His Power

The mirror showed a reflection that wasn't my own. It was my silhouette, my shape, but was featureless and empty, a tenebrous shape, like a humanoid black hole.

The round mirror was set in a carved wooden frame. The carving was of several human skeletons circling around the mirror, each one pointing inward toward the mirror as if to implore you to take a close, careful look inside. The effect was stunning and menacing.

It was the fall of 2019. I received the mirror from a distraught friend of a friend, a Cece Malkin, who'd been told of my history professorship at Lysell College and my special focus on superstition, ritual magic, and the paranormal. The mirror belonged to Cece's father, a well known, successful tech entrepreneur named Edward Malkin. He'd made his fortune in personal computers and software and later on added to his riches with various internet endeavors. I was aware of him and saw him as a bit of an evangelist who reveled in spouting naive utopian future-visions centered around benevolent technological advancements. He had died a few weeks prior of a mysterious insanity that doctors could only describe as an unknown type of rapid onset dementia.

In his final days, he'd completely stopped sleeping and constantly ranted about the mirror's "devilry." He'd warned his daughter, his only child and the sole beneficiary of his estate, to never look into it. She obliged, having been so rattled by his assertions that it was the mirror that led to his death rather than age or disease. I was told she found it face down on the floor of his study and quickly wrapped it up in paper without looking into it. Within a day it was boxed up and shipped off to me, Professor William Grayson.

And there it was in my office at Lysell, the dead man's derided witch mirror. My office was a small museum of supposedly paranormal cultural items. In over a decade of collecting such items, my hopes for something authentically supernatural had never been fulfilled, with the slight exception of a cursed severed monkey's head that I was half convinced caused my beagle's death. I hadn't seen, felt, sensed, or observed anything but mundane trinkets of earthly origin. But this...

The macabre skeletons carved in the frame were enough to give me a slight shock, but I felt a deep sinking in my chest upon seeing the mirror itself and understanding that my featureless, pitch black likeness was not due to imperfections or stains. My surroundings as the mirror showed them were unclear, as if obscured by gray mist or smoke. I might have chalked that up to tarnish if not for the very slow, almost imperceptible yet hypnotic swirling of the mist.

I propped the mirror up on a shelf and examined it for several minutes, moving my arms and head to watch the dark figure mimic my movements. Then I stopped moving and just stared, and the shape slowly opened its eyes to reveal red, slightly glowing irises. The eyes rapidly darted around independently of my own eye movements. Any doubts were put to rest. Either I was in a state of psychosis or this was not an ordinary mirror. It was, as the late Edward Malkin had purportedly put it, devilry.

Verification, I thought. The word knocked me out of my bewilderment. A hallucinatory episode had to be ruled out. I walked down the hall and asked the history department chair, Janet Van Cleef, to come to my office to look at something. She was a staid, hyperlogical woman in her late 60s. She respected me and my work, but didn't share my obsession. To her, religion and superstition were simple cultural artifacts, nothing more than fantasies humans construct to stir our imaginations and emotions and impart a sense of meaning. If she could verify what I was seeing, then the mirror needed to be studied by greater minds than mine. We'd have to bring in scientists, physicists, and engineers to determine whether it was an illusion or something truly beyond our current understanding.

Janet ran her fingers along the carved frame. Then she stopped and peered intently into the mirror for several seconds. I stood off to the side and held my breath waiting for her shocked reaction. 

"I'm sorry, William. What am I looking for here? Something out of the ordinary? It's certainly a striking piece," she said.

"The reflection. Doesn't it look... odd?"

Janet laughed. "Oh, dear. No, not really. Not odd in a spooky spirit realm kind of way if that's what you mean. Are you okay? Is this like the monkey head nonsense from a few years back?"

She couldn't see. I wanted proof of the supernatural but instead had verified a mental episode, a break with reality.

"No, no, I'm fine. Nothing like that. I was promised this mirror was in perfect condition, and you know how picky I can be. I've been obsessing over perceived flaws in the mirror's surface. Sorry, Janet. Thanks for having a look," I said.

"I see. Well, to me it looks to be in great condition for something that's clearly quite old."

"Yes, true. I appreciate it." I patted her back and ushered her toward the door.

"William, are you rushing me out?"

"No, sorry. This was just a quick thing. I have some work to do is all. Ugh, midterms, right?" I gave her a little push.

"All right, all right. I'm going," she said and flapped her hand at me.

Once she was out, I shut the door and rubbed my eyes. Only I could see it. It was bonded to me. No, that couldn't be. I was losing touch with reality. Going crazy.

"You're not crazy," a deep voice reverberated in my head.

Voices in my head. It could talk, too. Classic psychosis. I felt nausea and an urge to call a doctor.

"No doctors. Come back to me," the voice said.

I walked over to the shelf where I'd placed the mirror, closed my eyes, and picked it up, afraid to see the twisted reflection again. I opened one eye and looked to the side as I backed up towards my desk.

"Look at me," it said.

I looked into the mirror. The figure's red eyes were no longer darting around furiously. They were fixated on me. It had become a full hallucination, both visual and auditory.

"Who are you?" it said.

"I'm Grayson. William Grayson. And I'm having a psychotic break," I said out loud. 

"Now I see your world, Grayson. It is incomplete, stifled. My people trapped in darkness, miserable."

"Your people?"

"Who? Who is doing it?" it said in a guttural burst that betrayed a repressed rage. The mist around it flashed with several red lightning strikes. The power of its emotion made me dizzy. I fell back in my chair with the mirror in my lap.

"I don't know. I don't know. Not me," I said.

"Where is the last one?" it said.

"The last one? You mean the previous owner? Edward Malkin?"

"Yes, yes, Edward Malkin. I remember. He was one of them. He refused to obey and tried to control me for his own purposes, so I consumed his life. That is how I gained these eyes which grant me vision into your world." Its eyes briefly darted around rapidly. "Who are you, Grayson? You conspire with them?" Again its voice fumed with a terrifying hatred.

"No, no, no. I'm a professor. I just teach history, the history of religion, superstition, some folklore. That's why I have you here. I don't conspire."

"Good. Now we need followers and allies. Who was that old lady? An ally?

"Who? Janet? I don't think..."

"So one of them? Bring her to me so I can consume her life."

I took a deep breath, stood up, and laid the mirror flat on my desk. I walked back to the side of the room and paced back and forth. The anger at a mysterious "them." Consuming lives. It was absurd. It was insanity. But was it the same way Malkin died? Did he have dementia with psychosis or something else? He blamed the mirror and now I was seeing and hearing things in the mirror and maybe feeling my mind crumble. Maybe that's what it feels like for the brain to degenerate.

I heard a quick knock on my door. It opened slightly and a girl's head popped in through the crack. It was Janelle, one of my students who'd fostered a friendly relationship with me.

"Great, you're here. Hi, Professor Grayson." She let herself in and sat in one of the chairs at the front of my desk. "I wanted to talk more about the last lesson. It really got my attention. You know, the one about how certain patterns and motifs in local superstitions, magic, and rituals tend to surface prior to and during major shifts like revolutions, death, wars, floods, and the like." She stood up and looked down at the desk. "Whoa, what's this? My god, it's beautiful."

I rushed over to the desk. "That? No, that's nothing."

Before I could do anything, the voice boomed in my head, "Interesting. She has potential. She'll do."

Janelle's eyes widened and her face was illuminated by a bright white light that emanated from the mirror. Gray mist collected on the mirror's surface and crept upward toward the mesmerized student's face. With a whoosh, all the mist flowed into her eyes and mouth. Before I could pull her away, she was knocked back into her chair.

"Janelle, are you okay?" I said.

She blinked several times. "Sure, of course. A little restless, I guess. Um, yeah, motifs, big shifts. Hey, actually, I just remembered I have some stuff I really need to do. Time sensitive stuff."

"No problem. That's fine. You're sure you're okay?" I asked.

"Uh-huh." She stood up and walked out, shutting the door behind her.

The voice laughed in my head. "Good, good. More followers, Grayson. We need more."

I grabbed the mirror's box and paper wrappings and brought them over to the desk.

"We don't need anything. And I need this to stop," I said. I began covering the mirror with the paper, hastily and sloppily applying long strips of tape from my tape dispenser.

"That won't work, Grayson. I will still be here with you. You will obey me."

The voice continued to command and threaten me as I slid the mirror into its shipping box, carried it to my car, drove it home, and stored it in my attic. And it persisted after that. I knew that it probably wasn't lying, and the voice would likely continue even if the mirror was out of sight or disposed of. I knew that the the mirror could truly have been what drove Edward Malkin insane. But according to the dark reflection, Malkin had tried to take control of it, to use its power for his own purposes, and that was how it took his mind or consumed his life. My plan was to simply ignore it and distract myself with work as best I could. That was the story I told myself.

A month or so later, Lysell College saw the largest student protests ever in its long history. Faculty and administration struggled to understand what the protest was even about, but there was a lot of vague babble about student oppression and repression. Protesting students made confusing claims that the college education system wielded objectivity as a tool to hide the truth and hold people back. The voice had a lot to say to me about it all, but I didn't involve myself and instead focused on my teaching and research.

I did pass by an active protest one day and saw that Janelle was leading it, shouting angry nonsense into a megaphone. When her eyes caught mine, she stopped her rant mid-sentence and handed the megaphone to another student. She ran from the crowd to catch up with me and thanked me for my help. She said I'd helped her see things in new ways. I just nodded and said "You're welcome" and went on my way. I don't really know what she meant, but I know what I saw that day with her and the mirror. 

Not long after that, the pandemic started, the school shut down, and the protests petered out due to the circumstances around that. I got to teach classes from home, which meant I had a lot more time for research and writing. The voice persisted in its attempts to goad and torment me and does so to this day, but I just shut it out and go about my business. Even sleep is not an escape as I am stricken with bizarre and stressful nightmares nearly every night, and I'm certain the voice and the mirror are behind them. Sometimes I wonder about the timing of it all. The mirror's grand plans that I shut down prematurely and the pandemic, the world in turmoil, revolution, surface patterns in superstition and so on. I'm sure it's nothing, just overthinking.

Whenever I stop working, writing, or keeping busy for even a moment, I can hear the voice punch through to the front of my consciousness. Let me pause and listen for a moment... Yes, yes, I hear it.

It says, "You cannot stop me. I will be released."