A Fever Dream

CHAPTER 26. Through The Looking Glass

When I was a little girl, our family went to the theater every Friday. It was my mother's way of compensating for an unfulfilled dream of spending her life on the other side of the stage.

Even if my memories became murky with time, I could still remember getting dressed in fancy gowns, my hair curled and tied with ribbons, the smell of sweet Guerlain perfume floating in her bedroom, and the sound of hushed murmurs and rustling of fabrics just before the curtain went up.

That curtain, made of blood-red velvet, dividing illusion from reality, was always alluring. And once, while my mother was talking to the main actor after the play, I stumbled backstage and got lost behind it.

It felt like I had fallen through the looking glass.

While the stage was always drowning in stark colors and limelights and noise, on the other side it was dim and muffled, like the bottom of the sea. Pieces of furniture, spare pairs of shoes, dresses and so many other things I could not place lay there in disarray, discarded. It seemed like sunlight never reached this side of the curtain. It smelled like cold drafts from the basement, hair spray, forgotten flowers that sat in a vase on the floor, clearly granted by admirers and left behind by the actor or actress. Like dust, wood, and makeup.

I could not understand - how the other side of something so beautiful could be so dim.

The place where I found myself, as I fell through the black mirror of the August mansion, awoke similar feelings.

At first, I did not see anything at all. 

I landed with hands and knees on the solid, cool marble to the touch. But the more my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the more I felt that the other side of the mirror was something like a warehouse of unnecessary things.

Wherever I looked, wherever I turned, I could not find a path to step through, without knocking something over. The labyrinths of chairs, standing on each other, stacks of paintings in golden frames, rolls of carpets, and myriads of tapestries on the walls lined the walls, with bookshelves so tall, they were reachable only by ladders.

Books, notebooks and pieces of cloth tumbled from every surface, pinned down by hundreds of little objects, which I could not decipher with fading light. There was no ceiling as far as I could see - only the darkness tunneled upwards.

The light refracted and danced on the surface of walls from somewhere behind me. I turned abruptly and held my breath, shock still.

The wall that was behind me was completely made of tempered glass.

Behind it, like a ripple on the water surface, floated the light of the candle in the corridor, which I came from.  August corridor. There were the shadows of silhouettes, passing by.  But it was eerily quiet on my side.

Was it how Alice the world, saw when she fell through her looking glass?

The next moment, the glass covered in goosebump-like frost, obscuring the corridor and castle from me. When the haze cleared, another picture met my eyes.

Behind the glass, tall oak trees swayed in the wind between red roofs of white houses. The clouds floated in the murky skies and black dots of birds flapped their wings, leaving the lands in favor of the endless sea. However, not a single sound reached my side. I was watching the world from the dark space behind the mirror and I didn't know I was here. The silhouette of a man aimed and threw something at me and I flinched on instinct. His silhouette was strangely disproportional - with head small and legs huge. It looked like I was watching the world from the ground.

And then it clicked.

I must have been looking out from the surface of the lake. The mirror somehow connected to other mirror-like surfaces, showing me the kingdom from different angles.