On his way upward to the next island, The Prisoner had, for the first time, sensed something was wrong. Not in himself, but the world, the prison around him. Whether it was an onset effect from the presence of The Mirror ahead, or something else he didn’t know. The Observer hadn’t said anything, in fact she’d been unusually quiet on the short journey which was what had got The Prisoners attention. Somehow the feeling in the air was off, different, not what it usually was, or at least what it had been thus far. The Prisoner had felt, all of a sudden, a profound tension within himself as he climbed the last bit of the path before emerging onto the next island. Every assumption of there being something wrong was confirmed when he’d set eyes on The Mirror. The twisted figure of a man stood there in the open, limbs bent, hands bent over at odd angles, The Prisoner had almost got the sense The Mirror has somehow being reanimated by some unknown force. The Prisoner slowly, carefully stepped forward, then again as The Mirror remained twisted and standing deadly still. The whole thing had a sharp sense of unease, that something, somehow had gone terribly awry yet he couldn’t separate the exact reason as to why all this felt so terribly wrong to him, surely this wasn’t The Mirror’s normal form.
The Mirror slowly began to move, some strange form grew from his back, tendrils at first that formed into arms, remolding themselves as if made from clay to their creators desire. This new set of limbs quickly became a fully developed set of arms before yet another obsidian form grew in the same fashion only lower on the back. These too grew into arms that began reaching around, the fingers wriggling as if trying to grasp something in the air. The whole thing like watching a time lapse of a developing fetus or maybe a tree sprouting branches, the movements slowly becoming more sporadic, more energised as it grew in strength. The Mirror then stood up straight in his multi armed form, the unusual figure, strangely faceless seemed to look at The Prisoner for a moment before looking downward as the many hands started reaching down and all around the body. Pulling pieces of the body away, the hands pulled away chunks of the legs, the torso, then held these pieces, looking at them intently. Looking closer, The Prisoner could then see something that seemed unreal, impossible. The figure of The Mirror appeared to be, or perhaps became hollow, the pieces that had been pulled off were like shards of broken glass, and the inside of each piece appeared to be a mirror. With a piece missing from the leg, The Prisoner could see the inside of the leg were hollow as if The Mirror were some plastic doll completely empty inside. The inside surface of The Mirror, was in itself a mirror, these new limbs took these pieces and used the inside mirror surface to look at itself. The Mirrors blanks face appeared to look at its reflection, stopping as if shocked by what it was seeing.
The face suddenly looked to The Prisoner, nothing human about it anymore. “You.”
A hand pointed accusingly at him before dropping every shard of mirror that had been pulled off. The featureless body writhed then twisted before quickly becoming a mirror form of The Prisoner himself. Now looking at the reflection of himself, The Prisoner sidestepped his doppelganger, his movement mirrored nearly exactly by this impostor. Mere moments after this, The Prisoners reflected form writhed, the head flipping back and a mouth opening wide toward the sky. A strange but brilliant light had appeared from within The Mirror which had then expelled itself through the mouth. A massive spray of what, at first looked like fire, erupted into the air before being followed by something that was possibly electricity. The weird light rushed upward and into the air before swirling around the entire area like a vortex as a deathly howl emerged through the air in unison with this bizarre event unfolding in front of him. The body of The Mirror shrank and withered as if all the living energy were being sucked out of it and cast into the light in the air. The body quickly shrank to nothing as the light dispersed into unnatural streams of energy travelling through the air in no particular direction. The light show around him gave off the sense that something, he hadn’t known what, had been released, or a series of events set into motion by this weird expelling of energy. It was in the air, somehow as if it had permeated reality, an unseen virus inserted into the bloodstream.
Eventually it had become blobs, or nodules of light that floated in the air and defied gravity as if floating on thermal updraughts. The stuff floated in a show that The Prisoner found as mysterious as it was mesmerising, defying all known logic, science or philosophy. This light or energy or whatever it really was, had eventually dissipated into nothing. The Prisoner looked around to see The Observer gone, vanished along with any sense of meaning to what had just happened. His sense of unease now growing, the sense of wrongness in the air inescapable, but for now his goal was unchanged, upwards, and to the next island.

CONTINUED IN EPISODE 5