Fritz Leiber: Midnight in the Mirror World

All in utter darkness and pandemonium. Almost drowned in the latter, midnight’s, last strokes were twanging.

A hand moved up his back and suede-cased fingers lightly brushed his neck. As the last strokes twanged, one of the fingers turned hard and stiff and cruel and dug under his collar so that it caught him like a hook by the collar and the tightly-knitted tie the collar covered. It wrenched him into the air. A terrible pain stabbed at the base of his skull, then filled it to bursting.

It was four days before the policeman who nightly patrolled beyond the gate discovered by a stab of his flashlight the body of Giles Nefandor—whom he knew by sight, though never a sight like this!—hanging from the wrought chandelier above the landing strewn with glassy- shards. It might have been longer than four days, except a chessplayer across the city, contesting a correspondence game with the well-known recluse, spurred the police into action when the move on his last postcard had gone ten days unanswered. His first queries were ignored, but an evening phone call got action.

The policeman reported back the unpleasant condition: of the body, the black, booked, wrought-iron chandelier- finger thrust under the noose of collar and tie, and the glass shards, and several other matters.

He never did report what he saw in one of the two mirrors on the stairs when he looked at it closely, his powerful flash beside his chest as his wristwatch signalled midnight. There was a stack of reflections of his own shocked, sharply shadowed face. But in the fourth reflection there were momentarily two figures, hand in hand, looking back toward him over their shoulders—and smiling impishly at him, he thought. The one figure was that of Giles Nefandor, though looking more youthful than he recalled seeing him .in recent years. The other was that of a lady in black, the upper half of her face veiled.