We went into the reception hall, my wife and I. It smelled of moss and damp. Hordes of rats and mice leaped aside as we brought light to walls that had not seen it for a century. As we shut the door behind us, a puff of wind rustled papers piled in corners; light fell on them and we noticed ancient lettering and medieval pictures. On walls green with age hung portraits of my ancestors. They stared down, stern and disdainful, as if about to say:
“A whipping for you, my man!”
Our steps resounded through the building. I coughed and there came an echo, the very one that replied once to my ancestors…
And the wind moaned and howled. There was a sobbing in the chimney stack like someone in despair, and big drops of rain beat a melancholy patter on the glimmering windows.
“Oh, ancestors of mine,” I murmured with a sigh, “if I were a writer, looking at your portraits, I could write a long novel. For each of these old people was young once and each man or woman of them was a fitting subject. And what a story it would be! Look, say, at that old lady, my great-grandmother. That ugly misshapen woman had a remarkable history.”
“Do you see the mirror,” I asked my wife, “do you see it, hanging there in the corner?”
And I pointed out to her a large mirror in a frame of blackened bronze that hung in a corner near the portrait of my great-grandmother.
“That mirror has magic powers: it was the ruin of my great-grandmother. For it she paid an enormous sum and she did not part with it until the moment of her death. Day and night, incessantly, she looked into it, looked even when she ate and drank. As she went to sleep, she laid the mirror by her in the bed and, dying, begged that it be laid beside her in the coffin. It was only because it would not fit into the coffin that her wish was unfulfilled.”
“She was a vain coquette, wasn’t she?” said my wife.
“I admit it. But hadn’t she other mirrors, then? Why was it just that mirror that she loved and not another? Hadn’t she better mirrors even? No, my dear, some terrible secret is hidden there. How else do you explain it? Legend has it there’s a devil in the mirror and that my great-grandmother was fascinated by devils.”
I brushed dust from the mirror, looked into it and began to laugh. A dull echo replied. It was a crooked mirror that twisted my features in all directions: my nose appeared on my left cheek and my chin was cleft and turned askew.
“What strange tastes my great-grandmother had!” I said.
My wife went hesitantly to the mirror and she too glanced there-and at once a terrible thing happened. She went pale, trembled all over and cried out. The candlestick dropped from her hand and rolled on the floor and the candle went out. Darkness closed over us.
And at that very moment I heard something heavy falling: my wife had lost consciousness.
The wind moaned on as sadly as ever, rats scampered, mice rustled among the papers. The hairs bristled and stirred on my head as a shutter broke from a window and clattered down, and the moon came into view. . .
I lifted my wife in my arms and carried her from the house of my ancestors. And it was not till the evening of the next day that she came to herself.
“The mirror! Give me the mirror!” she said. “Where is the mirror?”
For a full week afterwards she neither ate nor drank nor slept and all the time kept asking for the mirror to be brought to her. She sobbed, tore her hair and tossed to and fro till at last, when the doctor said she might die of exhaustion, her condition being extremely grave, I mastered my fear and went down there again and brought back for her the mirror of my great-grandmother. As she saw it, she laughed with joy, then clutched at it and kissed it, and devoured it with her eyes.
#
More than ten years have passed by since then and still she stares incessantly into the mirror, not turning away an instant.
“Is it really me?” she whispers and her face, as she blushes, shines with serene delight. “Yes, it is! All things tell lies to me except this mirror. People lie, my husband lies. Oh, if only I had seen myself earlier, I would have known what I truly am and would never have married that man! He is quite unworthy of me. The most handsome and noble of knights should be at my feet.”
Once, as I stood behind my wife, I glanced inadvertantly into the mirror- and learned a terrible secret. I saw there a woman of such dazzling beauty as I have never seen in all my life, a wonder of nature, a figure of comeliness, grace and love.
How can I explain it? What had happened? Why did my ugly lumbering wife look so lovely in the mirror? Why?
Because, indeed, the distorting mirror distorted every line of my wife’s ugly face and by this changing of the features chanced to make it beautiful. A minus times a minus is a plus.
And now both of us, my wife and I, sit at the mirror, not turning away an instant, looking: my nose twists up my left cheek, my chin is cleft and turned askew but my wife’s face is fascinating – and an insane passion overcomes me.
“Ha, ha, ha!”
I laugh savagely. And my wife whispers, scarcely heard.
“How lovely I am!”
##
Editor’s Note
Chekhov deserves the accolades he gets for being the most important short story writer of all time. Here, he ventures into the horror sphere (albeit slightly) and I took the opportunity to post it.