Obsidian Mirror

The tumbling over and over of the Gnomes in the book had given me the idea. If the shadow was something serious I would need something ridiculous to defeat it. What was more ridiculous, goofy, or strange than the idea of Gnomes tumbling people apart? Yes, it had a dark component in it, but all things have both elements of the dark and the light. Barbie is never married, always just going steady with Ken: and Mattel makes machine guns. The profits of playing intermingled with the profits of war. Lawn Darts are fun, but they also could be used as tools of ****. After all, that practice of throwing something so sharp and dangerous is practice for a kind of warfare no longer practiced, but give or take a few “good” wars could eventually come in handy. And aim is often helpful. All things are in a teeter-totter of balance, I explained, and after all who hadn’t wanted to push some smug kid or group of kids off a teeter-totter or leave them stranded at the top of a see-saw rotation?

I would make tiny little toy tumbling gnomes and make sure that every kid had the ability to receive them, I told Officer Cox. I would give them out around Christmas Time, at the very least. And, just like the toys given out to the children of my workers, people would want the toy. They would be cheap, they would not bring in much money, but they would bring in enough to continue the business. The gnomes would come in packs of at least fifteen, for the smaller gnomes, and five for the bigger models I planned to make.

“I only need the five today,” I said, as we pulled up to the mansion that would very soon no longer be my home. I knew exactly what I needed, exactly what I needed to reach. The other car pulled up behind us, about a minute later. Everyone got out, and Artur, with his shotgun, broke through the closed door into the house. I looked up at the house and realised that the attic had been smashed in: a tree had gone through the window, and some of the house seemed to be hanging off where it should be, something like a runny cheese or that painting with the clocks melting all over the place, I forget the name of the painting or the artist who painted it. The whole house looked more like a painting anyways, now, as the storm still raged all around us. Wind rifled across the grounds and the cage of lightning still seemed peculiarly to be striking down around the house.

We all waited a minute, our breath held, hoping that nothing would happen.

“Nothing here,” said the Chef, as he came back outside and called us in.

We all braved the inside of the house, down the long hallway, and into the living room where the dollhouse lay, still smashed. The fire in the fireplace had long since smoldered out, and when I picked through the pieces I found that the doll I had attempted to burn was charred, but still very much the frightening figure from which we had fled. I could feel my sickness growing. I looked up at my friends, the chef, and the police officer.

“It isn’t gone,” I said.

“What did you need to do?” asked Robert.

“I need those carving tools my mother gave me. I locked them in my study drawer,” I said.

“You go get them,” said Officer Cox, “we’ll check out the rest of the house. She pulled out her service pistol. “We’ll start in the basement.” She motioned for Artur to follow her. A burst of lightning followed by the clap of thunder broke through the room.

“It’s just like that horrible Lich book,” said my wife, taking my hand, as we ran quickly up the winding stairs of the household towards my study. Another lightning strike, another pel of thunder. The lights in the house began to dim, flickering as we ascended the stairs. I thought of those long shots in Vertigo, and felt like I was chasing an imaginary person up the stairs. But, with more lightning, more flickering of the electric lights within the house, I saw that shadowman, that absence of light again.

It pointed its finger at me and grinned. This was the sort of grin where it’s face, if you could call what it had on it’s head a face, seemed to be cocked upwards, almost as if it was appealing for a sort of supplication, and the eyes rolled upwards towards heavens. It said something, in a language I could not quite understand, that sounded something like English must have far, far before even the Civil War. It sounded very much like the Appalachian dialect I often heard on old Lomax folk recordings of documentaries about mountain music, Roscoe Holcomb, and that high, lonesome sound. The words, though, each seemed strangely out of tune, always ending with a piercing cry. Though my hand was desperately grasping my wife’s wrist, I looked back down the staircase and found her missing.

And that is when things truly began to change. That is when whatever grip on sanity, on reality that I still might have had, drifted away. At least, that is what I hope to this day-- that what I saw then and what occurred next was all the figment of some bad dream, brought to life as if to resolve some psychological tension within myself. This is not the case, however. All those at that house testified to myself, in private, that these things which I am about to relate did seem to happen all around us. I do not know for sure. Can not know for sure. For I was flashing between two worlds then: that pre-twenties boom world of Hurry Hendrickson and the **** search for my tools.What that shadow had said, with all the piercing words, was “You are the same as he was, far more than you would think. See! See how it was. And there I found myself inhabiting the body of that old magician, and it seemed to me that I was inhabiting the body on the very night of his wife’s ****.

Peering out through Hurry’s eyes I was speaking to an attractive African-American woman who I perceived as a Jazz singer, brought to entertain the whole party. My hand grabbed her waist and I pulled her close, nibbling and whispering into her ear.

“This house is more magic than you think,” I-as-Hurry said. “I have a mirror, one that I bought in England on the last of my tours, that allows me to control everyone in this house. It allows me to play God.”

The woman tried to break free of my grip, but I held onto her tightly, my other hand cupping her buttocks.

“That’s why you always feel something in this house, telling you what to do. That’s why you cannot break free of meow, that’s why the whole of this party sees me finally as I wish to be: in the body of my wife.”

If you have ever had a dream where the point of view shifts with each large reveal, you understand well what happened next. The sort of dream I mean is not common to my **** mind, having trained myself to forget dreams after one or two that scarred me during childhood. The first dream involved myself in a grocery store that turned out to be placed in Skull Rock, that dangerous cliff from Peter Pan. Always in those dreams lightning flashed and my vantage point shifted from my first person narration of events to the third person: I saw, in that first dream the skull-like cliff from the outside, looking in through the eyes to the grocery store inside, where I could see the check out counter.

The second dream that I recall most vividly involved another storm. But, during this storm, where lightning shot down upon Earth almost matching the ferocity with which it shot down now, during my quest to recover the tools that would help me save myself and the others from the terror at Nevermore, a rainbow broke through and many people danced down the Rainbow. This was the most terrifying of all: so many small people, like little children, linking arms and singing something like the end of the world, something like Ragnarok. It is much clearer to me now that these images of children were indeed the Gnomes, protecting me at my tender young age from one of the first intrusions of the shadow-thing that wanted so to push my need for control into a megalomaniacal obsession.

When my point of view pulled back, in that fugue state of visions brought on I suspect by all the malice of that shadow creature, I saw myself-- that is the form of Hurry Hendrickson-- at the famed party where his wife had died. He was holding the jazz singer hostage, pulling her back towards him. I saw now that he was wearing no masculine clothes at all. Indeed, he was made up as Madame de Montespan, the mistress of King Louis XIV that fell from favor after dabbling in witchcraft and feeding him potions. He-- that is I-- wore a yellow period dress, with white lace, and underneath it the appropriate corset to push his-- my-- male figure up into a much more womanly, more more feminine figure. As I watched this version of myself, this past prototype from the outside, I realized and felt that underneath the wide skirt he wore nothing at all. The singer continued to try to pull away, but try as she might, even though he barely gripped her, she could pull away.

“Try as you might you cannot break free. I have instructed my Obsidian Mirror that it must be so.” She scowled and turned around, crying as she began to kiss him deeply, with a passion usually shared only between husbands and wives who have lived long lives of mutual satisfaction. Only her eyes, dropping their liquid down her face, revealed the pain and hatred she felt inwardly.

“It’s okay, my girl,” Hurry said. “I know everything you’ve gone through here. I was the one that made you want to lay there and let my wife and her lover’s into you. I was the one that turned you half queer. And I was the one that stole your husband away, that day. I know you thought it was my wife, all dolled up like Mabel Normand, but that’s the power here. That’s my power here. With my mirror and my knowledge I am completely in control.”

I shivered, though I still felt myself inhabiting the body of Hurry Hendrickson. With his every syllable of speech I recalled many of his memories. As he made this last reference I indeed recalled this woman’s husband, a singer and musician in his own right, and how I had indeed dressed myself up very much like the silent comedienne and seduced him. I had flashes of a day out at the lake, carrying a parasol, and paddling out to the middle. Flashes of long kisses, feeling the grip of strong hands on my neck, my back, roughly squeeze breasts and then-- forcing the hands down beneath crinoline and past undergarments to discover the essential controlling maleness of myself.

His hand backed away, he began to say something, but a quick bite of his lip, a lick of my tongue over my own, and a threat prevented him from escaping what the man now surely consider a trap.

“You do what I say,” I, or Hurry-- it was hard to tell, and very hard indeed for me to separate myself from the scenes I watched unfolding, even as lightning flashed around me in the real world and I desperately tried to crawl up stairs towards my study-- said. “Do what I say or I shall scream and tell the whole house that you have taken advantage of me. The whole house. Remember that they think like you-- that I am my wife. Now free my penis from it’s silken trap and do as your mistress tells you: serve me.”

I began to wonder, then, if this was indeed Hurry Hendrickson, the great spiritualist, who designed to hide himself in the disguise of his own wife, then who indeed was the male that played the part of the spiritualist, for the public. But a flood of memory washed over me, as the identity of Memoria was revealed, especially as the public face of Hurry Hendrickson angrily stormed over to me, dressed as King Louis himself.

“A word, Hurry,” said the male-dressed-Hurry-look-alike.

“Not now, wife,” I said. “I am instructing my new play thing.” I pointed to the jazz singer.

“You have to stop this. Stop all of this,” he said. But I shook my head. pulled the woman, who more and more seemed to be a toy to me, only an object, along with me. But that male-dressed-Hurry pulled her back. When I looked deep into her eyes I knew that this was indeed Memoria, supposedly so loved by the magician. It became clear to me then, as if the lightning flashes that continued around me, outside of my dream state, were little flashes of illumination. The whole story flooded back to myself-in-Hurry’s body.