People always told me not to face a mirror toward the bed. They say it invites “evil spirits” to watch you sleep. I never believed them, I wish I did. I wish I had listened.
I have a chair near my bed, I always make sure before I sleep that it is not facing my bed. About a week ago I woke up with it facing my bed. Oddly close. Sitting in the chair it was perfect, the perfect distance, the perfect angle. Every night since, the chair has been in a different position from where it was when I went to sleep. Always close to my bed, either next to it or at the foot of my bed. It’s a wooden chair. We have carpet floors. There’s no way it could move by itself.
I’ve recently started to notice bruises and scratches that weren’t there before I went to sleep. The scratches came in sets of fours, looking like they came from fingernails. The bruises looked like hands, the type of bruise you get from someone grabbing your arm with full force to keep you still. The type of grab you get as a child to keep you from running in front of a car to get your toy.
Last night I woke up with this odd warm, stinging, wet feeling. Once I got up and started to investigate where this feeling was coming from, I saw it. 4 scratches along my side, pouring out blood. It was as if someone had knives for fingernails and was fighting for their life, against me. My mattress covered in blood was too comfortable, I felt warm and safe in my own pool of blood. Though I’d just woken up I was exhausted, I believe it was from blood loss. Waking up had to have been at least 30 minutes after the initial injury with the amount of blood and the way it looked, most of the blood was dry but still slowly flowing.
The cuts ran so deep in my skin that I thought about calling an ambulance, instead, I drove to a nearby 7/11. I don’t think I realized how much blood I had truly lost. My white shirt turned red, both dried and fresh blood. The drive felt like hours, almost falling asleep, feeling ice cold. I bought wound dressing, Bandaids, and antibacterial creams. The cashier looked at me with worried eyes, like he’d seen a ghost standing behind me.
As I got home I quickly made the bleeding stop, put the dressings and creams, and the bandaids. Everything I could do to cover it. I got into my bathroom and at that moment I realized exactly what the cashier saw. My skin was pale, drained of any coloring. The bags under my eyes were so deep it looked like my skin was resting on the bones. I look like a living dead person. This spirit has drained the life out of me. I am now just a vessel for it to leech on, to use, to live in. The ghost the cashier saw was me, rotting away into what I am now.