Scheol

Fear the gloom, for its essence is echt.

The mirror had no glass in it. That was the first lie it told.

It lay in the lining of his coat, cold against his ribs, its silver handle catching what little firelight remained. Elias had wrapped it in cloth three times, then hidden it beneath a pocket he had sewn shut himself. Still, when the rain worried at the roof of the abandoned shed and the wind found every crack in the boards, he felt it looking for him.

Outside, the hillside was black. Inside, the last ember gave a tired sigh and disappeared.

The whispers began at once.

They never spoke words he could repeat. They moved through him like breath through a keyhole, full of grief and recognition. Sometimes they sounded like children behind a wall. Sometimes they sounded like his own voice, older and hollowed out, asking for one more look.

Elias pressed his palms against his ears. It made no difference.

Ten years earlier, he had been seventeen and certain that every locked thing existed to be opened. His grandmother had kept a small cedar chest beneath her bed. She had never told him where it came from. She only said that the box had survived people who had not, and that he was never to touch it.

The warning made the chest shine in his imagination.

One afternoon, while she was away at the market, he found the key beneath a prayer book. Inside the chest lay a folded page and a silver hand mirror, its back worked with a pattern of roots and closed eyes. The page said only this: It will show you what you most wish to keep. It will take everything else.

He laughed when he read it.

Then he looked.

The boy in the mirror was beautiful. Not handsome, exactly. Beautiful in the way a promise can be beautiful before it has to become true. Elias saw clear skin, bright eyes, a future without poverty or loneliness or the slow embarrassment of being ordinary. He saw a self that looked as though the world had been made for him.

He could not look away.

At first the mirror asked for nothing. It merely rewarded him. Each time he raised it, the reflection seemed younger, brighter, more complete. But the days around him began to fail. His grandmother’s voice became difficult to remember. Food had no taste. Friends spoke to him and found his answers drifting somewhere behind his teeth.

Then the whispers came.

They called the place beyond the glass Scheol. Not a country of flame, but a depth without morning. A road crowded with those who had traded their lives for the image of one perfect moment.

Elias ran when he understood. He sold what he could, burned what he could not bear to carry, and walked north until no one knew his name. The mirror followed in its hiding place. Every refusal made its whispers louder. Every look made his body older.

Now his hair was grey. His hands trembled. In the darkness, he felt seventeen only when he held the silver handle.

Just one look, he thought.

The thought did not sound like his own.

He unwrapped the cloth. Moonlight found the mirror before he did. The surface brightened, and there he was: the boy from the day he first opened the chest, untouched by rain, hunger, or regret.

Elias reached towards the face.

The reflection smiled first.

Behind it, far below the silver skin, a million shadows turned their faces up to watch. He understood then that the mirror had never preserved him. It had only kept an image to make surrender easier.

His breath left him. The mirror slipped from his hand and struck the floor without breaking.

By morning the shed was empty. On the boards lay a folded coat, a ruined fire, and a small silver mirror facing the door.

Anyone who entered would see themselves exactly as they wished to be.