a surgical saw through her skull bone.
These familiar objects, a part of her life since childhood, became in an instant strange, disquieting.
Neil stared at the tiny dancers for a moment, at the circling horse, and appeared to be unsettled by them. He made no attempt to switch off the music boxes.
Instead, he turned to the window once more, but he didn’t crank it open, as he had been prepared to do a minute ago. He engaged the latch that previously he had unlocked.
AS THEY HURRIEDLY DRESSED IN JEANS AND sweaters, Molly told him about the coyotes.
The somber drone of the rain, the manic plinking of the music boxes, and the almost subliminal pulsation of unknown source served as a musical score, without coherent melody, that made the adventure on the front porch seem far more ominous in the telling than it had been in actual experience. She tried—but knew that she failed—to convey to Neil the sense of wonder and the reverential awe that had characterized the incident.
Seated on the vanity bench, striving to describe the bond with nature that she had felt as she’d stood among the coyotes, she worked her feet into a pair of waterproof walking shoes. Her hands trembled. She fumbled with the laces, finally managed to tie them.
Still talking, she picked up, by habit, the brush that lay beside the pistol. Although she realized the absurdity of trying to deny the weirdness of the moment by resorting to mundane tasks, she turned to the mirror to assess the state of her hair.
Her reflection was as it should be, but everything else in the mirror was wrong. Behind her lay not the lamplit and cozy bedroom, neat except for the disarranged bedclothes; instead, she saw filth and ruin.
Her voice broke off in midsentence, and she dropped the hairbrush. She swung around on the bench to confirm that the room had changed. It was as it had always been.
In reality, only the bedside clock was out of order. A chaos of radiant green numbers continued to spill across the readout window.
In the mirror, however, stained walls were textured by moss or mold. One lamp remained, the shade cocked and rotting. Across the headboard of the broken-down bed crawled vines too succulent to be native to these California mountains; gray-green and glistening with moisture, the leaves hung like a host of panting tongues.
She was tempted again to believe that she had never risen from bed and gone downstairs, that instead she had been asleep through these events—and still slept. The rain and all the strangeness that began with it—from the coyotes to this mirror—made more sense if they were the fantasies of sleep.
Drawn to her side, Neil reached out to touch the vanity mirror, as though he expected to find that the image in it was not merely a flat reflection, but a three-dimensional reality, a world beyond the mirror.
Irrationally, Molly stayed his hand. “No.”
“Why?”
“Because …”
She had no credible reason to stop him, only a superstitious fear of what would happen when his fingertips met the silvered surface of the looking glass.
With his free hand, he touched the mirror, which proved to be solid.
Then, in that other bedroom, something moved. A shadow proved not to be a shadow, after all, but a figure sinuous and dark, darting so fast across the mirror’s breadth of view and out of sight that it might have been a man in a cloak, a man with membranous wings—or not a man at all.
With a gasp of surprise, Neil snatched his hand back as if the entity on the other side surely had the power to reach through the mirror as he himself could not.
In the same instant, Molly spun off the bench, exploded to her feet, crazily certain that something had crossed over, through the veil of glass and quicksilver. But no unwanted visitor had entered the bedroom.
She glanced at the clock just as the sideways scroll of numbers abruptly halted. The time was 2:44.
Checking her wristwatch, she discovered that the hour and the minute hands had stopped spinning. Her timepiece agreed with the digital clock—2:44.
The music boxes fell silent.
The miniature carousel horse went from gallop to full stop in a plink, and the dancing figurines froze in mid-waltz.
Molly felt suddenly relieved of the real or imagined weight that had been suspended overhead like a giant sword of Damocles.
The half-heard, fully felt, deep pulsations of sound stopped throbbing through her.
“The mirror,” Neil said.
The reflection that it now offered was of the room in which they stood. No ruins, no mold-textured walls, no crawling vine.
Neil shifted his attention from the mirror to the ceiling. Then he went to a window. He peered less at the surrounding forest than at the obscured night sky from which rain poured in great cascades.
“Gone,” he said.
“I felt something,” she admitted. “But … what was it?”
“Don’t have a clue.”
He was not being candid with her, nor she with him.
They had been formed by a culture drunk with the yearning for intergalactic contact, the bedrock of a new faith in which God was but a supporting player. Everyone knew the doctrines of this quasi-religion better than most people remembered the words of the Lord’s Prayer: We are not alone … watch the skies … the answer is out there. … They had been Spielberged and Lucased and Shyamalaned. A thousand movies and TV shows, ten thousand books, had convinced the world that the new magi would be scientists riding not to Bethlehem on camels but to a UFO landing site in mobile labs with satellite dishes on the roofs, and that the salvation of humanity would come from another planet rather than from a higher realm.
Molly knew the signs as prophesied by Hollywood and by science fiction writers. Neil knew them, too.
This September night lay deep inside the Close Encounter Zone. In this territory, alien technology was the only font of miracles.
She didn’t want to put this understanding into words, however, and apparently neither did Neil. A pretense of bewilderment felt safer than candor.
Perhaps their reticence had its roots in the fact that on this subject Hollywood offered two familiar scenarios—one in which the extraterrestrials were benign gods, one in which they were full of wrath and cruel judgment. Thus far, these recent events lacked the sweetness and the twinkle of G-rated family entertainment.
Turning away from the window and from his inspection of the rain-choked sky, Neil said, “Not that we’ll need it … but I’ll get the shotgun.”
Recalling the half-glimpsed, sinuous figure that had flashed darkly across the moldering room in the mirror, Molly retrieved her handgun from the vanity and said, “I’ll get some spare cartridges for this.”
