Mirror of Shadows by T. Lynne Tolles Page A

overgrown hedge that after further investigation revealed that it encircled a secret garden with a fairly large, non-working fountain. It looked as if it had been quite beautiful once and she thought it would be lovely to have it be once again.
    An hour or two after she found the garden she found a lone graveyard. It wasn’t large but there must have been fifteen or twenty large headstones and another handful of broken or smaller, less lavish markers. What caught Ella’s attention, though, was one grave all alone away from the others under a large oak tree. The primitive headstone had toppled to its side and lay there without inscription. How sad to think that this one person was not to be among the others. Was this person exiled? Had he or she done something that the others didn’t approve of or was this one person far greater than the others and set apart from them by fortune or fame? If so, then why not have a more elaborate headstone?
    She righted the headstone as best she could with one arm and wiped it off as if brushing the wrinkles out of a skirt. Though her walk through the forest was fruitful in adventure of discovering the garden and the graveyard, sadly, she did not find Boo and she returned to the house feeling as if she had failed the kitten immensely.
     
     
     

Chapter 12
     
    Tired and depressed from her failure to find Boo, she fell into bed before the sun had dipped behind the mountains. The phone rang many times that evening and she only looked at the caller ID to see that it was Matt calling aside from one call from Marlin.
    Surely both were checking up on her but she did not want to talk to anyone. She wanted only to find her kitten who must be very scared and hungry after two days. She must have fallen asleep for a bit, for when she woke the sky was dark. A fire had been built in the fireplace of her room and an old quilt she had found in a blanket chest had been pulled over her. A sandwich, a left over cookie from Meme’s tin, and an unopened Pepsi can sat on the nightstand. Jeremy must have been up to check on her.
    She wasn’t hungry and she didn’t get up; she just closed her eyes again and reached for Boo only to remember that she wasn’t there. Her heart tore a little bit more as tears fell to the pillow and she went back into a restless sleep.
    She found herself in a familiar swirling blackness and once more, walking down the stairs. The mirror—it must be calling me somehow , she thought as her body moved forward despite what her mind wanted. Again she found herself face to face with the mirror. The reflection of her stark white and scared face gave way to the churning black shadows of the mirror until an image emerged from them. It felt as if the mirror was physically pulling her through to its world, showing her through its visions what someone was seeing. It was a forest she was moving through. The same forest she had ventured in earlier that day looking for Boo. Headstones and markers started to appear scattered around and Ella recognized one of the more ornate headstones she had seen in the graveyard earlier.
    The image in the mirror moved her towards the lone oak tree with the single primitive marker, only it looked different somehow, newer. The dirt around the grave had been recently dug. A large pile of dirt was to the left of a long, narrow hole in the ground below the marker. Scratched coarsely, but not deeply into the marker was the word Willow — nothing else. When Ella looked down into the dark, unearthed grave she saw nothing at first. She bent over and squinted in the darkness to see better when something pushed her from behind and she was falling into the grave. It felt as if she had fallen a hundred feet down and there was a desiccated body coming at her fast.
    A noose around the neck of the corpse and a simple white linen nightgown reminded Ella of the previous vision of herself running through the forest from the mob only to be caught and hung. Was this the same