Don't Close Your Eyes

“The mirror showed a reflection that wasn’t my own!”

I remember screaming that to my sister as I ran terrified from the bathroom. She was upstairs on the landing, but I could hear the booming of her quick steps as she ran down the staircase towards me.

“What? WHAT?!”

“The reflection…wasn’t me…” I panted between sucking breaths.

As we met at the base of the steps, her with a hop and me with a slide, we collided in a terrified hug.

My sister is smaller than I am but she managed to pull me into her embrace, laying my head on her shoulder and gently stroking my hair as I gulped for air. The image that I’d seen in the mirror was seared into the back of my eyelids as I struggled to slow my fiercely beating heart.

A few moments passed, she and I still locked in panicked comfort. From the darkness of the house, I heard her speak first.

“Hey, you’re okay. Deep breaths, I got you.”

I could feel my entire body shaking…shock maybe? My fingertips felt numb and I could sense my knees attempting to buckle under my weight.

“I need to sit down, Lena,” I whispered to her.

“Of course. Hang on, lemme find my flashlight. Pretty sure I dropped it upstairs when I heard you shrieking,” she replied.

“Didn’t shriek,” I pouted.

“Yeah, ya did, ya shrie-ked,” she singsonged on her way up the dark, creaky stairs.

I just stood there. Still shaking, head down, shoulders drooped and defeated, my eyes now filled with fat, warm tears that blurred my already darkened vision. I didn’t bother to look up when I heard the click click of her flashlight button as she made her way back down to me. The last step pop wearily under her small foot as she paused on it.

“Nadi?” she asked me.

“Yeah?”

“You’re bleeding.”

“Huh?”

“You’re bleeding. Like from your forehead,” she clarified as she reached out her hand to touch my face.

The instant her fingers touched my head, I felt a stab of pain. I sucked in my breath, the air whistled past my clenched teeth and I flinched.

“What the hell?” I touched the blood too, dabbing it with my fingertips just to make sure it was a legitimate injury.

“Yeah Nadi, what the hell?” my sister repeated. “How’d you manage that?”

I shook my head. I thought what had happened, what I saw, was just a horrible figment of my imagination. But the blood trickling down my face, pooling in my eyebrow, was very real.

I shrugged and turned, flicking on the electric lamp to illuminate the dingy room and found our camp chairs a few feet away. “Grab the first aid box, would you please Lena? I’ll tell you what I remember and then maybe we can get the hell outta this place.”

My sister, ever the indelicate comedian, came to attention, snapped her heels together, launched an almost perfect military salute, and belted out “Ma’am, yes ma’am,” before marching over to our tote box.

“You’re a mule.”

“Yeah, and you’re a nag.”

I smiled briefly before collapsing my mostly still body into my chair with a resounding thud. Lena tugged over the tote box, the scraping of the heavy plastic along the old and decrepit hardwood floors sounded like the shrill noise of a train braking to a stop.

“You pack too much crap Nadi, I swear.”

I snorted a reply, “It’s all your damn snacks sis. I pack the important stuff, like a first aid kit.”

“Because you have to carry one everywhere you go, you clumsy ass.”

“That’s fair,” I agreed, the lightest of chuckles tickling my throat.

She tossed the kit on my lap and sat back on the lid of the tote while I opened it. I handed her some antiseptic wipes and butterfly closures as she poured water onto a gauze pad and started wiping my face.

“Okay now go…tell me what happened.”

I took a deep, steadying breath, rolled my shoulders to release some tension, pulled my hair away from my face and started to speak.

“I was in the maid’s room…you know the room where they say she died?”

Lena nodded.

“I was sitting on the floor and it was dead silent. I’d been there for about 10 minutes just sitting, asking questions, nothing happening. I could’ve heard a mouse fart from across the house, it was that quiet.

“There was no wind, but I sat there just asking questions. Questions like ‘are you here?’ ‘did you die in this room?’, typical ghost hunting stuff.

“It was so quiet it made my ears ring, almost like I could hear my pulse drumming in my skull. My eyes got heavy, I remember closing them for a few…OUCH!!” I jumped back in pain.

“Sorry!” Lena exclaimed. “But I gotta get iodine on it to keep it clean.”

“Frickin’ warn me sis, geez,” I laughed as I leaned back towards her.

“Sorry,” she said with a half smile. “Go on.”

“So I closed my eyes for a few seconds and I was getting sleepy. It’s like 3 o’clock in the morning and we’ve been up all day, right? I propped myself up and thought a couple minutes of shut eye wouldn’t hurt.

“It was so warm in there but I could remember a cooling breeze brush past my neck. I could hear my breathing slow, it was steady and soft. So peaceful and quiet, I totally drifted off. Then I swear I heard a voice, real close in my ear, murmuring something before I jerked awake. Pretty sure I just snored myself back into consciousness.”

“You do snore like a bear,” she confirmed.

I rolled my eyes. “Anyway…my body felt stiff so I stood up and decided to go to the bathroom, splash a little bit of water on my face. I didn’t need my flashlight; it was like I knew the layout of the house already. I just followed my feet, unlatched the bathroom door, and went in. The instant that door shut behind me though, I swear everything shifted.”

“What do you mean, shifted?” Lena asked.

“I can’t explain it. It was as if I'd stepped into someone else’s shoes.”

“With your giant feet?”

“Dude, shut up.”

We both laughed as I continued the story.

“I’m standing there, my hands hovering over the faucet handles, my face staring back at me in the mirror and I felt that cold breeze along my neck again. Only this time it started to sting.

“I was frozen. The hair on the back of my head was standing up like rebar. I could see a shape, darker than the darkness in the room, snaking its way along my jawline. My heart stopped beating and there was no way I could inhale any air into my lungs. I felt like I was choking. Like an iron cable was wrapped around my chest and squeezing every drop of air from my body.

“Then there was this ice cold pressure at the base of my spine that licked upwards along my back and trickled to my palms. I felt my feet sinking into the floor but my face never moved from the mirror.

“That’s when I saw her.”

I leaned back in my chair, staring into my sister’s face, watching her nostrils flare with fear as she pressed her lips tightly together. I put my head in my hands and continued on.

“Her face inched out from behind my head, so damn slow as if she was enjoying the terror she could feel radiating from my skin. The more I saw of her, the more gruesome it became.

“I could feel her reach her hands to the side of my head. I watched it all in the mirror, my mouth slowly dropping open as if I wanted to scream, to tell her to stop but no sound came out. If I even attempted to speak, the iron band around my chest would tighten.”

“There wasn’t much I could do but stand there, frozen in fear as she showed me her entire face. Her hair was darker than the moonless sky but her skin was pale, transparent even. She had no eyes, just deep black holes. Her mouth opened and a foul odor started to spread throughout the tiny bathroom, it suffocated the air around me. It pierced my nostrils, spearing a rotting scent deep into my throat.”

“My mind raced with thoughts of me begging her to stop, and I think she could tell but she only smiled with a gaping, toothless grin, tightening her grip on my skull. That was when I glanced back at my reflection and saw that what was looking back at me in that mirror wasn’t me…but her. My mouth turned into a snarl and I could hear her laugh before slamming my face into the mirrored image and shattering it all over the sink.”

I finished my story with a sob, touching my now scarred face, and began shaking again. My sister sat there stone faced, speechless for the first time in her life.

“Can we leave this place now please? I’m done ghost hunting for the night, probably for the rest of my damn life,” I asked her.

She slapped her thighs and popped up. “Help me get the video equipment upstairs, I want out of this frickin’ house too.”

We raced each other upstairs leaving behind the lantern and using only the thin beam of light from her flashlight to guide us. Across the second floor landing of the open loft, we could see the glow of the laptop screen that projected the three camera angles from the rooms we were investigating.

As we were powering down the equipment, Lena paused over the camera view covering the maid’s room, and looked at me.

“What?” I asked.

“Let’s just see if we can see anything on the footage before we go,” she said.

“What, now? While we’re still in this freaky place? Can’t we do that back at the hotel?”

“Just real quick, this happened like 20 minutes ago, let’s just scale it back and make sure there’s nothing.” She mouthed the word ‘please’ and smiled in her typical little sister way.

“Fine, make it quick. I’m sure there’s nothing on it but do it fast.”

Her fingers flew over the keypad and rolled back the video footage. We watched as I sat there on the floor, cross legged and speaking to the air. I propped my chin on my fist and we both saw my eyes flutter close.

“See? That’s all. Just dozed off and…” my voice trailed away as we watched the shadows behind the night vision image start to shift.

Lena pointed at the corner just over my shoulder. “Do you see it?”

We watched in horror as the murky shade swirled long white arms around my stomach and hair like worms cascaded around my face. There she was. The grisly visage of a woman was enveloping me as I rested, her mouth inches from my face, grimacing as her words licked against my ear.

“Oh God no,” Lena said to the screen. The woman stopped, her head jerking to the side as she turned her attention to the camera, gazing through the lens and directly at us.

She lifted one long arm and pointed, making both of us smother a gasp. The screen crackled and went black as the downstairs lantern bulb shattered and plunged us into darkness. In the distance, the sound of rusted hinges screeched as every shutter and every door slammed violently shut, impeding our escape.

Lena covered her mouth and stifled a cry. I felt tears begin to stream down my face. An awful smell permeated the space between us and I felt a familiar frigid air cloak our bodies. Every nerve ending I had began to ache and my head pounded as fresh blood seeped from my wound. There was a vile breath that tousled the hair around my ear and I clutched at my chest. A gurgle, so deep and sputtering, bubbled up with pungent decay and felt like acid on my cheek as this thing screamed…

“MINE!!”