The mirror came with the house — a heavy old thing, foxed at the edges, screwed to the wall of the back bedroom so firmly that the previous owner had evidently given up on moving it.
He noticed the marks a week after he moved in. On the reverse, where the backing board had come away from the frame, somebody had written dates in pencil. A column of them, in a small careful hand, going back decades.
There were three columns by the time he had cleaned the dust off. He copied them into a notebook and looked them up, which took an afternoon at the county office and produced a result he sat with for a long time. Every date was a death. All of them in that house.
The last one in the column was eight months ago. The previous owner.
He took the mirror off the wall that night, which required a screwdriver and most of an hour, and carried it out to the yard and broke it against the well-head, and swept up the pieces in the morning feeling, on the whole, foolish.
The replacement he bought in town: cheap, light, four screws. He hung it on the same hook because the hook was there.
It was a fortnight before he had any reason to take it down again, and when he did — because it hung slightly crooked, and he had finally got tired of it — he turned it over in his hands and found three lines of pencil on the backing board.
The same small careful hand. The first two dates he already knew. The third was tomorrow.