Excerpt (Chapter 5) from Where Do The Dead Boys Go?

V.

Usually, Death comes when you least expect him. But he also answers to your call.

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The mirror is like some horribly murky lake, bottomless and lightless. Any moment, a fish with bulging, pale eyes and teeth too big for its mouth could swim from the darkness, and Clara would scream because that fish would be her.

Really, the mirror is dark because the curtains in the room are drawn. But Clara doesn’t open them, because that would ruin it.

There’s a story that Anna tells Tup, about the skeleton kids. Clara doesn’t know if it’s true or false; either way, it’s stupid. How it goes is this: the skeleton kids were once normal kids, waiting in purgatory. They had been in there so long that they had all but rotted away. Well, when they climbed up to earth to take a look around, their souls flew away from them because their was no flesh to keep them inside, just ribcages. And it’s pretty damn easy, believe me, Anna would say, for a soul to escape from a ribcage.

So the skeleton kids had lost their souls. You could see the glowing lights floating at night, drifting through the forest like fireflies. And, sometimes, if you looked very hard, you could see the skeleton kids chasing after them, trying in vain to catch their souls.

But it was one thing to lose your soul, as you might lose a puppy or a left sock. It was another thing to drive it out with spurs and burning torches.

The more Clara stares at the mirror, the more its presence grows, until it seems almost alive, the terrible, blank eye of a beast reflecting an even blanker and more terrible beast. Sidling sideways, keeping her eyes on that great abyss, she covertly opens the drawer of the nightstand. Her hand closes around the revolver inside. Quick as lightning, she draws the gun up so it’s pointing at the black, blank mirror.

She fumbles with the hammer and triggering, muttering, “How do you use this thing?”

It goes off. There’s loudness for an instant, a shattering noise, and the mirror is a spiderweb of cracks. Two shards of glass fall to the floor with a chink.

“Oh, my,” she says. “My, my. What an incredible machine.”

A strange thought comes to her mind. Old Jam Camphor, she remembers, was the drunk who told her father about the outlaws running from Branders. Of course, her father had wanted to go after them, because he was a good man.

She cradles the revolver in her hands like it’s her own darling child, and wonders, and wishes. And then she hears a voice behind her.

“Well, was it you askin’ for me?”

She whirls around, and screams. The man she sees is skeletal and half-rotted away, one eye loosely fitted in its socket, all of his teeth spread in a Glasgow smile, and dressed in riding gear that is no real color at all.

“Didn’t make much of an entrance,” he admits, sounding embarrassed (but perhaps it’s just irony). “Now, appearin’ in the mirror, and then steppin’ out when it shattered, that woulda been pretty slick, don’t ya think?”

She doesn’t stop screaming, and throws the gas lamp at him.

“Now listen here, ma’am. I haven’t got much time, so you’d better make it clear what it is you want, okay?” He stretches out his hand to her, and it’s just bone with bits of skin clinging to it.

Then Clara remembers that she’s holding a revolver. She expends the five remaining bullets, two hitting the wall, and three passing through him like sand.

“Well, if that’s how you feel about it, I might’s well not waste my time,” he drawls, stepping up on the windowsill. “Though I got a feelin’ I’ll be seein’ you soon.”

She tries to scream again, but it comes out as a hiccuping sob. He’s opened the window, and she wonders at this apparition that doesn’t disappear in the sunlight.

“See you then,” he says, with a slight incline of his head and a tip of his hat. “At the Crossroads.”

And then he is gone.

Clara puts a hand to her heart, and can feel it fluttering. The revolver lies on the floor, empty of bullets. Light pours into the room, making her eyes ache, because the curtains on the window are drawn back all the way.

“Oh, it is insanity, isn’t it?” she murmurs, and throws herself on the bottom bunk.

Do you know where the Crossroads are, the broken mirror seems to say.