Chapter Two:
Days passed.
They were days in which Giles began to learn some of the tricks and twists that were to help him survive in this inverse, flipsided world. He discovered that only fully reflected food had any taste or substance, and that even that was a pale reflection of the real thing. He found that water seemed to be the only thing safe to drink, and that mirrored plumbing was something of a joke. He worked out how to shave using ‘borrowed’ safety razors, how to retrace the routes he was taking if he needed to and how to hunt for safe places in which to spend the night. Hotel rooms seemed to be the best option, although he slept once or twice in far stranger locations; inside a health club on one occasion, and in a display gallery in a museum on another. He lingered rather a long time in the museum, replacing his purloined weaponry with far better examples of the swordsmith’s art and sighing regretfully over books that – once pulled from their shelves – proved themselves to be nothing but empty pages, just like all the others he’d taken a moment to peruse.
There’d been a piece of him hoping that the books might somehow trigger the rest of those elusive memories that lay buried somewhere in his mind. They didn’t – but he took one anyway, searching among any number of desks until he found a pen that would write, using it to record what little did come back to him as he wandered the maze that filled the mirrored world.
Rooms opened into other rooms, doors lead him into passageways and they led him down flights of stairs and along galleries, each reflected space spilling into the next seemingly without pattern or purpose.
Seemingly.
It took a while, but he eventually began to figure out that the rooms were not connected in a completely random manner. The mirror world appeared to follow a very precise set of rules, partially linked to the nature of the reflections which shaped it, and partly determined by a subtle congruence between each reflection and the next. It wasn’t an easy correlation to spot, but once he had it, he could start to decipher the complex geography that shaped the world around him. It varied from room to room and from mirror to mirror; there were connections seemingly determined by colour, by common texture, or by style of design. There were sequences and patterns, whole areas of internal consistence and others where discordant architecture jostled for dominance amidst poorly defined and only partially reflected spaces. The external landscape defied definition; one room might offer glimpses of a city street, the next an enticing garden, and the one after that an ocean view. Sometimes there were doors that led out into sunlit exteriors, but – after one wary venture into an enticing vista – he made himself hurry past all and every temptation to venture outside the safety of reflected walls.
The sunlight, it seemed, only ever reached as far as the mirrors defined it. Beyond that lay shadows and shapes and soft whispering noises. The menace that stalked the rooms at night lurked out in the darkness of the day – along with other unpleasant and decidedly disturbing things. Things that scuttled and things that crawled. Hunters and the hunted, predators and prey. They were the things that you occasionally glimpsed in the depths of a mirror, late at night; the half seen flicker of movement at the very edge of your vision, the shadows that crept behind the glass.
Instinct suggested he stay well away from them.
Half remembered legends and lore agreed; there were creatures that dwelt behind the mirrors which threatened a man’s sanity along with his soul – and he had no desire to lose either, given a choice in the matter.
He fought for himself instead, using the hours he walked to delve into the foggy recesses of his mind and emerge with nuggets of memory, with names and faces and snippets of knowledge that reinforced his sense of who and what he was. Direct and immediate memory was hard; he struggled to recall recent events and achieved little more than fuzzy half hints and furiously strong emotions. He knew that the people that went with those emotions were important to him – as important as that determined label he’d found for himself that first day – but it was exhausting trying to focus on the how and the why that lay around them. As soon as he felt a headache threaten he’d retreat to easier ground, snatching at a line of poetry or prose and letting it roll out of him with lyrical exposition, using it to reinforce his mental frames of reference.
He found he could quote Homer in the original Greek, and recite Ovid and Virgil in structured Latin; English poets kept him company over lunch, and obscure singer- songwriters added music to his afternoons. He didn’t judge his eclectic store of knowledge, just reveled in it, happy to declaim classic poetry, sing light opera, or serenade the silences with acapello rock ballads as the mood took him. Each remembered line or lyric triggered a thousand thoughts and associations; bit by bit he rebuilt pieces of himself, treasuring each echo of his past that the puzzle revealed.
Rupert Giles, he decided with a slightly smug sense of pride, was a very educated man.
But then – as less the less certain parts of his memory recalled – that was something a Watcher had to be. His knowledge and his wisdom were important weapons in the war he’d been trained to fight. Every bit as important as the other skills he’d acquired; the mastery of archaic weaponry, the self-discipline of the martial arts – and, he suspected, a level of ability in the use of magic, although he couldn’t be entirely sure. Thinking about it gave him even more of a headache than recalling the names and faces that meant so much to him.
He went seeking his answers in safer memories – in recollections lifted from the written page, from the histories of his predecessors. While the history of his own life remained a jumbled, fragmented mystery, the words of the Watchers’ diaries that had once helped shaped that life began to do so again; in between snatches of song and the declamations of great literature, he sought sparks of enlightenment among his memories of dry, dusty words and the meticulous records of life – and death – serving the Slayer.
It turned out to be a somewhat unsettling way to occupy his thoughts, but it certainly served to distract him from the eeriness of his surroundings and the oppressive weight of silence that occupied them.
He’s been exploring his new world for some time before he began to suspect that he wasn’t the only living thing wandering within the maze during the day. He’d caught the odd glimpse of movement, hints of half seen figures that vanished into nothingness as soon as he turned his attention towards them, but usually they were nothing more than the echo of movements on the other side of the mirrors, those ghosts without substance that were reflections of the outer world. Once or twice though, he’d had the feeling that he’d disturbed something else in the course of his explorations, something that had raced away at his approach. At first he’d turned and hastened away from all and any such encounters, only too mindful of the thing that seemed to be hunting for him in the night. But as time went on he started to realize that these elusive day time encounters lacked the bone chilling, soul shivering presence that stirred him from unsettled dreams and warned him of encroaching danger. Emboldened by that – and driven by an insatiable curiosity to discover as much about this world as he safely could – he started to hunt down his previously unseen company, cautiously trying to follow rather than fleeing from them.
In the end, he found an answer to the riddle.
Although it might be more accurate to say that it found him.
The room was large and somewhat imposing; a picture gallery in some stately home, perhaps, with a row of windows running down the full length of it on one side, and a series of decorated mirrors on the other. Old paintings hung between each pair of windows, with spindly chairs and the occasional over stuffed chaise longue sitting beneath them. A long, threadbare carpet protected the highly polished wooden floor and ornate chandeliers hung from an equally ornate ceiling above it. There were people in the gallery, milling on the other side of the mirror; attending some kind of semi-formal buffet luncheon by the look of their clothes and the obsequious presence of white-coated waiters. Giles strolled down the length of the hall, feeling a disconcerted sense of isolation in the midst of so much activity. The sense of occasion felt strangely familiar and, at the same time, uncomfortably uninviting. This was the kind of event where everyone was on display, where politics and pointless diplomacy generated endless games of one-upmanship and arrogant assessments of wealth and standing. He found himself wondering what this august and decidedly pretentious gathering would make of the sword carrying, disheveled phantom that haunted their mirrors – and laughed out loud at the thought, only too aware of how disreputable he looked by now. He’d been living in the same outfit since his arrival. His casual jacket was creased and rumpled, as was the equally casual shirt beneath it. If he’d had a tie when he’d arrived, it had become misplaced somewhere along the way – along with a lot of other personal property, like his wallet and his driving license. He had the book he was using as a diary stuffed in one jacket pocket, a couple of tasteless apples in the other, and there were several long bladed knives thrust through his belt. Not to mention the sword which had barely left his hand since he’d acquired it. He had at least shaved that morning - courtesy of a rather portly gentleman in a less than swank hotel which had boasted both mice and cockroaches out in the real world – but for all that he looked less like a respectable librarian and a lot more like a bespectacled vagabond.
Librarian …
He paused as the thought came to him, mentally filing it away with the other memories that he was starting to get into some kind of order. It didn’t add much – but it sat rather comfortably beside those images of earnest young faces, sitting round a table piled high with books. He’d known all along that ‘Watcher’ was a calling rather than a profession, and it was nice to know that his obvious depth of education served him in practical as well as esoteric applications. No wonder he’d been drawn to examine the books that he’d encountered on his travels.
Or was that the Watcher’s instinct, eager for knowledge, continuously seeking to observe, deduct and learn?
It was a question worth considering, but one he needed to save for a safer place and a more certain time. The streams of sunlight cascading through the windows were a perilous deception; he was walking too close to the outside world to allow himself the luxury of philosophic contemplation. He turned away from the milling crowd and started to make his way along the rest of the gallery, hoping – as he’d been hoping every time he crossed a new threshold – that when he left it, he’d find himself in the reflection of a room he recognized.
It hadn’t happened yet, but he went on hoping. Went on believing that somewhere – somehow – he would find a way home.
Of course, he told himself wryly, what I really need is a guide.
That was when he spotted the cat.
It was just an ordinary, black and white cat, one with short, sleek fur and a proud tail which it was holding up like a question mark as it stalked imperiously along the carpet.
Except that it was his side of the mirrors – and it, like him, appeared as nothing more than the faintest ghostly image in among the swirling company that occupied their silvered surfaces.
"Good Lord," he exclaimed, coming to an abrupt halt and staring at the creature in amazement. It too stopped in its tracks, considering him with wary suspicion. For a long moment the two of them stood there, one poised as if the slightest movement would precipitate flight, the other wide eyed and totally speechless. Giles had imagined a lot of things, hearing the soft noises, catching the hints of something leaving just he entered a room, but he’d never considered that he might encounter something quite so – ordinary – stalking through this impossible labyrinth.
The fact that it was there, of course, suggested that it was far from ordinary. Perhaps it, like him, had somehow been brought to this place by some unseen power. Perhaps it was an enchanted animal, something other than it seemed. Or perhaps the entire species felis domesticus concealed skills and talents that the average human being would never have suspected.
There were, he recalled somewhat fuzzily, a lot of superstitions concerning the nature of cats …
This particular one apparently decided that he was no threat to it, because it stretched rather languidly, yawned – and then rolled over, exposing its stomach and waving its paws lazily in the air.
"Well," Giles considered, not entirely sure how to interpret this reaction. "Hello to you, too." He crouch down slowly, so as not to startle the animal too much, carefully laid his sword down on the carpet – its hilt angled so that he could snatch it up again if he needed it – and gingerly reached out his hand. There was a vague expectation, lurking at the back of his mind, of the creature transforming into something large, savage and decidedly ravenous - but the only thing that his hand found was soft warm fur and, while there were claws, they were simply a light reflexive flexing as the cat squirmed and purred under his touch.
His smile was equally reflexive – a moment of quiet delight and unexpected pleasure. He’d been lost, alone, and on edge for so long that this chance encounter, this sudden sense of companionship, was almost giddying. It was also utterly mystifying.
"Forgive my curiosity," he asked with a quiet smile, stroking the sleek fur and feeling its warm reality under his fingers, "but what’s a handsome fellow like you doing in a place like this?"
Hunting.
Giles leapt back as if he’d been bitten, somehow managing to snatch up the sword as he regained his feet; he hefted it warily, putting defensive steel between himself and the animal as he tried to assess what had just happened. The cat rolled onto its stomach and looked up at him with what looked suspiciously like a frown of puzzlement.
"D-did – you just - ?"
No, surely not. Cats didn’t talk. But then, Watchers - or librarians - didn’t usually hear voices, either.
Did they?
The cat blinked, climbed to its feet and began to walk away.
Follow me.
It wasn’t, Giles realized once he’d got over his initial shock, really a voice as such. It was more like a transmission of mental concepts, a sharing of thought and impression that his mind wrestled into a perception of words. That first exchange, for instance – the simple explanation of the cat’s presence behind the mirrors – had actually been an extremely complex message, filled with echoes of challenge and pleasure and prey. It had also held quieter echoes of Buffy and her Slayer’s destiny, which might explain why it had been quite so startling – and suggested that the sleek feline was almost certainly a lot more than he seemed.
The animal was quite definitely male, a fact suggested by its anatomy and confirmed by its unspoken voice. Giles couldn’t recall ever having much to do with cats in his half remembered life, although there were vague memories that had something to do with stables and horses. Old, distanced memories – recollections of childhood he suspected, since they came with a sense of comfort and uncomplicated pleasures. There was one thing he was sure of though – and that was that, while he might have occasionally conversed with a cat in the dim and distant past, he’d never had one talk back before.
If he’d come across the animal earlier in his travels he might well have started questioning his sanity, but he’d been in this world long enough, seen enough to convince him that it was entirely and bewilderingly real. It had an internal consistency that belied the deceptions of insanity. It had textures, it had hard and harsh edges, and it followed rules.
It was just that the rules here were different.
Here, it seemed, there were two types of reality – the one the mirrors imposed and the one that lurked, unseen and undetermined beyond the edges of the reflected world. It was a world that held its shape only when seen, leaving the rest to be defined by emotion and imagination. The landscapes and the dimensions of the first were somehow imposed on the second, creating further reflections; distorted echoes and dark, twisted replicas of things half glimpsed, half suggested by the play of light and shadow.
The cat led him deeper into the labyrinth, its chosen route twisting and turning through a bewildering series of rooms and passageways. They crossed wide, expansive areas – navigating the intricacies of shopping malls and business complexes – were swallowed up by sequences of homely, intimate rooms, emerged into stark utilitarian spaces – one of them a waiting room in a hospital, another the echoing emptiness of communal showers and shared locker rooms – and then moved on through a confusion of offices, galleries, and more personal spaces. They could have been going round in circles for all Giles knew – and in places he could have sworn they’d doubled back, except that they clearly hadn’t since every room they entered turned out to be somewhere different yet again. His confidence in the systems of transition that he thought he’d managed to figure out collapsed into perplexity and confusion – and he began to suspect that - where he’d thought he’d been following a carefully mapped and measured route - he’d actually achieved little more than aimless, undirected wandering.
"Where are we going?" he ventured to ask, as the cat led him out of what looked like a school-room and down a disconcertingly angled stairway. It wasn’t an easy guide to follow; it wasn’t leading him as a dog might, an eager step ahead and running back at every turn to make sure he was still on its tail. It was just making its own way through the world, walking where it wanted to walk, slinking through the furniture or leaping onto it, pausing to investigate nooks and crannies, running at speed or simply strolling aimlessly as the mood took it. For all that, it was leading him – sometimes waiting for him to catch up, sometimes appearing at his feet just as he thought he’d lost sight of it and occasionally glancing back to make sure he was still there. It had run down the stairs and then leapt onto the low banister at the end of it, sitting there and taking the opportunity to wash a non-existent spot from a pristinely white rear paw. The question – or possibly just the sound of his voice, since they had been traveling in silence for some time – lifted its head; deep green and amber eyes stared at him with a mixture of impatience and amusement.
Somewhere that isn’t here, the cat said matter-of-factly, leaping down and away before Giles could formulate a sensible response. He sighed, shouldered the sword blade and headed after it.
The route they were following seemed interminable, but at least it was going somewhere – and after so many long silent hours on his own it was a relief to be traveling in company again, no matter how strange that company might seem. They both helped themselves to food as they found it, the cat leaping on something in a shadowed corner while his human company picked up some fairly tasteless sandwiches from a buffet that they wandered past. They had the texture of cotton wool and about as much appeal as something that had been sitting in the fridge for several weeks – but it was still better than going hungry. The apples - which he’d snatched from somebody’s fruit bowl earlier that morning - were slightly better, although not by much; they offered only a reflection of the real taste, and he found himself questioning just how much sustenance the mirrored food actually held.
If I can’t find a way out, he pondered anxiously, will I just slowly fade away?
Or will I starve to death trying to live on illusions and facsimiles?
His guide reappeared from under the table, licking its lips and looking smug; whatever it was that he’d caught, he’d clearly enjoyed eating it afterwards.
"Is it much further?" Giles asked, feeling slightly resentful that someone had managed to find a square meal even if he couldn’t. The cat gave him another of those amused looks.
As far as it needs to be.
It wasn’t very a helpful answer but it was remarkably informative. The concepts behind it were extremely complicated; they contained hints of how the animal was managing to navigate the mirrored labyrinth, matters of desire and memory tangled up with patterns and correlations. He had been right about how the rooms linked one to the other – but he’d been unaware of the subtler elements that shifted random connections into directed navigation.
To actually get anywhere in this place, it seemed that you had to know where you needed to go.
It wasn’t that easy of course; if it was, he’d have found his way to somewhere he recognized days ago. The library, probably, since his memories of that seemed to be stronger than anywhere else. But memory alone was clearly not enough. There had to be a trick to it, a skill he had yet to acquire.
You think too much, the cat told him, hints of laughter lurking behind the remark. Feel it. Want it.
Become the Way …
They traveled a considerable distance without incident but, as the afternoon drew on both of them began to move with much greater caution, the cat pausing in doorways to assess what lay beyond them while Giles cast anxious glances over his shoulder, half convinced that something was about to happen. A few rooms further, and just as the glow from mirrors began to become visible again, his suspicions were finally proved correct; the sound of hissing and yowling suddenly shattered the oppressive silences, echoing and reechoing around them with fervent distress. His guide jerked to a halt and arched his back, puffing out his fur so that he looked at least twice his normal size. Giles frowned, glancing round what seemed to be a fairly innocuous living room before he realized that the sound was coming from behind a half open door at the end of it. It was a desperate, angry kind of sound and it was underpinned by a soft, bone throbbing buzz - the kind of noise that crawls into your body and can’t be shaken free again. He was instantly on edge, his fingers tightening reflexively around the hilt of his borrowed sword and his heart racing with alarm.
What the bloody hell is that?
Thoughts of the menacing, creeping presence that stalked the night sent a cold chill up his spine and his initial reaction was to take step back, to get away from whatever it was that was making such a furious noise. This wasn’t his world; it almost certainly wouldn’t be his fight.
Would it?
Two things put a halt to his retreat. One was the actions of the black and white cat, which had begun a slow and cautious stalk towards the source of the sound. The other was something much stronger than a merely selfish survival instinct – something in him that reacted to the sound of battle and desperate distress. Sensible men avoid things like vampires, demons and the unseen menaces of the dark, of course – and on his own, Rupert Giles was undoubtedly a very sensible man. But when someone else was in trouble? Then it appeared that a lifetime of training, an ingrained sense of duty and some inner deeper instinct kicked in.
Watchers, it seemed, ran towards danger.
He didn’t have that far to go. On the other side of the half open door lay what looked like an ornately glass roofed conservatory. One that was made up of pleasant reflected areas where sunlight danced on white painted woven furniture, interspersed with shadowed, threatening spaces which could not be seen in the narrow decorative mirrors that defined the room. The darkness of the true dimension had encroached into the gothic recesses between the glass panes; lush pot plants were matched with writhing grotesque parodies of themselves, their blossoms filled with sucking mouths and their vine like leaves groping eagerly for prey. The hanging baskets were the worst. Swathe of decorative flowers had become draping tendrils covered with a myriad of lidless eyes. They dripped slime – and they filled the air with a musty, sickly sweet scent.
In the middle of the room – standing ground on a hand woven rag rug that was part jewel-like colours and part washed out approximations – was a slender tortoiseshell cat, its back arched, its hackles raised and all its claws out. Crouched at the end of the rug, quivering up against the base of a terracotta pot, were a pair of kittens, mewling plaintively.
Giles saw all of this, and more, as soon as he arrived in the doorway. But it was the creatures that dipped and flitted around the besieged animal that drew his eye and sent a shiver of horror down his spine. They weren’t the creatures that hunted the reflected corridors in the dark; these things were too small, and they lacked the soul chilling sense of presence that haunted his nights – but they were something almost as bad.
House flies the size of Labradors would have been cute and fluffy compared to these hideous nightmares; they had a mass of squirming tentacles where they should have had legs - and too many eyes along with their blur of multiple, buzzing wings. They filled the air with a mind numbing thrum of sound, the notes of their flight rising and falling in discordant pitch as they darted between the pillars and the pot plants trying to get past the yowling, hissing wildcat that was keeping them at bay.
It took less than a moment to assess the situation; the tortoiseshell appeared to be evenly matched against one or maybe two of the creatures, but she was trying to track at least four, and couldn’t leave the confines of the rug without exposing the kittens to attack. They, in turn, were trapped in their sunlit refuge, since any attempt to bolt for the door would instantly bring them within reach of their attackers. There was a mixture of hunger and fear painting the air – and outside, night was fast approaching.
Once it grew dark none of them would stand a chance.
The knife was in his hand almost before he knew it. He couldn’t match his Slayer’s strength - or her reflexes either – but that didn’t stop him from flipping the weapon with unconscious skill, or launching it with all the force he could muster at the nearest of the flying nightmares. His aim was both accurate and deadly; it struck the thing just as it turned in his direction. The blade sank deep and the force of the impact knocked the creature backwards, straight into the reach of one of those distorted hanging baskets. There was a sudden writhing of vines and tendrils – and the thing was gone, literally ripped apart within seconds.
Giles didn’t have time to absorb the horror of that; his actions, his flurry of movement had attracted the attention of the rest of the swarm, and he swung the sword up in haste as they dived in his direction. They’d clearly never encountered sword play before; the leading creature simply impaled itself on the blade, forcing him to use its flailing body as a bludgeon to drive back the rest. He cursed soundly, fighting to shake the half dead creature free while trying to dodge away from the rest of them. Writhing tentacles painted pain across his cheek, slashed at his shoulder and raked down his right arm. Numbness followed almost immediately, creeping out from the edges of torn skin like frost crawling across window glass.
"Bloody hell," he swore, swinging his weapon round with desperation. The blade cut through shimmering wings, bit down on an armored body – and sliced away an entire cluster of eyes as the creature tried to move away from this sudden source of pain. The thing fell to the floor in a squirm of limbs and damaged wings, where it was immediately pounced on by a furious, spitting bundle of tortoiseshell fur and claws. Giles took half a step back, grimacing at the discomfort of his wounds, then hurriedly ducked as the last of the flying things made a swooping dive in his direction. A sudden sense of weight and force scrabbled at the small of his back – and then a black and white furred missile was launching itself off his shoulder with a yowl fit to wake the dead. Claws and teeth sank into a whirr of wings, forcing the creature to the ground.
The cat leapt free as it landed, giving Giles room to drive the point of his sword through the monster’s head; the thing writhed and struggled for a moment, before finally falling still. Man and cat looked at each other for a moment, one panting a little for breath, the other letting its hackles fall and its fur return to its usual sleekness.
You fight well, came the observation, surrounded by pride at the victory, pleasure at the kill – and a whole bundle of admiration and surprise. The wounded Watcher had to smile at the reaction. He was a little surprised himself.
"Thank you," he acknowledged, relieved to find he’d survived the encounter relatively intact. "You too."
The cat merely flicked his tail at that, moving away to bump noses with the tortoiseshell and leaving Giles to gingerly examine the damage to his arm. His jacket sleeve had absorbed most of the attack, although there was rip in it that ran from shoulder to elbow and a matching shallow scratch in the muscle beneath. The wound still felt numb, but the rest of his arm was beginning to tingle - as was his cheek. There was also, he realised with a sudden shiver, a crack in the right lens of his glasses. If he hadn’t been wearing them, he could well have lost an eye.
"What are these things?" he wondered aloud, turning his attention to the recovery of his sword, which was still quivering in the corpse.
Bandersnatch.
Once again the answer was more concept than comment – but his mind bundled it up and labeled it, giving it a name that was disturbingly familiar. With it, the echoes of a bizarre rhyme, a simple piece of childhood nonsense, suddenly took on sinister overtones.
Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jujub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch …