“Smoke and Mirrors”
Samuel T Witherspoon
looked deeply at his own reflection in the old bathroom cabinet mirror, it was uninviting, and a cold
feeling that crept over him as he reached for the bathroom cabinet door and
with the deft movement of darts player, grabbed the small round handle and opened it
with grace and poise. He was sick of being a no-one, one of a thousand faces in
a crowd, he tried to stand out he really did but tonight was the last straw. He
lost it and now he would have to pay the ultimate penalty.
His price for
the lives he took would be his own worthless and empty existence; he knew he
had the balls to do it, he just didn’t know how he would go about it. He popped
the top of the bottle marked Pain relief and thought to himself “well I am in
pain I suppose” as he downed ten of the potent hallucinogenic prescription only
pills his now deceased father used when his trick knees played up.
He was a
Vietnam veteran of two terms and he often delighted in telling his young son of
how he made those gooks pay! Well now he was gutted and a steaming pile of meat
in his favourite lounge chair and his mother a smile from ear to ear from the
wound he had inflicted with her best carving knife.
The blood now
washed off his hands and stained the pristine white porcelain bowel an eerie
red tinge. The revolver on the side of the bath was loaded with all six
chambers full and ready for action. He finished washing his hands and glanced
knowingly at the weapon with an understanding his father had used it in anger
during his time at war and he thought about the death it had inflicted; only
now it would be his own hand that steadied the barrel and pulled the trigger.
You would never
have thought a twenty four year old could be so bitter and twisted about his
life, nothing really stood out to him now, as to why he turned out bad, he was
a good boy who did his chores, loved his mother and got on with his father, but
the beatings when he was drunk, well that was just part of the war. That’s what
mum had said! Maybe I did resent them deep down, him for hitting me and mum,
and her for letting it happen for so long. Ah well not for much longer, the
cops will be here soon and I have to be gone before they break the door down.
“I wonder should I wait until they are at the door so it’s all dramatic and
stuff and when it’s on the CI channel as a special it will be all dramatic, I
wonder who they will use to play me.” I said out aloud to myself now holding
the pistol on my hand, the Colt single action a great weighted piece and I knew
it would make a mess of my brain.
I looked into
the old mirror and could see in the corners a slight silver lustre it must be
old I thought again as I studied the etching in the corner “REFICUL EMEVOL”
written in a circle and what seemed to be a five pointed star in the middle. I
wonder how old this is, I remarked to myself in my own thoughts then drifting
off to a documentary about a journalist who was the first to ever trek into the
head-hunters villages in the mountains of Borneo. He tried to take their
photographs with an old Kodak instant camera and they beheaded him and the
child he snapped as they believed the device captured the person’s reflection,
thus their soul or essence with it.
“Fuck it” I
pulled the trigger!
I watched as
time almost stopped in my still functioning mind and saw the hammer of the
pistol hit the pin sending a flash and the projectile along the spiral path
towards the spot just above my ear. It penetrated firstly stretching the skin
then breaking it in a shower of powder and led. I felt nothing at all, although
I saw everything, it was both unsettling and amazing all at once the damage to
my head was slight except for the powder burns around the entry wound and a
whole the size of a penny.
My vision
started to falter like a flickering TV and I noticed the left side of my head
started to bulge and then burst out with force and a whole the size of a
grapefruit was where my ear should have been on the other side, viscous matter
and fluids, brain matter and blood one can assume, flew out mixed with white
bone fragments, my vision left me and existence stopped.
To the outside
world it would have been instantaneous, trigger and death, but in the world
that is between realities my soul, the essence of what was me was captured in
that special mirror.
My eyes opened
and my first thought was that I blacked out for a second or I didn’t pull the
trigger and I had dreamt the whole thing, but I was nothing I felt nothing, not
hot nor cold nor weight or gravity, I just was. I peered at the mirror and I
saw a ruined body on the floor, it had shed itself of all vital fluids and the
face although mine was subsequently demolished by the power of the forty four
calibre slug.
I could hear in
tangles of garbled waves and I closed my eyes to concentrate but it didn’t help
much. I took a step back or at least I thought I did and I was looking through
a dark veil as the light muted around me.
The police had
broken through the bathroom door and were screaming and yelling but although my
body was now a dead meat sack, I was gone, and I caught sight of what was going
on as they moved in one by one to view the prone corpse of a killer.
I looked up and
as I did I caught the eye of a police man who looked in at me and then it hit
me I was in a dimensional space behind the mirror. An existence I had no idea how
I became to be in let alone hold my life experience and thoughts.
The police
officer looked deeper into the mirror exploring the spay pattern and vita on
the glass. I leaned forward melding with his own reflection moving
instinctively as he did matching his every move. He then frowned and I screamed
and bared my incorporeal teeth at him and he jumped back from the mirror in
fright.
“Bob you ok” An
older policeman asked as Officer Tanner regained his composure.
“Yep I think so
Jack I just spooked myself is all”. Bob answered knowing in his own mind he
didn’t believe it, he saw something come at him in that reflection that wasn’t
his making, and it scared him.
“Jack I’m gonna
get some fresh air if that’s ok?” he asked.
And as he left I noticed that from inside the
mirror world the name etched on the bottom corner actually read ‘LOVEME LUCIFER’.
At that moment something happened and I started to move back from the mirror I
was created in and I moved to a mirror in another house somewhere in the world.
Again the same words etched into the mirror, and then at will I could move from
mirror to mirror almost in an instant.
I could see
others like me floating around in the shadows and dull light reflected inward
from thousands of mirrored gateways. They all kept their distance and as such
so did I, I had no idea why this was but no matter how hard I tried to get
close or converse with the others like me, I was repelled like two positive
ends of a magnet.
I would soon
learn why and as I travelled and traversed the never that was the mirrors I
honed my abilities finding newly created, others like me and also those who
must have been in this place for a millennia, warped and twisted, almost animalistic
in the so called vision I had of them.
Then as quick
as I changed mirrors once again I found myself in front of a mirror with a
young boy of about eight or nine brushing his teeth and spitting the remainders
in the sink then looking up to check if any of the chalky white substance was
still on his lips.
That’s when it
happened; I found a crack I could use!
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