What the Night Knows

21

SIX SCREWS IN THE FRAME OF THE FULL-LENGTH MIRROR HELD it to the back of the door in the girls’ closet. On her knees, using a screwdriver, Minette extracted them, starting with the two in the bottom corners.

Naomi had gotten over the scare of the night before. Sister Half-Pint had infected Naomi with spookitis, which was one of the dangers of sharing a room with a sibling who both was colossally immature and yet had Daddy-green eyes that looked right into you and sometimes made you think she was the only third-grader in the world who knew everything. Of course Mouse knew only about enough to fill a teaspoon, she was your typical eight-year-old ignoramus, as sweet as a sister could be but tragically naive and dismally unsophisticated. In the clear light of day, Naomi knew, as she had always known, even in the grip of the mass panic Minnie had fomented, that no sinister creature had been moving through the mirror, that she had been right to say it was a moth shadow in the room behind her, a moth currently tucked into a corner somewhere and sleeping.

Naomi stared into the mirror now, as her sister worked on the screws, and she saw nothing scary or even unusual. In fact she was pleased to see that she looked rather pretty, maybe even more than merely “rather,” though she would have to do something enormously more stylish with her hair if she hoped ever to enchant a prince, because a prince would have a highly refined taste in all things and would be very discriminating when it came to such matters as his lady’s hairstyle.

“If we have to do anything at all, which I don’t think we do, why don’t we just cover the mirror?” Naomi asked. “This is a lot of work. Just covering it so we can’t see the mirror man and so he can’t see us—the mirror man who probably doesn’t even exist—won’t that be good enough?”

“No,” Minnie said.

“What do you know about it?” Naomi said. “You don’t know beans about it. I’m the one who knows about magic mirrors. I’ve read like sixteen thousand stories about magic mirrors. You’ve never read one.”

“You read one to me that time,” Minnie reminded her. “It was as dumb as scum.”

“It wasn’t as dumb as scum,” Naomi said. “It was literature. You were a second-grader then, you didn’t understand. It was too sophisticated for a second-grader.”

“It was pages and pages and pages of barf,” Minnie insisted, putting aside the first screw. “I thought I’d never want to hear a story again.”

“We could just hang a blanket over this thing.”

“And you’d all the time be lifting it to peek at the mirror.”

“I would not,” Naomi said. “I have plenty of self-control. I am disciplined.”

“You’ll all the time be lifting it to peek, and sooner or later the mirror man will be there, and you’ll start yammering at him about whether he’s a prince, and he’ll suck you into the mirror, and you’ll be over there with the dead people forever.”

Naomi let out a long-suffering sigh. “Honestly, dear Mouse, you are going to have to go into fraidy-cat rehab.”

“Don’t call me Mouse,” Minette said, putting aside the second screw. She got to her feet and went to work on the next pair.

Naomi said, “What are Mom and Daddy going to say when they find out the mirror’s missing?”

“They’re going to say, ‘Where’s the mirror?’ ”

“And what are we going to say?”

“I’m thinking about that,” Minnie said.

“You better be thinking about that.”

Extracting the third screw, Minnie said, “Why don’t you put your gigantic eleven-year-old brain to work on it?”

“Don’t be sarcastic. Sarcasm doesn’t become you.”

“Anyway, maybe they’ll never know we took the mirror down.”

“How could they not know? They have eyes.”

“Who cleans our room?” Minnie asked.

“What do you mean who cleans our room? We clean our room. We’re supposed to learn personal responsibility. Personally, I’ve learned enough personal responsibility to last a lifetime, so someone else could clean my room for a while, but that’s never going to happen.”

Putting the fourth screw with the first three, Minnie said, “After Mrs. Nash washes and irons our clothes, who brings them up here and puts them away? Who makes our beds every day?”

“We do. What’s your point? Oh. You mean, if we keep the closet door shut, then it’ll be a century before they realize the mirror’s gone.”

“Or at least a couple months,” Minnie said as she placed the stepstool in front of the mirror. “When I take out the next screw, the mirror’s gonna slip. Hold it tight for me.” She climbed onto the stool. “Hold it tight.”

Holding the mirror, staring into it, Naomi said, “What are we going to do with it when we take it down?”

“We’re gonna carry it along the hall to the storage room where Mom and Daddy keep all that junk, and we’ll put it behind some of the junk so nobody won’t even see it.”

“Or we could save a lot of work and instead put it mirror-side down under your bed.”

“I don’t want the mirror man under my bed,” Minnie said. “And I don’t want him under your bed, ’cause you’ll crawl under there to talk to him, and he’ll come out of the mirror into our room. We’ll be toast. One screw left. You holding it with both hands?”

“Yes, yes. Hurry up.”

“Be careful it doesn’t fall and break. If it breaks, maybe that lets him out of the mirror.”

The sixth screw came loose, Naomi didn’t let the mirror fall, Minnie put the stepstool away, and together they lowered the long pane of glass onto the bedroom carpet.

As Minnie closed the closet door, Naomi stood over the face-up looking glass, peering down into the reflected ceiling, intrigued by her face seen from this unusual angle.

The mirror dimpled like water dimpled when you dropped a pebble into it. Concentric circles spread outward across the silver surface.

“Bullcrap!” Naomi exclaimed, which was something her grandmother rarely said when the word chestnuts wasn’t emphatic enough. “Minnie, look at this!”

Gazing down at the mirror, Minnie watched two, three, five new dimples and sets of concentric rings form, as if the glass were a pool and rain were falling into it.

“Not good,” Minnie said, and went to the play table where her lunch sandwich waited on a plate with a sprig of sweet green grapes.

“You can’t just go away and eat,” Naomi protested. “Big weird stuff is happening here.”

Minnie returned with the sprig. She plucked one of the grapes, held it over the mirror, hesitated, and dropped it.

The plump green fruit plopped through the mirror as it would have sunk through the surface of a pond, and disappeared.