I am 49 years old, 50 in only a couple of months. Too old to be frightened of the stories my grandmother told me during the long winter nights, when my parents were visiting their friends and it was just two of us sitting in front of the fire. I shouldn’t even remember them. And yet, I still avert my gaze from the bathroom mirror if I happen to be there between midnight and three o’clock in the morning. I’ve heard people refer to those hours as the witching hours. My grandmother never called them that or any other name. When I asked her “Why shouldn’t I look in the mirror at that time of night?”, she just shrugged her shoulders and simply said: “Because they look back. And once they see you…”.
She left the rest of the sentence hanging there, unfinished, unspoken, in the space between us. She didn’t need to say it, we both knew what she was speaking off.
Like I said, I am too old to be thinking about silly stories told by an elderly woman to entertain and, in equal measure frighten, a gullible child. It’s not her stories that stop me looking in the mirror in the middle of the night. For that, I have stories of my own.
There is a basement under my father’s house, as large as the whole footprint of the ground floor. There is no way to access it from the house itself. For that I would have to go out of our front door, turn right at the corner of the house and then descend the steep concrete steps, eleven of them, to the gloomy space under our home. I hated that basement. It was dark and cold and smelled funny. Worst of all that’s where She was. An old woman who lived in that basement. No, not lived, as she wasn’t a living creature, yet she occupied that space as fully and as easily as she occupied and terrorised my childhood. The memory of her goes all the way back to my earliest recollections, she was always there, lurking… waiting…
She was my first. In the beginning it was just this unsettling presence that was concentrated at the bottom right corner of the basement. The space there appeared slightly darker compared to the rest of the room, like the light itself struggled to penetrate it all the way through. Over the next few weeks it seems to grow bigger, spreading further into the room, claiming more of the space for itself. It felt fuller, heavier, gaining mass and a shape, until I was able to see her in the corner of my eye. You all know what I am talking about; that moment when you brain says: “Wait, what was that?!” and your eyes are trying to focus on the fast, blurry image that flashed by, just at the periphery of your vision.
At first, my primal fear seems to satisfy her. I would sense her menacing presence and would immediately break into tears. I would call out to my mother or my father and tried to explain what I saw. I would beg them not to ask me to go down there! Nobody believed me, of course. “You are just a scared child with vivid imagination” they would say. But as I grew, so did her need for my terror.
She wasn’t there all the time. Sometimes, there would be a month that passed by, possibly even longer, just long enough for me to stop looking over my shoulder and start hoping that it was over. Maybe I imagined it all… Then the torment would start all over again, stronger than before. Few of these incidents were particularly terrifying, and even after all these years I still remember the details with crystal clarity.
One summer evening, I could not have been older then 10, I walked up the few stairs leading to my parents’ front door, I opened the door and entered the long hallway that led to the living room. I remember that it was unusually bright moon that evening, I could see clearly the entire hallway, so I didn’t bother to switch the light on. It has been a while since I saw her last, so she wasn’t at the forefront of my mind. As I approached the living room door the sense of dread suddenly washed over me, my skin breaking into goosebumps and cold, tingly electric shock run down my spine. I could feel her before I had a chance to see her and as I looked up, I saw her pale face looming right above me! This was the first time that I saw her so clearly. That night her face was permanently etched into my brain. I can see it now; her skin had a yellowish, waxy shine to it and her face was lined with deep creases. I could plainly see the droopy folds above and under her pale, grey eyes. Her hair was shoulder length, black but heavily peppered with grey hairs, uncombed and unruly. She was smiling; no, not smiling, more like grinning at me. Something just wasn’t right about it. Her lips were thin, stretched over her gums and exposing too many teeth. The worst of all was yet to come as that wide grin stretched wider, impossibly wide, and the high-pitched scream filled my ears and my head.
I run outside as fast as my ten-year-old legs would carry me. I remember willing them on to move as they felt wooden and so very, very heavy. I could hear my parents and their friends gathered around the barbecue at the very bottom of the garden, happily chattering away, completely oblivious to the horror I was living through at that very moment. I sprinted towards them. I almost made it too. I was just about to round the corner of the house when she was right in front of me again with that horrible scream coming out of that wide gap on her face that shook every nerve in my body. I tripped and fell onto the sharp corner brick of the house, cutting a deep gash into my chin. By the time I reached my parents front of my t-shirt was soaked in blood. I ended up with three stitches in my chin and all these years later that scar is still visible and permanent reminder of Her.
After that the game was on. She would come and go as she pleased. She was no longer constrained just to the basement, she was free to roam the house and torment me. The only other member of the family that would catch at least a glance of her was my grandmother. I, however, seemed to be her favourite toy. My terror fed her.
My bedroom was at the far end of the house, I liked it there, the distance from the other bedrooms in the house offered a much needed privacy from the rest of the family as it hid my nocturnal screams and sobs to some degree. My bed was pushed against the wall, lengthwise, under the large window. That left three sides of it open. On the nights she would come, she would start pacing at the top of the bed, then down the full length of it until she finally stopped at my feet. And then back up again. Her steps would be slow and deliberate. Now and then she would pause in her pacing, and I would strain my young ears, hiding under the bed covers, trying to figure out has she finally left me in peace for the night. More often than not, the pacing resumed shortly after with increased intensity and the taunting continued like the previous, countless nights. Now and then, she would yank on my hair that was protruding out from under the duvet, and I would scream and scream. My parents were at the end of their patience with my night shenanigans, as they put it. Maybe I needed professional help, after all, aren’t I too old to be crying at night?! I learned to bite down on the pillow and smother the screams on the nights that she was in particularly vicious and playful mood. She would keep me awake night after night, periodically pacing, whispering or screaming in my ears. And the life went on.
Two days before I left my parents’ house, she made sure to send me off with a parting gift. I was 18 years old, and I haven’t seen her for a long time, at least a year. I finally grew out of my imagination, or so I told myself. That night I went to sleep and few hours later something woke me up. I sat up in bed and listened to the quiet groans and noises that all old houses make, but apart from those familiar sounds all was quiet. I laid back down, covered my head with the duvet and was ready to go back to sleep, when suddenly, the loud scream bounced inside my head. It did not come through my ears, this horrifying scream just stuffed my brain, so fully and completely that there was no room left for a single, coherent thought! Then something pulled my hair, so hard that I felt my scalp lifting off my skull. The bedcovers were yanked off me in one sleek motion. The room was icily cold. I jumped and threw myself at the direction of the light switch, but where once was an empty space between me and the wall with the light switch on, was now occupied by Her. I wasn’t a child anymore, I was tall enough that my eyes were on the level with hers. I saw her hooded grey eyes staring at me, the pure malice shining in them, and then I heard the familiar scream wailing out of that wide grinning mouth. I felt her bony fingers closing around my wrists, squeezing harder and harder. Somehow I managed to rip myself away from her grip and hit the light switch, and her face vanished with the bright light filling the room. But I could still hear the screams, it took me a minute to realise that I was the one screaming.
I cannot describe to you the sense of relief I had when I left my parents’ home. I was tired of her, and I was tired of doubting my own sanity because of her.
I never saw her again. I was away from a family home for couple of years and when I came back, she was gone. Maybe she moved on looking for another child to terrorise or maybe my absence starved her of pure fear she fed on and was forced to return to the hell she crawled out of. I don’t know and I don’t want to know. I was ready to write her off as a figment of an overactive, childish imagination that lingered around for way too long, until my grandmother said to me: “My poor child, none of my other children see them. I though it stopped with me, but it didn’t. It just skipped a generation.”
Like I said at the beginning of this story, she was my first. Many, many followed. Most of them were just lost and searching for their loved ones, some completely unaware that they are dead, some trapped here by their own pain. Few were like her, feeding of the fear of the living. But that is a story for another time. Something more important is on my mind. I have three children now, two sons and a daughter. I was hoping that it stopped with me, or maybe they were lucky and it skipped a generation…
When my middle son was around 6 years old, roughly the same age I was when I saw Her for the first time, he started waking up screaming in the night.
“It’s just night terrors honey”, I would tell him while hugging his trembling little body close to me, “it’s a bad dream, that is all. Mama is here, don’t be afraid. What did you see?”
“I saw a little boy mama” he said, “and he asked me to swap lives with him. His life for mine.”
The only thing I could tell him throughout his childhood was this: “Just remember, do NOT look in the mirror after midnight and before 3 o’clock in the morning. Some call them witching hours. I don’t have a name for them. I just know that’s the time they look back. And once they see you… “