A Matter Of Taste by Fred Saberhagen (ebook pc reader TXT) 📕

      “After what I went through eleven years ago, there was no doubt in my mind. I don’t have any trouble recognizing one of them when I see one.”

      Joe was suddenly sounding like a cop. “Is this Kaiser one of that bunch who were involved in your kidnapping?”

      “No. I’m sure he’s not. I never saw him before. But I can tell what he is.”

      Something else was beginning to bother Angie, bother her more and more, and she decided that she was going to take care of it. Maybe she couldn’t do much for the old man, as Joe called him, but at least she would wipe the blood off his face. While the men talked, she went into the adjoining bathroom to wet a towel.

      While in the process of doing this she discovered that in this bathroom there was no mirror over the sink. A flat, glassy screen of the proper size and shape was there. But it reflected only dully.

      The screen was built right into the wall, and wouldn’t open when Angie tugged at a corner—no medicine chest behind it. And just above the screen, angled down to aim directly at her, was the glassy end of a dark cylinder, recognizable as the eye of a video camera

      Wondering, Angie observed and touched a switch beside the screen. Extra vanity lights came on, and in a moment her own image had appeared, in color and close-up, on the screen that took the place of a mirror. The picture had something odd about it, and Angie needed a moment to realize that this was not the reversed image that an ordinary mirror always presented. When Angie raised her right hand, the right hand of the young woman in the electronic picture, not the left, went up.

      Leaving the video turned on, she finished wetting her towel and came back out into the bedroom. “John? Did you see this?”

      Following her gesture, he went into the bathroom and looked at the camera and screen. Joe, who tagged along, grinned faintly and shook his head as if in admiration. “Kind of unusual, huh?” But in fact neither of the men seemed especially surprised.

      Back in the bedroom, Angie bent over the man in the bed and gently wiped the dried gore from around his mouth, his chin, and his bare chest. His eyes blinked once. Despite everything, she found much that was attractive about his face. Then, shuddering just perceptibly, she threw the towel into a laundry basket.

      Speaking about the video arrangement, she said “I’ve never seen anything like it. But I can see there are advantages. You see yourself the way you are, I mean not reversed.”

      The men looked at each other. John drew a deep breath. “Honey? The real point is that Uncle Matthew doesn’t care for mirrors.”

      “He doesn’t—?”

      “No. And they don’t do him any good anyway. I’m only surprised that some of the other rooms, like the one we slept in, do have them. No, I guess I’m not surprised. He likes to be courteous to his guests.”

      Angie was thinking aloud “It’s almost like he’s— disfigured somehow. Though of course he isn’t, he’s very handsome. I mean, about the mirrors, and being a recluse—” But no, she wasn’t thinking straight at all. If you wanted to avoid seeing your own disfigurement, how would a video camera be any better than a mirror? Of course you could leave it turned off—

      Joe cut in. “Angie, you haven’t got it yet.”

      “I haven’t?”

      Joe looked around the room. “Have you got a small mirror? In your purse, maybe?” He sounded calm and deadly serious.

      Without asking any questions Angie went out of the room and came back in a moment with her purse, from which she extracted a small mirror, holding it out to Joe.

      “Don’t give it to me, hold it yourself. And take a good look at him. In your mirror.” Joe gestured toward the man on the bed.

      She tried, and blinked, and rubbed the compact glass. She tried again, from several angles, and in several intensities of light. There were the upper bedclothes, cleanly visible, but they were mounded up over nothing but hollow invisibility. And there was the lower sheet, with its crackling plastic envelope of earth beneath it, pressed down as if under the weight of a solid body. But if there was a body there, the mirror was letting her look right through it. She needed a minute to convince herself that the image of the being she had been calling Uncle Matthew was not going to appear as a reflection.

      Once having achieved this understanding, she turned a helpless face to Joe.

      “Don’t ask me why or how,” he said. “I’ve heard of the laws of optics and all that. Maybe there’s really an image there in your mirror, but the human brain just won’t see it.”

      And that of course was no help at all.

* * *

      Angie still had had no sleep to speak of, and in her present state of exhaustion she was turning abnormally suggestible, likely to accept almost anything without an argument. Now she began to fear hallucinations. But reason and fear were both losing the struggle against sleep. At last, on a sofa, in the security of as much daylight as the apartment afforded, she succumbed. Her slumbers were beset by dreams, dreams of pale anonymous faces that came drifting in the night outside the windows of the apartment, mouthing pleas and threats. In her dreams she thought she could hear the creatures through the thick and otherwise inviolable glass, but their voices had no power to awaken her.

* * *

      When Angie did wake up she felt rested, and more herself than she had for a long time. It was almost as if she had slept for many hours, though the time was only a little after noon. The day was cloudy as before, but the light was still comfortingly full. Angie, now starting to feel hungry, stretched,