But some things were unchangeable. Where you were reflected, always, one of us at least was stitched to you.
Endlessly we were drab copies. The impurities and stains that had given us some relief were taken. As we tried to hide behind one, we were laid bare in another. Even where we stretched and warped we did it at your whim, forced into
But some of us, some few, some ones and twos, found we could break free. By a caprice we never understood, as we were watched by you our unconscious tormentors, some of us found the strength to rebel.
It would start and finish in an instant. Our revolts. A rush of freedom, a sudden certainty that we could move, a look up and a luxuriant stretching out and murder, a coming through. You would not withstand us, little men and women staring up dumb as your own faces came for you, your own arms crooked and pushing through the mirror.
And when you were done and finished, we were in your world.
A parliament of spies. It was a troubling victory. We were fixed, fast-frozen in these idiot bodies.
The mirrors broke with our passage. We found others. Pressed ourselves against them, staring into the empty rooms beyond the glass, and whispered into them. Whispered until our siblings heard us, and in that way we would make murmured plans. We received orders and gave them, and squabbled over them. We were deep under cover, and our tribes cajoled and begged us, and made the case for their strategies.
Some of us killed ourselves. We could do that, in the bodies that encased us. We could die. It was a horrid revelation, but the temptation of that new experience was too great for some.
We went to war. A fifth column.
There were plans we could make. To keep the tain covered, to slow the encroaching empire of mirrored glass. It made for strange allegiances.
We joined the Venetian ranks. Hidden, we infiltrated the camp of our own dumb torturers, kept our hatred battened down. This was not the time for rage but for politics and strategy. Having watched over the means of our misery, having seen it devised, Venice wanted it for itself, and made it forbidden knowledge. They coddled the glass-men of Murano, hid them behind enticements and threats, hostaged their families and would not let them leave. And even while they continued to make the mirrors, we swallowed and helped the floating republic keep them. The monopoly thrived on scarcity, and if we could not have no mirrors, we would fight to keep them rare.
So when through perfidy the tain-makers escaped, we were there to help Venice, to guide the assassins, to be assassins ourselves. When the French could not mimic the expertise and instead stole the experts, made their own mirror factories, it was we who poisoned the glassblower, we who gave the metal-polisher fever until he died. We killed the escapees, desperate, fighting for Venetian merchants against the merchant-state of France, each little victory scored against history.
Mirrors could not be corralled. We fought and strove and fought and agonised and lost, at every step.
We walked among you. We learned tricks.
There have been escapees, infiltrators on your side of the partition for as long as we have been in prison.
Some of us escaped from the water, the polished obsidian, the bronze and glass, and hid beside you. But never so many as broke your silvered glass.
We wore your faces, left-to-right. Mostly your friends, no matter how they loved you, could only stare at us a little, with a consternation of which they could make no sense. Staring at your reflection in flesh, knowing that something was altered but not able to see quite what it was, what of you was wrong.
And where there were marks or scars or tattoos, where our reflected nature was impossible to hide, we disappeared, and became new people. With our task.
Mirrors betray us. When we came through, we murdered those whose bodies had bound us, and there was no one among our tormented comrades left behind in our place, no one forced to mimic us from beyond the glass, as we had mimicked you. There was nothing in the tain made to take our shapes: we were invisible in the mirror, we had no reflections. When you saw that, you screamed, and called us things. We are the patchogues: that is our name. But you called us vampires.
Gongsun defeated us. Your champion. Gongsun, Gongsun Xuanyuan, Ji Xuanyuan, Huangdi. They are all his names. The man who defeated Chiyou with his south-seeker, who wrote a book of sex, created writing, made tripods that stood to mimic infinity. He who made twelve great mirrors, to follow the moon into the sky and capture the world. To capture us. The Yellow Emperor.
It was our fault. It hurts to say it. We thought we could win. The first attack was ours.
And when all was done and your champion, your Yellow Emperor, had led you to victory—at bloody cost, at least—he set free his mirrors. Snared us. Until then the worlds had bled, had oozed into each other. We had walked without pause from our plane to yours, through the doors of light, through the glimmerings of water and the flat gateways of stone and polished metal. Until your champion, with arcane sciences that I cannot begin, I cannot begin to understand, until he separated us and locked us apart. A world to play in, but punished with the enforced mumming of your vanity.
He changed history. He made it so that it had always been so. And you forgot us, and cast us as images, and ignored us, and stared at yourselves.
I have seen my people debased. Entities more powerful than your moon made to smear scarlet wax and fat on peeling lips, lick it off lumpy teeth, made to preen with you. Bulked into spasming fibrous meat and mutely raising and lowering iron bars, without complaint, unable to complain, as you stared at yourselves, at them, made to wear your sweat-wet clothes and jostle mindlessly from machine to machine as you worked to change your shapes. You have put mirrors by your beds, or over them, and trapped my people in your clammy fuck-embraces. You made us fuck each other, stare at the eyes of our siblings with shared hatred and apology as the bodies you made us wear did the corporeal things you did.
For six thousand years, and forever, you have held us down. Each of us alive and watching, and waiting, and waiting, undying all that time. You didn’t know, but not knowing is no excuse. And you have taken our freedom away in slow increments, until in a sudden flurry of three centuries you sped it all up, and took away our last escapes, and made our world yours.
When it came, the time was not one day but many, stretched out over months, a luxuriant, languorous release, in pieces, in parts and parcels, and the more infuriating but ultimately the more wonderful, liberatory, for that.
The streets were wet again. It was like a warning. London was never so alien as after the rain, its tarmac and slate turned into what would once have been mirrors.
Sholl walked through the remains of Hampstead, past empty outlines of shops spilling glass and the last remains of their produce. By a bookshop, he trod through a slush of decaying paper pulp.
There was water still in the air, a mist that coalesced and ran down Sholl’s face. The pavements tilted away from the Heath, and he could feel himself descending.
He kept swallowing, and changing his grip on his gun. He was surprised at the extent of his fear. He had not thought he would be alone. Even so, he did not consider changing his plan. It was irreversible.
Sholl listened hard as he walked, but he could hear only soft noise of the air. He felt closed in, hearing his own actions very close as if they reverberated back from walls, as if he were walking a corridor, a rut, channelled inexorably. He listened to his walking, his feet falling and rising. A gentle slap and plash before him, and behind him a faint wet parting. He breathed in deep, and held it for a long time, past several feet of brick and broken window, and exhaled, a tremor still audible.
Something moved away from him, up the wall, in a lizard motion not quite like anything Sholl had ever seen. He was approaching the junction by the underground station. This close to Hampstead’s heart, the fauna of mirrors were playing.
The street curled leftward, bringing the crossroads into view. For a last few seconds Sholl would not look at it. He focused instead on the water around him, on the puddles and slick asphalt. The light was hard, even through the clouds, but of course no light rebounded, there were no specular highlights. The rainwater washed the city free
