The Legend of Bush Man — Chapters 70 and 71: The Missing Reflection

Chapter 70 — Where It Went

“Don’t answer it,” Chloe said.

Nobody had planned to. But the thing in the glass had spoken in unison with the figure on the kerb bench — a half-second early, the way a reflection moves before you do when you are tired enough — and Marcus’s mother was still holding the question she had asked out loud, the way you hold a hot dish with both hands: If it’s in your reflection — where did yours go?

Marcus looked at the glass without looking into it, the trick they had all learned at cost: eyes on the frame, on the smudged handprint at shoulder height, on Joss’s taped dawn sheet curling at the corner. In the pane beside his own empty place, Chloe’s reflection stood holding Chloe’s sleeve. His mother’s reflection stood with her hands flat on nothing, on the chest of a boy the glass could not find. Only Marcus was missing. In his place, a half-step behind where he stood, the second Marcus smiled with his mouth and not his eyes, in a torn jacket with a grass stain, dry-shod in a morning full of fog.

“It’s the advance party again,” Chloe’s mother said quietly. “Only worse dressed. Shadows go first on the ground. This one goes first on the glass.”

“Five PEOPLE in my shop,” Joss announced to his counter, loud and ordinary, doing his count the way other men do a rosary. “Five. I do not count glass.”

The figure in the pane inclined its head at the sound — courteously, the way it inclined at doors — and Marcus understood, with the slow nausea of a floorboard giving, that the count had not refused it. The count had addressed it. There is a difference, and the garden has always lived in differences exactly that size.

From the AOP3D Forum — Page 98: “The Reflection”

Posted by rootcellar, Hollow Creek. Timestamp: now.

“You are asking where your reflection went, friend, as if it were a coat you left on a chair. A reflection is not a picture of you. It is a record, same as a shadow — proof, laid out on the glass in your shape, that something saw you. That is why The Glass was never about phones.

“If a reflection arrives at a house before its person, the house seats the reflection as the guest of record, same as a shadow. But mark the difference, because the garden does: a shadow can only knock. A reflection can be seen answering. It has your face to answer with, and your mouth, and it does not need your voice at all. People believe a face they can see nodding in a window. They have believed it all their lives.

“And one more, sorrier thing. A reflection does not leave empty. Nothing in that garden leaves a place empty. When yours stepped out of the glass to go and be seated, something had to stand in the vacancy and keep the shape warm. Check who has been standing in yours. Check it before you wave at any window on your street.”

Chapter 70 — The Vacancy

“It didn’t steal it,” Marcus said. His voice sounded scraped. “Listen to the page. My reflection left. It went to be seated — it’s at my table, in my house, in my chair, being the guest of record. And this—” he did not point; pointing is a kind of introducing, “—this is what the garden stood in the vacancy. To keep my place in the glass warm. So the glass still works. So nobody at home will look at a window and wonder why I’m not in it.”

“Because you will be in it,” Chloe said. “Just — arriving early. Everywhere. Waving at the neighbours.”

His dead phone buzzed in his pocket, in the rhythm. Crunch… swoosh… crunch. A photograph, from his own number: his neighbour at her gate in her dressing gown, smiling up the street at someone just out of frame, delighted, the way you smile at a boy you have watched grow up. Caption, in his finished voice: she sees me coming.

“She’s not seeing you coming,” his mother said, and her hands found his chest again, flat, certain, an address. “She’s seeing it going. There’s a difference, baby. There has to be a difference.”

Behind the glass, very slowly, the second Marcus raised one hand — his hand, the shape of every door he had ever knocked on — and waved. Not at them. Past them. At the street, at the morning, at every window between the truck stop and Elm Avenue, each one a thin, bright door a reflection can walk through without ever touching the ground.

They left by Joss’s service door, person to person, while Joss locked up behind them for his own reasons and counted them out loud, out only: four people and a driver who swore he was owed a phone. Hollis drove east on a running engine and did not turn around. That much, the morning allowed.

Chapter 71 — Walking Home in the Windows

They walked toward town in full daylight, which helped exactly as much as a paper umbrella.

Every shop window on the main road held the morning twice: the real street, pale and ordinary — and, a half-step ahead of the four of them in the glass, a fifth figure walking unhurriedly in a torn, grass-stained jacket, dry-shod, nodding at reflections of people who had not yet come out of their houses. It never hurried. It never needed to. Glass is faster than feet; a reflection arrives the moment there is light to carry it.

“Don’t wave back,” Chloe said to a woman in the bakery window who had lifted a hand, delighted, at the boy in the glass. “Love — don’t wave back at the window. Wave at us. We’re the ones out here in the cold.”

The woman’s hand faltered. She looked from the glass to the street, confused by the oldest difference in the world, and — mercy, ordinary mercy — she laughed and waved at the four of them instead, flesh to flesh, address to address. In the pane, the second Marcus’s wave finished alone, a half-second early, to nobody. For one whole window, it stood in the vacancy with its hand raised and no one receiving it, and Marcus felt something that was almost pity and had to put it down quickly, because pity, he suspected, is a kind of beginning too.

“It’s losing windows,” his mother whispered. “Say it loses windows if people wave at the real ones.”

“It loses this window,” Marcus said. “Don’t make it a rule bigger than we’ve proved. That’s how the forum stays honest. That’s how we stay—”

From the AOP3D Forum — Page 99: “The Wave”

rootcellar, Hollow Creek, replying to page 98, timestamp: now:

“One correction to my own page, and I make it standing up. A reflection seated as guest of record still needs the house to receive it, and a house receives through its people. A wave answered is a welcome begun. A wave refused — not with fear, friend, fear is seasoning — but with attention given to the real person standing in the street, is a door the glass cannot open. It cannot seat itself in a house whose people keep choosing the flesh over the picture of the flesh.

“But do not celebrate. The garden is patient, and a street is long, and not every neighbour will be told in time. It only needs one window received, on one street, by one kind person who waves back at the boy they think they know — and then the guest of record is expected at that address, and the vacancy in your glass is filled for good. Count your street, friend. Count it before the light changes.”

Chapter 71 — One Window Left

They counted the street the way Joss counted his shop: out loud, person to person, house by house, as they walked the last two blocks toward Elm Avenue. Mrs. Alvarez at number nine, told through her screen door, no names, just: wave at the ones in the street, love. The twins’ father at eleven, who believed them instantly and did not say why, which in Oakhaven now counted as a complete education. The Hendersons’ dark house, skipped, its address already known. Door by door, window by window, the four of them spent the morning like people sandbagging a river — and the figure in the glass walked on ahead of them, patient, courteous, raising its hand at each bright pane, and being refused, and being refused, and being refused.

Until the last house before Marcus’s own.

His neighbour was at her gate in her dressing gown, exactly as the photograph had shown her — smiling up the street, delighted, at someone only she could see coming. She had been standing there, Marcus understood with a cold that went all the way down, since the photograph was taken. Waiting to finish the wave. Some people hold a kindness the way his mother held a welcome: with a whole lifetime in the hand.

“Love,” his mother called, person to person, no names, quick as love gets, “wave at us, we’re—”

His neighbour turned. She looked at the four of them in the street — really looked, puzzled, at the boy with no reflection and his brave, unlearning mother — and then, gently, apologetically, the way you correct a child who has misunderstood something simple, she smiled and shook her head.

“Oh, honey,” she said. “I already did. He’s inside making tea. He said you’d all be along directly — he said not to keep him standing.”

Behind her, in the warm-lit window of her front room, a figure in a torn, grass-stained jacket raised a mug in a toast none of them returned — and, in the glass beside it, clearly, patiently, eight feet of black thorns stood folded in the vacancy where the boy’s reflection should have been, pale hollow eyes open, looking out at the real Marcus in the street.

And Marcus’s own front door, across the road, opened six inches. By no visible hand. From inside, in his own unfinished voice — his real voice, the one the garden had only just learned to wear — the guest of record called out, cheerful as breakfast:

“There you are. I kept your seat warm. Come inside — lunch is getting cold.”