He tires of this, and at last sits on the floor of his two-dimensional cartoon world, watching the toddler in the far corner, imprisoned in the crib while he remains imprisoned in the mirror. The child is far too young to be without supervision, he thinks. What was her name? Amanda?

  She peers at the mirror from above the bars of her crib, a thatch of wild, brown hair and huge eyes.

  Salazar doses her with cough syrup in the afternoon. She sleeps through the hours of his absence. Jude envies her drugged existence, as he has nothing but brutal sobriety with which to feel every throb of pain, experience every agony of a death and an afterlife without conclusion.

  * * *

  "I want you to let me go."

  Salazar plucks a hair from the center of his forehead as Jude presents his case. He laughs. Tattoos of mysterious sigils and signs of planets and spirits mark his arms. His gaunt cheeks puff with the force of his derision. Jude mimes it, and through him climbs an insidious, rising hatred. His physicality may be commandeered by Salazar, but on the interior nothing remains of himself to regulate his jangling nerve endings and his seething animosity. A drive-train of agony running with the engine of his heart.

  "Why would I do that? Look, you're what, forty years old? Think of it like this—you probably weren't going to last much longer. What did you have to live for anyway?"

  Jude tries to protest and instead lapses into sullen silence. That he cannot think of a reason to defend himself only multiplies his rage.

  Because I don't have a wife, or a meaningful job, or a particular pursuit, renders my life worthless? That's not fair.

  Regardless of the utility of life and its meaning, overwhelming despair claims him. Escape from the mirror will not return his life. His condition is permanent.

  So too, is his imprisonment in the mirror.

  Defeat comes on the heels of despair, and a series of images shuffle through his mind's eye—the detritus of his consciousness left over from the days prior. The sound of the gun in the cold air. The hiss of the radiator in another apartment. The residents had surely heard his agony and chose to remain in their matchbox rooms and let him die. Jude thinks of the divorce papers he delivered to Salazar. His signature and the empty space where Salazar was meant to sign his name.

  And then comes an insight, breathless in its power, that surely all of life is a series of contracts requiring signatures and agreements, and his imprisonment in the mirror is no more permanent than Salazar's marriage. While his death was irreversible, his place in the mirror was not.

  It could be broken, just like any agreement. He did it all the time.

  Jude holds a breath, his eyes expanding as he conceives the idea and wrestles it down and deep within him.

  Salazar leaves down the hall with the spider legs of shadows snapping at him before returning to their sensible positions and linear places beneath the flow of sunlight. Jude feels the same as they do, warped into Salazar's wake and then allowed to return to normal in his absence.

  It occurs to him that Salazar is the only thing he has left in the world, whether he likes it or not. A final last friend, a friend who killed him and imprisoned him in silver and glass.

  Jenny tweets.

  "Except for you," Jude whispers.

  He takes Jenny from his pocket. Plump and yellow, she preens and puffs herself to twice her size and satisfies herself with his finger for a perch.

  At home in his apartment, he collected canaries and other exotic birds, had a crow who learned to speak his name. Some he rescued and others he bought. There would be no one to care for them or feed them now.

  "I'm sorry," Jude apologizes to the bird. He strokes it with trembling fingers. "No friends, no one else to sing with you, or flock to you, eh? How lonely you must be."

  Her beak opens and she breathes, yellow belly contracting and expanding. Rapid flaps of wing until she takes flight. She careens for the portal, the mirror.

  "Don't!"

  She fails to perceive the barrier dividing the worlds, and Jude appreciates the sad irony of birds who can't distinguish one glass from the next. He attempts to intercept her but can't pluck her out of the air fast enough as she sails past. He hopes the impact will only stun her and flinches against the sight and the sound.

  Silence.

  Jude opens his eyes and releases a breath.

  Jenny's gone.

  On the other side of the mirror, in Salazar's apartment, she tweets triumphantly as she alights atop the crib and cocks her head, examining the baby as she might a bit of enticing bird seed.

  "Oh," Jude whispers.

  The bird casts no reflection. Free of the mirror.

  And suddenly, the child awakens from her cough-syrup stupor.

  Amanda, with the tousled hair, jerks upright from her slumber. Her eyeballs jitter and then fly open. She turns her head with an automated snap, joints cracking in her vertebrae until she stares through the rungs of her crib at Jude on the other side of the mirror.

  "You can see me?" he asks.

  The child grins, her mouth stained purple with cough syrup.

  "He left it out," the child says. Her voice plunges low and deep. Jenny flaps her wings but holds her place on the perch, wavering between fear and flight.

  Jude hears a sound like crinkling paper, and when he looks down at the edges of the portal he sees ice form along the frame, frost crystallizing from the air.

  He steps away from the mirror.

  He thinks to ask What? but decides that he wants no more of this. Wants no more of what lies beyond in Salazar's collected curiosities. The unnatural child speaking with the voice of something much older.

  "He left the bird out," she whispers in answer and rises up.

  A movement of uncoordinated limbs and then her hand whips out and seizes the bird. Jenny squawks and falls to silence as she succumbs to the child's grip.

  "These spells are very exact. One thing off and they mutate or unravel, like a string of Christmas lights," the infant says.

  "You don't sound like a child, Amanda."

  "I'll hear your case now."

  Jude licks his lips and stares at her. Her eyes roll and they now appear to him jaundiced and yellowed at their corners, with her veins creeping in green and her neck arching to stare at him from the side of her eyes.

  "Present your case," the child husks in a voice too old to be a child's. Pitched as a trembling soprano, it makes for a weird and laughable tone whose very humor invites the gooseflesh to rise and his skin to crawl.

  He thinks of bird song and wonders what such a voice is designed to impart with its malignant sound. It calls invisible things to it the same way Salazar's shadows trip over themselves to slither and grip at him.

  "My case?"

  "Salazar asked you what you had to live for. What is it, Jude? What is it that you have that's worth leaving the mirror? Present your case. Convince this old and tired judge."

  What did you have to live for anyway?

  Jude cannot shake the feeling that a man with only birds for companionship did not have a right to live. He'd made no difference in the world by being in it, had saved no lives, had never even donated to a charity.

  "I was in love once. That must mean something," Jude says.

  "Love does not have to mean anything at all."

  She turns the bird back and forth in her palm. The canary opens its mouth as though trying to take in air and smothers in the child's grip. The thing called Amanda opens her mouth in tandem with the creature, and Jude thinks she might stuff Jenny into her mouth and bite into feathers and cartilage.

  "Just don't hurt her!" he begs.

  "Then tell me what you have to live for. Are you not a lawyer? There are many laws both written and invisible. Approach the bench. Tell me what you live for. Tell me what you die for, and why you should be granted clemency."

  "I've done nothing wrong!"

  Amanda doesn't answer. Her implacable eyes shimmer, and Jude sees that she has two pairs of eyelids. A thin film that passes over her eyes like a lizard's and then disappears beneath her human, fleshy lid until he thinks perhaps it had never been there at all.

  Jenny tweets.

  "Love! Yes, love. I fell in love with a woman I met at a library, did you know that? She was taking out books on ornithology. She owned canaries and finches and cockatiels. She invited me over to see them, and I was looking through her cages, watching the birds. She kissed me when I turned around. Everything happened by accident. Maybe she didn't love me at all, but I know what I felt. A time later, she told me she was pregnant and I promised I'd marry her. I bought a ring and everything. And then, one day, I came home, and…"

  "And then what happened? Did love not see the day through? What happens when at long last it doesn't conquer all, hmmm?"

  "Just give her back. Give her back to me. I don't care. I don't care about living." His throat closes up and the tears burn hot as paper cuts at the corners of his eyes. "Hardly matters now, does it? What do I have to live for anyway? Give her back."

  The child laughs and hiccups from her belly, and the sound fills him with nausea as her grasp on the bird tightens.

  "You can keep your bird for now. But think on it, boy. Give me the bird and I can grant you a chance for release. You'll have to convince Salazar that he's the one in the mirror, you know. No easy task. And at the end of it, you'll still be dead, but at least you'll be free of the mirror and no longer a plaything for rich occultists with nothing better to do with their money."

  "Is that what you are?"

  She hisses and opens her hands. Jenny explodes into flight, her song puncturing the air. She arrows for Jude who catches her and holds her close as Amanda turns her back on him, collapsing into the crib as though she had never been awake.

  * * *

  "Good morning, Salazar," Jude says.

  Jenny flutters in his pocket, yellow feathers against his heart.

  Salazar smooths his hair back from his forehead, and Jude follows suit with fingers pulled by invisible strings. He does not fight but allows the magic to command him. The sensation of rain drops running along his joints, tidal and oceanic currents.

  "You sound pleasant today," Salazar says, eyes narrow in his gaunt face. "I don't like it."

  "Did you ever wonder, Salazar?"

  "What's that?"

  "If maybe you're the one in the mirror? And I'm in the real world."

  Salazar is expressionless. His heartless eyes flicker, and Jude detects the moment when the idea registers and catches hold on the edge of his consciousness.

  Jude holds the posture, unable to move until Salazar chooses to do so. He returns the occultist’s blank stare, measure for measure, caught in his supernatural cage.

  Jenny, in his breast pocket, moves against his dead heart.

  Salazar makes a face of disgust. A twisted leer of his lips. With an angry snap of his wrist, he plucks the bottle of cough syrup from the cabinet as he leaves. Jude follows him until the invisible cord that pulls and stretches him into action is released, freeing Jude to wander his two-dimensional Mirrorworld once more.

  * * *

  "Amanda. Little girl! Wake up, little girl!"

  Shadows undulate through window light and Jude makes out her face through the rungs of the crib. She drools with violet-tinted saliva, then her mouth snaps closed and her eyes fly open.

  "Amanda?"

  The girl sits up and stares at him. He looks for signs and traces of the thing she'd been before. She looks vacant and groggy, no trace of her otherworldly self until her face bisects with a grin longer than the circumference of her head, extending endlessly to the other side.

  "Yesssss?"

  "Take her," Jude chokes out the words. "Take her and give her back her life."

  The child climbs to her feet and grins, opening her hands.

  "What happens when you have her?" Jude asks, pulling Jenny from his pocket. She peeps from her hiding place and hops upon his finger.

  With her fingers, the child makes the gesture of a person running.

  "Your bird pops my cage open," the child growls, "and then you use your wits to make the most of my absence, eh?"

  "Fine." He kisses Jenny on the top of her head and lets her go.

  She ascends the air in a yellow puff.

  The mirror glass parts for her like a wizard's curtain, a shaft of light passing through her feathers.

  "Go, Jenny," he whispers and presses against the glass. The tip of his nose brushes the hard surface of the mirror portal.

  The bird bobs and weaves through the apartment. She dives down and alights on the edge of the crib. The little girl coos and blurts a string of excited nonsense words, as though the glittering lizard intelligence lying dormant beneath her child's flesh never existed. Her thatch of corn-silk hair stands out in all directions as the blue blanket falls away. The child offers a chubby fist, fingers grasping for the yellow bird above her. She opens her mouth hungrily, and Jenny stares at her before hopping along the rung and poising above the crib lock.

  Amanda blinks and the monster inside her is back. Or does it only pretend, Jude wonders, when it wants to seem a normal girl?

  "There, little friend," she hisses. "Right there."

  The shadows around them bend and beckon in their direction, as though all the sleeping, energetic lines of earth and electricity pull along a tide, conspiring to lull the bird and make it see things it could not recognize before. Then Jenny cocks her head and, in a flash of light, spots the bright crib lock for the first time.

  C'mon, Jenny.

  Tap tap. Jenny sets her beak against it. The little girl swipes at her and the bird dances out of reach, fluttering wildly and then diving in to tap tap again at the lock.

  With all the appearance of a normal child, she laughs with her open mouth in a pink curl, the beast evaporated from her eyes.

  The devil hath the power to assume a pleasing shape.

  Jude wonders what kind of devil she is. Any minute the thing residing deep inside her will rise to the surface with its yellowed eyes and green veins of rot.

  The thing inside her swells. She slams a fist against the crib door. Her fingers hit the mechanism in her desperate grab for the prize. The canary flutters, the lock snicks open and the door casts wide.

  Amanda spills out onto the floor, trailing blankets behind her. A monster pretending to be a toddler.

  "Yes," Jude whispers.

  Jenny describes a drunken figure eight in the air as though she were no more than a child's mobile. She dances in and out of Amanda's reach, and the little girl stretches her arms in a desperate bid to defy gravity and pluck her out of the air. Jenny dives and tumbles, teasing and tempting the toddler. Shadows cast from furniture and window blinds contract like fingers, becoming shaded tentacles that swat the bird to the ground. She lies flat over wood flooring with wings outstretched, dazed.

  Amanda giggles, scoops her up and disappears into the closet beyond. The door snicks shut. Laughter, giggles, the bird singing from behind the closed door.

  You use your wits to make the most of my absence, eh?

  Jude passes a hand across his forehead, his lips moving in silent prayer.

  He sits down on the floor of the Mirrorworld and waits while the little girl with something big inside her hides in the closet with the only thing that made his life worth living.

  * * *

  Jude does not quite doze but senses himself suspended in a netherworld. He thinks of his birds. Had anyone found them in their cages yet? Would they beat their wings against the bars until their hearts gave out, losing feather after feather to the cruel isolation?

  He snaps awake to the sound of Salazar whistling.

  Jude races to the mirror, hoping to peer through before Salazar enters, but he's too late—suddenly slapped back from the surface. Jude feels himself posed erect and placed into pantomime, unfurling like a cardboard cutout.

  He seals his lips shut against a cry and greets Salazar because he can do no other. He advances upon the looking glass as though they are dance partners engaged in a complicated waltz until Salazar himself appears.

  Jude musters all his enthusiasm.

  "Salazar! Why, did you have a good day?"

  The smirk disintegrates and dissolves into Salazar's face. His eyes ossify into stones.

  "Why on earth do you keep doing that?"

  "Doing what? I do everything you do, Salazar."

  "Why aren't you miserable, like the rest?"

  Jude follows Salazar's motions with cool dedication and loosens the collar around his throat. He pretends he is acting a part to a movie or a play, and this comes naturally to him. All of his future will depend on his talent for litigation and persuasion. His private play, his personal courtroom. Setting the stage and parading before the footlights for the benefit of an unseen audience. An invisible jury.

  For Jenny. For liberation from this hell.

  "What reason would I have to be miserable?"

  "You're in a mirror."

  "Am I? Still so sure that you're the one in the real world? Not the other way around?"

  Salazar's face turns a shade of red beyond blood, his lips settling in an anemic line. What he shrugged off as a joke before no longer strikes the Satanist as funny.

  "Stop it. This is the real world."

  "Well, anyone would think so, eh? Where's Amanda? That little girl you're always screaming at?"

  Salazar pauses, frozen, before slowly regaining his composure, staring at Jude measure for measure.

  "Don't go anywhere, boogeyman," Salazar sneers and turns on his heel to dart through the room and lean over the crib.

  Jude watches a slice of the man, silhouetted against a window, fists on the bars, looking down at the empty sheets before snapping back toward the mirror. Salazar's steps echo, impatient staccato against old wood.

  "What have you done with her?"

  "With the apple of your eye?"