The Boy in the Mirror

“The mirror showed a reflection that wasn’t my own,” Katarina Graham murmured.

Sitting across from Dr. Eyles, Katarina could barely make eye contact. Instead, she hunched down in the oversized chair, attempting to make herself small, largely because she felt small. Her embarrassment wore a countenance that displayed itself through the fidgeting of an unlit cigarette in one hand and swirling a half-drunk cup of OJ in the other. Through drooped eyelids, Katarina spied the thick white bandages that encircled her wrists, small pools of blood still painting crimson spots. She couldn’t help the feeling of wanting to be anywhere but where she happened to be, even if that meant death would have taken her when she sawed at her veins with a rusty boxcutter.

None of this affected Dr. Eyles. The middle-aged psychiatrist long held a compunction never to let a patient’s demeanor or circumstance rattle her. She stared long, albeit a bit coldly, through dark green eyes at Katarina. As she tapped the end of her stylus against the tablet, Dr. Eyles tried to sum up the state of the woman sitting across from her. The notes on the tablet reflected the intake form to the hospital – admitted for attempted suicide, incoherent rambling, and an acute case of paranoia of mirrors. At first, she suspected drugs were at play, but the toxicology report came back clean – save for trace amounts of alcohol, but not at any level to cause psychological damage.

“Whose reflection was it then? If it wasn’t your own,” Dr. Eyles questioned, letting that faint trace of professional doubt and accusation seep through.

Katarina still did not meet the doctor’s gaze; all she could muster was a soft shake of the head, causing her dark and matted hair to fall further, covering her eyes. “We’ve been over this already,” she seethed, the incessant sound of the tapping stylus grating her nerves.

“I know we have, Ms. Graham, but I’d like to hear once more.”

She continued swirling the cup of OJ in her hand, moving clockwise, then counter. These sessions continued to prove little value. Every day she went over the story, and every day the good doctor continued to tap the stylus and cast that all-knowing look of doubt upon her. A fit of hot anger burned deep within Katarina. If that rusty boxcutter had been in range, she would have grasped it and slit the doctor’s throat just to escape the so-called hospital filled with its professional smugness. They all pretended to know what treatment was best for her, and, as a ward of the State, Katarina had little choice but to go along to get along. For days she pleaded her case, but nobody believed her. Most of the doctors, Eyles included, believed she was nothing more than some sick woman inventing a story to cover up the failed attempt to take her own life.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

“Please, Katarina, tell me again. What did you see in the mirror that started this whole thing?”

The doctor’s voice shifted pitch to a motherly tone, a tactic often employed to coax the patient into a sense of security that they were safe to speak their truth.

“It wasn’t my face. I told you that.”

“So, whose face was it,” Dr. Eyles coaxed.

Katarina’s head shifted up, not enough to sit upright, but rather just enough to flash the doctor a soulless stare from under dark wisps of hair.

“It was the boy.”

“What, boy?”

“I told you, I DON’T KNOW,” Katarina emphatically lied. She knew who the boy was, but to admit so would be to admit another crime that would serve zero purposes. “His face was horrifying. Mangled and bloodied, broken in every way. But his eyes. Oh, his eyes,” Katarina wailed.

This part of the story always fascinated Dr. Eyles. “What about the eyes? Please, tell me again.”

“Why? You don’t believe me. You have never believed me.”

For the first time, Dr. Eyles stopped tapping the stylus and leaned closer to her patient. “Perhaps, I’m warming up to it. If you could just walk me through it all, Ms. Graham, I’m certain I can help you.”

“Sure,” Katarina retorted with a heavy sigh. “Just whip out your little prescription pad and order me up some pills, right? That’s what you really want. That’s what everyone wants.”

Dr. Eyles remained unphased by her patient’s lashing out. “Listen, Katarina, I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me. Even if it takes me hearing this a hundred times, I promise you, we will get to the bottom of it.”

Expelling a heavy sigh, Katarina continued. “The eyes were empty. Just two round orifices devoid of any pupils, just hollow sockets with a fire burning deep in them. And I mean deep, like all the way back in the skull where the brain should be. I wanted to run. I wanted to scream. But I couldn’t. The boy’s grotesque features held me, rooted me in place. I felt like a captive forced to look upon something so hideous that words can never fully describe it.”

“And then what happened,” the doctor probed, knowing precisely what came next in the story.

“My hallway, where I had hung the mirror, filled up with a vile smell. Reminded me of rotting eggs or something.”

“Sulfur,” Dr. Eyles offered.

“Yes, I guess that’s what it was – sulfur. The smell hit me in a wave so hard that I doubled over and vomited right there on the tile. As I coughed up the last bit of dinner and bile, I prayed that the boy would be gone when I stood back up.”

“But he wasn’t, was he?”

If you know my story so well, why do you continue to ask me to tell, you bitch!

Those words stood on the tip of Katarina’s tongue but never jumped out of her lips. “No. The hideous monster still reflected from the mirror’s glass, mocking me. I could see him smirk and laugh at my discomfort. You need to understand that I wanted to run, but my feet would not move even though my legs trembled and my knees threatened to buckle.”

The next part of the story terrified Katarina. She hated recounting the details that followed her sickness spilling out onto the white tiled floor. Her entire body visibly shook at recalling the events, so much so that the remaining OJ began to slosh and escape over the cup’s rim. Her other hand, the one holding the cigarette, instinctively brought the lung dart to her lips – she wanted to light the tip badly, but the beast of a doctor wouldn’t permit her to do so. If only she could have something to steady her nerves.

Sensing her patient beginning to slide, Dr. Eyles retook command of the conversation and redirected. “Let’s pause there for a moment, Ms. Graham. Let’s start from the beginning. Tell me how you came to possess this mirror.”

***

The antique gilded filigree mirror called to Katarina Graham from its lofty perch. The overhead fluorescent lights glinted off the slightly tarnished frame and smokey glass. From about twenty feet up off the showroom floor, the mirror watched over the shoppers as they plucked through the store’s wares. Seldom did anyone notice the mirror, but Katarina did.

When she first laid eyes on it, her heart skipped a beat. Katarina would never be able to explain the attraction, at least not to any rational person – not even Dr. Eyles. She could have sworn she heard someone calling her name as she roamed the haphazard aisles below. It was soft at first, barely a whisper. She found herself turning about, looking for anyone familiar that might be trying to grab her attention. Alas, no such person could be found.

Shrugging it off, Katarina continued to peruse the various antiques – she currently had her eyes set on some kitchenware dating back to the 1950s - the muted mint green paint conjured up feelings of nostalgia for her grandmother’s kitchen. She swore she heard her name again as her hands ran along a dented bread box lid. This time, the call came more pronounced and, seemingly, came from directly above her head. Craning her neck towards the store’s vaulted ceiling, her eyes caught the beauty of the gilded frame.

“An amazing work of art, isn’t it,” Jairo Medina quietly spoke as he sidled up behind Katarina.

At the sound of Jairo’s voice, Katarina Graham couldn’t help but let her petite frame jump. As she turned around, she found herself staring at the chest of Jairo Medina; the man easily towered a foot and a half above her five-foot-high stature. Clearing her voice, she responded with a generic It certainly is. Tilting her head back, she saw that Jairo wasn’t making eye contact with her; instead, he stared at the mirror in awe.

“Notice how the filigree weaves in and out, creating various designs? You can look at it one way and see one thing. Look at it another, and a whole other shape appears. You know something? I swear I even saw an angel playing the harp in there once.”

Katarina repositioned herself to keep Jairo at her side while refocused on the mirror. This way, she could keep the man in her peripheral view, just in case he might be up to something. Katarina had grown enamored with the mirror but nothing on the level of the man standing beside her.

“Come here often,” Katarina queried. She tried to come up with some small talk, but her naturally introverted self had never been very good at just striking up conversations with strangers.

Jairo Medina tore his gaze from the mirror and looked back at Katarina. A smile spread across his face causing the facial wrinkles to bend and fold. A snow-white mustache stretched out on the man’s upper lip.

“You could say that. Some people may even say I’m the store’s best customer,” Jairo responded playfully.

“Oh,” Katarina began, her awkwardness buying time till her mind could come up with something to contribute. “Shopper MVP, huh.” Her cheeks instantly flushed with embarrassment over the stupid remark.

“I’m afraid it’s a tad worse than that. You see, I own this little shop,” Jairo responded, still smiling. He saw her flushed cheeks and, to avoid any further embarrassment on her part, returned his attention to the mirror.

“You know, they say mirrors can see inside your soul. They know things that nobody else knows. They reflect the best and the worst in a person. It’s a very personal relationship between the mirror and the owner, almost spiritual when you think about it. You look into a mirror day in and day out. You talk to it like your reflection could answer back. And, all the while, the mirror hangs there, recording every glimpse of time. They say if you stare hard enough at a mirror, the things it can reveal will astound you. This particular mirror has an ancient past. Oh, the stories it could tell if it could speak.”

Katarina grew even more enamored at hearing the insinuation that the mirror came with a backstory and an age statement. Suddenly, her awkwardness subsided, and she knew what to say. “Just how old is it?”

Jairo Medina shook his head slightly from side to side. “Can’t rightly say. I received it in a trade several years ago. The former owner had died suddenly, and the estate passed it on to me. The boy that brought it to me said something about being in the family for several generations.”

“Hmm. I wonder why they decided to part with it,” Katarina asked.

“That’s an excellent question; you can rest assured I asked it; it seemed odd to me too. But this young man told me the mirror had been tucked away for as long as he could remember. Said his grandma kept it locked away in a room, never once bringing it out to care for it or to admire it.”

“That explains the tarnish on the frame, then.”

Jairo emitted a small grunt of agreement. “So, it’s been in my possession ever since. Never did hear anything else from the young man. He just took the money I paid him and split.”

Katarina momentarily stopped admiring the mirror and passed a quizzical gaze to the shopkeeper. “If I may ask, why do you keep it all the way up there? Are you secretly hoping nobody will buy it?”

“Well,” Jairo stammered, “I suppose you could say I’ve been keeping this mirror for just the right buyer. It’s special, and I suppose I kept it high up there in hopes that nobody twenty feet below would want to pursue it. That is, of course, till you walked in,” he concluded, letting his perfectly white toothy smile pour on the charm.

The rest of the conversation transitioned into the usual antique shop bartering. One thing was certain, Katarina Graham desperately wanted that mirror, and nothing, including the price, would stop her from obtaining it.

As the two haggled, Jairo put up pretenses of not really wanting to sell the piece. This caused Katarina to fall back on the desperate buyer’s heels and up her offer. Jairo could see the bond between Katarina and the mirror forming right before his eyes as he knew it would the moment she walked in the door.

After completing the sale, Katarina waited anxiously as Jairo climbed the tall ladder and gingerly took the mirror from its hooks. Reflections of the store warbled in and out of view within the smokey glass as the shopkeeper descended the ladder rungs. Once he reached the floor, Katarina caught her first glimpse of self-reflection in the mirror. She became immediately awestruck. She had perhaps looked into a thousand or more mirrors in her life, but none of them genuinely captured her.

Until now.

Returning home, Katarina couldn’t wait to tear off the brown wrapping paper Jairo had put around the mirror to protect it during transit. She quickly worked to uncover her new-found treasure on the living room sofa. Once free of the packaging, she leaned the mirror back against the sofa’s cushions, stepped back, and admired it. The aged glass marvelously reflected her beauty. The antique shopkeeper had been right; something about the mirror enthralled her, put a spell on her – so to speak.

She had just finished driving the nail into the hallway wall above the small table where she kept her purse and keys when her boyfriend, Bruce, let himself in through the front door. He took notice of the work and offered his assistance. Katarina was thankful; the old mirror weighed more than she thought she could safely heft up to the nail.

“Who suckered you into buying this old thing,” Bruce asked with an air of sarcasm.

“You don’t like it?”

He ran a hand nervously through his hair. “Well, babe, if I’m being honest, this thing is hideous. Doesn’t match anything in the house.”

“Well, I think it’s beautiful. Retro-chic,” she countered.

“If you say so. Seriously, though, just look at it. The glass is all dirty and grainy. Hell, we both look about two decades older in it.”

Katarina tried to see the mirror from Bruce’s perspective and failed. While Bruce saw their reflections as older and almost lifeless, she saw them as young and vibrant. They reflect the best and worst in a person. Jairo’s words recycled through her memory.

“Well, my house, and I’m keeping it,” Katarina stated matter-of-factly as she fought to tear herself away from the smokey glass.

“If you say so,” Bruce relented as he walked back to the living, flopped down on the sofa, and turned on the TV. “What do you want to do tonight? Stay in or go out?”

But Katarina barely heard a word he said. She continued to stare at her reflection in the mirror. Even though she remained perfectly still, the woman peering back at her seemed to dance and move before her eyes. It was as if her reflection had taken on a life of its own and was studying her.

“Babe, you going to stare at that thing all night? I’ve heard vanity is a sin, you know?”

His words barely registered. Katarina leaned closer to the mirror, engrossed in how the reflection conjured up varying depths of her. The closer she drew, the more detailed her features became. Unlike other mirrors, where the image could become distorted, this one seemed only to enhance the reflection like it was tattooing her to its memory, absorbing her.

“Seriously, stay in or go out,” Bruce demanded as he stood, pretending to leave if she didn’t quit her unhealthy obsession with the mirror.

Katarina apologized for her slight faux-Paus. Finally breaking free of the mirror’s grasp, she returned to the living and declared that they should stay in. After all, even from the recesses of her living room, she could keep an eye on her new treasure. Every chance she got, she would cast a sidelong glance at the gilded frame peering at her from around the corner of the wall separating the living room from the hallway. It never dawned on her that something was alive in the mirror, lurking deep in the smokey glass and that something would never let her go.

***

“And then what happened,” Dr. Eyles prodded as she leaned even closer to her patient.

Katarina Graham glared dubiously at her doctor. Was the woman finally listening to her? Did the interest she display originate from an origin of honesty? Or was this all still some kind of setup? The answers to those questions would only be answered by continuing.

“That night, as I tried to fall asleep, something seemed wrong. I don’t know how quite to describe it other than everything seemed off. And I mean everything,” Katarina interjected before the good doctor could ask her petulant question.

“Even the air seemed overtly still, heavy, and oppressive. I remember flicking on the bathroom light just to keep me company, not to mention so that I could see something coming before it came.”

“And what came?”

Katarina scoffed at the question, infuriated because the annoying doctor had to worm her way into the conversation with that insufferable line of simple questioning.

“I don’t know. A hallucination. A specter. A demon. I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT WAS,” Katarina couldn’t help but shout. “All I know is that there is absolutely no way that thing could have been human.”

Intrigued, Dr. Eyles put down her tablet and nodded in agreement, a simple way of telling her patient to continue with the story.

“I mean, it looked human, don’t get me wrong. The way it stood at the edge of my bed, staring at me as I woke up to turn over. The sleep in my eyes didn’t allow me to perceive the thing exactly. At first, I thought it to be a flit of my imagination; you know, the type of thing you think you see when you first wake up, but you realize it is just some kind of residual dream state.

“I remember turning over and snuggling back under my covers – I love heavy blankets; the warmth they provide is a comfort hardly imagined. But that safe feeling quickly evaporated when I felt the cold claw of the boy peeling back the blankets to reveal me. Thankfully, my back was turned to it, but I jolted awake nonetheless. I was paralyzed as the cold dead hand pawed softly at me, beckoning me to face it.”

This part of the tale incredibly intrigued Dr. Eyles. When she first heard Katarina recall the events that led her to be in the hospital, Dr. Eyles assumed some sort of night terror had taken hold of her patient. However, the more she heard the story, the more she grew unsure of her original assessment. The twists and turns of Katarina’s plotlines evolved with each retelling.

“I tell you, I couldn’t move, not an inch!”

“I can imagine,” Dr. Eyles responded.

“I’m not entirely sure you can. But, as I’ve told you many times, nothing else happened that night. I lay awake all night with the boy kneeling beside me on the mattress, his cold dead hand resting on my shoulder.”

“And in the morning, he was gone?”

Katarina Graham vigorously nodded, a frightened grimace sprawling across her face.

“Did you recognize the boy?”

“No, I told you that before,” Katarina lied again. “I never saw him before in my life. But, none of that matters because the next morning, when I summoned enough courage to leave my bed, I saw bloody footprints leading from my room back down the hallway.”

“And where did they stop?”

Katarina gulped hard as she recalled looking at the spot in the hall where the footprints stopped and where they climbed halfway up the wall. “The mirror.”

Deep down, she knew what she had said sounded like sheer lunacy. Bloody footprints from a ghost leaving a trail from her bed to the mirror and then disappearing. She knew it when she first saw them and knew it right then in Dr. Eyles’ office. Katarina firmly recalled grabbing her phone to take a photo of them, just to have as evidence, for she knew nobody would ever believe her. Focusing her camera on the prints, she snapped half a dozen photos, but when she opened her photo reel, all that remained were untarnished beige carpeting, white tile, and the antique gilded mirror. At that moment, even Katarina thought she might be losing her mind, but the footprints were still there, mocking her.

Gently and with high trepidation, Katarina slunk down the hallway toward the mirror. The gilded wall ornament seemed different as she slowly approached it. What had been enthralling the day before now appeared dark and foreboding. Her gut wrenched at being deceived by the object, almost as if it had a living personality of its own.

Step by gingerly taken step, she approached the mirror. She could feel it vibrate in anticipation of seeing her again. Katarina remembered she paused halfway down the hallway, trying desperately to shake the crazy thought from her that the mirror had somehow animated itself and had become sentient.

“I swear, Dr. Eyles, I know it sounds mad, but I’m telling you the truth – the mirror was alive. I could feel it call to me. Just like it must have been the one calling my name in the store the day I bought it. I don’t know if it’s possible; I just know it is.”

Dr. Eyles placed a hand on her patient’s knee in a show of comfort. “I want to believe you. I’ve seen many stressful events and recollections come and go from this room. In those moments, patients like you want to believe the things triggering them. What I want to know is how those triggers came to be.”

Katarina’s heart sank. Her hopes of convincing the doctor the mirror had been the culprit in her demise were slipping away again.

“What’s the point of all this? If you are just going to psycho-babble me and make me feel stupid, why am I even here?”

“You’re here because you need to be.”

The simple statement said all it needed to. It reminded Katarina that, as a ward of the State, she didn’t have a choice in the matter. If it took ten days or ten thousand days, she would have to retell this story again and again until either the State committed her for good, or she could convince a doctor otherwise. For Katarina, no other options existed.

“Fine,” she stammered. “As I got to the mirror, I turned to face it but did so with closed eyes. I was very fearful of seeing that inhuman boy staring back at me. I could feel my entire body shaking. I had to force my mind to will my eyes open.”

“And when you opened them, did you see the boy?”

Katarina shook her head softly, almost as if she felt embarrassed at the climax not matching the buildup. She often fancied herself as a storyteller, and the more often she told this one, the more refined it became.

“No, no, I didn’t. The only thing that stared back at me happened to be my own reflection.”

Dr. Eyles leaned back in her chair, satisfied that her patient could admit nothing sinister had reflected itself from the mirror. Progress, albeit slow, had been made. The first time Katarina told her story, the boy had been lurking from the left-hand recesses of the mirror, the rest of the smokey glass a barren landscape that only reflected the white wall behind Katarina but not Katarina herself. In the original, and often subsequent versions, the boy crept slowly into the frame, his hands grabbing at the other side of the glass, using it like he was climbing ladder rungs. The boy, his beaten and broken face, contorted itself into view, dragging a further beaten and broken body with it – Katarina would attest she had heard the breaking of bones as the boy inched closer to the center.

Thumbing through her notes on the tablet, Dr. Eyles saw entries she had written where Katarina claimed the smokey glass shimmered like a stone being skimmed across the water. She claimed the boy’s fingers flexed and probed their way through the surface of the glass, reaching out for Katarina. Dr. Eyles could recall a shiver of fear rattling its way down her spine when her patient told her the boy slowly extricated himself from the mirror and stood atop the small table below. The wild image indeed was frightening, but Dr. Eyles had heard madness like that before from other patients.

The tablet’s stylus resumed its incessant tapping against the screen, controlled by the nervous tick of Dr. Eyles’ wrist – the sound enough to snap Katarina back from her reverie.

“You think I’m completely mad, don’t you,” Katarina demanded. “You know I changed my story just now; I can see it on your face—that smugness you possess. You think you won something here. Well, what if I told you I changed the story cause I knew you wanted me to? Hmm? How about that?”

“Please, Ms. Graham, let’s not go down that road.”

“Why not? After all, you’ll never sign papers for me to leave here. I know it, and you know it! But you want to know what I think? Do you?”

Dr. Eyles paused her nervous tick. Over their time together, she had seen Katarina lash out; the behavior was nothing new. “A little bit of honesty would be refreshing.”

“I think that sonofabitch antique guy set me up. I think he knows exactly what kind of mirror it is. I think he knows the thing’s got powers, dark magical powers that can see inside your soul. I think he knows it punishes you for your sins. Yeah, that’s what I think.”

“And what sins might they be?”

The two had been down this line of questioning a few times; disappointingly, Dr. Eyles never got the answer she sought. Even now, Katarina withdrew into herself. She resumed toying with the unlit cigarette and half-drunk cup of OJ. Internally, she fought to hide the truth but lost the battle.

“The boy made me do it. I promise you he did. May God strike me dead right here and now if I’m lying to you. That boy crawled out of that mirror and told me to do it. Told me to slit my wrists. Told me it was my punishment for what I’ve done,” she began just like she had begun many times before, but, this time, she continued.

“You asked me if I knew the boy. Well, Dr. Eyles, I told you I had never seen his face before. There is truth in that lie. I never did see his face until after I had hit him with my car. Stupid kid skateboarded right out into the middle of the road at night. I never saw him, I swear to it. I hit that little bastard head on. He flew up over my windshield, and I never stopped. I guess my mind freeze framed the kid’s broken face against my windshield; I suppose that’s how I recognized him.”

Katarina broke down.

Dr. Eyles released a sigh of relief; she finally had the truth she sought. She surmised the guilt over the hit and run became too much to bear for Katarina, so the woman created this piece of melodrama. Like many of her other patients, Katarina’s tale had inconsistencies that allowed Dr. Eyles to pluck at various threads to see which would first unravel.

“Katarina, look at me. Let me tell you some truth now. I knew you recognized the boy in your vision. I further know the boy is the grandson of the antique dealer. I also know you went to his antique shop out of guilt and bought something very expensive and precious to make things right. But you know that doesn’t erase what you did. Your unconscious knew it, so you created this nightmare to atone for your sins. Logic would dictate if the mirror were haunted, you would have smashed it into a thousand pieces, but you didn’t.”

Katarina looked puzzled as Dr. Eyles paused to take a sip of water before coming to the final diagnosis.

“You see, Katarina, you are the boy in the mirror.”