Mirror to Jupiter

Two brothers embark on a thrilling adventure into the sewers to discover a secret world full of dark magic.

On the eve of his thirteenth birthday, Damon dreamed the dream again. 

He was of the age when nothing seems more important than to figure out—once and for all—the kind of person you would become, and though your life stretches far into the future, that life feels precious and precarious—like carrying an armful of crystal glass: one tiny slip and everything is destroyed.

It was the same dream he had always had. He found himself in a strange hallway, its walls red and streaked with pale moonlight. He heard roaring waves as if the ocean pummeled the rooms just out of sight, the waves crashing and receding like the exhalations and inhalations of an invisible giant. Damon walked the halls until he came to a wide, dark room. Though he could see nothing save a small dais lit from above, he knew the room was massive. He saw it on the dais—it was the same in every dream—a hideous black book laid closed upon the lectern. Its cover was decorated with a red pentagram surrounded by an angel, a bull, an eagle, and a winged serpent. In the center of the pentagram swirled a large red eye with a golden pupil. That horrible eye swiveled in its socket, sweeping the room with manic energy, ceasing its deranged searching only when it fixed its gaze on Damon. Pulled by an unknown force, Damon approached the dais and opened the book.

Then he woke up.

There is a brief moment immediately after one wakes from a nightmare when the unreality of dreams merges with the mundane. It is as if nothing has never existed, and in a tiny sliver of non-time, the universe kicks off again. 

Damon briefly remembered what he saw in the book: strange drawings in black and purple ink, paragraphs written in an alien language. But then the memory faded, driven away by morning’s light and the familiar objects of his room: his thin bedsheets, blue curtains sighing over his small windows like a silent wave, a shelf full of books, and the teddy bear his mom had given him on his first birthday, gathering dust on the top shelf. Through the open window, Damon heard birdsong and the distant hum of a lawnmower.

He turned over to go back to sleep, but his brother Henry dashed across the room and shook his shoulders. 

“Five days until space camp!” he said, and he leapt toward the window and threw the curtains open, flooding the room with light. “Wake up sleepyhead.”

“Go away, you pest.”

“I bet Mom has breakfast,” Henry sprinted out of the room, dodging the piles of unpacked boxes strewn across the floor. 

Damon dragged himself out of bed, the dim memory of his dream already gone. He followed his brother downstairs. It was a small house, smaller than their old one. The two upstairs bedrooms shared a single bathroom, and the first floor contained a galley kitchen that opened onto a breakfast nook off the living room. It was the only house their mom could afford after the divorce. Damon missed their old house. He missed having his own room. He missed the large basement that opened onto a sprawling back yard thick with trees. He missed his dad.

Their mom wasn’t making breakfast that morning. She wasn’t even home. They found a note pinned to the fridge: “I’m sorry, my love bugs, but I’ve been called into work. Hopefully it won’t take too long to finalize this account. I should be home for dinner. Let’s order pizza! Love, Mom. P.S. there’s egg salad in the fridge.”

Henry was sitting on the living room floor next to his telescope, a large book open on his lap. “Did you know that Saturn has over a hundred moons?” He was eating a piece of cheese. “Every year, they find more of them.” 

Damon opened the fridge but found nothing remotely appetizing. “Hey, do you want to run up to the grocery store?” he said. “To get something to eat.”

“We don’t have any money,” Henry said. He glanced down at his book, flipping through the pages. “Did you know the Voyager probe is the furthest man-made object from earth?”

“I know where Mom keeps her cash.” Damon ran upstairs to the master bedroom. He scooped a couple of twenty-dollar bills from the bottom dresser drawer. When he came downstairs, he found Henry peering through a telescope. “Don’t be a perv,” Damon said.

“I’m not looking at the other houses.”

“You can’t see anything. It’s broad daylight.”

“I’m trying to find the moon!”

“Let’s go,” Damon said. “I’m hungry.”

They stepped outside into the warm, bright summer morning. Most of their neighbors had their sprinklers out, the spraying water throwing rainbows across the grass. Damon saw a group of the neighborhood kids riding past on their bikes. He thought to wave at them but hesitated. They turned a corner into an alley and were lost to sight.

“Will you come with Mom to drop me off at space camp?” Henry said.

Damon didn’t know how to approach the neighborhood kids. For the first time in his life, he had spent summer without his friends. He wanted to get out and explore the new city, but what was the point in doing it alone? Without friends, the long bright days of summer, which had always promised endless possibilities, turned, instead, into a prison sentence—the days stretching interminably, one after the other, each indistinguishable from the last. Damon saw Henry staring up at him. “Maybe,” he said.

Though it was still morning, the day was already unbearably hot. The grocery store was only a few blocks away. They crossed a bridge over the highway, the steady stream of cars shimmering in the heat, the hum of their engines like rushing water. The downtown skyscrapers reached toward the blue sky, their shadows darkening the downtown districts. Damon walked in silence, thinking over his loneliness, while Henry prattled on about space camp. He had won the trip after he submitted an essay at his old school. All he could talk about was space camp, which Damon knew was his way of coping with the divorce. 

After they crossed the bridge, Damon saw an open manhole in the middle of the street. Its black, yawning mouth swallowing the light. 

At the grocery store they bought a bag of sun chips, two mountain dews, and a large meatball sub which they ate sitting in the parking lot. Henry told Damon why Pluto had been downgraded as a planet. “They found hundreds of Pluto planets. They had to make them all planets or make Pluto a planetoid. Can you imagine? Hundreds of new planets in our solar system.”

Damon was still thinking about the manhole. Its dark mystery promised something he had been missing that summer: a hint of danger lurking beneath the sun-baked streets. “Do you want to go on an adventure?” he said.

Henry, who often felt ignored by his older brother, stopped speaking and nodded, his eyes alight with excitement. “What did you want to do?”

“Did you see that open manhole just down the street?”

Henry nodded. He was hoping his brother wanted to go to the natural history museum or a bookstore. “Isn’t that illegal?”

“That’s what makes it an adventure,” Damon said. “Are you a chicken?” He made clucking noises at Henry. “You’re a pest and a chicken.”

“I am not!” Henry stood up. “But I don’t want to get in trouble with Mom. We shouldn’t have even left the house.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Damon said. “If you come with me down into the sewers, I’ll go with Mom to drop you off at space camp.”

“You promise?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die.”

The manhole was still open when they returned. The hot air shimmered around its edges. Damon thought he heard it whispering. They descended into the dark and the unknown in silence, Damon in the lead. As they made their way down, the darkness intensified and the air grew thick with the scent of sewage. Damon could hear the sound of water rushing beneath their feet, and he felt a thrill of excitement. This was exactly what he had been craving—a real adventure, something that would set the day apart from all the others, something he would remember about that summer. Henry was quiet behind him, a little hesitant, but Damon could tell that he was enjoying the experience despite his fear. The ladder was rusted and slick with moisture, and Damon felt some of the rungs wobble beneath his feet. The darkness engulfed them as they went, the light from the opening above them growing dimmer and dimmer until it was nothing more than a speck in the sea of darkness. Damon felt his heart pounding in his chest but he refused to acknowledge any fear in front of his brother.

At last they reached the bottom. The air was thick and damp, and the smell of sewage made their stomachs churn. Damon could feel the grit of the sewer beneath his shoes. Henry clutched at Damon’s shirt. “I’m scared,” he said.

Damon turned the flashlight on his phone. They were in a narrow tunnel, the iron walls flecked with rust. They could hear rushing water just out of sight. They walked down the tunnel, further into the darkness, the sounds of their footsteps echoing in the damp air. Damon noticed that the walls were streaked with a chalky white substance. The tunnel narrowed as they continued until they reached a door at the end. Damon pushed through and they unexpectedly came into a large room. There was a dim light, and when Damon pointed his flashlight, they saw, etched in white chalk the color of moonlight, a large pentagram drawn on the floor. At each point of the pentagram, a small candle guttered in the darkness. In its center lay a small black notebook.

“Damon, let’s get out of here,” Henry whispered.

But Damon stepped into the pentagram and picked up the notebook.

“I don’t know if you should touch that,” Henry said.

It was a journal. Flipping through the pages, Damon landed on a random paragraph and read it. His eyes widened in shock as he comprehended the words. “Woah,” he said. “Listen to this,” and he read the passage aloud to his brother:

“I have finally discovered the secret to star travel. The necessary spell was right there beneath my nose the entire time. The ritual easier to perform than I had expected. I tried to angle my astral projection at the moon but somehow landed on Jupiter instead. What a terrible shock that was! In one moment, I was in the warm darkness of the sewer, and the next instant I was in a terrible swirling storm, the cold so deep it fractured my bones, my lungs filling with noxious air. It was only through my quick wits that I managed to survive, casting first an alteration spell to keep me warm and then a breathing spell. I could then concentrate long enough to cast a levitation spell, to keep me from falling into Jupiter’s core. Let this be a warning to any sorcerer who attempts star travel before they are ready.

With my spells in place, I could then get a proper bearing of my surroundings. And what surroundings! The best painters of history could not render Jupiter justice. Hues of purple, red, and orange swirled together in rivers of color. Whole mountains and rivers, valleys and plains appeared and then dissolved within my sight. Along the horizon, I could see the Great Red Spot, a red wall of fury bearing down. It looked like the derecho storms that barrel across the American midwest, but that storm was a derecho worthy of the deepest reaches of hell.”

Damon could see Henry’s eyes blazing in the half-light. “Do you think it’s real?” he asked, his voice hushed and reverent.

“I don’t know,” Damon said, his mind swirling. It couldn’t possibly be real, he knew. But what if it was?

Damon saw a curious expression on his brother’s face. He was already picturing himself on Jupiter, floating through space, exploring the universe.

Henry dashed through the doorway at the end of the room and was gone, leaving Damon alone in the dark. He plunged into the maze of hallways with a racing heart, his feet pounding against the ground to chase after his brother. But he was nowhere to be found. As he searched for Henry, a feeling crept over him like icy fingers scratching at his skin. He felt eyes boring into him, shadows dragging along the walls as if alive. He heard whispering. It grew louder, morphing into a cacophony that filled Damon's head until all he could hear was a deafening roar that matched the thunderous beating of his heart.

But where was his brother? 

He came upon a heavy iron door. “Henry!” Damon called, but he heard nothing. He pulled the door open and passed into a new room. What he saw froze the blood in his veins.

Standing alone, in the center of a massive room, on a small wooden dais, was a black book with a red pentagram on its cover. There was the eye, too! Hideous, red, with a gleaming golden pupil. It swiveled and stared at Damon with cold malevolence. It’s all a dream, he thought, and that thought brought a curious relief—he had not descended into the sewer and discovered a bizarre journal that treated spell craft like scientific discovery; he had not lost his brother in a twisting maze of hallways; he had not found this horrible book full of strange, incomprehensible symbols. He knew he would awaken at any moment, feel the fresh summer breeze on his face, bright light streaming through the curtains.

But the nightmare persisted.

The eye stared at him, beckoning him closer. Damon hesitated. Then he heard what sounded like footsteps. “Henry!” He turned and left the room.

Silence was his only answer. He heard the footsteps again. Damon slowed his pace, trying to make out the source of the sounds. “Henry?” he whispered. The footsteps continued, and Damon felt the hair on his arms rise. The footsteps sounded like they were coming closer, and Damon heard the roaring water growing louder and louder. The sound was coming closer. Damon paused and held his breath, terrified of what he might see. But nothing appeared, and the sounds grew softer before fading away. Damon knew they weren’t alone in the tunnels, and he shuddered to think what kind of person—or thing!—stalked the dark halls along with them.

Then he heard a quiet, familiar voice. “Damon,” it said. “Damon, where are you?” Damon pushed through the next door and found his brother standing in a small room the size of a closet. He was holding a mirror in his hand. Damon heard the walls whispering, a disembodied voice calling out a sequence of names. “Henry, let’s get out of here,” he said, but his brother was transfixed, staring into the mirror.

“It’s all true,” Henry whispered. “Everything in the journal. I can see into the deepest reaches of space.” A strange light came from the mirror and bathed Henry’s face in its lurid glow.

“I’m serious, Henry, let’s go.”

“I can see everything.” Henry’s voice was distant, strange.  He turned the mirror in his hand and Damon could see the room reflected in the smooth glass. But where Henry’s face should have been, there was nothing—only the brick wall behind him. The glass shimmered and ripples ran from the center like a pool of water disturbed by a pebble. Then the mirror fell and clattered on the stone floor and Damon saw that his brother had disappeared. He picked up the mirror and saw his brother in the glass, but he looked different, like he had suddenly aged three or four years. 

“Henry!” Damon said, but his brother was gone from the mirror, too. 

He searched for his brother for hours, roving the sewers in vain. When night had fallen, he returned at last to the surface, shambling home to find that his mom had already called the police. They searched the sewers but found nothing, not even the strange rooms with the book or the mirror. Damon though the nightmare would end at any moment, but the following morning, he awoke to sunlight filtering through the half-closed blinds, illuminating his brother’s empty bed.

But he still sees Henry sometimes. He catches glimpses of him in mirrors, lurking at the edges. Damon came to understand that mirrors were not reflections of our world but a window into another world, a world in which his brother was trapped. Damon knew, with the right words—the correct incantation,—he could pass through any mirror as easily as one passes through water.

Damon went west to live with his father in the mountains. But he took with him a secret possession. For when he emerged from those dark and twisted sewers, he took with him the black spell book with the hideous roving eye. 

The residents of Ten Sleep, Wyoming knew that the strange lightning storms that came down over the winter mountains were not a product of nature but something else. Cats would disappear for weeks and months at a time, only to reappear in the center of town with strange and vacant looks, tottering on unsteady feet before dying, days later, of no apparent cause, their bodies rapidly decomposing, emitting a horrible putrid scent.

Damon heard the stories. A dark wizard who lived in the foothills. He knew the warnings parents gave to their children should they stray too far from town. He paid them no mind. For if people understood why, perhaps they would forgive what he did. But people did not understand that a dark mysterious world hovers beside our own, and that the barriers between them are few and flimsy.

He practiced in secret, under the cover of darkness, beneath strange moons. He practiced with diligence, spending hours poring through that haunted book, its roving watchful eye always vigilant. He practiced for years, for he knew it would take a long time before he developed the skills needed to pass unharmed into the mirror world and rescue his little brother.