Page:Weird Tales volume 38 number 03 CAN.djvu/84

 interests of virtue, one might do everything in one's power... and then fail. How? By looking, smiling at, daring to admire one's reflected form in a mirror. The human form was a debased thing of evil that only served to lead its owner off the garden path. Thus, logically, it was a thing to remain unseen; avoided. Jay's Father used it for shaving. That was its purpose.

NE of Jay's most memorable recollections was the time that he had been caught. He'd lost a tooth, as boys will, and was entirely engrossed in exploring the bloody cavity with an inquisitive finger. The mirror helped a great deal as he probed and poked... until...

"Jar!"

He swerved, nearly upsetting himself, and paled. "Yes, Father?"

"Ungodly brat! You were lasciviously admiring yourself!"

"I... I don't understand, Father."

"Do not trifle with me. I have explained the sin often enough."

"It was the big word I didn't understand. And, honest, I was just fooling..."

Which is as far as Jay got. His gasp was cut off as a gnarled hand jerked at the back of his collar. The shaving strop was seized, raised aloft, then brought down with a singing swish. Jay's cry of pain suffered the same brief span that his gasp had lasted. The steadily flailing strip of leather effectively stifled everything but an agonized wish for death. Again and again it rose and fell. The regularity was monotonous. The pain eventually indescribable.

Things, after a while resolved into a whirling world of unbeheved torture. Again and again rose the leather flail... down and down it beat against the semi-conscious jerking form that was Jay Swarz. Jay finally fainted...

A graphic experience is forever etched upon the consciousness of a child. Jay never forgot that beating. It bad the constant impact of a sledge-hammer swung against a huge brazen gong. The reverberations went on and on and on....

Jay grew older and finally left home to establish his own way in the world. He trod in minor paths. Luckier than most men, he never was troubled by an all-consuming ambition. The highways for others—the byways for him. A small job; a small room; these quite comfortably fitted his small desires.

His position with a large insurance company was safe and steady. Nobody resents a man who doesn't covet positions that aren't better than his; nobody wields an economic knife against a man who is supremely satisfied to trudge a tuneless treadmill.

He was accepted with the same careless complacence that is usually associated with a slightly worn piece of office furniture; and he was considered very much as devoid of personality or hidden depth.

But they would have been surprised.

He did have a secret.

Jay Swarz was still afraid of mirrors.

Psychologically conditioned by the ultra-stern conditions of his youth, his fear never diminished. To the contrary, it fed upon itself and grew constantly. Morbidly. A man incapable of making living enemies, he found himself in the anomalous position of having an inanimate foe. He used mirrors as sparingly as k was humanly possible. Brushing