Strange is the Night (3 page)

V

Robert found a job working full-time for a travel magazine that often gave him tickets to exotic locales so he could write articles about them. William finished law school and joined a practice where he made a good impression. He was busy, but he went with Robert on his work-related field trips as often as he could. They never again stayed in a hotel or motel with a mirror above or near the bed.

William took care of almost everything because Robert did not drive—Robert
could not
drive because the reflections were unreliable at best and terrible road collisions waiting to happen at worst.

The world got uglier and uglier to the point that the splashed paint colors of the sunset stopped being beautiful and began to look diseased. Robert took great pains to remove himself from the reflection world as best he could. They no longer kept mirrors in the house and at night when the windows became reflective they closed the curtains. William helped him block the sights away so he could sleep again at night. Robert never told him that sometimes he heard tapping coming from the shard of mirror he still kept in his nightstand drawer or from behind the closed curtains in the evening. He didn’t tell him about the scratching he heard coming from beyond the patio’s glass doors.

In the end, none of that mattered anyway because Robert couldn’t keep William safe in
this
world. He wasn’t there to hold his hand as he walked across the parking garage of his law firm one night when the lights went out because there was a hurricane blowing its way up the coast. William was trying to get home before the weather got too bad, but he didn’t make it because a man with a screwdriver and a drug habit got to him instead.

They found William in a pool of blood, pale blue eyes clouded and murky, staring at nothing. He was still wearing his wedding ring because the thief hadn’t been able to snatch it off his finger. When they found the junkie, he’d already spent the forty-six dollars he killed William for and the county coroner’s office gave Robert his wedding ring like it was a consolation prize.

The funeral went by in a blur and the days-weeks-months after William’s death were the same. Robert withdrew because there was no color or flavor left to the world.

Things only sharpened in focus again during the murder trial. When the murderer broke down at his sentencing hearing, Robert went after him. He intended to choke the life right out of the sniveling waste of skin, but the courtroom guards had other ideas. In the reflections of the murderer’s eyes Robert saw the monsters crowded close to the surface of the man’s dull brown irises.

They were packed close together, too close to the surface and Robert knew what they were doing: Watching. Waiting. Always seeking to devour. Robert laughed. He told the murderer they were waiting for him, that one day they would come and he’d regret it because his screams for mercy would only feed them.

Robert found himself locked up in a mental institution again for the first time since he was a teenager. He’d have been indignant if he had been able to care at all. On the day he walked out of the hospital, he turned to wave goodbye to the one nurse he liked.

The glass doors had closed and peering at him from the glass was William. Robert nearly went to his knees. William wasn’t on the other side of the door. William was in the reflection. He was in the world of always and forever and nothing good, where even the beautiful things were ugly. Except William. He was still beautiful though he looked frightened and so
alone
. He saw Robert and he smiled; his confused, terrified gaze clearing and fixing on Robert’s stunned face. He waved and Robert did go to his knees then.

After a minute, someone came to ask if he was okay; they asked if he needed to come back for another visit. Robert shook the helping hands off, told them
no
in a forceful tone and got up again. His brother was picking him up; he was running late, but he’d be there. Then like a miracle from above, his brother was there and he put his arm around Robert’s shoulders. It wasn’t long before they were heading home and not talking because Robert was even less communicative than before William died.

William followed them in the mirrors though it was hard for him to keep up. His palms were skinned and his pants were ripped; there was a line of blood bisecting his chin by the time they stopped. Robert didn’t want to get out of the car, but he had too and he went straight inside to get his shard of mirror so he could see William again.

Robert made himself a room full of mirrors after that and there he sat, day in and day out. When people visited him, he pretended everything was normal and said nothing about how he could hear the wind screaming through the saw grass on the other side or about how William was calling his name, begging him to please come back, to please don’t leave him alone.

He slept next to William, the glass separating them cold and unyielding. They talked when William could find his voice to speak and he told Robert he didn’t know how he got there. He was scared all the time because there was something wrong with the place.

One night, William whispered through the glass, “Why didn’t you ever tell me how horrible it really is?”

They would spend hours on end just facing each other, hands pressed to either side of the partition. They would stare at one another until they blurred in each other’s vision and melted into nothing but smears and shapes. Some days William wouldn’t be there when Robert woke up and he’d panic, living in fear until the moment he came back to him. When William would come back, often he was bloody and bruised, his eyes too big in his face and taking on a permanent cast of fear that crept closer to insanity every day.

Almost everyday he told Robert that he didn’t know what was happening. He said that Robert was the only thing he could rely on anymore because no matter how real the world he was trapped in felt, it couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be.

“The things here, Robert, the
things
,” he would say, muttering it under his breath until all the words ran together and became nothing but sound, a noise like a breeze gone mad.

Robert could only shush Willaim and tell him he was there. He never said anything about how there was a patch of shiny blue scales the same color as William’s eyes growing up the side of his neck.

Robert took to praying to the angels that wheeled around in the sky at night; those big, dark silhouettes that had been the one constant in the world since the first night he watched it. Of all the bad things he had seen, he hoped that at least the angels were good, though he’d never seen them intervene or perform an act of kindness in the cruel world they held dominion over. He’d never even seen them descend from on high at all, for any reason, but he was a longtime observer of the mirror world and knew that things changed.

One evening William sat down on the other side of the mirror and bawled and shrieked as he tore bloody scratches in his face. That same night Robert begged the angels to please come for him because he couldn’t leave William alone. He cursed them and their uncaring distance; for a thing to so deify itself then it must first do something godlike and as far as he could tell they did
nothing
.

He sobbed himself to sleep, unwilling to look away from William’s mutilated face as he mouthed apologies—apologies to himself or to Robert, he had no idea. He could only tell him to
shh
, he said that it would be okay. When William laughed, Robert heard the chitinous clack of a million locusts buzzing in his scaly throat.

The next night, William was not in the mirror, but something was. It took Robert’s breath away as he stared at the angel. They had heard his call and one had come. It stood at least eight feet tall with black wings that shone with a dirty blue sheen. The feathers covering its body were tighter, shorter and hid none of the power and musculature of it. There was another set of wings, smaller with delicately scalloped edges folded over where its eyes should have been. The angel had a beak like that of a raven which curved from its face, severe and capable of tearing huge chunks of flesh away. Its fingers were tipped in black talons. Robert stared at it, his brain not quite comprehending what he was seeing, but he didn’t turn away.

“Take me,” Robert said. “I want to go. I’m ready now.”

The terrifying angel cocked its head and made a chirping sound that went straight through Robert’s brain and into his bones and blood. He grimaced in pain and stared at the smaller wings where the angel’s eyes should be as he held out his scarred arms.

“Come on.” He smiled in invitation because blind or not, he knew the angel could see. “Come and get me.”

The angel reached out with its taloned hands and scratched at the mirror. The glass tore with the sound of madly ringing church bells and the screams of dying rabbits. Robert felt his brain judder, trying to pull away, but he gritted his teeth, kept his eyes open and waited. Soon, he would be where he was meant to be. He understood then that the reflected world had been always expecting him. He had spent too long trying to tear his way inside to reach it when all he’d needed to do was ask. To pray.

When the angel stepped out of the mirror, it unfurled the wings over its eyes and Robert looked into them. They were the color of nightmares. From the torn mirror a hurricane wind blew the sound of William calling his name.

“I’m coming home,” Robert answered as the angel stepped into the space created by Robert’s outstretched arms and wrapped him in its cold embrace. Robert sighed as the heavy weight of its wings enfolded him and they stepped back into the night full of black stars.

In the darkness, spirit music began to play in a discordant tune, and all around the night was alive with the screams of the damned and the dead as they celebrated being alive. Robert found William and in the silent flash-bangs of sour candy lightning, they danced. The scabs and scales were rough on William’s cheek where it pressed against his, but Robert didn’t care.

They dipped and twirled and laughed to the lunatic rhythm of the music. Robert kissed William and tasted bitter blood on his tongue. He pulled William closer and kissed him harder even as he wondered when the day would come that they would eat each other.

All things in time, he supposed. All things in time.

Also by Justine Sebastian

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