It took Agneta a week to ready everything for the construction of the mirror. She intended to follow the instructions in the grimoire precisely, which meant the project, with its many ingredients and rituals, must be done as a continuous process that would take 24 hours. She needed an excuse to be absent for so long, and she needed to surreptitiously bring some food up to the tower. Finally she was ready. She bade her husband and daughters farewell early in the morning and left, by the front door, for her “visit” to her dear friend Vania, who resided just out of town in a villa at the riverside. Once outside the mansion’s wall, of course, she made her way around to the locked door. Her expectation that the kitchen and back stairways would be empty at that time was correct, and she managed to secrete herself in her tower workshop unnoticed. And so she began.
Although there were chantings, sigils drawn on the walls and floor and even on her own skin, luckily the making of the mirror involved nothing louder than the hammering of coffin nails into the coffin wood that made the box in which the mirror rested. At various times during the spell Agneta had to consume unusual combinations of herbs, leaves, and teas made from barks and mosses. These left her feeling drunk, or something like it, and also fearful. The shadows in the corners began to seem like they held something worse than simply darkness. Her fear subsided, but not the tipsy feeling of being not completely anchored in her body or mind, so when, near the end, something like the shadow of smoke emerged from those shadows and seemed to enter the mirror itself, she was never sure later whether she might have imagined it.
The last step in the process, before storing the mirror in the coffinwood box, was to fumigate it with burning horse- and goat-hair. This step carried with it the greatest danger of discovery; the odor from the burning hair was exceptionally pungent. Agneta simply hoped the narrow archers’ windows in the tower, which of course held no glass, would let the smell waft away on the air, high enough to disperse before being noticed at ground level. In this she was lucky, or, perhaps, she thought, aided by a breeze that arose as soon as she began the smudging, and ended as she finished.
It was again early morning when the mirror was finished and sealed into its box. Agneta fastened the box in the back of the full-length dressing mirror she had moved to the tower workshop years ago (she had at first thought to use it as the basis of her project, only to discover, in studying the grimoire more deeply, that it was too large). Then she made her way back down the back stairs and out through the empty kitchen. It wouldn’t do arrive back home before her time, so she let herself into the garden hut and slept on some clean sacks she kept there. Around midday she arose and, using the door that was still her secret, left the mansion’s grounds, made her way to the front, and made her public entrance.
Agneta had been sustained for years by a fierce determination to create and use a magic mirror. It had a very specific purpose; the lore of the town said it had once held a magnificent and rich cathedral that had been looted and destroyed nearly two centuries before. The stolen riches, Agneta was sure, still lay hidden somewhere. The mirror, used properly, would show her where. She was already, of course, perhaps the richest woman in the town and lived quite comfortably in the mansion surrounded by servants and luxuries. She wanted for nothing, and admitted as much in the diary she kept. It had been reading the grimoire, really, that had awakened her obsession.
To her surprise, after the mirror was completed, Agneta discovered that her obsession had never been about the treasure, or even about using the mirror. It had been solely the making of the thing. Now that it was real, and hidden away, she found that she had no desire to use it. over the next weeks and months she visited the tower room less and less frequently, and finally tucked the grimoire beside the coffinwood box at the back of the dressing mirror and locked the tower room door for what was to be the last time. She continued to write in her diary, but never thought to turn back to the pages where she had written about her long project to make the mirror.
In her later years Agneta’s daughters gave her many grandchildren, and to amuse them she would tell the old stories she recalled hearing from her own grandmother. The stories were even older than that, really. They were tales of war; its soldiers and victims, the damage wrought, the aftermath, and about great treasures looted from castles and cathedrals. The tales the children liked best were about mysteries and hiding places and dragons under the mountains.
Eventually, as times changed, the town found itself too far outside the changing routes of commerce and activity and while people still lived there, far fewer stayed. The mansion, still owned by the same family, came to be more of a burden than an asset. It was closed and left empty. Everything inside was just as it had been, from the chairs around the dining table to the library with its printed books and the handwritten records left by various family members, to the contents of the one-time workshop in the south tower. And if some people in the town claimed to have seen, on occasion, a dark cloud in the vicinity of that tower, too low to really be a cloud and moving against the wind as smoke shouldn’t be capable of, well, who was to say that they weren’t just simple-minded country folk making up tales?
