Issue #148 : The Other Place
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Rory sat up and grabbed the mirror from his bedside table, staring into it and waiting for the change.
As he waited, listening to the clock thunking heavily from the corner, he saw his image in the mirror start to ripple, like water after dropping in a stone. It started in the center of his face and radiated out to the edges, repeating itself for several minutes before the color started to ooze out of the reflection, as if someone was turning down a dial, manually changing the picture to black-and-white.
Despite having seen this for over a week, the image in the mirror still made him feel like he was going to be sick. The top portion of the reflection detached, and began falling backwards like a window pane that had been blown over in the wind. Below his feet, the floor began to tremor, as if a heavy train was passing by the house. He could detect the smell of sulfur in the air, as if something somewhere was burning, a sound of crackling like a nearby radio that had suddenly lost its signal.
The image in the mirror vanished completely and went black, as if an unknown power source had been shut off. Then, after several minutes, the picture slowly resolved again. It started as a pinpoint of light at the center of the mirror and expanded out until he was looking in an image, completely different than what had been there before.
Rory looked out onto a barren desert.
The mirror had somehow become a window, looking out on a landscape that he had never seen before. The sky was a light yellow color, with strips of bright purples, shooting off into the horizon. Something flashed out of frame like lightning, giving a strobe effect to everything. After a week of observing this phenomenon every night, there was only one conclusion he could come to.
Somehow, he was looking out onto an alien world.
His mirror had become a gateway, a lookout point onto a place that no human had ever seen before. There was never sign of any life, just the bizarre desert, a still image of someone’s abstract imaginings of a world. It looked cold there, beyond the surface of his mirror.
It looked dead.
But it couldn’t be. There had to be life, had to be something. If he were to set up a window that looked out over a desert on Earth, you likely wouldn’t see much life there either. All he would see was sand, rocks and the expanse of ever changing sky.
The air seemed to pulse from an unseen light source and the sky above began to transition in color, first with spots of green that appeared and began to tendril outward, as if an egg had been cracked and dropped down from far above.
Up until this night, he had always been the observer. There was one threshold yet to cross.
Rory’s fingers trembled as he reached for the glass of the mirror.
It wasn’t as if the notion had never occurred to him, he thought about it every day. He just never had the courage to go through with it. Finally, it seemed that if he wasn’t going to go through with it, there was no point in just sitting here and staring, night after night.
He reached out, wincing as his fingers found air where the glass should have been. They brushed up, and passed into frigid cold air, behind the surface of the mirror. He winced at what felt like tiny daggers lancing into his fingers, but didn’t draw back. He leaned forward and extended his hand further. Clenching his teeth, he stretched his arm forward, until his entire hand and half of his arm was inside the picture frame.
In an instant, the uncomfortable cold became a raging heat, so intense that it was as if he had plunged his hand into a pot of boiling water.
He clenched his eyes shut, trying to stay calm and to keep himself together as the room began to spin. It was like everything that had tethered him to his sanity had slipped away and he was falling, the bedroom around him replaced by a dark mass of cyclonic fury.
He felt a hard impact as he landed, the feel of sand underneath him and all around, there was blazing hot wind. Opening his eyes he looked, agape at the desert that stretched away from him in all directions.
It was the desert from his picture frame.
Somehow, he had been transported to this place, plucked from his very existence and brought here, against his will or understanding. He cried out in pain at the feel of the wind in his skin, like probes of open flame assaulting him. Standing up, he felt the uncertainty of the ground underneath him as it threatened to slide out completely.
He needed to get back home, to right this error in judgment. Turning back, he moved to step back through the gateway he had just emerged from. From this side, it looked just as the mirror had from his bedroom, but larger in size. He looked through it, to his bedroom and stopped, mid-stride.
Rory was looking in at himself, peering in at him, through the mirror.
It was a near perfect replica of himself but enlarged, distorted and somehow fundamentally wrong. He looked into those eyes, his own eyes and saw an underlying malice, the likes of which he had never seen.
Whatever it was that had flipped over there, whatever he had traded places with, it was now impersonating him in his own world. It would turn away and carry about its intentions, wearing Rory’s likeness as a perfect disguise.
He had to get back. Had to stop this thing.
Rory lunged forward, but before he could take a step, he felt himself being pulled back. The wind swirled around his feet until he was stuck up to his ankles in wet sand that was inflexible and impossible to manipulate.
“Somebody help me!” he yelled out, knowing full well how pointless it was. The thing over there that had stolen his body was gone from this place and there was no one here that was going to help him. He looked down and saw that the sand was already surging up above his waist. He tried pushing himself out but nothing had any effect and suddenly, from beneath the ground, he felt two hands take hold of his legs.
In the waning moments, before he was pulled down into the sand and he began to feel his mouth filling with those dry, bitter grains, Rory saw the twisted version of himself, looking down at him from the gateway. There was fire and hatred in those eyes and one of the last things he saw before darkness flooded in was the glint of razor sharp teeth in the mouth that had once been his. A thin, claw-like hand reached out to take hold of the mirror and bring it down to smash the glass and trap him forever.
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