Broken Mirror

The mirror showed a reflection that wasn't my own. The sadness that pooled in the girls’ eyes were enough to make my heart jump with empathy more so than fear.

So many questions flooded my mind. Why was she cowering? What was this darkness that seemed to be swallowing her? How was I seeing her through the broken shards of my own reflection?

The house had a dark past, asking more questions than providing answers. When my family had moved here last fall, the neighborhood kids looked at my brother and I like we were some sort of trespassers on our own property. The stories about the endless baby cries coming from the vacant second floor were famous around school and even the wild animals seemed to avoid coming into the yard which didn’t seem to add up. Yes, I’ve watched as carefree squirrels bounced through the neighbors’ yards only to seem to stop abruptly at our property line and make a b-line for the sidewalk. It was almost as if they could smell something that would cause them to immediately pivot and barrel out to the road.

My brother, Brad, and I have never heard any of the reported late night baby cries coming from the house. Our bedrooms are both on the second floor so it seems we would hear it if it happened, and until this reflection of the crying girl in the cracked mirror hanging on my closet door, there really hasn’t been other strange occurrences beyond what I witnessed with the squirrels in the yard.

There was a rumor from Avery, the boy next door, that a man named Jack Wilkert and his 13-year-old stepdaughter Ava Milnes lived at this house prior to it sitting vacant for the 5 years leading up to us purchasing it. Ava's mother and baby brother had sadly both passed away during his birth when Ava was 10. Jack continued to live in the house with Ava, who was known to sneak out at night from her bedroom window on the 2nd floor. My guess is that she used to have my bedroom, since it's the only window you could safely climb out of and down the tree.

With Mrs. Wilkerts passing, Jack became more and more of a recluse. He even pulled Ava out of school and made her take online classes. Groceries would get delivered through an app service and the both of them just stopped showing up at any public social quarters. Avery swears that he saw Ava running away from the house one evening and she almost looked like she was hiding something in her jacket.

It wasn't too long afterwards that the house was vacated, and the sounds of a crying baby started to permeate the neighborhood.

It doesn't make much sense to me. From what I've heard Mrs. Wilkert and the baby both passed away at Lyon Mercy Hospital, not at the house. So even if the phantom cries of a baby were being heard, why would they be coming from the house if it was their deceased son?

I needed more information, so I made plans to stop by the township library after school today. A few hours later, I still had not been able to find much to tell me what possibly happened at the house, if anything. Jack was an engineer in a remote position for a automotive cybersecurity team. No mentions of him in the online papers I could find beyond the obituary of his wife and son. I didn't find anything on Ava, at all.

I stopped by to talk with Avery on my way home, to see if he could give me any other information beyond what he shared previously with his rumor.

"What do you want?" Avery asked when he opened his door, rolling his eyes at me. "Avery, you said that you used to go to elementary school with Ava Milnes that used to live in my house. I was hoping you could tell me more about her because I've started experiencing some...erm..strange things that I don't know how to explain at the house." "You might be able to learn more if you pull out a Ouija board and ask your questions to the great beyond. Last time I even talked to Ava, was in the beginning of the 4th grade."

"What was the girl like before her mom passed away? Who were her friends and who did she hang out with? How did you learn that she moved?" I asked him. "Woah! I never said that she moved, I said they just kind of disappeared. I don't know how long they were gone before we started noticing because they really never went anywhere. It was probably weeks before I realized that I hadn't seen a delivery vehicle dropping off food. The mail carrier might have been the one to point it out to me when he asked if the neighbors were on vacation because the mailbox was full and there was no forwarding address or a request to hold their mail."

It really was very strange that if they moved, they wouldn't at least have a forwarding address for their mail.

"I don't know who she hung out with. We were 9. We went to school together and sometimes I'd see her walking to their car or shopping at the grocery store with her mom. That's pretty much it. She pretty much just kept to herself."

Awesome. No new information I can really use. I mean, I get it, at 9 years old we don't really know who we are or have a busy social life yet. Maybe Jack lost his mind and murdered Ava and took off without a trace.

Maybe Avery was onto something with looking into a Ouija board and perhaps Brad would be interested in humoring me with joining in, so I didn't end up possessed or accidently granting the devil access into our house.

I jumped online on my phone and ordered a Ouija board and a black light on Amazon. Same-day delivery. Perfect!

I only placed my order 3 hours ago and here's my package, already sitting on the doorstep. God, I love today's world of commerce!

Brad was playing video games when I pushed his bedroom door open to ask him if he would help me use the board. "Does mom know that you have that?! You know she is going to freak out because having one of those is instantly going to make you a devil worshipper." He laughed back at me. It's true, my mom was extremely against having anything like this in the house and she was going to flip out if she knew about it. "Obviously, no, she doesn't know, and she isn't going to find out! I just want to see what I can find out and then I'll donate it with the rest of the stuff I'm dropping off this weekend to the resale store. Just sit in with me, please?! It probably won't even work.'

While Brad was busy getting to a point where he could save his game, I was in my room with the light blocking shades pulled tightly closed using my black light. Hey, if there was a murder or something in here something is bound to show up on the wooden floors, right? Nothing screamed bloody murder but there was a weird spot by the closet door about 8 inches wide that sort of resembled Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

Brad pushed open my door. "Oh my God. Why are you such a nerd?!" he teased me. "This is why you are single, you know," "That's not why I'm single. I'm single because I choose to be. We've lived here for literally 7 months and there is definitely not anyone around here worth dating!" I barked back at him. "If you could see yourself right now...this is not helping your case. I'm just saying." His words trailed off as he walked to the bed and picked up the box.

"So have you used one of these before?" he asked.

I had never used a Ouija board before. "It probably isn't going to do anything anyway - I'm just curious. And, if there are any weird spirits in our house, maybe they just want to get some piece of information out so they can peace out and leave us alone. Plus I saw something in the broken mirror the other day and it's got me a little on edge."

"Fine. Let's check it out so I can go back to my game." he said.

We locked my bedroom door and sat on the floor, next to each other. We set the dial in the middle of the board and each of us put our hand on it. "I guess we just ask a question and wait to see if it magically moves." I said.

"I'll start", I said. "I'm Maya and this is my brother Brad. We are wondering if there are any spirits in this room that would like to talk to us?" Brad made a ghostly ooooo and shook his head. "Seriously Brad, I'm just asking you to participate for a few minutes. Just focus for a minute and then you can go back to your game." He hesitantly nodded in agreement and said out loud, "Does anyone here want to tell us what happened in this house before we lived here?"

We sat watching the dial. It didn't move at all. I'm almost certain that we both stopped breathing while we watched for any movement. It was so quiet in the room I could hear my own blood traveling through my veins. We sat there for at least 2 minutes in silence before Brad said "I don't think this is going to work". Suddenly, half of the mirror on the closet door broke free and shattered on the floor. We both jumped and I heard my mom coming up the stairs to find out what happened. I chucked the board underneath my bed and ran over to unlock my door right as my mother got to the entrance.

"What the hell was that noise!?" she asked, sounding more concerned than upset. "We were just sitting in my room, talking and part of the broken mirror dropped and shattered." I explained.

Brad, ran his hand through his hair and gave me a look that told me he was done and headed back to his game. Mom told me to watch where I stepped while she ran downstairs to grab the dustpan.

I hurried up and grabbed the board and dial and shoved them back into the box and pushed it out of sight, under my bed again. I walked over to the shards on the floor, and there she was again! The dark-haired girl with the sad eyes, cowering. I started to speak, to ask her who she was and why she was sad, when she turned her face to me and disappeared as my mom walked back into my room. "Maya, please watch where you're standing. The last thing on my list of things I want to do tonight is to spend time in the emergency for stitches." "Mom, I've got it", I said as I took the dustpan and broom to scoop up the mess. "I'll use the wet Swiffer after I get this swept up. It's fine, Mom." I assured her. "I can handle this".

That must have satisfied her because she headed back downstairs.

Once everything was cleaned up, I went back to Brads room. "So, that was weird, right?" I asked. "Not really, that mirror has been cracked since we moved in. I'm surprised you left it up all this time. Now you probably have 7 years of bad luck coming your way or something. That'll teach you to try to talk with the dead." He didn't even look at me while we talked, too roped back into his game.

"Did you see anything?" I asked him, anxiously. "Maya, I saw the same thing you did. Nothing happening on the board and then that mirror fell. The end."

"Brad, I saw something in the mirror though. It's the second time this week. It's this girl with dark hair and really sad eyes. She's wearing a white sundress or nightgown or something and she just looks exhausted and sad." "Maybe you just want to see something. Maybe you saw your own reflection and you were already freaked out, so it looked like something else. People just talk, there's nothing weird going on here."

I climbed into bed and turned off my touch light. Maybe I was just freaking myself out. Maybe the animals not coming into the yard was just a coincidence. Maybe the crying was coming from somewhere else in the neighborhood and the noise reflected off our house to make it sound like it was coming from here. I don't know! I definitely saw something in that mirror though. What does it mean though?!

I must have dozed off sometime after 11pm. I dreamed of random pieces of places that were familiar and some that were not familiar at all. I remember seeing a black 67' Camero with 2 white pinstripes drive past me while I was walking on the side of a road. There was a white plastic grocery bag with red writing on it. I'm not sure what it said, maybe 'Have a good day' or something. I saw a bunch of dead animals around an apple tree and a baby in a car seat covered with a Noah's Ark themed blanket on it. I saw that girl that I kept seeing in the mirror, step out from behind the tree and that startled me awake.

The alarm clock blared out 4:07 AM in the darkness. I turned over to try and get comfortable enough to fall back to sleep. Just as I started to doze off, I felt a pressure change on my bed.

It was almost like, how you would feel the shift of pressure if a cat was walking from your feet up towards your head. We don't have a cat, though, so I squeezed my eyes shut as tightly as I could but then I experienced what felt like a cool hand on my forehead. I didn't open my eyes, but I could hear a woman's voice speaking calmly, inside my head.

She said 'please don't be scared. I know you have seen me in the mirror. I am just looking for my daughter and my husband. I need to know they are ok.' I thought 'Who are you?' and she answered me! She can read my mind!? Great! As if I didn't have enough to worry about already.

She said, her husband blamed himself for her death and for their son Jacob's death. His severe grief had drawn their spirits back to the house, to watch over him and Ava, instead of allowing them to pass on and cross over. She explained that it wasn't anything that Jack had done but she couldn't tell him that. She couldn't reach him. She had tried to reach out to Ava but had only frightened the poor girl into sneaking out of the house each night. In a fit of fear one night, Ava threw her jewelry box at the mirror and cracked it. It wasn't too long after that they both left the house.

It was the apple trees on the property that killed me and the baby. Cyanide poisoning. We didn't know about it. It seeps from the trees into the water system and with having a well on the property, it severely affected us. I wanted to warn Jack and Ava so they didn't suffer the same fate. I think I scared them and I am trapped here until I can cross over.

In the morning, when I got up for school, I ran in to use the bathroom. I looked at the shower and thought, maybe I should wait until I can find out if our water is contaminated. We normally drink bottled water at the house but we still wash with the well water and do laundry with it. Great. I'm quite possibly walking around in cyanide contaminated clothing. Better skip brushing my teeth until I get to school.

A quick search helped me to learn a lot more on the possibilities of cyanide poisoning and fetal poisoning of an affected pregnant mother. Suddenly I question if using my school computer to search this information is going to make me look like a conspirator or something. A little more searching and find that our township office offers free water testing kits!

As soon as I get home, I tell Brad about my dream from last night and he looks at me like I just told him I rode a unicorn home from school. He half giggles and says "and so these things are true now because you had a dream about it? That doesn't tell you what happened to the people that were living here before us. Dreams don't mean anything. They are just random thoughts from things you've seen or thought about mixed in with stress."

I told him about the water testing kits available through the township and encouraged him to wait on taking a shower or brushing his teeth with tap water until we find out what's going on.

The tests were pretty easy to use. I thought they were going to be something where I collected samples and mailed them out and had to wait several weeks before finding anything out. The simplicity of adding 1 fluid ounce to 5 labeled different vials with different colored lids was reassuring. One vial was the control. One tested for Arsenic, another for Cyanide. One tested for PFA's and the last one was a microbiology test.

I filled each vial with tap water up to the designated line and secured the caps. Almost immediately, the cyanide test fluid turned an amber, red color. I called my mom to tell her about it and she was already almost home to see it for herself.

Mom called her homeowners insurance agent and told her what we discovered and started a claim, before driving me up to the Township Hall with the test kit. The Township Supervisor acted slightly odd when we talked to him about our results. He tried to brush off our concerns with comments like "these tests are old, we can set up a meeting with our inspector to come out and further analyze your water but I'm sure you are in no immediate danger" and "you don't look sick. Do you feel sick? I'm sure it's nothing."

Once we were back home with a promised visit from the township inspector scheduled for tomorrow, I brushed my teeth with bottled water after my sandwich and went to bed.

That night I dreamed of waterfalls that were changing colors of the rainbow and birds flying in the bright sunny sky. I saw a girl who looked to be my age with braided hair, donning shorts and a hoodie. She looked at me and I told her I was glad she wasn't the girl I saw in the mirror in my bedroom. Her face immediately paled and she demanded to know who I was. I told her my name is Maya and asked hers. "Ava," she said. "Oh my gosh! I live at your old house!! Your mom is in my closet mirror!" She told me I was crazy and that the house was haunted. That's why her and her step-father left in the middle of the night. They didn't know if someone was playing a cruel trick or if the house was truly haunted, but since they had left neither of them had been sick.

I told Ava that her mother said she died from cyanide poisoning from the apple trees breaching the well system and contaminating their water. That I had just administered a test earlier today that confirmed elevated levels of cyanide and we were waiting for the township to come out tomorrow and run additional tests.

Suddenly, the woman from the mirror walked up to us. "Ava!" she yelled. "Mom!?" Ava responded. "How, how is this even possible!?" she asked. Mrs. Wilkert said she wasn't sure how this all worked but she wasn't trying to scare her at the house, just tell her that the water was poison and they needed to leave. When they left in the night, she didn't know where to find them and her spirit was trapped, on a mission to communicate this danger to her. She further explained how she laid in my body while I was sleeping and that is how she was able to be here now. Her work done, she was finally free to move on and cross over.

I woke up to my alarm at 7am. Mom took the day off so we could sort through the water issues with her attorney present. No water analysis test was given before we moved into the house. A pretty big oversight for inspection.

Turns out, the cyanide was poisoning the soil and the water. That's why animals didn't want to be in the yard. The Township Supervisor owned this property and was found to have brushed past some oversights and he was in deep shit now. We're staying in a hotel for the next two weeks and plan to move across town once mom closes on the new house.