Excerpt from
Stone Cells, A Novel
—
Steve Gergley
ON THE LAST DAY OF SUMMER VACATION, before they returned to Topine Central Middle School for the beginning of eighth grade, Margot Stanley and Johnnie Quinn discovered a pristine gothic mansion hidden in the woods behind their housing development on the southern edge of their rural hometown of Topine, NY. Though their parents had warned them to always stay out of the woods, both Margot and Johnnie assumed this command had been issued out of a fear of deer ticks and Lyme disease rather than the potential dangers presented by a mysterious mansion hiding among the winged elms, red oaks, sugar maples, and paper birches clustered behind the development. Because as Margot stood beside Johnnie at the edge of a wide clearing and gazed in awe at the conical turrets of limestone ashlar, the three-sided oriels with corbeled bases, the diamond-pane casements of mirrored black glass, the steeply-pitched gables topped with spear-like pinnacles, and the other breathtaking ornamentations of this beautiful house, she realized her parents couldn’t have been talking about this mansion when they had warned her and Johnnie to stay out of the woods. With neither a road nor a bike path nor a helicopter pad to facilitate the daily comings and goings of whoever occupied this mansion, there was no way anyone outside the woods could know this house existed.
But that wasn’t the main focus of Margot’s thoughts right now. No, what held her attention above all else in this moment was the collection of disorienting images sliding within the mirrored glass of each diamond-paned window of the mansion. Because in every window she looked at, she glimpsed a visual anomaly she’d seen only one other time in her life, a mystery that intrigued and puzzled her to this day: the image of herself reflected in two parallel mirrors. Or, as she had described it to Johnnie last year after she spent an hour standing between the two floor-to-ceiling mirrors in the upstairs bathroom of her rich uncle Barry’s house, her infinite army of clones trapped in alternate universes.
How it was possible for all these different windows to be reflecting an image of her, she didn’t know; after all, she stood too far away from the mansion to be caught in the reflection of any of the mirrored windows, let alone all of them. And then there was the issue of elevation and angle: the vast majority of the windows she could see were located on the second, third, and fourth floors of the mansion, topped with crenelated balconies, peering out at acute angles from semi-circular bays, slicing through the walls of limestone ashlar rising far above her head, and set into the building at locations that should’ve reflected the gnarled trunks of trees and the crooked branches sprouting forth instead of the skinny, black-haired girl standing at the mouth of the woods below.
But no matter how impossible the reflections should have been, there they were. Her infinite army of clones stared back at her from every window in the mansion, mimicking each minute movement of her body. And despite the unsettling yet strangely fascinating nature of her discovery, she didn’t mention it to Johnnie. She didn’t want to strengthen the mansion’s monumental gravitational pull on him. His impulsive dash through the woods that brought them here had already revealed his late-summer lust for one last adventure, so if she wanted to get them home before their parents grounded them both for the next fifteen years, she couldn’t say a single thing that might make this place even more interesting to him.
So Margot kept her mouth shut and followed Johnnie as he crept up to the heavy oak door at the front of the sprawling mansion. Why did she follow? She wasn’t exactly sure. Maybe it was because she too had allowed herself to get caught up in the intoxicating sense of mystery exuded by this secret place. Maybe she wanted to finally discover the truth behind her infinite army of clones trapped in their alternate universes. Or maybe, it was the fact that, after spending the past nine and a half hours playing at the park with Johnnie and the other kids from the neighborhood, it was somehow high noon once again. •
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Steve Gergley is the author of a bunch of books and a lot of weird writings of an indeterminate nature. His most recent book, There Are Some Floors Missing, was published by Bullshit Lit on February 20th, 2026. He’s also the editor of scaffold literary magazine.
Website | Twitter
But that wasn’t the main focus of Margot’s thoughts right now. No, what held her attention above all else in this moment was the collection of disorienting images sliding within the mirrored glass of each diamond-paned window of the mansion. Because in every window she looked at, she glimpsed a visual anomaly she’d seen only one other time in her life, a mystery that intrigued and puzzled her to this day: the image of herself reflected in two parallel mirrors. Or, as she had described it to Johnnie last year after she spent an hour standing between the two floor-to-ceiling mirrors in the upstairs bathroom of her rich uncle Barry’s house, her infinite army of clones trapped in alternate universes.
How it was possible for all these different windows to be reflecting an image of her, she didn’t know; after all, she stood too far away from the mansion to be caught in the reflection of any of the mirrored windows, let alone all of them. And then there was the issue of elevation and angle: the vast majority of the windows she could see were located on the second, third, and fourth floors of the mansion, topped with crenelated balconies, peering out at acute angles from semi-circular bays, slicing through the walls of limestone ashlar rising far above her head, and set into the building at locations that should’ve reflected the gnarled trunks of trees and the crooked branches sprouting forth instead of the skinny, black-haired girl standing at the mouth of the woods below.
But no matter how impossible the reflections should have been, there they were. Her infinite army of clones stared back at her from every window in the mansion, mimicking each minute movement of her body. And despite the unsettling yet strangely fascinating nature of her discovery, she didn’t mention it to Johnnie. She didn’t want to strengthen the mansion’s monumental gravitational pull on him. His impulsive dash through the woods that brought them here had already revealed his late-summer lust for one last adventure, so if she wanted to get them home before their parents grounded them both for the next fifteen years, she couldn’t say a single thing that might make this place even more interesting to him.
So Margot kept her mouth shut and followed Johnnie as he crept up to the heavy oak door at the front of the sprawling mansion. Why did she follow? She wasn’t exactly sure. Maybe it was because she too had allowed herself to get caught up in the intoxicating sense of mystery exuded by this secret place. Maybe she wanted to finally discover the truth behind her infinite army of clones trapped in their alternate universes. Or maybe, it was the fact that, after spending the past nine and a half hours playing at the park with Johnnie and the other kids from the neighborhood, it was somehow high noon once again. •
Steve Gergley is the author of a bunch of books and a lot of weird writings of an indeterminate nature. His most recent book, There Are Some Floors Missing, was published by Bullshit Lit on February 20th, 2026. He’s also the editor of scaffold literary magazine.
Website | Twitter