The Mirror

by Bridget Eilis

  The Mirror

  By Bridget Eilis

  Copyright © 2020 Bridget Eilis.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, and places are products of the author’s imagination.

  One

  It started with tapping. Not incessant, and not all at once. But from the day she moved in Melissa heard it.

  It’s just the house settling, she told herself. It was an older house after all. She’d gotten it for a steal; the previous owners were incredibly eager to move out. There had been rumours swirling about the family for months before they put their house up for sale. Their missing teenaged daughter, the fact that no amount of police investigation had turned up any evidence. Eventually the case had been closed, classified as a runaway situation.

  Old houses are prone to creaks and strange noises, she told herself as a reassurance. There was no pattern to the tapping noise, and no discernable origin. Everywhere she went she could hear it. Stranger still, everywhere she went, it was the same volume. It didn’t quiet as she passed through the rooms. Closing doors did nothing to dampen the sound.

  Tap tap tap tap taptaptap tap.

  It wasn’t enough to make life unbearable, just mildly annoying. But things continued as normal. At least for a while. Until it wasn’t just tapping.

  When the hissing started, Melissa began to suspect something might be wrong with her new-old house. She searched it from top to bottom, even venturing up to the rickety attic that she avoided for fear of falling through the ceiling. The house inspector hadn’t found any problems with the floors up there, but it gave her the creeps just to walk under the trapdoor in the ceiling. She hadn’t even stored anything up there, and when she checked she found it reassuringly empty.

  She hired a plumber to check all the water lines and pipes. A gas line technician to check for leaks. Neither of them found anything wrong, but more disturbing was the fact that neither of them could hear the noises. She watched the plumber as he made his way through the house on Monday, waiting for him to ask about the tap tap taptaptap and occasional hsssssssss. After half an hour she was peering at him so intently as he inspected her toilet that he stopped and turned his gaze on her.

  “Did you need something miss?” he asked, a perturbed impatience evident in his voice.

  “Can’t you hear that? Don’t you wonder what it is?” she burst out in response, her arms flailing wildly.

  “Hear what?” he replied, his impatience giving way to confusion.

  “The—” Melissa stopped herself just in time, before the poor plumber thought he had walked into a crazy person’s house. “Nothing… thought I heard something. Must’ve been a bird.” she finished hastily, and high tailed it out of the bathroom, leaving the perplexed plumber to finish up in peace.

  Even worse was when the gas man came to check the lines. She let him in and stood expectantly to the side of the open door, so focused on waiting for him to mention the noise that she forgot to close it. Eventually the young man reached and eased the knob gently from her grip, eyeing her warily as he swept the door closed.

  “So…what seems to be the problem?” he asked, and Melissa finally snapped out of her intense focus when he took a visible step away from her.

  “Problem?” she replied, head tilted to the side, “There’s not really a problem per se, well except… never mind. I just moved in and I wanted to have the lines checked, just in case, you know.”

  “Ahh, I see,” he replied, smiling now, “That’s a smart idea ma’am. I’ll just get to it then.” He headed off to check the natural gas in the kitchen and pipes coming in through the basement.

  Melissa had to physically restrain herself from following him through the house and when she tapped her debit card on his portable machine to pay him, inside her head she was screaming, Don’t you hear that?!

  Friends that came over also claimed to be unable to hear the noises. One friend even suggested that maybe her house was haunted. Melissa laughed out loud at the prospect—she was reasonably certain that ghosts did not exist. Still, she was desperate to find a physical explanation. Something that would explain where these noises were coming from. But as more time passed, she began to worry that she was losing it, and considered making a doctor’s appointment to have her head examined.

  That was until she heard her name.

  Two

  It wasn’t too late on a Tuesday evening. She remembered the day specifically because it’s not everyday your house begins calling your name. Deeply engrossed as she was in the movie she’d been watching, she jumped clear off the couch when she heard it. She slept with the lights on that night.

  The next day found her engrossed in her local library with every book on ghosts and poltergeists that she could find. Being scientifically minded made it difficult for her to accept that something supernatural might be occurring in her own home, but she couldn’t deny the sounds she was hearing. At this point, the joking suggestion of a friend from just a few days ago seemed more and more likely to be the only possible explanation.

  Tapping she could attribute to a loose shingle, knocking in the pipes, a branch hitting a window. Even the hissing could be hand waved away as a possible slow leak, maybe not in a gas pipe but in a hot water pipe somewhere maybe. But the very distinct sound of her own name being called? What else could that possibly be?

  In the back of her mind, the story of the missing teenager from the previous owners had taken root and blossomed into a paranoid delusion. Had they done something to their daughter after all? Was her ghost haunting Melissa now, unable to rest until her murder was solved. She had pored over the newspaper articles from the investigation, but there really had been absolutely no evidence of foul play. And the family involved had been distraught, but maybe they were just really good actors.

  She was not ready to confront the idea that she might be ill, though the idea of visiting a doctor continued to loom in the back of her mind. Mental health issues ran in the family, something she had steadfastly avoided thinking about for most of her adult life. Watching her mother’s descent into late onset schizophrenia was a terrifying thing to live through. Especially given the genetic component of the disease. The nagging reality of a scientific, though thoroughly depressing explanation, continued dancing around the dark recesses of her mind.

  So, Melissa became convinced that there was a paranormal explanation. Abandoning all her previous pragmatic beliefs rooted in science and solid evidence. She grasped at any straws she could find. She approached various priests for advice on exorcisms. This generally ended in the various holy men trying to convert her to their particular brand of faith before even entertaining the idea. Only after her continued begging for help would they explain to her, gently as though talking to a child, that exorcisms don’t exist anymore outside of movies and history books.

  She even went to see a psychic, which turned out to simply be a waste of money as she was told all about her very vague future. Lots of clichéd comments about darkness in her future and stuff that sounded like it was straight out of a trashy horoscope. Melissa was tempted to peek under the table and see if the lady was reading from a card of generic predictions, but the smell of incense started to choke her throat and nose. She had reluctantly paid the woman and exited via a gauzy and bedazzled curtain doorway.

  All through this, the noises continued, but no
matter who she had to come examine the house, no one could hear them but her. She lay in bed, thinking about the doctor a concerned friend had recommended. The number was written on the notepad on her nightstand.

  She placed her cell phone on top of it, determined to call in the morning and admit that something must be wrong with her. Loathe though she was to have reached that conclusion, she had exhausted every other thing she could think of. And if she were being totally honest with herself, it had all been a stall tactic to avoid getting to this point.

  Three

  That was the night that the mirror appeared.

  She stared at the ceiling, unable to sleep contemplating the implications of all the mental illnesses that involved auditory hallucinations. Chances were, she was experiencing the early indications of schizophrenia, the same as her mother had. But in between her research of all things occult, she had ventured cautiously into the terrifying world of medical research.

  What she found had not been reassuring and only spurred her on to find some other explanation, even if it meant that all the things that go bump in the night were real. All these thoughts chased themselves through her mind, round and round, making her head spin as she prayed desperately for sleep. She tossed and turned for hours, eventually coming to resent the glowing red numbers on her alarm clock. Eventually, she just turned the stupid thing face down to hide the time, angry at the clock for allowing it to slip by as she remained unable to sleep.

  She was desperate for sweet oblivion where she could escape the voices and noises at least for a few hours. Finally drifting off, her eyes grew heavy and that’s when she heard it.

  Melisssssa…help.

  She sat bolt upright in bed, gasping for air and straining to see into the shadow-engulfed corners of her dark bedroom. What the fuck was that?

  She crept out of bed and opened the door to her room as slowly and quietly as possible. The hallway was empty and dark, the only illumination coming from the small plug in light on at night. She was so distracted by mind-numbing fear that she didn’t think to flip on the light in the hallway, instead stepping cautiously out into the corridor with its limited illumination.

  As she struggled to get her breathing under control, she heard it again, this time very clearly emanating from the closed attic door. It was the first time that the voice/noise/whatever it was had seemed to come from any one place. Though her heart beat so hard in her chest that it hurt, she couldn’t stop herself from reaching up and opening the door. She needed answers.

  She pulled gently on the handle and jumped back about five feet when the door released with a sharp jerk. It had been a while since she had opened it, and evidently the previous owners hadn’t kept on top of oiling the hinges.

  She eyed the open door, psyching herself up to pull it the rest of the way, releasing the ladder that was folded up inside. Melissa realized her mouth was open, as if she’d been screaming but no sound had come out. She tiptoed forward and grabbed the handle again.

  Like ripping off a bandaid, she told herself, and yanked downwards. The ladder clattered downward, the noise echoing in the eerie stillness of the hallway. If it was possible, her heart rate doubled up, galloping against her ribcage.

  Ascending the ladder in the dark, she let out a sigh of both relief and exasperation from she breached the top with just her head—feet still firmly halfway up—and found the attic just as empty as it always was. Her head dropped forward and she let her forehead land with a dull thud on the attic floor. Frustration and fear competed for dominance within her, and she glanced around to find her footing and head back down the ladder when she saw it.

  A glimmer of light shone just out of the corner of her eye. Her head whipped around and there it was, an ornate gold mirror. Floor length, on a hinged stand so it could be tilted up or down. The moonlight from the small attic window reflected across the room.

  Melissa gasped for air when she realized she had not taken a breath in several seconds, then she hurried down the ladder as fast as possible. Jumping the last few rungs, she hit the floor hard, pain spiking up her calves from the impact.

  She wrenched open the door of the nearby linen closet, grabbing a sheet, then scrambled back up the ladder. Heedless of her discomfort with the attic, she rushed across the floor and tossed the sheet over the mirror. She couldn’t say, in that moment or any other, why she was compelled to cover the mirror, but she was consumed with the need to do so immediately.

  After her headlong rush down and back up again, she stood panting in the middle of the dark attic. The only illumination was the silvery light streaming in through the small, oval window set high in the far wall. She stared hard at the shape outlined under the sheet, questions and fears swirling in her mind.

  I’m never going to sleep again, she thought.

  She headed back for the opening in the floor, glancing over her shoulder several times to check and see if the mysterious mirror was still there. Every time she looked, there it was, despite her surety that the attic had been empty before. The solid presence of the mirror seemed looming now, as if it took up more space than its dimensions allowed for.

  With a final trembling glance as she gingerly stepped down the ladder, she eased herself to the bottom and quickly lifted the door, shoving it closed harder than was strictly necessary.

  The next morning before she left for work, she crept up the ladder, both needing to know and terrified of the answer. The mirror was exactly where she had found it, still covered with the sheet and looking far less ominous with bright sunlight pouring in on it from the small window. She sleepwalked through the day, bumping into cubicle walls in the office, spilling her coffee not once, but twice. Her mind drifted back to the mirror and its sudden appearance.

  After work, she entered the attic once again, this time climbing to the top of the ladder and entering the small room in one fell swoop, momentarily surprised at her own boldness. She crept towards the mirror, gingerly lifting the sheet to look at it. A part of her expected to see the reflection of a ghoul, a monster, or at the very least the ghostly presence of someone else, but instead only her own reflection stared back at her.

  Her petrified expression reflected back, a piece of the white sheet she was holding up and the rest of the empty but dusty attic behind her. She stared into it for a few more minutes, her expression slowly changing to one of intrigue and curiosity.

  She studied the frame of the mirror, taking in the ornate scroll work carved into it. Was that gold? Finally, she tore her gaze away and released the sheet, heading quickly back downstairs.

  Upon entering the kitchen, she was surprised to see the clock read 6:32pm, a full hour and a half after she had arrived home from work. Shaking her head in confusion and resolving to check the batteries at a later date, she set about making herself dinner. The house around her whispered and tapped all the while, however for the first time it didn’t seem as unnerving as it had before. She almost felt herself moving to the rhythm of the tapping, subconsciously stepping in time with the erratic beat.

  Four

  Several days later, the phone rang shrilly, echoing through a mostly empty house. The living room, kitchen, bathroom and bedrooms were all devoid of life. The ladder to the attic was pulled down, the square door in the ceiling still open, a black void. Inside the attic Melissa sat crossed legged in front of the mirror, the white sheet that previously covered it cast aside on the dusty floor as she stared rapturously at her own reflection.

  The ringing went on, and still she stared. Hours after that there came a knock at the door, tentative at first then more insistent. Melissa didn’t move, and the knocking eventually went away. Night fell, and darkness engulfed the attic, silver moonlight streaming in and reflecting off the mirror, lighting up Melissa’s fascinated face.

  Her stomach rumbled loudly, the noise echoing off the empty attic walls, but she didn’t seem to notice. The sheet that had been previously discarded so easily had begun to build up dust, blending into the rest of the dir
ty surroundings. Strangely, the mirror itself accumulated nothing. No dust, dirt or fingerprints muddied its elaborate surface. It shone as though it had been wiped down with polish and glass cleaner just moments ago.

  As Melissa sat in front of it, though, it was evident that she had not been doing any cleaning. Her hair hung in greasy hanks around her face, her eyes stood out from her face, seeming to protrude from the bruise coloured skin surrounding them.

  As morning dawned and the first hints of sunlight glinted off the glass of the window, her head fell forward as she nodded off in front of the mirror, having sat there so long she hadn’t slept in over seventy-two hours. The light shifted subtly as Melissa snored softly, chin resting against her chest as it rose and fell.

  It was dark when Melissa’s head snapped up, her neck sore from sleeping sitting up and slumped over. She looked up at the mirror and saw once again, and as always, her own reflection. The same thing she had seen for several days. How long have I been sitting here? she thought. Perplexed though she was, she had no desire to stand up and walk away from the mirror. The same lack of desire that had suffused her being for the last several days.

  At first, she had only spent a few hours in front of the mirror at a time, though each time she spent longer and longer. And each time had felt shorter and shorter. By the third day she had missed work to stay in front of the mirror, managing to call in sick and fake a cough before eagerly heading back up the ladder to resume her rapturous staring.

  Her first hint that something was wrong was when her reflection stood up, and she did not. All at once, she realized the voice was gone. The tapping was gone. The hissing was gone. After so long listening to the noises all around her, the quiet was uncomfortable and unsettling. I hate it, was the first thought that popped into her head.