Through the Looking Glass A story by Sammy It had started innocently enough. It had actually started as a game. Andrew H. Markham lived in a huge, empty house at the top of the hill. It had been in the family for generations, and he had recently come to claim it when his uncle had passed away. He lived alone in the house except for his live-in-maid. Andrew had dedcided to take a shower before going to bed and had started the water running in his very well decorated bathroom, but had forgotten to get one of his monogramed towels and, in leaving the bathroom, turned out the lights. He returned to the bathroom to find it dark. He found this to be a particularly sinister image, because the water was on, but the lights were out. It made him think about someone not living through a shower and having the killer turn out the lights but leave the shower on. He flicked on the lights and the bathroom immediately sprang back to its normal green tiled cheerfulness. He walked in, disrobed, and placed the towel on the rack on the shower door, then saw that the mirror had fogged up in his abscence. It cast the reflection of the room in a silver sheen, and shapes were rendered totally unintelligable. He wondered about the powers of randomness to create art and, on a sudden impulse, took some water from the shower and flung it at the mirror. It created an interesting pattern of droplets. It was suggestive of something and tugged at his brain. He flung some more drops. It was as if an image had just begun to come into focus. There were clusters in the middle of the mirror that were reminiscient of an altogether unneccesary number of eyes, and a column up the side which, with a little imagination, could MAYBE be construed as some kind of appendage. He turned around to get more water and when he turned back, he saw that the water had already begun to condense and drip down the front of the mirror, giving the thing a more definite face and what may have been fangs. Andrew decided that he had had enough of this game, turned around, and stepped into the shower. After a thorough scrubbing, Andrew picked up his razor to shave. He adjusted his in-shower mirror (One of the expensive anti-fogging kinds) and realized that he could see through the clear glass shower door at the mirror behind him. The droplets had moved further down, defining what he had come to think of as the monster's head, and the limb had pretty much resolved itself as some sort of tentacle. Andrew did not let it trouble him, and began shaving. Staring into the mirror, he caught a hint of movement in his peripheral vision and, startled, cut himself. He swore quite vigorously, and looked around to see what had surprised him. He saw nothing, and decided that he had only been scared by a drop falling off of the mirror behind him, which he had seen in the mirror in front of him. He was glad that the rear mirror was fogged up, because otherwise he would see that disconcerting "Two mirror" infinite dimention plane thing which always alarmed him. However, it interesting to note that the towel he had hung on the rack was placed quite nicely to give the "monster" a green head, and that the monograms could color the eyes and fangs. He became slightly disconcerted when he realized that the "tentacle" was being colored in by him. It was then, staring in the mirror, that he thought he saw movement in the mirror behind him. Maybe it was merely a drop falling, but it looked almost as if one of the eyes had blinked. Very quickly. Andrew passed it off as nerves, but when he looked back in the mirror, it seemed as if the reflection had changed somehow. It looked like the mirror behind him was giving some sort of warped reflection of the room, as if something was pulling the mirror inward. Then suddenly the mirror was back to normal. Andrew could do nothing but stare as the mirror then unmistakeably bulged OUTWARD towards him, as if there was something behind it. The "tentacle" began probing outward, looking for something. It found the light switch. If a thing in a mirror who can't really be said to have a face could smile, this thing did so now. It was at that point that Andrew's mind snapped like a dry twig. Suddenly, with a nearly liquid "PLOP" and a huge heave, the thing in the mirror freed itself. Andrew barely had time to scream before the thing crashed through the shower doors. The maid came running up the stairs, yelling his name, to see what was wrong. She could hear the shower running, but Andrew had yet to answer to his name and the door had been locked from the inside. She had to kick open the bathroom door, but the door was old and she was a very strong maid. The first thing she noticed when the door swung open was that the shower was on but that the light had apperantly been turned off. The maid flicked it on and had just enough time to take in the sight of Andrew's lifeless (but very clean) body lying in a broken heap in the shower before she too started screaming. The police were eventually alerted by neighbors, but never made heads or tails of it. All they found were two dead bodies, one mangled in the shower, one mangled in the doorway of the bathroom. The shower had been left on, but the light had been completely smashed to pieces and the light switch had been ripped out of its socket. Nothing else had been touched, except that something had removed the mirror that looked over the broken shower. It hadn't been taken out, and the frame was dusted for fingerprints and none were found, but it was as if something had just sucked the glass and silver right out of the frame. Or, more accurately, it was as if something had come through the glass and just taken it along.