Hanford Manor

“The mirror showed a reflection that wasn’t my own. A scream that I did not know was coming tore itself from my throat as I hefted the chair and threw it into the glass. The thing in the mirror smiled as though I had given it a gift in the instant before the mirror shattered. Too late, I realized my mistake. Realized that by acknowledging it, I had given it power. Now it follows me every time I look at any version of my reflection, waiting for the right moment.”

- The Diary of Preston Hanford. 15th July 1931

Of all the things to pull out of an ancient steamer trunk in the attic of an unused building, the diary of a madman was not high on my list of expectations. Certainly, in these old houses, there were often diaries like that – and I expect that in the future people will find diaries from my time, what with the recent craze for hand-written journals – maybe even old novel manuscripts or screen plays.

Wishes that never came true leaked out of those yellowed pages, their corners curling inwards after decades of neglect. Some of the stories were good, very good. Some of them came hand in hand with stacks of polite rejection letters from publishers.

Preston’s journal was different. As I read through it, curious about the life that Mr. Hanford had led, nothing exceptional jumped out at me until he moved into this house. There was a something there, from the first day he had commented on it. I wanted to think this was his madness surfacing. As though by condemning him to an asylum I could save myself from what I saw. As though I could convince myself that what happened had just been my own imagination.

I would look up his family, try to find evidence of inherited madness. Except there was no evidence. Nothing except the mentions of what hid in his mirror. And of course, what happened after that first sight.

-0-

“Let’s get a move on,” said Thomas, his hand landing heavily on my shoulder.

“Huh?” I tore my attention away from the neat, even handwriting of Preston Hanford and looked up at him. “What?”

“Another old book? Christ, you’ve got a fetish or something. Come on, we’ve got to start hauling some of this crap outta here.”

He ambled off, flicking a thick layer of dust off an ancient lampshade as he passed. The old house was crammed full of the type of antiques that made those people on tv wet themselves. If not for the dust, I had no doubt that everything here would be worth a fortune. But that was part of the business plan: move everything the family wants out, so they can dress up and sell the place, auction the rest.

Weirdly, the list of things this family wanted to keep was so short it might have fit on a medium sized post-it note. Grumbling about how history was not a fetish and longing for the days when my student debt would be paid off and I could quit that stupid job, I put the diary away and followed Thomas.

Hanford Manor was huge after the fashion of grand New England homes. Lots of stairs, parlors, libraries, sitting rooms, and bedrooms. Every single one of these rooms was stocked with wooden furniture that looked as though it had been old when Preston had been young. For all its age, though, everything was in shockingly good repair. Almost as though the dust had been taken off, the pieces polished, and then the dust carefully reapplied.

“This place is a gold mine,” said Angela, drawing a smiley face in the dust on a chest of drawers. “How much do you think it’s all worth?”

“No idea,” I said, crouched next to an ancient end table with an ornate lamp on it. “Minus these cobwebs and the dust, could be a ton. Let me know if you see any maker’s marks, yeah? Could be some really valuable stuff here.”

The door of the end table opened smoothly, which spoke to its hinges being in good order, and the inside held a bottle of something that looked both sealed and well aged. I pulled the bottle out and checked the date, a Glenlivet 30 years old a hundred years ago. Seal intact. Worth at least months worth of rent to a collector.

“What’s that?”

“Not for the likes of you, Angie. Hang on, I think I’ve found something else.”

Shining my pen light into the deep shadows at the back of the cupboard, I saw what I was looking for. A slightly faded manufacturer’s label smiled out at me from the darkness. A slow grin spread across my face as I noticed the year, and the intact product number. If I hadn’t been so interested in my share of the takings from this job, maybe I would have noticed how the darkness seemed to eat the beam of my penlight. Or how far into the shadows I had to hold it to make sure the beam hit that spot.

Unfortunately, I did not noticed. We, as a species, have a bad habit of not realizing things are wrong until that wrongness rears up and bites us. With lions, tigers, bears, and drunk people, we have an intuitive ability to notice those threats. But hair raising quiet, the echoing emptiness of a place usually full of life, or the unseen in shadows under trees or in old houses, these things are almost always harmless, and so we drop our guard.

Angela heard my small cackle of excitement and demanded I tell her what was so damn interesting. Naturally, when I told her about the label, her only response was, “oh, is that all?” Exasperated, but completely used to her offensive disinterest in these things, I sharply informed her of what pieces like that usually went for.

In an instant her demeanor changed. From ‘stupid academics and their obsessions’ to cartoon dollar signs in her eyes in less than a second.

“Not on the list is it?”

Just because it was procedure, I pulled my copy of the very short list from a zippered pocket in my overalls and checked. “Nope.” It was a little worrying that Angela never bothered to memorize the list. I distinctly remember being deeply vexed by it at the time. But, later, it seemed to work out. Memory is a tricky thing and it betrays us more than we are usually willing to admit.

Maybe her refusal to know the lists by heart was a defense mechanism. Maybe that’s why she was able to be in the industry so long. Maybe that’s why… but then, I don’t think it worked out for her in the end.

I marked the end table and the bottle with small gold stickers, indicating their probable high value, and returned both to their spots. The beauty of the business model was that everything not listed was ours, no matter what we got for it at auction. It was the family’s own fault if they hadn’t known what the real treasures were.

“Grant,” Thomas’s voice crackled out of my walkie-talkie just as Angela and I hauled another end table out of it’s alcove and put a silver sticker on it. “Grant I want you to come up to the fourth floor, west turret. I’ll meet you on the landing.”

“Roger,” I glanced at Angela but she was quick-stepping to the balcony, cigarette already between her lips. Not one to waste time, Angela.

I’m certain the staircases in that house would have been grand. It didn’t get a name like ‘Hanford Manor’ just for being a large house, after all. But the decades of quasi-neglect had dragged its opulence into the dirt. Everywhere I looked, there was the sense of frozen glory and arrested decay. On an impulse, I swiped away a layer of dust on the spines of some books that looked valuable and marveled that the gold leaf still shone like new.

Smarter people than me might have read the signs, might have seen through the façade earlier. But I was too engrossed with the job to notice how quickly the dust covered any marks I left behind. Or that my footprints vanished in my wake.

“Took you long enough,” grunted Thomas, rubbing at his thick, white moustache. “Take a look at this and – hey! What’re you doing?”

My attention had been grabbed by a mirror that stood at the end of the hall, just behind and to the left of Thomas. I pushed past him and ran a finger over the gilded frame, trying to rub away the decades and see what was written in the looping silver writing that ran along it. My inner academic was frothing at the mirror with the strange writing. It looked old. Very old.

“Sorry I can’t even begin to guess,” I started, but Thomas took me roughly by the shoulder and spun me around.

“Think you’re being funny? Come on, there’s one of the Narnia type of wardrobes in here. I can smell the money on it so do your witchcraft and tell me how much.”

“I don’t really… wait, did you not notice the mirror?”

“What? Just appraise the wardrobe for me, that’s what I pay you for! Tell me if I get to retire early or not.”

Grumbling that, technically, he only paid me to haul heavy shit, I looked at the empty wardrobe. Old fur coats probably worth more than my education were strewn across the floor, making me wince. The handles looked like brass, tarnished dark until a wipe from the microfibre cloth I kept on me, when they practically sparkled. The doors were richly detailed, each one an independent work of art that blended perfectly together when closed; the hinges were in as perfect shape as every other hinge in the whole manor.

A nearby chair let me climb up high enough to see that even the very top of the thing was in almost perfect condition. Then, on the inside, top right corner at the front where it could never be damaged through any kind of rough storage, an intact manufacturer’s label. Thomas nearly choked when I gave my best estimate for something like this. Even mentioned upping my take by as much as a percent.

Generous, really. Considering how much he had managed to stiff me on other jobs.

All through the examination, and through the brief consultation on its cost, which I was only able to guess at really, my mind was filled with the mirror. The intricate carvings in the wood and the gold, the tiny, flowing letters that I felt I could almost read. My fingers itches to touch it again, to examine it all so much more closely.

I felt, in my excitement and my arrogance, that I could uncover the secrets of that mirror; certainty that I could read the writing and understand why it was there and what it all was for. Even, though I did not know it at the time, I thought I could reason away why Thomas hadn’t cast a reflection over its dusty, sliver glass.

Slowly, though, that question began to dawn on me as my time in that house passed. Every spare moment, I was looking at the mirror’s frame, running my fingers along the silver letters, screwing up my eyes and my brain to try and translate them. I had studied ancient languages in school; there was no good reason why I couldn’t at least puzzle out where the words were from, or when. But my colleagues never acknowledged the mirror.

When I drew their attention to it, innocently at first, then with greater urgency as we slowly catalogued every item in the manor – without ever taking any of it out to the truck and without leaving so much as a footprint in the dust – but they steadfastly refused to look at it. I would point it out, or comment on it, or ask them. But to no avail.

“Help me move this,” I said one day to Angela as she came out of an upper room. I thought that something was wrong, had done for a while now, her face was drawn and ashen, eyes red and wide. She jumped as I spoke and whipped her head around. Nodding rather quicker than usual, she gripped the other half of an ornate, and locked, chest.

Only when we finished moving it and I had checked the wall side of the thing for damage did I realize that I had asked for help with the mirror. But when I opened my mouth to ask her again to help me, she spun on her heel and vanished. It was like something was compelling her away from that spot.

Thomas too was no help. He shrugged and swore, ordered me to leave that floor alone since we had already gone through it all. Refused to even recognize that the mirror was there. And when I pressed him about it, he sent me home for the day claiming that I had worked too hard.

Seeing things. That was what he claimed. The poor little academic had gone and exerted himself, now he needed a day off. I had even brought him up to that landing and demanded he look at the mirror with me, demand what he thought. I would not let up when he tried his normal deflections, tried to misinterpret me or flatly answer a question I had not asked.

That was when he sent me home.

But I did not take the day to recover. I did not drink some calming tea, read a book, watch a movie, find a date, go for a walk. None of it. Instead, I went through the receipts and contracts that Thomas still had on his desk in the office and I found the family. Emily Hanford, the only surviving grandchild of Preston, lived not far from my own apartment.

So naturally I went and paid her a visit.

A modest house that belied her inherited wealth stood on the corner lot of a quiet street in a good neighbourhood. The front lawn was well kept and neatly trimmed rose bushes lined the paved walk to her front door. Fallen petals dotted that path, a display of almost artful entropy. In all, a small, handsome place that managed to look more a happy home than Hanford Manor ever did.

Looking back, it was the sense of growth and change that clued me in. Flowers bloomed under the windows and the grass smelled freshly cut as I walked carefully up to the house. The garage door looked as happy as a fresh coat of paint can make anything look and a line of shingles on the roof were showing their age. The house was something alive, something that needed care. Something in and of the world.

Something that Hanford Manor, I’m convinced, had never been.

Knocking smartly on the door, I admired the miniature version of the house that served as the letterbox and noticed the brilliantly carved scrollwork around the doorframe. Certainly the wealth that had built Hanford Manor had not disappeared, but it was also not on ostentatious display.

“Yes,” said a small, thin sort of voice as the door opened. “What can I do for you?”

The voice sounded as paper thin as a wedding veil, fluttery as though uncertain of its role and reception. Standing in front of me was a short, older, handsome woman with round spectacles and a round, friendly face. Her eyes were little out of focus, almost like she was struggling to make me out.

“Ms. Hanford,” I asked, suddenly uncertain. When she nodded I continued, “I work for Checkers Movers under Thomas, may I speak with you for a moment?”

“Is there something wrong?”

“No, no. Nothing wrong, ma’am. I just have some questions about some of the things in the house. Well, one thing in particular.”

“Oh. Well I suppose you’d better come in. But really, I have nothing to say about that place, everything should have ben on the list I gave Mr. Holms.”

Following her into the house, I noticed just how lived in it felt. Comfortable armchairs and couches that all looked well used scattered the front room. It almost resembled a school residence common room, a place where people would gather and be comfortably together. I could almost imagine Emily Hanford hosting friends and acquaintances in that room, reading or talking or playing games.

Again, there was the sense of growth and change. The idea that this place and everyone inside it was alive. However, right at the edge of my perception, there was a sense of something missing. Not quite the same as it was in the manor, but it was there. An emptiness or an absence that I could not explain, not then at least.

We sat in worn leather armchairs on either side of a lightly scarred table and I asked her some probing questions about the house and its contents. She was not keen on the topic, never met my eyes and was constantly fiddling with something in her lap. It was almost as though talking about her grandfather’s house scared her, like it brought up memories she would rather have avoided.

Finally, after teasing the issue out with genuine questions about some of the items that could have been worth rather a lot but had not been on her list of things to keep, I gently mentioned the uppermost hallway. A muscle started working at the corner of her mouth when I first asked if she minded a few more questions about that place. “Of course not,” she obviously lied.

I decided to just jump in with both feet. “What can you tell me about the large mirror at the end of the hall? Just from looking at it I expect it would go at auction for well over fifteen thousand, I’m surprised you wouldn’t want to hold onto it.”

“Oh yes,” she said, relief breaking across her face with a warm, genuine smile. “Of course you’d be curious about that.”

I leaned forward, heart in my mouth, hanging on her every word. This was it! The answer to all the questions, I would finally know why she didn’t want it. Why it was stuck in my head. Why… why Thomas did not cast a reflection in it.

“My brother and I used to pretend that old wardrobe was the gateway to Narnia when we were young,” she sighed, eyes now focused on something that had happened a lifetime before. “Of course, we thought that grandfather would be angry that we were playing with the old coats in there, but he never was. It was always difficult to get grandfather’s attention, you know, he seemed to be obsessed with… but then, he would just laugh and tell us that if old things weren’t for playing with then he had no idea what he was to do with them.”

“No, Ms. Hanford, I meant the-”

“Yes, of course, I’m certain that old thing would be worth a fortune,” she went on, completely ignoring my attempts to direct her ramblings. “But I haven’t the interest or need to handle all that myself. No space here to keep it, either. Had better go to someone who has children who might love it as much as we did, Edward and I.”

“I wanted to ask you about the-”

“The coats? Oh, I’m not sure how much they’ll get for you. But since they are nearly a century old-”

“The mirror Ms. Hanford. What can you tell me about the mirror?”

She stiffened when I brought up the mirror. Her eyes lost their focus again and her hands began toying with whatever it was in her lap. She muttered something about the bottle of whiskey in the end table, and how she was certain it had never been opened. Maybe we could get something at auction for it.

Perhaps Thomas and Angela were messing with me. Maybe they had agreed between themselves that it would be funny if they pretended the mirror didn’t exist. Oh yes, what an excellent joke. Just sit around and laugh while I drove myself mad trying to get them acknowledge that our biggest pay day ever was sitting there on a dusty landing.

But there was no reason for Emily Hanford to be in on the joke. None whatsoever.

Breaking off her ramblings about every other piece of furniture in house, I stood and thanked Emily for her time. The motion was so unexpected that she jolted and was just slow enough in hiding what she had been fiddling with that I accidentally got a glimpse of the small piece of glass between her fingers. Its edges had been rounded off by years of rubbing fingers, and it glinted strangely at me, almost begging me to take a closer look.

Emily hastily shoved the glass into a pocket of her dress and walked me to the door. I was about to ask her about it, inquire politely why she kept that shard, when she said, “don’t ever look into it.” Her eyes were focused and clear, locked on my face for the first time since she had opened the door. But before I could ask what she meant, the door shut firmly and I heard the lock slide into place.

Still puzzling over the warning that Emily had given me, I went home and tried to get some rest. Maybe Thomas was right, maybe I was imaging things and should leave well enough alone. What business of mine if everyone pretended that a dusty mirror didn’t exist?

That was, until I actually got home and noticed something that made my blood run cold. Because in the mirror over my sink, as I brushed my teeth before bed, my reflection winked at me. It was insane, I hadn’t winked. I leaned in, tried to focus on the eyes and waited. I waited until the foam from my toothpaste had faded, until my brush dried, until the sun finished setting and the darkness hid the mirror from me.

Convinced that I had seen it, convinced that if I could only wait long enough it would happen again. I flicked the switch and turned back to the mirror. It was empty, then, slowly, sliding in from out of view as though it were playing my actions back to me on a screen, my reflection came to rest exactly where I was.

Then I felt something breathe behind me.

Eyes still locked on the me in the mirror, I reached my hand over my shoulder and tried to find what I could not see reflected behind me. It must be there, something was radiating its presence behind me. I just had to find it. But I did not turn around. Somehow, I had the strangest certainty that if I did, if I broke eye contact with my reflection, that would… even now, reflecting on the event, I don’t have words for what would happen. But I had to keep looking into the glass, not even daring to blink.

My hand found nothing but empty air behind me. Just as the mirror promised, I was alone in the room. But the breath came again. And the sensation of something brushing my hair, right at the base of my neck.

In a sudden panic I spun on the spot and looked for whomever was behind me. But no one was there. When I looked back into the mirror, I thought I saw something moving the shadows of my shower, and my reflection winked again.

Sleep was very slow in coming that night.

Back at work the next day, I noticed Angela’s absence immediately. But my questions were shrugged off by Thomas with a gruff, “quitting without notice. See if she gets a reference from me. Ha!” I tried to call her, at least to say goodbye, but her phone just ran.

“Leave it alone,” was Thomas’s sage advice when I mentioned this to him. “She wants to be gone let her go. We don’t want her anyway.”

Except I did want her there. My boss was not a very pleasant man to be around, he tended to degrade my work and complain loudly about how much it cost him to employ me. No matter how many times I informed him that I was technically working far below what would be standard for someone with my credentials and that this was really a great bargain for him, he remained angry. Muttering about how I was ungrateful.

I started to notice, though, that he was looking pale and drawn these days. Stressed. With red, staring eyes as though he hadn’t been sleeping well. Almost exactly the same look that Angela had had before I went to visit Ms. Hanford. Before she ‘quit.’

Also, his attention was hyper focused on the upper floors. It’s not that I avoided them, per se. I simply had too much work to do on the lower levels and thought that I should work my way up. Certainly not because Emily Hanford’s bizarre warning was rattling around inside my head. Growing louder and louder.

“Don’t ever look into it,” she had said. Thoughts of that sentence kept me awake at night. “Don’t ever look into it.” She could only have meant the mirror. She had finally answered a question that had been eating away at me for longer than I had thought possible.

Each night – after yet another day in that damned house, and those days were starting to blur together – I would avoid looking into my own mirror. Of course, I wasn’t afraid of it. Of course, I never looked over my shoulder in case the… something that had definitely not been there came back.

Finally, so many days later that I had forgotten ever working on a different project, I went in search of Thomas. A newspaper had caught my attention on my way to work, a story about some catastrophe in who-knows-where, but it was the date that drew my heart out of my chest and lodged it in my throat. I stumbled into Hanford Manor, the date still swimming before my eyes.

“Thomas,” I shouted, shocked at how my own voice sounded in my ears. Rusty, foreign, uncertain. “Thomas, where are you? We need to talk!”

Nothing. Not a damned thing.

Guessing that he was busy at work, I went room by room in search. Eyes scanning the perfect layers of dust for footprints. For marks of any kind that would show we had been in that place for as long as we had been.

Nothing. Not a damned thing.

Then I got to the top corridor. As soon as my foot touched the top step, I felt an ice cold finger of fear trace down my spine. I should not be there. I should turn and run. Instead, I walked forward, eyes carefully on layer of perfectly undisturbed dust on the floor, trying to remember the last time I had seen Thomas.

He wasn’t in any of the rooms. He wasn’t in the house. When had I last seen him? I was turning, finally running from that place, determined to never look back, when I heard a gentle knock. As though a hand were rapping on glass. Trembling form head to foot, I turned and walked towards the mirror. My hand shaking so badly I could hardly direct it, I wiped at the dust on its face, revealing my reflection.

The mirror showed a reflection that wasn’t my own. A scream fought to tear out of my throat. Thomas was there, his pleasant smile not reaching his eyes. I shook still harder, pushing down the instinct to attack the thing that was wearing Thomas’s face.

He winked, trying to get a reaction out of me. Slowly closing and opening one of his black eyes. They were black on black on black. Like a doll’s eyes, as though someone had plucked out his own brown ones and sewn buttons into the empty sockets.

Pulling Preston’s diary out of my pocket, I turned away from the mirror just as Thomas started mouthing the words, “touch the glass. Wipe away the dust,” I could almost hear them. “Join me.”

Preston’s last entry from the 30th of July 1931 stared up at me. A single, shaky line of text, his final words that I had not had time to read before and not thought of since, my mind totally consumed by the mirror. “Emily, Edward, dear God never look into that mirror. That’s all it takes, one look.”

Without looking back, I walked away. Off the job. Out of the house. Away from it all.

I toyed with he idea of asking Emily what had happened to Edward but threw it away. The truth was obvious enough if I cared to look for it. I don’t even know if this little writing of my experience counts as the attention that will let the reflections come for me.

Since walking off the job, out of the world, my hair and beard have grown rather long. I can’t trim them properly because every time I look in a mirror, it shows me a grinning reflection that isn’t my own.