Mirror, rorriM
(Autumn 1995)
17: Up Against It
1-Seeking Wanda
Alex reasoned that Wanda, once away from the Student Center, would most likely head for her dormitory. That was where he headed—keeping an eye out for Bloody Mary. Every rustle of a bush in the wind, every gleam of a high-flying plane made him crouch and stare. But he got across the campus without spotting either Wanda or her nemesis.
And then in the lobby—of course there was a Security woman on the desk, barring the way—Alex called Wanda's room and got no answer. Damn! What to do, what to do.
Well—he had an uncle who had once been a researcher into paranormal crap, or so he'd been told. He took out his wallet, found his miniature phonebook—home-made, only a few pages long, and printed in eight-point type—and found "Uncle Stanford, 618 Gopher Road, Gravity Falls," then the zip code and telephone number.
It wasn't a pay phone, and in his costume he didn't have change anyway, so it had to be an operator-assisted call. He told the woman that he wanted to make a collect call and read in Stanford's phone number. He heard the number ring, then Stanford, sounding groggy, answered: "Yeah, Pines residence."
"I have a collect call for Stanford Pines from Alex Pines. Will you accept the charges?"
Immediately more alert, his uncle said, "Right, sure. Put him through."
"Go ahead with your call," the operator said.
"Hi, Uncle Stanford," Alex said. "Uh—I'm having some trouble."
"How much you need, kid?" the gravelly voice asked.
"No, not money. Uh—you researched things like ghosts and demons, right?" He had lowered his voice. No one was in the lobby, but across the room at the desk the Security officer was leafing through a magazine.
After a pause, his uncle said, "That was a long time ago, before I, uh, retired, and I'm not sure I remember—"
"Mirror demons," Alex said. "I need to know about mirror demons."
"Huh. I—wait a minute, kid. I'm gonna go into the office. Don't hang up, I'll pick up there."
Alex fidgeted, worrying about the long-distance charges this was racking up. Then he heard the rattle of the phone as his uncle picked up the receiver in his office. "You there, kid?"
"I'm here. I'll pay for this call, I just didn't—"
"It's OK, kid, it's family. All right, I, uh, I kept a journal of my researches and I think I saw—I mean I think I remember writing something about demons and stuff in there. Why aren't these pages numbered? Where was it, where was it? OK, OK, let me read this to you. This is all I can tell you."
Alex didn't even have a pocket notebook to take notes, but he tried his best to remember:
If the Multiverse theory is true, as my researches have led me to think it is, perhaps the proof may be found in a startlingly mu—what the heck? Mun-dane. Mundane locus, who writes stuff like this? Mundane locus, namely in what I have termed the Mirror Universe. I have collected more than a thousand anecdotes of what I may term mirror anomalies. They suggest that, under certain circumstances mirrors may afford us glimpses into a slightly alternate universe, perhaps a limited pocket realm. I dunno what he—uh, I meant by that one, kid, too long ago, I guess. Anyways, let's see: Should one enter the mirror universe, it would be crucial to avoid one's own double, because should one touch the other, instant an—uh, annihilation? Yeah. Would occur.
After a moment of silence, Alex's uncle said, "That's all there is, kid. I hope it helps. What's goin' on, anyways?"
Someone lightly tapped on the door, and looking around, Alex saw Wanda, crouching outside. "Thanks, Uncle Stanford. I'll talk to you later, and I'll pay for the call. Bye!" He hung up and hurried outside.
No one there. "Where are you?" he whisper-called.
"Over here, behind the bush! I'm half-naked!"
"I have your skirt!"
They found each other, and surprisingly, she hugged him. "I've been so scared! She's out there, Alex—and I think she's hunting me!"
"Here's your, um, clothes. Skirt, I mean," he said. "I'll turn my back."
He heard the rustle of clothing, and then she said, "OK, I'm decent."
"What are we going to do?" he asked.
"The first thing," she said grimly, "is to find Becca and Selene. They started this!"
They went in together, and Wanda called Becca's room. No answer. She tried Selene's.
"Hello?"
"Is Becca with you?" demanded Wanda.
"Uh, y-yes."
"Both of you stay right where you are!" Wanda said.
Alex said, "Don't look in a mirror."
"What?" Wanda asked.
Alex repeated, and Wanda said into the phone: "Keep away from the mirror! And stay where you are!"
She hung up as if angry, but before she could stride away, Alex grabbed her arm. "I need to be there, too," he said.
"You can't—"
"You may need help," he told her.
She looked into his eyes. "Damn it," she muttered. "OK. Around back, the door beside the dumpster. Hurry! And if we get caught—we'll both be expelled."
"I think we have to risk it," he said.
"Go."
2-A Way In
All across the campus, mirrors in turn darkened as Bloody Mary used them as a means of transportation. She did not go into the mirrors—rather she gleamed off the surface of them, now an auto wing mirror, now a particularly reflective windowpane. She had lost her sense of where the girls, Selene, Becca, and especially Wanda, were.
But she would find them. She didn't know about daylight. She had never come out in the day, had never so much as glimpsed the sun. Darkness, though—darkness she knew.
Never before had she been outside her own realm—in the real world and out of the mirror realm—and she felt herself steadily weakening. Perhaps the yellow glare of the campus lights had something to do with that.
She needed to find Wanda, or Becca, or—best of all, if she could do it—Selene. Find one of them and destroy her, take in her life-energy. But that had to be done soon.
She didn't know it, but that meant before sunup.
Casting her senses out—radar for a victim, a kind of tingling in the perceptions—she first felt the others fading away, and then she happened across a hint of Wanda's passing nearby. Like a dog casting backward and forward, she found and followed the track.
It led in darts left and right, into shadowed niches and doorways. And then, finally, to the dormitory, to the hedge running along the front, to the spot near the door where Wanda had stood for long minutes, trying to find a way in.
She had just been here.
She had gone inside, no more than five minutes before. The door was glass, reinforced with a crisscross of wire, but it was barely reflective enough to allow Bloody Mary to . . . seep through.
One moment she was outside, the next inside.
She sensed that Wanda had gone upwards—and she set out to find the stairs.
"Hey!" the woman in uniform said from the desk. "Sign in!"
Bloody Mary stalked toward her. The woman spun an open book and thrust it toward her. She held out a pen. "Sign in!"
Though she could not read, in some occult way, Bloody Mary sensed that the most recent signature belonged to Wanda. She vaguely grasped the notion of making marks on the next blank line, and with the pen she made a scrawl in two parts, not copying Wanda's name, but just making a jagged, loopy scribble that might have been a name. The woman at the desk, more interested in her magazine than in students, had already settled back in her chair, reading the article.
Past her desk, Bloody Mary followed the—scent? The spoor? The trace of Wanda that she had sensed into a stairwell. Dropping to all fours, the specter began to crawl up the steps, head low, swaying, seeking to find Wanda's trail.
"He shouldn't be here!" Selene said, her voice quavering.
"Shut up!" Wanda snapped. "What did you two do?"
Becca had retreated into sullenness. "It was just a stupid game," she muttered. "I didn't think anything would happen."
"I think," Alex said, "that the two of you somehow contacted a—uh, I know this sounds stupid—an alternate universe?"
"What does that even mean?" Becca asked.
"It means you let some kind of monster loose!" Wanda said. "She grabbed me and pulled me into the mirror! Stop smirking! And Alex helped me get out again!"
"Listen, listen," Alex said, though with the dance going on, the floor was almost totally vacant and there was no one there to hear. "The thing we've got to do is find out how to get rid of Bloody Mary. Anybody know anything about banishing Bloody Mary?"
Shifting and looking pouty, Becca said slowly, "I've heard some girls say you draw a cross on each mirror in the place with a bar of soap. And you sprinkle salt on the floor. She hates soap and salt. And one girl said if you sprinkle vinegar on your clothes, she can't touch you."
"Guess we have to go to the corner store," Alex said.
"And I think we have to take the stuff back to the bathroom where she appeared," Wanda added.
Selene began to shake. "I can't, I can't!"
"We'll all go with you," Alex said. "We have to try something."
It took some persuading, but finally they got Selene and Becca to agree. "We've got an hour and a half before the dance is over," Alex said. "We'll have to move fast. Or—soap's easy, everybody has soap, but salt and vinegar—"
"The kitchen," Becca said, still sounding reluctant. "Everybody keeps stuff in the cabinet there. I know there's some salt packets and there's a cardboard box of ketchup and mayo and stuff like that. Maybe some vinegar, too."
"OK, you guys stop there," Alex said. "Collect it. I have to go down by the back stairway and sneak out without the alarm going off. Meet you out front in five minutes."
Wanda took Selene's arm and all but wrestled her into the hallway. As the girls went into the common kitchen on that floor, Alex cautiously opened the stairway and stepped out on the landing.
His first impression was that a large dog had slipped in and crouched halfway down the top flight of stairs. Then the head snapped up, the eyes glared, and he threw himself back into the hallway, slamming the door. "She's here!" he yelled, not caring if everyone could hear him.
Wanda ran from the kitchen. "Where?"
"Stairs!" he said.
"Move! Alex, move!" Wanda grabbed his hand and yanked him away from the closed stairway door.
He stumbled. Looking back, he saw something seeping under the door, like a pool of dark oil.
Except it wasn't oil. And it wasn't a shadow.
The mirror demon had impossibly flattened and was slipping into the hallway.
They were trapped.