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Claire turned off the lights at the front of the house and brought the remaining candy back into the kitchen. It had been at least an hour since the last of the trick or treaters had come to her door.

After cleaning up, Claire walked into her study and stopped short, when she saw the mirror on the closet door. Her heart skipped a beat and she fell against the door to the room. Claire caught her breath, pulled herself together and went over to the closet door.

She examined the mirror, it was obviously old. The frame was intricately carved from a light colored wood. She saw that around the frame were small, but highly detailed characters from literature, all of which seemed to be from mystery novels. Examining the mirror closely she saw Holmes and Watson, Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, Tommy and Tupence Beresford, Poirot and Hastings amongst the many characters. It was clear that the frame itself was worth a fortune.

As she looked closer, she noticed what she was really looking for. In the center at the top and bottom, and also the left and right sides of the frame was a symbol. The symbol was the infinity sign, but the two circles making up the loops were themselves the yin and yang symbols. The frame, though varnished, was not painted, so the dark areas were represented with fine carved hash marks.

Then she confirmed that everything to the left of the center point of this strange symbol at the top and bottom of the frame was mirrored to the right and everything above the center point of the symbols on the left and right were mirrored below. Each of the characters appeared to be reaching toward the center of the mirror.

She touched the frame to see how it was attached to the door. There were no obvious fasteners, or any way to remove the frame. The door behind it appeared to be solid oak.

Claire collapsed into her desk chair, and closed her eyes. "Why now; after all these years? I stopped looking for The Mirrors years ago, when Steve and I got married. Steve had saved me; my obsession with finding one of The Mirrors almost destroyed me."

Claire's thoughts went back to where it had all began, over sixty years prior. She'd been a young teenage girl at the time. Earlier that day a rumor had gone around about one of the boys in her class, that he had been caught the day before wearing his mother's clothes. That he wanted to be a girl. Claire did not know the boy, whose name was Jeff. Oh, she knew who he was, it was a small enough class that she knew most of the people's names at least, but she had never even spoken to him before.

She saw him being teased and taunted by just about everyone, and at lunch time he was sitting alone as everyone was avoiding him. Her heart broke for this poor boy, and she had made up her mind then and there that she was going to be his friend.

She smiled as she remembered going over to him that first day and asking if he minded if she sat with him. She saw a look in his eyes, gratitude, mixed with fear. He was naturally suspicious that she was trying to pull a prank on him, but longed for a friend. He had let her join him.

To make him feel at ease she avoided mentioning anything about the rumors. She would scold anyone who teased him in front of her, but that was as far as she would go in acknowledging that she knew about them. One day on the way home from school, Jeff had finally been ready to talk to her about it. He asked her why she had never said anything about the rumors.

She had told him that it was his business, that if it were true then she was there if and when he wanted to talk about it. She made it clear to Jeff that she would be his friend whether it was true or not. As it turned out it was true, Jeff had wanted to be a girl. His mother had completely rejected this need in him and he was hurting very badly from it. Worse, since his mother had so completely locked things down for him, he couldn't get even the mild release that occasional dressing had given him.

For a couple of days, she had tried to decide how she could best help Jeff. She would love to have had him come over and play "dress-up," but that would have been difficult to explain to her mother. Having a boy in her room, would have been forbidden for any reason, having him getting changed, well that was right out.

She went into the closet and looked through her clothes. As she came across one of her favorite skirts, she knew that was what she was going to do. It had a nice elastic waist, which would make it more likely that it would fit Jeff, and she had a nice oversized top that would go well with it. She went to her lingerie drawer and took out one of her newer pairs of panties, a package of nylons and one of her older bras that she had outgrown the cup size for, but would still probably fit Jeff.

She sat down and wrote a note saying that these were things she didn't wear any more, she chuckled as she thought, "well at least I won't once I give them to Jeff."

It had given her a nice warm feeling, knowing that she had been able to help Jeff. She saw him much more relaxed the next day, and that went on for a couple of months. Then his mother had found the clothes. Jeff got into a lot of trouble for that, but he had not mentioned to his mother that she had given them to him. She couldn't imagine what her own mother would have said about that!

A few weeks later, Jeff had told her that they were moving, that his mother had inherited a house from her grandmother, and they were going to go live in it. She was really sorry to see Jeff leave, but she also was happy for him, because the kids at his new school would not know about his situation and he would not be teased there.

They had kept in touch, and one day Jeff had told her a strange story about the mirror in his room being a portal to another universe. When he went through it, he came out into a world where he was truly physically a girl. It was hard to believe, but she knew intuitively that Jeff was not making this up.

It frightened her, especially when Jeff told her he had been told that he was eventually going to have to choose one world over the other. Several months later she had gotten the call that still haunted her to this day, Jeff had chosen, he was going to go through the portal and break the link back. To her it sounded too much like suicide, even though she believed Jeff. She had begged him not to do it, but in the end, he had said goodbye and hung up.

She cried the whole night long, and when she heard that Jeff's body had been found with a piece of mirror through his heart, she was devastated.

Her mother had taken her to Jeff's memorial service and the funeral. She looked at Jeff's mother with hatred in her eyes, and waited for an opportunity to get her alone. She and her mother were invited back to the house after the ceremony at the graveyard; her mother was hesitant, but acquiesced.

Later in the afternoon, she was coming back from using the bathroom, when she saw Jeff's mother sitting on the bed in his room. She went in and closed the door behind her.

Jeff's mother said, "Claire? Right? You were a friend of Jeff's from his old school?"

"Yes."

"Jeff spoke about you a lot. You were very good to him… after…"

"Somebody had to be. He needed you to listen to him. He was hurting so badly, I tried to help him… But you wouldn't listen to him, and then you wouldn't believe him when he told you about The Mirror. I tried to stop him, he called to say goodbye before he went through, I begged him not to, and he said he was sorry, but he had to go."

"He told you about the mirror?"

"Yes, he told me. He told me it was a portal to another world, a world where he was really a girl. He told me he had a sister there named Lisa, and a Grandmother Larkin. He had friends there that all knew him as a girl, and he told me he just couldn't stay here as a boy, and that you had told him you were going to destroy the mirror and he would be stuck here. I don't know how he did it, but then he killed himself and it's your fault!"

Jeff's mother broke down crying, and said "I didn't know… I thought he was just trying to get me to let him dress up."

Claire said bitterly, "Are you happy now? Was it worth having him kill himself instead of at least listening to him about his need to be a girl? If you had just listened, he would still be here. He must have broken that mirror somehow and stabbed himself. He needed help, he needed to see a psychologist or a psychiatrist to help with his gender problems, not to be told 'Be a man.' But no, you thought he should just suck it up, and that's why he is dead."

Jeff's mother raised her head defiantly and said, "He's not dead. He was telling you the truth. I came back in here that night, after the police had left and everything and they had missed a piece of the mirror. I saw her in the mirror and she pushed this note over to me."

She reached into her purse and handed it to Claire.
 
 

 
 
"You saw her, in the mirror?"

"Yes, she was crying and she said goodbye."

"Where is the mirror piece now?"

"The image faded out, and next morning it was gone. The same thing happened to the pieces the detectives had gathered. They were all signed into the evidence room that night, and next morning they were all gone. Even the frame and the door it was on disappeared. The door was solid oak, that door was in its place in the morning, it's a regular closet door."

Claire reacted like she had been struck, "You mean that all of that portal stuff was really true. It wasn't just some fantasy that he created to deal with his pain?"

"Yes Claire, I don't know how or why, but it was real. I wish with all my heart that I had listened to him, and tried to meet him halfway, but I do know that somewhere on the other side of that mirror, she is happy now."

Claire never did speak to Jeff's mother again after that night. From that moment on she became obsessed with trying to find one of The Mirrors, so she could find a way to see Jeff one more time and to be sure that he was happy.

There was not much she could do while she was in school. She did what research she could on the internet, but it was difficult. You couldn't just google "mirror portals" and get an answer. She did get some leads though, by following through and finding people that were into the occult. She had to be a bit careful though, because her parents strongly disapproved of anything occult.

They had tried to get her to focus on more mundane things like dating and schoolwork. Dating was pretty much out of the question though. The boys all remembered her friendship with Jeff, and none of them wanted to be tainted as being a possible sissy, if she were to like them.

Her parents had pushed her to go to college, but her grades had slipped the last couple of years of high school. She just wasn't interested in it. Once she graduated high school, she packed up and started a cross country search for more information on The Mirrors. She found an old VW bus that she was able to buy cheap, which she could use as a camper. She worked odd jobs, when she could, mostly in retail or waiting tables, to bring in money for food and gas and the car insurance.

She followed leads where they would take her, and she got close a few times, only to get there after a person that supposedly had one had recently passed away, and the mirror was gone. She did learn quite a bit about them along the way, by speaking to family members of people that had them.

There were supposedly about 30 of them at any given time, though occasionally a new one would be discovered. The mirrors were locked to an individual and they were the only ones that could use them. It was rare, but occasionally an unlocked mirror would stay behind after the lock was broken, and then wait to lock to the person that finds it, but usually it will disappear and reappear somewhere else already locked to a person.

Those things all confirmed what Jeff had told her, years before. She also learned that no one could take control of a mirror. Several times in history, someone had tried to, by killing the person the mirror was locked onto, but the mirror would explode as soon as the person tried to use it and they would be killed, similar to what happened to Jeff's body.

Those that knew had tried to convince her that she should give up trying to search for the mirrors; they told her she would never find one by looking for it. Her obsession however, just got stronger as a result of such advice. She was sure she could track one down. She just wanted to see for herself that Jeff was ok.

She spent 3 years looking for the mirrors. She was running out of energy. She was lonely, and tired of bouncing from one place to another. She had no money, no friends, and only the one overriding obsession kept her going.

Then one night, she was waiting tables at a local diner. A young man came in and sat by himself at one of her tables. He had smiled at her and they had chatted a bit about nothing really while she served him.

He soon became a regular at her diner, and always asked to sit at one of her tables. She learned that his name was Steve, and he was a senior at a local college. One night Steve asked her if she would like to see a movie or something when she wasn't working. She had hesitated, and Steve's smile left his face and said, "If you are seeing someone else, it's ok, you just well I've been coming here daily for a couple of months now, and I really like you, but you have the aura of loneliness to you. I'd like to get to know you."

Claire said, "No, I'm not seeing anyone else. I've been … well it's a long story, but I move around a lot, and it's been a long time since anyone has taken an interest in me."

Steve said, "Well I would like to learn more about you."

Claire made the decision that had changed the rest of her life, for the better. She smiled and said, "I think I would like that."

Steve and Claire dated for just over a year, and Claire put all thoughts about chasing The Mirrors aside. Early on she had told Steve about it, and he gave her a wry smile and said, "Claire, your friend is either happy in another universe somewhere, or he is dead, hopefully in heaven, or re-incarnated as a girl or whatever, but I'm sure that he would not want you to waste your whole life looking for him. At least not if he was any kind of a friend to you, he wouldn't."

Claire had shaken her head.

"Plus, and I don't want to speak badly of your friend, because you obviously cared for him deeply, but he moved on without looking back, don't you think you should too?"

And so Claire finally had done so. They were married, and she started taking classes at a local community college. Now that she was free to live again, and was focusing on her own needs, she did very well and ultimately was accepted into a good school, where she studied psychology. It took a long time, but with Steve's help and support she eventually got her doctorate in psychology, with a specialty in transgender issues.

She and Steve had two children, and had a good life together. He had passed away earlier in the year, and their children were grown and married with their own kids. She did not get to see them often, as they lived on the opposite coast from her, but she loved video conferencing with them across the internet.

Claire opened her eyes and looked again. Yes, The Mirror was still there. Again she asked herself, "Why? And on Halloween of all nights, did one of The Mirrors decide to come to me now."

It was spooky, she had very little left here for her, other than those wonderful times when she would get to go visit her kids. Thinking back to Jeffrey, she wondered if the mirror was here as a harbinger of her own death. It scared her a little, but she wasn't afraid to die any more. Halloween of course was supposed to be the night when the veil between this world and the next was at its thinnest. She laughed and said, "of course, when else would it come."

She tried to remember back to all that she had learned about the mirrors, and she could not remember any instance where the mirror was thought of as being harmful to the person it locked too. Even in Jeffrey's case, Jeffrey certainly did not think so. Most of the people that knew of people with them said that they had felt it was a blessing. So why was she afraid?

She thought about it, and wondered, what do I really want from the mirror now? The answer came to her; she would love to really just check in with Jeff, to see if his life had turned out the way he wanted. To share with him her story as well, and to just hug an old friend, was all she would want with it now. "Oh, of course" she thought, "I could also use it to keep an eye on my kids and grandkids."

Claire got up and touched the two sides of the mirror, thinking about her friend Jeffrey, no Joanne she thought. The reflection changed, and a nice room, well lit was displayed, with an elderly woman, sitting in a rocking chair, reading from a tablet PC, and drinking tea was shown.

Claire put her hand on the mirror and found herself being pulled through to the other side.

Claire looked down at herself and was pleased to find that she was herself, and not some other person. Then she looked around the room, and noticed on the mantle a series of pictures showing that the woman in the rocking chair was part of a large and apparently loving family.

Claire felt a peace wash away old angst she wasn't aware she was even still carrying, and she smiled at the woman in the rocking chair and said, "Hi Joanne, It's me, Claire. I've missed you so much. I don't have long, because I have to go back to be with my family, but tell me, how was life as a girl?"

Happy Halloween Everyone!