Read Broken Mirror for Free Online

he looked down at his granfa, he noticed dark circles the color of rotten plums around his closed eyes. His face was marred by splotches — irregular reddish-brown stains that were faintly visible under makeup. Victor was sure those blemishes were new. The corpse had only a few lusterless wisps peeking from his white knit death cap. He looked wasted away.
    Why didn’t that bother anyone else?
    As Victor stared down at the body, the mausoleum began to fill with a rippling pressure, and darkness swirled in front of his eyes like black ash. A blankout, now? They usually came on more slowly.
    Victor felt a presence nearby, smothering, and then he went blank.
    ***
    Victor bent over the coffin, hands clenching the dead man’s lapels. The corpse’s ribs flexed under the pressure, and a breath of foul air rose up, smelling of gas and smoke. Like Carmichael.
    Mourners’ muttering filtered through the quiet mausoleum.
    Victor had blanked out, but likely only for a few seconds. He felt none of the numbness and disorientation that accompanied a longer time away.
    Blankness threatened to return. He clamped his eyes shut. Bodies moved in the blackness, reaching toward him, accusing. Murderous emanations, like subaural bass notes, rippled over his skin. The hairs on Victor’s neck rose.
    Victor opened his eyes and stared into a young woman’s face. Then he recognized her.
    Elena Morales, her lips painted navy and ringed by black pencil, hair tightly coiled at the back of her head, was at his side, asking, “Are you all right?”
    “Someone killed him,” he whispered.
    Elena’s puffy eyes widened. “Let’s get you out of here,” she said. “Fresh air. Different sensations.”
    Victor leaned heavily against her as they moved toward the exit. They had to navigate past a clot of unfamiliar faces who’d queued to pay their respects. Victor’s grandparents’ little lapdogs yapped outside, masking the sounds of mourners’ quiet sobbing. Several strangers clothed in black turned to Victor and offered their condolences. They probably mistook his stony silence as a sign of deep, natural grief. Or maybe they dismissed him as someone whose mind could never be properly understood.
    Shock them and shock their judgments , Victor thought, and he let Elena lead him outside.
    What was she doing here? They’d started dating in high school, but then there was his horribly botched good-bye when she moved to the Republic of Texas five years ago. They hadn’t spoken since. How was she even talking to him after such a miserable breakup?
    When they reached the lawn, he avoided her gaze and stared at the Oakland & Bayshore skyline peeking from the fog. The dogs continued yapping like little bug zappers, though he couldn’t see them.
    He tried not to think about his granfa and the strange intuition that he had been murdered.
    Victor felt better outside, away from the other mourners’ staring eyes. Grieving people wanted to make eye contact for longer than usual. Dr. Tammet’s 3-5-7 rule said to maintain eye contact for three seconds when observing strangers, five seconds when speaking to someone, and seven seconds when listening.
    Elena stepped in front of him. “What’s wrong? Tell me.”
    Victor returned her steady gaze. Her eyes were brown, with green flecks, like emeralds casually scattered on a pile of brown sugar. He should be weighed down by their history, but he felt only relief.
    He said, “I was doing well. Dr. Tammet said I was improving. A year ago, nothing like this would have happened.”
    “And this time?” she asked.
    “Murder.” He sighed and shook his head at the ground. “I went blank, and when I came back I was certain my granfa was murdered.”
    Elena stared at him with wide eyes. “Wow, that’s something, even for you. Nobody is murdered in SeCa these days. At least not in the civilized parts,” she added.
    She was right. He sounded crazy for saying it aloud. Everyone knew that Europe’s special interest in