“Ostiarius,” Emrys repeated, and he thought he felt a sudden breeze. He turned to look, careful to keep his hand in place. Aside from the talking book, there was nothing unusual in view. Just my imagination.
“Aperi,” said the book.
“Aperi.” Now Emrys knew he felt something, but it was almost impossible to put into words. He felt a sense of … opening. Or anticipation. Like he was in the middle of telling a joke, and the universe itself had stopped to listen, holding its breath for the promised punchline.
Van Stavern finished: “Portam.”
“Portam,” he said, and the strange sensation he’d felt before snapped away. In its wake, he felt a faint buzzing behind his right eye, and gooseflesh all along his arms.
“Go on,” said Van Stavern. “Don’t lose your nerve now. Open the door.”
Emrys turned the doorknob and pulled open the door. The closet was gone. In its place was the Blue Reliquary.
“No way,” Emrys whispered. He stuck his hand inside, then ventured a single foot over the threshold. “It isn’t an illusion?”
“Nothing so tawdry as that,” said Van Stavern. “As I told you before, the Blue Reliquary is a sanctuary to the Order—and the Order is you. Immediate access to the place can be the difference between life and …” Emrys turned to look at the book. “Well. It’s important that you’re able to access the reliquary at all times. And that incantation allows you to do just that. Anywhere you find a door, you can find an entrance.”
“Watch the doors,” Emrys mumbled, remembering the ominous line at the end of the Doomsday Archives Wiki page. Did that have something to do with this?
“What’s that?” asked Van Stavern.
“Nothing,” said Emrys. “It’s just, this is totally unreal. Hazel is going to flip!”
“So long as you keep it between the two of you,” said Van Stavern. “As you can imagine, this particular incantation lists high among the Order’s most sacred secrets. It is meant only for those initiated into our mysteries, and has been jealously guarded over the centuries, a privileged secret shared from one member to the next over the course of—young man, are you writing the Order’s incantatory arcanum onto your arm with a Sharpie?”
“No!” Emrys said, quickly lowering his marker. “Well, yes. I mean, it’s a lot to remember.”
“You’re the one who wanted to learn ‘magic,’ as you put it.” Van Stavern tutted. “So learn.”
Emrys shut the door. He expected the dull throb behind his eye to shut with it, but the discomfort persisted. It even grew. “Ow,” he said. “Is there—do I need to do something else to end the spell, or …?”
He opened the door again. The Blue Reliquary was gone. In its place was a standard janitorial closet, with paper products and a mop and … was that sand?
Red sand, it looked like, pooled on the closet floor like a bloodstain.
“I don’t feel so good,” said Emrys. He turned to the nearest sink, splashing his face with water. He looked up, intending to get a look at himself in the mirror.
But the mirror was broken. Cracked into jagged shards, like a serrated spider’s web.
And the dead-eyed face that looked back at Emrys wasn’t his.
The Shadow in the Mirror
From the New Rotterdam Wiki Project
When Gwendoline O’Rear first saw the shadow in the mirror, she thought it a trick of the light. A New Rotterdam teenager in the summer of 1954, she’d been brushing her hair in her powder room, scrutinizing her reflection for the day ahead. As she finished, Gwen stepped away to greet her family, but something made her turn back. There she saw a dark outline in the mirror, right where she’d been standing, as if her reflection had left a residue against the glass. She rubbed her eyes, and the shape disappeared.
“A curious optical illusion,” she wrote in her diary later that week. “At least I thought so. Then it kept reappearing.” Her diary describes the shadow turning up several more times over the week, and then the weeks to come. Always in her powder room mirror. Each time, it lingered a bit longer, its edges growing sharper. Though Gwen knew she should be disturbed by the apparition, she wrote of a strange fascination with it.
Such subtle colors shift within its boundaries, like an oil slick catching the light! I find them soothing. They distract me from the dolor of this monotonous life, from my endlessly needful family and the judging gazes of the other girls at school. Today it waved as I left, as if we were two bosom friends departing. Gwendoline O’Rear’s Diary, 1954
According to her family, Gwendoline began spending an increasing amount of time preparing each day, and yet every morning she’d arrive at breakfast looking tired and disheveled. Then Gwen’s final entry takes a sudden turn.
The shadow tried to grab me by the neck today. It is no friend. Only now do I see the trap. Its colors transfix me while it siphons my essence away, bit by bit. Every day I waver more, while it grows more solid. I must destroy it tonight. Gwendoline O’Rear’s Diary, 1954
In the police report that was filed after her death, Gwen’s mother alleged to have witnessed her daughter’s last moments. She described finding Gwen perched before the mirror with an iron poker. She claimed a dark shape loomed in the reflection, like a figure reaching through the glass. As Gwen brought the iron bar down, the mirror shattered. So too did Gwendoline O’Rear. The girl turned to her mother, her face a tangle of spidery cracks. Her final words were, “Too late.” Then her body splintered to pieces.
8
Emrys wheeled back with a shriek. The face that regarded him from within the shattered mirror was a ruin. It belonged to an older boy whose skin was pale and slick—almost slimy. Two cavernous pits were all that remained of his eyes.
The boy’s mouth sagged open. Emrys half expected him to scream, but instead, red sand poured from between his withered lips, gushing outward in a glittering flood. There was so much of it. It spilled through the cracks in the mirror, fine grains sliding down the counter and into the bathroom sink, clotting around the drain in scarlet clumps.
The boy placed his palm against the mirror and pushed. There was a moment of sickening tension, a crackle of glass. Emrys pressed his back against the far wall, but he couldn’t break the boy’s gaze. The pressure behind his right eye crescendoed.
And then it was gone.
The pressure. The boy. All of it. Once again, Emrys found himself alone in the secluded bathroom, the faucet still running in the sink.
“I … take it you saw something?” Van Stavern asked awkwardly.
