Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 05.djvu/87

Rh, and as I watched die softly undulating motion of the draperies I became aware of something else shown by the looking-glass. Stretched on a pallet laid upon the floor, and looking straight at me, was the most lovely girl I'd ever seen. But I could not see my own reflection.

"Did they really do me in last night, and have I gone to Paradise because they killed me in a Moslem house?" I wondered. "Is this one of the Prophet's fabled houris?" Involuntarily I put my hand up to my forehead.

The looking-glass girl did the same.

"Good Lord!" I exclaimed as I kicked die striped silk cover off. There was a chime of silver anklets, and the mirror-girl kicked off her cover, displaying one of the most charming forms I'd ever looked at. She was quite undressed; for, as I was later to discover, the habit of "sleeping raw" just now becoming popular with Western women has been in vogue in the Near East since Alexander's soldiers introduced Greek customs. I moved slowly toward the mirror and the girl walked toward me. Arm's length from the looking-glass I halted and put out my hand. The mirror-girl's slim hand came up to meet mine and touched my fingers tip to tip, but instead of warm flesh I encounterdencountered [sic] cool, hard glass. I laid my palms against the glass; the girl behind the speculum did likewise. We might have been a pair of children playing "pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold." I even turned to look behind me. Besides me, there was no one in the room.

You remember that old song we used to sing in college:

I suppose I'd sung that foolish verse ten thousand times. Now I had the answer. It felt queer—creepy.

The girl's reflection—with growing consternation I realized it was mine—was beautiful. I—or she—was much shorter than I had been, barely live feet tall, and utterly exquisite. Her—my—face was perfect oval, neither white nor tan, but warmly shaded, like Parian marble with a light reflected from a golden mirror on it. Where my hair had been a sandy blond the reflected woman's was light as clear-strained honey, and very long and fine, plaited in long braids and wound in disks almost as large as saucers, and pinned each side the head with jeweled pins. The brows, in contrast, were so black and fine they might have been laid on in India ink with a bamboo brush. In her left nostril, fastened by a little hoop of gold, there was a square-cut topaz larger than an olive-pit, and its warm, translucent brown exactly matched the puzzled, frightened eyes that looked into mine. Great hoops of gold, so large their lower margins almost touched the creamy shoulders, were hung in her small, low-set ears; half a dozen bracelets of fine silver tinkled on each wrist; about each sharply-molded ankle was a pair of massive sand-cast silver bands.

The body matched the face in beauty, slim as a youth's, with slender hips and tapering legs, a flat stomach, but very full and high and pointed breasts.

I took a step back and turned sidewise, appraising the profile reflected in the mirror. Oddly—perhaps naturally I could regard this body into which I had been forced objectively as if it were the body of another, and the more I looked at it the lovelier—and stranger—I appeared to be. Carefullly and analytically I scrutinized the face. It