Matter Meets Anti-Matter

There was only one rule: don’t open the door.

She had said those words to me the first day we met. Many of the villagers were afraid of Agnes, the town midwife and healer. To me, she was my whole world. An orphan, she had taken me in as her apprentice when I, haggard and starving, first happened upon her woodland cottage so many years ago.

I remember the day like it was yesterday: after nursing me back to health, she gave me a tour of her cottage and outbuildings. There were greenhouses, drying sheds, apiaries and goat sheds until we arrived at one last building. Under the hushed shadow of an old elm tree, sat a shack covered in a blanket of sage moss. At its foot: the locked cellar doors, beckoning to be opened like the covers of a new diary. Still, I had promised.

As the years wore on, the curiosity gnawed deeper. I grew restless. Agnes’ responses to my prying questions took on vagaries all the more obtuse than the last. In order to be a true healer, you have to kill what is diseased or broken inside yourself.

I took to sleepwalking. I would often awake at the foot of the cellar door, my fingers jangling brass locks. Until one night, I awoke with the keys in hand. Tremulously, I turned the lock. At the end of a long stairwell were endless walls and corridors, covered with mirrors and flickering candles on sconces. Each mirror reflected back a different possible outcome of my life, some meeting with terrible, grisly ends. Finally, I chanced upon one small mirror in the corner: Agnes’ old face swapped with mine in a flickering reel. Then, the clanking thud of the doors above being locked. Next, the candles snuffed out.