MOSAIC

Chapter 6: Mirror

I crawled across cold cement floor like a reptile, dirt and filth sticking to my clothing as I dragged myself up against the wall outside of the bathroom where the lonely mirror beckoned to me. I didn't want to go in, but something inside of me nudged me forth, demanding I go inside.

Still crawling on the floor, I turned the corner into the bathroom and approached at an angle, dragging myself along the polished cement until I was practically right up underneath the mirror. The knocking sound was coming louder and harsher than ever before now. The red glow was darker in here too. Deeper and more ominous. I glanced upwards multiple times taking apprehensive lungfulls of air. I remained in a crouch, hesitant to stand up in front of the mirror as scorching hot terror smoldered inside my chest, weighing me down like heavy lava. With every passing second the knocking became more agitated and more hysterical. It sounded like something was going to shatter through the mirror's glass. With a few growling breaths I braced myself, allowing whatever pent up vehemence I had within me to envelop me in a false sense of furious courage. Jaw clenched, I tightly gripped one of the pipes sticking out from the wall beneath the mirror and began rising up to face my reflection.

​As soon as the top of my head appeared from the bottom of the mirror, the knocking abruptly faded away almost as though it was satisfied that it had successfully drawn me out. Now standing fully upright with my shoulders squared in front of my reflection, I bore my eyes into a doppelganger who glared back at me with equivalent ferocity. I peered at him through the bloodshot air which was angrily rippling like water, and all was eerily silent. Just me and the reflection, swaying back and forth in the dim red glow like two cobras. I could almost hear the beating of its hideous heart. ​

My face split into an experimental smile, and the primeval being in the mirror echoed the action, grinning back at me with malice. We remained transfixed to one another's presence, one looking inwards from the raw, tangible world, and the other gazing outwards from some sort of detached warped dimension. It seemed to breathe air of its own, as though it wasn't just a reflection. The smile faded from both our faces as we leaned in closer to one another, nearly touching noses. Small tufts of foggy moisture developed on the glassy surface, reaffirming the barrier between the worlds. I pulled back abruptly, not entirely comfortable being so close to it. The being in the mirror continued to glare back, the bathroom's shadowy reflection pulsing and twisting around behind it like a living, breathing thing. The somber red tranquility of the scene could only be described as existing somewhere deep within the quiet part of hell. ​

With a mounting sense of morbid thirst, I examined my mirror double, and the stranger reciprocated, peering back at me with a muddled face, his features ambiguous and liquefying into the red air like dense smoke. His eyes chewed into me coldly from between the vicious lines of his face, and I felt a distantly overwhelming sense of familiarity that went beyond this stranger simply being my reflection. This thing was something else. A quiet, leering darkness that I had encountered before. There was something highly unnatural which hung lifelessly in its eyes; extinguished remnants of something which used to exist but no longer did. It was nothing like looking into the eyes of a person, but more like staring into two placid pools of dead swamp water which had frozen over long ago.

I found myself transfixed and sinking into its coyote-like gaze, allowing something ominous and greater than I was to bleed through the fabric of reality and into the world, poisoning me with its vigour. I peered deeper and deeper into those bottomless eyes and experienced the vastness, bearing reluctant witness to my own desolation. I wasn't even certain that I was alive anymore, or that I had ever even existed.