I see my reflection, faint, in the clear glass, my face like a ghost, the eyes black holes. Beyond, he sits. His chair is bolted to the floor; the chains, woven into its frame and through sundry loops and clasps built into his straightjacket, hold the maniacal figure. He’s calm now, his unblinking gaze fixed into the distance. I wave, hoping to break his absorption with whatever he sees in the blank, cement wall. His dark eyes readjust and focus on me.
“Welcome home,” he says with a sigh. “You’re earlier than I expected. I would have thought you’d need another month…perhaps you’ve had help with my riddle? A mutual friend, maybe, gave you a pointer?”
“I assume you mean Dr. Christoph, and no,” I say, my gaze falling.
“No?” I hear his chains rattle. Glancing up, I seem him leaning back in an abstracted pose. “Then, is the good doctor ill. But with lives on the line…so you couldn’t talk to him, hmm? No, you would if you could. Can’t talk with him? Not without a medium, perhaps? Yes, it’s all over your face. Our old colleague is no more.”
“I solved this one all on my own,” I say, my eyes once again caught by my faint reflection.
“Maybe,” he smiles. “Did you go to his house, a quiet evening, to give your respects? Sitting there alone in his rooms, maybe his library, mulling the problem over, and suddenly—insight! Was it you, or did his spirit whisper in your ear?”
“I thought you were a materialist?”
“I am, but you’re not. Do you do anything, then, or is it all gods and spirits, heaven and hell rolling the dice?”
“You are?” I ask. “You? And what does that mean, ‘I am’? If all you are is material, then how can you say ‘I’?”
“You answer my riddle first, and then you can choose which questions I’ll answer.”
“You’re right,” I begin. “I stopped at his house, and it was in the library, looking over his books, a certain title, ‘Reflections of the Mind,’ stood out.” He smiles and nods. “I hadn’t quite figured it then, though. Had to sleep on it.”
“But you found an answer?”
“Let’s see, reflections, a double meaning, right? You can look at your reflections, but you can also reflect, look back. So, I tried to think back. I figured you’d somehow told me the answer already. Then I remembered that time Christoph took us out on a hike. It had rained recently, and we came across that big, black stone. All the water had pooled in its center, and then, that line from your riddle, ‘the sky below,’ suddenly made sense, because I remember how, when we got near it, we could see the sky reflected in the water. You climbed on the rock, stood in the puddle, and said, ‘Am I in heaven or in hell?’ That’s the key, isn’t it? Up or down? A reflection reverses things. What if I read the riddle backwards?”
“And what do you get if you read it backwards?”
“Gobbledygook,” I admitted. “But it was a cool idea.”
“Maybe I’ll use it one day.”
“Well, reversing the riddle didn’t work. So, I figured I should just go back to the rock, took a while to find it again, but look what was waiting for me,” I pulled the dirty sneakers from my bag, “sitting in the middle of the puddle. She was wearing these when she disappeared, but you couldn’t have put them there. You’ve been well looked after. So your riddle, it was someone else, someone on that trip with us. Someone you knew would put the shoes there.”
“How did Dr. Christoph die?” he suddenly asks.
I turned away from him and that ghastly reflection of my face in the glass.
“A patient, someone he was trying to help, hit him over the head. I called an ambulance, but—”
“You called the ambulance?”
“Yeah, I was…I was there.”
“And what patient, pray tell, did this?”
Tale Told 