1
Jean-Baptiste Archambault of The Archambault Glass & Mirror Company of Paris was half asleep when he heard the voice for the first time.
“How tedious dying is. Get on with it, why don’t you.”
Even on this first occasion he knew very well that he had not dreamed the voice, though he told himself that he had. Truth may be golden—it was something said by entrepreneurs during this period (some two-hundred years ago), the sort of chalky maxim that men of good fortune, like Archambault himself, declaimed whenever the opportunity arose—but a usable falsehood is no shabby tin; and anyway a man who has all but lain on his deathbed must get quick answers. So, after being startled awake by the voice, Archambault stayed silent and listened carefully. He heard nothing more. Of course it had been a dream, he said to himself—but what a grave and haunting voice! Bon sang de Dieu, what am I saying! I’ve heard a million voices in my lifetime; only a handful of them ever mattered a whit to me. What are the chances that this particular voice, which of course was only a dream anyway, should profit me, or justifiably hold my attention, even for a moment? Especially considering how poor in moments I’ve become!
2
Jean-Baptiste Archambault of Paris, a man of wealth and old age, a man who, as he himself perfectly understood, had stepped already into the final year of his life, heard the voice again the following day.
“The outcome is inevitable. Why do you prolong things?”
And then again the day after.
“You dare wag your nose at me. I’ll make things worse for you.”
And again every day for the next several months. The voice made it clear to Archambault that its intentions involved nothing less than eternity.
Finally, Archambault saw a way—like a dream unto itself—to get himself free, and save his soul from ruin.
3
The first phase of Jean-Baptiste Archambault’s plan was already in effect—even as his deteriorating health had left him mostly bedridden—when, on a brisk autumn morning, his old servant, Dama-Emmanuel (who was fifteen years Archambault’s senior, though his own deathbed lay still years away), entered the room without knocking.
“Monsieur, the vultures are circling.”
“Very well. Show them to the study. I’ll hobble along.”
4
Jean-Baptiste Archambault—successful glassworks man whose factories, under his recent directive, had begun distilling mercury for mirrors from a special cinnabar mined not in Spain but in Ceylon (from a remote quarry there that none of his competitors—not Ferringer, not Saint-Gobain—had yet learned of; and good, for he was swindling those Sinhalese for the meager price he was paying)—sat behind a bureau while wearing a robe, his face drawn and pale. Wifeless, childless, his three brothers long dead from the Napoleonic wars, he sat before a small audience of nieces and nephews, whose eyes—or so it seemed to him—gleamed only too brightly.
He did not say aloud: “Le petit diable, like any beneficiary of the dead, is quite happy, when a man is dying, to sit bedside and make small talk or just chew his nails while gazing through the window. He might even nod off from time to time. You lot can’t even be bothered with that much.”
What he did say was something far less blunt, far less extravagant; the undertone resounded through the room well enough.
5
“You are probably desirous to know that my affairs are in order,” said Jean-Baptiste Archambault, with a voice that did not tremble although his softly bristled jaw and chafed lips did. “Fear not, all the requisite papers are signed.”
His relations sat there looking at each other nervously.
“No, Uncle, we’re here because of the…reports. About the mirrors.”
“You’ll have to enlighten me.”
“You haven’t heard? The stories about…things…appearing in your mirrors?”
“Yes, things appear in mirrors, that’s what they’re for.”
“No, Uncle, not reflections. Things that are not there. Horrible things. People have said they’ve seen…monsters…in your mirrors.”
6
The voice became suddenly very loud and clear as Jean-Baptiste Archambault shuffled back to his bed after sending away his nieces and nephews.
“Oh, such boredom. What usual things. Of course that sullen brood does not love you. No doubt their nonsense about monsters was meant only to vex you. Probably their objective is to prey upon your weakened heart. And why not? There’s nothing left in the world for you any longer. Nothing in business, really. You’ve no other family to provide for. You said it yourself: your affairs are all in order. So let’s get on with it.”
7
Jean-Baptiste Archambault awoke after midnight to hear the voice already in mid-sentence.
“…and if you even glimpsed the swelling ranks below you’d know that savior of yours did a lousy job anyhow. Let the clay go, silly ghost, and be done with it. It’s a simple thing, really. The very simplest. Ce n’est pas la mer à boire.”
For the first time since the voice had made its sinister debut, Archambault spoke back.
“Why do you say these things to me?”
“Not everyone can hear us. You can. We like talking. You possess knowledge about shadows, and for that we have designs on you. You may be usable.”
8
From the last pages of Jean-Baptiste Archambault’s diary:
A devil has its claws on me. It plans to haul me away unless I can liberate myself. I am fortunate: the spirit seems to possess only a cursory understanding of my expertise in occult matters. I’ve devised a mechanism diagrammed below. Beauregard from the factory can assemble it. I’ll send for him tomorrow.
9
Jean-Baptiste Archambault lay in bed with tremors, a palsy seizing him through and through. And then, at the very moment he felt his breath begin to fail, he flipped a switch that had been installed next to him, and a wide mirror roped to a pulley fell from a compartment hidden in the ceiling, coming to a halt just before his face. For a few seconds, while the unmistakable anguish of the end washed over him, he stared intently into his own face—that now quivering face, a face that no longer resembled him, no longer distinguished him (for dying faces lose their particularity, they change into universals)—until the life left his body.
10
When Dama-Emmanuel discovered Jean-Baptiste Archambault’s dead body in the bed, he was taken aback by the sight of him lying before a mirror, his eyes still wide open. Eerily, Archambault looked to be faintly smiling. And then, to the servant’s horror, he saw that Archambault’s image in the mirror wore an expression of intense fury, with a gaping mouth and a flexed, knotted brow and outstretched arms and gnarled, twisted, elongated fingers that seemed to be scratching at the glass.
11
According to reports—or to legend (and what’s the difference, anyway)—the image of Jean-Baptiste Archambault that Dama-Emmanuel saw in the mirror remained frozen there, and did not vanish for three days.
12
The contraption that Jean-Baptiste Archambault arranged for the moment of his death is now kept in the family’s vault in Lyon, where it stays covered by a thick, burlap tarp. They say the mirror no longer reflects anything at all.
13
Today, mirrors that were manufactured by The Archambault Glass & Mirror Company of Paris (especially those made in the final year or two of its operations) fetch a hefty price at auction. Some say that the legend of Jean-Baptiste Archambault’s bizarre demise was fabricated for no other motive than this.
14
From Jean-Baptiste Archambault’s diary, a few maxims:
In my experience, amassing a fortune is a simple thing. The very simplest. One assumes that scoundrels chase after money, but really the reverse is true: wherever monsters go, the money follows.
All wealth is built up from traps. In the state of nature, goods never accumulate.
Not all cinnabar is the same.
The devil is the most visual of gods, for more than any other deity he is fixated on what is absolutely far from himself, and of all the senses it is vision that reaches the farthest.
The upcast eyes of the devil make him vulnerable to the trickery of images.
And his final entry:
I’ve read everything there is to read about the desultory history of mirror production, from the ancient Etruscans to Saint-Gobain in our own century, and I’ve seen just how stubbornly humankind has sought to copy the world, to make doubles of it. Probably we will never cease in this endeavor, we shall be endlessly and forever projecting filmy reflections of all that exists around us. For that is what we are: not gods, nor a demiurge, but that third thing: the animal that copies: mimic; painter; sense-bound ape; clay-made plagiarist: the mirror come to life.
15
Jean-Baptiste Archambault’s body was laid to rest in the Archambault Mausoleum in Paris in 1839. His tomb was promptly vandalized—perhaps by thieves, perhaps by some vengeful patron who had been tormented before one of his mirrors—and plundered for what modest finery it contained. Inexplicably, his body, too, like a polished metal mirror pillaged from an Etruscan grave, was stolen away.
Joachim Glage lives in Colorado. A collection of his speculative short fiction, The Devil’s Library, was published in 2024 by JackLeg Press. He is currently at work on a nonfiction/hybrid book called The Lights of Hades. www.JoachimGlage.net
High Horse 