Page 3

It happened late one evening, when the darkness lay heavy outside and the wind lashed at the house and howled in the trees. Once he would have thought it perfect conditions for writing. But all day his words had been coming more and more slowly, more and more reluctantly, and finally, at about the hour when dark powers were supposed to be loosed on the land, he found he simply could not write any longer.

He stared at the computer screen for a while, unseeing. His fingers, on the desk by the keyboard, began tapping complex meaningless rhythms on the polished wood. Finally, sighing heavily, he put his face in his hands and rubbed his eyes. When he looked up, he glanced by habit towards the mirror, which lay precisely where he had put it down on that first evening of his ownership, so many weeks ago. He had never, for some reason he had never seen fit to examine, got around to hanging it up on some wall.

 Instead of the reflected walls of his study, once again he saw the unlit and deserted streets of the city he had seen once before, desolate and at the same time utterly compelling. Rising from his place he went over to the mirror.

Once again, he felt the winds stirring in his face, and as he watched, he saw a scrap of some material, cloth or paper, blown along the street. There was no lighting at all, from houses or street lamps, but a faint illumination came from above, as of wan moonlight. The street looked as though it had not been used by traffic in longer than anyone could imagine, and yet it did not look dead and derelict. It looked strange and dangerous, but in his current frame of mind, also irresistible.

Before he quite knew what he was doing, Diego bent and passed through the mirror into the dark street beyond. As he went, he felt a slight ripple, a tremor, which shivered through him. It passed so quickly it was as though it had never been, and was followed by a sensation like a heavy blow that hit him in the back and sent him sprawling on his hands and knees on the pavement.

When Diego stood up, the first thing he looked for was the mirror, his passage back to his own room. He could not find it or anything remotely resembling it. Behind him was only a blank wall, peeling plaster and crumbling bricks faintly visible in the moonlight. The wind whipped dust around his ankles and pressed his clothing against his thin body, and he suddenly realised that it was very cold.

By now Diego had lost all desire to explore this city. Stumbling to the wall, he began running his hands all over its surface, as far as he could reach, but he felt nothing more than the hard and cold solidity of the structure. Suddenly close to tears, he began slapping his hands on the wall in frustration. He was interrupted by a rumbling noise behind him.

At first he could not identify what it was that sprawled on the pavement, rumbling. It was shaggy, essentially shapeless, melted into shadows and seemed to move by humping itself along the ground. And then one end raised itself off the pavement and turned itself into a hairy pointed snout. The low rumble deepened in pitch into a growl that abruptly turned into a snarl, and the snout wrinkled back to reveal a terrifying set of teeth. The shapeless creature gathered itself together and flung itself at Diego, the teeth reaching for him, seeking to cut and slash him to pieces.

Had he been only a little slower, he would have ended right then. As it was, the creature’s teeth ripped away one leg of his trousers below the knee and cut a shallow groove in his calf from knee to ankle. As he sprang away, the animal humped along towards him, the snarl turning into a series of hoarse throaty barks, and then even as he turned to run he realised what it was that had attacked him.

He ran down the pavement, as quickly as he could go, feeling the blood run down his leg as he went and listening to his footsteps slapping on the pavement, the harsh panting of his breath in his ear, and the barking behind him. Trying to turn a corner, he slipped on something, a wet patch on the pavement perhaps, and fell heavily, rolling over and feeling a sharp pain in his elbow. Throwing a quick glance over his shoulder, he saw the snarling dog-creature chasing him, humping itself along the pavement, teeth gleaming. The same glance showed him a low oblong aperture in the wall to his left, and he saw an arm and hand waving at him, beckoning.

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