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.

Warm. Recently occupied. While we'd been coming and going from that bathroom for two days.

We were gone in fifteen minutes. Police that night, and this time — because a warm cushion behind a two-way mirror in a bathroom is not a form-and-partial-refund situation, it's a crime scene — they came out, and they took it seriously, and there is a case, and I'll say no more about it except that we were, once again, not the first guests, and the chair had clearly been used a great deal.

The fingernail test takes five seconds and I do it now on every mirror in every room I stay in that I didn't hang myself — bathrooms and bedrooms especially, any large mirror that sits oddly proud, any mirror where a mirror is strangely the 'feature.' My friends have stopped teasing me. One of them does it now too. A five-second test found a warm chair behind the glass. I will press my nail to strange mirrors for the rest of my life.