Mary Thomas crosses a threshold

Mary Thomas barked angrily into the room without addressing anyone in particular: "Are you joking? Let us out now!"

"No one is keeping you," the house replied.

"Very funny. You've locked us in. There are no doors or windows here."

"Are you sure?"

The counter-question made the nun uneasy. She was proud to question everything and not take it for granted. So the suggestion that she might have been taken in by a simple deception hurt her pride. The walls were solid, they had already investigated that, but what about the mirrors?

She wiped a tarnished glass surface with her sleeve. At first, she couldn't see much behind it. She squinted and took a closer look. It actually seemed to her as if she could see into an adjoining room. At least it wasn't her reflection that was looking back at her. She stepped closer and formed a kind of funnel on the glass with her hands to block out the ambient light so that she could see better.

She recognized a low cellar room with a vaulted ceiling and rough stone walls, bathed in the unsteady light of flickering torches. In the center of the chamber stood a rack on which a pitiful creature was chained. Figures in long robes moved around the **** device, their faces hidden behind pointed hoods, torturing their victim with needles, pincers and other painful instruments.

Outraged, she shouted: "What you're showing here is inhumane. Even if it's just a movie or a projection, I demand that you stop this immediately!"

"Oh, you want the torturers to release the detainee? Then tell them yourself," teased the disembodied voice.

"And how?

"Why don't you just go there?"

She tilted her head, mused and studied the mirror again more closely. There was a stained brass plaque on the bottom of the wooden frame that read 'The Spanish Inquisition is questioning a witch'. Mary Thomas doubted that the depicted scene even remotely represented historical reality. In her opinion, this was all the worse. She hated when people were tricked. Her investigative curiosity was aroused.

"Challenge accepted," she muttered under her breath.

"What are you going to do?" whimpered Mary Emilia. Her eyes were dilated with fear and she kept looking over her shoulder as if a ghost could appear behind her at any moment.

"I'm going to find that exit!" her sister replied resolutely.

She scanned around the mirror's perimeter, trying to get her fingertips underneath it or to move, turn or fold it over as a whole. Nothing worked. Pondering, she put a finger to the corner of her mouth.

When she placed her hands on the glass surface, it had felt strange. Not hard and smooth at all, but more like a thin layer of ice over a pool of water. She now pressed harder against it, testing it. She felt a momentary resistance and then her hand sank into the mirror and disappeared.

Mary Emilia had been watching her and squeaked in horror: "What's that?"

Mary Thomas, on the other hand, smiled with great satisfaction. There you go. There was no mystery that couldn't be solved by a sharp mind.

"Wait here," she told the plump nun. Then she boldly took a step forward - and plunged into the mirror world.