Frozen

It was like staring at the sun.

The room was full of shadows and dark corners, but candlelight was blasted from every direction by a thousand mirrors. Everywhere I looked they stood, laid. From palm-size to full-length, they coated almost every inch of the surprisingly large room, of which had a low ceiling and no windows. I cautiously moved forwards into the small, singularly cleared few feet at the front of the wood-panelled floor, counting only a dozen or two candles amongst the cascade of mirrors. The reflections were what made the light so bright, kept them burning so bright. It was beautiful.

I scanned the room for a sign of something that stood out to me, a sign of a riddle like before, but nothing was apparent. I was just getting used to the light and dark when Dylan answered the question that had been spinning around inside my head.

“There,” he said, nodding into the shadows, and beckoned to me to follow him. I did, and instantly the reflection of the light showed me what he’d seen. From where I’d been standing before, the space had been in darkness. From where he’d been standing, however, it had been faintly and eerily lit.

We’d only moved a few steps forward to the edge of the clearing, and I surveyed our first challenge. Before us stood two mirrors, both about seven feet tall with thick silver frames. They were oddly plain, without decoration or of even much beauty, but it was clear to me that they were treasures. Dylan and I chose a mirror each, simultaneously; I moved to stand before the right as he stepped in front of the left.

The candlelight flickered and cast its light across part of the floor between the mirrors which had previously been shadowed, so it took me by surprise when I caught sight of something coloured white-orange from the flames, rested on the floor there.

Curious, I knelt down to pick up a small, blank piece of paper. I glanced at Dylan apprehensively, and turned it over. Despite my uncertainty about this unremarkable thing being what we were looking for, the other side of the paper revealed a wide, italic script. Only a few lines. Yet in seconds I was certain that it was Kayne’s.

Take a glass each and look back; speak the most secret of fears you have not accepted. My doors will open when you fall.

Puzzled, I read the words aloud to Dylan, and his answering expression of contempt confirmed my notion of the writer’s identity.

“We only have to look into the mirrors,” I said weakly, knowing I was saying far from the truth; a cruel, derisive man like Kayne wouldn’t have devised something so simple, “Nothing can hurt us in a mirror, can it? It looks like Kayne isn’t letting us out of here otherwise, so…look with me at the same time?”

He nodded with a serious aura about him, and neither of us hesitated. I turned to the mirror and stepped forwards so all I could see was its candlelit glass.

What happened next was gradual, so slow that I couldn’t have even noticed the first happening until it was over. A golden colour began to creep over the glass, and I unwisely construed it as a trick of the mirrors and their reflections. If I hadn’t done that, then I might’ve been able to prepare myself…

I noticed the gold then, and watched it focus in the centre of the mirror. I could feel myself being drawn forwards, my body moving without conscious effort, but then the glow exploded out to coat every inch of the glass, fading only to a light hue while I stood, mesmerised, to watch the scene unfold.

It was like a film reel was being fired onto the mirror, it was so clear. Unlike the ten or twenty seconds of building up before – which I’d seen only as darkness – it was fast, furious and didn’t hesitate to deliver the emotional blows it caused.

In the weeks after my dad disappeared, after I’d realised how unlikely it was that he would come back, I’d taken to watching every minute of the TV news that I could. Before school, at dinner, in the evenings, even at weekends, the horrors imprinted themselves on my brain. The murders, the abductions, the wars, the mysteries…all children are impressionable, but I’d been especially vulnerable then.

Every night for months on end, I’d had countless dreams about what could’ve happened to my dad. Each dream had been provoked by the terrors of the world around me, and each night my mum soothed my screams, crying silent tears. Jonas had never said a word to me about them, though I’d heard glimpses of him talking to her about sending me to a psychiatrist…

We’d all been involved in the nightmares. They had been the single times of my life when I’d hated the ability to imagine.

Now Kayne repeated those times.

The mirror showed me the end of an empty high street, streetlamps bright circles of light on the dark pavement. It had always been night-time in my nightmares. A figure, shrouded in a thick, hooded jumper hurried along the pavement, turning into an estate. He walked faster and faster, occasionally turning his head slightly to glance behind himself…

“No…” I whispered, horrified at the possibility of what could be unfolding before my eyes, “Please, no…”

The nightmare continued, my pleas unheard or ignored. In the estate there were fewer streetlamps, and the hour meant that only the odd house was awake, so the images I saw were blacker. The figure was still clear though, always hurrying, always on the edge of running.

He turned down a right fork of the street, and the houses became less frequent. Then I could see the men twenty feet behind, and the figure saw them too. He started to run.

The men moved impossibly fast, moonlight casting their shadows long and thin, their pumping limbs making those shadows spiderlike and grotesque as they mingled. There were four of them. My focus returned to the man being chased, though it wasn’t far now, as the distance between predator and prey closed.

Fifteen feet. Ten. He couldn’t run fast enough, but the end was coming. Breathing in gasps, the man sprinted to the house in the middle of nowhere, so comforting and familiar, despite its being asleep like its neighbours. The men seized their opportunity. Their prey had moments.

He hammered on the front door, pounded on it, so much that it shook. The chasers simply laughed.

“Erin!” he yelled, desperate. He ran to the fence on the left, and with a great leap tried to jump to climb over, but couldn’t get a grip.

“Jonas!” he shouted, and I was shaking, though I barely noticed. He leaped again, and fell straight down, hard. I saw the man’s knee twist awkwardly, and he bellowed in defiance at his predators, so close behind him.

He tried for one last attempt. I willed him with everything inside of me to succeed, and he did. He held his focus and began to heave himself up.

Was I wrong? I thought suddenly, Is this really going to be a victory? Is this really what happened?

The man had one leg over and in the next second would jump to the ground. But then he was hauled from safety and plummeted backwards, on the wrong side of the fence.

The men’s faces were covered, but the moonlight shone from their silver knives. I was silently pleading as they drew them all and took their victory.

The knives dove towards him, and I saw the victim’s face. In his last breath he screamed,

“ADENA!”

NO!

My father’s pain was everywhere, in my ears and on the ground, and soon he was gone. The lights in the house fell late of their cue, and the last seconds repeated themselves. My name was hollered, my dad’s screams screamed again and again, and I couldn’t take it.

“NO!” I shouted, and my horrified captivation shattered. I refrained from the violence I wanted to avenge what I’d seen with, and hurled myself away from the mirror, screaming,

“No, no! Dad!”

I crumbled to the ground and hid myself, shaking violently, feeling tears pour down my cheeks. The final images of the nightmare, imprinted on my closed eyelids, span and showed themselves without an end. And when I opened my eyes to escape them, I couldn’t see anything else.

Luckily - and unluckily, depending on how you viewed it – at that moment a huge, resounding crash echoed in my ears, and I jerked round involuntarily to locate the source of the noise.

Dylan was on his knees, the silver mirror before him shattered. Glass was scattered everywhere, and toppled candle flame was beginning to lick the wood below. His head was in his hands and he was shaking as I was, but too many things were happening at once, because then the doors behind us flew open.

Escape.

Unfamiliar warmth flooded my system, and I desperately held onto it. Trying with everything I had to focus on that single hope, I stumbled across the room. I tripped over my own feet as well as the glass coating the floor, and sobbed into Dylan’s ear.

“We have to go, Dylan. We have to get out of here.”

His body began to tremble more forcefully. I dreaded to think what he might’ve seen, a boy rendered alone for thirty years. He’d had decades longer to imagine than I had. Tears still spilled in a steady stream down my face, and I saw the flames spreading, the candles catching and eating up the floor with their hot light. Dylan wouldn’t or couldn’t move as I whispered, spoke and even shouted at him, so I did the only thing I could: I slipped my hands under his arms, which were curled around his head rigidly, and heaved.

Worryingly, he was still unresponsive, and I would’ve thought him unconscious if not for the tightness of his body and because he opened his eyes to stare at the ceiling. They were wide and unseeing, but horribly alive with emerald pain and misery. I hauled him backwards, a foot at a time with every few seconds. My muscles shrieked at me in defiance but the flames were growing, and I knew that there was no chance for us if I stopped.

Heave. Gasp, pant. Heave. Gasp, pant. There was no time to wipe the sweat from my brow or to move my hair back from my face. I frantically struggled to drag Dylan to escape, still sobbing and trembling all the while.

And by some miracle, we had reached the doors. With one last, agonising pull he was through, and I might’ve cried for joy if my eyes hadn’t already been overflowing with tears. Dylan came-to from his…seizure, whatever it had been, and gasped for air like he’d been drowning. I knelt down beside him and forced him to straighten out his body to get the air better into his lungs. He replied by gripping my arm painfully hard, with both of his hands.

Heat flared up the side of my face, and my attention flickered to the scene of the horrors that we’d just escaped from. Almost the entire room was now in flames, and a small part of me mourned for the loss of the treasures there; the rest of me was wrecked with relief. However, before the room was blazed into oblivion, I saw myself amongst the flames, my reflection gazing back at me from the depths of the tall mirror that was still standing. I was shocked at what I saw. The raging emotions in my mind were so overwhelming that I was easily distracted by anything but thinking about them, and I quickly studied the girl in the mirror, at length.

My form was shadowed and obscured by the smoke and fire, but I could just about make out my torso and the top of my legs. I’d never been particularly bothered about my weight, but I’d always kept myself healthy and fit; I liked most sports and loved some, and I’d never seen the attraction of food for comfort or excessive fast food. I wasn’t stick-thin like some girls my age, but I was comfortably average. I was happy.

My face was much more discernible than my body, and it was the part I could see that I found so disturbing.

The face of the girl in the mirror wasn’t quite oval, or quite round, but somewhere in between. Her features were even: small nose, compact mouth with full lips, and dark eyes. All I could see of them from where I stood was that they were not green or blue, and that flames burned in them. However, I knew from years of reflection that they were really a dark hazel, though sometimes seeming more brown, and were flecked through with green and gold. My favourite part of her appearance; they were the colours of the forest.

But then I saw and felt the extent of the shock. Her dark hair, brown and wavy to halfway down her back, was static. With all the crackling flames, it seemed as if it were as one with them. The girl’s cheeks and brow were smudged with ash, as were her clothes, and her expression was terrifying. Immense pain leaked out of her features, and her cheeks shone with the liquid sadness of fresh tears. Her eyes were horrified, tormented…

What a wreck this place was turning me into.

All of this was observed in moments, and suddenly I saw the flames intensify. With a last, pitiful glance at the girl in the fire, I slammed the doors shut and turned away from the plague of smoke and mirrors. Then I collapsed to the ground.

With the many, many distractions, I hadn’t fully registered my occasional cough, but in the chaos’ silence I began to steadily choke the smoke out of my lungs. I could hear Dylan suffering in the same way somewhere behind me, and I laid flat on my back to get closer to more oxygen. I gasped like a dying woman. My skin tingled, though I could feel that I thankfully wasn’t burnt.

All I could think was, One room down. How many more did that mean were left? How much more would Dylan and I have to endure before we had any hope of escaping?

This would be a really bad time to find out that we’re on a wild goose chase.

Even my thoughts were in disarray…

I simply rested for several minutes, the smoke gradually being forced out of my lungs, and then I relished the peace of the quiet. I didn’t let the nightmare rule me, because that was one obstacle that Kayne couldn’t traverse. Those nightmares had plagued me for months, yet I’d learnt to control them. They’d eventually stopped invading my dreams and I’d learnt to discern them from reality. I still felt cold from the fear Kayne had planted in my mind, but I didn’t let it take me over.

Dylan, on the other hand, was in worse shape. After I’d mostly recovered to my usual self, physically and mentally, I crawled over to where he lay, curled up into a ball on the floor. I knew that I couldn’t mention anything of his nightmare, or whatever else he’d been forced to see, so I merely whispered his name softly. I prayed not to startle him.

No response. I spoke it again, and after a third time he opened his eyes and asked blurrily,

“Lea?”

I was stumped. Who was he talking about?

“It’s just me, Dylan,” I breathed, an idea dawning on me more and more by the second, “It’s Adena.”

“Lea?”

He was focused now, but not on me. His gaze wandered to a nearby wall, where yet another painting was hung. I looked to it too, trying to make sense of what could be going on inside his head because of it, and then stopped.

The painting was the same painting as the one in the corridor. In Dylan’s corridor.

We both stood up and rushed over to it, though Dylan’s movement was unsure and I reached it first. Upon closer inspection I concluded that it was definitely the same picture. A copy, or the original of the copy…what did it matter? The painting of the girl on the moors was here too. The panting that had disturbed me so much before.

The blonde girl…

“Lea.” Dylan answered to my unanswered question, and smiled offhandedly. His expression was somewhat vacant; he was clearly in a world of his own, in his own imagination or memory. His gaze was distant. However, in the next blink of my eyes he was back to how I knew him to be – polite, considerate, brave and openly honest.

“That’s Carson’s sister,” he continued, and the link clicked just before he explained further, “My friend’s sister, the girl I-“ He stopped suddenly and glanced at me with a pleading expression. I understood, and nodded. He didn’t want to relive the memories. And from what he’d told me of remembering her, what it had cost him, I didn’t blame him at all.

“The girl from the memories Kayne’s machine used. I’d know her anywhere, even from that angle. This is Lea, I’m sure. And this place, it’s somewhere we used to go when we were kids.” He pointed to the shadowy moors the girl in the painting looked across, but he didn’t touch the canvas. His eyes sparkled angrily as he mused,

“This is Kayne’s doing. He’s used my mind somehow; he knows how much seeing her hurts me - how much she came between me and my brother, my best friend!”

Dylan slumped down to the floor, and knocked his head back against the wall below the painting, a little too hard than was outside the boundaries of common sense. He then winced regretfully, and looked into my face with an expression of such hopelessness that I instantly felt miserable.

“Why is he doing this, Adena?” he asked tremulously, and I silently wished that he wouldn’t go on, “Why is he still torturing me? Wasn’t thirty years enough? It didn’t exist for anyone else, but it did for me. I don’t understand why! Is he not finished with me yet? Is there something else he wants?”

All the while, I was stood speechless.

How could I possibly answer any of those questions? Only Kayne knew how, and I pitied Dylan for having to expose that dreadful position to someone who couldn’t help him.

He rose to his feet and his mortified look sent me a little off the rails. I stormed past him towards the hall, fighting back tears, too soon. My dad’s face drifted across my mind’s eye. I ignored the blood and the flash of silver which accompanied the vision, and only concentrated on him.

I wish you were here, Dad. I wish you were here to help us. You would know something…

“We need to go to the next room.” I said roughly, clearing my throat of the choking sadness that was the lingering friend of my tears. I knew I could trust that Dylan was following me; I heard his resounding footsteps behind. I was grateful that I didn’t have to look him in the eye. This boy had a lifetime of pain and conflict that I wasn’t ready to deal with just yet.

I would have to get used to this feeling, of muted anger at how I couldn’t do anything to help, of joined sadness of being trapped, and worst of all, of all the hardship I knew had to be to come.

I needed to keep my emotions in check though. I stopped in the middle of the hall, and after a few seconds began walking once again, without turning round. Dylan and I walked side by side. How had the easy, carefree nature between us evaporated so quickly? Only an hour or so ago, we’d been laughing as he’d fixed my injuries.

I guessed it was this kind of thing that really put you to the test. Being forced under pressure proved what kind of person you were; you could shatter – scream at the sky, the world, succumb to begging for mercy. Or you could be stronger than that and remember the sunshine, waiting for the clouds to part again.

I let out a long breath and felt Dylan’s gaze on my face. I looked to him and smiled sadly. He soon returned the expression, meeting my strength equally. This was the kind of person I wanted to be. I wanted to push through the tunnel and come out the other side, even if I was worse for wear afterwards. It seemed that the boy beside me felt that way too.

And I’d thought that teenagers already had enough to deal with.