（外文电子版资料）Fritz Leiber - Midnight in the Mirror World.pdf

Scanned by gojukai From Fritz Leiber’s The Mind Spider and Other Stories MIDNIGHT IN THE MIRROR WORLD Fritz Leiber As the dock downstairs began to clang out midnights twelve strokes, Giles Nefandor glanced into one of the two big mirrors between which he was passing on his nightly trip, regular as clockwork, from the telescopes on the roof to the pianos and chessboards in the living room. What he saw there made him stop and bunk and stare. He was two steps above the mid-stair landing, where the great wrought-iron chandelier with its freight of live and dead electric bulbs swung m the dull fierce gusts of wind coming through the broken, lead-webbed, dramond- paned windows. It swung like a pendulum—a wilder yet more ponderous pendulum than that in the tall clock twanging relentlessly downstairs. He stayed aware of its menace as he peered in the mirror. Since there was a second mirror behind him, what he saw in the one he faced was not a single reflection of him- self, but many, each smaller and dimmer than the one in front of it—a half-spread stack of reflections going off to- ward infinity. Each reflection, except the eighth, showed against a background of mirror-gloom only his dark lean aquiline face, or at least the edge of it—from bucket-size down to dime-size—peering back at him intently from un- der its sleek crown of black, silver-shot hair. But in the eighth reflection his hair was wildly dis- ordered and his face was leaden-green, gape-jawed, and bulging-eyed with horror. Also, his eighth reflection was not alone. Beside it was a thin black figure from which a ribbony black arm reached out and lay on his reflected shoulder. He could see only the edge of the black figure—most of it was hid- den by the reflected gilt mirror frame—but he was sure it was thin. The look of horror on his face in that reflection was so intense and so suggestive of strangulation that he clutched at his throat with both hands. All his reflecti