Storymania - Some Mirrors Never Lie by Darcy K Metz

Some Mirrors Never Lie
Darcy K Metz

“Like I told you before, I’ll say it again. You don’t know how lucky you are. You are one of the few to ever get to know. Well, no use beating around the bush now since I am here for one reason. After the commencement of your forty-sixth year, you are destined to die. Like all humans, your length of existence is predetermined. I cannot tell you exactly when or where, but that sometime after your forty-sixth birthday Death itself will appear to you and end your life. Yes, Death, the skeleton thing with the black cloak and the scythe and all. Just like in the movies and just like the myths. Nothing you do can stop it from appearing to you. That is all that I can tell you, what you do with this information is up to you.”

And that was it, the dream never changed. The same middle-aged man, who looked like a photographic negative, said the exact same words to me as he had been ever since I was thirty. The dream came always twice a year on the exact same nights: six months after my birthday, and the night before my birthday. I had gotten used to expecting the dream and it ceased to affect me much at all, except this time things were different. Tomorrow I would turn forty-six.

You might say to me that this was just a dream and meant nothing. Or maybe you’ll tell me that it is because of some kind of repressed sexual feelings or something like that. Well, I don’t care much about what you think because I know for fact that this dream was real, a real warning. It runs in the family, this dream. When I was a boy and my Grandpa was in the home, he would tell me about this same dream. The only difference was that the dream came to him when he was sixty and told him he’d die after his seventy-sixth birthday. Well, four months after his seventy-sixth, Grandpa had a severe stroke and died the same day. That’s one reason that I chose not to have a family; I didn’t want any child of mine to have to live with this dream.

So how does a man live his life believing and knowing when he’s going to die? That all depends on the man, but for me I chose to have fun while I could. I lived in Prince George, British Columbia all of my life and like my Dad I became a tree faller. I was an only child and my parents died when I was twenty-five and left me their property. So I had it good, a nice home fully paid for and a good paying job. I spent most of my money on women and the bottle. I’ve been in every piss hole bar in small town northern British Columbia and I’ve learned to pick out the women who were easy. It wasn’t that difficult, you just say you’re working in camp and want to party for a few days and you’ll pay and that’s it. As a result, I’ve been quite reckless and lucky at the same time: I never used protection and have never gotten any disease. I have had close calls on the job, but I always knew it wasn’t my time to go.

After my forty-sixth birthday came though I was never quite the same. I thought I was prepared for this, having known for the last sixteen years that I was going to die. I was more afraid than I ever was before and I was a wreck. I couldn’t sleep at all and I cried quite often, being alone and all. I think that’s what got to me the most, the fact that I had less than a year to live and I had never really loved a woman. I had been with probably hundreds of them, but never had anything special with any one woman.

The first four weeks after my birthday were the longest I’d ever experienced, I was so drained and yet always on the edge; every time I caught a shadow out of the corner of my eye I panicked, expecting it to be Death himself finally coming for me. But it was always just a shadow. One evening I decided to get out of the house and went to a quiet pub in downtown Prince George. I sat alone at a booth with a jug of draught and forty dollars in spent pull-tabs. I wasn’t paying attention too much of anything when someone joined me. I looked up and saw the most striking woman I’d ever seen. She was in her late thirties and had this incredible long, curly brown hair. Her eyes sparkled a deep blue and were clear under the dark pub lighting. When she spoke, her voice was so soft and pleasant that it made my heart race. “You were looking pretty unhappy over here and I though that you looked like a nice enough fellow so I thought I’d try and cheer you up.” “I don’t think there is much you can do to help me there,” I said to her with a barely noticeable smile. She said nothing for a moment then pulled out a cigarette and lit it and took a deep puff. As the smoke drifted out of her mouth and up over her face, her eyes twinkled through the smoke, kind of like the stars do at night. It was a weird thing to see, and then she spoke to me. “Oh, I think everyone can be helped in some way. Maybe I can help you and maybe you can help me.”

I had no idea what she meant but I didn’t want her to leave just yet, so I gave it to her plainly. “You see, I am quite ill. I have less than a year to live and there is nothing that can be done to save me.” She was surprised by what I told her as she twitched in her seat and a real, genuine look of concern filled her face. What she said next was enough for me to hear. “Well, less than a year is still enough time to be happy, and why not live your last days being happy.”

She came home with me that night and we spent the whole night and a bottle of scotch talking. We both got along so well; it was like we were meant to be together. I never told her about the dream and she never asked what I was sick from. I don’t think she cared what was wrong with me, she just wanted to make me feel good. She moved in with me after two weeks and each day was something special for me. The first time that we made love I cried in her embrace because I knew that this wouldn’t last very long. Knowing I was going to die wasn’t the worst of it, knowing that it would be any day now was what was unbearable. I tried the best I could to enjoy each moment I had with her.

It didn’t take long before we fell in love with each other, actually it was less than four months. I was now forty-six years and five months old, and being so close to death liberated me to actually live for the first time in my life. She was trying to convince me that being happy and having a reason to live might make me better. Even though I knew otherwise, I played along with her suggestion to make her feel like there was some kind of hope. Each day was now a gift to me and I lived in the moment, not thinking about my destiny yet to come. What an experience that was, being lost in the moment with a person who made time stand still. I told her how if I had met her when I was younger I would have married her on the spot. She laughed at that saying she would have never fallen for such a wild, cocky asshole like that.

On the morning that I turned forty-six and a half, she got out of bed before me and stood and stretched beside the bed. Her naked body was absolutely perfect; the sun peeking through the window blinds cast bright horizontal stripes across her flesh. I sat up in bed gazing at her body as she walked past the mirror to go to the bathroom. What I saw in the mirror shook me form the very core of my being. As she walked past the mirror, I saw no reflection of her naked body. What I saw was what looked like flowing black cloth, and the reflection of her arm showed the bright, bleached bones of a human arm. She wiggled her hands as she passed the mirror, and the reflection showed a metacarpled hand moving in the same way. She closed the bathroom door behind her. I was frozen with fear and utterly confused at the same time. I scanned the rest of the bedroom but nobody else was to be seen. What did this mean? I jumped out of bed and turned on the light. Trembling with fear, I looked into the mirror and saw only my terrified reflection. I turned away, looking at the bathroom door and thought hard. I did not remember ever seeing her reflection in a mirror before, but why would I need to think about such a thing as that?

For the first time in my life I had love and a reason to live, what time I had left had purpose: to be happy with her. But now what? I couldn’t handle the thoughts that were beginning to surface in my mind. At that moment I lost it. I ran into the bathroom, she was already in the shower, and I pulled the curtain aside, tearing half of it from the railings. She was startled and pulled the wet hair from her face. “What are you doing, you scared me to death!”

“Who are you! What are you!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.

“You know who I am. What is going on, are you okay?” she answered, her voice cracked with fear.

“Do I! Do I know you!” I screamed back at her and grabbed her by the hair and pulled her from the shower. She tripped as I yanked her out, but I dragged her form the bathtub over to the sink. The mirror was covered in condensation and I swiped a clean spot in the middle. She fought to resist me now, and screamed and kicked and thrashed hard to get free. I smacked her face into the sink quite hard; her nose became a fountain of red. Grabbing her by the hair, I lifted her face in front of the mirror. I saw the reflection of a black hooded white skull. I dropped her right then and there. I screamed at the top of my lungs, utterly shocked and terrified. I also felt cheated, betrayed.

I backed out of the bathroom quite fast, making my way to the dresser then stopped and leaned over, crying out of despair, anger, hatred, every possible negative emotion. I saw a shadow out of the corner of my eye coming from the bathroom. As steam flowed out the door, she walked towards me, deliberately slow. Water droplets were beading all over her nakedness; blood still ran from her nose, down her face and neck onto her breasts. She brought her right arm up across her chest and her hand was open like she was gripping something. She was expressionless but her eyes were locked onto me. Suddenly, her whole body flickered for a second and from her feet up to the top of her head, her image waved and parts of her became bone and then flesh again. She stopped four feet from me and made a motion like she was grasping a pole or a stick or... a scythe! Then I remembered the dream, “.... What you do with this information is up to you.”

Without any hesitation I grabbed a pair of sewing scissors from the dresser and lunged at her, driving the blades deep into her stomach. I pulled them out quickly as she shuddered and moaned in pain. Then I drove the blades right into her heart, deep up to the handles, and jerked them from side to side. She grasped at my hands and fell backwards with a loud thud onto the floor. I stared in disbelief at what I had just done as blood pooled on her abdomen and chest, quickly staining the beige carpet beneath her. She squawked some awful, unintelligible sounds and then looked up at me. “You do not know what you have just done, (unrecognizable sounds), life is, (unrecognizable sounds), now, (unrecognizable sounds), cursed to the living.” She let out her last breath and her arms went limp beside her. I had killed Death itself.

The world was never the same after that. People no longer got old or got sick or died naturally, but accident or murder could still kill you. Humanity was given the gift of immortality. After many generations, war was basically eliminated, scientists could do real long-term research and a lot of knowledge was gained. Exploration of deep space had begun and humanity entered a new age of knowledge and discovery. But if I could go back to that dreadful day so long ago, I would let Death take me. You see, after Death was killed, people stopped dying, but people also stopped being born. Humanity had been sterilized by my one selfish, cowardly act. All of the children that were alive when I killed Death simply grew into adulthood, and then stopped aging. Nothing could be done to alter this, no technology or anything.

Nowadays, people are mostly sad or distant or unfeeling. People need to care about something; people need to care about people. With no hopes of having children, well, our numbers do decline every year because of sadness and lack of such hope. After long enough, you run out of reasons to live. And now, after all of this time I know what that reason was. Death gave people a reason to really live.