The girl laughed again. She walked nonchalantly back toward the mirror, letting her arms swing casually at her sides. Once she stood in front of the mirror, Callie could see her eyes were full of hate and malice.
"What did you do?" Callie whispered, terrified. The reflection rolled her eyes, then looked right through Callie, fixing her hair and inspecting her face as if truly looking into a reflection; as if Callie was now the reflection in the mirror.
"Well," she began, straightening the white mini skirt of her nurse costume. "It's not what I did, but more like...what you did." She looked directly into Callie's eyes now. "You unlocked the door, then you opened it."
"You—you were scared. You were in trouble..." Callie tried to rationalize the situation.
"Ha! That is so like you, to believe your own lies." The girl put her hands on her hips and narrowed her eyes, her taunting glare icy, her words defiantly derisive. "Years, Callie. Years I have spent trapped in there, feeling your hate and your contempt. You have insulted me, bullied me, laughed at me, teased me... I am so fed up with your self-deprecation and feelings of worthlessness. You've given me plenty of time to think about it, and I've decided that I don't want you putting me down anymore. You’re nothing to me." She turned and headed toward the door again.
"Wait!" Callie pleaded. "Wait, please. I'm sorry! I didn't know...I wasn't aiming it at you...I’m so sorry!"
"You aren't sorry. You were aiming it all at yourself. And I am you. You meant every word."
"But—"
"Too late, hon. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a party to get to, a boyfriend to take, and a—what's her name? Melinda?—to humiliate. Just like you always wanted."
The girl paused at the bedroom doorway for a moment and tossed one last remark toward her new reflection.
"I think I'm going to enjoy being a real girl."
Callie was left in the mirror, the room growing colder by the minute. The mirror was whole; the door was locked. As she sank to the ground in despair, she did the only thing she could do. She sang.
"Save me from my hate
Protect me from my fate
Deliver me from here
One day each year.”
About Crystal M M Burton
Crystal M M Burton is the beloved wife of a brilliant Texan electrician and super-mom to three beautiful, energetic children. She runs a local cake-decorating business out of her kitchen, and in her free time enjoys crocheting, reading, gaming, and movie marathons. Writing is a passion she has carried with her since she was about eight years old, developing it into a full-time hobby. She has a new blog on Wordpress for short stories and tall tales, and a multiplicity of works in progress which can be seen on Wattpad.
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/crystalmmburton
Twitter: @CrystalMMBurton
Wordpress: http://crystalmmburton.wordpress.com
Wattpad: http://www.wattpad.com/user/CrystalMMBurton
Tip of the Hat
By Roy Lawrence Daman
We had just settled into our new home a little over a year ago. After the accident, my daughter and I just couldn't stay in the old one. There were too many memories of my wife. Too many reminders. It wasn’t that we wanted to forget her. It was just that her presence was too palpable to ignore. We packed up her things and left them in boxes in the attic of our new home. Those boxes sat there, untouched, collecting dust. The scent of her summer perfume still lingered on her clothing. I didn't go into the attic after that.
Closing those boxes felt like burying her all over again, each closed lid another shovel of dirt. Closing the attic door felt like lowering the casket, again. Neither of us wanted to unearth the dead.
After the move, I absorbed myself in my work. I dedicated myself to finishing the novel my wife and I had started together. I attempted, pitifully, to stamp out the noisy memory of the accident by tapping at my keyboard all day. I finally came to the conclusion that it was useless for me to keep ignoring her. She was there, in my writing, right beside me. The only way I could still have her was to write. So, I would chase after her until my eyes refused to stay open.
Cassie suffered as I did. I saw it in her eyes. I allowed my depression to swallow us both. We became haggard wraiths of our former selves. I wish I had seen the signs of division then. He had already been at work in our lives without our realizing it.
Had I been stronger, perhaps things would not have ended as they did. My pride, my indiscretion, and my anguish only served him. I regretted the part I played in the Tempest. Maybe this could have been avoided. Maybe there was no other way. I would never know for sure.
Cassie tried to bear the hurt on her own. I knew she did. She had discovered me before the accident. She knew. I avoided her out of guilt and shame. She spoke to me less as the months progressed. I wanted her to judge me, but she didn't. I wanted her to condemn me to hell for my infidelity, but she refused. She displayed no anger, only silence. Hopeless defeat shone dully through her eyes whenever we met accidentally. And so, we grew further apart. Living two lives, separately, in the same house.
She chose to bear the absence of her mother internally, using less artistic routes. She spent time with her friends while I stayed at home refusing the world. No world was worth experiencing without Tangie.
Loud screeching guitars would scream from the speakers of her home theater system during the day. My daughter stayed out late, coming in at questionable hours of the night. Something ate her from the inside out. The pallor of her skin became washed and pale like leather left out in the rain. I wondered, by the ever-growing gauntness of her face, if she were using drugs.
One night, she opened the door to the house at four in the morning. It was the same night when my mind dwelt on the distance that had grown between us, and the rage I felt at myself for my failures reached a fevered pitch. I shouted angrily that she was grounded and could not leave the house. Cassie told me I could not keep her locked away. She told me she had to keep going out at night and there was nothing I could do to stop her. She owed it to her mother to keep trying. I didn't know what she meant by that, then. I took it to be an emotional jab at me. She begged me, in desperation, to let her leave. She couldn't stay in the room at night. I refused.
We stopped talking, altogether, after that.
A week went by. She never left the house; I made sure of it. She stayed in her room and I barely saw her. I set my desk up in the central hall to keep an eye on her. One night, as I finished typing the last words to the chapter of our book, The Gnosis of Sophia, I heard a muffled scream from Cassie's room. I grabbed the shotgun from the closet and ran to her room. We lived in a home that sat inside a thick, isolated forest, and I kept a means of protection, just in case. I heard loud crashes from inside her room. She sung words I did not understand.
My skin crawled with chills as I approached her door. I felt an unexplainable yet overwhelming sense of fear and foreboding. Death waited on the other side of that door, I knew. I had heard the body goes cold when it’s prepared to fight as blood stores itself closer to the body to minimize bleeding. My body froze as if I were encased in ice.
I wasn't afraid of dying. I had a gnawing fear that, just like my wife, I couldn't save Cassie. Death had taken my greatest love; he would have me before he would have Cassie. My hand firmly clasped the brass doorknob. I held my breath. Tightness swelled in my chest.
An ancient presence permeated the room beyond. Fright. Malevolence. Terror. Dread.
The door wouldn't open when I turned the knob. Not knowing where Cassie's location lay inside the room, I couldn't fire the shotgun to open it. Every instinct urged me to run. I closed my eyes tightly and swallowed hard. I had to ignore them.
I raised the stock in the air and attacked the door knob until it flew off. Chips of wood and paint splintered over the hardwood floor. The heavy knob hit the wooden floor with a loud thud, and I kicked it out of the way. I placed my hand on the painted doorframe to open what remained of the door.
A dark man with a malicious smile stood over my daughter's bed. No part of his body was discernible save for the sharp black hat on his head, and the cold, lifeless eyes that stared through me. He turned slowly in my direction, tipping the brim of his black velvet hat towards me with raptor-sharp fingers. Shadows, fingers shaped like knives, rested on the gold cord that encircled the base of his hat.
Cassie's stereo turned on abruptly, causing him to turn his gaze from mine. The familiar bass chords of The Chain by Fleetwood Mac blared loud and brave, thundering through the room. My wife loved that song. At that moment, I swore I could hear her singing. Her brazen melody set the room afire with the conviction of her strength. For the briefest moments in time, I felt her hands warm on my shoulders. Her light diluted the darkness.
The man in the black hat turned his attention back to me. His sneer sent pricks of dread down my spine. He tilted his hat in such a way that the gleam off the cord reflected in my eyes, so bright I had to shield them. I uncovered my eyes. He, and his overwhelmingly evil presence, were gone.
I went to my daughter, who sobbed loudly under the sheets of her bed. I approached her as her wailing abated. An abrupt yet soft moan released from her lips, the terrified kind one emits when they know their death is imminent. I shook her forcefully to wake her. Her eyes bulged frantically and she released a shriek so shrill I had to cover my ears. Tears streamed from the corners of her eyes. She did not recognize me. She didn't recognize anything. Her eyes moved frantically as if she were trapped behind a one-way mirror with no way to see out.
Her left hand searched desperately for an object on her bed. Cassie squeezed the object softly. A faint smile treaded cautiously across her lips, and as she grasped the thing she needed her eyes slowly focused on me. I saw the first glint of recognition in her. She brought the object to her chest and held it tight. Her eyes did not waiver from mine; they locked on mine in such a way I believed Cassie dared not look anywhere else.
What did she see on the periphery of her vision that tormented her so? She held in her arms the worn and tattered unicorn plushy my wife had bought for Cassie's crib. My daughter never left that doll alone. The white fur over the years had transformed into an off-white gray. When Cassie was little, she would say her mother was that unicorn. She told us, when she was old enough to speak, that she imagined the unicorn was her mother when she couldn't be with Cassie.
Looking around her room, I could not find the teddy bear she had also carried with her everywhere through her childhood. Those two dolls had been with her no matter where she went. I bought her that bear because of her insistence on calling me her ‘Papa Bear’ when she was six. My beard and gruff attitude no doubt gave her the impression I was a bear. She had told me that it protected her from the monsters. Where could it be now, if not here?
I thought we had boxed those up in the attic. How had they found their way to her room?
A faint resemblance of calm returned to my daughter. She clung to the unicorn like a life raft in the midst of a rancorous storm at sea. I asked her what had happened and who that person was. Through a deep, hoarse voice she would only say, “Tempest." She fainted shortly after. No effort on my part roused her from the torpor under which she found herself. She breathed heavily as if she had not slept in a week's time. I quickly found her pulse, but every effort I made to wake her met with futility.
I inhaled. It wouldn't be so miraculous a statement to make except that I hadn't in several minutes. The color returned to my skin and I felt the blood rushing through my ears. When the signs of life have been absent from your body and they suddenly return, you wonder how you never sensed them before. The cold vapor of the room faded. Every muscle ached as they released from a tension of which I had not been aware. Warmth returned to my body. Exhaustion overwhelmed me.
A shot of adrenaline coursed through my newly opened veins. I couldn't be sure who I was dealing with. I shook my head and closed my eyes. I was an intelligent and logical man. Not being religious, I refused to acknowledge supernatural explanations for the intruder. That man must have used hallucinogenic chemicals to make me feel like I experienced those things. Perhaps Cassie had been given a higher dosage, causing her to become catatonic.
Then a thought, more frightening than being drugged, occurred to me. He had escaped while I was stunned. I hadn't heard a door open. That meant he must still be in the house. I went about looking for any indication of where he may have exited the house, but I found none. No doors unlocked. No windows broken. No trap doors to be found. I gripped my shotgun harder. I searched every crevice of the house. I looked inside showers, under beds, inside closets, in the garage—all with my pulse ramming steadily against my neck. I couldn't find a sign of a hiding place. Where did he go?
By the time I finished, the first rays of the morning sun shone in through the windows. Weariness leaned on me with all the weight of a sleeping giant. I made one last sweep of the house to ensure every door was locked, and then I returned to my daughter's room. What else could I do? I didn't think it wise to call the police. I had no evidence to give them and my daughter lay comatose in her room. They may suspect me of doing something awful to her unless I could produce the intruder.
I braced a chair against the destroyed door. I placed the wooden rocking chair to face the door, then sat down to rock nervously and rest the shotgun in my lap. He likely hid from me in some niche of which I was unaware. Now he would have no other choice than to come to me. There wasn't another house for twenty-five miles, and the nearest town was triple that in distance from us. If the intruder set out now, he might make it to town before dusk, when the coyotes liked to roam the woods on either side of the road.
This thought calmed me a bit and I slowed my rocking. He would have no other choice than to come to me, and when he did, he would answer all of my questions.
I palmed the wooden armrest. My wife used to nurse Cassie in this chair. It seemed fitting that I sat as a sentinel in it now.
I looked over at Cassie and went to check on her. Her condition had worsened. Her skin, no longer holding a healthy hue, felt cool to the touch. Her body was coated with cold perspiration. Her pulse and breathing felt normal. Her face tensed in pain. Black, spidery veins rippled vigorously beneath her sallow skin.
A book fell from the desk at her window. I opened it up. This journal my wife gave to her last year. I skimmed through it, hoping to find answers there. Maybe she had taken drugs. Or worse. This journal had to have some answers for me, something that could explain the events of the night. One thing was evident without opening the pages. Cassie knew who this man was and had tried to avoid him for quite some time. My god, why hadn't I listened to her? She had begged me to leave, and in my stubborn selfishness I had responded in anger.
I opened the journal. The spine creaked in protest. The first pages dealt mostly with typical teen angst and her sullen feelings over boys. Some had to do with an interest in her mother's affinity for paganism. I rapidly turned each page, skimming over most details, in search of an explanation. She mentioned her mother a lot. The mood of her writing gradually became darker and more serious. The edgy teenager changed gradually over the pages into someone more adult than she should have had to be.
My mind froze. I couldn't think. Cassie wrote as if her mother still lived. What pain she must have been in when her mother died. She fixated on her mother's interests and personality. I loved Tangie deeply, but I knew this to be unhealthy obsession. At that point, the dark man began to emerge in her words. She said she had discovered from her mother, too late, about the curse and what it meant for her. She wrote that my wife had kept it from
her because mentioning him around Cassie would attract his attention to her. Before Tangie died, she told Cassie about the shadow man with the sharp, brimmed hat.
Between written paragraphs about her mother and the dark man, she lamented our arguments and how she wished she could explain to me. Cassie never blamed me. I sighed with relief. She wrote kindly about our falling-out and how it saddened her. She didn't stop loving me. She wanted me to know she fought something inside her. Something I shouldn't have to deal with. As she put it, I was not part of the curse, and she didn't want to lose me, too, even if I had broken the chain. I didn't understand what that meant. She had dissociated herself with reality and created one of her own. One that helped her make sense of the tragedy of her mother's passing.
I swallowed hard. Dread loomed over me as I turned the pages to what came next. I almost dropped the book when I realized what they were—drawings of that dark man. Horror bled into my hands as they shook. This dark, hatted man. She drew him exactly as my wife imagined him; he was a character in our book. Had Tangie seen this man, too?
Cassie described, in lucid detail, meeting this hat man when he first appeared at the foot of her bed.
'He arrived tonight. He finally found me. Pulsing darkness and dread wherever he breathed. All are simultaneously alive and dead in his presence. I should have expected him. He overpowered mom, and now he is after me, wearing me down night after night without rest. It is only a matter of time before I can no longer resist, and then it will be over.
'She knew her time was short. She warned me a few days before she died. He cannot be defeated while the chain remains broken. For the curse to break, someone must stand in the hollow and unite the chain. Mom said that there hasn't been a human born who could stand in the hollow and remain whole.
The Grim Keepers Page 15