“Windows are just glass,” said the cat, “and they manage to have another side.”
“Look,” I said, “I’llshowyou.” I stood up and stalked over to the mirror. “See? It’s just a…”
And then I stopped because the scene in the mirror was my bedroom, exactly as it should be, but there was no woman and no cat reflected in it.
“Where are our reflections?” I asked, staring into the space that should have held my mirror image and unaccountably didn’t.
“I told you, we’re on the other side of the silver,” said the cat. “Try to pay attention, will you? Things in what we will laughingly call ‘the real world’ have reflections. We, however, are not in that world, so we don’t.”
“But it’s reflecting the bed and the walls and…”
The cat sighed the sigh of the much put-upon. “I didn’t plan to educate a human today,” he said. “I was going to chase a ball of paper and then have a nap. You had best plan to feed me very well when we return.”
“I’ll find you a nice saucer of milk,” I promised.
“Ohmilk,” said the cat, as if I had suggested he eat sand. “Ifthat’sall you can do, don’t bother.”
“Cream?”
“Better. Somewhat.” The cat readjusted his grip, managing to sink his claws into the meat of my shoulder in the process. “Now, turn around and look behind you. You see the room, yes?”
“Yes?”
“That’sthe reflection. What you see through the mirror is the actual room.”
I turned around twice, trying to get my bearings. I always slepton the right side of the bed, and the room viewed through the mirror had rumpled sheets on that side, and my book lying on the bedside table. But in the room behind me, the book was on the left side and the pillow with the indentation was on the left and…
If this is a hallucination, it is an extremely internally consistent one.
“Are you sure I haven’t gone mad?” I asked.
“Your questions are remarkably unoriginal. ‘Am I mad, is this a dream, oh no, what’s going on, why is this happening?’” He gazed off into the distance as if I were no longer worth considering.
Strange as it sounds, this stung a bit. It’s one thing to know that a cat holds you in mild contempt, quite another to have it actually insult you in language you understand. I tried to think of a better question.
“Cat,” I said slowly, “if someone came into the room right now, would they seeusin the mirror?”
“Naturally,” said the cat. “Assuming they bothered to look, which humans can’t be relied upon to do.”
“Is this magic?” I asked. I hated to even say the word.
He actually thought about this for a bit, flicking his ears back as if listening to a distant sound. “Yes and no,” he said finally. “Mirrors are like blood or bones or oak trees. All the magic is in what is donewiththem.”
“I don’t believe in magic,” I said, aware of how ridiculous it was even as I said it, given that I was having a conversation with a talking cat.And thatmustbe magic, because they are not like parrots, and in a rational world, a cat couldn’t make human speech even if it wanted to.
He jumped down onto the bed, not bothering to pull his claws in. “Then you are being very stupid, even for a human.”
“Probably,” I admitted. I looked at the mirror again, where there was no cat to be seen, and the dark rectangle around it. “But if this reallyisthe mirror, why are so many things painted gray? The real things aren’t.”
“Work it out for yourself,” said the cat. “There’s no point educating someone who won’t believe in magic when it’s already happened to them.” He thrust out one hind leg and began cleaning it aggressively. His paw pads were a deep burgundy.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”
The cat made a noise that might have been “hmmph!’” though I couldn’t tell if it was because he accepted my apology, or didn’t accept it, or was simply nipping at the base of his tail in a slightly obscene fashion. I turned back to the mirror, my eye caught by the frame itself. The inside was brilliant gilt, but the outer edges were featureless gray, with only a line of shadow to differentiate them from the dark paint on the wall. When I ran my fingers over the grayness, it felt smooth and cold, but it was the slightly grainy smoothness of a river rock, not the slickness of gilded wood. The line between gold and gray was ruler straight.
It’s all so crisp, I thought despairingly. Hitting your head is supposed to make things vague and fuzzy, and this very much wasn’t. Nor did it have the disjointed quality of a hallucination. I had experienced those once or twice in the course of my experiments, and none of them had looked anything like this.
The book on the bedside table caught my eye again.I wonder if the writing inside is mirrored, too?I picked it up and opened it, but there was no writing at all, only the smooth, cold gray on every page.
