#10 of 100: The Mirrored King
Harold Barkane is happy to spin a false tale about his occult curios to any customer who walks through the door, but one day he buys a selection of items that truly unnerve him.
Fatigue plagued most of my afternoon, so this is yet another story mostly written after 11pm, and thus doesn’t have a proper ending.
Barkane’s Curios had been in the family for generations, nestled in a small street in central London. Despite having burnt down three times in the 20th century alone, the shop front had remained the same: gold lettering on a black exterior, with green-tinted frosted glass that obscured the items inside. Harold Barkane, its current owner, had allowed the lettering to peel, finding that passersby were often enticed by its decaying exterior. Besides, he reasoned to himself, the place was due another fire in a year or two, so there was no point renovating.
Harold did not believe in all the tales told about the occult paraphernalia he bought and sold. His best-selling items tended to be what he considered tat - creepy tarot cards, ouija boards, and “haunted” porcelain dolls. In recent years, at the behest of some of his more unnerving clients, he had sourced items that were purported to have belonged to famous murderers - pages from their journal, or a stretch of rope stained with blood from a supposed victim. Harold always told his customers that items proven to be authentic might get him into trouble with the police, but he still gave lurid descriptions of how killers may have used items “very much like this one”, accompanying his words with a knowing wink.
One chilly Wednesday afternoon, Harold heard the tinkling of the bell by the door and looked up to see a young man dragging a heavy suitcase behind him. At first, he mistook him for a tourist, but the man pulled up to the counter and started unzipping the case.
“My grandfather’s stuff,” the man said, panting as if he had been dragging the thing across half of London. “I wanted to just chuck it, but my uncle said you might pay a few quid for it and eBay seemed like way too much effort.”
“I assume your grandfather is -”
“Dead. Thank God.” the man muttered, then gave a pained smile. “I mean, it's sad and everything, obviously, but he was pretty… Well, I mean, just look at his stuff.”
The man grabbed a handful of things out of the suitcase and thrust them onto the counter.
“A jar of human teeth, not sure how he got those. Mummified ibis. A mask woven out of, um, something. Seven different hand mirrors that keep showing stuff that isn’t there. Some old scrolls, Google couldn’t tell me what language they were in. Oh, and a freezing cold skull. Touch it. It shouldn’t be that cold, right?”
Obliging, Harold touched the skull. It felt like the man had put it in a freezer for a few days and only just retrieved it. Still, he thought the items were intriguing enough he could spin a few stories about them to any curious customers.
“I’ll take it all off your hands for fifty quid.”
“Fifty quid? In total? This bird alone is worth more than that!”
“And who else are you going to sell it to? You can keep it, if you prefer. I’m honestly not fussed either way.” He replied, offering a supercilious smile.
The man glanced from the clutter he had dumped to the suitcase he had been lugging around and sighed.
Once they had exchanged money and Harold was left on his own, he laid out each item on a table in the backroom. It was an eclectic mix. The teeth did indeed appear to be real human teeth, numbering over a hundred. The skull was also human, although the elongated nature of it suggested the head had been artificially deformed at a young age. The mummified bird was in poor condition, but there were a few odd regulars who loved anything vaguely Egyptian.
The hand mirrors were the most normal items, and thus, in a sense, the most strange. The handles and frames were heavier than they looked, and each made of either brass or silver, and intricately decorated with swirling patterns and contorted faces. The heads of each of the figures were bald and elongated, like the cold skull, but atop each one was a crown.
Harold peered into one of them, wondering what the man had meant about odd things appearing. He saw nothing but his own face. He twisted the mirror around, in case it distorted any of the cabinets or trinkets around him, but no. They seemed like perfectly ordinary hand mirrors.
Ordinary things had no place in Barkane’s Curios. He would either have to figure out a spooky story for them, or sell them online.
After the sun had set, Harold took a few photos of the new items for the shop website. He didn’t actually sell anything online - he disliked the lack of intimacy in such an exchange - but he did use it to advertise new goods. He took a photo of all the hand mirrors and added a lazy caption:
Seven hand mirrors with a highly unusual and ominous story behind them - ask in store for more details.
There. Maybe it could be a fun challenge for himself, to make up a story on the fly.
His dreams were the usual unpleasant mish-mash of murder, ghosts, and fire. He thought it was inevitable when he spent his whole life pursuing disturbing artefacts that he would have disturbing dreams. His parents often spoke of having nightmares, and his grandmother would wake the whole street up with her 3am screams.
Harold wasn’t entirely a sceptic, enough strange occurrences had happened in his life that he believed in some supernatural entities and potential life after death. So when he woke to find the skull had disappeared, he felt a chill drip down his spine.
His first thought was that he had just put it somewhere else, but a slow search of his entire back room, including all the locked cabinets he hadn’t touched in a while, proved that couldn’t be right. Next he considered the idea that someone had broken in and decided to steal just that skull and nothing else. The young man, perhaps, angry that Harold had had paid him so little, and keen to get some petty revenge. But there was no broken lock or smashed window, and nothing else that looked remotely out of place. Where the skull had rested on the table still felt unnaturally cold.
His third thought was: it would turn up. The whole thing would sort itself out. He opened up his shop and started laying out the new goods. The jar of teeth went well with the other strange anatomy items he already had, and the mask could hang up beside the dolls.
As he was about to move the hand mirrors to the shop floor he glanced at his reflection. It was fine, his hair was a little scruffy and the bags under his eyes were darker than usual, but then he spotted it. The skull. According to the mirror, the skull was on the table exactly where he had left it the night before.
Harold looked at the empty spot in the real world, then back at the mirrored table. A wave of nausea crashed over him, the same travel sickness he felt when he was in the back of a stuffy car for too long. Just when he was about to look away, he saw a smoke-like figure in the mirror pick up the skull and fixed it atop his neck. Heart pounding in his throat, he turned the mirror a little more to see the full figure.
Every inch of the figure was constantly shifting, but its outline remained that of a tall, naked man, the skull affixed atop his head, and atop that stood a shimmering gold crown, as solid-looking as anything else in the room.
Terror clashed with curiosity and greed. Curiosity and greed won. This was the type of find that only came once a generation. These were the artefacts the Barkane name had been founded on, all the way back in the 1800s. But a mirror that showed a spooky figure didn’t feel like enough of a find for Harold. What he really wanted was that crown.
If the skull could move from this world to the mirror one, he thought, wouldn’t it stand to reason there was a way to transport the crown to this one? It looked like it might be solid gold, and the jewels fixed into it alone would be worth thousands.
He backed up until he was within touching distance of the shadowy figure, keeping his back to it so he could still see it in the mirror. The skull turned in his direction. Smoke swirled behind the eye sockets, and Harold realised the crowned figure could see him too. Harold reached behind him. His hand drifted through the smoke, but when he moved it upwards, it hit the solidness of the skull. He fixed his gaze on nothing but the mirror, afraid the connection between worlds might break if he looked away.
He stood on his tiptoes and stretched his arm as high as it could go, and then, finally, he curled his fingers around one edge of the crown. He could feel the chill of it, and its intricate design beneath his fingertips. He could feel the cut of one of the diamonds.
Then he felt a hand on his shoulder. The figure’s shadowy fingers clutched his flesh so tight he yelped in pain. He was now unable to wrench his gaze away from the skull behind him in the mirror. The other shadowy hand was raising a finger to its bare teeth, and then reached forth and touched the mirror.
Harold blinked out of existence.
I shall forward this to my Tory friends.
The perils of greed.