In early June I had been taken by my Aunt Linda to stay the summer at her country home in upstate New York. It was a huge old house in poor repair on a few acres surrounded by somebody's apple orchards. Aunt Linda was in her sixties and lived alone so I basically had the run of the place with very few rules. I was overwhelmed by the ornate furniture everywhere in that old house. Every chair, bookcase, cabinet, table, picture frame - they were all so intricate and fancy. They all had that dark, cracked look that wooden furniture can get after so many decades go by. I had thoroughly explored the house, barn, and sheds and was still feeding my insatiable boyish curiosity when I asked one evening what my uncle had been like. Aunt Linda smiled and showed me an old photograph of a thin man with a handlebar mustache and a huge cone of cotton candy standing up against an immense Ferris wheel at some fair. Then she started telling me the most wonderful romantic tales of a very colorful young man. She said she'd married the smartest man she'd ever met. He loved games of the mind - he had played chess tournaments all through school, had studied mathematics and physics in college, and knew Greek, Latin, French, and Spanish. After college he had studied the abilities of the mind, she said. What she didn't say was that he pursued hypnotism and mesmerism, psychic and supernatural phenomenon. She told me how that he especially liked designing mazes for people to walk through, designing and building garden labyrinths and houses of mirrors. What she didn’t say was that his later mazes were themselves experiments in supernatural. My aunt proceeded that evening to take me somewhere I hadn’t gone - the attic. She told me to stay at the open door, she crossed to a chest which she unlocked, and then she came back with what looked like a doctor’s black bag. We left the attic and I followed to the kitchen table. In the bag was a world of wonders for an eight year old. There was a pair of magnets, a prism, a kaleidoscope, a huge magnifying glass, a set of 15 small mirrors, a periscope, a flask of mercury, some 3-D glasses, a crystal ball, a blue and silver mobius strip, and what she called reflective protractor - it looked like a small, clear accordion with inward facing mirrors at each end, and metering marks, so that you could get endless reflections in both mirrors, but at all different angles, so that you could measure the angles. She showed me the difference between the plain glass mirror, where the silvering is protected behind the glass and the front-reflecting mirror, which has the silvering on the outer surface - unprotected by the glass, but much clearer and giving a true reflective angle... The next day I spent hours playing with the contents of that wonderful bag, but the following day after breakfast I went to explore the attic by myself. The hours I wasted in that attic seemed endless, but they are irrelevant except for the discovery of the ghost. In the attic was a very large covered mirror. It was about 7’x4’ and was a front-reflecting mirror. It had some kind of steel backing with hinges and brackets brazed on in unusual places. When I first uncovered it, it was dust free and daylight from the single window fairly filled the attic. When I stopped looking *at* the mirror and looked *into* it, I jumped out of my skin. There was a reflection of some other boy behind, and kind of through, my own reflection! The other boy in the mirror was just barely distinct enough not to be my imagination, but he was also moving independent of my own movements and was mouthing conversation at me. Over time the boy got easier and easier to see and to understand - he would talk and gesture, but there was no sound. It may have been lip reading or telepathy - I just got to where I understood his “speech”. I didn’t wonder who he was - he was just the boy in the mirror. Oh, and I knew he was dead - there was an unmistakable edge of fear and sorrow that was intrinsic to his presence. Nobody needed to tell me he was a ghost, and his name was Robert Walker. He could have been the same age as me, or a little older. For the next few weeks I would sneak to the attic and talk to him. I kept his mirror covered except when I wanted to see him, and he was always there, always waiting with an unnerving patience that always made me feel guilty. Robert always asked me questions, all kinds of questions - my name, age, where I was from, had I seen any other children in mirrors, were there other mirrors like his, had I been to the world’s fair, was the war still going, where were my parents, could he meet my father - some had seemed normal enough, others were downright incomprehensible. My nervous little secret began to trouble me more and more until I eventually became afraid of the attic, finally avoiding it all together. I spent my days outdoors, my evenings with Aunt Linda, and dreamed freely at night. It became a perfect boy’s summer - swimming, fishing, climbing trees, laying in the grass watching clouds... The summer passed in the way summers do, and when my father came to get me in August, the boy in the mirror became a childhood fantasy I’d left behind. - - - - I was seventeen, and a junior at Hammond’s Boy’s School of Eastridge when Aunt Linda died. My father had disappeared a few months after my mother’s death, to this day I’ve not heard from him, but Linda had become my whole family - quite literally. She had moved to a small house walking distance from the school and I’d spent practically all my weekends with her. It had never occurred to me that she also would be without any other family. I was grief stricken to a point of despondency. Her church pastor and some neighbors took care of everything. I’d never felt so alone - and the funeral was practically unattended. I spent the next few days out of class and alone in my room at the school. My whole perspective of life just kind of dropped out, leaving me confused and empty - with no purpose or even direction for life. I decided I should probably start going to church on Sundays and maybe that would help. I also made up my mind to talk to the school councilor about college and different careers - either after Hammond’s or after college. It was after dinner, two days after the funeral that I was summoned to the conference office in the main lobby. The dean met me at the door and walked me into the office. Inside was Aunt Linda’s pastor and a man I hadn’t met, named Charles Oliver. Well, Mr. Oliver was a lawyer. It seems that I was my Aunt’s primary heir and also that her estate was unimaginably greater than her lifestyle had ever hinted at. In a few moments I financially surpassed my lifetime’s expectations. There was a legal trust holding the money until my eighteenth birthday, but an allowance was provided “in order to settle any accounts and manage reasonable expenses”. The trust was managed by Mr. Oliver’s firm. The three men sat with me in that office and outlined exactly how I should proceed immediately, and during the next few years. They made me promise to finish my school at Hammond’s and attend college, and encouraged me to call on them at any time at all. Charles and I continued to meet at least once a week, and he invited me to his home often. Life again formed an optimistic perspective. It’s amazing how powerfully wealth plays on our emotions. One moment I was shattered and hopeless, the next I was dreaming and scheming. My funds would be far more than adequate to finish college and live comfortably for a long life. As I sorted out the whole affair, I made a few rather interesting discoveries. Firstly, I discovered that my aunt had retained the summer house I’d stayed at as a child, I immediately thought of the ghost and wondered... The second surprise was that my aunt had warehouses, owned or leased, all over San Francisco - with nothing to indicate what was stored in them. I decided to visit the old house that summer, and began thinking about visiting San Francisco after I graduated, perhaps even attend college there... - - - - Four months later school let out for the summer and I took a bus out to the old estate. I tried to find interest and beauty in the old furniture and the old memories, but I was too distracted. Eventually, I went up to the attic, carefully loaded the mirror, still covered, into a special padded carton, and retrieved my uncle’s chest. The chest held his black bag of tricks, but much more significantly, was filled with textbooks, letters, and notebooks. The subject matter of these included optics, mathematics, and the supernatural, the theme of his personal obsession being the relationship between the three. I found out a lot about my uncle at that time, he had indeed built mazes. It seems that he had been overwhelmed as a child by a huge house of mirrors at the 1900 World’s Fair in San Francisco and had, by his 20’s began running his own house of mirrors on Coney Island. It was on Coney Island that he began seeing ghosts in mirrors. Another man would have ignored it or denied it, but my uncle began systematically solving the issue, convinced that the ghosts were real, and that the mirrors were allowing him to see them. During the following year, his obsession became my own. I left the fated mirror packed away, but resurrected all the books and notes I had. I even revisited the old house and successfully uncovered an even larger collection of notes and books. I searched the whole estate, finding three other caches of notes, and began the tremendous work of cataloging them by subject matter and date. By the time I was nearing graduation I had a working familiarity of all of them, and had them well organized. I had read enough, especially knowing about the ghost, to believe that my uncle’s theories were correct. I believed that the spirit realm could be opened by some unfathomable manner he had devised. I had also decided to continue my uncle’s studies though the physics program at the University of California in San Francisco. - - - - Having no family, I left Hammond’s Boy’s School directly for San Francisco. I rented a house near the university and began systematically exploring the warehouses I had wondered about for almost two years. I had no problem getting access to them, but they were all filled with the cheapest kind of random rubbish. I later decided that they had intentionally been filled with worthless junk, because each had a hidden treasure - a matching mirror to the one from Aunt Linda’s attic. Not only this, but the first one I found had it’s own ghost - I briefly saw the reflection of a tall, angry man. I didn’t uncover any of the others. There was a total of 17 mirrors, the one from my aunt, and one from each of sixteen warehouses. A seventeenth warehouse (actually the fourth one I visited) had not been occluded with junk, but held all the other necessary components for his great circle. There was an abundance of metal framings and mounting tracks, as well as a very large case containing the 16 7’ prismatic buffers, and the smaller cases containing a flawless 10” crystal ball and a slender, red, 40”pedestal. I then got rid of the warehouses. I disposed of all the junk, checking each (in vain) for more books, and terminated the rental locations. I was left with ten locations which I owned, and into the best of these went the mirrors, prisms, crystal ball, and all the hardware. I committed to myself that I would not unlock the warehouse again until I had unlocked my uncle’s notes. Then I studied physics, quantum physics - light. I obtained my Master’s in only five years, all the time wrestling with my uncle’s notes. I stayed on with the college continuing my graduate studies when I began to understand. I knew that I was missing three compilation notebooks, but they were not to be discovered and now, in retrospect, I am convinced that they were long destroyed. I also did not have one major textbook which I could not discover - he always referred to his books by only the last name of the author, and a book on refraction by some unknown “Lewis” was frequently cited. I could not understand the whole of his reasoning, but felt I was ready to duplicate his experiment. I was twenty five. - - - - I had no intention of building a house of mirrors or surrounding labyrinth for the 17 mirrors. I would only build the center - a 15’ circle of 17 mirrors held at approximately 160 degrees to each other, with each joint between mirrors buffered by full length prisms tuned to the matching angles. The center of the room was occupied by the slender red pedestal supporting the crystal ball, directly above which would be a single pane circular window mounted at an angle exactly parallel with the floor of the room and equipped with a remotely worked metal cover. Access into the circle of mirrors was via a stairway from below, a stair of which no part rose into the circle area. The room construction was not particularly difficult, I was fortunate enough to employ the services of a gentlemen who could comprehend my exacting requirements of a perfectly flat, level floor and my special window and staircase. For convenience of delivery and construction, the whole was on ground level with the entrance stair going beneath the floor and emerging in the room just outside of where my circle would be. I also used the contracted help to move the metal framing parts, and then ended my accounts with all contractors. It took no more than ten days to build the framework, and I marveled at the quality and smart design of the brackets, knowing it would be easy work to mount the mirrors and prisms and align all the angles. Of necessary concern was the unveiling of the mirrors, at least some of which were possessed of ghosts. This was to be done without any light in the room, and the small lights I would be using to fine tune the alignment the frames after the mirrors and prisms were in would have to be screened and faint. I was not remiss and mounted my aunt’s mirror first. I searched the mirror’s depths, but it was only a perfect reflection of myself, then, as I was turning away I just caught his image stepping away back further into the mirror, as if he were hiding. Then, skipping each alternative frame, I put in the next three mirrors. That was all I could do in the light. Prepared further by a portable screen and a small flashlight, I pressed the switch which covered the window. The room was soaked in pitch black darkness - as was correct. The fifth mirror was from the first warehouse, and the only other mirror which I knew contained a ghost. I began to feel a real uneasiness as I mounted it and trued up the bracket and prisms. The seventh mirror also must have been occupied because I was actually alarmed with fear as I carried it, almost dropping the mirror as I neared the bracket. By the ninth mirror, my sense of unease had risen to a passion held in check by sheer stubborn determination. I had completed the circle once with alternate frames still needing to be filled. It was when I picked up the eleventh mirror that the temperature in the room undeniably dropped several degrees, suddenly, like a gust of wind will do. When I finished aligning the fourteenth mirror I thought I heard voices - and there was light in the room. I turned off my small flashlight and dropped the screen to the floor. The first, third, seventh, and eleventh mirrors had visible images in them, all of them pressing, or even clawing at the glass of the mirrors. Then I understood. This was not a window to the afterlife, but a door. These people had been taken through the mirrors by the mirrors, taken and trapped. I could not release them. I risked my own doom in the mirrors or my destruction by their wrath - I could feel the intensity of their menace. I felt like I was staring through thin glass at desperate madmen who might shatter the glass easily at any moment. I steeled myself for action, and stepped through one of the three empty frames to escape the circle. I made sure of my flashlight and pocketed it - I didn’t dare provide any light now! I worked from behind the mirrors, first covering them all, then taking them down and sealing them back into their individual cases. It was the worst trial of my life, sweating profusely and shaking uncontrollably, I took down all fourteen of the mirrors, in the pitch black, sometime handling mirrors seething with dangerous hatred, but I dared not allow any light! When I was finally done and the mirrors were all closed back into the cases, I threw open the door ran out. I returned the next day at noon to clear away all the unusual artifacts, leaving the frames intact. I locked the building and never returned, delivering the mirrors, prisms, and crystal ball back to the warehouse. I would discover in short order that I had not escaped unscathed. I fear I have been roughly marked by that contact with this cursed gateway. Over the next several days I noticed several gray hairs emerging, and by the end of the month I looked more like fifty than twenty five. I also lost a lot of weight and have never since been able to keep much weight on, and worse, I found myself afflicted with an old man’s trembling. - - - - I am 56 years old today. The new millennia is upon us. I think about a boy at a world’s fair exactly a century ago, and think of 17 mirrors that have been waiting for me for 21 years. I have spent the last few years revisiting my uncle’s texts, but they are really quite beyond me - they always were. The truth is that my health is shot, I look more like a man in his 70's then his 50's - no color to my skin, eyes, or hair, no meat on my bones, and my loathsome debilitating trembling that quakes my body as much as my hands. Even my mind is inconstant, haunted for years now by perpetual half-glimpses of the old ghosts in mirrors and shadows. My thoughts brood darkly over the inevitability of my own death. I think of the childhood warnings of judgement from God and wonder if there is a mirror for me to cling to instead, or if perhaps I’ll simply dissolve from my fears into silent, cold, total darkness. I have decided that I would rather risk the menacing spirits than the inconceivable concept of true death. I have decided not the enter the new millennia, but to keep to my own era. Tomorrow I bid for immortality as I face the ghosts my uncle and I have held in their captivity for all this time. I will mount all the mirrors, feed them their light - and I will find out what it is that my uncle has built...
November 3, 1999
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