December 2, 2002
Dear Shana,
I’m sorry to leave you as abruptly as I have-
Well, you haven’t gotten to that part as yet. I forgot. Forgive me.
The important things first, as I am sure you and Helga would both insist on:
All my papers are in order. I’ve made sure that they include the phrase “vanished under mysterious circumstances,” as I certainly have, as well as “in case of death,” to make sure that my property passes to you. I made the last insurance payments on the cars two days ago, so they won’t fall due for some time as yet. My taxes are current, my accounts are current, there are bowls of food and water all over the house for Spark and a variety of litterboxes so that you don’t need to come immediately if you don’t wish it, and the key is under the mat.
There are other things, of course, but the letters placed strategically around the house should guide you as needed. This letter has a different purpose, and I won’t use it to tell you everything you need to know. The letters will do that, especially the one that you’ll find just inside the door, stuffed full of legal details. Almost the only thing I can think of in this letter, besides the story I'm going to tell you, is the mention of three bound manuscripts in a locked box on the top shelf of the closet. The key you’ll find just inside the first of Spark’s litterboxes goes to that. The manuscripts contain all the novels I’ve written since 1992—close to 80 of them. Those, you may do with as you wish.
Yes, I know I haven’t published any books in ten years, and I’m sure you’ll want to know what the manuscripts are doing in a locked box on the top shelf of my closet, and why they even exist. But—just this once—
Instead of settling everything in its proper place, I want to tell it to you as it happened. My diary entries, if you will, though I suppose they will seem like the ravings of a madwoman by the time you get to the end of them. But, for once, you can’t yell at me to hurry the story up, as I am not there.
Where am I?
All in good time.
November 12, 2002
It started that night.
I had just tossed aside the latest in a long line of disappointing books that had plagued my reading life since October when I realized that Spark, who had napped securely on the window-ledge since about six, had awakened and was staring at a spot across the room. Her normally calm green-gold gaze had that look that a cat’s eyes get when it intends to either bolt or pounce.
“What is it, Spark?” I asked, following her line of sight. I pride myself on normally seeing just what my cat does. Most cat owners claim their beauties stare at spooks or flies or specks of dust floating on the air, but I can usually see something interesting where Spark does, even if only a beetle trundling along the wall.
This time, though, I saw nothing.
I glanced back at Spark and realized that she had turned her head and now stared fixedly at the western wall. I followed her gaze again, and again saw nothing. Spark made a hissing sound beneath her breath. I glanced at her, at the wall again, then at her and at the wall again. (Before you judge me, Shana, it was nearly midnight and I had nothing better to do. Besides, remember the book that I had just tossed aside? It deserved to fly across the room with exemplary force, but I didn’t have the energy. I hardly had the energy to turn my head back and forth between the cat and the wall).
“See something, Spark-“
A loud bang echoed directly above the house, and I started to my feet. Spark, meanwhile, fled like a ruddy shadow down the back wall and across to the kitchen. She wouldn’t, I noticed, go near the front or the western walls where she had apparently glimpsed the spook.
I glanced out the window that Spark had just abandoned, and then drew in my breath in relief. Rain suicide-dashed itself on the pane, flung by an enthusiastic wind I could hear howling in the eaves. If Spark and her spook hadn’t distracted me, I would probably have heard it earlier. The loud crash, of course, came from thunder. I shook my head in bemusement at my own strange behavior. For a moment there, I had attributed Spark’s odd gaze and the loud noise to some supernatural cause.
Lest I must remind you, it was midnight, and I could usually see what my cat found so fascinating. I shook my head again and prepared myself for bed, completing only half my usual ritual of a hundred strokes on my hair. A deep drowsiness had come on me suddenly, and I only wanted to crush myself into bed and sleep until it passed.
Yet, when I did crush myself into bed, I couldn’t sleep. I would doze, then awaken as though a spider had crept across my face, waving a hand at nothing but air. It seemed as though I awaited something, or perhaps my brainstem and the primitive part of myself awaited something. Whatever it was, they certainly couldn’t tell my brain about it—at least not until I had spent a fitful four hours and lay awake glaring at the roof. Then my mouth dropped open, and I blinked several times.
Since that initial crash, I had not heard thunder.
November 13, 2002
I smoothed my hair back behind my ears, hoping desperately I looked casual. Both the visit to my neighbor’s and the reason I had come were more than a little unusual.
I hadn’t knocked as yet, but the door opened. Carl stared at me sullenly. I sighed and manufactured a polite smile. “Hello, Carl-“
“Ms. Talencher.” His gray eyes squinted, drawing down so harshly that I had to fight a temptation to look down and see if the frown lines dripped off his chin. “What do you want?”
No point in being polite, was there? I thought, and decided I might as well come straight to the point. “Call me Kia,” I said, and then sighed as his eyes just tightened further. The name probably brought up unpleasant memories, but I was much more comfortable with first names, and I hadn’t ever forbidden him mine; it had been his decision not to use it. “I came over to ask if you heard the thunder last night.”
He stared at me. “Thunder? Of course not. Why would I hear thunder?” His eyes tightened again. “Perhaps they set off fireworks over in the park again, Ms. Talencher-“
“Kia.”
I hadn’t known a human face could grow so tight. “Kia,” he said, and I tried to casually disguise wiping the spit off my face by coughing into my hand. “It didn’t rain last night. Why in the hell would I hear thunder, you bitch? Nothing. No thunder. No noise. It was probably in your imagination, and if you don’t take your imagination and get away from me right now, I will call the police.”
I couldn’t resist. “You probably wouldn’t have to call them, Carl. They love your house. I’m sure they come to play hide-and-seek with the drugs all the time.”
He slammed the door in my face.
I ambled back home, studying the dead leaves on the lawn as I did so. No, now that you mentioned it, I thought; they shattered under my feet like hearts breaking, but they didn’t have any rain upon them. Odd.
Perhaps Carl had been asleep when the storm hit, but I didn’t think that the leaves had also been asleep. Something strange had happened. Some mystery. Some spook.
(Yes, Shana, I’m sure that you’re having trouble believing this. I never did. Shall we move on?)
November 16, 2002
I awakened at once to the sound of the door opening and closing. I didn’t call out, “Spark?” as someone else might have. Cats don’t open and close doors.
Well, perhaps they did. If raindrops that no one else heard and which the leaves didn’t feel could show up and dive on the windows like the Japanese on Pearl Harbor, then perhaps cats could open and close doors. Yet, I was sure it wasn’t Spark. I sat up, my heart pounding in my ears—from excitement, not fear—waiting.
Someone set a foot on the stairs.
At the same time, a noise like many pairs of scissors opening and shutting very rapidly came from just above me.
I ducked, but just then a thin ball of light wavered into existence on the other side of the room and I saw by its white radiance that the being making the scissors noise was already a good way away from me, sinking into the chair I keep for Spark’s pleasure near the door. It opened its mouth, and the clicking and snapping sound came forth again. Gazing at it in wonder, I didn’t care if it had just threatened me, or if that sound was part of a strange language.
It could have been human, I suppose, once long ago and far away. I didn’t find the spirit that looked out of its tilted green eyes entirely alien. But now—now it resembled a human only by coincidence. The pale skin encased long, slender hands with six fingers, equally long and slender limbs that bent the wrong way, an angled face that contained the tilted green eyes and cheekbones and a nose so sharp they looked like knitting needles, and shining curves that might have been female, or on the other hand might have mimicked the curves of waves in the ocean. I shuddered a little, in consuming delight, and leaned forward to look at the strange, silvery hair that framed its face in jagged lines.
The hair turned towards me like the antennae of an insect, and I caught a glimpse of my own face in its surface. The reflection hung there for a moment, pale and trembling, and then melted and flowed apart as the hair traveled into the sides of the thing’s face. The entire form shuddered and rippled, and I had to close my eyes for a moment to rid myself of a sensation not unlike motion sickness.
When I could bear to look again, something that seemed almost human sat before me, retaining only the pale skin, six-fingered hands, sharp face, and cat-like eyes to mark it as inhuman. Black hair had blossomed from the sides of its head, apparently, and clothing had closed over the sleek curves. A being I recognized, though only from paintings and my own novels, sat facing me.
“Are you an elf?” I asked.
It—she—laughed at me, opening and closing her mouth rapidly. A wind I could not feel stirred her dark hair, and she rose and pirouetted across the room to the door. A heavy footstep sounded just outside it, and with a start I remembered that something had been climbing the stairs to the door of my room. The elf opened the door, and a mirror stumped into the room. (I say a mirror, Shana. I jest. It only looked like a mirror. But more of that in its place).
The mirror settled into the chair where the elf had been, and the being stepped in front of it and bowed extravagantly to me. Then, abruptly, she and the mirror both began to waver, and I had to close my eyes once more.
When I could see again, the elf was gone. The mirror still sat in place, though this time it looked like an ordinary mirror, if set in a mahogany frame, instead of a free-floating oval of silvery glass or water. I stood and walked over to it, letting my hand slide along the surface. It felt like glass or perhaps polished metal, nothing more extraordinary than that. I frowned, lightly disappointed. I didn’t think I had dreamed the elf or the mirror coming into the room, but as a remnant of a vision it didn’t seem worth the effort.
Then I looked down and saw a book lying in front of the mirror. It possessed a simple viridian cover, with a blue design like a brooch in the center of it. Written above it in raised red letters, I read: Dia Daro.
November 17, 2002
I’m sure you’re waiting breathlessly, Shana, to hear what the book was about. But what use to describe something I lived through, rather than read? Anyone who has experienced something similar can understand, and anyone who has not must be left to wander in the wilderness of his ignorance.
Forgive me. Poetic flair quite carried me away, for a moment.
But Dia Daro surrounded rather than simply entertained me the next day. I could see the green of the country it described, a green forever renewed and forever reborn, instead of born in one season and then enduring through others until it fades as the shade called by the name “green” in our world is. I could taste the water of the streams that threaded their way, singing like windchimes, through this green country until they reached the great blue-green sea that surrounded it. I could almost feel the warmth of the purple sunsets that danced over the mountains, blue and hazy with distance, until the gentle arms of the night came to tuck them in. Dia Daro almost certainly had to be a fantastical country rather than a real one; I don’t believe such beauty exists in our world. But it could have been a place in our “real” world that I simply had never heard of before. It certainly seemed real enough.
I floated through the pages, and then I floated back up the stairs to gaze at the mirror that the- elf? - had brought me. To my surprise, it had moved once more. Instead of upon the chair where the elf had sat, it stood now near the window that looked out over a small balcony, where I would stand in better weather to watch the lawn and the garden below. I gazed at it for a long time. It shimmered with mystery. Ripples moved in the surface as if it were truly a pool of water instead of a mirror. When I dared to reach out and trail my hand over the surface, though, it felt as it had the night before, smooth metal or glass. I was willing to believe, though, that this surface might be only a sheet covering the mirror’s real nature and blocking me from—
From what?
I shivered, for I knew what the answer would have been in one of my own novels. Mirrors never seemed to serve any ordinary purpose, at least in the stories I wrote. A mirror like this would be a gate to another place.
Dia Daro?
My hand tightened on the book I clutched so firmly. If there was any truth to my supposition, I knew I was lost. If the mirror would let me through, I would go.
And it didn’t matter if I never came back.
As I turned to go, I caught another glimpse of the mirror from a corner of my eye, and turned back so hard I nearly gave myself whiplash. My heart sang in my ears, a deep, peculiar sound, as I stared at that glassy surface. Something married it now, exactly where my hand had rested.
A crack.
November 19, 2002
Of course, I suspected it, but-
It was still a shock to have it confirmed like that.
I invited Helga over today on the flimsiest of pretexts, telling her I might have a new manuscript to show her. That got her attention, of course, and, more, her bright-eyed interest. She stared around in every direction as I led her into the bedroom, senses almost preternaturally alert, ready to notice anything out of the ordinary. I had told her my showing her the new manuscript depended on her being able to spot something out of place in my bedroom.
The mirror had moved once more, and now stood on the edge of the balcony, leaning against the bars. When Helga had examined my room carefully and admitted, mouth turning down, that she could see nothing out of the ordinary, I told her the surprise was on the balcony and led her out.
She looked right at the mirror, which now displayed two cracks, blinked, and looked away. I tensed at once, asking, “You didn’t see anything?”
“What—“ She turned her head back to the mirror, then brightened. “Oh, this thing. I did think it a little odd that you were venturing out of your normal reading ground, but I put it down to stress.” She walked over and picked up the book Dia Daro, which I had left in front of the mirror. Her arm pressed strenuously against the mirror’s surface for a moment, and still she noticed nothing. She turned and extended the book to me. “Why would you read something like this?” she asked with a little shiver, her nose turning up.
I looked down and gasped in spite of myself. The book’s cover was black, though still with the same raised red letters proclaiming Dia Daro. The blue brooch-design in the center, though, had vanished, replaced with a picture of an upraised bloody axe and the legend: The shocking true story of the female mass murderer whose exploits enraged a nation!
“Is this the surprise?” asked Helga, holding the book out to me with her fingertips, as if she didn’t want to touch it. I nodded to her as I took the book from her. My own fingers cringed as I touched it. The black cover was too smooth, almost silky, like threads from a spider’s web. I fluttered the pages, and winced as I noticed the printing had changed, from green on white, as it had been, to red on white. The words “blood” and “fear” and “murder” appeared on almost every page.
“Kia?”
I looked up in surprise, realizing only then that Helga had called my name more than once. Helga stared quietly at me, and something moved in her eyes I didn’t like. “Are you all right?” she asked, not in the way that someone would ask that of someone else whose concentration had wandered for a few moments.
“What do you mean?”
“First that.” Helga nodded to the book as if she disliked even mentioning it. “Then this decoration.” The thing I didn’t like moved in her eyes again. “I tried to be neutral, Kia, and think the book was the surprise, but I really think this is it.” She stooped and seemed to pluck something from thin air, though it appeared as if rising from the floor of the balcony. She held it out to me with a questioning look.
A knife.
A black-handled knife, at that, with a skull-and-crossbones pattern worked on the blade in red.
As I stared at it, Helga went on, “I know you thought that deciding to stop writing was the right thing to do.” Somewhere, dimly, I realized she knew now I had never intended to show her any manuscript. “But writers are always closer to the edge than most. Well-documented fact. Artists, poets, writers, sculptors—‘there is no genius without a touch of madness’ and all that. Seneca. I wonder if something like that might have happened to you, Kia, and calling me here to show me this book and this knife is a, a, well, a cry for help. Kia—“
I looked up and realized that Helga was moving backwards, towards the door into my room, her eyes wide and desperate. The babble flowing out of her mouth had been intended to hold my attention away from her movements, though the knife had really been doing that for her.
I’m afraid I couldn’t help myself, Shana. My instincts took over, and I raised the knife above my head and charged her, screaming nonsense that included, “I vant to suck your blood!”
Helga ran so fast that I could almost see the dust rising from her shoes as one would in a cartoon. I know that you’re going to have a hard time persuading her to come back.
Once I was sure she was gone, I dropped the knife and sat down with my face in my hands. If Helga was right, I was almost surely crazy. If I was right, there was a mirror there she couldn’t see, a book that changed form depending on who looked at it, and a knife I hadn’t been able to see until Helga touched it.
Glancing up, my eyes focused on the book, and I realized that wasn’t all true. The Dia Daro book hadn’t changed back. Red letters, axe, and all still looked up at me.
I still knew which explanation I preferred.
I reached for the book, picked it up, and began to read.
November 22, 2002
Rain fell on the balcony and the mirror that stood there, now with four cracks in the surface, forming the shape of a cross in the upper half and the shape of a reversed cross in the lower. I laid my hand on the glass door as I once had on the mirror and blinked miserably at it.
How did I even know it was raining? If my selective perception had told me so ten days ago, and now chose to tell me so again, how did I know it was right? I had to wonder about everything now, I thought, even the texture of the glass beneath my hand, and I slapped the door gently.
I looked up through the rain again and suddenly stopped, eyes going wide. I even held my breath until black spots crowded my vision and I had to hastily let it out again, panting like a deer in flight as I did so.
The mirror’s surface had vanished, cracks and all. It seemed an upright pool of water in a mahogany frame now, reflecting a deep green valley of exactly the shade that the Dia Daro book’s cover had been. I stared at it with longing, studying the dusty path that led into the valley, the slopes of the gently rounded hills rising on either side of the path, the grass and flowers that I could see beyond. A violent violet sunset was just coming in above the valley, and beyond that I could see the first pinholes of stars, richer and more radiant than anything in our world.
I closed my eyes to keep from crying out.
When I opened them again, I saw only the silvery rain, and the mirror, surface back and more silver than the water, hovering in the air about an arm’s length beyond the balcony.
November 25, 2002
I awakened from a dream to find that I had sleepwalked onto the balcony and now stood, arms open wide and yearning towards the mirror, on the very edge of the railing. One more step, and I could have fallen, or dived into the mirror, assuming that such a thing was possible.
The mirror had thinned, or opened, once more, and showed the same curve of verdant valley, sunshine path, fading day, rising stars.
I dropped back onto the balcony and reached out with one arm.
My hand passed into the mirror’s surface, into the warmth of a summer’s day.
November 29, 2002
I began to set my affairs in order this morning. It rained again, and, as I worked with paper and pen and phone, I hummed a tune I long ago forgot the words to beneath my breath as I looked out on the water falling steadily down upon the leaves. I would go out later and lean a hand on them, see if the leaves had felt the soaking this time.
Perhaps not, though. Selective perception or not, I had learned to trust my own mind, or had chosen to trust my own mind. Perhaps there wasn’t really a difference, I thought, swallowing part of a chocolate cookie and thinking it nearly as rich as the sunshine I had seen in the mirror.
No difference at all.
At one point I glanced up, hearing a sound beyond just falling water in the world outside, and realized that someone or something in the woods beyond my house had lifted up its voice in clear, unearthly song. I opened the sliding door on the ground floor of the house that echoes the sliding door opening onto the balcony above and stepped out, ignoring the rain that soaked at once into my robe, listening.
The song included all the birdsong I had ever heard and thought beautiful, all the trills and chords from music on the radio that I had loved, all the classical strains that I had almost swooned to hear, and other lovely tunes that I usually recognized only after I heard them. I stood in the rain with my head bowed, listening to the voice for as long as it cared to continue.
Then it stopped.
I stood in the rain for a moment longer, then stepped back inside and shut the door. I sang as much as I could remember of the music for most of the afternoon, and even Spark looked at me strangely. Then I went up and looked at the mirror hovering in the air beyond my balcony.
It was farther than I could reach or leap, unless some magic supported me.
December 2, 2002 (again)
So. Here you have it, Shana. The full tale, the last one I shall ever tell, perfectly as it happened.
Of course, one thing remains to be told, something that you must have wondered about, and which I told you at the beginning of the tale must come in its place. Why did I abandon my writing, at least to the rest of the world? Why write novels but never send them out for publication?
The reason’s simple, Shana: they’re so much better than the world we live in. I thought I could stand it, watching the contrast between the worlds I created and the world as it is, and perhaps I could bear that. But I couldn’t bear the eager faces, the eager voices, asking me questions about the books and—and never hearing the answer.
I wrote to escape from the world for a little while. That’s not a correct thing to say, you know. You’re not supposed to support escapism. If you write fantasy, you’re especially not supposed to support escapism. Fantasy has a time of it being taken as a “serious” or “respectable” genre in the way that science fiction, mystery, or even romance is, and you aren’t supposed to support one of the enemies’ major claims. If any fantasist admits to liking escapism, the enemy is likely to pounce upon him and claim that he is incapable of writing anything serious. Escapism is linked to ignorance of the world’s problems, bigotry and hatred of others, simplifying value systems, and—well, well, well—mental illness. Fantasy needs to at least pay lip service to the ideal of writing about social problems, crises, and injustices that afflict the “real world,” even if the fantasist really doesn’t intend anything of the kind.
I never intended anything of the kind. I wrote to escape, and I’m still writing to escape, I suppose: to escape the endless rounds of doctors talking to me, of friends talking to me, of fans talking about me. I’m writing to escape responsibility, and all the tiresome things that go with this “real” world.
I suppose you might hear it in the news even before this letter reaches you, Shana. Either the news of a disappearance or a suicide, a woman who was once a major writer jumping off her balcony into thin air. Reaching after a vision, though of course they’ll never guess that. There will be an autopsy, searches for traces of drugs in my bloodstream, questions to you and Helga, and so on and so on. I can only imagine what they’ll make of the manuscripts in the closet.
But I—
I think I’m going to a better place—and I don’t mean that in the way that most people do. I’m going to a place better and more beautiful than this world, without the problems that afflict it. I tried to do that for the past ten years by all but becoming a recluse, and it still didn’t work. This time, it will.
I don’t think you’ll find my body on the pavement.
Farewell, sister,
Kia Talencher.
