by J. S. Bailey
A car door slammed in front of the house. Elena capped her lipstick and went down to the lounge, straightening a vase here, a lamp there; just to prove to herself she could at least pretend everything in her life was as it should have been.
The knock she’d expected came then, and Elena threw the door open with a flourish. Marty stood before her with the mirror hugged to her chest, the shocking pink headband in her hair again.
“I—I brought it back.” Marty’s tone was overly cheerful.
“I see that.”
“Should I bring it in?”
“Might as well put it back where it belongs.”
Marty didn’t say another word until the mirror hung in its proper spot on Elena’s bedroom wall. They watched in silence as policemen in the reflection dusted the room for prints.
“It’s just too pretty to break,” Marty said without looking at Elena. She’d crossed her arms. “Like smashing the Mona Lisa.”
Elena put on a humorless smile. “So. What did you use on it?”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about. But you know, it’s funny. I thought I’d do you a favour and took it to an antiques dealer near my flat right after they opened this morning, and when I tried to sell it to him, he went white as a sheet and told me to leave; and the lady at the next shop I took it to said they don’t accept mirrors!”
“Can you really blame them? This thing has got to be a legend.”
“Maybe so. You know,” Marty said, “you could always just leave it in a bin somewhere.”
“I could.”
Marty checked her wristwatch. “Goodness, look at the time! I’d best be on my way to work.” She started towards the bedroom door. Elena latched onto her arm to stop her.
Marty’s eyes were bloodshot. “Why did you have to buy that bloody thing? Why couldn’t you have bought something normal, like…”
The policemen in the mirror seemed to be finishing up. Elena swallowed a knot in her throat. “Any other suggestions?”
“Just one. Don’t let yourself die.”
ELENA paced from one end of her office to the other, the jitters making it impossible for her to work. She’d come up with some half-true excuse for not showing up the day before, and now she needed an excuse to leave.
But what would she do if she left? Walk out into traffic? Have a piano drop on her head? Get blown up in a terrorist attack?
Don’t let yourself die, Marty had said, but the mirror had made it clear that Elena didn’t belong in the future.
Getting rid of the mirror seemed the logical option. However, its absence would not change the fact that Elena’s father and policemen would soon be in her bedroom wondering what had happened to her.
“If only I could run away from it all,” she murmured, pausing to look out her office window.
Traffic rumbled past the office car park: cabs, lorries, buses full of tourists.
Elena’s skin prickled. “I can run away.” The light changed, and traffic ground to a halt. An advertisement for the Isle of Skye splayed across the side of a bus. “I can run away.”
She looked at the time—only half past eleven. Far too early to leave.
Just go, urged a voice in her head that sounded remarkably like Marty. Go and don’t look back.
Elena’s hands shook as she gathered up her things. This was a daft idea—an insane idea.
She thought it might even be brilliant.
“Where are you going?” Gemma asked her as she walked past her desk. Elena neither looked at her nor answered. To do so might make her rethink her actions.
She went outside, where ordinary souls went about their lives as if things like cursed mirrors didn’t exist.
Elena was an ordinary soul, too, with one difference: she would choose her own fate.
In a few months she would call Marty and let her know she was doing well. She could call her father, too. She might even sneak back into her house eventually to pick up a few things, but she could never, ever go back into her bedroom and look into that dreadful mirror again.
Just to be safe, maybe I should avoid my house altogether. The thought of leaving every possession behind made her heart ache. Maybe it had been wrong to collect so much in the first place.
Elena bypassed her car and walked to the nearest bus station. One arrived minutes later and belched a mob of passengers out its doors.
Elena straightened her shoulders and got on board.
GREG and Tabby Moss, formerly of Swansea, Wales, met Erica Wong, an estate agent, in front of a house on the western side of London one rainy spring morning. Greg’s work had transferred him to London the month before, and Tabby had been praying ever since that they could move out of the tiny flat they’d been living in for four weeks. Erica had showed them three houses already this week, none of which had looked promising. This house here had more potential: it was in a good neighbourhood, and it came fully furnished.
“So glad you could come out today!” Erica said, gripping an umbrella with one hand and a key with the other. “I really think you’ll like this one.”
“I hope so,” Greg muttered, looking like a drowned rat without his umbrella, which they’d accidentally left at home. He was growing nearly as disheartened in their house search as Tabby. The last place Erica showed them had a leaking roof, and the one before that was full of mouse droppings no one had bothered to clean up.
Erica let them inside. The air smelled stale and unlived-in. Apparently it had been vacant for a year.
Tabby entered the lounge first, admiring the white rug and tidy furniture. A fancy old vase sat on a table. It looked expensive.
Erica chattered on about the house’s features, most of which Tabby knew already from the listing online. “Why’d the owner leave all the furniture here?” Tabby asked when Erica paused for breath. It seemed an awful waste to leave so much behind when one could simply take it all with them when they moved.
“I’m sure they had their reasons,” Erica said with a smile.
“Who does own it, anyway?” Greg asked, squinting at an abstract painting on the wall.
“Now that, I can’t tell you. Their agent was very hush-hush about the whole thing. Personally, I think an actor may have lived here.” Erica’s eyes twinkled. “Though you could always ask the neighbours to know for sure.”
Erica finished showing them the ground floor and then took them upstairs. The home boasted two bedrooms, which was perfect considering Tabby’s bulging stomach. The baby would be here in two months, and Tabby hoped to be settled into a new place by then.
They went into the master bedroom, where the bed was neatly made and all the furniture properly dusted. An antique oval mirror hung on the wall to their left above a cherry wood dressing table. For one brief moment Tabby saw herself in the mirror trying to soothe a screaming infant, but the moment she blinked, the reflection returned to normal.
This pregnancy is making me go barmy, it is, she mused to herself. Between that and bizarre cravings, the pains of labour would be a welcome reprieve.
“How do you like it all?” Erica asked.
Greg glanced Tabby’s way, a smile on his face. “I think it’s perfect.”
Tabby nodded in agreement. The home would be just the right size for the three of them. They could even sell some of their old furniture if they wanted and save the money for the baby. “If he likes it, we’ll take it.”
As they walked out of the room, Tabby glanced into the mirror again, but this time it didn’t reflect the room at all: instead she saw herself kneeling beside a child’s grave, weeping bitterly as bouquets of flowers wilted at the base of the headstone.
She quickened her pace as she followed Greg and Erica onto the landing. This pregnancy would be the death of her sanity, it would. This baby had better come quickly.
IT HAPPENED AGES ago now. Sometimes it all seems a myth, but I know it’s true because I was there.
I was twenty-two then: a quiet, geeky type with my nose perpetually tucked i
nto something written by Shirley Jackson or Poe. When I wasn’t reading, I wrote, and hoped to someday make a decent living at it. Don’t we all?
My name is Terrance Colby—Terry for short, or “Cheese Man” if you want to pick on my last name. Some friends of mine—Paige, Darren, and Cynthia—met up one evening at The Union Jack, an English pub we frequented when we weren’t studying, or in Darren’s case, pretending to be studying.
The Union Jack wasn’t actually an English pub, seeing as it had been built in a small Pennsylvania town down the street from our college campus. It more or less resembled one, although Paige, who was in fact English and in the U.S. to earn her biology degree, had informed us that The Union Jack was to English pubs what Taco Bell is to Mexican food.
The pub had dim lighting and tall-backed booths that hindered conversations from straying to unwanted ears, so we gathered there as often as we could to plot our various misadventures, which had so far taken us to a haunted cemetery, an abandoned church built in the 1800s, and an empty shopping mall that closed in 1995. There’s something of an adrenaline junkie about me, I suppose. Trespassing on forbidden property gives me the same kind of high as writing.
I’ve never claimed to be perfect.
The four of us had crammed ourselves into our usual booth—Paige sitting next to Darren, and Cynthia sitting next to me.
Paige, a lithe, dark-haired beauty I could never work up the courage to ask out, wrinkled her nose at the small paper menu laid out in front of her. “Ugh, it’s always the same thing. I suppose I’ll just order a burger again.”
“Why not have the fish and chips?” Darren asked, mimicking her accent. The amount of cologne he’d put on that evening nearly had me lightheaded. “I think they’re quite smashing.”
Paige shot him a glare. “You’ll give me an ulcer if you keep talking like that.”
“Pip pip,” Darren said as he returned his attention to his menu. He flinched when Paige swat him in the arm, then snickered. “Hey, Cheese Man, what are you getting?”
“The usual,” I said. “A veggie wrap.” I grinned at Darren’s look of utter disgust. He wasn’t the sort to believe in vegetables.
Cynthia, the shyest member of our gang, said nothing. Being friends with her was like being friends with a ghost. Sometimes I forgot she knew how to talk.
After we’d all ordered our dinners (Cynthia had quietly ordered a salad), Darren put his hands behind his head and made a show of getting comfortable. “So what’s on our after-dinner agenda tonight? I’ve got my K-II meter out in the car; we could go back to that cemetery again.”
I flashed a smile, for I had the perfect suggestion. “I found an abandoned house way back Sutter Lane this morning. Want to go check it out?”
Some of the color drained from Darren’s dark face.
“What?” I asked.
“Sometimes I forget you’re not from around here,” he said. (For the record, I’m from Michigan.) “You do not want to go to that house. Do we want to go to that house, Cynthia?”
Cynthia shook her head, her blonde curls bobbing from side to side. She usually researched locations we could explore, and she’d never objected to any of the others, but that might have been due to her reticence.
Paige, meanwhile, looked as perplexed as I felt. “Would anyone care to explain?” she asked, glancing from me to Darren.
Cynthia of all people cleared her throat. “That house is haunted bad,” she said in her small voice. “My mom’s told me stories about it.”
Paige and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. “And exploring the haunted graves was okay?” she said. “I can handle a haunted house, thank you very much.”
I nodded in agreement. Not believing in ghosts despite my friends’ many efforts to find one, I didn’t think snooping around there sounded like a bad idea. “When do you want to go?” I asked Paige.
Her blue-gray eyes sparkled, and my heart skipped a beat. “After dinner is fine with me. What do you think, Darren? Or are you too scared?”
“Who says I’m scared?” Darren squared his shoulders and puffed out his chest. “It’s just a house.”
“You didn’t seem to think that a minute ago,” I said.
“Well, it’s just…you hear things growing up around here. My dad said a guy murdered his family there back in the forties. And the disappearances…”
“I heard that cultists used to meet there for rituals,” Cynthia said, then shivered. “They’d sacrifice children they kidnapped and drink their blood.”
“Used to,” Paige said. “Doesn’t mean we can’t go have a look. Do any of you have a torch?”
“Got one in the glovebox,” I said.
“I have a flashlight app on my phone.” Darren waved his Android in the air for emphasis.
“Excellent!” Paige rubbed her hands together in gleeful anticipation. “I can’t wait to see this place.”
I couldn’t, either. I’d found it that morning while riding my bike from my apartment to the town library, having taken a narrow, winding road through the woods that promised more scenery than a trip through the main part of town.
I’d pedaled past a gravel lane retreating into the woods and brambles and then braked to a halt. I hopped off my bike and stared down the lane, trying to catch a glimpse of wherever it might lead but seeing nothing.
Lanes in the woods have always fascinated me—as a child one such lane near my home led to an old cemetery full of leaning, lichen-covered headstones—and, being in no rush to return my books, I walked my bike up the lane a few yards and put up the kickstand.
The house lay another quarter of a mile back. I rounded a bend in the lane and there it sat, in all its decaying glory. It had two floors and wooden siding that still bore ragged patches of gray paint clinging to it in places, and several shingles were missing, likely blown away in some long-forgotten storm. Someone had spray-painted the anarchy symbol in red on the front door, and below a cracked front window someone else had chiseled the words “Bob loves Steve.”
I assumed children or teenagers did the vandalizing. I felt much like a child myself in that moment, for nothing in the world seemed better than to walk right up onto that rickety porch and through the door to see what kind of secrets the dwelling held.
I almost did just that. I’d gone so far as to put my foot on the step leading to the porch, but hesitated. I wasn’t completely stupid. The whole floor could cave in beneath me if I went in there.
It would be better to explore the house with backup.
Cue my friends.
RAIN started to fall early that afternoon, so I’d traded my bike for my car. After the four of us ate, we drove across town to Sutter Lane with Darren’s ghost hunting equipment packed in the trunk.
Night fell during our meal at The Union Jack, and when we exited the car, the sound of our doors slamming echoed eerily through shadowy trees. I clicked on my flashlight and grinned at my friends, then flailed as something bat-like flapped past my head.
“Who’s scared now, Cheese Man?” Darren asked, the flashlight app on his phone illuminating the mirth in his eyes.
A gust of wind wafted more of his cologne into my sinuses, and I sneezed. “Shut up.”
I popped the trunk, and Darren pulled his K-II meter out of a box—the device picked up electromagnetic energy, which supposedly indicated the presence of spirits. Also in his kit were a thermal imaging camera and a digital voice recorder. I took the former for myself, and Paige snatched up the latter, switching it on.
I shined my light on the front of the house, revealing broken window panes and peeling shutters. It looked a much more formidable place than it had by the light of day.
Scanning the area with the thermal imaging camera, I picked up nothing unusual. I hadn’t really expected it to. I only came for the thrills, not for the ghosts we wouldn’t find.
Cynthia, shivering in a sky-blue hoodie, looked as though she were seriously considering climbing back inside the car, but Page’s n
arrow face conveyed pure ecstasy. “Ooh, I love it!” she exclaimed, holding up her phone and snapping a picture that would never show up properly in this lighting. “Terry, lead the way!”
Praying I wouldn’t be attacked by rabid animals or, worse, rabid squatters, I squelched through the mud and up onto the porch, put my hand on the grimy doorknob, and pushed it open.
At first all I could see was a mass of cobwebs like wisps of stringy smoke in my flashlight beam, and I recoiled.
As I saw an eight-legged monstrosity the size of my hand scurry across the floor in front of me, I began to reevaluate coming here. I do not receive thrills from bugs.
“Hey, Cheese Man, what’s the holdup?” Darren asked, nudging me in the back.
“Nothing.” I braced myself against any impending arachnid attacks and stepped farther into the house.
I shined the light all around the front room, and the four of us fell into a collective silence as we took note of our surroundings. A maroon couch and matching recliner were arranged in front of a coffee table and a giant television with a smashed-in screen. Two coffee mugs sat on the table beside the remote and a curling copy of National Geographic.
I hung the camera around my neck, gingerly picked up the magazine, and blew off a layer of dust. A sketch of ships and palm trees appeared on the cover above the words “Our Search for the True Columbus Landfall.”
“This is the November 1986 issue,” I said, holding it up for all to see. None of us even existed in 1986, which made me feel a bit like an archaeologist.
“Terry, look.” Cynthia pointed toward the corner, where a bucket of Legos had been dumped out on the moldy carpet. A bug crawled over a half-built Lego house, and I tried not to grimace.
“It’s like they just went out one day and never came back,” Darren said as he cast his light across family photos hanging on the walls. A large picture in the center of the arrangement showed a mother, a father, and two little brown-haired girls maybe six and eight. The woman had a perm and an ugly fuchsia shirt and her husband’s giant glasses made him look like some kind of beetle. The girls wore frilly dresses and expressions of misery all too common in studio portraits.