1 result for (book:tsm AND heading:"chapter three" AND stemmed:mirror)
[... 16 paragraphs ...]
“After the break, Seth told us to shut the door leading to the bath. The living room side of the door holds a full-length mirror, and Seth told us to look into it. Since the mirror is tall and narrow, we had to crowd in close on three sides of the little table, in order to see our reflections. Jane sat in the middle. Her lips were very close to my ear as she talked. I could hear and feel each breath, each swallow she took. Her voice dropped considerably in volume and I really had the sensation that she was indeed speaking for someone else (rather than for a subconscious personality, for example, who just called itself Seth).
“ ‘Now the three of you see your reflections clearly in the mirror, just as you should. Watch, for I’ll change Jane’s image and replace it with another,’ Seth said. And Jane’s image did begin to change. Her head dropped lower. At the same time, the shape of the skull changed, the hair grew shorter and fit about it much more closely. The shoulders of the mirror image hunched over, and grew more narrow. And then the head in the mirror tilted, and looked down, while Jane herself sat with her head erect, staring straight ahead into the mirror.
“Jane said later that this shocked her more than anything else. I looked at her first beside me, then in the mirror. There was no doubt as to the difference between the two. I also saw a shadow suffuse the mirror image. At the same time I had the feeling that the face hung forward from the body. The mirror head seemed to grow smaller. I detected a faint glow about it as it hung in space, seemingly between the mirror reflection and the three of us.
“It was also obvious that the mirror image sat several inches lower down than Jane herself sat. And now and then the mysterious head would dip down and then hang forward from the body.” End of Rob’s notes.
During the séance I hadn’t been a bit nervous or frightened. Toward the end, though, I was shocked to see such a difference between my mirror image and myself. I think that I was momentarily afraid that I really looked like that. After all, that’s a normal enough reaction—usually when you look into a mirror, it gives a faithful reproduction, and no woman is going to be pleased to see a weird-looking apparition staring back.
When Seth took over, his confidence knocked all other ideas or doubts from my mind. Yet my eyes were open all the while. I could examine the differences between my hands, for example, and see the other set of fingers, and the white glow that ran up to the edge of my rolled-up sweater. I seemed to “click out” when Seth spoke, yet a tremendous sense of energy rushed through me as he did so. Except for the mirror image at the end, nothing bothered me.
[... 1 paragraph ...]
My intellectual skepticism was aroused simply because the affair had been so successful. We argued back and forth as to whether or not suggestion could have been responsible, but we knew that this could not explain half of what happened. It could hardly explain the bumpy quality Rob had felt in my hand, or the second set of fingers, though we decided that it could perhaps have accounted for the odd mirror image.
[... 23 paragraphs ...]