Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

I don’t understand why I’m talking to Constance’s class, not really. It’s not like my area of expertise really overlaps with their subject, not beyond the most basic levels, where just about everything overlaps with just about everything else. No, strike that, I know exactly why I’m here. I’m here because Constance asked me to be, and even though it’s been years, and I don’t know what she hopes to gain, I still can’t say no to her, not any more now than I could then.

My mouth goes dry, my tongue thick. There’s a bottle of water on the desk beside me, and I pick it up, unscrew the cap and take a drink, my taste buds crying out for something stronger, even though I haven’t had anything stronger in nineteen months, unless you count the Coke that I drink way too much of these days.

I tell them about how ancient people believed that what we see in the mirror was not just light bouncing an image of ourselves back into our eyes, but rather our souls, our other selves. I tell them that’s why vampires don’t reflect in mirrors, which gets a scattered chuckle, at least, which lets me take a breath that I didn’t even know I was holding. I ask if anyone has ever been in a house where the mirrors were covered after someone had died, and only two people raise their hands, but still, they’re paying attention, that’s something. I talk about how dead souls could get trapped in mirrors, about fetches and doppelgangers.

It all seems to be going okay, so I let myself relax a little, feel the heat starting to leave my ears, the half-an-alprazolam I dry-swallowed just before walking into the room finally starting to take effect. I walk in front of the desk—Constance’s desk, I think as I lean back, feel the edge of it bite into the back of my legs, just below my ass—and then I tell them about psychomanteums.

“Since before we had mirrors, we’ve been using our reflections to scry. To see events that are far away, in the past or the future. To communicate with god, or the devil, with the dead, or just with our Jungian secret selves. A psychomanteum is sort of the ultimate expression of that.”

I force myself to inhale again, to exhale, my breath hot and raspy in my throat, so I take another swallow from the bottle of water that I’m surprised to see is already more than half empty, but I suddenly realize that my bladder is not. “In its most basic form it could be as simple as a mirror turned to reflect only darkness, or two mirrors facing one another. You’ve all been in an elevator or a bathroom or a hotel lobby where you got to see the effect that can produce, right? Like an infinite hallway, stretching in both directions. Maybe you’ve even had the sense that you can almost look around one of those corners, or like something else is waiting there to look at you, as soon as you turn your back. Now imagine that same effect in a dark room, with nothing in your line of sight but the mirror, and no illumination but candlelight. You’re beginning to get the idea of a psychomanteum.”

Are they actually paying attention now? Sitting up a little straighter, their eyes a little brighter? I lean away from the desk, forward into the crowd, warming to my topic as I’m imagining that they are too, thinking, for the first time since I walked into the room, that maybe Constance isn’t just devising some obscure means of torturing me, that she knows what she’s doing after all.

“Some people took them farther. Not just two mirrors, but entire mirrored rooms, where every wall was a reflective surface, a thousand hallways leading off into infinity, a thousand portals to… well, you name it. Like that room at the end of Enter the Dragon , and who knows, maybe that’s what Han kept that room around for. They were popular among the Victorians, during the heyday of spiritualism, but every now and then a new one turns up, even today.”

When I’m finished talking, they don’t clap or anything—I’m in a classroom, not a conference—but Constance comes down to the front of the room and thanks me for coming, asks me to wait a moment once class is over, as if I would leave, and then addresses her students. She says some stuff about them being grateful for me being there, and I smile and dip my head without even really thinking about it, and then she calls out a handful of them by name, reminds them of some sort of extra credit project that’s happening after school. I consider slipping out to pee, but the urge is no longer as strong now that their attention is off me.

Then they’re all gone in a clatter of shoes and a squealing of chairs being pushed back from desks, of backpacks being slung over shoulders and voices receding down the hallway, until the last student out closes the door and Constance and I are alone in the room that a few minutes ago felt so big and now suddenly feels too small. She smiles at me, that same reassuring smile, and this close I can see how brown her eyes are. One of my hairs has come loose from my ponytail, and she reaches up and tucks it back behind my ear, but I can see that she doesn’t mean anything by it, that it’s just old habits dying hard.

“Thanks for coming, Mads,” she says, in a way that ends with a comma, not a period. It was always Mads with her, never Madeline or even Maddy. I try to smile back, but all my anxiety has washed me out now, and being so close to her is hard, so I think it looks more like a grimace. I want to touch her hand, her face—old habits, like I said.

“Somehow I get the feeling that I’m here to do more than give a film studies class a lesson on psychomanteums,” I say, feeling like it comes out harsh when I want it to be cool.

Her hand, which has been sort of hovering between us, falls back to her side, then clasps the other in front of her skirt. She looks down at the floor, then back up at me, and her brown eyes have gotten harder, brighter, in the second they were turned away. “Have you ever heard of the Granfalloon?”

She tells me about it on the way to her house. Somewhere over the years she’s traded her old Volkswagen—and I don’t know how many other cars in-between—for a Mini. One of those long ones, what’re they called? Country something? This is the second time I’ve been in it; she picked me up from the hotel before class. She also offered to give me a ride from the airport, but I opted to take a cab, just like I opted to stay in a hotel instead of the proffered guest room at her place, which didn’t seem like a great idea. The hotel was themed rustic—faux log cabin, taxidermied animals in the lobby, a copy of a John Constable painting above the bed—and there was a bar with nobody in it, which was probably also not a great thing for me, but so far so good.

“Did you ever read Vonnegut?” she asks me, and I shake my head.

“I never got into him in high school, and if you don’t get into him in high school then it’s too late.”

“Me neither,” she says, “but I saw the George Hill version of Slaughterhouse-Five back in film school. Anyway, the word Granfalloon apparently comes from Vonnegut and means ‘a proud and meaningless association of individuals.’”

“Weird name for a movie theater,” I tell her, looking out the window, watching the houses pass by, thinking how much nicer this neighborhood is than mine, how much nicer her house is going to be than my little apartment.

“Frederick Castle was a weird guy,” she replies. “Technically Doctor Frederick Castle, but not a real doctor, he got his PhD in parapsychology from a mail-order course. His money came from his wife, Vera Warner, whose father was a condiment tycoon, back when you could still be called a tycoon of things like condiments.”