I’ve always been afraid of mirrors. Ever since I was little, I’ve had these terrible nightmares. I’d be walking around my house at night, cold and sleepy, and I’d get this urge, and I’d go into the bathroom, peek into the mirror, and there would be nothing there. All I saw was an empty bathroom, with nothing looking back at me. It was like I wasn’t even real. Or worse: there would be a face looking back at me, but it wasn’t my face.
I avoided looking at mirrors most of my life. My mom took down all the ones she could, but some were necessary, like the ones in the bathroom, or at the vanity where she put on her makeup. I used to watch her get ready there, sitting half-dressed at the little desk, staring right in the mirror, daring to close her eyes and put stuff on her eyelids. It would creep me the hell out. When I had to wash my hands in the bathroom, I’d do it from the side, so the mirror couldn’t see me. Sometimes I taped paper over the mirrors, but it annoyed her if I did that too much, so I only did when she was out.
Of course, it affected my social life. If anyone tried playing Bloody Mary at a sleepover, I had to call my mom to come get me. So that didn’t make me popular, but I probably wouldn’t have been anyway. I couldn’t pluck my eyebrows, and going to the salon was a nightmare—sitting in front of those big mirrors made me sweat like a dog, so my mom always cut my hair at home, in the kitchen. People never complimented my haircut, but at least she kept it out of my eyes.
When I moved out, I spent days hunting at Goodwill, picking out the dullest, least-shiny appliances I could. I worked from home, where I kept my own mirrors covered constantly, and I never opened my blinds. The only time I glimpsed my reflection was at other peoples’ houses, or at restaurants. Clearly, I didn’t get out much, and when I did have to use the bathroom in public places, I took deep breaths, averted my eyes, and counted down the seconds until I could dry my hands and get the fuck out. I could have used more therapy, obviously—but what, am I rich or something?
It’s not so bad to let a phobia run your life. I just don’t make a big deal out of it. Really, it only became a problem when my mom died. Lots of things became a problem then. How was I supposed to live in a world where my mom was dead? Also, who was going to cut my hair now?
My mom didn’t have a lot, and what little she had was inarguably mine, so I hired a probate attorney with the promise of a pittance from her estate. Even though there was no contest, it took forever to wrap things up, and talk to the banks, and work it out with the mortgage people. The house sat empty for a long time, until I was ready to hold her wake.
The wake was small and casual. My mom was never fussy, so we ordered pizza, sat around talking, and I got gravely wasted off boxed wine. Her old shift supervisor put me to bed that night, tucking the blankets around my shoulders while I sobbed. I woke up badly nauseated, with a pillow snugly tucked against my back, keeping me from rolling over. That was nice of them.
I opened my eyes and saw something shifting in the shadows of the room.
I remembered how this worked, of course. Like I was a kid again, I held completely, utterly still. I didn’t even breathe, which was a mistake. I held my breath so long that I involuntarily inhaled with a tiny hiss. I waited, and waited, head swimming and stomach churning, then peeked out through slitted eyes. They had put me to bed in my mom’s old room, probably thinking it was mine now, and her old vanity mirror pointed right at me. I couldn’t make out my reflection, but I’d seen something moving. I could hear it still, a faint rustling, like an animal in the walls. That happened at night, in this house.
I stayed there for a long time, until my rippling gut let me know I couldn’t wait much longer. I threw off the blankets and dashed down the hall, into the bathroom, kneeling over the toilet just in time. The vomit burned through my throat, and my stomach cramped from convulsions, and I was crying as my uncut hair dipped into the toilet water. My mother was dead, and there was no one in the world who loved me now. Who cared if I died?
I flushed the toilet and clumsily patted the ends of my hair with toilet paper. I didn’t do a great job; I was probably still a little drunk. I swayed for a moment, trying to decide if I needed to throw up more, but decided to be optimistic about it. I went to wash my hands. I forgot I’d removed the paper for the wake, knowing my mom would have been embarrassed for all her friends and coworkers to see it, to know I hadn’t grown out of my fear in any meaningful way. I was looking right at the mirror before I even knew what was happening. And there was someone looking back.
It wasn’t me. I knew what I looked like from pictures. This face had pale-white skin, roughly-shorn hair, and a cold, hard stare. This face hated me. This face had always hated me. It pressed up against the mirror from the wrong side, its wet rotten teeth clacking against the surface, its white fuzzy tongue slathering all over the mirror. It wanted me. It wanted out.
I tried to scream, but nothing came out; my throat was still weak from the vomit. I fled the bathroom and bolted down the hall, running so fast I pitched forward and
…
One of my mom’s friends had stayed over to make sure I made it through the night okay, and heard when I didn’t. They took shifts beside my hospital bed over the next few days. My concussion wasn’t too bad, but the doctors were worried about my state of mind. I’d come in on the brink of alcohol poisoning, crying about faces in the mirror, and I’d recently suffered such a grievous loss. I heard them whispering about it in the hallway. There was no one in the world who loved me or could take care of me, so they wanted to observe me for a few days, make sure I was okay. Like it was helpful to saddle me with additional medical bills, but they didn’t listen when I argued about that.
“You’re okay, honey,” said my mom’s old coworker, a smoker with stained fingers and sweet eyes. “We’ll help you.”
“I can’t take your help,” I lied. Though my mom wouldn’t have liked it, I took the envelope of cash she handed me at the end of my stay without further protest. It didn’t cover the whole bill, but a good enough chunk that I stopped thinking about killing myself for practical reasons, and got left with just the emotional ones.
I stayed out of my mom’s house for as long as I could. I couldn’t bear to go back there, where I’d seen the thing in the mirror. I knew I’d just been drunk, hysterical, having a nightmare, an episode of sleep paralysis, hallucinating from grief (one or maybe all of these things) but the thought of going back made me want to die. But the lease on my apartment was ending, the few friends I had were distancing themselves, and my mom’s friends had done enough for me already. So I went home.
I taped so much paper over the mirror, then I leaned a big cutting board over it. It wouldn’t keep the creature in—not that there was really a creature—but it made me feel a little better. I drank as little water as I could, and, most of the time when I had to pee, I crouched over the kitchen sink. I realize this was a major problem, but come on. I’d just lost my mom, so I had other things to worry about, like how to pay the mortgage, or what to do with mountains of worthless stuff. She’d kept every baby drawing I’d ever made, even the meaningless scribbles. Even a mother’s love shouldn’t have made her like those, but my mom was special.
My mom specialized in not throwing out anything. We were too poor to be choosy, she would tell me, when I said something or another was expired. She collected cans of food and microwavable bags of rice, but thankfully she seemed to have eased up on that since I’d left the house. She had hardly anything left in the pantry.
I called over a couple of her friends to come forage through her knickknacks and portraits and whatever else was left. They were all woo-woo old ladies who seemed like they’d be into the c h e r i s h or coffee, love, faith word art decor my mom had favored. They seemed happy to have the opportunity to come check up on me, and I was happy for them to take the cheesy signs off my hands.
Sonja, my mom’s old shift supervisor, had to use the bathroom while she was there. She seemed tearful when she came out of the bathroom, and gave me an extra-long hug goodbye.
“I know you have your thing about mirrors,” she said. Of course, she’d seen the setup I had in the bathroom. “I don’t know if I oughta tell you this, but your mom was a bit the same. She never wanted to tell you; said it wouldn’t help.”
“My mom was scared of mirrors too?” I asked. No way. She used to march me into the bathroom in the middle of the night, when I’d been bothering her too much, and force me to look. At some point, a school counselor made her stop.
“Just a little,” said Sonja, and sniffled. “She said sometimes she’d have these dreams, and that she wouldn’t see her reflection. They only started when you guys moved here. Sorry, baby, I know this probably didn’t help. I just think you have the right to know. This house don’t feel right, not to me. Please be safe.”
I thanked her for telling me and stood there for a long time after she left, feeling lost. My mom had never even hinted that she had a thing about mirrors. She made a point of loving them in front of me, always checking her reflection in car windows and shopfronts. It had never occurred to me she might have been trying to set an example.
Sonja said the nightmares only started after we moved into this house. I’d been so little when we moved here; I wouldn’t have known. I did know there was something wrong with our house. We didn’t talk about it. Sometimes we heard scratching in the walls, or sobbing. Things moved around at night. Sometimes you couldn’t see your reflection in the mirror.
My mom always ignored it, ignored me. She said the house was normal and fine and I was weird and wrong. When I begged to move, she yelled at me until I stopped asking. Everything was fine, and I was too scared, too silly, too imaginative. Since my mom was dead now, and I’d inherited what little she had, and I understood now that we never could have afforded to move.
I didn’t let myself think. I went right to the bathroom and tore down the paper. There I was: scared, silly, and imaginative. I pulled my face, moved my head, tried to escape the face in the mirror, but I couldn’t. It was normal. There was nothing in the mirror but me.
My heart was beating fast, but I wasn’t going to be afraid anymore. I was real. I was grown up. I was motherless. I had to take care of myself. I took that cutting board off the floor and I threw it right at the face in the mirror.
The mirror shattered, but it didn’t. A few pieces fell to the sink, but I still saw my reflection. There was something behind the mirror—there was another mirror.
It didn’t make any sense. I couldn’t breathe. I threw the cutting board again, and there was a bigger shattering sound, a crumpling, and I heard the mirror shards falling to the floor on the other side of the wall.
I peeked though. It was dark on the other side. If I let myself think, I’d run screaming. So I pulled out my phone flashlight to get a better look. Peering through, I saw a little room on the other side of the mirror. It looked just like my bathroom. It had the same wallpaper, the same towel hanger we hardly used, the same doorstop on the wall.
I used shampoo bottles to knock out the rest of the glass shards. I kept a large shard clutched in my hand carefully, as a weapon, and then I clambered onto the sink and climbed through. There was broken glass sliding under my slippers, and I felt it pricking the bottoms of my feet. I turned around, inspecting.
On the other side of the small room, where I couldn’t have seen from the mirror, there was a little nest made out of what looked like old blankets. I recognized some—the Scooby-Doo blanket we thought I’d left in McDonald’s, the quilt my grandma had made for my mom when I was born. She’d blamed me for losing it. They were soiled, blackened and dirty. They smelled. There was a toilet and a sink, which didn’t work. There was a door that didn’t open, to my relief, no matter how hard I tugged.
I turned to look at the hole I’d climbed through. There was a wire bent above the mirror. I reached up, and realized it was attached to a wooden square, which had been the frame for the mirror before I’d shattered it. It was removable from this side. I took it down. There were still shards embedded at the top of the hole, on the side where my bathroom was. I saw that they were only glass, perfectly see-through. Not a mirror.
There had never been a mirror in our bathroom. There was a glass window, and the mirror someone hung up against it, facing outwards, and which they took down sometimes, at night.
What if it came back and saw I’d found its spot? I climbed out as fast as I could, splitting open my forearms in the process. I barricaded the bathroom door before calling the police. The dispatcher was skeptical about my story; maybe that’s why it took the cops hours to show up. I paced the living room the whole time I waited, picking at my new scabs, flinching at every sound. They showed up, greeted me without interest, went into the batheoom and came back out, delighted.
“This is a weird one,” one commented to me. “Listen. Whoever’s been livin there is long gone. You said the house been unoccupied? How long?”
“Um,” I said. “A few months. Since my mom died.”
“Sorry to hear that,” he said, perfunctorily. “Listen. Oh man. I’m guessin they’ve been eatin your food, living off you like some kinda critter. Can you imagine?”
“Um,” I said.
“When you left, we’re guessin they ran out of food. And moved on.”
“How long were they here?” I demanded. I wanted to keep talking, make it clear how serious a problem this was, but I couldn’t think. I just said it again. “How—how long?”
“God,” he said, with admiration. “Coulda been decades. That glass panel y’all thought was a mirror? It was detachable, like a little door, y’know? They could climb out whenever they wanted, so. How long you been livin here? Food ever go missin? Y’all ever hear somebody movin around at night?”
“Yes,” I said, and began to cry. He patted me on the back for a while, then went to find his partner, where I overheard them gossiping like teenagers in the bathroom. They just loved it, couldn’t believe it, couldn’t wait to tell the boys.
When they left, I don’t even know if they filed a report. They didn’t seem to think it was a real problem, and even congratulated me on their way out, for conjuring up a spare half-bath. They pointed out that it would have connected to my mom’s room, but that the door had been boarded up for some reason. They doubted I could save the old blankets, and recommended burning them.
I considered calling Sonja, but it’s not the type of story you tell an old lady, especially not one who’d picked out the silliest of my mom’s word art decor (With ☆ GOD ☆ all ☆ THINGS ☆ are ☆ POSSIBLE). So I wrote this post. I didn’t know what else to do.
I haven’t repaired the mirror yet. I honestly feel better about having a hole in the wall instead. That way I can make sure nobody’s in it. I worry that the person who lived there is going to come back somehow.
But to be honest, lately I’ve started to consider repairing the hole, getting another glass panel set up and buying another mirror for the other side. I can’t keep up with the mortgage payments, and the bank’s been sending me increasingly URGENT letters. I’m afraid to open them. Sooner or later, something’s going to happen, and I’m going to lose the house. The only thing I can think to do is come with the house in secret. The idea sounds better and better to me lately.
After all, wouldn’t it be nice to be on the other side of the mirror for once?