At 12:17am, every night, arises the oppertunity to awaken an alternate soul. The most common way of viewing them? Through a mirror.
It is through said medium that the process must take place. Begin at exactly midnight. By no light but that of a single candle, stand before the selected mirror. For ten minutes you must concentrate in silence, focused entirely on your reflection. Do not look away from the eyes; for it will be interpreted as weakness and you will be overcome.
After ten secounds have past you must draw blood to smear in a line across the eyes of your reflection. Doing so will blind it, and you will watch as your own features begin to warp. Slowly, gradually, they will mutate into a frightening creature, one beyond the comprehension of those who have not experienced it. You must not look away through the entirety of the change.
Soon the writhing movements of the image will cease. By now an echoing, inhuman sound will resound all around you, the creature will begin to ease towards the mirror's glass. You must keep watching as it approaches.
If you do not extinguish the candle at exactly 12:17 the creature will escape.
Be warned, should you succeed, through any polished surface, be it mirrored, wood, or window your reflection will always be watching you.
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SLAM.
I jump so hard my head hits the ceiling. My eyes search wildly for my attacker and for a moment I can see him clearly. Tall, deathly pale, faceless and dressed in a suit. And so slender...
Then he's gone and I exhale. I'm being crazy. The evening I spent playing Slender and reading online horror stories had messed with my head, now, at 11:50pm I'm finally cracking, like my brain is sending me a crude message to go to sleep. This is how it does it, by bringing my imagination to life, or at least it seems life like, then whisking it away just before I can have a heart attack. Real funny brain, real funny.
I climb down from my top bunk and locate the source of the slamming: the window, blown open by the bitter wind that hammers relentlessly on the glass. Being careful not to look in the mirror I close the window and return to my bed, where my laptop is still open on Creepy Pasta, my current guilty pleasure. Over the past few months I've become almost addicted to the terrifying tales spun by the, shall we call them, authors of the website, to a point when I long for my next fix of gore. Even as I read them I know this will give me nightmares, but I can't help but read on, desperate for another bone chilling ending.
Although it isn't the worst, my latest find interests me the most. An actual ritual you can do to see a creature? And what did you need? Just a candle and a mirror? It's so tempting to try, just to see how far my mind will go, but not good for me. Not good at all. But, honestly, I've just tricked myself in to seeing Slenderman in my own bedroom, can it actually get any worse?
My mind is made up.
I have a draw full of old candles, nice smelling ones which I steal from the front room downstairs. I pick the least melted one and light it by the mirror, checking my phone: 11:55 and one message from my best friend. I open it.
"I can't get to sleep," she writes. "Entertain me?"
Since I have five minutes I decide to reply immediately. "Dude, I'm so freaked out XD"
I expect her to have fallen asleep by now, but a few secounds later my phone vibrates, giving me such a start I almost knock my candle over. "You're not on Creepy Pasta are you?" she writes, I can hear the exasperated laughter behind her writing.
"Well..." I text back with a wink face. Then I add. "Technically I'm not looking at it anymore. I found this soul-seeing ritual thing and I'm trying it out."
"Oooh awesome! What do you have to do?"
It's 11:59 now, so I decide wait until after my experiment to tell her how it goes then set an alarm on my phone for 12:10am. I check behind me. Yes, my little sister is still fast alseep in her bunk and there's no sound from the rest of the house for once. I start to stare at my reflection, keeping eye contact. It's quite hard to concentrate without letting my mind wander to what my happen, or worse, what might be in the darkness behind my reflection. The lavender scented insense drifts from my candle, filling my nostrils until I'm almost choking on it, but still I do not break eye contact with my reflection.
The alarm goes off.
I reach for the pair of scissors on my stool and do the part I am not dreading enough for any sane person. I drag the blade across my hand, pressing as hard as I can until blood starts to seep out of the cut. It hurts, it hurts a lot, but I am too engaged in what I'm doing to notice. Using my thumb, I smear the blood across the eyes of my reflection so the grey-blue eyes can no longer stare back at me.
Then it starts.
It's so subtle at first. Just a slight greyish tinge spreads over my, or rather it's, skin. The lips begin to turn purple, and then black, becoming hard and cracked. Gradually, my nose starts to bend in such a sickening way I can almost feel the pain and the nostril stretch until they are facing the ceiling, then snap back down, curling right over so they can no longer be seen, almost as if they are fused to the skin above the black lips, which are now dripping with dark green bile. The hair, which was once reddish-blonde, has become grey and matted while my cheeks have become lumpy, with each raised peice of skin turning dark blue.
What I can see of my torso has become unrecognisable as a human body. The arms no longer look solid, they just hang there uselessly as a purple rash spreads over them. Meanwhile, the clothes and skin have melted away, revealing the rib cage, but it does not look like a rib cage. The bones have twisted themselves in to obscene knots that wriggle and crunch loudly as blood starts to drip on to the floor, but I can barely hear the noise over the ear splitting wailing that's filling the air around me, bouncing off the walls, all around the house.
It's a song, I realise. A tortured, furious song that penetrates my mind, seeping through my very soul until I'm sure any more will kill me, but still it goes on. The expression of the reflection is agonised as the mouth moves over the nonsensical, never pausing, words of this song and I realise with a horrifyed jolt that my own mouth is also moving with the lyrics.
The creature starts to shuffle towards the glass, climbing on to the dressing table and crawling towards me. I don't know what the time is, but it must be near the end. I can't stand anymore. The creature is so close, it presses it's terrifying face against the glass, lowering it's head so in any secound it's eyes will no longer be covered and it will overcome me with it's tortured gaze...
A sudden heat touches flare in my palm and suddenly I'm in complete darkness. I open my mouth to scream but nothing comes out. Have I released the creature? Is it right infront of me still, but now on the real side of the mirror, in my world?
No. I look down and see my phone flashing with the time 12:17 on screen. I did it, at exactly the right moment I put the candle out and saved myself.
"It's gone, it's gone, it's gone, it's gone..." I whisper to myself again and again, trying my hardest to believe it. With trembling hands I wipe the blood from the mirror with my un-cut palm and back away until I walk in to my bed. Shaking from head to toe, I climb up on to my bunk and burrow as far as I can under the covers, closing my eyes against the darkness. But even behind my eyelids I can still see the creature I created and hear the wailing song it sung. In my mind, words appear infront of the image:
Be warned, should you succeed, through any polished surface, be it mirrored, wood, or window your reflection will always be watching you.
