The rain kept coming. The ghosts kept digging. The hole got deeper.

  Madeline sighed. “I see.”

  “I’ve stayed on top for over eighty years, Madeline,” he said. “Killing anything that got in my way. Anything that might have been a threat. I am rich and powerful, and of course, unstoppable. So I’m going to get that money out of that miserable hole and then you’re going to get back in the car, and we’re going to go back to the hotel for a nice little chat.”

  She chuckled. “Harder you fall, Cavallaro.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said you might want to check that miserable hole you just mentioned.”

  He stomped over to the space behind the shack where the ghosts were working. They had excavated a relatively large area. There was nothing. He had been so busy in his exchange with Madeline he hadn’t noticed it was empty. No briefcase. No money.

  Cavallaro spun, ripping through two ghosts in a rage before his sights turned back to Madeline. Ignoring the remaining dead, he started back towards her. Before he made it half way, she held up her hand, her face passive.

  “Yes, I knew there was no money. I knew Newmare was going to lie to you. I helped set this all up.”

  “Why?” he spat. “What could you hope to accomplish? And when the hell did you—”

  “I never spoke to him. The dead did. They told him. They told him who you were, what you were going to do to him regardless of what he said, and they told him to lie. To get you here.”

  For once, he looked honestly confused. “Why?”

  “Because they hate you!” she screamed, losing her composure. “They hate us for what we do. And they should. I hate us too.”

  The downpour continued, drenching both of them. Mud splashed up from the droplets around their feet, the effects of the rain the only sound, nothing else for miles around them. Shaking with tears, Madeline stared at Cavallaro, willing him to say something of merit. To give a reason, or at least an excuse. Anything.

  Instead, he gave her a sneer and said, “So what?”

  Her face collapsed for a moment. Then she pulled herself together, pushed her dripping black hair back, tried her best to stand straight, and looked directly at her mentor. There would be no wisdom or purpose gleaned from him.

  “Do you know why it was here? Here of all places?”

  “I assume you’re going to tell me,” he replied.

  “Vampires, wendigo and werewolves,” she said.

  “What are you babbling about?”

  “You used to taunt me about those monsters. But there are no monsters in the walking world, except us of course. But there are monsters. Horrible ones.”

  “Are there now?” he asked, taking two steps towards her.

  “Yes. And they’re all dead.”

  Now Cavallaro paused, looking concerned. “Dead monsters? I’ve never heard of any such nonsense.”

  He didn’t notice the darkness between the trees behind him start to thicken, to coalesce. Shadows elongated, grew more dense, becoming something more tangible. They rolled down over the edge of the quarry like liquid smoke. Throughout the mass were pockets of deeper black. A substance that hurt to look at, a material never meant to rise this far into the material world. The mass of it shuddered and moved forward.

  Madeline smiled. “The dead knew. They always knew. Why would they tell you? They only told me so that we could destroy you.”

  Cavallaro finally noticed her line of sight and spun to see the living darkness building behind him. Bellowing, he tried to use his powers to stop it. Nothing. He forced the few remaining ghosts upon it, but his effort was like throwing pebbles at a hurricane. Stumbling back, he fell in the mud, gaping up at the monstrosity that formed above him. The sections of deeper black merged into a central core, while lesser parts branched off into what appeared to be rudimentary appendages. These whipped around, smashing into the mounds with incredible strength.

  “It lives here somewhere, I guess. I don’t really know,” Madeline said. “I was just supposed to make sure you got here.”

  He screamed her name, sliding back in the mud.

  “Why haven’t you ever seen one? Because it took one thousand ghosts sacrificing themselves to this thing to raise it. A thousand ghosts willingly feeding themselves to this to stop you from feeding on a million more. That’s how much they hate you.”

  Something within the deeper black shifted. It more than moved in space, it tilted on a level beyond comprehension. An orifice opened, revealing a light that had no color. It didn’t shine, or emit warmth, or in any way illuminate. Perhaps it was all things to the dead leviathan—eye, mouth, ear, other unknown sensory organs. The giant limbs unraveled and grabbed Cavallaro to draw him into that light.

  He screamed and scrambled in the mud as the lengths of blackness whipped around his legs, pulling him down, begging and pleading with Madeline as the dead nightmare dragged him closer. She didn’t move and neither did the ghosts he had brought as slaves. They all stared in horrified fascination. They stared as Cavallaro tried to bargain and threaten and then finally wail like an animal as he was lifted into the light.

  “That’s how much I hate us both,” Madeline whispered as she watched him be devoured.

  She stood there, the echoes of Cavallaro’s screams fading from the quarry. And she waited. She didn’t expect to leave this encounter alive. Never had. While her sins were nowhere as great, she had enough. Resigned to her fate, she closed her eyes and accepted the inevitable.

  It didn’t come. Looking up, she saw the darkness diffusing and slipping back up into the tree line. Part of her wanted to run after it. After everything, why?

  Then a single thought came to her. A single word roared into her mind by the disappearing abomination in the chorus of a thousand voices. One that sent her running for the Escalade.

  * * *

  “Are you sure that’s what you want?”

  The ghost nodded. “Absolutely. Even if she ends up marrying someone else. I mean, I want her to be happy. But I want her to know I loved her. And that I wanted to marry her.”

  “I’ll make sure the ring gets to her,” Madeline said. “You said it was in a shoebox in your closet?”

  “Yeah, it’s the only one. Box my hiking boots came in. It won’t be hard to find. Like I said, it was my grandmother’s.”

  She wrote it all down. The ghost fiddled with the laces on his jogging shoes. She could tell something was bothering him, and it wasn’t the memory of getting hit by a car while out for his morning run. She was pretty sure what it was.

  “Go ahead and ask,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Go ahead. You want to know why I’m helping you.”

  “Um, yeah. I heard necromancers weren’t exactly the friendly type.”

  “That’s usually true. But I got some advice once.”

  “What was that?” the ghost asked.

  She smiled at him. “One word. I was once like other necromancers. Maybe not as bad as some, but I’d still eaten ghosts. And profited off their misery. But I was willing to make a sacrifice and, well, I was given a second chance.”

  “So, don’t leave me hanging! What was the word?”

  Madeline picked up her notebook and gazed out over the sunny cemetery.

  “Change,” she said as she walked away.

  During the last ten years, Brian Fatah Steele has written a number of both short- and long-format horror fiction pieces, much of which is being published by an independent co-op.

  Steele is the author of the novel In Bleed Country and the single-author collection Further Than Fate. His work has appeared in several magazines and journals. Steele’s short story, “Wet Heavens,” appeared in Blood Type: The Anthology of Vampire Sci-Fi, a charity volume that benefits The Cystic Fibrosis Trust.

  His dark tale of the supernatural, “Delicate Spaces,” was published in the Bram Stoker Award®-nominated Dark Visions: A Collection of Modern Horror - Volume One from Grey Matter Press.

  Jude falls back against the wall with a smoking hole in his expensive business suit. Divorce papers fall to the floor.

  Salazar holds the gun. The end of the barrel forms a toothless mouth ringed with lips of iron.

  "But I'm not dead," Jude whispers.

  He presses his hand against the hole in his suit. The bullet has penetrated deep through the fibers of cloth, through the shirt beneath and ventilates his interior pocket. A single, high-pitched twitter of bird song prevails through the smoke, and then all is silent.

  "Why?" Blood bubbles up over his lips.

  He regrets not taking the time to think of something better. The last moment of his life and all he has to show for it are lines purloined from melodramas and low budget films.

  Salazar's face divides in half with a lean smile. "I traffic in black magic mirrors."

  "Mirrors?"

  "I need dead men to make them."

  Jude opens his mouth to ask another question, and that is how he dies; frozen expression of eternal surprise and one hand clasped at his wound. A bullet in his heart, a canary stowed in his breast pocket.

  * * *

  Jude awakens.

  His memories of waking in his life before are nothing like this. His coming to is automated and without transition from one consciousness to the next. He arrives from blackness to find himself reduced to a doll whose wind-up key is touched off once and then set loose, eyes opening.

  He stands in a new room. Blood snakes down his suit and stains his clothes from his chest to his belly.

  His breast pocket pulses like a heart and he reaches into it.

  "There you are, Jenny."

  The canary hops into his palm, talons pricking at his skin. Pale yellow. He brings her to eye level. Her wing feathers are singed around the edges where the bullet clipped her and punched straight through to the other side of him.

  "Does that hurt?"

  Jenny hops onto his finger and gives him a reptilian glare. He deposits her back into his pocket where she flicks her head over the top and watches their new world from the warm nest of his body.

  The time before remains faded and dizzied in his memory and difficult to recall. A man named Salazar. A drawn weapon. Dying. Did that happen? Did he die, just like that, so easily? At the hands of a man who marketed in black magic mirrors. Some two-bit Satanist with a reputation for posing like a punk rock singer but was just a greasy con artist telling futures to old ladies for blow. Jude quietly tacks on murderer to the list.

  Would anyone even know he was gone? Jude analyzes his quiet, solitary life and draws a mental portrait of himself, sad and disappointing in its smallness: a man who enjoys chess, classic novels and birds. Never married, never loved. With dismay, he finds the mark he made upon the world is insignificant—so mediocre, no one will notice his absence.

  Is this death, then? Heaven?

  Jenny tweets from his pocket and then falls silent.

  The room remains unchanged, yet like no room he ever inhabited. He moves toward the couch, and it shimmers and pixelates like an image from the LCD screen in his office—flat and two-dimensional.

  He touches it. Fingers press into a gossamer resistance, invisible and unyielding, an object with no height or width or depth. The couch is like a cardboard cut-out.

  He rubs his fingers together and they feel greasy and coated in oil. He wipes them on his pants leg in disgust.

  Beside the couch stands a crib. A dangling mobile above it. All these things, the bookshelf beside it, even the window through which summer light pours, gives an impression of life—but life without substance. He draws closer to each. Jenny whistles and punctuates his rising panic with ululating song. The furniture are as pages torn from a magazine, fluttering, insubstantial. Artificial.

  "Jude."

  The voice drifts in like a foul wind. He spins and comes face to face with a window, an oval pane of glass set in the wall.

  Like a mirror.

  A man stands on the other side of the portal, and Jude recognizes the dark brown hair, the cruel slant of his features, the steady hands behind the trigger that authored his death: Salazar.

  Memories detonate. Firecrackers in his head. A dark-tinged recollection of the divorce papers he was sent to deliver to the residence, office rumors of Salazar sacrificing goats. Men and women claiming to be witches engaging in unholy congress with him by the light of the moon. How bad could it be? Gossip, tabloid nonsense, Jude had said.

  Jude remembers—his fingers moist with the humid summer—bending the pages as he waited for Salazar to answer the door, impatient, tapping his foot against the floor. All they had to do was just sign the damn divorce papers, but they always gave him trouble. They always stalled and hemmed and hawed. He had planned on stopping at the vet's office in the next hour. The bird cage broke in transit, so he had his canary huddled in his pocket. The entire day had been nothing but a series of small travesties.

  Then Salazar answered the door with gun in hand and shot him through the heart.

  "Do you like your new home, Jude?"

  "What is this?"

  "You're in the mirror, of course. You're dense for an attorney, you know that?"

  I'm in the mirror?

  It did not seem possible.

  Jude recalls his father, who passed away from a heart attack when he was a child. His mother tore through the house, drifting from room to room like a sad ghost, covering all the mirrors with scarves. He considered it an old superstition as tired and banal as stories passed in the high school hallways about Bloody Mary and conjurations in narrow bathrooms between the toothpaste and the soap. Games played by bored teenagers.

  The difference is this is real.

  Fury spikes through him. A lifetime's worth of pent-up frustration propels him forward to reach out and break the glass, shatter Salazar's face.

  Nothing happens.

  Jude's hand hangs on the air like a stalled puppet and will not obey his will. Salazar pulls out a comb and brushes back his hair with a vain gesture. Jude follows and matches the movement with his own hand in uneasy pantomime.

  "Oh, I wouldn't start becoming violent now, Jude. I'm afraid that won't help you very much. You might want to make yourself at home. You could be in there a very long time."

  Jenny flutters against his breast. Presses hollow bones against his heart. She burrows deeper into the pocket lint as though the sound of Salazar's voice sends her into a panic.

  "There's no such thing," Jude protests.

  "No such thing? You're in it now. All it takes is your blood, your signature—which you handily provided with the divorce papers from your firm—a few symbols and spoken words over your dead body. You didn't think witches were the only ones who could work spells, did you?"

  "I'm just a lawyer. I've done nothing to you. This is criminal!"

  "Haven't you? What, did you think criminals need a reason?" Salazar snorts laughter. "I'm no more evil than you are. How many shady clients have you ever saved from prison and set loose on the street? Well, making mirrors like this, that's my job, and it pays well. It's business—just like getting chumps like me to sign unfair divorce papers is your job. Nothing personal."

  Jude considers the nature of evil, reflects on the subpoenas, indictments and divorces he'd delivered in the past, before dismissing it in a burst of rage.

  "There's a world of difference between delivering an indictment to a criminal and imprisoning a man for no better reason than you can't keep better terms with your ex," he snaps.

  A baby cries in the distance.

  Salazar arches his head toward the crib nestled in the corner. Jude struggles for autonomy to move in the other direction but mimics Salazar's motion against his will, his body not his own.

  In the crib, a child turns uncomfortably in her blankets and cries again.

  "Shut it, Amanda!"

  Salazar continues to yell, walking away from the mirror.

  Your father's a bastard, little girl, Jude thinks bitterly.

  "You shouldn't treat your child that way," he says.

  Salazar makes a sound between a growl and a hiss. Jude pulls closer against his will when all he desires is to shrink back from the man who bares his teeth, as though he might come through the mirror itself and deliver a worse altered reality than the one he already occupies.

  "Oh, you think so? Well, you should pray this cough syrup never runs out. You got a fancy education, lawyer man, you know your Shakespeare. What is it? 'The devil hath the power to assume a pleasing shape?'"

  Salazar moves out of sight.

  When the man passes the limits of the mirror’s frame, Jude experiences a tremor like a line snipped in two. A cord snaking up through his spine and from the top of his head severs and sets him loose. His joints, his limbs and legs are his own again, to move as he pleases.

  I'm a mime, he realizes. "Good Lord, this must be Hell."

  Jenny tweets her despair. She recognizes cages when she sees them, after all.

  * * *

  Time takes on new meaning in the Mirrorworld, as Jude comes to think of it.

  He remembers and catalogues all the mirrors he had seen in his life—bathroom mirrors, hand-held mirrors to shave with, pocket mirrors for grooming, rear and side view mirrors, mirrors in a woman's make-up case. He wonders now if lost souls like his were not imprisoned in them all, forced to carry out the actions of their owners.

  Salazar visits the mirror every morning, and again in the evening, to arrange his hair or to examine the fit of his clothes. In each instance, Jude finds himself trapped in dreadful pantomime, aping Salazar on the opposite side of the glass.

  When Salazar leaves, shadows follow him by bending in weird knots when he passes and then springing back into place as though nothing ever happened. It calls into question just how many items in the man's apartment are filled with unearthly vitality, their substance stolen from other lives. Who is trapped in the antique end table, and what poor soul might inhabit the arm chair?

  Jude presses his face against the glass and peers into the Otherland. He tries breaking the surface again, but the glass remains as stone and the force of his assault knocks him back with proportionate energy. He succeeds only in exhausting himself.