Fritz Leiber - Midnight in the Mirror World

And the black figure definitely was wearing a veil, although he still couldn’t make out the features behind it. Yes, a veil . . . and long black gloves, one of which sleekly cased the slender arm outstretched to his shoulder —for he suddenly realized that despite its height almost equal to his own, the figure was feminine.

A gust of fey hard to understand went through him at

that discovery. As on the second night he wanted to strike out at the figure to prove its insubstantiality—smash the glass! But could that effect a figure 70 feet away? Would smashing the single glass in front of him smash all the nine panes he calculated still separated him from the figures in the Mirror World?

Perhaps it would—and then (he black figure m the Mirror World could come straight out at him . . . now.

In any case the veiled figure, if she continued her approach, would be with him in five more nights. Perhaps smashing the glass now would simply end the horrifying, fascinating phenomena—foil the figure for good. But did he want to do that?

As he asked himself that last question, the twelfth stroke came and the Black Lady in the fifth reflection vanished.

The rest of the night, while he played Tchaikovsky and studied the chess games of Vera Menchik, Lisa Lane, and Mrs. Piatigorsky, searching for hidden depths in them, he reviewed the Lives and Loves of Giles Nefandor. He discovered that the women in his life had been few, and those with whom he had become seriously entangled, or to whom he had done possible injury, fewer still. The half dozen candidates were all, so far as he knew, happily married and/or otherwise successful. This of course included his divorced wife, although she had often complained of him and his "hobbies."

On the whole, though romanticizing women, he had tended to run away from them, he concluded wryly. Perhaps the Dark Lady was a generalized woman, emblematic of the entire sex, come to be revenged on him for has faint-heartedness. His smile grew wryer. Perhaps her funeral costume was, anticipatorily, for him.

He thought, oh the human infatuation with guilt and retribution! The dread of and perhaps the desire for punishment! How ready we are to think others hate us!

During this search of his memory, the dark seed stirred several times—he seemed to be forgetting some one woman. But the seed refused to come clear of its burial until the clock struck its twelfth stroke next midnight, when. Just as the now clearly feminine figure in the fourth reflection vanished, he spoke the name, "Nina Fasinera."

That brought the buried incident—or rather all of it but one crucial part—back to him at once. It came back with that tigerish rush with which memory-lost small .incidents and encounters will—one moment nonexistent, the next recalled with almost dizzying suddenness.

It had happened all of ten years ago,, six years at least before his divorce, and he had only once met Miss Fasinera—a tall slender woman with black hair, bold hawklike features, slightly protruberant eyes, and rather narrow long mobile lips which the slim tip of her tongue was forever wetting. Her voice had been husky yet rapid and she had moved with a nervous, pantherine grace, so that her heavy silk dress had hissed on her gaunt yet challenging figure.

Nina Fasinera had come to him, here at this house, on the pretext of asking his advice about starting a school of piano in a distant suburb across the city. She was an actress too, she had told him, but he had gathered she had not worked much in recent years—just as he had soon, been guessing that her age was not much less than his own, the Jet of her hair a dye, the taut smoothness of her facial skin astringents and an ivory foundation make-up, her youthful energy a product of will power—in short, that she was something of a fake (her knowledge of piano rudimentary, her acting a couple of seasons of summer stock and a few bit parts on Broadway), but a brave and gallant fake nonetheless.

Quite soon she had made it clean that she was somewhat more interested in him than in his advice and that she was ready—alert, on guard, dangerous, yet responsive— for any encounter with him, whether at a luncheon date a week in the future or here and now, on the instant

It had been, he recalled, as .if a duelist had lightly yet briskly brushed his cheek and lips with a thin leather glove. And yes, she had been wearing gloves, he remembered now of a sudden!—dark green ones edged with yellow, the same colours as her heavy silken dress.

He had been mightily attracted to her—strange how he had forgotten that taut nervous hour!—but he had just become re-reconciled with his wife for perhaps the dozenth time and there was about Nina Fasinera an avidity and a recklessness and especially an almost psychotic-seeming desperation which had frightened him or at least put him very much on guard. He recalled wondering if she took drugs.

So he had courteously yet most coolly and with infinite stubbornness refused all her challenges, which in the end had grown quite mocking, and he had shown her to the door and closed it on her.

And then the next day be had read in the paper of her suicide.

That was why he had forgotten the incident, he decided now—he had felt sharply guilty about it. Not that he thought that he possessed any fatal glamour, so that a woman would die at his rebuff, but that conceivably he had represented Nina Fasinera’s last cast of the dice with destiny and he, not consciously knowing what was at stake, had coldly told her, "You lose."

But there was something else he was forgetting—some- thing about her death which his mind had suppressed even more tightly—he was certain of that. Glancing about uneasily, he stepped down onto the landing beneath the low- dipping chandelier and hurried down the rest of the stairs. He had Just recalled that he had torn out the story of her death from a cheap tabloid and now he spent the rest of the night hunting for it among his haphazardly-filed papers. Toward dawn be discovered it, a ragged-edged browning thing tucked inside one of his additional copies ,of the Chopin nocturnes.

Last night the glamorous Nina Fasinera, who was playing on Broadway as recently as three years ago, committed suicide by hanging, according to police Lieutenant Ben Davidow, in the room she rented at 1738 Waverly Place, Edgemont.

A purse with 87 cents in it lay on top of her dresser.

She left no note or diary, however, though police are still searching. Despondency was the probable cause of Miss Fasinera’s act, according to her landlady Elvira Winters,. Who discovered-the body at 3 A.M.

"She was a charming tenant, always the lady, and very beautiful," Mrs. Winters said, "but lately she’d seemed restless and unhappy. I’d let her get five weeks behind on her rent. Now who’ll pay it?"

Before taking her life, the 39-year-old Miss Fasinera had dressed herself in a black silk cocktail gown with black accessories including a veil and long gloves. She had also pulled down the shades and turned on all the lights in the room. It was the glare of these lights through the transom which caused Mrs. Winters to enter the actress’ small, high-ceilinged room by a-duplicate key when there was no answer to her knocking.

There she saw Miss Fasinera’s body hanging by a short length of clothesline from the ceiling light-fixture. A chair lay overturned nearby. In its plastic seat-cover Lieutenant Davidow later found impressions which matched the actress’ spike heels. Dr. Leonard Belstrom estimated she had been dead for four hours when he examined the body at 4 A.M.

Mrs. Winters said, "She was hanging between the tall mirror on the closet door and the wide one on her dresser. She could almost have reached out and kicked them, if she could have kicked. I could see her in both of them, over and over, when I tried to lift her up, before I felt how cold she was. And then all those bright lights. It was horrible, but like the theatre."