Diary of the Investigator — Part 4 (Final Entries)
Day 28
I tried to burn the room tonight.
Not the mirror room — I could not bring myself back there — but the dressing-room glass in my lodging, the cheap oval I bought years ago and then forgot about. I carried a coal from the grate and held it to the edge of the frame, thinking the heat might loosen whatever has glued itself to the silvered back.
The coal sputtered. The flame winked. For a moment I had hope. The coal died. The mirror did not. My hand trembled so hard the coal fell into the ash pan and the ceiling blackened with smoke, but the glass remained whole, indifferent as a god.
When the smoke cleared, the reflection smiled. Not my mouth. The smile was a thing of its own.
Day 29
Webb came by today. He is kinder than I deserve. He carried a thermos and sat a long while before he spoke. He spoke of gardens, of his sister's children, of mundane things meant to anchor a man. I answered in fragments. He left after an hour, shaking my hand as though everything were still salvageable.
I relocked every mirror in the house — covered some with cloth, tipped others face-down behind furniture. For ten minutes I thought I heard someone whispering from beneath the sheet: come back. I pulled the cloth away and the glass showed only my face, pale, ringed by the cloth like a halo.
Day 30
The mirror-room returned to me in daylight, unbidden. I saw it when I walked past a shop window: a hundred panes, and in each the same man — my face — turning his head very slightly as if in pain. I went in. The shopkeeper looked up and said: "The place you mentioned? Empty now. They've sealed it. Strange tenants, a woman said, voices at night."
Perhaps it is sealed. Perhaps not.
I stood on the pavement and watched my reflection in the shop glass. It did not match my movement. It smiled, then looked away, and for a breath I saw, not my face, but a crowd of faces pressed against the inside of the glass. I do not remember how I came home.
Day 31
I wrote the names down.
Not other people's names — not victims, not witnesses — but a list of things I feared I might become: fraud, coward, liar, monster, mirror. I wrote them one under another until my hand cramped. When I read them back, one had been crossed out in a hand that I did not recognise.
Crossed out: coward.
Day 32
Tonight I went back.
I took Webb's old lantern and walked the long way to the cellar. The gate was rusted, padlocked. There were notices now — police tape, civic markers. The building keeper met me at the iron gate as if expecting a visitor who is already late. He handed me a key, blunt and cold, and for once did not ask why I had come.
The chamber was unchanged in one sense: the mirrors still lined the walls; the chair still waited. The coroner's seal had been broken months ago. Whoever had barged in had taken the corpse and left the room tidy, as though respect mattered to them. The glass shone.
I moved among the reflections. I counted — and this time I counted nineteen. Nineteen faces where eighteen should be. The extra face stood just behind me in each pane: not smiling, not accusing, only patient.
I touched the glass.
It was warm — warm as skin. I thought of water and the old sensation of sinking. My fingers left prints that did not come away when I wiped them.
Then across the nearest pane, a hand appeared. Not mine. It pressed lightly from the other side, palm flat, fingertips splayed. It was a child's hand. I did not flinch when I felt the cold match my skin from within the glass.
Day 33
(Fragments — the handwriting rushes)
— the child's hand was small and the nails were clean
— the hand did not belong to anyone I know but I recognised it as an ache
— the panes showed not only faces now but places: a bridge, a bakery shelf, a train window with a girl in uniform
— the panes showed old things I had tried to forget; they held them up like trophies
— they do not ask; they invite; they sing without sound; I think I can answer because I know the cadence
Webb called. He asked if I were well. I told him I was. I wanted to say: I am not mine. I wanted to say: They are patient. I could not bring the words out intact. Instead I muttered about evidence and left the line open.
Day 34
If this journal had instruction, it would say: do not look when they smile. But who can decide? A mirror smiles as easily as a flower opens. The temptation is not in malice but in recognition.
I stayed the day in the chamber. I sat in the chair that had once supported a dead man, and I listened to the glass breathe. At first, there was only the small hiss of my own blood. Then the glass grew clearer and more honest than any witness I had ever questioned. In it, I saw my mother's hands when she ironed, the bakery owner's laugh when a new batch rose, a small boy's chalk writing on slate: Stay. I saw the faces of those whose names the TT had recorded in a bound book. Each face had a single request; each request sounded like a lullaby.
I thought I might be able to bargain. I will write their names. I will remember. I will not forget. The glass did not answer with the words I offered. It answered with motion, and the motion was an opening.
Day 35
(Last coherent entry)
I understood why the TT asks for names. Names open things. Names are keys. The book of the TT — what he wrote — is not a ledger of passengers. It is a register. He writes them and they are taken. He does not steal lives; he catalogues what has already gathered. To speak a name aloud to a ledger is to invite the glass to open a little farther.
I have given my days to the living, and yet the living have not kept my hours whole. The dead are patient because time is theirs. They do not hurry. Their patience is a thing of malice and mercy in equal measure.
If you find this book, if any hand other than mine turns its pages, then listen: do not go near the mirrors. Do not answer them. Do not be the one who says your name aloud into their ledger. There is a thin, almost comforting voice that speaks from behind the glass, and it will call you by your fondest memory. It will promise reunion.
It will not tell you that the exchange requires a seat.
Day 36
(The final lines — pressed, heavy — the ink applied with a weight that bends the paper beneath.)
They asked my name.
I told it.
They smiled.
— end —
(A smear of ink, the page torn; the diary was found on the investigator's desk, one window of the lodging house open to the night. In the glass across the road, the neighbors later swore they saw him study his reflection, raise a hand — and not meet his own.)