‘Gothic Series Sold Out’, was the only reply. No Returns even mentioned, not even a PO Box to send them to.
I was stuck with him, and I knew it. Two more days, then Sam would have to have him in her bedroom. Some birthday present. I knew, even then, I should bury him under the noodles and cans in the dustbin and buy Samantha Lamb something else.
But by that time it was too late.
It had come to me as I was lying in bed waiting to go to sleep. I’d just seen ER and my mind wouldn’t stop. You know the feeling. Not good. The moonlight always came in around the side of my blind, and that night it silvered the claws of the wolf-mirror and made a pale glow in its depths.
I got up and turned him to face the wall.
Then I got back into bed.
I could feel the power in his red-eyed glare, even with his back to the room. The moonlight flooded in anyway, and suddenly I knew what the forbidden thing was, as certainly as if it had been chalked on the back of the mirror, where his silver claws appeared around the backing.
Don’t look into the mirror by moonlight, or you’ll see what animal you are.
I sat up in bed. What animal you are?
I got up and moved the mirror, very carefully, out of my room.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ Dad wondered, coming up the stairs to bed.
‘I don’t like him in my room at night,’ I told him sheepishly.
‘I’m not surprised, it’s hideous. I thought it had four legs.’
‘It has.’ I checked him. ‘There’s one at the back.’
‘Night, then,’ Dad said.
‘Night, night.’
Sweet dreams, I almost added, except I didn’t get any, myself. Instead, I had the moonlight leaking in around the blind and the feeling that grew and kept me awake until it was driving me mad.
Two feelings, actually.
One was the certainty that if I got up to go to the loo and had to walk past the wolf-man I wouldn’t be able to stop myself looking into the mirror by moonlight.
The other was the certainty that he’d had all four legs wrapped around the front of the mirror, and no leg down the back.
In the end I had to get up.
I made it past the mirror to the toilet, though his ruby eyes scorched my ankles. I made it back as far as the bedroom door before I let myself see, through half-closed eyes, the place where the wolf-man had been.
His mirror glared down the stair-well, reflecting the outside light that leaked up the stairs in the darkness; a plain, silver-edged mirror, so ordinary you might even have ordered it from pub/mirror.com, or from any shop selling candles, or any department store.
The wolf-man was gone, I didn’t like to think where.
I must have knocked him off his perch in passing; probably he’d rolled down the stairs. Probably if I looked I’d see him, forlorn and glinting, in the hall.
But I didn’t look.
Instead I slept on the landing in the sleeping bag I found in the airing cupboard, too scared to go into my room.
In the early hours, a flash of silver seemed to tumble into my dreams. The glare of ruby eyes reminded me, over and over again, of the one thing I knew I mustn’t do.
Dad fell over me at seven o’clock.
‘Lisa! What on earth—?’
I turned over. ‘Dad.’
A hammering headache filled the whole of my brain. Those burning eyes had drilled into the back of my head. They saw what I really was, reflected in their own fiery depths.
‘Where’s that—’
‘Mirror?’ Dad set it straight. ‘Must have fallen over in the night.’
There he was, but he didn’t fool me.
So the mirror-man was back on his mirror, with his wolf-legs folded around it as if he’d never been gone. Flashing around like a slip of silver all night. He’d changed his position, anyone could see. What did he think, we were stupid?
‘Why aren’t you in your bed?’ Dad bleated.
‘Doesn’t matter, does it?’ I said, turning over. ‘Leave me alone,’ I growled.
The next night was Friday night, and we went to the cinema for Sam’s birthday treat, as her party was going to be only part of her birthday, as Sam gets everything she wants. The film was OK, not great. We spilled a whole tub of popcorn over the floor, plus these stupid boys kept annoying us, but anyway, it was all right.
When I got home I remembered him. The mirror-man upstairs. I delayed for as long as I could. But finally I had to go to bed.
It was the worst night yet. I finally got off to sleep all right, which I don’t usually after a Jumbo Cola and a giant bag of Pik ’n’ Mix, which was pants, as they had the wrong prawns and massively big worms, so you have to pay five quid to get one.
So at last I was just drifting off. I don’t know, I may have been asleep – when I thought I saw him running round my room. Quick as quicksilver, the mirror-man, wolfing my slippers and flashing over my desk, his red eyes burning, his tongue slavering, his quick tail flicking and whipping.
Who was he? The reflection of someone’s secret self, the last person to look into that mirror in the moonlight, after they’d ordered it by mistake? That mirror, that mirror, that mirror. Had been the cause of it.
I started up in fright and launched myself at that mirror.
In the moment before I smashed it, I saw what animal I was. The wolf rolled off the top of it and raged and boiled on the carpet, changing shape as I watched into the animal that was me, until I put my pillow on top of it, and another pillow on top of that, and my dressing gown and a pile of books, and everything I could find to weigh it down and stop it, that reflection of my secret self…
‘Happy birthday!’ Sam wishes herself, her head around Lisa’s bedroom door on Saturday morning. ‘I let myself in, all right?’
Sam waits, but nothing happens; no move to get her her present. Instead, Lisa puzzles over the pieces of a mirror. Not a very nice mirror, either.
‘What are you doing?’
‘What does it look like? I just have to piece it together. Then I can send it back.’
Sam picks up a twist of silver. ‘What’s this?’
‘What does it look like?’
‘A dragon?’
‘It was a wolf, but the wolf-man’s gone.’
Sam looks at the dragon’s curved limbs, at the shape it’s designed to hold, its tail licking clean round an oval. ‘What’s this meant to be for?’
‘He sits on top of the mirror,’ Lisa supplies. ‘When he’s not—’
‘What?’
‘Broken,’
‘You said, alive.’
Lisa’s eyes flash. ‘I said, broken.’
Sam looks at her friend. ‘About my party tonight—’
‘Mind if I take it back?’ Lisa scratches Sam very slightly as she reached up to grab the figure. Blood wells up