NECROCITY TIMES - Issue #1 - HALLOWEEN SPECIAL

Man in the Mirror by @light-in-darkness

by: light-in-darkness

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The mirror had been my great-great-grandmother's. Or so my mother said as she hoisted it up the narrow stairwell. My housemates eyed the overly ornate thing with concern. They seemed to know one of us were bound to break it. I just prayed it wouldn't happen today.

I jumped forward to lend Mom a hand. "Shouldn't it be going in a museum or something?"

Mother laughed, "Oh, Eleta, it's a family heirloom. Please don't give me fears you'll pawn it."

I decided not to argue, and we slide the thing across the hall and into my bedroom. My roommate, Jessica, startled as we banged through the doorway and lifted her head from her book as we propped the thing against the wall opposite my bed.

"Creepy," she said.

It wasn't an inaccurate description. With its black iron decorative frame and its hazed out glass, it did resemble something from a horror movie. Not to mention the reflections it did give off were faded and ghost-like, but I gave Jessica a dirty look anyway.

Mom and I went out for lunch, said our pleasant goodbyes, and when I returned back to the house, the mirror was still intact, still leaning against the same wall. I emailed a reminder to my housemates to be careful and stuck a post-it note on the glass. 'If you break me, you die,' I wrote.

Luckily, as the semester continued and we hosted a few parties, the mirror survived. People learned to avoid the room.

After the first party, I found a note on the door that read, 'Creepy mirror inside. Enter at own risk.' Other post-it notes were added to the mirror: 'Thought it was just 7 years bad luck.' 'But I LOVE breaking mirrors!' and 'Beware the man in the mirror.'

As I pulled off the notes, the last one struck me. At first, it just seemed a strange thing to write, but the more I thought about it, the more it gave me the creeps.

I asked my housemates if they recognized the handwriting. Most just shook their heads and walked away. One laughed and said, "You're trying to make that thing creepier, aren't you?"

"I swear," I laughed. "It's not me."

As I was changing into my clothing one morning, I saw him: a man in the mirror watching me from the corner of the room. I snapped my head back, squealing as I covered my chest with the scarce material in my hands. No one was there. It was so strange. He'd looked so solid, so real.

I glanced back at the mirror, but there was nothing, and then my roommate groaned from her bed, "What's with the screaming?"

"Nothing," I said. "Just thought I saw . . . someone. It was nothing."

"Jesus, Eleta, don't scare me like that."

That evening, my roommate didn't come home after class.

"It probably didn't help that you tried to prank her this morning," one housemate said.

"What's that supposed to mean?" I protested. "I didn't prank Jessica."

The girl shrugged. "She said something about a man in the mirror? Anyway, she's moving out. Might want to rethink your pranks next time."

While I was mad about the false accusation, I didn't mind losing the roommate. I liked having the room to myself and even grew comfortable with having the mirror around. At times, I did feel eyes on me, but the feeling always passed.

At night, I'd dream of waking to find a handsome man peering out from the mirror as if through a window. I was always more intrigued than afraid of him. This is how I knew it was a dream. In any other situation, I would have freaked over seeing such a thing. Now, the man in the mirror was becoming some sort of semi-sexual fantasy.

Halloween night, I escaped the loud noise of my sorority's party to the quiet seclusion of the bedroom. The music roared from somewhere downstairs, and as I changed down to my pj's, I noticed the note on my mirror had been moved.

I leaned over to lift it off the mirror, but as I did, my fingers hit glass. The note was exclusively on the other side. Heart racing, I gave the note a closer look. Scribbled in thin slanted letters were the words, 'You're beautiful.'

I tapped the glass, trying to figure out how this illusion was happening. Was this a Halloween prank? Had someone added another layer of glass and stuck this note between the mirror and it?

But then a hand thrust through my reflected self and removed the note from the other side.

I let out a yelp as I scrambled on my heels. My bottom collided with the floor, my back against the bed. He was fiddling with the mirror from the other side. His pants were dark, his chest was shirtless, and his long hair was tied together behind his back. When he glanced up at me and grinned, I recognized his face. Maybe I hadn't been dreaming!

As he pulled out the glass out of the frame, my ghostly reflection slide out of view. The room behind him still perfectly mirrored the one I was in, and he set the glass somewhere on the other side.

I was frozen stiff, voiceless, as he stepped through the mirror's frame and entered my world. He squatted down to my level, took my shivering hand and kissed it before lifting me into his arms.

I let out a yelp, but he shushed me, and I was too afraid not to obey. He carried me through the threshold of the mirror, set me on the opposite bed and placed the glass of the mirror back in its place. Waving a hand over the glass, the glass darkened to stone, and when he turned his eyes back to me, I knew there would be no escape. He wanted me, and he believed I wanted him too.

Looking for some more spooks? Check out the Dark Dreams | Tenebris Somnia Halloween Anthology taking place all month long tenebris_somnia . Below is a teaser of my new short story to be released in the anthology on October 28.