"I can unmake you, you know. I've got a hundred ways to send you to Hell."

  "I've been trying to tell you, but you won't listen."

  "Where is she!?"

  "You're the one on the other side of the mirror, Salazar. That's why your precious girl isn't with you. I'm on the right side. The life side. You're the one dead and trapped in the mirror."

  “Mirrorworld,” Salazar mouths. "You're lying."

  "Really, Salazar? Can you afford to be so hasty? You're all alone."

  "I was just outside. I can go outside again. I can leave anytime I want."

  "Suit yourself." Jude makes his voice casual. Tread lightly. Be convincing, dammit! Make the closing argument too strong to be denied. "Where do you think I go when you're not here? Turns out, I go anywhere I want as well."

  From beyond Salazar's erect figure, a streak of yellow bolts from the closet, fluttering and flapping wildly into the room.

  Jenny tweets furiously, and Salazar starts at it and his mouth parts in confusion. Jude stares wide-eyed at the bird and leaps upon the opportunity afforded him.

  "If yours is the real world, why is there no reflection of that bird in mine?" he asks.

  Salazar snaps his gaze from the bird to the glass. His eyes widen and his lips part, mouthing a single word: No.

  "I wouldn't be too hard on yourself. I mean, what do you have to live for anyway?"

  Jenny tweets. She hovers at the window and then streaks to the ceiling fan and remains there, preening.

  Salazar stumbles against the end table. He jerks open the drawer. Inside, a gun rattles along the bottom, a box of loose bullets clinking together like change. He picks it up and Jude remembers the firearm. The mouth with no teeth.

  "This gun proves I'm real," Salazar insists. His finger lines the barrel.

  "I have one too, Salazar."

  Jude holds the fluctuating, flat-imaged pistol in his own fingers, waving it before him to demonstrate his power.

  "It's not yours. I shot you with this gun. This is the real gun!" Salazar's voice becomes ragged, the rhythm of his breath uneven. "I can't be in the mirror."

  As though to prove it to himself, he places the cold muzzle against his cheek.

  Unable to do otherwise, Jude follows the motion.

  "See," Jude pitches his voice to soothe. "See how you lift the gun as I lift it? The magic compels you to follow my motions."

  Salazar gasps. His arm trembles and strains. Reality tumbles and swaps places and disorients his reason.

  Jude grinds his teeth to hold every small emotion within, to keep for himself the secret. He holds his breath and touches the pistol to his head along with Salazar.

  An explosion.

  The blue flame licks from the muzzle.

  Jude is suddenly everywhere at once as molecules of his own self struggle to follow the progress of Salazar's broken skull and splattered brains across the wall and carpet, a thousand shards of mirror reflecting every tiny portion of himself.

  He fractures and splits and divides, helpless but to share the same fate as Salazar.

  A death rattle from each of the men plays in two-part harmony, filling the empty apartment with a woeful sound.

  The little girl with the growling voice and the jaundiced eyes slumbers in the closet, her lips stained with cough syrup.

  She dreams of yellow birds and other pleasing shapes.

  Martin Rose writes in a wide range of fiction genres covering the fantastic to the macabre. Rose’s work has been published in a number of anthologies and highly respected literary magazines. His story, “Dark Rose,” received an honorable mention from editor Ellen Datlow. He is also a contributing reviewer for Shroud magazine.

  His tale of dark religion, “How to Make a Human,” is featured in the Grey Matter Press volume Ominous Realities: The Anthology of Dark Speculative Fiction. His zombie novel, Bring Me Flesh, I’ll Bring Hell, was published in 2014.

  When not hunting the Jersey Devil in the wooded areas near his home, Rose focuses on his dark, literary writing while sometimes also moonlighting as a graphic designer.

  At first I was blind, swimming in and out of morphine-fired dreams. Again and again I saw the aeroplane bank, its engines howling as it came in to attack. I heard the explosions and the screams, saw the earth thrown up, the Jeep in front of me tracing a lazy pirouette in the air as its passengers came apart like toys hurled at a wall, felt the impact like a slap in the face and awoke trapped under a smouldering vehicle. Friendly fire. Over and over again.

  For a long time, all I knew were the hands of those caring for me. Brisk and business-like they changed my dressings, washed me, checked my temperature and injected me, before letting me slip into unconsciousness once more. I was rolled over, prodded and maintained like a temperamental piece of machinery to be discarded if all else failed.

  I began to recognise one particular pair of hands amongst all the others, the fingers long and delicate as they lingered tenderly on my brow and gently teased dressings away from wounds.

  Later I could see. The bandages were removed from my eyes, and I could identify the face that went with those hands. Her name was Lily. Lily’s eyes were dark and perceptive, her hair mousy blonde; not pretty but interesting, which was better. She treated me as a person, looked me in the eyes, spoke to me even though I couldn’t answer, told me about my case as if we were colleagues.

  Later, when the worst was over and I was on my feet again, I learned where I was and remembered I had met Lily before.

  * * *

  It was when I was ten. There was a garden party. Everyone from the villages that surrounded March Hays, the big hall, had been invited. I remember the day because after a week of dismal cloud the sun broke through and turned the grounds into a blinding vision of white and green and blue and ochre. Tables had been set up on the lush lawn, covered with crisp snowy cloths and piled with food and big jugs of cider and lemonade. Adults clustered in groups, the men stiff in Sunday suits, the women in the patched and carefully preserved dresses of yesterday the colours of crocus, daffodil, pinks and clover, befitting a day straddling spring and summer. Around the adults eddied tides of children, uninhibited by their parent’s social awkwardness.

  I left my mother’s side to get a drink. A harassed maid thrust a glass into my hand, and I discovered she had given me cider rather than lemonade. My first instinct was to exchange it, but I realised I had been offered a chance to experience a forbidden pleasure. So I wandered off, sipping the unfamiliar, sour-sweet liquid that formed cloudy whorls in the glass.

  For a while I stood in the arch of a coach house watching grooms saddle a recalcitrant stallion. With the cider and the sunshine making my head swim, I drifted to the other side of the hall where younger children were chasing up and down on the lawns. I decided to explore the graveyard of the nearby chapel. It was overgrown with grass, nettles and foxgloves. Slate gravestones poked up like fingers from a fur cuff.

  “Who are you?” A small girl with long, fair hair tied with a plaid ribbon was perched on top of an ornate granite tomb. A little rough-haired dog sat below her in the shade, tongue lolling.

  “Sam Meachum,” I said. ”You?”

  “Lily Siddons.”

  “You live here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you go to school?”

  “I have a tutor. Next year I’ll go to school.”

  “In the village?”

  “Boarding school. Devon.” She pulled a face.

  “They’re sending you away?”

  “It’s where Mummy went to school. Supposed to be the happiest days of my life.” Lily spat into the nettles. That impressed me. The dog scratched himself, wheezing like an old man.

  All the girls at school were as familiar to me as my family. They giggled and played skipping games and had inexplicable rules and secrets. Sometimes we all ran riot together, and at other times they were a species apart. They were part of the unquestioned landscape of my childhood, flowers planted in the same soil. Lily was new and different.

  I can’t remember everything we talked about, no doubt the inconsequential things that seem important when you’re ten. We threw sticks for Monty the dog and tossed pebbles at the chapel, trying to get them through the corner of a window where the glass was missing. We wandered round the little graveyard, and Lily showed me an ancient tomb with a hole at its base where the stone had broken away.

  “It’s a murderer’s grave,” she said.

  “No it isn’t.”

  “Yes it is. Hundreds of years ago Lord Radcliffe Siddons murdered his gamekeeper. And they hanged him.”

  “Why did he murder the gamekeeper?”

  “He just did. Have a look inside. You can see the bones!”

  I knelt down and peered into the hole.

  “Get closer. But be very quiet or he might wake up and grab you.”

  I got closer.

  “Don’t make a sound.”

  I peered into the murk, the gap was full of dead leaves and dirt, but beyond that I thought I could see something. I pressed my eye firmly to the hole.

  “See anything?” Lily whispered, very close to my ear.

  “No.”

  “RAAARGHHH!” she screamed, grabbing me under my ribs at the same time. I leaped away from the tomb and sprawled on my back. Lily convulsed with laughter. My heart pounded and I gasped for breath. I glared at her, which sent her into more convulsions of mirth. Her hilarity was so infectious that I couldn’t help smiling and then guffawing myself. We rolled on the ground. Monty danced round us, tail wagging, not sure what the game was but wanting to join in.

  We clambered back to our perch on the grave. Lily tasted the cider but pronounced it, “Foul stuff.” I agreed, but thought I should pretend to like it so as to appear grown up. So it was that my mother found us lounging on top of the tomb with a quarter-full glass of the demon drink between us.

  “Sam, I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Wherever have you been? Who’s this?” She gave Lily a thin smile.

  “Lily Siddons,” I said.

  “Oh. You’re the daughter.” Mother rearranged her face into a more polite mask.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Lily said, hopping down to extend a hand, playing the polite little girl.

  Then Mother saw the glass of cider.

  “Sam, have you been drinking alcohol?”

  Drink had played some unexplained part in my father’s demise, and so my mother had always been dead against it.

  “That’s mine. My father lets me,” Lily said.

  “Does he?” Mother paused. I could tell that she doubted it was true, but she couldn’t pursue it without calling the daughter of her host a liar. “How nice. We must be going. Come along, Sam.”

  Lily gave me a wink. I grinned at her and followed my mother. I looked back to see Lily in the gateway, sun striking her fair hair, Monty at her feet. She had rescued me.

  That was the moment when I fell for the girl perched on top of a tombstone in the everlasting sunshine of the 1930s. Did she realise the wounded soldier she tended was the friend she’d made so many years before? I didn’t know. But I remembered her.

  * * *

  At the outbreak of the war, Lily and her mother gave over March Hays as a hospital for injured troops, especially those from the surrounding areas who could be looked after near their friends and families. The larger spaces—the ballroom, the upper gallery—were stripped of their fine furniture and period paintings and filled with rows of functional, iron-framed beds. The family migrated to the upper floors, to rooms formerly only fit for servants. Nursing staff and doctors were installed. Lily went to London to train as an auxiliary nurse and then returned to her home to repair shattered bodies and minds.

  When I could move around, I spent my days drifting through the grounds, marking the changes that war had made to the fine red brick and stone house. There were few able-bodied men left to tend the gardens, so the lawns grew wild and tall and grass seed drifted in the breeze. Inside, a business-like clatter overlaid the dignity of the house like a mackintosh worn over a ball gown. I wandered the corridors, trying to avoid the doctors. Sometimes I found myself in the wards and looked in on old colleagues or friends from my boyhood.

  On one of these occasions I found myself looking down on a poor, broken thing, swathed in bandages like an Egyptian mummy. The patient lacked an arm and a leg, a carving abandoned incomplete. As I stared, he thrashed for a moment, shuddered and then was still. A doctor hurried over, gave him a cursory examination and declared him dead. Curtains were drawn around the body, masking it from sight. Later, I saw Lily crying in the nurse’s room. For a few seconds her calm, professional manner crumbled away and beneath it I saw the grief and strain her job caused her. I wished I could say something that would help. A moment later she wiped away her tears and went back into the fray.

  * * *

  My favourite room in the hall was the library. It was still much as it had been before the war, lined with bookshelves and boasting several comfortable armchairs and a large desk in front of windows that looked out onto a terrace. It became my habit to sit in the library every evening to watch the sun set and twilight flow up the lawn to flood the big windows in darkness. Few patients or staff used it and, mostly, I had the room to myself.

  This changed one day when I was walking along the corridor that led to the library. I was talking to Ted Allenby who had been in the class under me at the village school. He joined the RAF and had been shot down over the Channel, crashing into the sea near Hastings. Suddenly Ted cocked his head.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  I had heard nothing and told him so.

  “Sounded like someone calling me.”

  With that he opened the library door and stepped inside.

  I waited for a few moments. “Ted?”

  There was no answer, so I stuck my head through the doorway. He wasn’t there. A glazed door next to the windows gave out onto the terrace. The only other exit was an anonymous panelled door on the opposite wall, between the high shelves. I stepped into the room.

  The terrace door was closed so I turned to examine the other. As I gazed at it, I began to experience a peculiar feeling. It’s hard to describe, but I felt as if the panelled door was somehow wrong. I hadn’t paid it any attention in the past, in fact I couldn’t remember noticing it at all. But now it set my teeth on edge. Perhaps there was something subtly awry in its proportions or placement in the room.

  I realised I was now standing right in front of the door with no memory of stepping across the room to get there. Close to, it appeared perfectly nondescript. I reached out a hand and touched it. The polished timber felt cool, its surface smoothed and burnished over centuries.

  With an effort I shook myself out of this odd reverie and walked back across the room. I was still in a delicate state, prey to unhealthy fancies and night terrors. This could have been just another instance of that. I looked through the window to see if Ted was on the terrace. At that moment, from behind me, I heard a furtive chuckle. I whipped round. I was still alone in the room yet I had distinctly heard someone try to stifle a gloating laugh.

  I don’t mind admitting that I left the library with undignified haste. Later, I berated myself for having been spooked. But still I found reasons to not visit the library. In the deep of night, when my more rational self slumbered, I imagined that the voice had not come from behind the door at all, but had been made by the door itself.

  * * *

  The war ended. There were celebrations and rejoicing with an edge of hysteria, an attempt to forget the deep scars of the last six years. The hospital at March Hays was gradually disassembled. Patients departed to return home or enter institutions offering long-term care. Medical equipment was removed. Stored furniture was dusted down and reinstated. The house returned to some semblance of its pre-war state.

  With the wounded gone, I stayed on at March Hays to help elderly Jem with the horses, something for which I had demonstrated unexpected talent. My mother had remarried, sold the cottage and moved away, so with no other home to go to I established myself in a room above the stable block.

  Though I didn’t go back into the library for some time, I did try to work out where the door might lead. Pacing out the corridors beyond the library walls, passages turned away before they reached the right spot and featureless walls confounded me. In the end I gave up the search and decided to confront my fear, go back into the room and simply open the damn thing.

  This time, the door was no longer there. In the space where it had been was a panelled alcove with an upholstered seat. For a moment I thought I had walked into the wrong room. I glanced around in confusion but everything else was as it had always been. The seat showed years of wear, and the surrounding panels perfectly matched the rest of the room. Clearly, the alcove had always been there. I slowly backed out of the library.

  Trauma and injury affect the mind as well as the body. I had seen ample evidence of that among the injured here. While I felt perfectly sane and clear headed, it was becoming clear to me that I was not yet my old myself.

  * * *

  A year later, Lily married Edward Radcliffe, a big, barrel-chested man with curling black hair. Edward claimed to work in what he called ‘acquisitions and supplies’ but he was vague about what that involved. He made himself at home at March Hays, playing the local squire, occupying the family pew in the chapel and joining the hunt.

  Once again, the library became my occasional, illicit refuge. If the phantom door was the product of my fevered imagination, there was no reason not to steal in and partake of the calm offered by the room. One evening as I sat in my favourite armchair looking at the sunset I noticed a slim leather volume that had been left on a small table: Etchings, by someone called Emily Nast, published by the Suffolk Press in 1878. I opened it at a random page and read:

  Old Tod...