Midnight in the Mirror World

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As the dock downstairs began to clang out midnight’s twelve strokes, Giles Nefandor glanced into one of the two big mirrors between which he was passing on his nightly trip, regular as clockwork, from the telescopes on the roof to the pianos and chessboards in the living room. What he saw there made him stop and bunk and stare.

He was two steps above the mid-stair landing, where the great wrought-iron chandelier with its freight of live and dead electric bulbs swung m the dull fierce gusts of wind coming through the broken, lead-webbed, dramond-paned windows. It swung like a pendulum—a wilder yet more ponderous pendulum than that in the tall clock twanging relentlessly downstairs. He stayed aware of its menace as he peered in the mirror.

Since there was a second mirror behind him, what he saw in the one he faced was not a single reflection of himself, but many, each smaller and dimmer than the one in front of it—a half-spread stack of reflections going off toward infinity. Each reflection, except the eighth, showed against a background of mirror-gloom only his dark lean aquiline face, or at least the edge of it—from bucket-size down to dime-size—peering back at him intently from under its sleek crown of black, silver-shot hair.

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