Scanned by gojukai 
From Fritz Leiber’s 
The Mind Spider and Other Stories 
MIDNIGHT IN THE 
MIRROR WORLD 
Fritz Leiber 
As the dock downstairs began to clang out midnight's 
twelve strokes, Giles Nefandor glanced into one of the 
two big mirrors between which he was passing on his 
nightly trip, regular as clockwork, from the telescopes on 
the roof to the pianos and chessboards in the living room. 
What he saw there made him stop and bunk and stare. 
He was two steps above the mid-stair landing, where the 
great wrought-iron chandelier with its freight of live and 
dead electric bulbs swung m the dull fierce gusts of 
wind coming through the broken, lead-webbed, dramondpaned 
windows. It swung like a pendulum—a wilder yet 
more ponderous pendulum than that in the tall clock 
twanging relentlessly downstairs. He stayed aware of its 
menace as he peered in the mirror. 
Since there was a second mirror behind him, what he 
saw in the one he faced was not a single reflection of himself, 
but many, each smaller and dimmer than the one in 
front of it—a half-spread stack of reflections going off toward 
infinity. Each reflection, except the eighth, showed 
against a background of mirror-gloom only his dark lean 
aquiline face, or at least the edge of it—from bucket-size 
down to dime-size—peering back at him intently from under 
its sleek crown of black, silver-shot hair. 
But in the eighth reflection his hair was wildly disordered 
and his face was leaden-green, gape-jawed, and 
bulging-eyed with horror. 
Also, his eighth reflection was not alone. Beside it was

a thin black figure from which a ribbony black arm 
reached out and lay on his reflected shoulder. He could 
see only the edge of the black figure—most of it was hidden 
by the reflected gilt mirror frame—but he was sure it 
was thin. 
The look of horror on his face in that reflection was so 
intense and so suggestive of strangulation that he clutched 
at his throat with both hands. 
All his reflections, from the nearly life-size giants to the 
Lilliputians, copied this sudden gesture—except the eighth. 
The eleventh stroke of midnight resounded brassily. An 
especially fierce gust of wind blew the chandelier closer 
to him so that one of its black hook-fingered arms approached 
his shoulder and he cringed away from it before 
he recognized it for the familiar object it was. It-should 
have been hung higher, he was such a tall man, and he 
should have had the window repaired, but his head missed 
the chandelier except when the wind blew hard and after 
he'd been unable to find a craftsman who could work 
leaded glass, he had not bothered about either chore. 
The twelfth stroke clanged. 
When he looked into the mirror the next instant, all 
strangeness was gone. His eighth reflection was like the 
rest. All his reflections were alike, even the dimmest most 
distant ones that melted into mirror smoke. And there was 
no sign of a black figure in any one of them, although he 
peered until his vision blurred. 
He continued downstairs, choosing a moment when the 
chandelier was swinging away from him. He went immediately 
to his Steinway and played Scriabin preludes and 
sonatas until dawn, fighting the wind with them until it 
slunk away then analysed chess positions in the latest 
Russian tournament until the oppressive daylight hadwearied 
him enough for sleep. From time to time he 
thought about what he had glimpsed in the mirror, and 
each time it seemed to him more likely that the disordered

eighth reflection had been an optical illusion. His eyes had 
been strained and weary with star-gazing when it had happened. 
There had been those rushing shadows from the 
swinging chandelier, or even his narrow black necktie 
blown by the wind, while the thin black figure might 
have been simply a partial second reflection of his own 
black clothes—imperfections in the mirror could explain 
why these things had stood out only in the eighth reflection. 
For that matter the odd appearance of his face in 
that reflection might have been due to no more than a tarnished 
spot in the mirror's silvering. Like this whole vast 
house—and himself—the mirror was decaying. 
He awoke when the first stars, winking on in the sky of 
deepening blue, signaled his personal dawn. He had almost 
forgotten the incident of the mirror by the time he 
went upstairs, donned stadium boots and hooded long 
sheepskin coat in the cupola room, and went out on the 
widow's walk to uncap his telescopes and take up his stargazing. 
He made, as he realized, a quite medieval figure, 
except that the intruders in his heavens were not comets 
mostly, but Earth satellites moving at their characteristic 
crawl of twenty-some minutes from zenith to horizon. 
He resolved a difficult double in Canis Major and was 
almost certain he saw a pale gas front advancing across 
the blackness of the Horsehead Nebula. 
Finally he capped and shrouded his instruments and 
went inside. Habit started him downstairs and put him 
between the mirrors above the landing at the same minute 
and second of the day as he had arrived at that spot 
last night. There was no wind and the black chandelier 
with -its- asymmatric constellation of bulbs hung motionless 
on its black chain. No reeling shadows tonight. Otherwise 
everything was exactly the same. 
And while the clock struck twelve, he saw in the mirror 
exactly what he had seen last night: tiny pale horrorstruck 
Nefandor-face, black ribbon-arm touching its shoulder 
or neck, as if arresting him or summoning him to 
some doom. Tonight perhaps a little more of the black

figure showed, as if it peered with one indistinguishable 
eye around the tinied gold frame. 
Only this time it was not the eighth reflection that 
showed these abnormalities, but the seventh. 
And this time when the glassy aberration vanished with 
the twelfth brassy stroke, he found it less easy to keep 
his thoughts from dwelling obsessively on the event. He 
also found himself groping for an explanation in terms of 
an hallucination rather than an optical illusion: an optical 
illusion that came so pat two nights running was 
hardly credible. And yet an hallucination that confined 
itself to only one in a stack of reflections was also most 
odd. 
Most of all, the elusive malignity of the thin black 
figure struck him much more forcibly than it had the 
previous night. An hallucination—or ghost or demon— 
that met you face to face was one thing. You could strike 
out at it, hysterically claw at it, try to drive your fist through 
it. But a black ghost that lurked in a mirror, and not 
only that but in the deepest depthy of a mirror, behind 
many panes of thick glass (somehow the reflected panes 
seemed as real as the actual ones), working its evil will 
on your powerless shrunken image there—that implied a 
craftiness and caution and horrid calculation which fitted 
very well with the figure's cat-and-mousing advance from 
the eighth reflection to the seventh. The implication was 
that here was a being who hated Giles Nefandor with 
demonic intensity. 
This night and morning he avoided the eerie Scriabia 
and played only dancimgly brisk pieces by Mozart, while 
the chess games he analysed were frolicsome attacking 
ones by Anderssen, Kieseritzky, and the youthful Steinitz. 
He had decided to wait another twenty-four hours and 
then if the figure appeared a third time, systematically 
analyse the matter and decide on what steps to take. 
Yet meanwhile he could not wholly keep himself from

searching his memory for people whom he had injured to 
the degree that they would bear him a bitter and enduring 
hatred. But although he searched quite conscientiously, 
by snatches, through the five and a half decades over 
which his memory stretched, he found no very likely candidates 
for the position of Arch-Hater or Hater to the 
Death of Giles Nefandor. He was a gentle person and, 
cushioned by inherited wealth, had never had to commit 
a murder or steal a large sum of money. He had wived, 
begat, divorced—or rather,, been divorced. His wife had 
, remarried profitably, his children were successful in far 
places, he had enough money to maintain his long body 
and his tall house while both mouldered and to indulge his 
mild passions for the most ethereal of the arts, the most 
coolly aloof of the sciences,, and the most darkly profound 
of the games. 
Professional rivals? He no longer played in chess tournaments, 
confining his activities in that direction to a few 
correspondence games. He gave no more piano recitals. . 
While his contributions to astronomical journals were of 
the fewest and involved no disputes. 
Women? At the time of his divorce, he had hoped it 
Would free him to find new relationships, but his lonely 
habits had proved too comfortable and strong and he had 
never taken up the search. Perhaps in his vanity he had 
dreaded failure—or merely the effort. 
At this point he became aware of a memory buried in 
his mind, like a dark seed, but it refused to come clear. 
Something about chess? ... no ... 
Really, he had done nothing much to anyone, for good 
or ill, he decided. Why should anyone hate him for doing 
nothing?—hate him enough to .chase his image through 
mirrors?—he asked himself fruitlessly as he watched Kieseritzky's 
black queen implacably pursue Anderssen's 
•white king. 
The next night he carefully timed his descent of the 
stairs, using his precision clocks in the cupola—with the

result that (precision machinery proving less reliable than 
habit) the downstairs clock had already struck five strokes 
when he thrust himself breathlessly between the mirrors 
above the landing. But his greenish horror-struck face was 
there—in the sixth reflection this time, as he'd fatalistically 
assumed it would be—and the slender black figure 
was there too with outstretched arm; this time he seemed 
to detect that it was wearing a veil or stocking-mask: he 
could distinguish none of its features, but there was a faint 
shimmering in the face area, rather like the pale gas front 
he had once again detected crossing the Horsehead Nebula. 
This night he completely altered his routine, neither 
opening a piano nor setting out any of the chessmen. Instead 
he lay for an hour with eyes shut, to rest them, sad 
then spent the rest of the night and morning investigating 
reflections of reflections in the mirrors on the stairs and in 
two somewhat smaller ones which he set up in the living 
room and tilted by the fractional inch to get the best 
effects. . 
By the end of that time he had made a number of interesting 
discoveries. He'd noted reflections of reflections 
before, especially on the stairs, and been amused by their 
oddity, but he'd never thought about them systematically 
and certainly never experimented with them. They turned 
out to be a fascinating little field of study—vest-pocket 
optics—a science in miniature. 
Vest-pocket wasn't such a bad designation, because you 
had to stick your vest and yourself between the two mirrors 
in order to observe the phenomena. Though come to 
think of it, you ought to be able to do the same thing with 
a periscope held sideways, by that means introducing your 
vision between the mirrors without introducing yourself. 
It might be worth trying. 
But getting back to basics, when you stood between 
nearly parallel mirrors, looking at one, you saw first the 
direct reflection of your face, next the reflection of the 
back of your head is the mirror behind you; then, barely 
visible around those two, you saw the second reflection of

your face, really Just an edge of hair and cheek and ear; 
then the second reflection of the back of your head, and so 
on. As the heads grew smaller, you saw more of each, 
until the entire face became visible, quite tiny and dim. 
This meant, for one thing, that the eighth reflection 
he'd seen the first midnight had really been the fifteenth, 
since he'd only counted reflections of his face, as far as 
he could remember, and between every two of those there 
was a reflection of the back of his head. Oh, this mirror 
world, he decided, was fascinating! Or worlds, rather— 
a series of shells around him, like the crystal globes of 
Ptolemaic astronomy in which the stars and planets 'were 
set, going out in theory to infinity, and in each shell 
himself staring at himself in the next shell. 
The way the heads got tinier intrigued him. He measured 
the distance between the two mirrors on the stairs 
—eight feet almost to the inch—and calculated that the 
eighth reflection of his face was therefore 116 feet away, 
as if it were peering back at him from a little attic window 
down the street, He was almost tempted to go to the 
roof and scan with his binoculars for such windows. 
. But since it was himself he was seeing, the eighth reflection 
was sizewise 232 feet away. He would have to scan 
for dwarfs. Most interesting! 
It was delightful to think of all the different things his 
reflections could be doing, if each had the power to move 
around independently in the thin world of its crystal shell. 
Why, with all those shell-selves industriously occupied, 
Giles Nefandor could well become the world's most accomplished 
pianist, most knowledgeable field astronomer, 
sad highest ranking of all chess grandmasters. The 
thought almost revived his dead ambitions—hadn't Lasker 
won the 1924 New York international tournament at 561— 
while the charm of the speculation made him quite forget 
the menace of the black figure he'd now glimpsed three 
times.

Returning to reality somewhat reluctantly, he set himself 
to determine how many of his reflections he could see 
in practice rather than theory. He discovered that even 
with the best illumination, replacing all the dead bulbs 
in the wrought-iron chandelier, he could recognize at mostonly 
the ninth or perhaps the tenth reflection of his face. 
After that, his visage became a tiny indistinguishable ashgrey 
blank in the glass. - 
In reaching this conclusion, he also found that it was 
Very difficult to count the reflections accurately. One or 
more would tend to get lost, or he'd lose count somewhere 
along the line. It was easiest to count the gilt mirror 
frames, since these stood in a close-packed row, like 
golden numeral ones—even though, for the tenth reflection 
of his face, say, this involved counting nineteen gilt ones, 
ten belonging to the mirror in front of him and nine. to 
the mirror behind. 
He wondered how he could have been so sure the first 
midnight that it was his eighth reflection which had shown 
the unpleasant alterations, and the seventh and sixth reflections 
on the two subsequent midnights. He decided that 
his shocked mind must have made a stabbing guess and 
that it very likely had been inaccurate—despite the instant 
uncertainty he'd felt. Next night he'd watch more carefully 
—and the fifth reflection would be easier to count. 
He also discovered that although he could at most count 
ten reflections of his face, he could distinguish thirteen 
and perhaps fourteen reflections of a bright point of light 
—a pencil flashlight or even a candle-flame held dose to 
his cheek. Those tinied candle-flames looked strangely 
like stars do in a cheap telescope. Odd. 
He was eager to count more reflections than that—to 
break his record, as it were—and he even fetched his best 
pair of binoculars and stared into the mirror with them, 
using for light-point an inch of brightly flaming candle 
affixed to the top of the right-hand binocular tube. But 
as he'd feared, this was no help at all, magnification fad

ing out the more distant light-points to nothing, like using 
too powerful an eyepiece on a small telescope. 
He thought of making and testing out a periscope—• 
candle attachment—but that seemed a touch over-elaborate. 
And in any case it was high time he got to bed— 
almost noon. He felt in remarkably good spirits—for the 
first time in years he had discovered a new thing in which 
to be interested. Reflectology mightn't be quite up to asfronomy, 
musicology, or chess, but it was an elegant little 
sdence all the same. And the Mirror World was fascinating!—
he looked forward excitedly to what he'd next see 
in it. If only the phenomena didn't stop! 
It was perhaps his eagerness which got him between the 
Stairway mirrors next night several seconds before the 
clock began to strike twelve. His early- arrival, however, 
didn't inhibit the phenomena, as he suddenly feared might 
happen. They began on the clock's first twanging stroke 
and whatever may have happened on previous evenings, 
it was certainly the fifth reflection which was altered tonight 
The figures were only about 70 feet away now, as 
he'd earlier calculated, and so considerably larger. His 
fifth reflected face was pale as ever, yet he fancied its 
expression was changing—but because it had gone more 
than halfway into eclipse behind the massed heads in front 
of it, he couldn't be sure. 
And the black figure definitely was wearing a veil, although 
he still couldn't make out the features behind it. 
Yes, a veil . . . and long black gloves, one of which 
sleekly cased the slender arm outstretched to his shoulder 
—for he suddenly realized that despite its height almost 
equal to his own, the figure was feminine. 
A gust of fey hard to understand went through him at 
that discovery. As on the second night he wanted to strike 
out at the figure to prove its insubstantiality—smash the 
glass! But could that effect a figure 70 feet away? Would 
smashing the single glass in front of him smash all the 
nine panes he calculated still separated him from the fig

ures in the Mirror World? 
Perhaps it would—and then (he black figure m the 
Mirror World could come straight out at him . . . now, 
, In any case the veiled figure, if she continued her approach, 
would be with him in five more nights. 
Perhaps smashing the glass now would simply end the 
horrifying, fascinating phenomena—foil the figure for 
good. But did he want to do that? 
As he asked himself that last question, the twelfth stroke 
came and the Black Lady in the fifth reflection vanished. 
The rest of the night, while he played Tchaikovsky and 
studied the chess games of Vera Menchik, Lisa Lane, 
and Mrs. Piatigorsky, searching for hidden depths ifl. 
them, he reviewed the Lives and Loves of Giles Nefandor. 
He discovered that the women in his life had been few, 
and those with whom he had become seriously entangled, 
or to whom he had done possible injury, fewer still. The 
half dozen candidates were all, so far as he knew, happily 
married and/or otherwise successful. This of course included 
his divorced wife, although she had often complained 
of him and his "hobbies." 
On the whole, though romanticizing women, he had 
tended to run away from them, he concluded wryly. Perhaps 
the Dark Lady was a generalized woman, emblematic 
of the entire sex, come to be revenged on him for 
has faint-heartedness. His smile grew wryer. Perhaps her 
funeral costume was, anticipatorily, for him. 
-He thought, oh the human infatuation with guilt and 
retribution! The dread of and perhaps the desire for punishment! 
How ready we are to think others hate 'us! 
During this search of his memory, the dark seed stirred 
several times—he seemed to be forgetting some one 
woman. But the seed refused to come clear of its burial 
until the clock struck its twelfth stroke next midnight, 
when. Just as the now clearly feminine figure in the fourth

reflection vanished, he spoke the name, "Nina Fasinera." 
That brought the buried incident—or rather all of it but 
one crucial part—back to him at once. It came back with 
that tigerish rush with which memory-lost small .incidents 
and encounters will—one moment nonexistent, the next recalled 
with almost dizzying suddenness. 
It had happened all of ten years ago,, six years at least 
before his divorce, and he had only once met Miss Fasiaera—
a tall slender woman with black hair, bold hawklike 
features, slightly protruberant eyes, and rather narrow 
long mobile lips which the slim tip of her tongue was forever 
wetting. Her voice had been husky yet rapid and she 
had moved with a nervous, pantherine grace, so that her 
heavy silk dress had hissed on her gaunt yet challenging 
figure. 
Nina Fasinera had come to him, here at this house, on 
the pretext of asking his advice about starting a school of 
piano in a distant suburb across the city. She was an 
actress too, she had told him, but he had gathered she 
had not worked much in recent years—just as he had soon, 
been guessing that her age was not much less than his 
own, the Jet of her hair a dye, the taut smoothness of her 
facial skin astringents and an ivory foundation make-up, 
her youthful energy a product of will power—in short, that 
she was something of a fake (her knowledge of piano rudimentary, 
her acting a couple of seasons of summer stock 
and a few bit parts on Broadway), but a brave and gallant 
fake nonetheless. 
Quite soon she had made it clean that she was somewhat 
more interested in him than in his advice and that she 
was ready—alert, on guard, dangerous, yet responsive— 
for any encounter with him, whether at a luncheon date 
a week in the future or here and now, on the instant 
It had been, he recalled, as .if a duelist had lightly yet 
briskly brushed his cheek and lips with a thin leather glove. 
And yes, she had been wearing gloves, he remembered 
now of a sudden!—dark green ones edged with yellow, the

same colours as her heavy silken dress. 
He had been mightily attracted to her—strange how he 
had forgotten that taut nervous hour!—but he had just 
become re-reconciled with his wife for perhaps the dozenth 
time and there was about Nina Fasinera an avidity and 
a recklessness and especially an almost psychotic-seeming 
desperation which had frightened him or at least put him 
very much on guard. He recalled wondering if she took 
drugs. 
So he had courteously yet most coolly and with infinite 
stubbornness refused all her challenges, which in the end 
had grown quite mocking, and he had shown her to the 
door and closed it on her. 
And then the next day be had read in the paper of her 
suicide. 
That was why he had forgotten the incident, he decided 
now—he had felt sharply guilty about it. Not that he 
thought that he possessed any fatal glamour, so that a 
woman would die at his rebuff, but that conceivably he 
had represented Nina Fasinera's last cast of the dice with 
destiny and he, not consciously knowing what was at stake, 
had coldly told her, "You lose." 
But there was something else he was forgetting—something 
about her death which his mind had suppressed even 
more tightly—he was certain of that. Glancing about uneasily, 
he stepped down onto the landing beneath the lowdipping 
chandelier and hurried down the rest of the stairs. 
He had Just recalled that he had torn out the story of her 
death from a cheap tabloid and now he spent the rest 
of the night hunting for it among his haphazardly-filed 
papers. Toward dawn be discovered it, a ragged-edged 
browning thing tucked inside one of his additional copies 
,of the Chopin nocturnes. 
FORMER BROADWAY ACTRESS 
DRESSES FOR OWN FUNERAL

Last night the glamorous Nina Fasinera, who was playing 
on Broadway as recently as three years ago, committed 
suicide by hanging, according to police Lieutenant Ben 
Davidow, in the room she rented at 1738 Waverly Place, 
Edgemont. 
A purse with 87 cents in it lay on top of her dresser. 
She left no note or diary, however, though police are still 
searching. Despondency was the probable cause of Miss 
Fasinera's act, according to her landlady Elvira Winters,. 
Who discovered-the body at 3 A.M. 
"She was a charming tenant, always the lady, and very 
beautiful," Mrs. Winters said, "but lately she'd seemed 
restless and unhappy. I'd let her get five weeks behind 
on her rent. Now who'll pay it?" 
Before taking her life, the 39-year-old Miss Fasinera 
had dressed herself in a black silk cocktail gown with 
black accessories including a veil and long gloves. She 
had also pulled down the shades and turned on all the 
lights in the room. It was the glare of these lights through 
the transom which caused Mrs. Winters to enter the 
actress' small, high-ceilinged room by a-duplicate key 
when there was no answer to her knocking. 
There she saw Miss Fasinera's body hanging by a short 
length of clothesline from the ceiling light-fixture. A chair 
lay overturned nearby. In its plastic seat-cover Lieutenant 
Davidow later found impressions which matched the actress' 
spike heels. Dr. Leonard Belstrom estimated she 
had been dead for four hours when he examined the body 
at 4 A.M. 
Mrs. Winters said, "She was hanging between the tall 
mirror on the closet door and the wide one on her dresser. 
She could almost have reached out and kicked them, if she 
could have kicked. I could see her in both of them, over 
and over, when I tried to lift her up, before I felt how 
cold she was. And then all those bright lights. It was horrible, 
but like the theatre."

When Giles Nefandor finished reading the clipping, he 
nodded twice and stood frowning. Then he got put maps 
of the city and suburbs and measured the straight-line 
distance from the rooming house in Edgemont to his own 
place across the city, then used the scales on the maps 
to convert his measurements to miles. 
Eleven and a half, it came out, as nearly as the limits 
of accuracy would make it 
Then he calculated the time that had elapsed since Nina 
Fasinera's death: ten years and one hundred and one 
days. From Mrs. Winters' statement, the distance between 
the mirrors between which she'd hanged herself had been 
about eight feet—the same distance as between the mirrors 
on his stairs. If she'd entered the Mirror World when 
She died and been advancing toward this house as she'd 
moved the last five nights—two reflections, or sixteen feet, 
each time—then in ten years and one hundred and one 
days she'd have traveled 60,058 feet. 
That figured out to eleven miles and 1,978 feet 
Eleven and a half miles, or close to it. 
He puzzled, almost idly, as to why a person could 
travel only such a short distance in the Mirror World each 
twenty-four hours. It must depend on the distance between 
the two mirrors of your departure and also on the' two 
mirrors of your arrival. Perhaps you travelled one reflection 
for each day and one for each night. Perhaps his 
theory of shells like the Ptolemaic ones was true and in 
any shell there was only one door and you had to search 
to find it, as if you were traversing a maze, to find the 
right two doors in the crystal maze in twenty-four hours 
could be a most difficult task* And there roust be all sorts 
of interlocking dimensions in the Mirror World—slow 
paths and fast ones: if you travelled between mirrors set 
on different stars, you might travel faster than light. 
He wondered, again almost idly, why he had been 
chosen for this visitation? and why of all women it should 
have been Nina Fasinera who had had the strength and

the will to thread purposefully the glassy labyrinth for ten 
years. He was not so much frightened as awed—that an 
hour's meeting should lead to all these consequences. 
Could undying love grow in an hour? Or was it undying 
hate that had flowered? Had Nina Fasinera known about 
the Mirror World when she'd hanged herself?—he recalled 
now that one of the things she'd said lightly when 
she'd tried to storm his interest had been that she was a 
witch. And she would have known about the mirrors on 
his stairs matching those in her room—she'd seen them. 
Next midnight when he saw the black figure in the third 
reflection, he instantly recognized Nina's pale gauntly 
lovely race behind the veil and wondered why he had not 
recognized it at least four nights before. Rather anxiously 
he glanced down toward her black-stockinged ankles, 
which were slender and unswollen, then quickly back to 
her face again. She was gazing at him gravely, perhaps 
with the ghost of a smile. 
By now his own reflection was almost wholly eclipsed 
behind the ones in front of it. He could not even guess at 
his expression, nor did he want to. He had eyes only for 
Nina Fasinera. The impact of his years of unfelt loneliness 
shook him. He realized how desperately he had been 
wishing someone would search him out. The clock twanged 
on, swiftly marking time forever gone. Now he knew thiat 
he loved Nina Fasinera, had loved her since the one only 
hour they'd met. That was why he'd never stirred from 
this rotting house, why he'd prepared his mind, for the 
Mirror World with chess-squares and singing wires and 
the stars. Since the hour they'd met . . . Except for colour 
and the veil, her costume was the same she'd worn that 
fateful sixty minutes. If she*d only move, he thought, be*d 
faintly hear the hiss of the .heavy silk through the five 
thick panes of glass remaining. If she'd only make-that 
smile more certain ... 
The twelfth stroke twanged. This time he felt a terrible 
pang of loss as her figure vanished, but it was swiftly replaced 
with a feeling of surety and faith.

For the next three of his nocturnal .days, Giles Nefandor 
was happy and light-hearted. He played the piano 
music he loved best: Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Scriabin, 
Domenico Scarlatti, He played over the classic chess games 
of Nimzowitch, Alekhine, Capablanca, Emaneui Lasker, 
and Steinitz. He lovingly scanned his favourite celestial 
objects: the Beehive in Cancer, the Pleiades and Hyades, 
the Great Nebula in Orion's sword; he noticed new telescopic 
constellations and thought he saw the faintest crystal 
paths ... 
-Occasionally his thoughts strayed eagerly yet guiltily, 
as if to forbidden fruit, to the mazy crystal corridors of 
the Mirror World, that secret diamond universe, and to his 
thousand wonderings about it: endless rooms and halls 
ceilinged and floored by transparency, and all the curious 
mirror-lost folk who lived adrift in them; piercingly sweet 
music; games of glass; revels and routs at a thousand 
levels; the tinkling of a million glittering chandeliers; 
diamond pathways to the farthest stars— 
But he would always check these thoughts. There would 
be time enough for them, he felt certain. Experienced reality 
is always more satisfactory than imagination and 
illusion. 
And often he would think of Nina and of the strangeness 
of their relationship: two atoms marked by one encounter 
and now drawn together among all the trillions of 
trillions of like atoms in the universe. Did it take ten years 
for love to grow, or only ten seconds? Both. But he checked 
these thoughts too—and struck the keys, or moved the 
men, or re-focused the 'scope. 
There were moments of doubt and rear. Nina might be 
the incarnation of hate, the jet-black spider in the crystal 
web. Certainly she was the unknown, though he felt he 
knew her so well. There had been those early intimations 
of psychosis, of a pantherine restlessness. And there had 
been that first glimpse of his face, sick with horror . . . 
But they were moments only.

Before each of the three remaining midnights he dressed 
with unusual care: the black suit newly brushed, the 
white shirt fresh, the narrow black necktie carefully knotted. 
It pleased him to think that he had not had to change 
the colour of his suit to match that of her dress. 
The first of the three midnights he was almost certain 
of her smile. 
The next midnight he was sure of it. Now both figures 
were in the first reflection and he could see his own face 
again, scarce four feet away. He too was smiling gravely 
—the horror was gone. 
Nina's black-gloved hand resting on his shoulder, the 
black fingertips touching his white collar, now seemed a 
lover's gesture. 
The night after that the wind came back at last, blowing 
with more-and more violence, although there were no 
clouds, so that the stars flickered and streamed impossibly 
in his 'scopes. The gale seemed to fasten on and shake 
their beams like crystal stalks. The sky was granular with 
wind. He could -not remember such a blow. By eleven it 
had almost driven him from the roof, but he stuck it out 
although the wind increased in frenzy. 
Instead of daunting, it filled him with a terrific excitement. 
He felt he could leap into the air and be blown lightswift 
anywhere he willed in the diamond-dazzling cosmos 
-except that he had another rendezvous. 
When he finally went inside, shaking with the cold, and 
took off his fleece-lined coat, he became aware of a 
rhythmic crunching and crashing below, with rather long 
intervals between. 
When he went down the stairs, they were dark and the 
crashes were louder. He realized that the great chandelier 
above the landing must be swinging so far that it was 
hitting the lead-webbed windows beyond, breaking their

remaining panes—and had long since burst all the electric 
globes it carried. 
He felt his way down by the wall, keeping close to it to 
avoid the chandelier's murderous swings. His fingers 
touched absolute smoothness—glass. Then the glass rippled 
for an instant, tingling his fingers, and he heard 
husky irregular breathing and the hissing of heavy silk. 
Then slender arms were around him and a woman's slim 
body was pressed against his and hungry lips met his 
lips, first through a faintly astringent, dryish, tormenting 
tantalizing veil, then flesh to flesh. He could feel under 
his hands the ribbed smoothness of heavy silk and of 
pliant, lightly fleshed ribs under that. 
All in utter darkness and pandemonium. Almost drowned 
in the latter, midnight's, last strokes were twanging. 
A hand moved up his back and suede-cased fingers 
lightly brushed his neck. As the last strokes twanged, one 
of the fingers turned hard and stiff and cruel and dug 
under his collar so that it caught him like a hook by the 
collar and the tightly-knitted tie the collar covered. It 
wrenched him into the air. A terrible pain stabbed at the 
base of his skull, then filled it to bursting. 
It was four days before the policeman who nightly patrolled 
beyond the gate discovered by a stab of his flashlight 
the body of Giles Nefandor—whom he knew by sight, 
though never a sight like this!—hanging from the -wrought 
chandelier above the landing strewn with glassyshards. 
It might have been longer than four days, except 
;a chessplayer across the city, contesting a correspondence 
game with the well-known recluse, spurred the 
police into action when the move on his last postcard had 
gone ten days unanswered. His first queries were ignored, 
but an evening phone call got action. 
The policeman reported back the unpleasant condition: 
of the body, the black, booked, wrought-iron chandelierfinger 
thrust under the noose of collar and tie, and the 
glass shards, and several other matters.

He never did report what he saw in one of the two mirrors 
on the stairs when he looked at it closely, his powerful 
flash beside his chest as his wristwatch signalled midnight 
There was a stack of reflections of his own shocked, 
sharply shadowed face. But in the fourth reflection there 
were momentarily two figures, hand in hand, looking back 
toward him over their shoulders—and smiling impishly at 
him, he thought. The one figure was that of Giles Nefandor, 
though looking more youthful than he recalled 
seeing him .in recent years. The other was that of a lady 
in black, the upper half of her face veiled.