Chapter 5: Through the Looking Glass
And You Say I Never Get You Flowers
Previously in Chapter 4: Incendio
Back at the Villa, we found a white iris laying in front of our bedroom door. Nicole gently lifted the flower and added it to the quiver.
Four horcruxes had been destroyed, which meant that Nicole was strong enough to face the Pane of Vanity, which remained sealed and tucked away in the closet.
She hung her coat, slipped into a robe, and pulled out the box housing the mirror. She reread the scroll.
“The third object is a mirror, purchased at an estate sale of a once-great starlet. With each passing day, you grow stronger, even as your reflection fades away. What people see is but a glimmer of your true strength. Real power is found reflected back to us in the eyes of the ones for whom we care. Heed their cries and shatter what’s only a thin pane of glass.”
Who among us hasn’t been caught staring in the mirror?
So much of how we imagine ourselves comes from reflections and photographs. When we tell a funny anecdote or daydream in the shower, we do it with an image of ourselves in mind, a plugged-into-the-matrix avatar of our best angles and favorite digitals… but if all our focus is on perfecting an outward construct, we’ll always feel flat. Strip away everything that diminishes our vanity and what we’re left with — at best — is the power to send nudes. Real power is forged in our capacity for generosity, seasoned over time like cast iron.
Nicole tore E.P’s warning from the top of the box and broke the seal.
The mirror was narrow, about two feet tall and framed in dark wood. She rested it against a high-backed chair in the corner of the room.
“Heed whose cries?” Nicole wondered, as she moved towards the Pane. The whisper of voices only she could hear called her close, the hypnotic silver pool offering sweet paradise.
An energetic chime signaled an incoming video call on my phone, which I answered and showed Nicole, breaking her transfixion. Filling the frame was a salty-black, mustachioed, miniature schnauzer.
“Llama?!” Nicole exclaimed. “What are you doing, Llama?”
Salvador Dalí Llama is one of our dogs, who at that moment, was back in Manhattan with my Aunt Sue and Uncle Julio. I instantly knew what we had to do; possibly because I had orchestrated the call in the first place, but also because Llama was born with the gift of song — if song means the blood curdling shriek of a baby on an airplane. I believed her cries could destroy the Pane of Vanity.
We began a pack howl. Llama’s eyes widened and her paws gripped the rug beneath her, instinct taking hold. She raised her snout to the sky and howled. Awoo! Ow ow awooo!
Llama shifted up an octave, creating a surge of electrostatic energy that leapt between the particles in the air. Dust floated up from the windowsills. As her cry went supersonic, a white fog crept into my frame of vision, a sure sign that I was blacking out. I didn’t know if I could stay conscious long enough to — CRACK — all of a sudden, a chasm opened in the mirror and spread across the glass like a spider’s web. I gritted my teeth and held down the Pane as Llama wailed louder. More veins erupted across the face of the horcrux until finally, a Praxis shockwave blasted us backwards.
We had done it.
From behind the high-backed chair, I pulled a hydrangea, all that remained of the strongest horcrux so far. Tied to its stem was the sixth scroll. Nicole set aside the clue and added the flower to her quiver. Meanwhile, Sue and Julio calmed Llama down and wished us a goodnight.
There were only two horcruxes left.