Mirrors

When my grandfather died they draped black cloths over all the mirrors in the flat. I asked my grandmother why. "To keep the dead from climbing out," she told me. For the rest of the day I found it near impossible to look anywhere but those shrouded mirrors, half expecting dead fingers and toes to emerge. I was unconvinced the flimsy cloths would keep a determined dead person at bay.

Nana was too sad at the time for any more questions, but I felt I had enough information to figure out how it worked and induce a surfeit of nightmares. When people die, the young me surmised, they go to the next world through the nearest mirror whose surface weakens just enough to let them pass. But once the dead on the other side see someone coming through they try to push their way back into the world of the living. So the living have to get the cloths up quick as they can to stop an invasion of the dead.

But how did it work exactly? The cloths blacked out the gateway, I figured, otherwise surely they'd have to be boarded up. The cloths only prevent the dead being able to see their way out. But if so it wasn't a very efficient system. What would stop an enterprising dead person from determinedly touching every spot in the vicinty of a recently functional mirror? Once they found the softened mirror—out they'd pop. Wouldn't the mirrors be visible the instant someone died? And besides some people die alone. Who'd cover up mirrors for them? What would happen if someone on the dead side just happened to be passing by a mirror when a new dead person came through? They could easily jump through before the cloths went up.

What about malfunctioning mirrors? I was very young but I'd already seen ample evidence that not everything works perfectly all the time. Televisions, cars, and especially computers didn't always function like they were meant to. Even relatively simple things like pens and yo-yos could start spurting ink or get all tied up at any minute. What if a mirror stopped working? Did old mirrors that'd been changing back and forth between mirror and portal for the dead for ages and ages stop being able to change so easily? What if one got stuck being a portal? And what if a mirror broke? Was that why it was seven year's bad luck?

There must be dead people everywhere.

Next time my family visited Nana (at the time we didn't live in the same city as her) I asked about the mirrors again, hoping she'd clear up some of these questions, and hopefully reduce my nightmares. She looked at me blankly.

"The dead what? No, no, the mirrors you cover for vanity. You rend clothes, you don't wash. You don't think of you, or your face in a mirror when a person dies."

Was that the truth? Or had she told me the truth the first time? I tried to erase mirrors and what lay behind them from my mind but I remained nervous around them even after I'd begun to forget why. Then I read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and, more importantly, its sequel Through the Looking Glass. Another world on the other side of a mirror. Had Alice been amongst the dead? It made a lot of sense.

Later still I saw Jean Cocteau's Orphée where the other world is explicitly the land of the dead. How does Orphée get there? Through a mirror that weakens and lets him through—exactly as I had always imagined it. Terrifying.

I had by then learned that my bit of accidental cosmology was deeply suspect and not supported up by any mainstream religion, including my grandmother's, not to mention any reputable scientists. But my nervousness around mirrors continues.

New York City, 13 July 2004

© 2004 Justine Larbalestier

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