Fractured Shards

The mirror showed a reflection that wasn’t my own. It rested against the wall in the darkest corner of the antiques store my mother had dragged me into that morning. We’d been in here for hours, my mother scouring the place for anything she might be able to resell for a higher price. I stared into the mirror, watching the boy staring back. He looked like me, but…off somehow. The room in the background was different too. It looked like it might have been a hospital once.

It didn’t seem like he could see me. His eyes were unfocused and far away. An alertness had settled in his gaze, even as he stared through me. It was the kind of alertness you might find in a deer that had just heard something move whilst grazing. It was the kind of look about the face that prey often did right before it was hunted down and killed. I wondered what could make a person feel like that. Hunted.

My mother’s voice broke through the dust and objects that cluttered every inch of the shop. She was calling me. I sighed, she’d probably found something she thought worth buying to do up and sell again. Or perhaps she’d just found something she liked enough to keep. As one would imagine, our house was filled with odd furniture dating back to my great grandmother’s sense of fashion. A faint clicking sound drew my attention back to the mirror. I could just make out a clock on the far wall, ticking away merrily in the eerie silence of the room. I shook my head, clearing the fantasies that often plagued my mind.

My mother’s call came again, more insistent this time, so I turned and made my way carefully back through the chaotic jumble of antiques towards the front of the shop. Oddly, once I got a few steps away from the mirror, the light filtering through the store from the front windows seemed to grow significantly stronger. Another fantastical thought I buried deep into the recesses of my mind for another day.

Finally, I reached my mother. She’d barely made any progress for how long we’d been in the store, standing next to a set of wooden drawers, with flowers and vines painfully carved into them. The look on her face was the kind of face a child makes when they bring a rat in from outside for their parents – looking for approval. Inwardly, I sighed.

My father had a lot to answer for. She was a smart, very loving person, but he’d quite ruined her self esteem over the years with his mistreatment of her. He was the kind of man meant for permanent singledom. Unfortunately, his misplaced and rather patchy sense of honour and I had quite ruined that for him, unexpectedly prompting him to marry my mother. I glanced back towards the back corner where the strange mirror rested. She peered at me, her eyes lighting up.

“Did you find something you like?” I went to shake my head, but something about the mirror stopped me. It was like I had some sort of compulsion to own the mirror. I scanned the drawers again. Conveniently, the detailing on them was rather similar to that of the mirror’s. I wondered why they hadn’t been placed together in the shop, but figured the clerk had just found a place to dump them both and left them as is.

“Actually, there’s a mirror at the back that would probably go quite well with these drawers.” My mother clapped her hands excitedly, doing a little bounce at the thought I might finally be taking an interest in her work. I wasn’t, but if this meant she would buy the mirror, I’d let her live in her own fantasy for a little while longer.

I led my mother towards the back corner, my mind flitting through excuses about the reflection. I decided that telling my mother that it was an electronic trick would probably work well enough to satiate any curiosity she had on the matter. When we got to the mirror though, it looked like a plain old mirror, dully reflecting our faces back at us. My mother and I were framed in coiling vines and wildflowers of wood.

I could see her mind switching to thoughts of how well it would match the drawers, its potential resale value, what she might do with it if she kept it. After a few minutes, my mind began to wander. Thoughts of the person I had seen in the mirror flitted through my mind. I wondered what the figment of my imagination might be doing now? Probably running, if his expression was any indication. Running from some unnamed horror no doubt. The image of him sprinting down some dark corridor, darkness chasing him popped into my head. That strange clicking of the clock accompanied the image. It just worked with it somehow.

My mother was looking at me when I turned my attention back. I stole a glance at the mirror, and nearly flinched at the horrid creature staring back at me. Globs of ruddy saliva dripped between long, blunt teeth that were set in a grotesque purple mouth. The mass that accompanied the mouth was hairless. Strange, mottled red skin pulled over a hunched, vaguely human looking thing.

Its eyes stared straight back at me, where the boy’s had looked through me. They looked like the eyes of a feral dog. Angry and cornered. And violent. I managed to stifle a cry as it lunged into a strange, decrepit lope towards the mirror. Before it reached the mirror, something caught its attention, its head snapping towards some sound out of sight, saliva flying out of its mouth. It disappeared after it. My mother looked back at the mirror, then back at me.

“Is something wrong sweetheart?” I shook myself out of it and schooled my expression. She very clearly couldn’t see what I was seeing in the mirror, and if that was the case, I was probably imagining it. I shook my head, plastering a smile on my face and hoping my mother didn’t catch onto how fake it was. She seemingly didn’t, as she wandered over to the clerk near the front of the shop. Probably to discuss pricing with him. I turned to follow her, but something on the ground in front of the mirror caught my attention and I spun back, edging closer. A large glob of saliva oozed on the floor. The same rusty colour of the saliva from the horrifying creature in the mirror.

The car ride home was filled with my mother’s excited rambling about how nice these new projects were going to turn out, and ‘all because you noticed that mirror at the back sweetheart’. I added obligatory comments and sounds of agreement every now and then, but my mother was content for the most part to fill the silence herself. My thoughts stayed stubbornly on the mirror that was now sitting in the trailer, on the way to our house, where my mother would plan and carefully bring imagination to life in her creations. It may even be there for months. Longer if she decides she likes it enough to keep it.

A shiver went through me as I thought back to the saliva on the floor. I’d touched it. My finger had come away wet. Not a figment of my imagination. The moment I'd touched the sticky stuff a sense of dread had set my spine tingling. Maybe it had been a bad idea after all to convince my mother to bring the mirror home. In fact, I wanted to be as far away from it as possible.

It was mid afternoon before my mother took a break from inspecting the mirror and drawers. She did it with every item she brought home, figuring out what could and would be done to them. It was always her favourite part, the beginning. The excitement of bringing something home to be remade into something new.

I was glad that being married to my father afforded her at least the luxury of choosing what to do with her life. It could have turned out very differently. One of my childhood friends had not been so fortunate, and her mother had been away so often for work she practically lived with us until she was old enough to work herself, then she was taking odd jobs to help her mother out with her younger brother’s school fees.

It was nearly midnight when I heard the voice calling through the house. At first, I thought it was just my mind playing tricks on me, the girl’s voice so soft it could have been the wind. But it came louder the second time. And the third. She got louder every time she called my name until she was screaming in anguish. Attempting to block out the sound was pointless, her cries ringing in my ears until I pushed myself out of bed, stumbling down the hall to the garage, where my mother worked on her various pieces.

It took throwing my body against the door to shove it open, strong winds blowing around the garage slamming it shut behind me. The mirror sat on a workbench, the surface rippling violently like a lake in a storm. Still, she called. I stared into the mirror, only just able to make her out. Dark brown hair that fell in a sheet to her waist, pale skin, and the body of a track runner. The syllables fell off my tongue in a whisper, but she still seemed to hear them.

“Ella?” The name clanged through me, a void opening up in my mind as I fell into a memory. It was warm there, warmer than this frigid garage with the wind careening through it from a source I didn't want to acknowledge. The warmth spread through me, laughter and a crackling fire echoing through me with it. My name being screamed again tore through my reverie. I jolted back to reality to meet Ella's eyes, staring directly at me. Straight through the mirror. I could have sworn her eyes had been brown, not this grey colour.

She shouted at me again, not sentences, just my name, over and over again. Something in her voice broke me all over again. Tears burned in the back of my throat, lodged there, refusing to fall. Ella kept screaming.

Something caught my eye, something huddled behind Ella in the strange, sterile room. Another memory surfaced then. A body lying broken on the floor in a different room, her unseeing eyes staring through me as sirens wailed in the background. Someone else screaming their pain behind me as I knelt, broken in a different way to Ella.

I was up and running before I knew it, straight at the mirror. My mind did not process that it was a mirror, that I was about to shatter what was probably a very expensive new acquisition of my mother’s. Ella. Ella. That was all that went through my mind as I ran at that mirror. All that went through my mind as I ran through that mirror, and into the horror of a world that awaited me.

The hospital room was even darker than the garage, the only light source a bare bulb that looked to be on its last legs. It was cold too, so cold. Wind whipped through a wall that had long crumbled to my left, howling through the hallway beyond the door opposite me. It took my brain a few seconds to catch up before I whirled around to face Ella, who was standing directly behind me. Her face was crumpled in confusion and fear, and she was murmuring to herself. I couldn’t make it out. Her eyes flicked up at me, then behind me, and then she was moving, shoving me out of the way. If the wind wasn’t already tearing through the room, I'm sure I would have felt the disturbance in the air as the creature from before took a swipe at where my head had just been.

The nightmare creature made this constant noise halfway between a gurgle and a scream. It was off putting at best. I watched as it prowled around us, not coming closer than a few feet away. Every few seconds it would snarl in what seemed like very human frustration. I didn’t want to know why. Just like I didn't want to know why its form was so eerily humanoid. I just wanted out of this crumbling, once hospital room. I looked back at Ella. She was staring at me already, waiting to see what I would do. She stood between me and the mirror.

It took only a few seconds for me to deliberate. Enough time for the creature to become frustrated all over again, snarling and clawing at the ground. I wondered why it didn’t just maul us to death. I shook the thought away, then ran forwards, grabbing Ella’s arm on the way past. If I could go through the mirror to her world, she could come through to my world. Right?

Ella slammed into an invisible barrier as I stepped back through the mirror. Then the creature attacked. Whatever had been stopping it before was no longer in effect. I reached back for her, grabbed her hand and pulled towards me. The mirror seemed to try and pull me back into it, resisting my attempts to pull my friend to me in my world. The wind picked up until it was a raging storm around me, whipping at my cheeks, my hair, my clothes, clawing to separate me from Ella. Just as the creature clawed at her, raking fingernails down her back.

A single one of Ella’s fingers emerged from the depths of the mirror, pale and small and gripped tight to my arm. Then everything, all at once. She came tumbling through the mirror, falling on top of me. The wind ceased immediately, an eerie silence settling over the dimly lit garage in its place. It was unnerving after the battering wind. Ella scrambled off me, turning to stare at the mirror, then swung her gaze towards me.

We both sat, breathing hard, staring at each other in shock. She reached out, slowly, to touch my face. It was like coming out of the mirror, first her finger was touching my face, then she was flinging herself towards me, tackling me to the ground in a crushing hug. I felt the same way, holding her close to me. Skin and muscle and bones and blood met my embrace. Real.

Finally untangling myself from Ella, I pulled her to stand. I couldn’t find my voice, so I nodded towards the door, and pulled her towards it. Before we left the garage, the mirror caught my eye again. It seemed quiet for now. I led Ella back to my room, and we fell into my bed, the dirt and blood covering us forgotten in our weariness. I fell asleep staring at Ella’s.

I woke up again close to morning. My first thought was Ella, and panic coursed through me. What if she were a figment of my imagination, gone back into the mirror once I'd fallen asleep. Opening my eyes, I could just make out her figure, motionless on the bed. Relief flitted briefly through me, before awareness prickled in its wake. Something felt wrong. So badly wrong I felt sick to my stomach. Slowly, so I wouldn't wake Ella, I slipped out of the room, padding on bare feet down the hallway for the second time that night.

The door to the garage opened easily this time, swinging open on silent hinges. I frowned. My father must have finally gotten around to oiling the hinges. That was…surprising. I edged towards the mirror. It felt like a wet towel had been thrown over my head, muffling the sounds of the night. The heavy silence only served to heighten my unease as I looked into the mirror. When I saw it was only my reflection staring back at me, something in me eased slightly, but a sense of wrong still hung over me.

It took quite some time, standing there, staring at the reflection to realise why I felt so uncomfortable. The eyes. They were the first thing I noticed. They were the wrong colour. His eyes were pits of darkness, nothing but emptiness reflected back at me. Then it was the room in the background. How could I have missed the crumbling room surrounding myself? His skin was paler, his cheeks more sunken.

His movements were the thing that confirmed it. They were the slightest bit jolting, slightly delayed. Almost smooth enough to pass for my own. Almost. Wrong. He was wrong. It was all wrong. Something about him made every fibre of my being vibrate with panic. Whatever had happened between the antiques shop and now, he was no longer scared. I took a step back. He smiled.

It was the most terrifying smile I had ever seen. I could not imagine a more ghastly smile. Just the slightest twitch of his mouth, the corners turning up ever so slightly. The endless voids of his eyes seemed to light up with sadistic delight at the fact that I'd figured out his little ruse. Delight drowned somewhere in those bottomless pits at my fear. And then he took a step forward. Through the mirror.

Time seemed to stretch as the tip of a dirty toe emerged from the mirror. Unlike with Ella, it was like he was stepping through water. The mirror seemed to pool around him as he melted out of it. Then he dissipated like smoke.

As if waking from a trance, my body snapped into motion, and I ran out of the garage, leaving the door wide open, and back to my room, where I slid back under the covers and into the warm darkness of sleep.

When I awoke again I was in a pool of my own sweat, and morning light stained my eyelids a vibrant red. I must have been too warm with Ella beside me while I slept. I hoped that I hadn't sweat enough to impact her, at least. My mother’s scream jolted me from my jumbled thoughts and upright in bed. My bedsheets were red. A wet, dark red that spread across me from beside me. A lump caught in my throat. Not sweat. It was not sweat I had awoken in. It was blood. I turned slowly. Ella lay next to where I was sitting. If I ignored the red stain drenching her body and the sheets around her, she almost looked like she was sleeping peacefully.

Except her eyes were open, and she didn’t look peaceful. She stared straight ahead at something I could not see, her mouth open in a silent scream. Her neck had been shredded. Judging by the blood, whatever had done this had to have hit an artery or two.

Numbness swept over me like a blanket, dampening the sounds of my mother’s hysterics in my doorway. It shut down anything I might have felt at seeing my best friend’s dead body all over again. After just getting her back.

Again. The word echoed through me as that numbness settled into me. I stopped hearing my mother, retreating into the recesses of my mind where I could live in that moment forever. The moment that Ella came through the mirror. Back to me. Back home.

The silence followed me the whole day, as the police arrived and questioned my family and I. They did not get much out of me. I watched them talk quietly among themselves about me, heads pressed together as if it would stop anyone from figuring out who they were talking about, what they were talking about. As though it wasn’t obvious.

All I could think about were her eyes. Those empty, scared eyes. I had been sleeping. Sleeping right next to her as the life drained silently out of her. They had followed me the whole week.

It was unbearably sunny. Not a single cloud as far as I could see. It bothered me that it was so brilliantly bright. I wished it was dreary. My mother had sent me out to get groceries, thinking it would be good for me to get out of the house. The bus was late, and I waited limply. I thought I saw glimpses of the horrifying reflection from the night before in the car windows as they passed. The me that wasn’t me. But every time I glanced back over my shoulder, there wasn’t anything there. It was probably my mind, slowly fracturing apart.

It seemed to follow me all day, that shadow, snippets of its reflection visible in reflective surfaces I passed. It was always just over my shoulder, seemingly waiting for something.

The sun was starting to go down when I walked out of the shops with the bags of groceries my mother had asked for. The pain in my left arm from carrying the heavy things in it felt like it was someone else’s, like it might blow away with a light breeze. I flicked my eyes to the shop front window. Cold, depthless eyes and that awful smile stared back at me. I wondered what he wanted.

It seemed the shadow intended for me to find out. He beckoned to me. A sliver of fear broke through the blanket of nothing that had fogged my mind all day. The hair on my arms raised, adrenaline leaking through my body. Now that I was feeling things again, I wanted back into the void. The empty feeling was better than this absolute panic spreading through me.

I ran.

The bags lay forgotten on the footpath, groceries scattered every which way. Home was about a fifteen minute run and I could see the shadow flitting between windows. It kept pace as though taking a stroll. My panic continued to rise, my breath speeding up. Two more streets.

My mother was waiting on the front steps of my house, an alarmed look on her face. She probably didn’t expect me to run home. She could clearly see I didn’t have the groceries. And that I was scared. I looked behind her at the windows by the door, the blood draining from my face as I opened my mouth, reaching out for her. Too late.

Quick as a whip, he lashed out of the glass. I faltered, lurching to a stop. My mother had disappeared into the other world with him. He’d dragged her through like it was nothing. The garage flashed through my mind, trying to pull her through the mirror. It had been like trying to pull her through mostly dry cement. What monster was he?

A pool of blood was the only thing that remained of my mother on this side of the reflection. I stood, staring at it. Slowly, I lifted my eyes back to the window. My heart, which had just started to slow, sped to a gallop. The creature was standing behind me. Not the shadow version of me, but the other one. The maybe once human but definitely not human anymore. Briefly, I wondered when I had started calling that creepy thing my shadow, but the thought was quickly swept away when the monster behind me twitched. I was running again.

Back into the house, past my father. He called out down the hallway, something about the noises outside. I didn’t have time. I stopped at the door. Tattered police tape hung from either side of the doorframe. They’d cordoned it off in their investigation as a potential entry point, nevermind that people couldn’t get in through the garage from outside our house without a biometric scan. They were right, of course, but I had a feeling telling them he came from a mirror would have me committed in seconds.

The door was back to creaking when I opened it. Slowly, it edged open. It was dark in the garage. I took a slow, unsteady breath, willing myself forwards into the room. I flicked on the light switch with a shaky hand, listened as the light blinked, once, twice, then sputtered to life. The light bounced off the mirror far more dim than it should have. I knew he was waiting.

One last breath as I walked towards the mirror, then, holding my breath, I stepped through. It was easy for me, like it had been for him. I wondered what kind of monster that made me? I shook away the thought. Find my mother. That’s all I needed to do. I could hear the clicking again. This time, I wasn't sure it was the clock. Drops of blood led out of the room. A trail leading me to my death. It was a grim thought. I swept it away. Not the time.

The rooms I passed beyond the crumbling room were almost more creepy. Instruments left behind when this hospital had been abandoned lay strewn across the floor like they’d been abandoned in a hurry. I didn’t want to know why they’d left in such a rush.

The trail ended in another pool of blood that made me wonder if my mother really was alive. All of the doors in my life seemed to have some sort of vendetta against me. This one gave a loud, metal squeal of protest as I dragged it open.

The shadow was humming a creepy rendition of the lullaby my mother used to sing to me as I fell asleep. He stood over my mother as she lay unmoving on the floor of the room. A quick scan of the room told me this one had been a surgical suite. I blinked.

The shadow seemed to blink with me, reappearing directly in front of me. He was so close that he heard my breathing speed up, panic beginning to seize me again. The sadistic look in his eyes that always seemed to be just under the surface came fourth in full force. A wide smile spread across his face, making him look unhinged. Every part of me wanted to run away, to curl into a ball and hide from the world forever. But he had stolen my mother. And he killed Ella.

Anger began to replace my panic. Before I could think about doing anything though, a sound came from down the hallway, outside the room. It was the clicking sound, accompanied by what sounded like something being dragged. The shadow’s attention flicked to the door behind me, then he dissipated again. A few seconds passed as I paused. I rushed forward. I didn't know how long he would be gone, but I had an opportunity.

My mother had a pulse. I caught myself momentarily wishing she didn’t so I wouldn't have to drag her out of this place with me. She would only slow me down. Revulsion clamoured through me at my own thoughts. I needed to get out of this place. I bent down, adrenaline making it easy for me to pick up my mother and throw her over my shoulder. Her pale arms flopped in front of me, blood trickling down and dripping off her fingertips.

The hallway was empty when I peered out into the gloom. Wherever the shadow was, it wasn't here. I just hoped he couldn’t somehow magically find me in this place. I moved. Back towards the crumbling room and the mirror. Our only way out of here.

We were about halfway back to the mirror when an inhuman shriek came from behind us. It sounded furious. Terror blasted through me and I broke into an all out sprint. Doors blurred past.

I sprinted past the doorway to the crumbling room. My heart rate picked up, beating faster than I thought was humanly possible. I skidded to a stop, spinning on my heels, and stopping dead. The nightmare creature stood in front of the door I needed to escape. It seemed to be smiling with its horrible, gaping mouth.

I didn’t have time. The shadow would be on its way, if it wasn’t already waiting for me in that room. No time. The words repeated in my head, over and over. I needed to get out of here. I didn’t have time. Something in me snapped, and I was in the room, in front of the mirror. Black eyes stared back at me and I almost screamed. But it was my terror in that reflection. I was there. The mirror was in front of me.

The shadow blinked into existence behind me, rage written all over its face. I pushed through the mirror. The mirror snagged on my mother, trying to keep her. I dragged her through, dropping her on the floor and turning back to the mirror in time to see that the shadow was starting to step through. I looked around, desperation clawing at me. A hammer hung nearby. I glanced back. He seemed to be struggling a bit, the mirror fighting him.

Too far. The hammer was too far. I grabbed the mirror, bringing it up over my head, then slamming it towards the corner of the workbench. Glass exploded in every direction. It was like the mirror had been holding pressure back behind it. Black smoke, similar to the smoke the shadow had dissipated into, floated out of the mirror, pouring onto the floor before it dissolved completely.

Over. it was over. I looked at the shards of mirror scattered across the floor, then over at my mother, still lying unconscious on the floor. I stepped over to her, glancing down at the particularly large piece I was stepping over. Endless black eyes stared back at me. I picked up my mother, and left the garage.