and passed something to him
By turns, his experience with the man from the mirror played in memory like a dream but then as real as the smell of his own fear sweat.
He felt a need to know what was truth and what was not, perhaps because too much of his life seemed unreal, making it impossible to tolerate yet one more uncertainty. Far from brave, but less a coward than he had expected to be, he approached the snake-protected glass.
Convinced by recent events that the universe of Aelfric Manheim and that of Harry Potter were in quiet collision, Fric would have been alarmed but not much surprised if the carved serpents had come magically to life and had struck at him as he approached. The painted scales, the sinuous coils remained motionless, and the green-glass eyes glittered with only inanimate malice.
In the looking glass, he saw only himself and a reversed still life of all that lay behind him. No glimpse of Elsewhere, no hint of Otherwhen.
[288] Tentatively, with his right hand, dismayed to see how severely it trembled, Fric reached toward his image. The glass felt cool and smooth—and undeniably solid—beneath his fingertips.
When he flattened his palm against the silver surface, making full-hand contact, the memory of Moloch seemed less like a real encounter than like a dream.
Then he realized that the eyes in his reflection were not the green that he’d grown up with, the green that he had inherited from Nominal Mom. These eyes were gray, a luminous satiny gray, with only flecks of green.
They were the eyes of the mirror man.
The instant that Fric recognized this terrifying difference in his reflection, a man’s two hands came from the mirror, seized him by the wrist, and passed something to him. Then the man’s hands closed over his hand and compressed it into a fist, crumpling the bestowed object before shoving him away.
In terror, Fric threw down whatever had been given to him, shuddering at the simultaneously slick and crackled texture of it.
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