by Colin L. Campbell
Salix parked his bicycle in the cycleport and entered his house through the side entrance. Hanging up his navy blue cap and jacket, he could already smell the fish cooking in the kitchen. What a good wife he had, thought Salix, as he embraced her from behind at the stove. Her blonde hair had the aroma of the beach wafting around its curls.
“How was work?” she asked, speaking over the pops and crackles of the sizzling salmon.
Rummaging around in the icebox and grabbing a bottle of milk, he said, “Ah, Observatory Tower Nine, becoming more predictable everyday.”
She kissed him on the forehead. “Well, let’s not forget all the predictable money that comes from having a Government job.”
Salix gave a look of concession, then asked, “Where are the girls?”
“In our bedroom, playing.”
He found them on the bed, dolls trapped in their tiny hands. As soon as they saw him, his two daughters bounced off the mattress and into his arms, suffocating him with affection. They were getting bigger everyday. Xanthoria was really starting to resemble her mother, with her long golden hair. Elodea, the youngest, had brown hair like him but had her mother’s curls.
Salix saw a flash of light coming from the bathroom in the corner of the room. He walked in, curious, and came out holding a small oval mirror. Just then, his wife came into the bedroom, drying her hands with a towel.
“Aralia, he asked, “why did you have the looking glass out? Were you putting on makeup?”
She rolled her sea-green eyes. “Just because you stare at a giant looking glass planet all day, doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t look at our own reflections once in a while.”
“Okay. But just so you know, you’re pretty enough that you don’t need makeup.”
She just sighed harshly and responded, “Dinner’s ready, husband,” and then marched out of the room. Salix knew that whenever his wife called him “husband,” she thought he wasn’t doing a very good job at being one.
At the round glass table in the dining room, over fish and vegetables, Elodea showed him what she had drawn at school. It was a picture of Opuntia, their planet’s reflective outer neighbor, the second planet from the sun. Standing on its glassy surface was a group of mages, crude stick figures wearing fishbowl helmets and gripping crooked staves. He looked at it closer. She had scribbled faces on the planet, too. Presumably, to symbolize the reflections of people on their own world of Poa. Their mouths were all open in the shapes of O’s.
Something about the drawing disturbed Salix, and he didn’t know whether it was because of the people’s unintentionally haunting expressions, or the mages. The teachers still taught kids that the mages were all heroes, Government good guys who had fearlessly traveled to Opuntia ages ago and gave Poa the means to periodically observe itself. But more enlightened people knew that the planet had merely achieved its reflective nature as a result of the mages’ terraforming attempt gone terribly wrong.
Opuntia had been a windy desert planet, almost entirely sand and larger chunks of lustrous white metal. The terraforming process had heated up the surface of the planet too fast, eventually leaving it a molten ocean. When it solidified, Opuntia was a mirror world. Every couple of years, Poa and Opuntia come into opposition, lining up with each other and the sun. Now, the two planets’ elliptical orbits had brought them the closest they’ve ever been to each other in history.
Of course, if it hadn’t been for the mages, Salix wouldn’t have the job that he did, but he could do without the sun being reflected back onto Poa as well. It was almost like having two suns. When the planets were aligned, it never really got completely dark, just twilit. When it was supposed to be nighttime on this side of the planet, there was Opuntia, standing next to it, catching the sunrays and throwing them back. Poa had been slowly heating up, too. Whether this was a direct result from the sun’s reflection or something else, nobody knew. The astromages of yesteryear had gone away, and the space program was dead. The Government was only concerned with watching now.
***
Salix left early the next day, after his daughters had left for school, and began the thirty-minute commute to work on his bicycle. The ride out of the village was his favorite part, gliding past neatly plotted gardens, the gnomes hard at work, pitching soil with their spades and tending to the plants. Aralia and him should get a couple, he thought. Garden gnomes could be lively additions to a home, and they were loyal to the family. The girls would especially love them. Salix could afford things like that now, working at Observatory Tower Nine.
He coasted down the hilly terrain of the village and past the marina, the loud noise of seagulls and splashing assaulting his ears. Wet, sand-scented air clung around him as he pedaled by. The tower stood like a lighthouse in the distance. Climbing the steep hill to its entrance was the second worst part of the job. The first was climbing the spiral staircase to the top of the tower. After flashing his badge at the guard, he ascended the coiled stairway one sluggish step at a time.
Salix was Borago’s relief. The heavyset man looked noticeably more cheerful as soon as his replacement entered the observatory chamber.
Borago slipped him a telegraph report and said, “You’re watching section four. Report any incidents, and, well, I guess you know the drill.”
Salix nodded and began turning a series of metal wheels. Rusted gears grinded together, and he could hear the telescope mounted on the roof of the tower squeak as it raised and swiveled its barrel, pointing to a precise spot on Opuntia. Once the telescope was set for section four, Salix slumped into his chair and prepared to adjust the lens settings.
“Have fun,” Borago said, slapping Salix on the back.
As Borago walked off, Salix gestured a half-wave and then peered into the telescope’s eyepiece. With the powerful Dragon eye lenses, he could view Opuntia in amazing magnification. Poa was cloudless at section four, allowing Salix to scan the reflection unimpeded.
Salix read the telegraph report. At Opuntia’s present distance, it would take light approximately one minute to reach Poa, after being reflected. This meant that anything he observed would have already happened one minute ago. Salix began monitoring section four, starting with broad sweeps and zooming in on areas of interest.
Sometime after lunch, Salix’s attention was drawn to an aberration while he was hovering over a cluster of villages. After getting a closer view, he realized that what he was looking at was a clan of grizzly camels. Groups of these carnivores had been seen more frequently in recent years, but they usually stayed further inland. They lived in more arid climates. Salix wondered if the camels’ slow expansion of their hunting grounds was due to the planet’s continual warming. The Glittering Desert grew as the temperature steadily rose, spreading its radial dunes farther every year like tentacles.
He watched the animals roam the village and sniff the air intently. Zooming in, he could read a street sign that said IRIS, which, Salix realized, was only a few blocks from his own street. After telegraphing the police, he decided to scan his house just to make sure. He was relieved to find there weren’t any wild beasts wandering around outside it. At least, not one minute ago.
Aralia was out working in the garden, and Salix zoomed in voyeuristically and admired his wife’s delicate features. Yellow tendrils of hair blew against her face in the breeze. She casually brushed them away just as her face became drenched with shadow. Salix zoomed out and saw that there was a man standing over her. It took him a second to realize he was the milkman, making his daily delivery, white robe billowing in the wind.
Aralia stood up and smiled. They were chatting with each other. Probably talking about the weather, Salix guessed. They continued their conversation while walking onto the porch, and then to Salix’s astonishment, the two stepped into the house together. His thoughts danced. But none of the excuses he could imagine assured him that there wasn’t something wrong with what he just witnessed.
Salix tried to pry through the round window on the front of the house, but the shutters were drawn. For the next twenty minutes, he just stared through the telescope viewer, hardly blinking, until the milkman finally came out. His wife waved goodbye as the man strutted off. Salix didn’t like the way she waved either–not using her wrist but playfully wiggling her fingers. It wasn’t the right kind of wave for a married woman to give a milkman.
When his shift was up, Salix left, his mind still stuck on what he’d seen. He decided he wasn’t going to say anything. Not yet, at least. It was still too early to start with the accusations. Maybe to cast away his cares, he stopped by the pet shop on his ride home. They only had one garden gnome left, but it would do. He looked just like every other gnome–just over a foot tall, a red conical hat, and a white beard.
Salix was greeted enthusiastically by his family as he walked through the door. After surprising them with the gift, he set the cage down on the rug in the living room. A few moments later, the gnome poked his head out cautiously. He carefully studied the humans stalking over him.
“His name’s Jepp,” said Salix.
Aralia got down on her hands and knees and greeted him exaggeratedly. “Hi, Jepp! How are you?”
“Honey,” said Salix, “I think you’re scaring him. Let’s give him a little space, okay?”
She stood up. “Hey, why don’t the girls show him the garden? That should put him at ease.”
The two daughters took the gnome by his stubby hand and led him out front, giggling.
Salix tugged on his shirt collar, fanning himself. “Why is it so hot in here?” he asked his wife.
“I forgot to tell you that the frost circulator is broken again,” she said, tying her hair back.
They went outside and traipsed around to the back of the house, where Salix located the F.C. unit and opened its lid. There was a large fan connected to a bunch of tubes that ran into a hole through the wall. The gears were still meshing together, powering the fan. That part was working fine, but Salix turned a knob, clicking it as far as it would go clockwise, so he wouldn’t have to wind it up later. He looked behind the fan, where the Yeti lung ballooned in and out.
“Could it be the winter valve?” asked Aralia.
Salix shook his head, focused on the lung. It was still pumping correctly, he thought. But why wasn’t its naturally cold air reaching the fan? He fiddled with some of the tubes attached to the end of the lung.
After a minute or so, he said, “I think it’s the winter valve.”
Aralia glared at him. “That’s what I said! You never listen to me.”
Salix gave her a submissive shrug, and the two of them went back around to the front of the house. The girls were playing with the gnome, chasing each other around the yard.
“Where’s your secret treasure at?” demanded Xanthoria.
Salix corrected her. “Gnomes horde secret knowledge, not gold or jewels. Don’t they, Jepp?”
The garden gnome winked at him and said a little rhyme: “All the secrets of the shiny stars of heaven, poured into the tiny jars of seven.”
***
The next day at work, Salix began the same routine as he’d done since he’d started the job–feign interest in Borago’s small talk, position the telescope, and change the lens settings. Today, he was scanning section three, which wasn’t anywhere close to his village. He was glad of that, because he was afraid of what he’d see if he zoomed in on his house. And because all kinds of crazy things were happening in section three.
It had started a little after Borago left. There were fires, grizzly attacks, murders, and riots. It’s like the heat had finally gotten to everyone, thought Salix. But something stranger happened after he telegraphed the police about the incidents. In almost every case, the police telegraphed back and said they couldn’t find where the occurrences were taking place at, or that he’d been mistaken. It seemed as if none of the things he’d witnessed had actually happened. As if Opuntia was showing him false reflections.
He relocated one of the scenes where he’d observed a massive fire and saw that the large urban area wasn’t burning but had been blackened and destroyed from where there had been one. Now he wondered if the police weren’t just incompetent.
Salix returned home that evening, weary with stress. Jepp had already settled in and was busy planting more tomatoes in the garden. Some toadstools had mysteriously sprouted up overnight, and the gnome occasionally rested under the shade of their wide, warty caps.
The frost circulator was still broken, and Salix spent most of the night sweating and tossing around on his sticky bed sheets.
Relieving Borago the next morning, Salix asked him, “Have you noticed anything weird in your monitoring?”
The nightshift worker nodded, his chins bouncing boisterously. “This planet’s gone mad! And when I reported all the crazy things I’d seen in section six, the police said they couldn’t confirm it! What the hell is that about?”
Salix didn’t know but was somewhat soothed that it wasn’t just him. Was it some kind of police conspiracy? The thought was ludicrous, but he found it hard to believe that it was all some bad optical illusion, either.
A few minutes later, he was back to observing section three. And once again, like yesterday, the streets were teeming with chaos. He couldn’t help but wonder what was happening in section four, the area that included his village. He rotated the telescope and gazed into the eyepiece. The same stuff was occurring there, too. Every place he scanned was littered with violent disorder. There was a fire coming from a small building in his village. Zooming in, his eyes widened as he realized that it was his daughters’ school. He recoiled from the viewer in horror. It wasn’t real, he said to himself. But he couldn’t take that chance. He had to get down there as soon he could.
Jogging down the winding stairs of the tower, he found a patrolling guard and stuck him at his post in the observatory chamber. Then he leapt onto his bike and sped off towards the school. He knew right away, as soon as he neared the building, that there had been no fire. Nothing was ablaze and nothing was burnt. No smoke or kids being evacuated. Salix rested his sweaty head on the handlebars, panting heavily.
On the ride back to work, he stopped by his house. There was another bicycle in the cycleport. That’s strange, thought Salix.
He found Jepp watering flowers in the garden and went up to him. “Do you know whose bike that is?”
Without taking his eyes off the flowers, the gnome said, “A man’s. Almost trampled me petunias on his way in.”
Salix’s heart stopped. “A man’s inside the house?!”
“Been in there for a long time, he has,” affirmed Jepp.
Salix burned with fury. The milkman incident the other day could have been another reflective deception, but this was real, he knew. This was really happening, and it made him sick. He wanted desperately to charge in there and catch her red-handed, but he had to get back to the tower. There was still a possibility that some of what he saw was genuine, and he had to continue to report it to the police.
When he returned to Observatory Tower Nine, he contacted the police as well as the Government. He waited until his shift was over, and he still hadn’t heard back. The Government was silent. They wouldn’t address the issue at all.
***
The fist thing Salix did when he got home was tell the kids to go to their rooms. He had to speak with his wife alone. She was stirring a pot of stew in the kitchen when he stormed in angrily.
Raising his voice, he said, “Did you think I wouldn’t find out? I saw his bike, you know!”
Aralia stopped stirring and spun around. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the man you had sex with today while I was at work!”
She stared blankly at Salix like his words hadn’t registered. Then she began to laugh, covering her mouth with her hand. “That was just the frost circulator repairman, Salix.”
In his fiery rage, he hadn’t even noticed the cool air streaming through the vents. His ruddy complexion evaporated into a pallid mask of mistakenness.
He backed out of the kitchen and staggered outside. Collapsing onto the stairs of the front porch, he softly sobbed into his hands. Salix thought some more. Jepp had said the man had been in the house, not outside where the F.C. unit was. He had no business inside, at least not for any good length of time. It’s possible that nothing happened, thought Salix, but he had to know for sure. It was eating at him.
When he could take no more, he desperately went up to the gnome in the garden. “Jepp!” he said. “Can you give me some of your secret knowledge?”
The little gardener smiled and asked, “Is what ye seek an answer to what should be believed, truth to whether ye could be deceived?”
“Yes!” Salix said, shocked. “That’s exactly what I need to know.”
Jepp stroked his beard. “Aye, I will give ye this knowledge. But first ye have to do me a favor.”
“Anything.”
Jepp pointed to a lawn a couple of houses over. “There is a gnome as fair as a ghost orchid over yonder. But when I try to get close to her, that beast of a dog barks and chases me away.” He pulled out a letter from his pocket and handed it to Salix. “Give her this so that she may know of me true feelings.”
Salix looked at the letter, which was written in the gnomish language, and agreed to take it to the female garden gnome who lived just down the street.
When he stepped onto the neighbor’s lawn, he couldn’t see any gnomes or dogs, but he admired the garden, which was bigger and more ornate than his own. It was splashed with color and had feathery foliage, strung with plump fruits and vegetables.
Salix walked up to an arrangement of herbs that was bordered with rocks. Parting some long spears of grass, he finally saw the gnome that Jepp had spoken of. She was crouching down, ripping out weeds. He introduced himself and passed along the letter.
As he was about to leave the yard, Salix caught a blur of something big and furry rushing at him from the side. He turned only to see the frothing muzzle of the neighbor’s dog clamp down on his pant leg. Salix had strolled by that house many times and the dog had never so much as growled at him. Why it was attacking him now, he didn’t know.
The animal tugged and tore off a shred of fabric, which aloud Salix to make a panicked dash into the street. Looking back while he ran, he could see the dog’s plaque-stained teeth gnashing behind him. He faced forward again, closing his eyes, expecting at any minute to be bitten and brought down like a slow wildebeest. When he glanced back a second time, the dog was gone. He came to an ungraceful halt and turned around, still fearful. But the dog had vanished.
Salix was still trying to catch his breath when he met back up with Jepp in the garden. The gnome thanked him and then held out his hand. In his palm was a small pile of seeds, all different kinds.
Jepp gave them to Salix and said, “The seeds will be sown, if your mindscape is tilled, when swallowed. Your needs will be grown, and that blind gape is filled, when hollowed.”
Salix was skeptical but didn’t question him. He went inside and washed the seeds down with a bottle of milk.
That night, Salix had strange dreams. There were no people, just images of plants germinating, surrounded by a black abyss. They grew into straggling vines and filled the darkness.
He awoke the next morning to sunlight beaming in through the window. Aralia was still asleep next to him.
Salix searched his mind for the answers to Aralia’s fidelity and found they weren’t there. But something else was. Another dark secret had revealed itself instead.
When he focused on those thoughts, visions of horrible things flickered in his head for a second, and then a sandstorm blew over them, hissing, and snuffed them out.
“The Government lied to us,” said Salix.
His wife’s eyelids rustled and then opened. “What are you saying?”
“They told us there weren’t life forms on Opuntia when the mages started terraforming.” He stared at his wife with red lightning eyes. “But there were. They were sentient and perfectly adapted to the desert climate of the planet. Because of our desire to expand, the astromages went ahead with the terraforming process knowing there was intelligent life. It killed them all. And it was all in vain, because it didn’t even work.”
Salix sat up in his bed and thought about this for a while. Then he got dressed and reported for work.
***
In the observatory chamber, Salix passionately relayed the secret knowledge that he had learned to Borago. The hefty man listened, unsure what he believed, but agreed to stick around and help Salix spread the word to all of the other observatory towers. Most of the towers refused to acknowledge their message, but a few of them telegraphed back and said they were going on strike until the Government explained some things.
Observatory Tower Twenty-Three, on the other side of the planet, had already shut down. They said that the workers there could no longer stand to view the awful things that showed up in Opuntia’s reflections. They had seen horrendous natural disasters and bloody civil strife. Images too disturbing to continue working.
Salix, on the other hand, felt strangely compelled to keep observing, even though he was just as disturbed over some of the scenes he’d witnessed.
After he aimed the telescope for section four and adjusted the lenses, he pressed his dark-sagged eyes up to the viewer. There was something right next to the telescope, but he couldn’t tell what it was. All that he could make out was something orange and scaly. Then it moved, and Salix was looking at the large slit pupil of an animal’s eye staring back at the telescope lens. The barrel vibrated as the animal flapped its massive wings and flew a few feet back.
“A Dragon!” said Salix.
Borago jumped up from his seat. “What? Dragons haven’t been seen in decades!”
He pushed his fat head up to the ocular. Salix ran to a window, but nothing was there.
He waited a minute, then asked Borago, “Still in the viewer?”
“Uh huh.”
And there was still no Dragon outside the window.
Salix had the impression that all these strange and terrible images really existed, but not in their world.
He sat there and thought some more, then nodded off. He saw the tangle of vines in his head again, covered in flower buds. They began to blossom, and colorful petals gently unfurled. Then Salix was woken up by Borago clearing his throat. Seconds later, Salix had a vision of a clock face. It had two separate minute hands. One of them was stuck a minute behind the other one. He knew that both times existed in separate but equally real dimensions. Then the vision scattered.
Salix got back on the telescope and soared directly to his house. His jaw dropped as he saw a line of men standing on the porch in front of the door. Jepp was working in the garden, but he looked different. As Salix closed in, he could see that the gnome’s skin was now dark and cracked like sun-baked mud. His eyes were cherry-red, and a massive hump protruded from his back. Salix looked away. He didn’t want to see anymore. He decided to leave early.
Salix slowly pedaled home under the scorching sun. He still hadn’t determined if his wife was really having affairs, or if it had all been part of the alternate reality–the one created in Opuntia’s twisted mirror surface. The one that existed a minute behind his own reality. He hoped that nightmare world never caught up to his own.
A while after Salix had left, Borago stared into the telescope’s viewer in the observatory tower. He could see the line of men and the wicked looking gnome just as Salix had. Then he saw Salix himself strut across the lawn. The distraught husband accepted a pair of gardening shears from Jepp, shooed away the men at the doorstep, and entered his house.
But Salix didn’t see the line of men when he parked his bicycle in the cycleport one minute earlier. Jepp too was not as he had appeared in the mirror image. The gnome was singing to himself as he trimmed the hedges. Salix entered through the side entrance. The F.C. must have gone out again, he thought, as he made his way down the humid hallway to the bedroom. Aralia was asleep on their bed, the sheets ruffled. He thought he could hear wind blowing, whistling from somewhere unseen. His vision became grainy. He thought Aralia was wearing makeup, but he couldn’t tell.
Then he saw the small looking glass in the bathroom, signaling him with twinkles of light. He went and picked it up. And as he gazed into the image of their bedroom, he could see the gardening shears sticking out of Aralia, the bed sheets stained in dark red. He raised his hands to his mouth, only to see that they too were covered in blood.
When he stared at them with his own eyes, the blood was still there. It was no longer just a reflection. He shut his eyes, trying to stamp out the terrible vision, but more of them came. Images of death and destruction. Then the wind came again, carrying sand, and washed over it all.
About the Author
Colin L. Campbell lives in Kansas City, Missouri. He has been published in Atomjack and has an upcoming story in Big Pulp.
©2008 Colin L. Campbell
