Sweet beginnings of a strain Charlie had heard as a child seemed to sweat from the

rafters of the old house. Back there again for the frst time since he was twelve was a
harrowing experience and an uplifting one at the same time. He touched the dank and
soiled white walls, once gleeful with photos both old and new, now wasting under the
age of humidity, street dust, vandals and the like. Someone had scrawled graffti in the
living room where a painting of an old tractor pull at a county fair once hang,
reminiscent of a Rockwell-like creation depicting a scene that both never happened and
had happened a thousand times in a thousand rural communities across America over
the past century. Mouse holes riddled the baseboards and no small amount of dirt and
debris invaded the ancient Berber carpet his mother used to be so particular about. The
fragrance of foral incense mixed with clean was a memory only the sharpest of minds
would detect in this place. Now the only real smell was that of a dead cat somewhere
behind one of the walls, trapped forever in its primeval necessity to hunt down its arch
enemy. Charlie covered his nose with his shirt and drifted further into the shell he once
knew. A crazy idea occurred to him. Maybe if he went to his old room he would fnd
something worth fnding. The misty memory of what he used to do here assaulted him
with a vengeance. He could hear the door to his parents’ room slamming and the
yelling of his mother a muffed scream just breaking through the darkness of the long
hallway, a homiletic dedicated to her hatred for all the male sex had to offer. No, they
would have disposed of anything belonging to their wayward son long ago. Charlie
opted to return to the bedroom anyway, curious if it was in the same shape as he had
discovered the foyer and living room.

The bedroom was no better. In fact, it was worse. Paint was peeling off the walls,
and a long, cavernous crack divided the fourth wall. The doors of the built-in cabinets
and drawers were hanging half off their hinges. Inside the cabinets, mouse droppings
and dust dunes created a landscape of emptiness. The only thing vaguely familiar to
Charlie was the frame of his twin bed still sitting in the same corner he had slept in for
most of his childhood. The mattress was long gone. Charlie saw no sign of the rest of
the furniture he remembered: a chest of drawers on the far wall closest to the road, a
small desk with a chair for studying and reading (not that he did much of it what little
time he spent in school), and a small nightstand with a lamp and an alarm clock. The
nightstand was draped over with a small cloth his mother had sewn together from scrap
pieces and called a blanket. It was more like a cloth napkin than anything, and Charlie
had always hated it. He wanted to throw it away, give it away, anything except have it in
his room, but he couldn’t move it from the nightstand. If he had, his mother would have
scorched him with a fame of obscenities and left him crying in some nook or corner or
other. But it was colored up like something put together by a color blind designer. None
of the colors on the pieced together fabric matched. The piecemeal doily looked
sickening to Charlie. He couldn’t look at — or even think about — the cacophony of
shades and hues and saturations without feeling dizzy and out of his mind. Most of the
time he would keep it covered up with an extra towel he had snuck out of the master
bathroom and then uncover quickly when he heard his mother coming toward his room
from down the hall. She would enter without announcement, raffe through whatever
she fancied without permission, and give Charlie no word of explanation — or any word
at all, for that matter — upon exiting the room. He would often fnd money he made
from doing odd chores for neighbors on the weekends when his mother and step-father
were away missing from his room. It didn’t occur to him as a younger person, but as an
adult he often wondered whether his mother had been as hopeless a drug addict in those
several years as he had turned out. Perhaps she used the money she stole from him for
weed, crystal, or maybe even the occasional small hit of heroin.

Charlie opened the door to the closet. He coughed and turned and his head away
from the inner darkness. He thought he felt something brush his leg as it ran out from
the closet and he almost fell backward, catching himself against the wall. It was then
that he saw the clock.

It lay on its backside in the back corner of the closet on the dirty foor. Charlie took
out his fashlight and aimed the dim beam at the clock. Nothing was there that could
obviously attack him or worse. Charlie reached inside the closet and picked up the
clock. Though flthy and sporting a cracked face, the clock was just as he had
remembered it. He pulled back out of the closet quickly and hurried along the walls,
searching for the exact place the clock had hung when he lived in the house. He found
it, just above where the nightstand had sat for all those years, covered with the demonic
doily his mother had conjured up. Charlie had forgotten about the wall clock, but
remembered the alarm clock from the nightstand.

“That’s strange,” he said aloud to the empty room. “I wonder where the alarm clock
is?”

Charlie began hunting for the alarm clock. His buzz from the last hit of crystal was
wearing off, and his faculties of analytical thinking were kicking in. He checked his old
bedroom thoroughly. He brushed out the piles of dust in the old built in cabinets and
fashed his fading fashlight inside the drawers. He checked every room up and down
the hall. He even checked both bathrooms and the kitchen, leaving no cabinet or
drawer unopened. The alarm clock just wasn’t there.

“It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make any freakin’ sense.”

When he was able to let go of his obsession with fnding the other clock, he
remembered something more important. The mirror from the pawn shop was still in the
living room.

Charlie ran back to the bedroom, careful not to hit any rotting pieces of foor on the
way, and grabbed the old wall clock from the bed frame where he left it. He double
checked to make sure the clock wasn’t missing any parts despite the crack on its face
and, satisfed that the mechanism was still intact, sprinted back through the house to the
living room and straight toward the freplace. He stopped short and lost his breath.

The mirror was gone.

His breathing came back, broken but fast and near hyperventilation. He looked
around the room, trying to calm himself enough to remember whether he had moved the
mirror before leaving the living room the frst time, perhaps hiding it in the coat closet in
the foyer in case someone had followed him. No. It wasn’t in the coat closet in the
foyer. It wasn’t in the living room. Again, Charlie went into overdrive, checking every
room in the house, knowing before he entered most of them that the mirror wouldn’t be
there, and it wasn’t. He even looked up inside the freplace in the living room. The
mirror was not there.

Charlie crumpled to the foor in the living room. The foor was hardwood, more of
an entertaining room than a place to relax, but his parents used it for a relaxation room
all the same. It was comfortable a place as any for them back then, but for Charlie it
seemed no different to him as a child than it did now, his heels carving canyons in the
piled up dust on the foor as they slid out from under him, his backside plumping down
against the hardwood, rough with age, his back dragging down against the wall, breaking
his fall with cold hard friction, causing more desolate paint to fake from the wall and
snow to the foor behind him. He felt no comfort now, no hope to make it to his
destination, wherever that was supposed to have been. He couldn’t go to the city and
steal enough money to buy enough tickets on enough planes, busses, trains or taxis to
take him where he wanted — needed — now to go.

As he sat there, staring into space, the door in front of him was open wide to the
front yard. The house was quiet, and the only sounds came from the nature outside. The
sun had fnally come up, and the eastern sky was glowing orange and yellow behind a
thin veil of wispy clouds. No one had followed him. Not out here. It was too remote. It
was too out of the way for the typical rubbernecker to bother. Yet, someone had. They
followed him and took the mirror. It didn’t walk away on its own.

“But, why? Why in the hell would someone wanna…”

A sound from outside silenced Charlie. It was faint, but there and persistent. The
noise sounded like it was at least several hundred feet from the house. Charlie sat still
for several minutes, holding his breath, listening. The longer he listened, the more he
was able to make out the sound of a child laughing. His breath came again and he
slowly rose from the wood foor of the living room and eased over to the side of the front
door. The porch was empty, but he could now hear the voice a bit better. It was the
voice of a child, probably not much older than Charlie would have been when they frst
moved to the old house. The voice belonged to a girl, and she was singing something.
For the moment, Charlie forgot about the mirror and the clocks. He stepped out
onto the porch, listening closer, focusing his entire auditory sense on the single task of
understanding what the girl was saying and following her voice to her location. The
renewing sense of clarity the focus brought to Charlie was exhilarating, and he followed
it with abandon, not thinking of his own safety, let alone the need to recover his only
means of transport — the mirror itself. Before long, Charlie was off the front porch and
into the yard. He was walking with confdence toward the short stretch of woods a
couple of hundred yards beyond the front yard one moment, then running the next. His
whole being became focused on the sound of the little girl singing and laughing, and as
he continued to listen, he found himself running no longer with reckless abandon, but
with complete conviction. He became aware, somewhere in the strange and confusing
mixture of small branches slapping his face as he ran through the woods and the sound
of leaves crackling underneath the hard footfalls of each long stride, that the voice wasn’t
what drew him. Something else did. Some force that he knew but didn’t know, a
paradox of epic proportions that couldn’t possibly be and yet, at the same time, was. He
had never felt it before, and yet now, in this long lost and terrible place from his troubled
and tortured youth, he followed it blindly, running toward it with all of his heart and all
of his soul and all of his might. The closer he got to the source of the young girl’s voice,
the harder he ran, and the more he began to laugh out loud. He felt a rush and, again, a
strange mixture of dialectics — hate and love, dread and anticipation, turmoil and
peace, fear and faith. He ran, and he cried with joy as he began to understand. They all
existed within him, a multiplicity of impossible dyads that made up the whole of Charlie
Sinert, and Charlie Sinert was running, on the power that fowed from these eternal
truths, toward the source of who he was.