The mirror crack'd

Tony Ellis · 01 Sep 2000, 14:06 · from urth-v0029.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: "Tony Ellis" <tony.ellis at futurenet.co.uk>
Subject: (urth) The mirror crack'd
Date: Fri, 01 Sep 2000 15:06:42 +0100
Message-ID: <urth-v0029-0202 at digest.urth.net>
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Nigel Price wrote:

> This is a story that I would like to discuss=E2=80=A6 The boy in "And whe=
n they
> appear" has the chance to escape by hiding in the freezer=E2=80=A6 but
> fails to do the sensible thing=E2=80=A6
>

Ah, but does he? The sanctuary that House offers the boy has its dark
side. He=E2=80=99s a prisoner. He has no contact with other human beings or=
 with
the outside world. We=E2=80=99re repeatedly that he wants =E2=80=9Creal thi=
ngs=E2=80=9D, and who
can blame him, but all he=E2=80=99s got are holograms. Shadows. Can you say=
 =E2=80=9CThe
Lady of Shallot?=E2=80=9D

House, no doubt with the best motives in the world, doesn=E2=80=99t want its
little boy to grow up and leave home. Doesn=E2=80=99t it strike you as just=
 a
teensy bit suggestive that House wants to =E2=80=98save=E2=80=99 the boy in=
 a deep
freeze? With the preserved bodies of his parents?

Suppose he did hide in the freezer. Would he ever have been able to open
that great heavy door again? Wouldn=E2=80=99t he find, if he did, that he w=
as
entombed under the rubble of the collapsed house?

As upsetting as the story=E2=80=99s ending is, at least it ends with the boy
still alive. The hideous Anti-Claus he=E2=80=99s shacked-up with isn=E2=80=
=99t the sort
of human contact any of us would wish for him, but at least he=E2=80=99s ou=
t in
the real world now. He=E2=80=99s escaped one gaoler, he can escape another.

One more thing. I may be reading too much into this, but:

At the start of the story, we=E2=80=99re carefully primed with the informat=
ion
that Mouse has a small but deadly built-in blade. Background colour, or
Checkov=E2=80=99s Gun? At the end of the story, Mouse is under the boy=E2=
=80=99s pillow,
the place traditionally reserved for weapons to fend off attacks in the
night.

--
Tony Ellis
On-line Editor, PC Format magazine
01225 442244 x2349
http://www.pcformat.co.uk

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