In the autumn of 1897, a traveling photographer named Casemir Ostrov arrived in a remote hollow called Sable Notch. He was 36 years old, a tall, thin man with silver-stained hands from his trade. He had been on the road since he was 21, photographing people for money.
Ostrov had been summoned by a letter from an 84-year-old woman named Mrs. Otili Faren. She wanted a photograph of her surviving family. She promised to pay in silver. She also made an unusual request: she asked that he not bring any looking glass of his own into her house.
The Faren house was a two-story clapboard place at the head of the notch. It had a slate roof and a porch that ran the full front. There was no dog, which surprised him. Otili Faren met him on the porch. She was small, with white hair and pale gray eyes. She repeated her request about the mirrors.
Inside the parlor, Ostrov saw a large mirror on the wall. It was almost as tall as he was, with a heavy walnut frame carved with leaves and berries. At the top corners were two small carved faces. They were not cherubs but old, wrinkled faces with closed eyes. The mirror was completely draped in a heavy black cloth, pinned along the sides with brass pins.
Ostrov asked if this was a religious matter. Otili said it was not. She said it was a matter of the house.
That first evening, she served him chicken and dumplings. She watched him eat. Then she asked if he had ever seen his own face and felt that it was not looking back at him properly. He said he had not. She told him that most people have, once or twice, and forgotten it.
She told him that her husband had taught her a lesson from his own mother. She said, "Mirrors were never made to show your reflection. They were made to watch you. What you see in them is a courtesy. What they see in you is their business."
Ostrov was not a superstitious man. His trade would not allow him to be. But he could not think of a polite answer.
In his room, there was a small mirror above the wash stand, covered with a white linen cloth. He did not lift it. That night, he heard Otili go into the parlor. Then he heard a soft, rhythmic sound. He could not tell what she was doing. Later, he understood she was talking to the mirror.
The next day, the family began to arrive. Ostrov photographed each of them alone and in pairs. On Saturday, he photographed the whole surviving line of the Faren family together. The covered mirror was out of frame.
Every night, he heard Otili speak in the parlor. On the third night, he thought he heard something answer her. It came from the wall of his own room, from behind the wash stand. It was a small sound, like a fingernail tapped once against glass.
In the morning, Otili showed him the little house behind the barn. He had taken it for a smokehouse. It was full of mirrors. There must have been 40 of them, of every size, each covered by a piece of cloth. In the middle of the room was a plain wooden chair.
Otili sat down. She explained that the house was built by her husband's father, Absalom Faren the Elder, in 1842. He was a silversmith who had learned certain things from a man in Baltimore. She said a mirror is not a passive thing. The silver on the back is not a coating to reflect. It is a coating to hold.
She said the mirror in the parlor was the oldest. It had come out of Baltimore in a wagon in 1843. It had watched five generations of her family. She said, "It knows me very well. That is why I speak to it."
Ostrov developed the plates that evening in his wagon shed. The composition was correct. The focus was sharp. But on the wall behind the family, above the fireplace, there was a faint face. It was an older woman with thin features and direct eyes. He knew he had not double-exposed the plate.
He went into the house. Otili was standing in the parlor. She asked if the woman was in the plate. He described her. Otili said it was her husband's mother, who died in 1862. She said that sometimes what has been in the mirror comes out to be photographed too.
That night, he heard the tapping again. It came twice, then a third time from further away. He got out of bed and walked down the hall. He opened a door to a spare bedroom. There was another mirror, covered by cloth. Behind the cloth, something was moving.
He shut the door. Otili was standing at the bottom of the stairs. She told him to come down. She told him a story about her husband. He had lifted the cloth in 1865, three months before he died. He would not tell her what he saw. He said only that the thing on the other side had used his face because it was the one it knew best.
Ostrov made fresh plates the next morning. He arranged the family again. When he developed the plates, there was a face on the wall. It was a man's face. It was long and thin, with a scar on one cheek and iron-colored hair at the temples. It was his own face.
He took the plates to Otili. She said she thought it meant the mirror had learned him over the six nights. She said, "Once it knows a face, it keeps knowing it." She apologized. She said she had not wanted that for him.
Ostrov broke the plates with a hammer. He buried the shards under a corner of the springhouse. She gave him the second half of his payment. He asked what would happen to the mirror. She said it would go into the little house with the others. She said they do not smash them. She said, "If you smash it, it does not go away. It only becomes many."
Ostrov drove his wagon out of Sable Notch. He never went back.
He lived until 1936. He died at 75 of a stroke in a boarding house in Ohio. In the 39 years between that autumn and his death, he did four things.
First, he stopped photographing people. He switched entirely to landscape work. If a person walked into his frame, he would wait for them to leave or move to another spot.
Second, he kept one small photograph in his breast pocket for the rest of his life. It was a portrait of a woman he did not know. He carried it because it was the last face he was sure had never been in a mirror in the Faren house.
Third, he did not look into a mirror for the rest of his life. He shaved by touch. He combed his hair by feel. He carried a small black cloth that Otili had given him. He used it to cover any mirror he could not have removed.
Fourth, he made one more portrait at the very end. He asked an old lithographer named Winston Merrill to draw him from life. When it was finished, Ostrov looked at it for a long time. He asked if there was anything strange about it. Merrill said no, only that he looked like a man who had been alone a long time.
Ostrov folded the drawing and sent it to Loman Farren in Elkins, West Virginia. He asked that it be placed inside the little house behind the old Faren place. He wrote that perhaps then the mirror would leave off the face it had been keeping. Loman Farren received the envelope. He did as Mr. Ostrov asked. Ostrov died six weeks later.
We do not know if any of this was real. We do not know if the face in the plate was a chemistry accident. We do not know if the tapping was an old house settling. What we know is that a working professional photographer went into that household and came out changed.
What we know is that he lived for 39 years without a mirror. That is the longer part of his adult life.
What we know is that the mirror itself disappeared. It went to a cousin who died in 1951. It went to an estate sale. It went into private hands. After that, the record is quiet.
Somewhere, it is presumably hanging on a wall. Somebody walks past it every day.
The thing that cannot be let go of is this: whatever Otili Faren was warning him about does not go away when we forget it. She said what is watching you through the glass is not watching because you have believed in it. It is watching because you have stood in front of it.
She said, "What you see in them is a courtesy. What they see in you is their business."