Read Online Wild Fell by Michael Rowe - Free Book Online Page A

ship’s lantern with a hand-painted shade featuring a rendering of a sailboat at full mast, hard against the wind.
    Feeling better for having vented a bit, I turned away to put on my pyjamas and get into bed. I thought I saw something flicker and shift in the depths of the mirror. There was a sudden impression of fluttering, as though a moth had trembled in front of a lamp, wings beating a frantic insectile tarantella in the air. But when I looked again, I was alone in the mirror with my empty bedroom reflected in the glass behind me.
    Then suddenly I
wasn’t
alone. I
knew
I wasn’t alone as surely as I knew my own name, or that my beautiful red bike had been stolen that afternoon, or that I wanted it back at that moment more than I’d ever wanted anything in the world.
    I touched the glass and tapped it lightly with my index finger. “Mirror Pal? Are you real?” Even at eight, I realized how ridiculous that question was, but I asked it anyway. I breathed on the glass, running the tip of my index finger through the condensation, bisecting the cloud of moisture with a jagged line of fingernail. “Mirror Pal?”
    What happened next was something I
felt
in a way that almost precludes an adult ability to put it into words. As I opened my mouth to form Mirror Pal’s answer to my own question, the air inside my room became heavy with something like the weight of the electricity and ozone that presages a summer lightning storm. By reflex, I closed my eyes as though anticipating a thunderclap. There was the burst of the orange-red light that always accompanies a rapid opening and shutting of the eyelids.
    An image rose in my mind—or, more accurately, appeared to impress itself on my mind from somewhere outside of my own reckoning—of a young girl of my age whom I had never seen before. She had long dark hair tied up in the sort of bow I had seen in pictures of my grandmother when she was my age. The girl wore some sort of dark-coloured dress rippling like black water caught in a shaft of moonlight. And her name came to me then: Amanda.
    Amanda
.
    When I spoke, it was my voice, of course—Mirror Pal’s voice—but this time it was also
not
my voice at all. I had uttered the name without any conscious intent to do so, but I said it as reverently as if it were an invocation. The name seemed to pour out of me of its own volition, shaping and wrapping itself around my vocal cords and calling them to life. I heard it with my ears, but I also heard a double-voice say it in my mind, as though two record players were playing the same single at different speeds, causing a slight overlap.
    With my eyes still closed, I reached over and switched off the light on my night table. Then I opened my eyes and looked into the mirror.
    Something indefinable had changed in the reflection. It was still my room, but the edges now bled into a general murkiness, a blurring not dissimilar to that of the faded quality of an antique photograph: yellowing, age-burned and cracked at the edges. My reflection, too, had changed in a similarly impalpable way. My eyes were obscured by the shadows of the room, but my shoulders were hunched in a narrowing way that suggested somehow the fey mien of a young girl sitting on the edge of a large antiqued chair that was too big for her. When I instinctively relaxed my shoulders to dispel the illusion, my reflection followed suit, but it seemed to lag just a beat, as though it slyly wanted me to know that it was doing it on sufferance, not because the laws of physics had compelled it to do so because it was my reflection.
    My. Mine.
    Mine.
    I said, “Mirror Pal? Is that you?”
    Again, the unbidden response, the weird aural duotone of my own voice echoing in my head.
    My name is Amanda.
    I was entranced. I’d forgotten that I was speaking to myself, forgot that this illusion was impossible, forgot that I must be speaking in my own voice because there was no possible way my reflection could be addressing me