The Tale of the Landlady's Mirror Read online

The Tale of the Landlady's Mirror

  Iain Brown

  Killing Vector, Oslo

  Copyright Iain Brown 2011

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Image: "Desnudo del Espejo", Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg

  About the Author:

  Born on Merseyside in 1979, Iain Brown grew up in the East Midlands of England. Vastly over-educated in theoretical physics, he embarked on a research career focusing on the most interesting and least fashionable areas of cosmology. Guitarist, songwriter, sound engineer, author, digital artist, obsessed with mediaeval history and absurdly egotistical, he set up Killing Vector as a creative outlet in 2011. The marque will feature a range of fiction and music from short stories to serial novels, albums and compendia, all released on a loose, flexible schedule through a range of online outlets.

  Contents

  • Cover

  • Copyrights

  • About the Author

  • Dedication

  • The Tale of the Landlady's Mirror

  • Notes

  • Also by this Author

  The Tale of the Landlady's Mirror

  Jane was unhappy. She wasn't born in Lower Elmsworth; she had moved down when she was sixteen and believed she was in love. Dundee had been her home, and she would have given anything to see the scum on the Tay again. Instead she was stuck in this house in a small village cut off from the rest of the world. Her teenage lover had knocked her up, beaten her and then committed suicide. Frightened, pregnant and alone, Jane had tried to return to Dundee. But Lower Elmsworth had its pull. The woods that surrounded it dazzled an outsider. Phantasms danced in the mists and capricious ghosts rose from the rivers and led wanderers astray. The paths were bent and all led back to Lower Elmsworth.

  Jane had taken a job at the local pub, washing dishes. She became a barmaid and then the landlord's lover, and then the landlady. Her daughter grew to a beautiful young girl and was joined by a half-brother. The two children reached adulthood and left home to make their own mistakes, leaving Jane to reach the morbid end of hers, with a pub she didn't want and a husband she no longer liked, in a village she wanted to leave.

  Thirty years passes quickly, even in a stultifying village like Lower Elmsworth.

  Mondays were always the best. Jane didn't work on a Monday; she left the pub in Donald's capable if somewhat tedious hands, and did her own thing. Most Mondays she would meet her two friends and they would read each other's tarot to the accompaniment of much gin, but Mary was away — away from Lower Elmsworth! — and Roberta had taken offense last week and refused to talk. Jane had called Roberta's daughter a filthy slut. While it was no doubt true, perhaps she might have been more diplomatic. But no matter. Jane could find her own entertainment today.

  Her wandering footsteps led her through the woods towards Addereastworth Eaves, a beautiful stretch of silver birch amongst which Jane and Donald had plighted their troth, the silver bark that glimmered in the moonlight lending a lovely romantic air to an otherwise uninspired evening. Addereastworth Eaves had changed in the thirty years that lay between that warm summer's evening and this crisp autumn morn: these days the dump lay beyond them. Jane stood leaning against a solitary oak gazing to the east. You couldn't see the dump from here. It was just beyond the bald ridge known locally, for reasons perhaps best left forgotten, as Hannah's Fall. You could smell the dump, though, a slightly tangy smell that made Jane think of old bookshops infested with damp. Jane had never been to the dump. The owner had a somewhat unsavoury reputation and Jane's position as a landlady meant that she heard the gossip through the mouths of tipsy grandmothers and sodden lumberjacks. But whatever the rumours of the dump-owner's greed, his avarice, his arrogance, his nosiness, all were agreed on one point: the dump had some interesting goods in it. Perhaps it was the dump that led Jane to Addereastworth Eaves, rather than the fading memory of an evening years before.

  Her feet took her across Hannah's Fall and into the dump.

  The mirror caught Jane's eye almost immediately. It seemed something belonging more in Snow White than a filthy eyesore in an English wood, a large ellipse of clear, smooth glass edged in gloriously carved silver. The back was curved like an old lyre and an elegant tripod would stand it at a somewhat shallow angle. Jane gazed into it, intent. Her reflection was slightly clouded, slightly misty, the harsh lines and angles on her face smoothed out. It was as though there was a layer of fine, gauzy gas between the glass and the silver and it was beautiful.

  The dump-owner stood beside her, too short to rise above her shoulder.

  "It's pretty, ain't it?" he asked.

  Jane nodded wordlessly.

  "Cost me fifty quid but I can't sell it at that. Pretty lady like you could use a pretty mirror, so I could let it go for twenty. Sound good? You'd have to be careful, of course. Nothing bought in this dump is quite what it pretends."

  Jane nodded again. The flattery was unnecessary; she would have paid a hundred without question. She wasn't that pretty, not anymore, and she knew it. But the mirror made her look beautiful again, beautiful and young, more like the teenager who had first come to Lower Elmsworth for love and less like the woman who had remained under obligation.

  "Be too heavy for you to move alone," the dump-owner continued, his hands counting notes Jane couldn't remember giving him. "Tell you what, I'll get it delivered to the pub early this afternoon. Back door, discreet-like. Sound good?"

  Jane nodded again, still staring into the mirror. Clouds drifted gently behind her head, puffs from a giant's pipe. Waving leaves cast small shadows across the mirror's glass and she almost failed to notice that the dump-owner cast no reflection whatsoever.

  The mirror looked as though it were designed for her bedroom. Donald didn't comment on it when he leaned his head around the door to let her know he was going downstairs. She hadn't expected him to. They didn't share the same bed these days. They didn't even share the same room. It was possible Donald thought she'd had the mirror for some time.

  Jane leaned closer to the glass. Her reflection peered back at her, youthful face unlined and glorious, eyes tinged with a sorrow born of age and experience, a sorrow that lent elegance more than anything. She let down her hair and it framed her face with a softness auburn again.

  She was meant to be working tonight. It was, Wednesday, karaoke night in the back room, and it was always busy. But Jane stared into her reflection's eyes for moments longer. She hadn't looked this good since she had left home and come to England. The scar on her chin, relic of a glass smashed when she was 20, was gone. Jane blinked back tears, tears which in her reflection made her eyes dance in the light.

  She wondered what anyone else might see in the mirror. It seemed to show Jane her reflection, perhaps from before Amy was born, but surely not everyone would see the same. Perhaps it really was taking people back to the days when they were last truly happy; perhaps the dump owner cast no reflection because he was always happy. Perhaps on Monday she could show it to Roberta and Mary. Perhaps they would say what they would see.

  She looked in the mirror again.

  It was gone six and the bar was filling up when Donald knocked on the locked door to a silent and empty room. In front of the mirror was a short note, addressed to him, signed by Jane — just three words. Three simple words, blue ink stained and smeared by three small drops of blood. He read the note and he glanced in the mirror. The setting sun filled the image of the room behind Donald with a warm golden glow but his reflection was dark, a mystery in silhouette. He leaned closer, and the setting sun glinted on the mirror's golden frame.

  Notes
r />   This is perhaps my favourite of the dump-master stories because it's very simple and actually quite sad in a way. As with the Siamese Painting (see The Tale of the Siamese Painting) I had no real idea what the Mirror was when I started and it was in 2008 that I decided to leave the entire story like that. Does it take people back to when they were happy, literally? Does it drive them mad with remorse so that they kill themselves? Does it absorb them or provide some kind of portal, or give them the courage to break from their situation? I added in the note and the blood to add credence to the one idea, commented that there was no body and on the whole magical nature of the Mirror in the first place to imply another, and deliberately provided no firm answer.

  I had no idea how many words this would come out as, but in the end it was "not very many". I love this. To me it's kind of fairy tale melancholy. Probably to everyone else it's just ham-fisted schmaltz, but I don't give a toss.

  Iain Brown, Oslo, June 2011

  Also by this author:

  Dawn Touches the Girl

  The Tale of the Siamese Painting

  Weblinks:

  Killing Vector blog: https://killingvector.blogspot.com

  Amazon profile: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00546D7EG