Hungry As Mirrors

At eleven thirty, the mirrors went dark and the doorbell rang. The first was strange because they hadn’t been so black ever before, though they had been empty once. The second was strange because it was late, and there was hoar frost on the windows and snow making it difficult to open gates and cross roads and drive out of ditches. Nuala watched the mirror in the hallway for another half a minute before she went to see about the door.

Nuala opened the door. She wasn’t hopeful about whoever was at the door. It was either an emergency, which would require immediate action and would disturb her lethargy and her bored mood, or it would be something trivial, which would do nothing to help her boredom. When she opened the door and spilled light onto the snow, she had to blink for a moment. The white snow blinded her and made it hard to make out the shadows just above it.

There were several of them. She had to count twice to get to six. Nuala also had to slow down and force herself to actively listen to figure out what had just changed about the air. It wasn’t the air, just what was in it; they were singing. The sixsome had begun all at once. They were precise in their words, no one fumbling and singing out of time. She wasn’t impressed. In fact, normally, she would be embarassed or shocked, enough to give them an impatient look and close the door as soon as they were finished. It reminded her a little of being ambushed by Christmas carolers in the town square. But Christmas carolers sang Christmas songs and this was… not that. It sounded more like a shanty tune, like something sun on a boat when there was no one around to hear you. It was like a song about drowning. She heard the word hungry in it, and the word watch.

“What the hell?” Kay, Nuala’s older sister, leaned out of the kitchen and glared in her direction. When this wasn’t enough, Kay emerged. “It’s friggin’ cold. You- oh. Oh, whoa.”

“Yeah,” Nuala said, because she disliked to be told off without having done anything wrong in the first place.

“It’s a bit early for caroling, isn’t it?” Kay said, which meant that she knew it was early and she didn’t have positive feelings about it. She was embarassed on the singers’ behalf but she wouldn’t show it. There was a politician’s smile on her lovely doll’s face, beneath her lovely blonde curls. Nuala was a little disappointed to see one of the singers return Kay’s smile. She also disliked it when people couldn’t see through Kay’s smile, but she couldn’t blame them, she supposed. Kay could even charm the things in the mirrors, sometimes. Or it looked like they were charmed. It was a pleased sort of smile on their strange faces anyway.

The singers didn’t stop singing. The cold rushed in with them, and a short gust of snow, like a dusting of sugar. Kay folded her arms over her chest, which seemed unnecessary to Nuala. It wasn’t that cold. But this was a polite way for Kay to inform the singers that she wouldn’t be entertaining them much longer, not if the outdoors continued to be as cold as they were. Kay leaned forward- she smelled like the shavings of an erasure – and tried to speak as discreetly as she could, directly in Nuala’s ear. Nuala tilted her neck three degrees so she couldn’t feel her sister’s voice directly on her ear lobe. “Go get some of mam’s ginger loaf. I don’t have any cash for them.”

Nuala thought of the black mirrors. There was a large mirror on the wall of the kitchen. She thought it was probably pitch black as well right now. She wondered if whatever was in the mirrors would see her getting the ginger loaf.

Nuala shrugged. “You get it,” she said to Kay, a little too loudly. The singers said nothing, but Kay’s ears pinked. Nuala let herself be manhandled just outside the door so Kay could pull it shut against the wind and more sugary snow-clouds. The radio was still on inside. Their mother was upstairs. There were no other voices; the mirrors must still be dark. Kay smiled at the singers again, as though apologizing for Nuala.

On of the singers moved. Her belt flashed, like there was a very polished buckle on it, or a piece of glass. Nuala tried to look at it discreetly, but she felt that the singers were watching her closely. They could not be distracted by their own voices. Nuala wanted to nudge Kay and point, but Kay wasn’t good at other people’s subtlety, only her own.

The singers began to wind down. Their voices muted just like the wind did, both gradually and quickly. Kay began to clap before it was over. Nuala was abruptly annoyed that she’d missed the exact moment it ended. “Gorgeous,” Kay said.

The singers put their hands before them, like they’d been carrying instruments and were laying them down. They all had flashing belts. It must have been a charm of some sort they carried, Nuala thought. Like a charm. One of them, a woman with a berry-red mouth, asked them, “Did you like it?”

Nuala said, “I’d like to know what it was first. I didn’t think I’d get sung at today. And not by strangers.”

Kay elbowed her sharply and obviously. She wanted the strangers to know that she was appalled by Nuala’s words, and less likely to give them a terrible answer.

The berry-lipped woman said, “That sounds fair.” Her eyes flicked to her left, to someone with dark hair and eyes. He had the sort of black hair that people argued didn’t exist. It wasn’t very dark brown- it was black. So black that all the accents in it were blue, like the underside of the ocean. He didn’t return her gaze. At least, Nuala didn’t think he did. He had mirror-black eyes and it was difficult to tell exactly where they were pointed.

Kay clapped her hands together, like she was about to organize a meeting, though no one looked like they were about to be organized. Nuala watched Kay in her periphery. “We don’t have nay cash,” Kay began, “but we do have some ginger cake if you’d like. It’s got pieces of crystallized ginger on top, and we’ve got tea to go with it. Or I can make some hot cider if you’d wait a few minutes.”

“We don’t have many minutes,” said one woman. She had a long, thin face, like someone had pulled on her chin and stretched it out. Her shoulders bent forward; her fingers were folded into her hands but there was something strange and numerous about the amount of knuckles she had. “We have many places to go tonight. You can come, if you’d like. We can always use more singers. Please, come sing with us.”

Kay shifted in the doorway. The light slivered and changed and flashed off the thin-faced woman’s belt. There was definitely glass on it. It flashed straight into Nuala’s eyes. Nuala tried to look into it, but it wasn’t very effective. There didn’t seem to be much to see. For all its reflectiveness, the glass was too dark for details. She looked at the woman instead, but the woman didn’t seem to notice that the glass was there, or that it was flashing. She withstood Nuala’s gaze easily.

Something climbed the wall of Nuala’s stomach. The glass on their belts were exactly as dark as the black-haired man’s eyes.

Kay laughed. Nuala almost couldn’t blame her, because the invitation was very ridiculous. But the singers didn’t look like they were waiting for a laugh. “I think the cake would do you better,” she said. “It’s warmer, and you’d need warm on a night like this. I can’t believe you’re out and singing like it’s nothing at all.”

“Everything seems colder at night,” the red-lipped lady said. She exchanged a glance with the black-eyed man, and then, like they were dolls on the same hinge, they turned at the same time to Nuala and regarded her. “And this night is long.”

“The longest,” Nuala said. She didn’t know why she’d said this. She was sure they knew, but she didn’t want them to think her unprepared for some reason. She did not want to seem an idiot to them.

“Really? If it’s the longest then you should definitely have something to warm up with, “Kay said. “Look, I’ll just go cut you each a piece of cake. Or I’ll bring the whole thing over here with some paper- just, hang on. I’ll be right back. I’ll put the kettle on, too.”

Kay edged back inside. The light slanted back and forth again; the glass winked on everyone but Nuala’s belts. She was glad the door didn’t closee entirely. The front yard was entirely dark without the hallway light.

“Was that a yes to our invitation?” The thin-faced lady said.

Impulsively, Nuala looked down at their belts without trying to be discreet. She said, “That’s not a lot of warning. I might not like it.”

They all exchanged glances. Some of them looked like they were looking at two people at once. All eyes were hooded and shadowed. Nuala put her hand against the door, ready to push it open. She might almost take the mirrors over this.

“You won’t know until you try,” the black-haired man said. He sounded amused and sure, like she had already agreed.

“There are other singers around here,” Nuala said. “What’s so special about us? Why us? Why now?”

“We will go ask others to sing with us,” the red-lipped lady said. “As we have before. Every year there are more people to sing with us. But there are also fewer.”

Nuala said, “Maybe not everyone likes to be in the cold and the dark all the time.”

She had a thought, when those eyes tilted at her, that she might never wash off their gazes. The eyes would be gone, but the gazes themselves would linger on her skin. “How many people have sung with you before?” she asked. Her head was full of black glass.

“More than now,” the red-lipped lady said. Their shoulders all tipped forward a fraction. Nuala heard the click of the electric kettle and saw the lights flicker as the kettle stopped stealing electricity. “This is your last chance for now,” the lady said. “Are you coming?”

Nuala had a household chore to complete. “Not tonight,” she said.

“We’ll come again,” the black-haired man said. The thin-faced lady’s mouth tilted and twisted like he’d said something wrong. “Soon. For your second answer.” It occurred to Nuala that his eyes had been on her since she’d opened the door.

Kay’s footsteps were loud. She’d just nudged the kitchen door open and it squeaked as she padded toward them.

It occurred to Nuala that his eyes had been on her since before she’d opened the door. And their voices didn’t just sound like caroling and wind. They sounded like the strange nights in the house. “My second answer will be the same as my first.”

The black-haired man said, “You can’t answer us now when we haven’t asked you a second time. Some people change their minds. We still haven’t even been introduced.”

Kay was almost at the door. Nuala said, “Maybe next time. Maybe not.”

The singers backed away from the door’s light quickly, but not hurriedly. They faded out of view the way wind died down. Nuala kept the door closed right up until Kay coughed loudly. When Nuala opened the door for her, Kay stared over her plate of ginger cake and her pot of tea at the empty yard.

“You scared them off, didn’t you?” Kay said to Nuala, unkindly. “God. You’re such a teenager. I doubt they’ll come back now.”

“You didn’t really want them to,” Nuala said as Kay stomped indignantly back to the kitchen. Nuala followed her and took the mirror in the kitchen down. It was a slightly lighter shade than it had been before the singers showed up. She took down the mirror in the hallway next. Then the mirror above her mother’s vanity, and the mirror in her room. The only mirror she could not take down was in the bathroom. She draped a towel over it instead. It was almost a normal colour, except for the shadows reaching across it.

When Nuala got ready for bed, a little past midnight, she brushed her teeth in front of the covered mirror. The window was open; the air was cold. The wind itself struck Nuala as hungry, just then.

She spat into the sink and ran the water. Then she heard it. It was just this one mirror, because she hadn’t taken it down. The sounds always started up like this, as gradual and quick as wind. She could hear their dismay at being covered, but it wasn’t comforting at all. The towel between the mirror and herself felt like gauze, like water, like nothing at all.

Nuala turned off the water and stared at the towel over the mirror. They knew she was listening. They knew.

“Put the mirrors back,” they said, all speaking at once, not a voice out of time. “We miss seeing you.”

Art by Barbara Florczyk

Text by Lucie MacAulay