The Passage

The lunar calendar indicated a rare configuration: a full moon and the spring equinox aligned in a perfect celestial harmony. Isao had meticulously prepared his workshop since dawn, setting up his equipment with near-religious precision. The Victorian mirror, still majestic despite recent events, stood at the center, surrounded by a complex arrangement of secondary mirrors, each angled precisely to create an endless play of reflections.

Isao carefully unpacked his latest acquisition, still wrapped in its tissue paper: a collection of unexposed vintage glass plates, dating from the mid-19th century and acquired at an auction. The exceptional quality of these plates, with their remarkable fine detail, had struck him immediately during the exhibition prior to the sale. He examined them with reverence, gently brushing his fingers over their surface. Their fragility, their imperfections — tiny air bubbles trapped within the material, slightly irregular edges — were a testament to their age. Nothing like the industrial perfection of modern glass.

"These plates have survived nearly two centuries," he murmured to himself, fascinated by the purity of the materials once used.

The atmosphere was charged with palpable electricity. Isao had lit the herbs entrusted to him by Nakamura-sensei. The bluish smoke curled around the main mirror, as though drawn to its surface.

"Tonight is favorable for passages," Kagura-sama had whispered to him during their last meeting. "The veils between worlds are thinning."

Isao had spent the day preparing his special collodion emulsions based on mugwort, according to the traditional recipe taught by the old craftsman, though with a few personal adjustments: a bit more silver bromide to increase sensitivity, a drop of purified ethanol to slow drying. The dimmed light of his laboratory gave his movements an almost ritualistic quality.

At precisely eleven o'clock, he began the final preparations. The room was immersed in a cathedral-like silence, only disturbed by the regular clink of chemical solutions being poured methodically into their respective containers. His antique mahogany camera was positioned facing the imposing Victorian mirror, ready to capture the first strange reflections that were already dancing on its surface.

"Lucille," he murmured, adjusting the black veil that covered the apparatus. "I will try something new tonight."

In the silvered reflection of the mirror, he perceived a tremor, as if his name had caused a ripple across the surface of invisible water. He continued his preparations, pouring the collodion onto one of the unexposed 19th-century glass plates with the fluidity of a master. The vapors of ether and alcohol filled his workshop, creating a slightly intoxicating atmosphere.

After sensitizing the plate with silver nitrate under the twilight glow of his safelight, he carefully placed it into the camera's chassis. His fingers were steady despite the importance of the moment. He had repeated these actions hundreds of times, but never with such stakes.

Isao paused for a moment, his hand resting on the lens cap, and closed his eyes. In the silence of his workshop, a wave of confused emotions passed through him, and a diffuse warmth, unexpected in the unusual coolness of the room, spread through his body. It was not a specific memory, but rather an impression. A nearly forgotten scent, a barely perceptible softness, somewhere between tenderness and pain. The sensation of a hand against his cheek, a distant voice — a murmur or a sigh, impossible to say.

He felt both exhilarated and terrified by the idea that his art could either free or condemn a soul.

The grandfather clock struck midnight, signaling the fateful moment. Isao breathed in deeply, feeling his concentration return gradually. Then, with hands still trembling, he carefully removed the lens cap. In the Shigaraki ceramic dish, Hiroshi’s herb mixture continued to burn, emitting a scent of lavender, mugwort, and amber. The air seemed to vibrate subtly, saturated with this herbal fragrance, as if the molecules themselves resonated in unison with ancient knowledge.

The full moon, perfectly aligned with the workshop's windows, cast a silver beam that crossed the room to strike exactly the center of the Victorian mirror. For a few moments, time seemed to suspend, as the light slowed and turned to matter. It refracted in the secondary mirrors, their angles meticulously studied with astronomical precision, forming a complex tangle of beams that encircled the main mirror in a moving, pulsating light cage.

His eyelids fluttered. For a fraction of a second, he thought he saw a face in one of the reflections — a gaze, a hint of a smile. Lucille ? Impossible. He straightened slightly, his muscles tense, as a shiver of cold breeze brushed his neck.

The smoke from the herbs mingled with the beams of light in a hypnotic ballet. Then, a sound. Not a noise, but a suspended note, faint, almost inaudible, like the hum of a Tibetan bowl struck slowly. His body reacted before his mind: his breathing slowed, his heartbeat became more measured.

As the tension built inside him, he felt a strange vibration course through the camera, as if the mirror itself were responding to his call.

Isao held his breath. In the frosted glass of the camera, the image began to form. Not just a simple reflection of his workshop, but something deeper, as if the lens were piercing through the surface of the mirror to capture another place, another time.

A shiver ran down his spine as he distinguished the first shapes: moving silhouettes, flickering lights that didn’t exist in his workshop. Paris. It was undeniably Paris. A second temporal rift seemed to open onto Lucille's era.

Focused on his observation, he reached his hand toward the frosted glass as if drawn by magnetic attraction. What happened next would forever defy the principles governing the rational world.

The glass, usually solid, yielded beneath his fingers like a liquid surface. But it wasn’t smooth or uniform. A viscous resistance slowed his movement, a thick texture, almost sticky, like honey in midwinter. A wave of freezing cold radiated from his palm, traveling in burning shivers up his arm. The air around him seemed to vibrate, as though the room itself were holding its breath.

At first, it was just a fleeting impression, a disturbance in the light, a mere shiver of discomfort. Then, suddenly, he felt his pulse race, each beat strangely resonating, muffled under a glass bell. His breath became distant, foreign, as if no longer coming from his own lungs.

Terrified, he tried to pull his hand away, but an insidious force infiltrated his muscles, pulling him inexorably toward the inside of the camera. His fingers vanished into the shimmering surface. Then his wrist. His forearm. His workshop wavered around him, its contours blurred, the walls undulating, dissolving into streams of shadow and light.

The world around him transformed into a kaleidoscope of images and faint sounds. Fragments of images appeared, too fast to grasp: a dark coach gate with ornate ironwork, the sharp crack of a cab speeding through a light rain, a veiled figure rounding a cobblestone passage.

Isao lost his footing, falling entirely into this vortex. A cold shiver enveloped him, immediately followed by a suffocating warmth seeping under his skin. His body no longer belonged to him: it dissolved, each fiber breaking into luminous fragments before recombining into an unknown material.

His vision blurred completely. A dull hum rose, first faint, then deafening. A crack, an explosion — no, thousands. As if an infinity of windows shattered simultaneously. The pain was brief, intense.

A smell of soot. The acrid residue of coal smoke lingered in the air, lightly stinging Isao’s nostrils. Then came the distant drumming of hooves on stone, irregular, hesitant, followed by the dull creak of a wheel struggling to move along a soaked cobblestone. A breath, a cold wind bit his skin.

Then, suddenly, nothing. No more whirlpool, no more noise. An absolute silence, a crushing depth that seemed to emanate from the depths of time. Isao dared not breathe. The air around him felt thick, heavy, as if the world were holding its breath. He strained his ears, expecting to hear an echo, a faint whisper. Nothing. Even his own breath seemed unnaturally stifled, absorbed before it could spread.

He felt his heart pounding in his chest, a dull, solitary sound, vibrating in the strange emptiness surrounding him. The total lack of reverberation confused his senses. His very body seemed lost in this absence of sound.