Author's notes: Some acknowledgements. I wrote this story a little while after reading China Miéville's novel Looking for Jake. In that collection, Mr. Miéville wrote about people in mirrors but in a fairly different context. I'm a huge urban fantasy fan and the ideas that are typically found in those kinds of stories run rampant through this one.

There are also two very well known quotations hidden in this story. It's probably unnecessary to cite them but I'll do it anyways. The first is a permutation of 'the medium is the message', a famous quote by Marshall McLuhan. The second is'there is method in his madness'from Hamlet (but you probably all knew that anyways. :p).

As to the title, 'sans' is French for 'without'. It is pronounced the same as 'sang', which is French for 'blood'.

This story… is open to interpretation. Place it wherever you want. It's only AU if you think it is. I hope that you enjoy it.

"Chance is only the measure of our ignorance. Fortuitous phenomena are, by definition, those whose laws we are ignorant of."

Henri Poincaré

Sans

Backwards messages scribbled at the bottom of mirrors; that's what I remember.

My mother was mad you see. She was the traditional definition of madness. She saw things that did not exist – that could not exist – and spoke with them. I was a part of her long, detailed, midnight ravings when she spoke in a language that I could not understand and was far from interpreting. She would whisper to me, later on, the things that the unseen creatures had whispered to her.

My mother was stark raving mad.

She was never dangerous in her madness. She never once hurt me. Herself, sometimes, but it was not malicious; she needed the blood to scribble her messages. Vincent, dear, the language is inside of us. It's written in our cells, in our blood. She was mad, I told you.

A deep, unyielding, contagious madness; that was my mother's.

In the night, she would tuck me into bed and already her eyes would be distant. She would smile and kiss my forehead but her eyes were watching something that I could not see. Sometimes she would mutter as she left the room.

I had the bizarre sense, even then, that she was protecting me though from what I could not say. Them, perhaps, or it, as I named her madness, as if her madness were a physical entity that could press itself up between us and make it's presence known.

My mother's hair was a light, tangled blonde. Mine is black – I get it from my father – but there was no father in my life and my mother never spoke of him. The others and it were enough fathers for me. They distorted my mother and stole her time… that is what parents do for one and other, is it not?

I loved her dearly as a child though I knew that she was mad. I lived with it as I imagine all other children live with their parental ticks. Do we ever truly question our parents? Children do not question; they inherently understand. And so I understood my mother and her madness and I embraced it and perhaps even loved it for I loved her dearly.

It is easier, I think, to believe her mad then to question if she truly were… because if she was then I surely am as well because the madness is catching.

It was my folly – note: folly, not madness – that sent me back to the miserable square where I grew up. We lived in a forgotten corner of town, a long lost place. When I was younger the world seemed brighter but when I returned it was to a darker, greyer landscape. The graffiti seemed more jarring, more sinister where it had once been mysterious and colourful when I was a child. Different but not frightening…

Strange writing that I could not read, scribbled in blood – always in blood – on my bathroom mirror. I would ignore it and brush my teeth…

I had forgotten … I had forgotten about it until I walked past the derelict park where I used to play as a child, metal swings more like severed iron limbs swaying listlessly in a half-hearted breath of breeze. Every corner was a whisper and a memory. I brushed past the curb where I received my first injury. Pain is something that a child does not forget; it is intrinsic. We remember that fire is hot, that it burns. We remember the older boy who pushed us and how we fell against a curb that did nothing to soften the blow… how we stumbled home, crying, to a mother who wiped our tears and bandaged our hands with smile and a kiss to make it better. Some things we do not forget.

Blood in the windows, how could I have forgotten?

Adults do not remember. Adults train themselves to forget. They tell themselves that their mother was mad and that the madness was hers alone and that there is nothing in the mirror because, logically, there can be nothing in the mirror. There are no blood-messages scribbled in our adult world, not on mirrors or windows or anything else.

It has to be a passage, Vincent. Where do you think it leads, your window? What do you think it sees, your mirror? They are watching us. They can see us.

My mother was mad but I am not. That is what I tell myself – told myself.

Until I looked up from shaving and saw the message on the mirror, a message that I had not written, scribbled in blood. Until I looked up and saw something else looking back at me. It was not human and I was alone in the room. When my eyes shot back to the mirror, the corner was free again and I was alone.

I am not mad. I have had doctors, doctors, doctors, since I was thirteen and my mother went truly mad and the blood message that she left for me trailed from her wrists in long thick lines, making patterns in the water. A final gift for the others. A sacrifice. The medium had become the message.

Yes, my sense of humour has long been morbid.

I am a clear-cut man; I believe in science. My mother was mad and her madness, however benign it may once have been, drove her to suicide. That is the reality that is given to me. That is the truth of the situation that has been painted for me.

But turn logic sideways and you have chaos theory staring at you. Patterns disintegrate into random chance and hidden variables and numbers that you cannot control… they tell me that the world is logical, that my mother was mad but I am not mad and there was a man staring at me in my bathroom mirror.

There are two logical explanations. The first is that I am mad, that I have snapped, that whatever madness swallowed my mother is devouring me as well and it will not be long until I too am leaving messages in doorways – no, they were mirrors and windows, not doorways – and muttering dark things where no one can hear them.

The second is that my mother was not mad.

That realization jolted me out of bed at two thirty in the morning and left me frantically feeling for a light. I have never been afraid of the dark – the others meant me no harm as a child until they killed my mother – but in that moment I was petrified because if my mother was not mad then there truly were watchers in the dark … and they could be watching me right now.

Any sane man would be afraid.

I stumbled to the bathroom and splashed water on my face, all the while avoiding looking at the mirror – the door. I kept my eyes down and yet the whole time I could feel something watching me from behind. I was deathly afraid that something was going to lay its hand down on my shoulder and whisper my name Vincent the way my mother had always done… Vincent.

Paranoia is a symptom of those who are mad. I am not mad. I am not clinically insane.

Paranoia… paranoia… is the only logical course in a mad world.

I grabbed my jacket and fled my apartment. The city is dangerous at night; I would be mad to wander its streets alone at night. But I am not mad.

I stumbled my way past the well-manicured streets that I know; past the well-to-do and then past the well-off, and further still to the not-so-badly-off, to the poor and then the destitute and then finally, shockingly, I slid down into the forgotten, the grey, the land of my childhood.

Garbage in the streets and skeleton trees; gravel that looks up at me and a flat, concrete sky. It is a place where the rules of our society have broken down, where there is no 'tax', no 'people'. Here, there are only the others - the forgotten - that have slid down between the cracks and walk on the edge of another kind of door.

I understand, now, why we lived here.

The apartment complex where I grew up is long abandoned. If there are people here then they are as reticent as my mother's manifestations. The steps that I walk up are silent but I feel them creaking underneath me. The building chokes me with its ponderous weight. Dust mites scrabble beneath me. My breath catches in my throat.

I hear music but I know that I am imagining it. The music that I am hearing could not exist. Logically, it cannot exist. I am imaging the scratchy record that my mother was so fond of; the soft blues and nameless singer that I knew so well, back then. I never knew the words to any of the songs and I still do not. My memory of music is toneless and diluted and such is the song that I not hearing now.

Memory and time, they bleed together. People cannot distinguish them… the past becomes the present and the future. This building is dead but in my memory it is vivid and alive and that alone is enough to breathe life back into it. Hence the music.

There is method in my madness, perhaps.

The apartment – number nine, but that is hardly significant – is unlocked and as I push the door open I am half expecting a dilute light from the kitchen to filter through and for my mother to smile at me and say Vincent! How was your day? She was not truly mad, my mother. Not in the average, every day sense.

She was only mad past midnight.

There is nothing here though. Our old furniture is long gone – auctioned off, if I remember – and there is nothing left. The light from the street filters in from the curtainless windows and paints the empty, dirty apartment in an unnatural blue glow. I swallow, looking around. The living room, the kitchen… I remember where my bedroom was as well. But that's not what I've come here to see. That's not where the doorway lies. I'm looking for the bathroom… for the mirror.

My steps should creak – because I remember the floorboards always creaked here – and the silence alone is enough to frighten me. I walk to the bathroom noiselessly when there should be sound and stand by the doorway… it was always doors, thresholds… something about a place that could not be seen, that existed in the in between…

The bathroom is small and dark. I do not bother with the light switch; it would not make any sense to do so.

There is a memory – very sharp and sudden – of my mother, naked, lying in a pool of her own blood in the bathroom… eyes open and smiling as if she could see what was taking her and she were welcoming it with open arms... but then it is gone again and there is only the oppressive weight of the bathroom mirror that is looking back at me.

It is broken and it should not be because I remember it being whole… yet it is broken and the glass is warped and faded. My feet crunch on the shards – finally a sound but it does not comfort me – as I walk up towards what remains of the mirror. There is a younger Vincent standing in front of me, using the stool his mother gave him to stand up and brush his teeth, not ignoring but not noticing either the blood that is scribbled on the bottom of the mirror.

My hands are shaking and I cannot stop them. I ignore them but there is no calm in my body, only the fluttering sense of otherness that overwhelms me.

With trembling hands, I grab a piece of glass and drag it across my index finger. The pain is real enough to ground me for a moment but then it is snuffed out by the darkness, by the otherness that swallows this room, this building.

My mother was not mad… I tell myself. I am not mad.

I press my finger against the shattered glass… a long, vertical line.

A child touches the stove and it burns him. He screams and cries because he has cut himself with a knife and it hurts him. A woman smiles at him and her smile alone could cut glass… glass, and it is cutting him. Glass and there are messages… messages… messages in the mirrors.

VINCENT!

A million volts of electricity run through me. I fall back and I... I... I can't breathe! There's a connection and then suddenly there are ten thousand voices screaming at me, screaming, screaming… and they all know my name.

My feet slip on the glass and I scarmble away from the mirror - there are eyes, fucking eyes, looking at me - and I cut my hands. Blood flicks off them, leaving patterns in the glass, in the dirt, in the air. The world is intricate, intricate, beautiful, terrible patterns. The cacophony in my mind is deafening and I AM NOT MAD!

Running, I am running all the way down the stairs, away from that terrible place… my mother was not mad... she was... my mother...

The voices follow me; they clamour at me to be heard. I am clutching at my head, tearing down the streets – I am running mad – and my tears blur the streetlights.

Patterns, can you see them? Patterns in the streetlight, patterns in the starlight? Everything, everything is a door. Mirrors, blood, windows… look out a window and what do you see?

Eventually, I have to stop. My chest heaves and I can taste blood in my throat… the voices flutter, concerned. They question. They ask. They wonder.

I press my fists against my eyes and slump down… I am in a park now, I realize. My back rests against a tree – infinitely old…

Old, the voices murmur. Very, very old.

I am terrified of these voices, these others. I feel their presence now, suffocating me. Men were not meant to know such things… we are not meant to…

Patterns, in everything. Do you see them?

I moan quietly and lean my head against the bark of the tree. I cannot… there is too much noise. I cannot think.

The voices murmur quietly.

I feel them bubbling in my blood, my madness. This is madness. I am surely mad.

… my mother… beautiful creature… she was not truly mad.

I hold my hand in front of my face. Blood trickles down from my fingers, down my palm. I am coated in it.

Did you kill her? I ask and I do not know to whom.

Blood, they murmur, as if it is a secret.

I close my eyes wearily.

No, I am not mad.