So the following morning Mr. Colella picked me up in the shop truck and we drove to a large old house. When I saw the mailbox, I caught my breath.

Mrs. Hubbard had lived there.

The Japanese mirror stood in the foyer, right where the old woman had told Mr. Colella she was planning to put it all those months ago.

I averted my head as we walked past.

Though I kept myself busy in other parts of the house, the mirror was on my mind all morning. When Mr. Colella left me to continue the inventory while he went to pick up lunch, I found myself drawn irresistibly back to the foyer. I hesitated to enter, but finally a curiosity stronger than terror drove me on—curiosity . . . and the hope that perhaps here I could find the answer to the strangeness that had overtaken my life.

I walked slowly toward the mirror. From the angle of my approach I could see the opposite wall reflected in its smooth surface. Everything seemed normal.

I stopped and took a deep breath, then stepped forward and planted myself in front of the mirror.

I screamed.

The wall in the mirror was the same wall that stood behind me. The pictures, the coat rack, and the umbrella stand were all the same. But where I should have seen myself crouched a creature more hideous than anything I had ever imagined.

Blood began to seep down from the top of the mirror. The creature raised its hands and reached forward, reached toward me, as if it wanted to snatch me through the glass.

I ran.

In the garden behind the house I threw myself to the ground and sobbed. What made the thing in the mirror so horrible was not horns or scales or anything demonic. What made it horrible was the smoldering rage twisting the features that were all too clearly my own. That, and the understanding that the anger I thought I had escaped for the last six months had been coming here. All my darkness—every vile thought, every angry moment, every instant since October when I had been less than my best—had collected in the mirror, slowly creating a beast that was now nearly strong enough to break out. It was a repository for all that was bad about myself, and what I had seen there was not merely terrifying, it was disgusting.

My mother had said I looked “thin around the edges.” Now I understood why. Too much of me had gone into the mirror.

I thought back to the bits of information Mr. Colella had dropped in his usual terse way as we were working. “She died of a heart attack,” he had said at one point, for no reason that I could make out. “They found her body in the foyer,” he had commented later.

A chill ran over me as I concluded that my other self had scared Mrs. Hubbard to death.