The Mirror Was a Window

I have a thing about two-way mirrors since a documentary years ago, so I always do the fingernail test — press a nail to the glass, and if there's a gap between your nail and its reflection, it's an ordinary mirror; if the nail appears to touch its reflection directly, the silvering is on the front and you might be looking at a window. Most people think I'm paranoid. In this rental I was right.

The bathroom had a large, heavy, 'decorative vintage' mirror, the listing's photos rather proud of it, and it sat oddly — proud of the wall, a good few centimetres out, framed in a way that hid its depth. My fingernail met its own reflection with no gap. No gap. I stood there in a stranger's bathroom with my nail against the glass and my stomach dropping, telling myself the test is imperfect, that old mirrors can fool it, that I was being the documentary-addled paranoiac my friends tease me about.

Then I knocked it, gently, along the frame. Hollow. Not wall-behind-mirror solid — hollow, a void, the specific deadness of empty space behind a panel.

I should have just left. Instead I needed to know, and the mirror was, I discovered, on a concealed hinge — it swung, when I found the catch, like a door. Behind it was not wall. Behind it was a low, dark crawlspace between the bathroom and the neighbouring room, and in that crawlspace, positioned directly at the back of the glass, at exactly the height of someone standing at the bathroom sink, was a chair. A single chair, facing the mirror. With a cushion on it. And the cushion, when I made myself touch it, was warm.