A House Without Mirrors (8 page)

T
he wardrobe was as dark as ever, but something had happened. The glass in each of the mirrors was not the still, polished surface it had been before. Now shadows were billowing there, like blood swirling through water or thunderclouds being chased across the sky by a storm.

Erland was in the house of mirrors, I was sure of it. I could hear him screaming.

The transformation took longer this time, and the shift in the light did not offer any relief, as it had done before. On the contrary.

When I stepped out of the wardrobe I almost crashed into Hetty. She was standing just outside the door, dripping wet and shivering.

“He came through,” she said weakly. “I don’t know where he is.”

The same wordless cry sounded from somewhere in the house again. Now I could hear both fear and pain in it. Erland sounded like an animal.

“We’ll find him,” I said, trying to steady my voice. “Do you have any dry clothes that you can change into?”

She nodded. “In my room.”

For the first time I got to see Hetty’s room, which was a mirror image of the same room on the second floor that I had chosen for myself. The bed was the same, and even a couple of the paintings above the chest of drawers. Apart from the reversal, the main difference was that Hetty’s room felt a lot more like a home than mine.

I helped Hetty out of her soaking-wet clothes while she stood on the carpet, shaking from the cold. The water poured from her, as if she had been fished out of the sea moments before.

“What happened?” I said. “Where did all the water come from?”

She looked at me quickly, her eyes frightened.

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I think it’s him who does it.”

Hetty was taller than me now, and looked almost
Wilma’s age. When she wriggled out of the singlet with stiff, jerky movements I saw that she had grown tiny breasts.

I rubbed her dry with a cotton throw that I found on the bed and helped her into underwear and bodice, wool stockings with garters, blouse and skirt. I had never seen such clothes before, but Hetty pulled them on with practised movements.

When she had pulled on a knitted cardigan and buttoned it up to her chin she stopped shivering.

“How did he find the way here?” she asked. “Did you show him?”

I shook my head. “Erland eavesdrops,” I said. “He sneaks around people and snoops out their secrets.”

Hetty stood up, straightened the cardigan, and inhaled deeply. Then she closed her eyes for a moment, as if she was composing herself.

“Erland is a good boy,” she said, reaching her hand out to me. “It’s not his fault that it’s inside him that darkness gathers.”

I had never thought about Erland in that way, but it was true. He was an empty space where a darkness of varying depth mingled with blackness.

Hand in hand we walked along the darkened corridor, in the direction of the screams. They were coming more often now. I tried to switch on the light in the hallway, but nothing happened.

“He doesn’t like the light,” Hetty said. “He has made sure it’s dark.”

The moonlight shining through the
stained-glass
window was enough for us to see where to place our feet. And for me to see the traces left behind by Erland. A large pot lay smashed on the first landing, the flowers trampled into the carpet as if somebody had been jumping on them. On the walls were darker streaks from dirty hands and a picture frame hung askew and gaping above a sofa.

All of that was stuff that Erland could have done in the real world as well, even if he always tried to blame somebody else. But when Hetty opened the door to the basement, I grew scared. Scratch marks around the handle looked as if some predator had made them: deep grooves that shone white against the brown wood.

“I think he tried to get out,” Hetty said quietly. “I didn’t dare to open.”

The light on the cellar stairs didn’t work either, of course, but Hetty held my hand and led me downstairs. With each step Erland’s screams grew stronger and more frequent. He knew that somebody was coming.

I had been in Henrietta’s basement many times, but there were many things in the basement of the house of mirrors that I didn’t recognize. The great mangle was still in the laundry room, but instead of a washing machine and tumble dryer there was a walled-in washbasin and a sort of press with a long handle. The larder was lined with shelves, and everywhere there were jars of jam and preserved fruits, sacks of flour, peas and dried beans. A wooden box in the corner smelled tartly of last autumn’s apples.

Half the boiler room was full of coal to feed the fire; large chunks glistening in black behind a plank on the floor. The boiler itself was different too, old and sooty with a flap, flames swaying orange behind its grill. The firelight spread over the walls until they seemed to surge in the light.

“He’s in there,” Hetty whispered in my ear. “There, in the corner.”

She pointed into the darkness next to the boiler, and I saw, but couldn’t believe my eyes. How could the black, spider-like shape that had crawled into the corner be Erland?

Not until he cried did I realize it was true.

Perhaps it was his scream that made the flames of the boiler flare up. I don’t know, but in any case it grew brighter. When the yellow light fell on Erland’s face, I realized why he sounded the way he did.

Erland no longer had a mouth.

The lower part of his face was just smooth skin, which stretched and strained when yet another scream pressed up through his throat. His eyes were like they were before, but large with fear.

I couldn’t help it. I started crying.

“What are we to do?” I whispered.

Hetty shook her head while she started pulling me slowly back towards the door.

“We can’t do anything,” she said. “Someone who loves him must come.”

I stopped, but Hetty’s hand held its grip on my arm.

“Uncle Daniel won’t listen to me,” I said. “He’ll never come here with me.”

Hetty pulled and I started moving again.

“I’ll tell you what you should say to him,” she said. “This time he will listen.”

H
enrietta’s house was still, as if it were holding its breath between its high walls.

I was still not quite sure if I was fully awake, but my naked feet slapped hard against the floorboards in the corridor. Even here in the real world everything felt like a nightmare.

It was not until I entered the room that Erland shared with Signe and saw his empty bed that I realized that everything was true. Erland was no longer here on the outside.

Signe was sitting up in bed. Her hands were fidgeting with something invisible on the duvet and she seemed worried, almost like when she first came to the house.

“Signe,” I panted, “I have to talk to Uncle Daniel!”

She looked up and her eyes were frightened.

“Dad’s not here,” she said softly. “He’s looking for Erland.”

“Where?” I said, trying to catch my breath. “Where is he looking?”

I could read the answer in Signe’s eyes even before she whispered the words.

“In the basement.”

It was easier to run downstairs. I took the steps in huge cat leaps, held onto the railing at the corners and rushed down the corridor towards the kitchen as fast as I could. I didn’t really know whether my rushing would help Erland, but that was not why I was running.

I ran because standing still was too awful.

The cellar door stood open and in this world the lights were working. I lit every single one that I could reach and all the time I was crying Daniel’s name.

He was standing in front of me as I turned a corner and I hardly had time to stop.

“Have you found him?”

Uncle Daniel was not his usual self. His arms, which usually hung limply down his sides, stuck out and jerked tensely, while his shoulders were pulled right up. He was holding a torch in his hand, and it blinded me.

“Could you move the torch, please?”

He lowered it impatiently. “But have you found Erland?”

I didn’t know how to respond. My hesitation made him angry, I could see that, but I couldn’t simply say yes or no. I had to tell him using exactly the words that Hetty had used.

“Thomasine, I’ll have no more of this—”

“No! You must listen to me!”

The words came out in a shout, although I hadn’t meant to scream. It worked.

“Erland is not here,” I said quietly. “I will take you to him, but first you have to listen.”

Uncle Daniel watched me with a look that swung between anger and some other quality, but he kept quiet.

“Follow me,” I said, turning. “I will explain along the way.”

On our way back up through the house I repeated what Hetty had told me, almost word for word. That our lives are shards in which only a piece of something larger is reflected. That there are parts of every human being that are hidden to themselves. And that we need each other to have the courage to see.

I had understood everything when Hetty spoke to me, but I felt in my body that Uncle Daniel didn’t understand me now. And who could blame him? The things I said sounded insane; it sounded as if I were lying.

On the very last step before the second floor, I stopped. The strength that had borne me running through the house was all used up, and I couldn’t believe in anything any more. Least of all what I had just said. When I turned to Uncle Daniel I saw that his eyes were frightened. They were almost as frightened as Signe’s.

At once I could see what he was seeing. His child had disappeared and here was a girl he hardly knew—that he didn’t even like—who babbled about mirrors and shards and invisible realities…

I closed my eyes and Uncle Daniel’s grief and loneliness merged with my own.

“Is he alive?”

His voice was just thin air. Like the wind blowing through grass, but it made me open my eyes.

I nodded, although I wasn’t quite sure it was true. If that thing I had seen with Hetty in the boiler room was Erland…

“I can’t explain,” I said. “You have to come inside with me.”

“Come where with you?”

I didn’t waste any more time on words. I had talked enough.

“Just come,” I said, taking Uncle Daniel’s hand.

I had never thought about the wardrobe being narrow, not even when I went in there with Wilma. But now I was totally aware of Uncle Daniel’s big body pressing against mine, his heavy breathing, the heat that radiated from his pot belly and through my nightie into my back.

“Thomasine, I don’t know—” he breathed, but I interrupted his faltering whisper with my own.

“Quiet! Can’t you just stand still and be quiet, please!”

My eyes closed, I hoped, hoped, hoped that the transformation would happen this time as well. What would I say if it didn’t? Or if I thought it had happened and it hadn’t, and opened the door only to find that we were still in the same house where we had begun?

What if I had imagined it all? Perhaps I was really mad.

But when I opened the wardrobe door and stepped out onto the floor my foot landed in something cold and wet: a puddle of water that Hetty had left behind.

“Come,” I said again, but this time I didn’t take his hand.

Uncle Daniel followed me through the dark house of mirrors and I saw out of the corner of my eye that he was trying to understand where he was. A couple of times—by the smashed flowerpot on the stairs and when we passed an upturned sofa in one of the drawing rooms—I heard him trying to say something. I put my finger over my lips and indicated that he should walk on.

At the cellar door he stopped in his tracks, although I had already taken several steps down.

“Listen now, Thomasine, that’s enough,” he said, rather loudly. “What is this? Where are we?”

I shook my head.

“I don’t know any more than you do,” I said.

I continued down the cellar stairs, and when I had reached halfway I heard that Uncle Daniel was following. It ought to have made me relieved, but it only made me more anxious.

What would Uncle Daniel say when he saw Erland? And could anyone, least of all his dad, save Erland now?

“Who is she?”

Uncle Daniel’s whisper came close to my ear.

“Who?”

“The girl! What is she doing here?”

It hadn’t occurred to me that I ought to have explained who Hetty was or why she was standing there in the passage before us. I was just so happy to see her.

“Her name is Hetty,” I said, and I pushed him past me. “She wants to talk to you, so listen.”

And Uncle Daniel did actually listen while Hetty talked to him softly and gravely.

I had no idea what she said to him, but after a while I saw him nodding.

“I will try to talk to him,” he said. “Erland is not an unreasonable child if you explain things to him in the right way. Where is he?”

Hetty’s eyes were sad when she took hold of Uncle Daniel’s hands.

“Is he your child?”

Uncle Daniel looked as if he didn’t understand.

“I told you he is,” he answered. “Why do you think I’m here?”

“Is he your child?” Hetty’s voice was just as quiet when she asked the question a second time, but something anxious crept into it and I saw her hands squeezing Uncle Daniel’s.

“What do you mean?” he said, pulling his hands free. “Are you sure we are talking about the same child? Short hair, blue eyes, rather—”

“Is he your child?”

Uncle Daniel fell silent and looked at her. I didn’t understand how he could meet Hetty’s gaze. I wasn’t able to.

It was as if all the grief in the world was contained in those pale blue eyes; as if years of lonely weeping had gathered there.

“Is he your child, Daniel?”

I had time to breathe ten times before Uncle Daniel moved. He nodded once, bent his head and started crying with his face hidden in his hands.

“Then go to him,” Hetty said. “Bring him home.”

And Uncle Daniel went by himself into the dark room where Erland was.

I don’t know what he saw in that boiler room. Perhaps he just saw Erland’s usual self, or else he saw the same creature that I had seen. In any case, he stayed in the dark and after a while he started whispering.

Hetty sat down with her back against the wall with the boiler-room door and I lay down with my head in her lap. I was so dreadfully tired, but I couldn’t sleep. It felt like hours went by as I lay there listening to Uncle Daniel’s whispering voice. Sometimes he cried so much I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Sometimes I heard, but not everything.

She didn’t want me
, Uncle Daniel whispered.
She left me when I needed her the most, and it hurt so much. I wasn’t brave enough to let myself need you and Signe, even though you stayed with me. I was scared that you’d disappear and that it would hurt again, Erland. I’m sorry
.

The strange thing was that I understood everything Uncle Daniel said, even when the words were incomprehensible.

I understood in the way you understand music, and after a while the whispers rocked me to sleep, in the way the waves wash a bark boat towards the shore.

I woke in my own bed, and it was early morning. A humming sound could be heard in the street. When I walked up to the window and peeked through the curtain, I saw the cab waiting outside the gate with the engine running.

“Would you like to say goodbye?” Dad was standing in the doorway, fully dressed as if he had been up all night.

I didn’t need to ask who was leaving.

Barefoot and in my dressing gown, I followed Dad down the stairs into the hallway by the main entrance. Sitting on top of a suitcase so large that she could dangle her legs was Signe. She looked up when I arrived.

“We are going home, Thomasine,” she said. “The train is leaving soon.”

“I know,” I said. “What… Where is Erland?”

“There he is.” Signe pointed behind me.

I turned around, and at first I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. Uncle Daniel was walking through the drawing room with his arm around a boy I had never seen before. He was small and thin, and dressed in a coat and a knitted hat. The face was pale and his eyes were fixed on the floor in front of his feet as if he were afraid of stumbling.

Not until he was right beside me did I get it.

The boy was Erland, but he was not like before. All the dark that had lived inside him was gone.

Uncle Daniel had changed too. He was wearing his usual clothes, but it was as if he didn’t fill them any longer. The coat hung from his shoulders and the trousers flapped around his legs when he walked. His steps were as cautious as Erland’s, only slightly longer.

“Well, then,” he said, glancing at his watch. “The taxi is waiting.”

All the chill and spitefulness had gone from his voice, and it reminded me of somebody else’s voice. It took me a couple of seconds to realize it was Dad’s.

“We’ll help you with the bags,” Dad said. “Put on a pair of shoes, Thomasine.”

Holding Signe by the hand and carrying her little cardboard suitcase in my other hand, I walked down the garden path towards the gate. Signe’s hand was soft against my fingers and I felt how she was holding on to them.

“Are you afraid?” I whispered. “Would you like to stay with me?”

She shook her head without looking up.

“Erland is fine now,” she said. “Dad and I will look after him.”

I looked at Erland’s face when Uncle Daniel carefully stretched the seat belt across his chest in the back seat. Signe was right. He was just a boy now.

When we had loaded all the bags into the boot of the taxi and I had helped Signe with her car seat and her belt, Uncle Daniel turned to me.

“Will you be seeing Hetty again?” he asked, so quietly that only I could hear.

I nodded.

“I think so.”

“Thank her from me,” Uncle Daniel said. “Tell her that I’m grateful for what she did.”

I nodded again. Dad and Uncle Daniel shook hands and Signe gave me a hug before I closed the door behind her. I walked round the car and stood on the pavement next to Dad.

The driver put the car into gear and the taxi slowly started to move. The grit in the gutter crunched under the tyres and the car windows mirrored the pale blue dawn sky above us. Through the
back-seat
window I glimpsed Erland’s pale face as the car glided past. His eyes were large and dark, and as
they looked straight into mine his mouth formed one single, silent word.

Sorry
.

I raised my hand in farewell, and they were gone.