It is my turn to tell our story. Finally I am free, I have served my time, out much sooner than expected due to good behaviour. It no doubt helped that Marla had no local connections to protest against our release, she was from away, after all, she and her mother. They just randomly showed up in our town, almost forty years ago, when Marla was a baby, and they never had any visitors or family that anyone ever heard of.
As if they were hiding something.
I knew better than to say what it was- I’m not like poor stupid Lisa, confined to a psychiatric ward for the rest of her life because she can’t shut up about what she saw. Mandy, Yas and myself, we know better. We kept our mouths shut. Yes yes, mass delusion, group psychosis, there have been precedents, blah blah blah. No, there had been no falling out, no confrontation, we, the four of us, just randomly decided to attack Marla as she lay on the ground injured from her fall, and we bashed her face in with sticks and rocks we just picked up, killing her. It happens.
None of us had displayed any deviancy before or since, Marla was our friend, we knew each other since childhood, we went hiking together, and that was where it happened. Out on a hike. We just randomly and cold-bloodedly murdered her, in the most brutal way possible. It happens. No explanation.
Except the one that Lisa gave, which landed her in the loony bin.
Let me tell the story from beginning.
It started when Marla and her mom landed in our small town in remote northern Canada, seemingly out of nowhere. Marla’s mom made a living teaching English online, and she became known as a pleasant, harmless single mom, understood to be avoiding an abusive relationship. She homeschooled Marla, but did try to arrange a bit of a social life for her, even though you could tell, from that early age, how protective she was of her. I was a child myself, and I remember playing with Marla out in the street, she wasn’t allowed to come to any of our houses, but she could invite us over, and we sometimes went. Marla’s mom was nice enough, but she was always looking worried, cautiously looking around, checking the environment, twisting this way and that. I remember her perfectly, even as a child myself, always making sure Marla’s face, a perfectly normal-looking face, was covered as much as possible by a huge baseball cap. I remember once she refused to drive us somewhere in her car- and she got quite cross with Marla for insisting. She took her indoors and kind of shoo’d us away. It was only later when I thought about it I realised Marla had never been inside any of our houses, or in any of our parents’ cars, nor were we ever in her mom’s car.
There’s a lot of time for going over the minutiae of memories in prison. I remember going to the washroom in Marla’s place, and realising something was missing but I couldn’t figure out what it was.
Then later that night I woke up suddenly realising what had been missing. A mirror. There had been no mirror in their washroom.
It must have been a couple of years after, maybe we were twelve or thirteen and we wanted to go to the mall by ourselves. We were at that age you know, testing boundaries, and of course some parents were stricter and others not so much. Marla’s mom was one of the strict ones, we got it. But we wanted to go to the mall really badly, the five of us, Mandy, Yas, Lisa, myself and Marla. Marla knew she was not allowed to but we all decided to go anyway.
We saw it then. We saw her face reflected in the mirrors at the mall. Marla’s face in the mirror was the face of a demon.
We were in Sephora, dizzy with the colours and the make-up and lights and excitement, and we were trying on products and the beautiful glossy salesgirl was helping us and it was Marla’s turn and she was laughing and going to try on this gorgeous green-gold eyeshadow, and she looked in the mirror and all of us saw clearly, her reflection, a terrible demon-face, a flayed skinless face, fierce soulless yellow eyes and a lipless mouth drawing back over dreadful fangs.
There was a moment of silence as Marla flinched away from the mirror. Lisa gave a little shriek. I pushed Marla aside, and looked at myself in the mirror, confused.
We went back home. We didn’t talk about it. There was nothing to say.
We saw Marla less after that, she didn’t hang out with us much anymore, she seemed to be spending more and more time with her mom. They had taken up hiking and camping, and a very outdoorsy lifestyle- everybody did the great outdoors in this part of the world.
The two lived quietly enough until a few years later, Marla’s mom died of cancer. Marla, now a young adult, was all alone, and she naturally gravitated back to the friends she had had as a child- us. I understand, what else was she to do? She had a pleasant, sociable personality. And maybe the demon vision in the mirror at Sephora, so many years ago, had been a fluke? Anyway, our friendship was reignited through our love of camping and hiking, really there isn’t that much else to do in our small town.
One day, when the five of us were out on a hiking trip, Marla caught her ankle on a branch and fell, bashing her head on a rock on the way down.
We knelt by her still body, calling her, and one of the us – it was Mandy I believe, definitely not me- drew out a pocket mirror and held it in front of Marla’s face to check her breathing. I don’t know if she had forgotten about Sephora- we had never talked about it, after all.
We crowded round the mirror to see, and then we began screaming, we couldn’t help it- we were horrified at the pulsing skinless face and fangs protruding from the lipless mouth.
Marla’s fiery eyelids fluttered in the mirror.
Our screaming grew louder- I can still hear it. Then Lisa snatched up a rock and just as Marla was opening her yellow demon eyes, smashed it down on her face. Honestly, Lisa had never been very stable –it’s not fair to blame her breakdown all on Marla and her demon-face. But when she did that- somehow we all snapped, grabbing up sticks and rocks, beating down on poor Marla’s face.
Soon Marla was unrecognizable, lying in a pool of blood with her face smashed in. Panting, we looked at each other and our bloody weapons. The small mirror, broken and splattered with blood, lay on the ferns.