Mirror Mirror

Day Three

Jaime awoke to a throbbing back and a painful neck. The couch was hardly the place to get a good night's sleep, and even though he'd only spent half the night on it, that was enough to convince him he didn't want to spend another.

He staggered to his feet, went to the bathroom and brushed his teeth, then put on a pot of coffee and went to get dressed.

He didn't have class today. His intention had been to spend the day studying, but instead he found himself at the desk in the bedroom, sitting in front of his laptop.

He glanced around the room, nervous, but there was nothing to see, so he turned his attention back to the computer. He brought up his web browser and typed two words into the search bar.

HAUNTED OBJECTS

The cursor blinked and then a bunch of results popped up. When he looked at the page count he saw that there were over three hundred pages of results.

"This is going to take all day." He muttered to himself, sipping the hot coffee.

Even so, Jaime scrolled through the results, clicking on any that looked promising. The first chronicled a supposedly haunted brush that made the owner's hair fall out if they used it - Hardly relevant, and more than a little dubious.

The next link he clicked told the tale of a haunted doll that apparently ran around at night terrorizing all those who lived with it. On one occasion it was even seen looming over a bed with a steak knife from the kitchen clutched in its porcelain hand. This was no more believable than the last account, and didn't get him any closer to finding out about his own object.

Another account, however, was a little more interesting. It seemed that a pair of brothers in London had purchased a very old mirror from a flea market and brought it home, hanging it in their hallway. From that moment on they got no peace. Vague figures moved around their house at night, they heard strange noises and footsteps when there was no one there, even voices. The phantoms would whisper things, including their names, which terrified the pair. Eventually things came to a head when one of the brothers tried to kill the other, and then claimed a spirit that lived in the mirror possessed him. When the pair investigated the origin of the mirror they discovered it had hung for many years in a local mortuary, and that before that it was rumored to have belonged to a man who killed his entire family and then disappeared.

Jaime read the story a second time, and then studied the photograph that accompanied it, a picture of two guys posing net to the troublesome object. While it didn't resemble his mirror – it was smaller with a less ornate frame – it gave him a chill to look at, so he clicked the tab to close the browser window.

The one thing that struck him the most about the mirror in the article was its background. Jaime had no idea if the mirror really had been in a murder house, or if it ever actually hung in a morgue, but now his interest was peaked. He wanted to know more about the mirror leaning against the wall behind him. There was only one way to do that, he would have to go back to where he found it.

He jumped up, closed the laptop, and found a clean set of clothes, selecting a shirt and fresh jeans from his closet, and grabbing a belt and socks. He dumped these on the bed and headed to the bathroom to freshen up.

After his shower he returned to the bedroom and dressed. When he looked for the belt he'd placed on the bed only moments before though, it was gone.

He searched around, wondering if it had fallen to the floor, but there was no sign of it. He returned to the bathroom, thinking that he'd put it down somewhere there, but he hadn't. Ion his ay back to the bedroom he took a quick look around the living room, even though he knew it would be there. Empty handed and frustrated, he returned to the bedroom, found another belt, slipped it through the loops of his jeans and buckled it. He could worry about the missing one later. There were more important things to do.