The Crumpled Mirror by Elizabeth Loea (free novel reading sites TXT) 📕

changed, too, in a matter of meters, from redwoods and oaks to streaming branches of wisteria that kissed the air as we strolled through it. We’d walked into a kind of summer I’d never experienced.

Lilac tucked her hands into her pockets and waited for me to say something.

“Why can we only just now see it?” I asked at last. The air warmed a little more, now becoming temperate enough for me to sleep in. I carried the board at my side and Lilac snuck a peek at it. Vivi glared at the bone-white wood.

“I assume it’s because of the first test,” she said. “We passed, so we’re able to go in.”

“Did we...all pass?”

“Who the hell knows?” She angled an astonished laugh at the moon, half-victorious and half-perplexed.

I shrugged and turned my attention to the house itself. It was the most gorgeous place I’d ever seen.

The house must have been built in the early 1900s; it was a grand, Georgian-style house, ornate gates framing the trail as we approached. There was no fence around it, just the gates bolted to the trees, but we took the time to go in through the gates.

The iron felt cold in my hand. This was real.

My first thought was: Oh no.

The journal page had mentioned a mansion. A mansion, a dark-haired translucent girl, and a young woman.

No. Vivi wasn’t real, I reminded myself. Vivi was a memory. If she’d been a real ghost, the others would have been able to see her.

I took a deep breath and tried to smile.

As if on cue, Vivi materialized near the front door of the house, her arms crossed.

The main area in front of the house was free of trees, but thick grass dotted with pale flowers flooded the ground up to the door of the house. Ivy crowded the windowsills and choked the elegant metalwork on the railing that encircled small balconies on the higher floors. Moonlight ebbed from the petals to the ground.

The path stopped beyond the gates. Whatever this place was, nobody had been here in a while. If it had just been built, which I doubted, it hadn’t bothered to make it easy for us to approach.

I followed Lilac through the grass, the stems brushing my legs and my kneecaps. Vivi materialized next to me and walked at my side, but she didn’t disturb the grass at all—it just went right through her. We climbed the stairs in silence and examined the exterior of the house for any signs of danger.

Aside from the memory of Vivi that stalked to my side and stared at me. I ignored her. This was no time to fall into old habits of believing in ghosts.

The outside was made of stone bricks carefully stacked together. Columns framed the door, brick steps paving the way for us to approach. The night sky loomed behind the house, but lights were on in several windows along the upper floor.

That might have been a worse sign. That meant someone had been there recently, or might still be inside.

Lilac and I took one look at each other and grinned.

When we pushed the main door open, it creaked to announce our arrival. It seemed, though, that someone had been waiting for us. A note rested atop the iron table in the entrance hall, a neat script scribbled across it. Fortunately, it wasn’t the same handwriting as I’d seen on Amaranth’s note earlier that evening.

Welcome. Check out the library. It has some spellbooks you might like. Do not under any circumstances knock anything over. -- Mint

“Holy shit,” I said. Lilac nodded and reached into her backpack for a flashlight. She clicked it a few times, but it didn’t flicker to life even after she checked the batteries.

Fortunately, we didn’t need it.

The house lit up as we examined it, chandeliers coming to life over our heads. Kerosene lamps flared on a round table in the entryway as we passed, flowers blooming in real time from a vase. I stopped to gape at them: the flowers were California poppies, but their pigmentation was an unmistakable sky-blue. Their edges glowed a little, too, as if they were ready to catch fire with the slightest breath of wind.

Vivi glared at them and gave the flowers a wide berth as she passed.

“Come on,” Lilac told me. “Look at this.”

The ceiling of the next room must have been thirty feet in the air, curved beams meeting in the middle to hold up the wooden ceiling. The ceiling itself was dark redwood, like the rest of the room, painted with the most beautiful mural I had ever seen.

The mural had so many sections, I wasn’t sure where to look first. A group of women in dark dresses stood in a circle atop a whirlpool in one corner. In another, a mirrored tray of flowers gave off smoke that congealed in an open claw near the middle of the room. Antlers changed to branches and bloomed as I watched. The mural shifted, slowly but surely, until my face appeared in the veins of a leaf and Lilac’s face rippled in the ocean waves. A cluster of blue poppies crowded into the well-lit center of the ceiling.

And there, in a tiny, poorly lit spot next to mine, was Vivi’s face. A ghost’s face. It hit me in the chest: she was real, or at least, she was real enough to count to this house. She had always seemed imagined to me, as though my mind was conjuring her spirit.

This house knew her, though.

Lilac yanked me back to the present when she started to speak. “Do you think…” she started. “Do you think everyone in that painting has been here?”

She was staring hard at something, but there were so many faces, I couldn’t track her line of sight to a specific one. In the corner, I spotted Mint painted in next to a dark-haired man.

“I don’t know. And I don’t know if I want to find out,” I replied, my eyes on the scowling man at Mint’s