Snake Eyes

Mirrors are curious things. Monica's was no exception. It had started life in the Penny-Wise furniture shop on Frenton Street. Then, its reflections were fairly mundane and transitory, consisting of an uninterrupted view of three table legs, one wicker chair and the occasional browsing shin. That was until Monica caught her ankle on its splintered frame as she made a balletic attempt to inspect a rusting tumble drier, sandwiched between a Welsh dresser and a rather dubious mahogany fireplace.

        "Jee-sus!'' she screamed, rubbing her injured leg whilst hopping on the other one.

        ''Can I help you at all?'' enquired an elderly gentleman; wearing faded brown overalls complete with sawdust epaulets and paint-splash buttons.  ''Are you hurt?  Do you need assistance? Are you bleeding?''

        The questions flowed from his lips without waiting for answers. It was though he'd been rehearsing in private, and now that the curtains were up, he'd succumbed to stage fright and fluffed his lines. During the interrogation Monica backed into a table, brushed off the dust and sat down, tugging at the hem of her black micro mini which barely covered her thighs. She attempted to cross her legs, but a cast iron sewing machine prevented her from doing so.

        "This place is a bloody health hazard. How is anyone expected to find anything?  I only came in for a tumble drier and got assaulted by a...''

She paused, picking up the offending article...

        ''Poxy Mirror!''

        One of the gilt brackets at the top had captured a little tag of skin and stocking, which flapped as she waved it.

        "Please madam. That is a valuable Japanese lacquered mirror. It shouldn't be in here.'' May I?'' He shuffled towards her, shimmying through the slalom of jagged corners and jutting nails, with consummate ease. The note of urgency in the old man's voice, coupled with the speed at which he crossed the room unsettled Monica. Something tugged at a buried memory, something familiar. It was like a blind tasting, she recognised the flavour but not the food. Before it could crystallise, the shopkeeper snatched the mirror away, and began polishing it with a piece of rag he'd pulled from a deep front pocket.

        "Excuse me!'' she protested. If I'd only known it was a valuable antique, I wouldn't have bled all over it.” 

        He propped the mirror on his knee and continued polishing, with light deft strokes, stopping every now and then to breathe on the glass. The silence was punctuated by the oil-hungry squeal of the letter box followed by a dull thud on the doormat.  

        “Excuse me madam”, said the old man, bowing slightly. He carefully placed the freshly polished mirror in a vacant magazine rack before going to collect the mail. Monica decided against picking it up in case she lost a finger. She bent down to examine her injury and was relieved to discover a small triangular graze close to an old scar. She stroked it, feeling the ridge of dead skin under her fingertips and remembered how it had happened. She was about twelve or thirteen and was trying on a pair of her mother’s tights and high heels. She stood facing a full-length mirror admiring herself in rucked and wrinkled 20 denier, pursing her lips like a page three model. It was when she attempted a full 360 degree twirl that the pedals of a retired exercise bike found her ankles and left three deep lacerations. It wasn’t the stitches that frightened her, but the removal of the tights which were enmeshed with her own dried blood. Soaking only helped a little.

        “Right, where were we?” said the shopkeeper clutching a large brown envelope to his chest.

        “Tumble drier?”

        “No, sorry. We only sell Objet D’art and bric-a-brac. Try Henshaws four doors down.” He turned and started to walk away before Monica could answer.

        “Don’t worry your bald little head about me. I’m fine” she whispered, checking her makeup in the door of a small bathroom cabinet. She couldn’t be bothered to tell him she was leaning against a tumble drier, albeit a very ancient and corroded one. As she tried to fathom the best route out of the musty little death trap, she felt a cool draught at the back of her neck. The fire exit was propped open by an old washing machine and she slipped out before the old man could accuse her of loitering. While she tried to get her bearings she noticed the passage was lined with hundreds of old mirrors. It was like some vast looking glass graveyard.

        “There must be at least a thousand years of bad luck lying around?” Some of the mirrors looked antique, and, had it not been for the ravages of the British climate Monica was sure some of them might have been salvageable.

        “What a waste.” She said. “Mind you, perhaps the old git’s got a thing for old mirrors. When he gets bored with one it ends up here to rot with the rest of them.” She smiled, and saw the shape of a car bonnet flash accross the bottom of the alleyway. Her thoughts switched from mirrors to the hunt for a new, old tumble drier. What was the name of that place? Hentons? Hendons? Henshaws, that was it.

As she negotiated the bags of rubbish and discarded mirrors, her ankle started to sting a little. Instinctively, she bent down to see if the blood had super glued itself to her tights. It had. While she was down there, trying to tease the nylon away from her skin she noticed something glinting in the sunlight. Reaching over she pulled back a dirty plastic bag and saw it was the very same instrument of torture that had caused her injury. What’s it doing out here? He can’t be tired of it already? She lifted the deceptively heavy frame up to check it still held a piece of her ankle, which it did. He was right; the mirror was probably at least a hundred years old and lacked the flawless finish of modern, mass produced versions. Near the gold frame, some of the silvering had flaked off, which added to its appeal. Quickly, she wrapped it in the polythene bag and teetered out into the busy street, turning left instead of right to avoid the old man’s shop window. For a small mirror it was deceptively heavy, and the sharp wall brackets soon dug into her fingers.

Then another childhood memory chose to re-surface. This time she was twelve. It was cold and dark. Martin, her brother was walking in front of her. She could see the breath-smoke rising from his head as he talked.  They were carrying an old sash window, that weighed a ton. Martin kept assuring her they were nearly at the bonfire, and when they got there she could smash the window if she wanted to. She remembered thinking why on earth have I agreed to be his slave for the night? Then the agony in her fingers dragged her back to reality.

The tumble drier will have to wait, she thought. I’ll drop this off first, before I get a blister. Thankfully her flat was only three streets away. Each time someone walked past she experienced a strange rush of nervous excitement, as she imagined a cat burglar might, returning home with some priceless air loom tucked inside his tight leather jacket. Once inside the flat she unwrapped her swag and had a proper look at it. Monica loved the way the glass rippled slightly, like warm toffee, as well as the tiny air bubbles locked-in for over a century.  For someone so obsessed with her own physical appearance one might imagine her being repulsed by such an imperfect ornament. A quick scan around her spotless, minimalist flat would do nothing to suggest otherwise.

The frame was filthy, so she rubbed at it with the corner of a damp serviette. At first the stubborn grime refused to budge, but gradually a few patches of gold started to appear. She rubbed a little harder, and two tiny red dots emerged. They were smooth and hard, like beads or possibly drops of coloured lacquer. This fuelled her curiosity even more, so she decided to wheel out the big guns, in the form of an old tooth brush and a pan of hot soapy water. She’d read some article in Cosmopolitan or Country Life, during a fairly mediocre manicure, about restoring antiques. It cautioned against over cleaning, so she bit the bullet and soaked first before gently brushing off the dirt.

Each passing minute revealed another bit of the strange eastern design. If she held it one way it resembled a Chinese stylised Dragon, but if she turned it round it looked like a mythical sea monster coming up for air. She expected it to feel hard and unyielding to the touch, but it was almost like stroking the skin of a living reptile, slightly leathery and almost warm. Monica assumed it was warm because of the water, but when she dipped her finger in the pan, the liquid was stone cold.

She glanced up and saw a mobile phone vibrating its way along the edge of her glass coffee table. A well-timed lunge and grab stopped it from committing suicide on the polished parquet floor. Her friend Sophie’s face grinned back at her from the screen and Monica realised she was very late for her Wednesday Pilates class. Ordinarily she’d have taken the call and traded shopping stories with her, but for some reason she rejected it and went back to studying the mirror.

        “It’s only Pilates. Sophie will understand.” Said Monica, tracing her finger along the serpents body. By rotating the frame she realised it was composed of not one, but four monsters all chasing each other towards eternity, or their next meal, whichever came first.

        “Now, the next question is where to put you?” she said, pursing her lips. Only one of the four walls held any decoration. Gordon, an ex-boyfriend (who just happened to be an artist) had donated his own abstract landscape painting. Monica squinted at it, tilting her head slightly. She failed to see any of the ‘wanton desolation’ or ‘stark hopelessness’ he kept banging on about. She thought it looked more like someone attempting to cover up a crack in the wall with a gob of Polly filler. The only reason she’d agreed to put it there in the first place, was so as not to hurt his feelings, and because it was one of his much smaller works. Taking it down made her feel purged of any residual fondness for gorgeous Gordon.

        “Sophie will lap you up” she said, sliding the picture behind her white leather settee. Luckily, the hooks were still intact, as were the brackets on the back of the mirror.

        “Your next mission Monica, should you decide to accept it is to hang the bloody thing up.” The words were spoken in her best Sean Connery Glaswegian accent, which, on reflection she felt was a little too Rab C Nesbitt.

        “Now Gordon, where did you leave my stepladder?” she said, walking from room to room, randomly opening doors and cupboards like a lazy house burglar. In the bedroom, feeling very irritated by her own lack of practical know how, she fell onto the King Sized divan, shouting swear words into the goose down pillow and beating her tiny fists on the duvet. Once the tantrum was over she jumped off the bed, grabbed her faux Louis XIII chair from under the secretaire and dragged it behind her like a spoilt child dragging a well-loved teddy bear.

        “How hard can it be?” she said, placing the chair under the marble fireplace and stepping gingerly onto the hand-stitched upholstery. By standing on tip-toe she could just touch the wall mounting.

        “Hmmm, I need more height. I wonder?” She rocked the chair backwards and forwards until it started to jump a few inches. Eventually, it became wedged under the mantelpiece. From there she used the back struts as a rudimentary ladder and climbed up onto the fireplace. Even though she’d used her new found initiative in assuming the role of handyman there was a fatal flaw in her approach. Unless, by some miracle she’d suddenly become Mary Poppins, no amount of frantic waving would cause the mirror to fly up into her hands.

        “Bloody hell!” she shouted, almost losing her balance on the polished Carrera marble. Then, calmly, with her back to the wall she narrowed her eyes, did a slow neck roll, took a deep breath and dived off the mantelpiece. Three seconds before she made the decision to jump something happened to the mirror. One of the lacquered serpent’s red eyes began to glow, like the standby light on a TV. At the very same time, Monica experienced a warm feeling in the pit of her stomach which spread upwards into her chest and arms. She suddenly felt as though she could do anything she wanted, and what she wanted to do right that very second was take flight.

If someone, say for arguments sake her friend Sophie, had popped over for a chat and had had the foresight to capture the moment on film, she might have dismissed Monica’s blood-red eyes as a common photographic anomaly. Alas there was no Sophie, no camera and no anomaly. Monica’s eyes burned with the same intensity as the serpents, right up to the point she should have landed on the settee’s soft leather cushions. Instead, her confidence vanished at the exact moment the fire in both sets of eyes went out. She overshot it by three feet, hitting the back wall head on.  Monica’s neck snapped, like someone breaking a fistful of spaghetti.

A few minutes later, her phone vibrated again and Sophie’s smiling face appeared. When it stopped buzzing an altogether different sound took over. Sophie, or for that matter Monica may have said it sounded like a dried face-pack cracking, possibly because of uncontrollable laughter or a deep frown.

One of the serpents circling the frame began to swell, as though someone was slowly inflating it. The tail thickened and twitched as it grew. Then the jaws began to rise like a pair of minute bellows drawing life into the creature. It shed it’s man-made skin of gold paint and varnish, revealing a glistening jade green body stamped with black diamonds. It lifted its head and tasted the air with a flicking pink arrow and slithered off its wooden prison. As it skidded over the mirror, it hissed at it’s own reflection and went in search of its first proper meal in a very long time.

The intercom buzzed twice, stopped and then buzzed again. The small black and white monitor above the phone flickered into life revealing a young woman standing next to the security gate waving frantically at the camera. Then Monica’s phone vibrated into life, and from behind the sofa the serpent lifted its head and hissed loudly as if to say “go away, can’t you see I’m busy!”