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

We must have looked like a duck and her ducklings as the group trailed Ginger across the house. Up stairs, down ladders, around one floor that started a foot lower than it ended up. She rejected one option after the other, and so the sounds of tired footfalls and somewhat labored breathing continued to fill the house.

Finally, she spotted something out of a window: the top of a lighthouse. Adrian and I fetched the various flying objects from downstairs and soon we were off, floating through the afternoon sky high above a field of pale purple grass I had never seen before in my entire life. A stretch of great blue ocean spread across the horizon like a thick layer of jam across bread, a little unnatural in its vivid color and its slow, rhythmic rippling.

“Focus,” Ginger reminded me. She and Lilac walked circles around the lighthouse as the rest of us examined the intricate carvings on a sign near the main door, which had no knob. There was nothing significant about the carving—just flowers and vegetables.

Indigo alighted on the ground so smoothly that he might as well have been flying, even though he’d sat behind me on my board again. He tapped a finger the carvings, searching for a button that would help understand the mechanisms of the door. It took a few moments, but with a press of his index finger to a carved iris, the door clicked and opened with a smooth shhhh sound.

He glanced at me before stepping inside. I slid from my driftwood to the soft purple grass, propping my driftwood against one of the carvings as I followed Indigo inside.

The place looked like a museum. Old pictures of other worlds hung from the walls, so fantastical that if I had seen them a week before, I would have thought them impressionistic. Furniture crowded the steps partway up and more paintings were piled up against each other, gathering dust. Ornately painted plates, cut glass goblets, bronze silverware, and a stack of sculpted gold apples all lay abandoned on the stairs as I followed Indigo up toward the top of the tower. Spellbooks littered the stairs in a variety of languages and I had to restrain myself from picking the closest one up.

It seemed that this had once been the hoard of some kleptomaniac magician.

At the top of the spiral staircase was a bedroom-slash-kitchen-slash-den,  small enough that ten long paces could cross it. This room was more spare, decorated as simply as possible with a couch, an unmade bed, a simple mirror without a frame, and a stove. There was no refrigerator and, as far as I could tell, no plates.

Someone made an oof sound downstairs, and then swore. It sounded as though Lilac had tripped over one of the artifacts.

“So?” Indigo asked, turning to me.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket and searched for a surface to draw on. There were the windows, but the balcony outside looked far from sturdy and I didn’t want any of us plummeting to a grisly death.

Indigo tapped the mirror and I figured it was as good as any surface. Lilac appeared at the top of the stairs and jogged over to watch the magic; Ginger and Adrian were close behind.

An audience made this infinitely harder.

The moment I was done, the mirror began to shift. As if a hand had grabbed it and pulled it inward, the center buckled, the reflection gaining angles until the magic smoothed it out a little. Adrian took a step back as the mirror snapped into place again. I reached out to run a finger over it: the reflection looked like a ball of crushed paper that had been flattened out again; it was functional, but it had crinkles.

“Wow,” Indigo said. He was not looking at the mirror—he was looking at me. “So what now?”

There were two choices: wait around for Mint to come back, whenever that was, or go through the mirror to whatever lay beyond. It would be dangerous, of course.

But when had that ever stopped me?

It would be wise to wait. Especially with ghosts around, and whoever was turning people to ash, we needed advice from the one person we knew could answer our questions (no matter how little he wanted to do that).

I was about to suggest turning back, but warmth clasped my upper arm, right next to my shoulder. It wasn’t a hand, exactly, but it was a suggestion. Something intangible—something outside me—had summoned me into the mirror.

It had summoned us.

What can I say? Wisdom cowers in the face of adventure.

I set my hand to the glass and let the crumpled mirror consume me.

XVII

Whatever I was expecting when I stepped through that mirror, it was not a diner straight out of the late ‘50s. It was not the sound of Elvis playing on a jukebox, or the smell of french fries.

And yet, there it was. The place itself was the smallest surprise, perhaps because it was so familiar. Grease bubbled in the kitchen and rubber soles squeaked across the tile floor. The teal pleather booths were squeaky clean and smelled like antiseptic.

The customers, though...they were the unusual part of this place.

There in one corner was a woman who looked like the sky, her hair billowing white as clouds while her skin was the flickering blue of a chilly, sunny day. There in the opposite corner was a man like us, but with no pupils or whites to his eyes: just green, green, green. Most people were humanoid, but there were some that I wouldn’t have been able to discern as sentient unless they moved: a person composed of tightly-woven vines, sipping a cup of tea.

And then, at one of the most distant booths, was Mint. His fingers were pressed so hard to the table, the surface had begun to warp around them. He had his chin propped precariously on the top of a cup. His face rippled, back and forth,