Five Stories for the Dark Months (2 page)

She watched wistfully as her mother
sliced fresh cantaloupe and poured real maple syrup into a jug for
the table. “I didn’t do it,” she muttered for the thousandth
time.

“Then who did,
Adie?” her mother snapped. She had clearly lost patience with
Adie’s protestations of innocence. “Only you and I were in the
house, and I promise you that
I
didn’t carve ‘Fuck you’ all over your mirror. Are
you suggesting that some
criminal
broke in and did it?” She looked as if she wanted
to throw something.

Adie rather wanted to throw
something, too. She shrugged, looking down at her plate. What could
she say?

The new mirror for her bathroom was
delivered within a week of the old one’s demise. Under her mother’s
direction, Adie had cleaned and polished the room to a sparkling
sheen, and the air was heavy with the remnants of chemical vapors.
The mirror itself was larger and more elaborate than the other one
had been. It had a beveled edge where the other had been plain, and
a border of frosted-glass roses that Adie longed to run her
fingertips over. She stole glances at the glass as her father
installed it, and watched as her mother polished it to brilliant
clarity. There was nothing unusual in their reflections. She began
to hope.

After dinner that night, she crept
towards the bathroom with butterflies in her stomach. Once again
she reached through the doorway first to turn on the light. New
mirror or not, there was no way she would ever set foot in that
room again without the light. Across the flawless counter, she laid
out her supplies: toothbrush, toothpaste, dental floss, mouthwash.
Then she looked up.

For one long, still moment, she
stared at her reflection, and the reflection stared back at her.
Neither of them moved. Around them, the house was quiet. Downstairs
she could hear the news, and over it her parents’ quiet voices.
Nothing was out of the ordinary.

Adie slowly let out the breath that
she must have been holding for ages. In the mirror, the other girl
let out a breath, too. The two of them smiled at each other and
reached for their toothbrushes.

But as Adie squeezed toothpaste
onto her brush, her reflection’s smile continued to grow. In a
moment it had become a savage grin, baring sharp white teeth much
larger than her own.

She shrieked and leaped backwards,
hitting the wall hard. A towel rack jabbed her painfully in the
back. The thing in the mirror let out a shriek, as well, and then
began to laugh. Adie could only just hear it over the thunder of
footsteps on the stairs: her parents, coming to see what was
happening. She wanted to tell them to hurry, please, help her—but
the thing in the mirror had wrapped its fist around its toothbrush
and was advancing towards the glass. Adie threw her arms across her
face just as the mirror shattered.

When her parents reached the
bathroom door, they found her crouched amid a sea of broken glass,
hiding her eyes and weeping hysterically. Of the thing in the
mirror there was now no sign, only a little flicker in one of the
shards of glass, which might have been a trick of the
light.

This time the
mirror was not replaced. Instead, her parents began to talk about
“finding special care” and “seeing a therapist” when they thought
that Adie couldn’t hear them. She barely heard them, anyway. She
had discovered, to her horror, that reflections were
everywhere.
She caught
glimpses of herself
in windows, pot lids,
the blades of table knives. Though she kept her eyes lowered as
much as possible, she kept seeing twitches where nothing was
moving, flashes of teeth out of the corners of her
eyes.

One night, on her way to bed, she
paused in her bedroom doorway. Across from the door, next to the
closet, there was a full-length mirror that her mother had bought
for her at a flea market years before. It was very pretty, with a
carved wooden frame the color of oxidized copper. Adie had always
loved it, but since her first encounter with the thing in the
mirror she had left it carefully covered. Now the sheet that she’d
covered it with lay pooled on the floor, and the mirror stared back
at her unguarded.

Her reflection gave her pause, for
she looked almost at death’s door. She had grown pale and drawn
from many nights without much sleep, and the skin under her eyes
was so dark it looked almost blue. Her hair was an unkempt mess,
and her clothes were slightly out of place: she never checked her
appearance anymore if she could avoid it. It was no wonder her
parents had taken to whispering about her when they thought she
wasn’t listening. The changes in her appearance would have startled
anyone.

Just as she remembered that she
should probably look away, the girl behind the mirror took a step
forward.

Adie was out the door and halfway
down the hall before she’d really registered what had happened. She
had just enough presence of mind to tiptoe back and yank the door
shut behind her. She thought she felt something tug against it when
it was nearly shut, and had to hold back a scream as she wrestled
it into place. When it was finally closed, she grabbed a few
blankets from the linen closet down the hall, minced back across
her doorstep, and pounded down the stairs as fast as her legs would
carry her.

Her parents were in the kitchen,
talking in hushed voices again. They fell silent when they heard
her go into the living room. “What are you doing, Adie?” her mother
called, in that sweet, careful voice she’d taken to using
lately.

Adie spread one blanket across the
old tweed couch cushions. “I’m sleeping down here tonight.” She had
given up explaining herself, since they never believed her
explanations anyway.

There was a flurry of whispers.
“Um... okay, honey,” her father said. She heard him close his
newspaper. “Good night.”

She stacked most of the throw
pillows at one end of the couch, then spread the other blankets on
top of them. As she slid between the covers of her makeshift bed,
she heard chairs scrape in the kitchen. A moment later, the kitchen
light went out, leaving the downstairs infinitely vast and dark.
“Good night, sweetie,” her mother called.

“Night, Mom. Night,
Dad.”

In the darkness,
her hearing grew sharper. She listened to her parents footsteps as
they climbed the stairs and started down the hallway. They were
still whispering, as if they thought she didn’t know what they were
talking about. One of them stepped on the creaking board outside
Adie’s bathroom. There was a soft
click—
someone turning off the hallway
light—and the darkness deepened. A moment later, Adie heard her
parents’ door squeak open and shut.

Now the living room became an alien
wasteland, alive with strange black shadows that seemed to move
whenever she tried to look at them. Shivering, she pulled a blanket
all the way over her head. Like everything in the linen closet, it
smelled vaguely of mothballs, although her family had never used
them.

She tried to reassure herself that
she was safe. For one thing, her parents were probably still awake.
They always sat up talking and reading for a while after they’d
changed into their pajamas. In her mind she saw the clean white
light of their reading lamps, heard the placid murmur of their
voices. It made her feel a little better to know that they’d hear
if anything strange started to happen.

Then she remembered the menacing
stare of the thing behind the mirror. It had traveled from the
bathroom to her room so easily. What was to stop it from traveling
to her parents’ room, as well? Her reassurance twisted into anguish
in her gut, but she did not dare climb up the stairs to warn
them.

The house grew very quiet, and into
the silence there came a dream. Adie was walking. She had in her
arms a long, thin parcel: the mirror from her room, safely covered
once again.

Something was pounding against the
glass beneath the sheet. Adie knew that if she didn’t lock the
mirror away, the thing inside it would get out. Then it would get
her, and maybe after it killed her it would take on her face and
kill her parents, too. Her bedroom closet was the nearest safe
place to put it.

As Adie tried to
shoulder open the sliding door, fingers rose from beneath the
sheet. They clawed at her arms, leaving welts that stung like cat
scratches. She forced back a scream as she wrestled the mirror into
the closet. “You are
nothing,
” hissed a voice from beneath
the glass. “You are
food.”
Sharp teeth bit into her neck just as Adie hurled
the mirror into the corner. She heard the glass crack, and saw the
sheet start to fall. Leaping backwards, she dragged the door
shut.

For a moment, there was
silence.

Then something began to scrabble
against the door.

Adie screamed herself awake. For a
moment she lay paralyzed in the darkness, soaked in sweat. The
stifling air was full of harsh, desperate breathing, as if an
animal’s lungs had been ripped from its body and left to die on
their own.

Gradually the breathing slowed, and
Adie realized it was her own. The last black shreds of the
nightmare fell away. She remembered that she was still curled up in
the darkness beneath a nubbly, scratchy old blanket that smelled
vaguely of mothballs, on a couch that under ordinary circumstances
she’d have gotten in trouble for sleeping on. This was the living
room, not her bedroom at all, and the mirror she’d dreamed about
was nowhere nearby.

Her mouth was as dry as if it had
been wiped out with cotton balls. Adie swallowed, but couldn’t get
rid of the sour taste that lingered in the corners. She took one
last, deep breath and pulled the blanket off her face.

Cool air rushed over her skin,
drying her sweat and giving her goosebumps. She peered into the
dark, trying to assure herself that nothing was amiss. The night
was dark and still, and the neighborhood was silent. Even the
crickets had stopped chirping. It had to be late—maybe three or
four in the morning. Adie turned over uneasily. She meant to go
back to sleep, but quickly discovered that she desperately had to
pee.

She thought, for a split second, of
waiting until morning. The house was vast and black and
frightening, but in her nest of blankets she felt relatively safe.
The pressure on her bladder, however, became too powerful to
ignore, so at last she relinquished her safety and staggered to her
feet. Clumsy with sleep, she toddled toward the bathroom. The
hardwood floors were chilly, and she wished that she’d thought to
bring socks. In the kitchen she heard the hum and groan of the
refrigerator, and was startled by the the rattle of ice falling
into the dispenser.

It wasn’t until she had almost
reached the bathroom that she remembered: Her own bathroom had no
mirror anymore, but this one certainly did.

Frost crept up Adie’s spine as she
stared through the pitch-dark doorway. She almost retreated right
then and there, but she knew that she’d never be able to make it
until morning. A brief notion of going back upstairs was quashed by
the memory of her nightmare, and of what she’d seen in her room.
Downstairs it was.

Anyway, if the thing was in her
bedroom now, then maybe it hadn’t come downstairs yet.

Somewhat cheered by this thought,
Adie reached through the doorway and turned on the bathroom light.
Its cheerful yellow glow spilled into the hallway, shrinking and
clarifying everything it touched. Now Adie could see that the
bathroom was, in fact, just a bathroom. There was the striped
wallpaper that her parents had picked out together. There were the
gleaming brass fixtures her mother polished with frightening
regularity, and the white tile floor that her father had laid one
sweaty afternoon when Adie was nine. An unlit purple candle among
the hand towels filled the room with the scent of lavender and
roses.

Just to be on the safe side, Adie
kept her eyes lowered and stepped quickly past the mirror. Nothing
flickered in the corners of her vision, and nothing hissed or
muttered when she raised the toilet lid and sat down on the icy
seat. She concluded her business without incident and got up to
wash her hands.

Morbid curiosity compelled her to
look up this time. She raised her eyes fearfully to look at her
reflection—but there seemed to be nothing to fear. She saw only
herself—the same old Adie, frizzy hair and awkward nose and all.
When she smiled, her own shy smile came back to her. She lifted her
arms, and her reflection’s arms went up, as well. She even did a
little dance, and the mirror mirrored it without a trace of
mockery.

The thing must somehow have been
confined to the upstairs—or maybe she’d even defeated it when she’d
trapped it in her dream. Tomorrow she would ask her dad to take the
mirror out of her room. Maybe a priest could even come and bless
the house. She’d ask her mother about it.

Happy that the end was in sight,
Adie grinned at her reflection.

Her reflection grinned back, and
turned off the light.

~}*{~