Through the Mirror

The silence was deafening in the cold, white, wide empty room. Not even the footfalls of the woman running made any sound at all though they should have thundered. Stride after stride, her chest heaving with exertion, and still all was silent. It was difficult to tell even that she was truly moving anywhere at all with nothing to hear, and nothing to see to mark her passage.

Then, in the whiteness in front of her, a small dark speck seemed to ooze into existence. With a visible but soundless effort, her feet pounding into the white concrete, she ran harder, ran faster, the dark speck slowly growing larger with the magic of perspective.

Step by step, the woman ran; each breath was more of a struggle for her, but I kept pushing past the burning in my lungs until I began hearing the slightest of sounds as it neared.

Thu-dump, thu-dump, thwump, thu-dump.

It was the beating of my heart that I heard growing louder with every breath I took; it was all I could hear in the silence but the volume of it was such that it would have been all I could hear even had there been a brass band providing a soundtrack to run to.

My momentum ceased, and it was as if the woman were a puppet cut from her strings. She fell to her knees in front of a large, dark grey mushroom with a flat cap. The giant fungi was the size of a small dining table and in the center of it was a small, white rectangle. As I peered closer, I realized it was a name badge. It was blank, without a name or logo. Then I noticed the shimmering pen next to it. I couldn't decide if it was blue or green or something in between. Or perhaps both at once. I picked it up and leaned down to write my name.

As the pen neared the empty white space, a single dusky drop of inky blackness elongated from the tip of the pen. Gravity pulled the viscous liquid closer and closer to the matte surface of the badge until it separated with a splash. The blackness soaked in and spread, flowing out around the woman in undulating ribbons of shadow.

Inky shadows wrapped around her until all that white emptiness filled with darkness.

I began walking through the darkness. Where was I going? I didn't know and I didn't care. I just knew I had to move. Black, blacker, blackest; step by step the darkness deepened until all around me was an obsidian anti-light darker than midnight. I kept moving through the blackness, determined to get to wherever I might be going.

Abruptly she stopped. And a new sound filled the air.

Clickity-clack, clickity-clack. First louder, then softer, then louder again. Clickity-clack, Clickity-clack. Clackity-click.

Teeth. Dozens of teeth. It was the sound of millions of teeth chattering in the dark beneath her feet.

Nervous now, she again began to run. To run away from the teeth, away from the darkness. I was running harder than I had ever run in my life, towards a shining silver and gold light bright in the darkness.

Before I reached it, pink pinpoints of lights, then blue, then green and yellow and orange flashed brightly, blinding the woman. The lights formed into the shape of a paw print and then another and another and another, gleaming brightly until she saw the animal pacing alongside her. Since when were ferrets four feet long and furred in sparkly glitter?

I slowed to a stop again, this time staring at a silver mirror in a wooden frame gilded in gold-leaf. It fascinated me. Never before had I seen a mirror so clear. Seriously. If it weren't that I saw myself in the mirror's surface and my reflection raised a finger even as I did...I might have thought I was looking through a glass window.

The woman's finger touched the mirror ever so gently and the silver surface rippled like raindrops in a puddle of water. She stepped through, gasping —

And I heard a disembodied voice, so perky I cringed. The voice said,

"Thank you for visiting our dark wonderland. Please come again soon.”