I first saw it when I was six.
My parents were redecorating, and were painting a wall of the house. The wall that they were painting happened to have several pictures and a mirror on it. They obviously couldn’t paint over these things, and they weren’t stupid enough to paint around them, so they took them down temporarily. They distributed the placement of these items throughout the bedrooms of me and my older siblings. My room received the moderately sized, bulky wooden mirror, ornate in intricate and exquisite carvings.
I had seen the mirror before, it was nothing of notability unless you came up close to it to examine its decorative properties. I took no extra thought of its presence when I entered my room following my bath and toothbrushing for the night. My mother tucked me in, and I fell asleep easily.
I slept gently, that was, until I awoke to a sound. One I cannot describe. It was not grotesque or creepy, or anything of note, but rather I had never heard anything similar to it, and never have since. I turned to examine the room, lit by the gentle light of a full moon that hung ever so gallantly over the clouds dotting the sky, above all in it’s firmament. There was nothing out of the ordinary, my mess, typical for the room of a first grader, was most definitely not absent, and in all positions where I had left it before turning in for the night. I turned to look at my alarm clock. It read, 2:11 A.M.
Six year old me gasped and exclaimed “Wow!”, ever so quietly as to not arouse attention from my slumbering kin. I had never known it possible to stay up to such an hour, but I had achieved the feat! It was one I had intended to share with my peers the following morning. As I turned myself around as to fall back asleep, having forgotten completely about the circumstance of my awakening, something caught my eye, just in the corner of peripheral. Movement. However so slight, any six year old knows the dangers of unknown movement in a darkened bedroom, late into the reign of the night. From the time when the Moon is king to the time the Sun is ceded the title of such, we all know that the monsters lurk. And if anyone knows this best, it is an imaginative young mind.
I bolted my head to the side, my curiosity aroused, my fear piqued.
Nothing, there was nothing. I sighed, one of relief. There was no looming fate for me in the deep corners of my dwelling after all. And then I heard a cough, one as if it’s origin had been clearing it’s throat. I listened.
Hello? Hello, hello? You, there, come to me.
I was surprised to hear myself talk. Why had I spoken? Then, a feeling of horrible dread bestowed itself upon me. That wasn’t my voice. Why would I have thought that in the first place? (Six year old stupidity, I suppose). No, that wasn’t my voice piercing the silence of the night, the dead of the ungodly hour. It was one of that who is foreign to me, to us, one who resided in the night.
I screamed. I screamed an I cried, as any six year old would after having been spoken to by an entity of the darkness, a creature of the darkest shadows that cast themselves in the darkest hours for the darkest means. My older sister, Anne, was the first to throw open my door. My older brothers, Brice and Ronnie, came next, followed by Mom and Dad.
I explained to them what had occurred. They expressed sorrow and concern, but I recognized the notion that they failed to find belief in the explanation of my sudden outburst. I did not play upon it, I knew better than making trouble.
The following day at school, I told my best friends, Danny, Joey, and Mike, what had occurred. They communicated to me their own tales of monsters, of which I now, of course, recognize to likely be fabrications. Monsters do not behave as they described. They had seen things, or made them up in dreams or thoughts. However so, they were intrigued, so we agreed on asking my parents to host a sleepover that Saturday.
After school that day, I asked my mother, the only one of my parents present, if I could have permission to have Danny, Joey, and Mike over on Saturday night. “Well, what about what happened last night, huh?”, she asked me. I assured her that the monster was gone (it was not, but of course she didn’t need to know that). And so it was set. Two nights from then, me and the closest thing a six year old could get to a crew would be over at my residence, hunting for the monstrous scum that preys on our fear and lives on the energy, or lack of it, that chooses to reside in the lightless rather than the light.
The next two nights were unbearable. Speech, calls, all sourced themselves from my bedside, and I merely had to refuse to acknowledge them in order to not be the world’s youngest heart attack victim. Then came Saturday, and at 7:30 PM, my friends started to pour through the door. We ate pizza, and then raced each other to my bedroom.
We had done this multiple times before, sleepovers were a ritual for me and Danny, Joey, and Mike. We played our usual games and tricks. Tic-tac-toe, the Nintendo 64, locking the bathroom door from the inside so that when Anne emerged from her room with an overfilling bladder she couldn’t get in and would be forced to go back to her room and hold it as best she could. It was strange, but that’s what six year olds do. Torture people in the most meticulous of ways.
Eventually, the clock turned to 10, and our parents arrived in our room to force us to sleep. I use force loosely, because, while we usually would fight being put to bed, this time, we excitedly followed their orders. After they went to bed themselves, we listened around for anymore activity. Ronnie liked to go bed early, as he was always tired, and Brice was staying at the home of a friend of his after playing a football game that night. The only person awake other than us was Anne, who could be heard complaining to her friends over the phone about someone taking up all this time in the bathroom while she really needed to piss. We all giggled as we listened in on the profanity-filled conversation. Eventually, it hit midnight. Anne had since gotten off the phone, and we snuck out of our room to check the progress of our prank.
She was rolling around on her bed, in a fetal position, with her hands in her crotch, making a horrible hissing sound, with tears streaming down her face. Me and my friends managed to deduce that peeing wasn’t the only thing that she was dying to do, and we raced back into my room, laughing our asses off like little maniacs.
Back in the safety of the room, we began to discuss Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Mario 64, anything that was of interest to a first grader in 1997. That’s when we heard a voice. Kids!, it yelled. We turned, expecting to our see our parents looking down at us with angry eyes, enraged that we were not sleeping. However, that was not the case.
As we began to wonder what the voice had been, we remembered the event that had brought us here, and I remembered the events of the previous two nights. I turned to meet my friends’ collective dreadful gaze. The moon shine bright yet again, however, tonight, my curtains had blocked it’s face from looking into my room. I began to remember the monsters of the dark, the phantoms of the air, the devils of the world.
Look here, you kids! Listen to me, already!
We shivered, and Joey let out a muffled scream, one he silenced as to not awake anyone. And that is when I happened to gaze in the mirror. Instead of being met by my own reflection, I saw that of a woman staring at me with hateful eyes. Ah, I see you’ve finally noticed me, mister!, it said to me in a voice cusping on angry and exhausted. I pointed to her, but it was no use, my friends had already noticed her.
Yes, yes, look. But not at me, no, no. Down the hall, rather.
We followed it’s instruction, and poked our heads out the door and down the hall, in the direction of the house’s one and only bathroom. The one we had locked from the inside.
Outside of it’s door stood Anne, dancing. We all knew why. She was crying too, expectantly waiting for a phantom individual to exit.
We watched as, suddenly, she gasped and liquid began to hit the carpet beneath her, and, uh, other stuff came out of her. We first graders were proud that our prank had been pulled off successfully.
The Lady of the Mirror wasn’t so.
Is this who you want to be, what you want do? Why, this is mad! Don’t take part in such activity!
We were not impressed with the lecture. We ducked back into the room, no longer viewing the crying yellow-and-brown mess we had turned my own sister into.
Mike told her to shut up, she didn’t know anything.
Young Michael Hemmeth, I know all.
Mike was shocked she knew his name. He wanted to ask how she knew, but he knew better then to ask a cosmic entity that.
And you, Stanley, she said looking at me, you are a traitor to your own family.
I stared at her. I didn’t speak. I knew that she was wrong. Joey than piped up.
”Look, lady, I don’t know where you came from, but you’d better fuck off!”
Me, Danny, and Mike met each other‘s eyes. Joey had obviously learned the words from Anne‘s earlier conversation.
Joseph DeGrasse, I sense a devil in you!, yelled the Lady.
Right then, the worst, most horrible thing I had ever seen in my life happened. As the world seemed to deafen, the mirror displayed an image: no longer that of the room or of the Lady, it showed the interior of a badly damaged car. It was a tan Buick. A distorted version of Africa by Toto struggled its way out of the broken radio. And in the front two seats lay…
”MY PARENTS!“ Joey screamed, this time taking no caution in his volume.
This time, my parents rushed to the door. We thought that it was because of Joey’s ungodly scream, or perhaps because of Anne’s accident that we had induced upon her. But it was neither.
”Joey, I’m so sorry…” spoke my parents, one of which was holding a landline phone, in unison, but we already knew.
The other day, I was going through a family photo album after Anne’s funeral. I’m the only surviving member of my family, and of my first grade friend group, which I had long since forgotten about until recently.
In one photo, it showed my great-great-grandmother’s deathbed. Everyone in my family told stories of her greatness. She had been a Catholic nun that had supposedly saved a boy from a fire. In the background of the photograph, I noted the mirror. The memories suddenly rushed back to me like a marathon. As I thought about it, I noted some familiarity in my great-great-grandmother.
I still don’t know why she did it, we were just little kids who wanted to pull a prank.