"I didn't lock the door to keep them out. I locked it to keep you in." // Sherlock
October, 1879, Edinburgh
It has been a proven thorough-line of deduction, that once you have exhausted all the evidence to the contrary - and at such, eliminated the impossible - whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Of course, the usual course of such is then to open up the mind unto the possibility of even the most unlikeliest of motives, the most innocuous of culprits and the most outlandish methods-- but even then, there always remained a certain degree of grounded reality to most of his cases. Something logical, something explainable, however convoluted it may be. Something he could understand.
Spectral women in the looking glass rather pushed the boundaries of disbelief.
But then, isn't that what made this whole affair so curious?
"... Quite." The detective finds his voice after a beat has passed. Which is, to expatiate, yet another beat after he has slowly risen from stool sat in the middle of the attic, only moments after the loud click of the lock behind his back had snapped his gaze first to the door, and then forwards again knitted together; towards the antique, floor-length mirror leaned between two narrow windows up against the wall, and the figure in it, formerly his own, now looking back at him. Moving her lips.
The room is dark - unlit quite by intention - save for the pale blue moonlight which cascades in gentle waves on either side unto the ageing floorboards, in the fall of which speckles of dust dance in the draft seeped from outside like little wisps of luminescence, making the in-between seem... darker, somehow. The mirror a void, a portal, drawing near the shadows around it into a supernatural hollow, the swirling ivy pattern of its silver boarding barely perceptible, let alone the woman at the centre of it.
But he does perceive her. Mind and body seized to the image, grasping for fractures. There is something about her that is shifting, formless, but when he concentrates, he sees a stream of slick black hair, falling in waves, as though she'd stepped out from the water; a slip of olive skin under her eye; a gown like mist beneath a waterfall. Around her he can see his own surroundings echoed back, inverted, and yet she stands where he should be, superimposed over his own reflection. Or, a part of it...?
All the while he stands, the intensity of his grey eyes never leaves her, never blinks - as if some part of him had thought, perhaps, that what he sees might disappear as soon as he does. It would be all too easy to dismiss this whole occasion a hallucination, a sudden delusion of the mind - it would not be the first time. But he had been called here on some business; up to Edinburgh on behalf of a most frantic creature, ranting and raving of a haunting; of voices whispered in the night, murky water trailed through the halls, and of being watched, within their bed.
A disconcerting notion, certainly, and an account which makes it all the more a challenge to reject the voice as simply a symptom of his often, shall we call them, recreative habits. If it is the wind, then it has gotten rather literate.
They'd moved the mirror to the loft. Into a vacant room all of its own, trying to contain whatever devilish spawn or creature they imagined had possessed it. Too frightened even to dispose of the old thing, though it is well enough they hadn't; He'd rather hoped to spend a night within its company, to study it if nothing else, perhaps run a few tests for toxic contaminants - although thus far, he must say his expectations have been substantially circumvented.
Is it excitement, threatening to catch his breath, or something else?
"I confess, I don't quite feel the urgency to leave." He speaks at the spectre as the corner of his mouth tugs, ever faintly. Straightening up where he remains some paces from the wall - staving off any approach - he assembles to some form of measure, although his lips remain a fraction parted to sustain a sense of awe, and he rather believes that he can feel his pulse a little quicker. A chill, taking to raise the hairs along his forearms, when he thinks he her eye look through him.
"It would appear to me as rude, seeing as you've only just arrived."
