WHAT THE MIRROR SAW

A Tale of Sogmarsh — in which somebody finally asks the traumatised mirror what it has seen, and gets an answer, and wishes for about a minute that they had not.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

There is a mirror in a corridor at Murkminster, and everybody in that building will tell you the same thing about it in the same six words: "That's the traumatised mirror. It's seen things."

They say it with relish. They say it to visitors. It is one of the small pleasures of working in that building, and it has been for as long as anybody can remember, and in all that time — and this is the whole of the tale, so I will put it early — not one person had ever asked it what.

Not one. In two hundred years. They asked is it true, and who put it there, and does it do anything, and one clerk in 1911 asked it to show him next Thursday and got, correctly, his own face.

Nobody asked the question. It is the same failure as the four bells and the same failure as the ninth collector and it is, I am beginning to think, the realm's only real fault: we will spend two hundred years enjoying a mystery rather than five minutes addressing it.

The person who finally asked was a woman of about fifty who had come in to complain about a boundary and had been left in that corridor for an hour and forty minutes, which is what this realm does instead of an appointment.

She got bored. She read the plaque. She looked at her own reflection for a while, the way you do.

And then she said, out loud, to a mirror, in an empty corridor, in the tone of a woman who has been kept waiting: "Well, go on then. What did you see?"

It told her.

I am going to be careful here, because there are eleven versions of what happened next in circulation and nine of them are rubbish. There was no voice. There was no cold wind and nothing came out and nothing reached for her. Two people have made a good living telling it that way and I have no patience with them.

What happened — she is alive, she has told it perhaps four times, always the same, always reluctantly — is that she understood something, all at once, standing in front of it, the way you sometimes understand a sentence a second before the person finishes it.

And what she understood was this.

It is a mirror in a corridor. It has hung there for two hundred and eleven years, opposite a door. It has never moved. It cannot look away, and it cannot close, and it has no more choice about what it takes in than a window has.

And what it has taken in, for two hundred and eleven years, is everybody who ever walked down that corridor.

That is all. That is the whole of what the traumatised mirror has seen: people, going past, in a corridor at Murkminster.

Now hold that, and then remember what building it is in, and what the door opposite it is.

It is the corridor to the eastern rooms. It is the way you go to the Office of Boundary Clarification. It is the passage every survey party in this realm has walked down on the morning it went out — twelve men in 1893, and eighteen men in whichever telling you keep, and the four before them, and every party since — coats on, boots new, in good spirits, some of them stopping to check their reflection because a man does, before a thing like that.

And it is the passage they came back down. The ones who did.

Two hundred and eleven years of that. In one fixed frame. Every face on the way out, and then the gap, and then which faces came back and which did not, and how long between, and what the ones who came back looked like when they passed it the second time.

It is the only complete record of the eastern expeditions that exists in this kingdom. It is not in a drawer, it has not been redacted, it was not revised in 1894 and 1895 and 1897, and no clerk has ever copied it forward wrongly.

It is a mirror. It never wrote anything down. It has simply been unable to look away.

She went and sat in the yard for a while afterwards. That is the part I find most convincing about her account: not the swoon, not the scream — she went and sat down in a yard, which is what a person actually does.

And then she went back in, and did the thing that makes her the only person in this story I would trust with anything, which is that she went and found somebody senior and told them, plainly, and asked whether the mirror could be moved somewhere quieter.

Not covered. Not destroyed. Not exorcised. Moved somewhere quieter, which is what you would ask for on behalf of anybody who had been made to stand in one place for two hundred years and watch that.

She was told it was a fixture and that fixtures required a form.

The mirror is still in the corridor. Of course it is. They have put a small brass plate under it now which says THE TRAUMATISED MIRROR and gives the date it was hung, and visitors are shown it, and the six words are still in daily use, and the whole building still enjoys it enormously.

But there is a thing that happens in that corridor now which did not happen before, and nobody has ever minuted it, and nobody will.

When a party goes out east — and they still go, less often, but they go — the people who work in that building have taken to walking down the corridor with them, as far as the door. Not making a fuss about it. Falling in alongside, chatting about nothing, seeing them off.

Ask anybody there why and you will get a shrug and something about it being polite.

They are standing with the mirror. That is what they are doing. They have worked out, without one of them saying it out loud, that a thing which cannot look away should at least not have to watch on its own.

We would rather have a haunted object than an accountable one, and a realm will keep a mystery on the wall for two hundred years rather than ask it a question — but ask, and you will usually find no ghost at all: only something that was put in one place, and told to stay, and could not look away, and has been keeping the truest record in the building the entire time because nobody thought to relieve it.