friend Sam’s birthday was coming up, so I searched the Internet for these mirrors. Sam likes stuff for her room, and I knew she’d just broken one. Finally I found a site selling mirrors. It took an age to download the graphics. But when they popped up, I was gobsmacked.
They were pretty amazing mirrors. Twisted spirals of silver around shapes that looked like wolves’ heads. Mirrors like the shields of knights in battle. Gilt ‘chimney glasses’ crested with eagles. Copies of Roman hand-mirrors shaped like the sun. Unbreakable mirrors of polished metal. Used by explorers, the site said. And all at pub/mirror.com. I didn’t know mirrors like that existed. I’d never seen anything like them.
I actually never meant to order it.
Those mirrors – especially the glaring wolf’s head with the burning ruby eyes – seemed to jump out at me, to make me click on them and order them. I’ll never know why I put the wolf-mirror into my ‘shopping trolley’. Next thing, I’d OKd Mum’s credit card number and the wolf man was on his way.
He actually turned up in the cat flap next day. The postman pops parcels through the cat flap whenever there’s no one at home. When I saw the package labelled PUB/MIRROR WORLDWIDE in the darkness of the garage, I felt very slightly sick. As though his burning ruby eyes could read my mind through the bubble-wrap already, and he knew that he wasn’t wanted.
‘And where are you going to put that?’ Mum’s reflection looked back at her disgustedly from the silvery depths of the wolf-mirror.
‘I’m not. It’s for Sam’s birthday.’
‘Good job. He gives me the creeps.’
He gave me the creeps, too, actually.
The wolf man curling around the mirror glared down at me before I went to school. His grinning face, resting on the top of the mirror and hanging down over the edge of it, glared down at me when I came home. His silver paws hugged the sides of it and glinted in the moonlight that leaked in at night around the sides of my blind, and felt like they’d like to hug me too, and not in a friendly way. I got up and put him outside.
I forgot about him until I fell over him on my way to the bathroom next morning. He toppled over on to my feet and lay looking up at me, still creeping around his mirror like some twisted mythical beast.
I don’t even like you. Get off me!
Three days until Sam’s birthday.
Why didn’t I send him back?
You know in fairy stories, there’s always a forbidden thing, something the person in the story mustn’t do, and then they always go and do it? DON’T forget to go home at midnight. DON’T go into the woods alone. DON’T forget to drop the enchanted nut into the sea for your magic griffin to rest on, all that stuff? I began to wonder about the mirror man, the more his ruby eyes got to me. What did he do, to be stuck there like that, hugging his mirror and hoping someone might want him over the Net?
‘Did you get me something?’ Sam asked.
‘Something?’
‘A birthday present?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ I said. ‘I got you a present. I got you a present, all right.’
I tried to send him back that night, but Returns weren’t optioned at all, and pub/mirror.com came up with some boring looking pub mirrors, as if that was what they were selling. ‘What happened to the wolf-mirror?’ I mailed them.
‘Gothic Series Sold Out’, was the only reply. No Returns even mentioned, not even a PO Box to send them to.
I was stuck with him, and I knew it. Two more days, then Sam would have to have him in her bedroom. Some birthday present. I knew, even then, I should bury him under the noodles and cans in the dustbin and buy Samantha Lamb something else.
But by that time it was too late.
It had come to me as I was lying in bed waiting to go to sleep. I’d just seen ER and my mind wouldn’t stop. You know the feeling. Not good. The moonlight always came in around the side of my blind, and that night it silvered the claws of the wolf-mirror and made a pale glow in its depths.
I got up and turned him to face the wall.
Then I got back into bed.
I could feel the power in his red-eyed glare, even with his back to the room. The moonlight flooded in anyway, and suddenly I knew what the forbidden thing was, as certainly as if it had been chalked on the back of the mirror, where his silver claws appeared around the backing.
Don’t look into the mirror by moonlight, or you’ll see what animal you are.
I sat up in bed. What animal you are?
I got up and moved the mirror, very carefully, out of my room.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ Dad wondered, coming up the stairs to bed.
‘I don’t like him in my room at night,’ I told him sheepishly.
‘I’m not surprised, it’s hideous. I thought it had four legs.’
‘It has.’ I checked him. ‘There’s one at the back.’
‘Night, then,’ Dad said.
‘Night, night.’
Sweet dreams, I almost added, except I didn’t get any, myself. Instead, I had the moonlight leaking in around the blind and the feeling that grew and kept me awake until it was driving me mad.
Two feelings, actually.
One was the certainty that if I got up to go to the loo and had to walk past the wolf-man I wouldn’t be able to stop myself looking into the mirror by moonlight.
The other was the certainty that he’d had all four legs wrapped around the front of the mirror, and no leg down the back.
In the end I had to get up.
I made it past the mirror to the toilet, though his ruby eyes scorched my ankles. I made it back as far as the bedroom door before I let myself see, through half-closed eyes, the place where the wolf-man had been.
His mirror glared down the stair-well, reflecting the outside light that leaked up the stairs in the darkness; a plain, silver-edged mirror, so ordinary you might even have ordered it from pub/mirror.com, or from any shop selling candles, or any department store.
The wolf-man was gone, I didn’t like to think where.
I must have knocked him off his perch in passing; probably he’d rolled down the stairs. Probably if I looked I’d see him, forlorn and glinting, in the hall.
But I didn’t look.
Instead I slept on the landing in the sleeping bag I found in the airing cupboard, too scared to go into my room.
In the early hours, a flash of silver seemed to tumble into my dreams. The glare
