror laying all across the sink and grabbed one. Ethan cleared his throat again. “Fine. Fine. ‘Clear’ with you… you know, Nate, you are the only one I have ever met or had the pleasure of knowing for more than a day that has managed to carry on so long after our chance encounter. Why is that? I don’t know… maybe I like you. I do like you for some reason, Nate. Perhaps I want you to know. Perhaps I want you to live. Perhaps we are closer for some reason besides the obvious cosmogonic doppelgänger situation that we have.”
Ethan walked out of the bathroom and towards the living room where the mirror he had first emerged from yesterday was still sitting under the white sheet. I followed him. I had the shard of mirror grasped so tightly in my hand that I felt it start to itch my skin from its sharp cutting. Ethan pulled the sheet off of the mirror and looked at it with a proudness and speculation.
“I found out many years ago, decades in fact, of a little bizarre trick that all of us doubles, triples, endless numbers, have deep inside. A very flummoxing thing it is, Nate.” I watched him as he stepped around the mirror in observation of all its details. I felt like he was a snake in the grass about to strike me at any second with his venom.
Ethan continued, “All of us share, if you will in ‘simple’ terms for your singular listening convenience, memories, or images of others’ memories. We are, after all, somewhat the same person, Nate, so it does make sense, yes? People we see in dreams that we cannot remember how or why we know them, there’s a reason. We see what our others have seen in their worlds. A ghost in your home? Well, nine times out of ten, it is just one of your others existing in the same way on another plane of existence… out of sight and out of mind. Well, I guess it could be someone else’s other existing there instead, but no matter. There aren’t ghosts. What you think of ghosts are just copies… a parallel universe existing simultaneously behind a cosmic curtain where they can’t see us, and we can’t see them, until we do. It might be a break in these parallel worlds’ times and dimensions that allows us for a small moment to see perhaps a book fall from a shelf, or a whispered statement muffled by the waves of its wormhole travel that humans perceive through their frames of references bound in folklore and storytelling to explain it and conclude their speculation with a scream saying, ‘oh, a ghost!’” Ethan had the white fabric pulled from the mirror and was wearing it over him like a sheet ghost, reenacting movement like one with outstretched fingers. I stepped back, disconcerted at his childlike antics, to which he snickered and removed the sheet before continuing.
“What is merely a shout where I exist can break through to your existence as a small whisper. The quintessence of the universe? The baffling black void that keeps growing? Well, how else do you fit in thousands of versions of you and the millions of people on earth? You have to make room for them somehow, right? Well, there you go… except, as you might observe, I am not totally, um, of the same being as you and the others. I am something… more now. Not entirely human. I suppose you could presume, even, not human at all. It’s not that I never was as you and the others are, but now, well, I am of an existence that would make you want to claw out your own eyes.” Ethan grinned and then his face became an empty expression. “When I asked you the other day if you had ever had déjà vu, you lied. You lied to me.”
I swallowed hard, because Ethan had just then appeared from beside the mirror to right in front of me in a matter of a second, and because I knew that he was somehow in my head. I couldn’t lie anymore even if I had wanted to.
“Oh, but that is alright… I forgive you,” Ethan said quietly with a smile before brushing some non-existent dust off of my shoulder for me, “Okay, okay… the déjà vu tidbit that I was about to delve into. You were told long ago that Kathy was gone, missing, and you experienced it then, yes? You felt it again when I held that picture yesterday of her… there’s a reason. Oh, oh there is a reason,” he laughed loudly with a childlike giddiness, “It takes me time to remember things, and while Kathy was just some figment of imaginings yesterday that I couldn’t quite place as reality when I saw her in that picture, I think I remember now. I’m not sure, but oh, it will be quite fun to know along with you! Between you and me, I have never shown any of us this trick. I’m not even sure why I am, but let’s just roll with it!” He said all of this too happily and cackled before speaking again. “Give me your hand, and no silly, not the one with the razor-sharp piece of glass poised to stab me and kill me, right? Oh Nate, you are a card!”
In my hesitance, Ethan grabbed my hand forcefully himself and held it in both of his own. I stared at him, but slowly he became a cloud of haze… the whole room and world joined him, and soon the entirety of the area and all around me was gone, and I only saw complete darkness. I was alone.
“Hi, you.” I heard a female voice in the void, but not just any…. it was Kathy. She emerged from the dark happily as if none of this was strange. I stayed quiet, unsure of what was happening and wondering if my brain had finally snapped from it all. Kathy stopped in place, tilting her head slightly, but then started running over to my direction with a smile.
“Kathy?” I asked, my voice shaking. Was I dead? Had Ethan actually killed me?
She ran right through me then, as if I was not there, like I was a ghost, and into the arms of a man that looked exactly like me. He was wearing a white button-up and a black blazer over it, but his eyes were normal, and he didn’t ooze black oil from his eyes, mouth, or ears. His smile was the same. I watched as they hugged tightly, and my copy kissed her on the forehead.
I wanted to cry. Kathy was there, but she wasn’t there. Kathy was mine, but she wasn’t mine. I never thought I would ever be able to see her again, and yet there she was, but out of reach and untouchable… never knowing that I was there. After all, this Kathy wouldn’t know I even existed. The two of them disappeared into the same hazy smoke, and I was alone again.
“Where is she?” I heard my own voice ask, and I turned around to see a copy of myself in the doorway of my house as two officers stood outside in the pelting rain. My copy sobbed and raked a hand through his hair.
“We can’t find her anywhere, sir. There is just not a single trace. We will continue to do our very best to search.”
Déjà vu. I was having déjà vu all over again. The image of all of them hazed out, and I fell to the black ground beneath me in shock. There was something wet and gloppy seeping into my pants. It was all around me, covering the ground, but I couldn’t see it. Everything was so dark. I dipped my hand down into the liquid. It was thick, warm, and gooey to the touch, and almost as quickly as I had touched it, I smelled hot copper all around me. Blood.
I jumped up from the ground, wiping my hands frantically on my pants, but it wasn’t coming off.
“Hello, friend,” I heard my voice say, although quite changed and sinister in utterance, from somewhere around me. It was Ethan standing some ways away looking at me.
“Ethan, no, what---” I stuttered, but simultaneously I heard myself from another area around us say it with me. I turned around and saw another copy of myself crouched down crying.
“Please, don’t do this! Just do whatever you want to me, okay? Just don’t hurt Kathy! Don’t hurt my Kathy, please… please,” the copy said, and Ethan giggled.
“Hurt Kathy? Why I would never ever hurt our Kathy. I just need to get rid of you, so I can slip into your position, my dear friend. Nothing more. Then we can go on and on as if nothing had happened! Kathy is here! She never went missing! Oh, I am so happy now, and it is because of your sacrifice that I get to be with her again!”
The next thing I saw was Ethan on the ground hunched over the copy’s dead body, eating him piece by piece, ripping him apart, sucking on the teeth, until the entirety of the copy was consumed. Ethan lifted his head and sighed happily, leaning back on his knees.
“Oh, you have such nice memories of Kathy, friend. I can see all of them! Oh, how wonderful! I will love her well, do not fret.” He laughed, and then he faded from view.
I saw a blurry image of Ethan in the reality with the Kathy he had stolen from the dead copy. They were driving somewhere, laughing and singing along to some song on the radio, and then I heard the loud, sharp crashing metal of two cars meeting at a high speed and watched as Kathy was thrown from the car through the windshield. I reeled over and retched at the sight. She was dead. Ethan remained intact. They both became a haze.
Ethan appeared at a distance sitting in front of a mirror holding his face in his hands and screaming. I don’t know how I knew, but somehow, I did… I knew that in this vision I was seeing before me that it had been decades since he had taken the first copy’s life and even longer since its Kathy had died. It hadn’t been the only time Ethan had done so either. I glanced around the void engulfing us both, and scattered all in the blood in piles, were hundreds of bodies of us, of our copies. Ethan kept screaming with his hands on his face.
“You-- killed all of--” I started, but I couldn’t finish my words.
Ethan stopped screaming and removed his hands from his face. In place of his once normal eyes were now lifeless ones, completely red, and dripping down from them, his mouth, and his ears was the black liquid as if his dark soul was trying to find a way to leave such a corrupted, disgusting body. He seemed to look at me confused, but then started laughing, revealing his knife-like teeth, and turned back to look at himself in a mirror.
“No matter, no matter, no matter, Ethan. Uh, uh,” he muttered and began looking around in the darkness for something. He ended up grabbing a spool of thick gauze out of nowhere. He haphazardly and quickly wrapped it around his head multiple times, covering his eyes completely. No matter how thick the gauze was around his eyes, it became spotted and stained with the black oil in the areas where his eyes were underneath.
“There, there, there, that covers it!” he said tremulously, “No need to look at a mirror again. You’re normal… you are normal until you look at yourself. For now, you are normal, Ethan.”
He faded out of view, and again, I was alone in the black void. The floor beneath me was no longer covered in blood, but glass, like a mirror. It broke beside me, quickly forming a trail of cracks all around me until it shattered, and I fell through. I couldn’t see anything, but then I did.
I was back in my living room… all as it had been before the mad show I had just witnessed, through what? My mind? Through Ethan’s mind? I blinked rapidly, trying to ground myself back into the safety of reality, and then I saw Ethan right in front of me, not smiling, not blinking, just staring with his eyes wide.
“I-- I-- I-- I-- I never should have let you see that,” he said stuttering with no control over his words, juxtaposed with the way that he had been able to craft his sentences so artfully before, “That was not supposed to happen… I’m a good person. I’m a good person. I don’t remember, oh I--” He fell to his knees and folded his hands over the top of his head in contemplation of what we had both seen.
“You killed the other copies? You have been killing the other copies for years? Eating them like a cannibal to gain their memories, to take their place in their reality, to take their Kathys as your own, to become them?” My voice grew louder with each thing I said. Ethan didn’t answer. He just stared at the ground breathing heavily. “You travel through the mirrors to find your other selves… you’re the aboriginal, aren’t you? Why-- how did our Kathys both go missing? What? Am I your exact copy in a reality where you had never killed anyone?”
Ethan shook his head and then met my eyes. “Nate, I was a human, just like you. I had a wife, just like you. I lost her, just like you… when I was told she was gone I just… I lost myself. I had the same thing happen to me that happened to you. I crossed timelines with another copy of us and in that moment, I knew I could get rid of it all… I could be with Kathy again, I just had to--” He stopped talking, but then continued. “The first time I did it, it was like, like a voice in my head, something very wrong and evil and horrifying speaking to me in my mind. I knew somehow from this voice or something inside me, I don’t know, that if I ate him, I would have everything he had been, and it could all be normal again for me. I felt this overwhelming pull and need to taste his flesh and blood. I couldn’t control the hunger for it, and when I had shaken myself from the stupor, his body was gone, eaten, and oh, what I was left with… I had everything he was, everything he had seen of Kathy swirling in my mind. It was like a drug.”
It was as if a switch had flipped in Ethan. He was still his ghastly self, but it was like he suddenly remembered all of what he had done. It was like he hadn’t truly grasped the totality of his evil actions over the years. A machine just devouring all in its path. Ethan turned around away from me, rubbing his face, and he made a horribly somber moan.
“Oh, I did this for years, Nate, decades! Time is a funny thing, you remember me saying. Some copies were in the past, like ones where he and Kathy had just met. Some were far in the future where he and that Kathy had children… but each time, I only got to keep Kathy for a day before I lost her again. Each Kathy was killed, or died from some car wreck, or got sick, or already had cancer, something. Something. Always. Took. My. Kathy. So, I kept going to new realities to get her back. I took, and I took, and I took, and I took, and with each taking, I lost memories of what I was doing, of what this was all about… I lost my humanity. I was no longer human. I became what I am now before you. I saw myself in the mirror as this changed thing… and I remember trying to hide the image from myself. I-- I didn’t look in a mirror for so long… but then something about all of it made me so deliriously happy. I couldn’t stop smiling. Oh, that was when I first felt alive! It was like I was Dorian Gray. I got hideous and terrible with each act, but I stayed alive, unable to die, traveling to every conceivable version of the world! I was powerful, something more than human, and oh, so intoxicatedly happy!” Ethan jumped around joyfully smiling, but then he stopped in place. He turned around to me, and I saw once again the crazed Ethan break through the mantra of his past memories. The switch was flipped back to its factory settings, and with it, I felt doomed.
“I remember all of it now, Nate. It was like, like, like I knew it was all in my mind still somewhere, a memory that was deep inside me that I couldn’t quite find again, but ha ha! Look! We found it together! It is all so clear, isn’t it? Yes? Yes, so clear! I remember having déjà vu about our very meeting years ago! I remember me… I remember you… I think I looked like you still. I must be losing track of all my steals, because I have come back to you twice now. The first time, I actually took your Kathy with me. I wanted to see if I could steal a Kathy and have her back in my reality, but when I did that, she just, ha ha, poof! Disappeared completely! She was missing! I don’t even know where she is now! Well, and you don’t either, hmm. It is all quite clear…” Ethan studied me harder, touching my arms and hands. “So alike, you and me. Time is a funny thing.”
I could barely speak. I was sweating at every bend of my body and at any moment I felt as if I was going to throw up. “How---” I swallowed hard. “How many have you killed?”
Ethan smiled and squinted his eyes at the ceiling as if trying to recall. He began counting with his fingers, but as soon as he got to the number five, he held up his hands and breathed out a laugh.
“Ah, well too many to count, I’m afraid, old chap. I’d say thousands, given the years. There are so many of us! So many…” He grabbed me by the shoulders in a friendly gesture. “You know, Nate… I really like you. You have been my favorite anthropomorphism of me. I hate this for us. To see such a close-knit bond about to break apart and ooze and drip red, but it’ll taste so heavenly! Oh, oh, I am starving, Nate!”
Ethan’s hold on me became a violent grip, and his nails dug into my skin. He growled with an unearthly sound, and his teeth protruded their sharp razor points. I jammed the shard of mirror I still had in my hand into his neck and twisted. Ethan howled and let me go as I pulled the shard back out only to plunge it into him again, this time into the center of Ethan’s lifeless eye. He stumbled in place and then fell to his knees. I ran over to the mirror, looking it up and down, praying for some kind of answer to rid myself of this horror. Ethan crept up behind me with his long, thin claws extended out in front of him. I grabbed hold of him and slammed him into the mirror.
“Oh, you really are so strong, Nate!” Ethan cackled, “A real fighter, you are!” I pulled him back by the neck and shoved him into the mirror again. The glass started to crack.
“No, no, no, no, no! Nate! We are twin souls, you and I!” Ethan screamed, “Please, you wouldn’t! You don’t understand what this will mean!”
I slammed him into the mirror harder and harder until it shattered completely. The mirror was broken. Ethan let out a horrible scream. I let go of him and watched as his wounds drained out black liquid until he was a raggedy pelt of limp flesh on the ground. The rest of him melted away into the hardwood floor, leaving a sickly black spot in his place. He was gone.
The mirror in the wooden frame is no more. I destroyed it completely, throwing it, frame and all, into a fire to burn. I have destroyed all the others in the house as well and have placed a sheet over the bathroom mirror.
I now sit now in the living room, years later, in the chair beside the rug placed over the black spot that never leaves the hardwood floor. I hold Kathy’s picture in my hands, and I miss her. I miss her so much. The mirror in the bathroom calls to me, but I am hesitant to answer it, so I stay seated. My stomach growls, but I do not wish for food. I try to ignore it. Kathy’s face fills my mind, and involuntarily, I feel myself moving to the bathroom. Without memory of how I got here, I see the mirror in front of me, the sheet having somehow been pulled down off of it. I want to touch it, and I do. I want to see… to see what lies beyond that frame again. Only now, I think I know how to get through. Only now, I wish to hold Kathy in my arms again. My stomach growls as I see my reflection blink when I have not blinked.
“Hello… friend,” I say, and he stares back, wide-eyed and confused. I cannot help but smile.
FOR THE AUTHOR'S ANALYSIS, MORE INFORMATION ON THIS PIECE, AND A LINK TO THE STORY--INSPIRED SPOTIFY PLAYLIST, PLEASE SEE THE SEPARATE ADJACENT POST TO THIS ONE (TITLED "AN AUTHOR'S ANALYSIS: 'CURIOSITY KILLED THE COPIED CATS'") BELOW OR ON THE "CURIOSITY KILLED THE COPIED CATS" PAGE.
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