Reflections. Chapter Four. Part 1

Four

Mirror Mirror

Leyton Falls

Later that same day.

Peter Ferris was a simple man caught between his morals and the desperate love he had for his only child as he stood with his back pressed hard against the morgue’s iron gates. His heart thumped, his breaths short and sharp, his eyes flicking left and right in the hope he’d see no one, moreover, in the hope no one would see him.

         In all his thirty-two years he had never considered himself brave, but bravery wasn’t the thing that brought him here tonight. It was something purer, something he had in abundance for the little girl he’d come to collect tonight, it was love, plain and simple love.

         The task he was about to undertake, and the unholy ritual to follow, scared him, but he was determined to see it through regardless of his fears. Which, at thirty minutes to midnight, gave him no time to consider. Thirty minutes to get in, get his daughter, get out, and get back to the house, and then do what needs to be done or it would all be for nothing, or perhaps worse than nothing, if the crazy old woman was to be believed,

            Thing was.

            Peter did believe.

         Three weeks ago he visited Mrs Evans in the sanatorium to ask questions about the house he’d purchased from her through her solicitor. At the time she seemed to have all her faculties more or less intact, she articulated well and seemed sincere. But before he got to ask any of his questions, she insisted he listen to her story, a story she said no one believed. Apparently, everyone there thought she was crazy. And so, for the following two and a half hours, Peter sat and Peter listened. His opinion of her at that time changing with every passing minute, and although she looked and sounded rational, what she had to say left him in no doubt why she was in such an institution in the first place. In his opinion she was the craziest of crazies, so he never bothered to ask questions regarding the house.

         Two weeks later, whilst tearing wood panelling from the walls during the renovation of one of the upstairs rooms, Peter uncovered something the crazy old lady spoke of, something that made her claims not so crazy after all. Something, if he remembered correctly, she referred to as “The Twins”. That night, at the time of one minute to midnight, and as she said it needed to be done, he tried it out on his daughter’s favourite doll, a hideous-looking two-foot-high clown with a worn and cracked enamel face, which his daughter called Mr Cheeks, due to them being bright-red and bulbous.

         He followed her directions and all the cracks and faded paint, and even the doll’s torn and tattered clothing were repaired. The doll looked brand new. Its eyes gleamed bright-green, and, as ridiculous as it might sound, looked alive. And so, logic being what logic is in Peter’s head, if it worked on an inanimate object like the doll, then why shouldn’t it work tonight, on his six-year-old dead daughter?

         The bolt cutters he acquired that afternoon from Randall’s Hardware were heavy, cumbersome things, and as he positioned the jaws on the padlock that held the thick rusted chain across the two gates, he took one last look around before closing the jaws. But something happened that hadn’t crossed the logic in his head. The chunky padlock succumbed to gravity and dragged the hefty chain with it, each of its links rattled on the iron railing as it slithered its way to the ground like a dead metal snake. An alarm going off couldn’t have made any more noise. He looked about, watched for lights going on, listened for sounds, but other than a dog barking in the distance and a million crickets vying for the attention of a mate, the night was empty of the sleepless.

         Peter pushed one of the gates open to hear a soft, two-tone squeak, he tossed the bolt-cutters aside and hunkered down as he crossed the small dusty car park to the morgue’s rear entrance. Once there he stood at the side of the door and put pay to a small pane of glass with a jab of his right elbow, then reached in and unlocked the door.

         Seconds later he stood inside a narrow hallway where the smell of industrial disinfectant assaulted his nostrils. He aimed a small pocket-torch along the floor and followed its plate-sized disc until he reached the door of the room his little girl would be laid in. He lowered the steel handle and the door swung open until it caught with a light click on the tiled wall behind.

         Side on before him was a stainless-steel platform with a shallow slope sunken into a tiled block of concrete. To his right were three porcelain sinks and a four-foot long, flat work surface. To his left stood nine silver drawers, three columns of three from the floor up to chest-height. The torch’s beam flicked over the small square doors where he found no recognisable form of identification, each of the drawers showed a letter followed by a number, A1-A2, B1-B2, and so on. The first three drawers he pulled out were empty; they slid with relative ease, but the forth held a little more weight.

         A white linen sheet covered the tiny body, and when the drawer came to a sudden stop, his daughter’s left arm slipped from beneath it. On her middle finger was the heart-shaped ruby ring he and his wife had given Elizabeth as a birthday present only sixteen hours earlier. A tear rolled over his cheek, he wanted to peel back the sheet to see his daughter’s face but couldn’t. If this didn’t work, if, for whatever reason, the night turned out to be a failure, he didn’t want that memory to haunt his every waking moment. Her blonde hair and the most radiant of blue eyes, along with her perfect complexion and a smile that never waned, were the memories he kept and wanted to hold on to.

         He lifted the small corpse from its stainless-steel bed and shoved the drawer shut a little too hard with his knee. It clattered on its runners before it boomed in the empty space around him. He waited a few seconds for the reverberations to subside before he made his way back to the rear entrance.

         He look through the hole his elbow made and listened The dog had ceased barking but the crickets still cricketed, but there was a new sound. Somewhere in the distance and headed up the hill toward the morgue was a car, its engine noise and the grinding of gears getting louder, nearer. Someone had obviously heard the sound of the chain and called Mitch, the sheriff. A few seconds later the car stopped short of the open gate where it remained concealed behind the eight-foot-high stone wall that encircled the morgue. One of the car doors opened but wasn’t closed, and the engine still ran.

         A silhouette appeared at the open gate but he couldn’t tell who it belonged to. It wasn’t the sheriff; this guy was taller and a lot slimmer and looked very unsteady on his feet. Probably a consequence of the bar he’d left and was now looking for somewhere to relieve that consequence. He hadn’t noticed the open gate he walked through, nor did he see the chain and padlock he tripped over in the dark.

         Peter could only stand and wait as the drunk went about his business in the shadow of the gatepost. He needed this guy to be quick, it was time Peter could not afford waste. He struggled to push his left wrist far enough out to catch what little light he could on his watch, 11.48. Twelve minutes before this deed had to be completed. He waited behind the door for three of those minutes, one of which the drunk spent pissing, the other two he spent regurgitating the bar’s produce.

         Eventually the man finished his business and returned to his car, all the time singing about some guy called Jeremiah who was a bullfrog and a good friend of his. A few seconds later Peter heard the door slam and watched as the car drove past the gate in jerky spasms.

         He waited until the engine noise faded before he flicked open the door with his foot and ran out. He concealed himself in the shadow of the gatepost the man had used and caught the stench of ammonia and vomited beer. He needed to move but had to be sure there were no late-night dog-walkers or any more drunks who may have left the bar on foot. If anyone should see him with his dead daughter in his arms they’d put him away for sure, probably in the padded room next to Mrs Evans. He gave it one final check and went through the gate, turned left, and dashed to the car he’d stolen a couple of hours earlier. Then, and after placing Elizabeth’s corpse on the back seat, he climbed in and made the eight-minute journey home.