Alchymical Romance by Lee Battersby (best big ereader .txt) 📕

bed, or whatever drugs, blades or fluids he used to batter his nerve endings, the core of him remained indifferent. Nothing reached inside. The void remained empty, pressing against his organs, deadening everything it touched. Nothing had changed, not in all the months since his visit to Sir Million. Not since then, and not in all the years before. It was not that the failures proved so disastrous. It was knowing the inevitability of failure, and still being compelled to try.

The taxi arrived, the lover departed, and a small interval of peace descended. Again, and again, and again.

Today, however, a change: the taxi was gone, and a courier van filled the driveway. A uniformed figure approached, knocked on the front door. Markus signed the proffered form, received the brown-wrapped package. A flat box, perhaps four inches thick, long and wide enough that he chose to lean it against the arm of his sofa rather than attempt to lift it onto the coffee table. He curled his fingers over the top flap and pulled, revealing the contents in one long tear of cardboard.

A mirror, simply framed, reflective surface gleaming a dull brass in the light from the single lamp. A small sheet of something like thick paper was taped to its surface. Markus fingered it. A spark of something tickled him inside. The sheet was not paper, but vellum— smooth and supple beneath his fingers, slick as he pulled it from its mooring. He recognised Sir Million’s rounded, feminine hand in the letters stained into its surface. He read.

Dear Fellow,

A surprise. Not what you expected. There was so little of you left. So few drops of essence. Not enough to transmute blood or dreams. Enough to spread over a surface. Enough, I hope, to show you. What? Who knows? A mirror made of you, dear Markus. Let it not fail.

M o’C

Markus ran a finger over the mirror’s surface, frowning. It was soft and warm, sticky, not at all the cold, smooth metal he had expected. In the mirror, his doppelganger frowned and removed its finger from the glass. Markus bent, and peered closely. The image was dark, its outline vague and wavering. He stood and recovered the lamp from the far corner of the room, set it upon the coffee table, and knelt before the mirror again. The light worked-he saw himself, the details of the room stark behind him. Still, the image bore soft edges, almost out of focus, as if a million tiny imperfections caught the light and diffused it. A fault of the odd surface, Markus decided. A flaw in his essence.

There was something else wrong with the image, something he could not quite put his finger on. Markus traced his outline. There he was, in the centre of the glass, in his shirt and trousers, and with a look on his face that countless women had referred to as the final straw. The lamp was there, casting its light. The coffee table, the curtains… there. Behind him, to the right. A figure. A dim smudge where he should be able to see to the wall. As Markus watched it came closer, became clearer. A woman. There was a woman. Markus spun away from the mirror with a gasp, then stopped short. The room was empty. The coffee table, the lamp, the curtains. Nothing else. He turned again to the glass. She was there, almost touching his shoulder. Markus reached out behind him, felt nothing.

“What the hell?”

There was more, now, Markus saw. A fault with the woman, something wrong, or missing. She was beautiful, breathtakingly so: short without appearing small; curvaceous; her breasts the perfect size to balance the swell of her hips; elfin features atop a long neck; suntanned skin the colour of lightly burnished bronze; short bobbed hair curled around delicate ears. Her almond eyes met his. She smiled, and in that smile lay all the joys that had avoided him for as long as he could remember. Markus gasped. A bolt of heat struck the centre of his chest, tearing his breath away. The woman stepped in front of the mirror-Markus and raised her hand. She was perfect, as perfect as any desire he could ever have. And exposed to his gaze as she was, with nothing between them but the surface of the mirror, the light from two lamps playing across her, front and back, Markus saw the wrongness he had been unable to place. Her skin was not just the colour of bronze. It was bronze.

The woman in the mirror was made of bronze.

They stayed that way for several minutes, staring at each other across a gulf of space and understanding. Then, with a smile so sweet it made the void inside Markus ache, she raised one perfectly forged hand, and beckoned him: closer, closer. Markus fell to both knees, inches from the mirror. Without knowing why, he raised his hand and pressed it against the sticky surface, like a prison inmate in an interview booth, desperate for the touch of a visiting lover. The surface resisted him briefly, then his hand sank into it, deeper than the millimetres-thick plane. He let go a shout of surprise. On the other side of the image, his hand appeared. Only it was not his hand but a simulacrum, in every detail a perfect imitation of his own, forged from glinting bronze.

Markus wiggled his fingers, and the bronze hand in the mirror did the same. He clenched his fist, and watched the metal fingers curl over until they pressed against their palm. He pulled back, and his arm came out of the glass. The hand slid backwards until the heel was on one side and the fingers were on the other. Markus stared at it, then leaned forward again.

“How? I don’t…” But of course, he did know. It was Sir Million, and his essence, and the need that had been drawn out of him-transformed, transfigured, given shape. He looked into the perfect eyes of the bronze woman. She reached out, and her hand nestled inside his.

And suddenly, just like that, the barrier that surrounded his void was ruptured, and into the breach poured… he didn’t know, didn’t have the words, but it was hot as blood, and it stung, and the emptiness inside him drank and drank and he was crying and laughing and so… so…

“Oh, oh, God. Oh, God.” He brought his free hand to his face, and wept into it. “Oh, God.”

And slowly, slowly, the first, boiling rush of emotion thickened, settled, until the void was full and only gentle waves lapped at the edges. Markus raised his head, drew the back of his hand across his face, tears and snot mingling in a long streak. He sniffed, brought his breathing under control.

“Oh, God,” he said to the woman behind the mirror. “Is this what it feels like? Oh, God. Do I love you?”

She smiled, and pulled on his hand, drawing him closer to the surface of the glass. Markus resisted, looked around— at the room, the furnishings, the fixtures. Nothing here, he realised, nothing that isn’t beyond the mirror. Nothing that isn’t replicated. He turned his gaze back to the glass, and the one thing he could not find anywhere else.

“But what if…?”

He paused. What if what? He looked at himself in the mirror. What happens to him, he thought, if I’m there too? Does he disappear? Do I? And if I disappear, will anyone notice? Will they care?

And he realised: it doesn’t matter. None of it does. Whatever happened, he would not be alone. Whatever happened, she would be beside him, and if not her, then someone, and he would love her.

He would love her. And for that small fact, that one small fact, he would risk the answer to any question.

Smiling, crying, happy, Markus bent forward and leaned beyond the mirror.

Alchymical Romance by Lee Battersby is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia Licence. You are free to copy, communicate and adapt the work for non-commercial purposes, so long as you attribute Lee Battersby and you distribute any derivative work (ie new work based on this story) only under this licence. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.battersby.com.au/.