From: dvacca@nyx.cs.du.edu (David Vacca)
Subject: Mirror
Followup-To: talk.bizarre, alt.horror
Organization: Nyx, Public Access Unix @ U. of Denver Math/CS dept.
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 92 07:24:47 GMT


     A small, decaying, rust-belt city in the midwest.
     A decaying neighborhood, once filled with graduate students and
junior faculty from the college a quarter mile away.  But a group
of retirees hated the boisterous and vital graduate students, who
reminded them of what they had lost and what they had never risked.
So they passed laws in the name of Christian Decency and Property
Values to chase them out.  Godfearing white trash with potsmoking
heavy metal thug kids moved in instead.  The vandalism of their
children chased out the faculty, leaving the hoodlums and the
retirees, the latter of whom screamed for police protection while
placing their assets into tax shelters so the graduate students
and junior faculty who now lived in a good part of town would
pay instead.
     1:33 in the morning in this neighborhood.
     A battered Toyota crept up an alley, past the garage doors of
retirees and white trash.  The retirees all had vandalized garages.
The white trash may have had vandalized garage doors as well.  Who
could tell?
     One functioning headlight dimly picked out the bright points
of litter among the weeds.  Ruts in the alley, filled with broken
ice just beginning to freeze again, scattered the light away from
themselves while remaining black as holes punched through the 
ground and into the future.
     The driver sighed, and rubbed his eyes.  He knew the alley
well, had played in it as a kid, had kissed his first girl in it,
smoked his first cigarette in it, smoked dope for the first timer
on the roof of a garage next to it.  The only milestone of his
life that hadn't happened here was getting laid for the first 
time, but he'd tried.  Partially for nostalgia, but mostly because
it was cheap.  Eventually, though, he'd been forced to spring for
a room in a motel on the highway.
     He was coming up to the largest rut in the alley, a monster
pothole that could eat a car and take off the muffler on the way
out.  He slowed the car down to a crawl.  Looked up at the rear
view mirror.  Saw he'd have to adjust it.  Wendy would be taking
the car to the McDonalds where she worked at 7, and she always got
bitchy if the mirror wasn't just right.  He reached up to adjust
the mirror, and froze.
     It had been a fluke.  The red glow of the brake lights and the
sudden re-arrangement of the rear view mirror lit up the side of
the alley by the Tyler's garage and gave him a view of the bushes
beside it.  And next to the bushes, just beginning to cross the
alley, was some _thing_. 
     He took it all in in a split second, despite the dimness of
the light.  It seemed to be flesh-colored, and big- maybe bigger
than he was.  It had a shape that should not have been allowed
to exist on the face of the earth.  It bulged at odd angles, 
like the sandcastles he'd made at the beach as a kid by dripping
wet sand into heaps.  It had no arms, no legs, and no head.  But
it had moved, he was sure of it.  And it was alive, he knew it
was alive, buried in the alien figure was the symnetry of a living
being.  Startled, he released the mirror and, in a moment of extreme
stupidity he was to regret, stepped on the brakes.  The figure
twitched once, then vanished into a flurry of motion.  It moved 
faster than the driver could believe, although slowly enough for him
to get the sense that it had collapsed and then become multiple
things, all diving into the weeds by the garage.
     It took less than three seconds, all told.  The driver stared
dumbly in the mirror.  The weeds barely moved, no more than any
other clump of weeds that had been brushed aside by his car.  By
the light of the taillights he could make out much of the clump of
weeds, and it seemed much too small to hide what he had seen.
     Eyes straining, curiosity beat out fear.  He backed up, and 
pulled the car to the other side of the alley to allow the one 
working headlight to illuminate the weeds and loose trash by the
garage.  Nothing, except that a neighborhood dog had been at a bag.
The carcass of a chicken dinner seemed to have been the prize.
     What had he seen?  He thought.  Flashback?  No, to have a 
flashback you had to have used something stronger than pot, he was
pretty sure, and he never had.  Okay, what had happened?  Well, I
reached up to adjust the mirror, he thought, and slowly repeated
the action.  Then he stopped.  In the dim light the car provided,
his hand took on a whole new perspective.  Shadows hid parts of it,
making it somewhat unrecognizable.  He held his hand up to the
mirror.  If he squinted, and let his imagination run free, it did
sort of look like what he'd seen.  He then opened his hand and 
jerked it away from the mirror, like he had earlier.  A flurry of
action resulted, as his fingers separated and then whisked out of
the way.  It didn't seem convincing as an explanation for what he'd
seen, but it was the only one that made any sense.  What else could
it be?  He'd almost crapped his pants because of the reflection of
his own hand in a mirror.  Christ.
     With a growing sense of relief that still did not allay his
uneasiness, he drove to the end of the alley, put the car in the
garage, went inside, microwaved a couple of frozen burritos, and 
went to bed.  Wendy was asleep.

     Outside in the alley, the automatic timer on the garage light
ran its' cycle, plunging the alley back into gloom.  Something
gnawed the last few bits of gristle from a chickenbone.  Have to
do something about that one, it thought.  Maybe its window will
be open...

---
David Vacca, Just an Excitable Boy.

     (Okay, it's a bit pretentious.  So kill me.)X

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