The Litany of Glass

 

The mirrors at Saint Ernestine School for Girls were old enough to remember forces that no one else did. They lined the corridors in narrow, pitted gilt frames, their glass slightly warped and prone to swallowing light rather than reflecting it.

The nuns claimed the mirrors were there to remind the girls of modesty—to keep their hair pinned tight, their collars starched straight, and their eyes cast perpetually downward. But no one ever asked the obvious question: why were so many mirrors necessary to ensure a girl didn’t look at herself?

Maggie Bell learned the truth during her third winter at Saint Ernestine’s, the year the frost crept inside the stone walls and refused to leave. It happened in the east dormitory bathroom, a place of cracked porcelain tiles and a radiator that knocked with the rhythmic desperation of a trapped animal. Maggie was fourteen, hollow-cheeked and careful in the way children become careful when they realize, deep in their bones, that they are not safe.

While scrubbing her face with grey, lye-heavy soap, she noticed a girl behind her in the glass. The reflection was wrong. The bathroom was small and empty, the air thick with the smell of damp stone, yet the mirror showed a student standing against the far wall. Her hands were folded, her posture perfect, and her uniform was a relic of a different era—a longer wool skirt and a collar that rose to graze her jawline. Her face was pale, calm, and far too knowing for a child.

Maggie spun around, her heart hammering against her ribs, but the room was empty. There was only the hiss of the radiator and the drip of a leaky tap. When she turned back to the basin, the girl in the mirror had moved. She was now standing directly behind Maggie’s shoulder. Maggie didn’t scream; Saint Ernestine’s had a way of training the sound out of you before your first term was through.

“Who are you?” Maggie whispered, her breath fogging the silvered surface.

The girl in the mirror smiled—a slow, sad movement—and opened her mouth as if to speak. Nothing came out but a flicker of static, like the sound of a distant radio station lost between frequencies.

The nuns enforced the rules of the glass with a fervor that bordered on the fanatical. You were not to linger. You were not to speak. You were never, under any circumstances, to touch the glass. Sister Beatrice, the head of discipline, enforced these rules with particular enthusiasm. She had a voice like dry leaves skittering across a grave and eyes that lingered too long on the girls' reflections, as if she were checking a ledger only she could see.

“Vanity is a beacon, Margaret,” Sister Beatrice whispered, her ruler hovering an inch above Maggie’s knuckles. “The glass is hungry for a face to hold, and it prefers the ones that offer themselves up. If you keep looking, it will eventually stop looking back and start reaching.” She didn’t look at Maggie as she spoke; she looked at her own reflection with a raw, naked terror that Maggie didn't yet understand.

Maggie learned to pass the mirrors with shallow breath and eyes fixed on the floor, but the reflections did not stop watching. There were more of them now. Faces appeared where there should have been only her own—girls of different ages, from different decades, all wearing the distinct, somber variations of the Saint Ernestine uniform. They never moved when Maggie looked at them directly; they only shifted when she blinked or turned her head, always hovering just behind her shoulder, always waiting.

The first true warning came during Friday chapel. Maggie was kneeling on the hard oak bench when the large mirror behind the altar—usually shrouded in purple cloth during Mass—flickered. In her peripheral vision, Maggie saw hands pressing desperately against the glass from the inside. Dozens of mouths opened in silent, jagged urgency.

A split second later, a heavy iron candle holder beside Maggie toppled over without a breath of wind to nudge it. Fire licked across the hem of her wool skirt. The nuns rushed in, their prayers sharp and frantic as they smothered the flames. Maggie was dragged away and scolded for her “clumsiness,” her singed uniform confiscated as proof of her failure. No one mentioned that the heavy iron base of the candle had not been touched by a human hand. No one mentioned that the mirror behind the altar was now vibrating with a low, sub-audible hum.

That night, the reflections in the dormitory crowded closer than ever before. They didn't smile. They pointed. Maggie began to understand the pattern: the girls in the mirrors appeared as heralds. They showed up before a stair gave way, before a fever turned deadly, or before a punishment from Sister Beatrice escalated from a lecture into something much darker. The reflections could not speak, but they could show. They showed a tightening of fingers around a wrist; they showed a bath filled too high and too quiet. They were not trapped spirits; they were stationed sentinels.

“You see them, don’t you?”

The voice came from the shadows one evening while Maggie was scrubbing the hallway floors as punishment. Sister Agnes stood nearby, her habit brushing the tiles like a whisper. Maggie froze, her brush dripping soapy water.

“I see what, Sister?” Maggie asked, her voice trembling.

Sister Agnes didn't look at Maggie. She watched the reflection in the long hallway mirror instead. “They chose a few,” she said, her voice devoid of its usual sternness. “The ones who are quiet. The ones who pay attention.”

“Why are they there?” Maggie whispered.

Sister Agnes’s reflection smiled, a jagged expression that didn't match the weary woman standing in the hall. “The mirrors are the tax this house pays to stay standing, child. We give them the quiet ones, the ones the world won't miss, so the rest of us can grow old in the dark. Better you than me.”

The horror of it didn't truly sink in until the night Clara Wynne fell from the bell tower. That night, the mirrors didn't just watch; they sang. It wasn't a sound you could hear with your ears, but Maggie felt it in her teeth and in the sharp ache behind her eyes. She ran, ignoring the curfew and the shouting of the prefects.

She burst into the north stairwell just in time to see Clara’s reflection pounding on the glass of a landing mirror, screaming silently and pointing upward toward the rotting rafters of the tower. Maggie reached the top floor gasping for air, but she was seconds too late. Clara’s body lay broken on the stones below, the fresh snow already staining a deep, terrible crimson. The next morning, Clara’s face appeared in the bathroom mirror. She didn’t look afraid anymore. She looked relieved.

Eventually, the weight of the school’s secrets became too much for the world to ignore. Saint Ernestine’s closed its heavy oak doors for good in the late seventies. The building was sold to developers who complained about the impossible cold and the way sound traveled through the vents. The paperwork took years. The silence took longer.

But Maggie never left. She stayed as a caretaker, then as a ghost of herself. She aged strangely, her body thinning and her skin turning the color of parchment, as if the world were losing its grip on her. Her reflection began to fade, becoming translucent, until the glass no longer recognized her as a physical presence.

One winter morning, thirty years after the school closed, Maggie stood before the great mirror in the foyer and realized she no longer cast a reflection at all. She was on the other side now. The mirrors were full—filled with generations of girls standing in silent, attentive rows. Maggie pressed her hand to the cold surface of the glass, and from the outside, the glass felt back.

Now, time has shifted again.

Far down the main corridor, where the light bends at an impossible angle near the old chapel, a man stands studying the frames. He is dressed like a priest in a black cassock, newly arrived and already sweating despite the chill. He feels the weight of a thousand eyes. He raises a hand to steady himself against the wall, hesitates, and then reaches into his coat for a thick, leather-bound notebook.

Behind him, in the warped glass of the hallway, Maggie Bell stands perfectly still. She adjusts her collar, folds her hands, and begins to point. The glass, patient as ever, waits for him to look.