The Dragon Charmer by Jan Siegel Page B

quick shiver ran through her, as if at a sudden chill.
    Indoors, they said good night with more affection than was customary, Fern even going so far as to embrace her friend, although she had never acquired the London habit of scattering kisses among all and sundry. Gaynor retired to her room, feeling insensibly relieved. As she undressed she found herself looking at the television set, disconnected now but still retaining its air of bland threat, as if at any moment the screen might flicker into unwholesome life. She thought: I don’t want it in here; but when she tried to move it, overcoming a sudden reluctance to approach or handle it, the machine felt awkward, at once slippery and heavy, unnaturally heavy. She could not seem to get a grip on it. In the end she gave up, but the blank screen continued to trouble her, so she draped a towel over it, putting a china bowl on the top to prevent the makeshift covering sliding off. Will would probably be asleep now; she could not disturb him just to help her shift the television. She climbed into bed and after some time lying wakeful, nerves on the stretch, she, too, slept.
    She was standing in front of the mirror, face-to-face with her reflection. But it looked different from earlier in the day: it had acquired a sort of intense, serious beauty, an antique glamor that had little to do with the real Gaynor. It isn’t me, she thought, but I wish it was. Behind the reflection her room, too, had changed. There were books, pictures, a potted plant whose single flower resembled puckered red lips, a bedspread made of peacock feathers. A smoked glass shade softened the lightbulb to a dull glow. This isn’t my room, she realized. This is Alison’s room, the way it must have looked when she lived here. Mirrors remember. Her gaze returned to her own image with awakening dread: she knew what wouldhappen with that dream-knowing that is both terrible and ineffectual, a vain striving to alter the unalterable. Dream turned to nightmare: the face before her shrank into a tapering oval, hollow cheeked, broad browed; the deep eyes were elongated into slits, not dark but bright, shining with the multifaceted glitter of cut crystal. A dull pallor rippled through her hair, transforming it into the dim tresses of a phantom. Gaynor was paralyzed, unable to twitch a muscle, but in the mirror her mouth widened into a thin crimson smile, curling up toward her cheekbones, image surveying reality with cold mockery. The surface of the glass was no longer hard and solid: it had become little more than a skin, the thickness of a molecule, dividing her from the other room, the other person. And then the reflection reached out, and the skin broke, and the stranger stepped out of the mirror into Gaynor’s bedroom.
    “Alison,” said Gaynor.
    “Alimond,” said the stranger. “Alison was just a name. Alimond is my true Self.”
    “Why have you come back?”
    The smile became laughter, a tinkling silvery laughter like the sound of breaking glass. “Why do you think?” she said. “To watch television, of course. I’ll tell you a secret: there is no television beyond the Gate of Death. Neither in heaven nor in hell. All we are allowed to see is our own lives and the lives of those we touched; an endless replaying of all our yesterdays, all our failures, all our mistakes. Think of that, ere your time comes. Live yourself a life worth watching, before it’s too late.”
    She took Gaynor’s hand as she spoke: her grip felt insubstantial, light as a zephyr, but cold, so cold. The icy chill stabbed Gaynor to the bone.
    Alimond said: “Plug the television in, and switch it on.”
    Gaynor tried to pull free of the cold ethereal grasp but her nerve withered and her strength turned to water. “You are too sensitive,” murmured Alimond. “Too delicate to resist, too feeble to fight. You have neither the backbone nor the Gift to stand against me. Fernanda chooses her friends unwisely. Push the plug