Professor Clemens's workshop reeked of turpentine and disappointment. Brass frames loomed against the walls like the skeletons of some monstrous insects, while shards of looking-glass crunched beneath one's boots – the remnants of past experiments that had ended with the same lack of distinction as everything else the Professor touched. I stood in the corner, feigning an interest in the steam engine's fittings, though in truth I was merely watching the old man attempt, yet again, to swindle Mother Nature.
Clemens maintained that mirrors could be arranged with such cunning that light would lose its way between them forever. “An optical labyrinth,” he called it, rubbing his hands as if discussing a gold vein rather than a pointless dalliance with reflections. I had been in his employ for three months, fetching tools, polishing glass, dropping said glass, and receiving clips round the ear for my trouble. The standard life of an apprentice in Manchester, anno Domini 1887, where steam engines thundered on every corner and the scientific ambitions of professors invariably concluded in chimney smoke and shattered shards.
That evening, he installed the final glass. There were sixteen of them, uniform and tall, narrow things in frames of tarnished brass. The Professor arranged them in a semicircle, then a circle, then a spiral, muttering incantations regarding angles of refraction and the nature of infinity. I did not listen. I watched the gaslamps flicker in the panes, multiplying and fracturing, as if the flame itself couldn't decide which reflection was the genuine article.
“Edwin,” Clemens called out, not bothering to turn. “Stand between the second and third mirrors. I must gauge the depth of the corridor.”
I sighed and did as I was bid. The mirrors hemmed me in on all sides, cold and indifferent. I beheld myself – hundreds of copies receding into the gloom, growing smaller and more spectral until they dissolved into the murky distance. And every one of those Edwins stared back at me with the very same expression of fatigue I felt myself.
“How many?” the Professor demanded.
“I haven't the foggiest. A lot.”
“Be precise!”
“To hell and back again,” I muttered, and Clemens grunted, apparently satisfied that this was a sufficiently scientific answer.
He adjusted a dial, shook his head, and stepped closer. The mirrors shifted – only a fraction, but it was enough to make the reflections move as if they were alive. I blinked. I could have sworn one of my doubles blinked a split second later.
“Professor,” I began, but he had already waved me off.
“Home with you, boy. We shall resume tomorrow.”
I stepped out into the street, where the fog mingled with the factory smoke, and took a deep breath. The workshop had been stifling – not from heat, but from something else entirely. The air in there felt too dense, as if something that had no business being there had become lodged in it.
The following day, the Professor met me with eyes that positively gleamed. He hadn't slept a wink; one could tell by his rumpled frock coat and the ashen residue on his fingers – he'd been smoking his pipe until he'd practically charred his own mustache.
“Edwin,” he pronounced with great solemnity, “I have achieved perfection.”
The mirrors had been repositioned. He had aligned them into a long corridor – two rows, facing one another, perfectly parallel. Between them lay a narrow passage, perhaps five feet wide, stretching into the depths of the workshop. I stepped inside and halted.
The corridor did not end.
That is to say, physically it hit the back wall – I knew this, for I'd seen the Professor place the mirrors. But the reflections marched on, multiplying, vanishing into infinity. I raised my hand. Thousands of hands rose in unison, disappearing toward a horizon that did not exist.
“D'you see?” Clemens whispered behind me. “Light knows not the way out. It is imprisoned.”
I said nothing. I felt a sudden chill, despite the steam boiler chugging away in the workshop. The reflections were too sharp. Too precise. I could discern every crease in my waistcoat, every scratch on the brass frames, repeated over and over like an echo that refuses to fade.
“Enter,” the Professor commanded.
“Whatever for?”
“Because I tell you to.”
I took a step. Then another. The mirrors crowded me on both sides, and with every step I saw myself more clearly – not just in profile, but from behind, from the side, and at angles impossible for a man observing himself. It was as if I had been splintered into pieces, and each piece was keeping watch over the others.
I walked some ten yards and turned back. The Professor stood at the entrance to the corridor, looking small and distant, though the actual distance was laughable. I waved to him. He did not wave back. He simply watched, squinting, scribbling something in his ledger.
I started back. And that was when I noticed it.
One of my doubles – I know not which, somewhere deep on the right – was walking a fraction slower. Only a fraction. So slight was the delay that I doubted my own senses. I stopped. They all stopped. But the one in the depths took one more half-step and then froze.
My heart plummeted.
“Professor,” I called out, my eyes locked onto the reflection. “Something is amiss.”
“Nonsense,” Clemens replied. “Light aberration. The angle of incidence distorts the perception of temporal motion.”
I hadn't the faintest idea what that meant, but his voice sounded calm, almost bored. I forced myself to exhale and exited the corridor.
The rest of the day passed in silence. The Professor took measurements, sketched diagrams, and muttered to himself. I polished the mirrors, taking great care not to look into them for too long. But my gaze would slip to the smooth surfaces of its own accord, and I found myself searching – for what, I didn't know. I was simply waiting for a reflection to misbehave again.
That evening, as the lamps began to fail and the workshop sank into twilight, I saw it once more. I was standing at the workbench, my back to the corridor, but mirrors were everywhere, and in one of them – out of the corner of my eye – I caught a movement. I spun around. No one.
But the reflection in the furthest mirror, at the very end of the corridor, was still moving. It was slowly turning its head, as if listening for something.
I swallowed hard. Closed my eyes. Counted to ten. Opened them.
The reflection was watching me.
Professor Clemens appointed me to the nocturnal watch. He claimed the experiment demanded observations in the dead of night, when the street lamps are extinguished and the solitary source of illumination is the kerosene lamp flickering in the bowels of the workshop. I raised no objection – he paid with commendable regularity, and my chamber at Mrs. Shelton's lodging-house was so perishingly cold that remaining in the workshop with a chugging boiler felt like a stroke of providential mercy.
During the first night, I merely sat upon a stool by the entrance, recording the thermometer's readings every hour. A futile occupation, yet the Professor insisted upon it. The temperature remained stubbornly stagnant – eighteen degrees, hour after hour, as if the very air in the workshop had petrified. The mirrored corridor gaped like a black maw in the depths of the room, and the lamp suspended above the workbench was reflected therein as hundreds of wavering embers, receding into nothingness.
I endeavored not to look that way too often.
But the corridor possessed a certain gravitational pull. It was much like standing at the edge of a precipice – one knows that peering down is a precarious business, yet one approaches anyway, peering over the brink to feel the vertigo and a certain dark curiosity. I caught myself turning my head, as if by chance, and squinting into the depths of the reflections. I was searching for that double who moved out of step. But in the gloom, everything coalesced – shadows, silhouettes, and vague outlines. It was impossible to discern where reality concluded and its facsimile began.
On the third night, I succumbed to sleep.
I know not for how long. I was startled awake by the sputtering of the lamp – the wick had burned unevenly, and the flame thrashed about, casting jittery shadows upon the walls. I sprang up, reaching to trim the lamp, and froze mid-motion.
Someone was standing in the corridor.
A silhouette. Uncertain, blurred, but unmistakably human. It was no mere reflection – it stood too deep, too far back in the perspective, in a place where the light had no business venturing. I took a step forward. The silhouette did not budge. Another step. Silence. Naught but my own breathing and the hiss of steam within the pipes.
“Professor?” I called out, though I knew full well that Clemens had departed for home some five hours prior.
No one answered.
I seized the lamp and approached the corridor. The light lunged into the mirrors, multiplying itself, and I beheld myself – dozens, hundreds of copies, clutching identical lamps and wearing the same mask of trepidation. But there, in the depths, the silhouette had vanished. It simply dissolved, as if it had never been more than a trick of the soot-stained air.
I remained thus until morning, unable to tear myself away. When dawn finally struck the windows – grey and misty, like all Manchester dawns – I felt my back stiffen and a dull ache pulse in my temples. The Professor arrived toward noon, appearing simultaneously jaunty and irritable.
“Well?” he barked, stripping off his gloves. “Anything out of the ordinary?”
I intended to speak of the silhouette. I opened my mouth – and checked myself. What, precisely, had I seen? A shadow? A caprice of the light? My own exhaustion? Clemens watched me with an expectant air, drumming his fingers upon the table, and I realized that if I spoke the truth, he would either mock me or conclude that I was losing my wits. Either outcome spelled dismissal.
“Nothing,” I replied. “All was quiet.”
He nodded, as if he had expected nothing less, and waved a hand dismissively.
“Go then, get some rest. We shall repeat the performance tonight.”
I did not return to the lodging-house. Instead, I wandered the streets, where factory smoke mingled with the rain to form an oily drizzle. I retreated into a pub, drank some tepid ale, and listened to laborers berate their overseers, complain of their wives, and squabble over the price of coal. Ordinary life. Simple. Comprehensible. I tried to hold it in my mind like a talisman, but my thoughts invariably drifted back to the workshop, to the mirrors, and to the corridor that did not end.
That evening, I returned. The Professor had already departed, leaving a note: “Continue observations. Record everything.” I lit the lamp, took my seat, and stared into the corridor.
This time, I did not avert my gaze.
I watched until my eyes began to water, until my temples throbbed. And that was when I saw it.
The reflections were moving.
Not all of them. The majority remained stationary and obedient, as mirrors ought to be. Но some – in the very depths, where details blurred and the light lost its edge – were turning their heads. Slowly. Cautiously. As if testing to see if I would notice.
I stood. I approached the corridor. I stepped inside.
The chill struck me instantly. It was not physical – the temperature had not wavered, the thermometer did not lie. But something in the atmosphere had shifted. It was as if I had stepped into a space where time flowed at a different pace, where every breath required a conscious effort, and sounds were muffled, as if my ears were stuffed with wadding.
I ventured deeper. The mirrors crowded around me, and I saw myself from every vantage – front, back, side, and from angles that simply should not exist. Thousands of Edwins, and every one of them was watching me. No, not me. Each other. I had become a link in this infinite chain, where every reflection observed its neighbor, which in turn observed the next, unto infinity.
“Who are you?” I whispered, and my voice echoed down the corridor, multiplying and distorting until it became a rustle, a murmur, a barely audible sigh.
One of the doubles – far to the right, almost at the limit of visibility – moved its lips. Not in synchronicity. It spoke before I did.
I froze. Мое heart hammered so loudly I could hear its resonance in the mirrors, as if hundreds of hearts were beating in unison. Но that one, deep within, was beating slower. Or perhaps faster. I could not tell.
I extended my hand. My fingers brushed the mirror. The glass was warm. Not cold, as it should have been, but warm, almost vital. Something beneath my fingertips quivered – not the surface, but something deeper, as if water were churning or skin were breathing behind the glass.
I recoiled and stumbled back. I tripped over my own feet, nearly sprawling on the floor. I fled the corridor, gasping for air, and leaned against the wall. My hands were trembling like a faulty piston.
The next day, I confronted the Professor with a question:
“What is it you seek in those mirrors?”
Clemens looked up from his blueprints. He smirked.
“Immortality, boy. Is it not obvious?”
“Immortality?”
“If light is imprisoned between mirrors, it exists forever. Ergo, so does the image it carries. I wish to fix the moment for all eternity. D'you see? Not a photograph that fades. A living reflection that refuses to perish.”
I said nothing. The Professor returned to his sketches, but I saw how his fingers trembled. He was lying. Or at the very least, he was withholding the full truth. It wasn't immortality he was hunting. It was something else. Something he was afraid to name aloud.
That night, I remained in the workshop once more. But this time, I brought a mirror of my own – a small, pocket-sized thing in a scuffed leather case. A gift from my mother, the solitary relic remaining after the consumption took her. I withdrew it, stood at the entrance to the corridor, and angled the little glass so it reflected the labyrinth.
And I saw.
Through the small mirror, the corridor appeared different. The reflections therein moved with greater liberty, as if the small glass did not bow to the same laws as the large ones. I saw the doubles in the depths conversing – silently, with only their lips moving. I saw one of them turn and look directly at me. Not at his own reflection. At me.
The mirror slipped from my fingers. It hit the floor, though by some miracle it did not shatter. I snatched it up, thrust it back into my pocket, and marched out into the street, though four hours of my shift remained.
Manchester greeted me with rain and the mournful howl of steam whistles. I walked aimlessly until I found myself by the canal, where barges bobbed upon the filthy water and the fires of vagrants smoldered on the banks. I sat upon a stone parapet, withdrew my mirror, and looked into it.
My face. Ordinary. Weary. Unshaven. Nothing untoward.
But when I brought the glass closer, scrutinizing my own eyes, I thought I saw something stir within the pupils. Something minute and distant, as if in the depths of my own gaze there lurked another corridor, another infinity.
I snapped the mirror shut and did not open it again until dawn.
When I returned to the workshop, the Professor was already there. He was standing in the corridor, motionless, staring into the depths. He heard my footsteps and turned. His face was ashen, as if he hadn't slept for a week.
“Do you see them?” he asked quietly.
I nodded.
“They are alive,” Clemens said. Not as a question. As a statement of fact. “I know not how it is possible, but they are alive. The reflections. They are observing us.”
He paused. Then he added, in a voice barely above a whisper:
“And I believe they wish to come out.”
Professor Clemens ceased to emerge from the workshop altogether. I would arrive in the morning to find him already there, huddled upon the floor by the corridor, knees clutched to his chest, staring into the mirrors. I inquired if he had slept – he merely waved me off. I brought him sustenance from the bakery – he did not touch a morsel. The bread grew stale and blossomed with mold upon the workbench, yet the Professor sat on, unblinking, as if waiting for the reflections to divulge some monumental secret.
I endeavored to work. I polished the new mirrors he had commissioned – eight more of the things, though where they were to be placed remained a mystery. Brass frames loomed in the corners, and the workshop began to resemble a warehouse of reflections, where every surface multiplied the space, splintering it into a thousand shards.
“Edwin,” he called out one day, not bothering to turn. “What is your age?”
“Nineteen, sir.”
“Young,” Clemens muttered. “You still possess time. I never had any to spare.”
I failed to grasp his meaning, yet I did not press the matter. In those final days, the Professor spoke in a most peculiar fashion – in fragments and riddles, as if addressing someone invisible to my eyes.
That night, he commanded me to enter the corridor and remain there.
“For how long?” I inquired.
“Until you feel it.”
“Feel what, precisely?”
“You shall know.”
I had no desire to comply. Every fiber of my being shrieked that this was a wretched idea, that I ought to turn on my heel and vanish, slamming the door behind me never to return. Yet I stayed. Not out of curiosity. Not out of any lingering loyalty to the Professor. Simply... I could no longer leave. Something tethered me to that workshop, amidst the mirrors and their interminable copies. It was as if I had become a component of the experiment myself, and the bond was now indissoluble.
I stepped into the corridor.
The mirrors hemmed me in, and immediately, breath became a labor. Not for a lack of air – there was plenty of that. But every inhalation felt foreign, as if I were breathing not with my own lungs, but with the lungs of all those reflections at once; they were breathing me, and we became entangled in the question of which of us was the genuine article.
I ventured deeper. A step. Another. I counted to myself – ten, twenty, thirty paces. The corridor did not end. I knew a wall stood behind me, that physically I could go no further, yet my legs moved of their own accord, and the distance multiplied in the glass, conjuring the illusion of an endless pilgrimage.
I halted. I turned.
The Professor stood at the entrance. Small, remote. But his reflections were closer. They surrounded me – hundreds of Clemenses, aged, stooped, with a feverish glint in their eyes. And they were not looking at me. They were looking at something behind my back.
I turned, very slowly.
In the depths of the corridor, where the light barely ventured, stood a man. Not a reflection. Not a silhouette. A man. I could discern the folds of his attire, the buckle upon his belt, even a scar upon his chin. He was just like me. More accurately – he was me. But a fraction different. As if I were looking at myself not in a glass, but across the span of years, through some invisible frontier.
He raised his hand.
I did not move.
He took a step forward.
I recoiled.
He smiled. It was not the smile I saw upon my face in the glass of a morning whilst shaving. It was different. Colder. As if he were privy to something I was not.
“Professor!” I called out, my gaze locked upon the figure. “Professor!”
My voice returned as an echo, distorted into a whisper. I heard my own name – “Edwin” – but uttered by a voice that was not mine. Lower. Slower.
The figure took another step.
I spun around and fled. I did not walk – I ran, stumbling, catching my shoulder against the mirrors. They swayed and chimed, and reflections darted about like living things, as if attempting to seize me. I heard footsteps behind me – even, unhurried. Someone was following. Or many. I did not look back.
I burst from the corridor, collapsing to my knees and gasping for air. The Professor stood beside me, peering down.
“You saw him,” he said. It was no question. It was a verdict.
I nodded, rendered speechless.
“It is you,” Clemens continued. “But not quite. D'you see? Mirrors do not merely reflect. They create. Facsimiles. Variants. Possibilities of who you might have been. And the longer you gaze, the more vital they become.”
“This is madness,” I choked out.
“Madness is believing we are the only ones,” the Professor retorted. “Every mirror you have ever peered into has retained your image. And now it exists. Somewhere. Somehow. And here, in the corridor, where reflections are locked upon themselves, they gain strength.”
He knelt beside me, placing a hand upon my shoulder. His palm was ice-cold.
“I see him too,” he whispered. “Myself. The man I might have been, had I not turned coward thirty years ago. He is younger than I. Stronger. And he wishes to occupy my place.”
I looked at him. The Professor's eyes gleamed, though not with tears. It was something else. A sort of dark rapture.
“You want to let him in,” I realized.
“No,” Clemens replied. “I want to understand how to prevent it.”
But I did not believe him.
The following days dissolved into one continuous vigil. I would arrive at the workshop, and we would sit in silence, staring at the corridor. The Professor scribbled notes, sketched diagrams, measured angles. I simply watched. The reflections moved with increasing frequency. They no longer troubled to hide it. They turned their heads, gestured, and conversed soundlessly. At times, I fancied I could hear them laughing.
One day I arrived to find the mirrors had increased in number. The Professor had installed new ones – directly within the corridor, set at angles to create branches, side-passages that veered off, multiplying the space even further. The corridor was no longer merely infinite. It was a labyrinth.
“Whatever for?” I asked.
“To confound them,” Clemens replied. “If they cannot find the exit, they shall remain within.”
“Or we shall be unable to find our way out,” I said quietly.
He did not answer.
That night, I dreamt. I dreamt I stood in the corridor, and the mirrors began to crack. Slowly, thin spiderwebs of fractures crawling across the glass. And behind the cracks – hands. Hundreds of hands, clawing to break through. I woke in a cold sweat, and my first instinct was to seize my pocket mirror. It lay upon the bedside table, closed and safe. I did not dare open it.
In the morning, when I returned to the workshop, the Professor was gone. His frock coat hung upon its hook; his pipe lay upon the workbench, still warm. But of Clemens himself, there was no sign.
I approached the corridor and peered inside.
Deep within, at the very terminus of the infinite perspective, stood the Professor. His back was to me. Motionless. I called his name – no response. I stepped into the corridor, advanced several paces – yet the distance did not diminish. He remained just as remote, as if I were merely treading water.
“Professor!” I shouted.
The figure turned. Slowly. And I beheld his face.
It was my own.
Not Clemens's. Mine. That same double who had haunted me in the depths of the mirrors now stared back at me with the Professor's face. No, not with his face. He wore his face like a mask, carelessly, askew. And he was smiling that same frigid smile.
I ran. Not toward the exit – deeper. Toward him. I know not why. Rage, terror, despair – all were curdled together. Mirrors flashed on either side, reflections multiplied, and I lost count of the steps taken, the turnings passed. The corridor branched, looped back upon itself, and I ran until I collided with a glass pane.
I fell. I raised my head.
Before me stood myself. The real one. Or at least, the one I took for real. He looked down at me, and in his eyes was something I had never seen in my own. Pity.
“You will not leave,” he said in my voice. “No one leaves.”
And the mirrors behind his back began to crack.
I have no recollection of my egress.
I came to upon the workshop floor, a few yards removed from the entrance of the corridor. My cheek was stinging – evidently, I had struck it in my fall. There was the copper tang of blood in my mouth. My hands trembled with such violence that I could not steady them; I merely pressed them to my chest and sat, staring into the vacancy.
The corridor remained intact. The glasses stood plumb, neither cracked nor shattered. The reflections were in their proper stations. Quiet. Docile. As if nothing untoward had transpired.
The Professor was nowhere to be found.
I rose, reeling, and traversed the workshop. I peered behind the workbench, into the scullery, even into the cramped interstices between the boiler and the wall where Clemens occasionally discarded his botched blueprints. Naught but vacancy. His effects remained – the frock coat, the ledger of notes, the pipe, the spectacles in their case. Everything in its place. Only the Professor himself was absent.
I returned to the corridor. I stood at the threshold, scrutinizing the depths. The reflections stared back at me. Hundreds of my own countenances, motionless, mute. Not a hint of movement. Not a shadow of the Professor.
“Clemens,” I called out softly.
No echo returned. The voice was simply swallowed, consumed by the looking-glasses.
I remained thus until eventide. I know not why. Perhaps I was awaiting his reappearance – expecting him to emerge from the depths of the corridor as I had, to brush himself off and deliver some acerbic remark regarding young apprentices who believe in fairy tales. But he did not emerge.
As the shadows lengthened and the lamp began to soot, I realized I must depart. Not tomorrow. Not in an hour. This instant. Immediately.
I seized my jacket and thrust the pocket-mirror into its depth – my hands acted of their own accord, as if reaching for the final anchor to reality. I turned at the threshold. The corridor gaped in the darkness, and in the treacherous light of the lamp, the reflections appeared vital. Breathing.
I left and did not cast a glance behind me.
The workshop was sealed a se'nnight later. The constabulary arrived, questioned the neighbors, and filed their reports. I told them the sum of my knowledge – that Professor Clemens was engaged in an experiment involving mirrors, that I was his assistant, and that one morning he was no longer at his station. The constable took notes, nodding with thinly veiled suspicion. He inquired if the Professor had enemies. I replied that I did not know. It was the truth.
The workshop was never reopened. The landlord, a corpulent coal merchant, attempted to lease it to another tenant, but the fellow, upon stepping inside, turned on his heel and vanished without explanation. There were a few other prospective occupants, yet none remained longer than five minutes. They claimed it was perishingly cold. That a queer odor lingered. That there were simply too many mirrors.
Eventually, the windows were boarded up, the door secured with a padlock, and Clemens's laboratory became yet another of Manchester's forgotten hollows, of which this city possesses hundreds.
I procured different employment. At a manufactory for steam valves. A grimy, clamorous, uncomplicated trade. No looking-glasses. No experiments. I arrived in the morning, tightened bolts, took my midday meal with the other laborers, and departed in the evening. I lived in the same chamber at Mrs. Shelton's, ate the same porridge for breakfast, and frequented the same pub on Saturdays.
Everything was as it had been.
But in the small hours, I would wake and lie long in the darkness, listening to the silence. It seemed to me that somewhere in the distance, beyond the walls and the streets, in the very gut of the city, the mirrors were still standing in that corridor. And the reflections were still waiting.
One day, some three months hence, I returned to the workshop. I know not why. I was simply passing by and halted. The windows were shuttered, the padlock was rusted and untouchable. I pressed my palm against the door. The timber was warm, despite the chill of the day.
A sound emanated from behind the door.
Faint. Scarcely perceptible. As if someone had paced the floor. Or sighed. Or trailed a hand across glass.
I recoiled and made my escape, quickening my pace with every yard.
I have not ventured near that street since.
The pocket-mirror remains with me still. In a desk drawer, beneath old receipts and letters I shall never post. Occasionally, when sleep eludes me, I withdraw it. I hold it in my hands, feeling the cold smoothness of the leather, the weight of the metal. But I do not open it.
I am afraid that I shall behold something other than myself within.
Or worse – that I shall behold exactly myself. The one who remained in the corridor. The one who looked upon me with pity and declared that I would not leave.
Perhaps he was correct.
Perhaps I never truly left.
Perhaps I am still there, in the depths of the mirrors, gazing upon infinite copies of myself and waiting until I finally discern which of us is the genuine article.
While he who pens these lines, who works at the factory, who drinks ale in the pubs of Manchester – is merely another reflection fortunate enough to have slipped away.
Or unfortunate. I no longer know the distinction.
