#author: porschephiliac

[redditnosleep]

M is for Mirror

by porschephiliac

I bought the mirror from my step-father, who had inherited it from his step-father. He claimed he didn’t like it, but after the experiences I’ve had with it, I believe now he did what he could to get rid of it. It was ornamental, seemingly Asian design, and gorgeously stained a deep red mahogany. It had spirals ascending on either side beginning from the bottom, intertwining similar to a caduceus. At the apex of each spiral was some sort of shellfish, either an ornate clam or smooth mollusk. On the rear, it has a small etched logo, simply displaying “MI". Otherwise, there are no marks, chips, or cracks in the wood or glass. It appears to be very old, but looked like it was made only recently, carefully, with an expert hand. It barely fit into my wife’s Town Car, but we managed to load it and keep it mar free in the massive trunk.

When I mounted it on the wall in our living room, I cascaded it across another, more modern, mirror, creating an infinity effect. Unfortunately I failed to attach the hanger to a stud in the wall, using only a nail, and after only a few minutes, it ripped out of the wall and crashed on the ground. My wife and daughter heard it fall, and claim it made the tell-tale tingling of glass fracturing after a thudded impact. When I came in the room and found it lying face down, I turned it over, preparing for the worse. I feared the $6,000 I “invested” in it would be trash, but as I lifted it, I found it was perfectly intact. At the time, it was a rather large investment for a young English teacher like myself, having followed in my father’s footsteps.

My wife, thirty-seven, and my daughter, now eleven, have always been credible, other than flirtatious white lies from the wife, and giggle-fibs from my little girl. I didn’t doubt their claims about the noise it made, yet showing them the evidence, they both appeared dumbfounded at it, and glanced awkwardly at each other.

I purchased the correct anchors and brackets to really secure the mirror and installed it the next morning. I added an even more secure joint, not wanting it to ever fail. When I hung it on the wall and peered into it, I found the reflection of the first infinite wave from the opposite mirror, but it had changed. What before was an infinity effect, was now the old mirror in the reflection of my modern mirror, showing a glorious mosaic of fractured cracks. I spun my head and inspected the mirror I just hung, and it was again and still blemish free.

I called out to my wife and as she arrived I told her to look at the mirror. She looked, looked at the modern one, and quickly glanced back, just as I did, confirming my experience. She stared at me slack-jawed, and my daughter entered the room. She asked what we were looking at, and when we tried to show her, she couldn’t see the reflected cracks. Scratching our heads, we simply dismissed it and headed out to the ice cream shoppe.

I would find out later that the red flag of refracted cracks should have prompted me to remove it. No one but my wife and I saw the cracked mirror. We would entertain occasional guests and friends, family would visit, and no one noticed anything odd. No one announced any odd feelings felt from it, even in my immediate group, and often we received compliments on its beauty and condition. Weeks turned into months, and once a year and seven months passed, a day before two weeks in, I first noticed a slightly askew view in the perception of the modern mirror.

I happened to walk past the old mirror and casually glanced into it. I saw myself in the reflection, but my head was turned a different direction, only slightly. I stopped my trot, spun around and stood directly in front of the old mirror, and stared at my own face, cautiously, momentarily. I watched as my face, no, my head turned slowly to the left, not breaking contact with my own eyes. My daughter walked in the room from the left just a second after my head in the mirror turned, and I realized that I too turned my head just as the mirror did.

Neither my refracted doppelganger or myself broke eye contact. I thought to myself about those comedic moments in cartoons and some movies where a person meets his twin, convinced it’s a mirror, and starts doing silly things to test it. Sometimes it’s a mirror, sometimes it’s a twin. Just as I considered the Marx Brothers famous Duck Soup mirror scene in which Harpo pretends to be Grouchos’ reflection, the twin raised his hand and waved at me. I gasped and, in all honesty, let out a shart.

I startled back a step and stared intently at the waving hand. It seemed like me, it moved like mine, even sharing the same scar as mine from when I had cut it with a carving knife one unfortunate Thanksgiving ago. I realized that as I was looking at its wave, I was waving too, my hand feeling alien instead of normal. It seemed to be that whatever it did in the mirror, only seconds later I would copy it, but it felt like an echoed delay. I was instantly uncomfortable and I quickly left the room and found my wife.

We conversed about it and she agreed that she had noticed peculiarities from it, such as noticing a piece of furniture moved in the mirror, but not in the room. She’d return later to see the room rearranged to mimic the mirror, but originally assumed our daughter had done it. Later she noticed in the reflection a book on a table, but again not in the room. She found that same book on her nightstand that evening. The book was the first Harry Potter book, one of her favorites. She found that the chapter which featured Harry sitting with the Magic Mirror and his dead parents was earmarked. An obvious omen, but overlooked as coincidence. Her repeated mantra was “it feels like a bad dweam” every time she commented on this odd situation.

We decided then and there that it was time to take it down. I’d sell it, probably for a fraction of my investment, or cover and store it. We headed downstairs and found our daughter talking to the mirror, to herself. Our interruption disturbed her, and we asked who she was talking to. She simply said “myself, duh” and hopped away. My wife and heaved the thing up off the clevis joint I made and set it down.

As I turned to grab a hold of it from behind, I looked straight on into the modern mirror, and saw an oddness. The reflection showed the mirror still in place, still cracked, still hanging on the wall. At the base of it was my daughter – lying still in a pool of her own blood. I remained fixated on the scene, unable to turn away. I was standing in the spot that the mirror showed my dead or dying daughter. For a brief moment, the scene changed to my wife and I having kinky relations in the blood puddle, including an awkward mustache ride. The love-making session evolved until the two us, covered in blood, merged into one, hideously large, woman. She grabbed at her thigh, ripping flesh off, and daintily placed it into her mouth.

As she consumed herself, she morphed back to my daughter. I looked closer, getting tunnel vision, and I strained to see the faintest of movement from her body. That’s when I noticed an angled reflection in the blood – a face, my face. My face stared back at me from the puddle. Once I made eye contact with it, it started to rise up out of the puddle, taking a crimson form as the volume and mass increased. The body of my daughter seemed to wisp away, as if a vacuum was sucking her inside itself. As my copied, bloodied form emerged, she steadily grew smaller.

My wife grabbed my arm and shook me, pulling me out of the hypnotic trance I was in. I stole a look at her, then right back to the mirror on the other wall – all was as it should have been. I saw myself, bracing the mirror against my bosom, my wife adjacent staring deeply at me, and my daughter standing to the other side of me. I looked away from my wife and glanced at my girl, but she wasn’t there. Back in the mirror, she wasn’t either, seemingly disappearing from both realities. I wasn’t quite sure what I had seen, and I buried the ideation away into lost cabinet rearward of my mind.

Later that evening, I wrapped the mirror up in some old blankets, tied the bundle, and moved the package to the shed. My wife had already had some photos of the thing saved from earlier, and she listed it in all the sales and markets she could.

Later that evening, we watched a newer romance on VHS, cuddling on the couch. During the scene in which Tom Hanks reaches the top of the Empire State Building and runs into Meg Ryan, curing his sleeplessness, the screen faded darkly for just a second, and in that second, a bloodied me was standing over my shoulder, pointing at me directly through the screen. I convulsed slightly, startling my wife. She accused me of falling asleep during her favorite part, but I know what I saw.

As we cleaned up the popcorn and our empty chipped mugs, the news blaring about some interesting incident with a woman and a bus, I found myself walking past the spot where the mirror was hung, I took care not to look at its empty space where the clevis joint and other hardware still hung. Instead, I tilted my head to my left as I passed, and in my peripheral vision, I saw myself walk past the modern mirror. As soon as I crossed my own path, my reflection abruptly changed course and charged me. I darted my head to fully grasp the vision, and I comprehended that the running me was coming from the reflection of the old mirror still hanging. As I turned to look at the blank wall, I was struck hard from behind, plowed down like a tackle sacking a lazy quarterback.

The shock of the hit knocked the wind out me, and the two of us toppled to the ground. I rolled onto my back and started to wrestle my attacker. As I reached with searching fingers for a hold, I realized I was fighting my bloodied self. He straddled me, smacking my hands away, and at once grabbed my throat with both hands and squeezed. We locked eyes, and I felt a withering sensation overcome my entirety.

I choked the life out him. It was so easy, he was so scared. He had no idea what was happening, only that I was there, killing him, and he was defenseless. He tried to grab at me, pull my hands away, but he kept slipping off, unable to grasp the slick blood that coated my body. He tried hard, and after three minutes of desperation, he finally went limp. Not dead, but deeply unconscious. I picked him up over my shoulder and carried him into the mirror. I washed the blood off, put on some of his clothes, and stepped out of the mirror into the completely ignorant bliss of his wife and daughter. Later he awoke, as I had once done, and he slammed against the mirror, glaring at me, screaming at me. I simply mouthed to him “Don’t wait for me".

Occasionally, I will see him at the mirror and try to break the mimic he’s forced to repeat. I will bring his wife to the mirror, the modern one as he called it, and show her off to him. Of course, she can’t see that it’s him. She can’t see the ancient mirror still hanging on the other wall. Sometimes, when that girl of his is out of the house, I will make love to his wife in front of him. I do it where he can see it, but doesn’t have to mimic it, since it’s just out measured perception. I can hear his desperate banging on the mirror as he gets furious at me, but she can’t hear it.

He always stays in the room. If only he would stop obsessing over me and what I am doing to his family, he could explore the world out there, on his side of that mirror. His new can’t wife see his craziness as he yells at the mirror, and she can’t talk to him, talk him away. His face has grown shaggy with unkempt hair, his body thinning from starvation. He can’t die in there though, not until he learns how to stalk and mimic another perfectly.

Hopefully, his wife that I have impregnated will birth me a son, one in which I can sell the mirror too. Or maybe I’ll help the daughter find a suitor worthy of imprisonment in the mirror, so her real father can escape and occupy another. Either way, he is throwing his life away on the other side of the mirror, instead of living it the way he could. Unfortunately, he is stuck in the infinity he created, and when his wife, er, my wife, sold the mirror to an avid mirror collector from the Pine Grove Mall, it meant his only easy escape from my trap departed this family. He can only escape to a son-in-law or step-son.

I wonder what evil entity will trap that mirror collector. There are so many that can be trapped inside. I wonder how many will be trapped in that hall of mirrors the collector owns. I wonder how many mirrors he has sold with trapped innocents contained within, desperately trying to steal your soul and escape their imprisonment. After all, when I escaped, it was 1993. I had been trapped eighty years.

A lot of mirrors have been made, bought, sold, and resold in the last two and a half decades. I wonder where he is now. Don’t look too close at your mirrors…