BY DR. AGONSON
The sanitarium reeked of urine. It was a dark place, like a prison, but I had seen better prisons. Some of the madmen were chained to columns or manacled to the wall. They were the violent ones. Whether made this way by the years of their torment or whether it came naturally from their malady, they lunged murderously as I passed, mumbling incoherent phrases or shouting obscene threats. The silent ones, less dangerous, held more terror for me. I saw one, dressed in a nightshirt and long, white socks, just standing there, still, unmoving—a stone, a sculpture would move more than he. It was like, if indeed it was not the same, as if I were looking at a dead man standing right in front of me. His head was tilted upward. It was when I saw the eyes of the other one that I knew they were truly the living dead. This was seated in a worn wicker chair, an old crone, and I walked into her line of perpetual, unblinking sight. There was a spell in it, as if her great lethargy would spread from her to me by the invisible beam of her gaze. I shivered as we passed, as I was taken further down into the place.
O the horrors of that deep dungeon. There are twisted things down there, hard to describe, things barely human, and some things that never were of man. I saw there the indescribable monsters of unfinished abominations which were the sad failures of ignominious dark cults and vainglorious wizards who had attempted to summon some one or another of the banished angels back into our reality. There in the penultimate shadows were puddles of senseless limbs which never tired of screaming in their unyielding agony, masses of flesh covered in fingers which proceeded caterpillar like across the floor.
Then there was the very bottom, the focal point round which these nightmares were kept like prizes. Here was the centerpiece of this mad menagerie, the mirror. That was my sentence: I was to be brought before the mirror and made to look into it.
On the upper levels, the more lucid patients had recognized me, that is, had empathy for me. They knew I was to be like them, that they too had been sane before they were brought here, that I would in due time be joined, either to them or to some deeper more hateful level of this hell. It really depended mostly on the mirror, on what I would see. There was no mention of how long I had to look, and for a time I played with the notion that I would be able to fulfil the law’s demands of me by quickly blinking at it and thereby suffer the smallest does of that mirror’s unbearable reality. I played with the idea right up to the end.
In shape the thing little resembles a mirror, more of an overgrown crystal, some sort of pointed obsidian pillar, an obelisk of many dark faces. But the one quality which makes a mirror a mirror it had: Thrust into the room, I saw—I had tried my trick, but my eyes, once caught, could not blink nor turn away—it was a mirror in the fact that a shadowy image was there behind every one of its many facets.
What sort of alien woman would sit before this vanity? From where had this monstrous reality come? Some say it was mined from the depths of the earth, others that it was a shard of the night’s firmament, that a piece of the darkness between the stars crashed onto our planet.
There are some experiences for which there is no hope that man may lay it out in words or song. I suppose, were I to spend the rest of my life, and three times over live my life, I should not be able to explain it. Though I were to begin now and henceforth never faulter in proclaiming all that I saw until the whole of the universe were to tire and die, I would accomplish as much as if I were to remain mute or die in the moment I saw it. There is no explaining it. It is.
Tale Told 