The Thing in the Mirror

The mirror showed a reflection that wasn’t my own. Not at first. I might not have noticed at all if it weren’t for those eyes. I was beyond tired, the project was due at five a.m. and I’d used every last second to finish. My arm hovered above my keyboard, severed it’s ties to my nervous system and let my barely extended finger thud heavily onto the enter key. With the deep, satisfying click, the spell prolonging my life had been broken. Without the standard pump of adrenaline that comes with having a purpose with a deadline, I was dead weight. It was as if the unseen marionettist controlling my life had cut my strings without warning. I wasn’t crumbling easily, time had built calcifications on my joints that would hold me up just long enough to get some food, take a shower and go to bed. I hoped.

I almost think my life might’ve turned out the way I wanted it to if I’d stuck to that itinerary, rather than what I actually did, which was improvise. The levees in my mind holding back the murky waters of sleep were just beginning to leak. I wasn’t about to crash, but I stopped thinking as clearly as I could have and I began wandering around my apartment, reacquainting myself with my furniture after a long absence. It wasn’t anything more than curiosity that brought me to the mirror. As I had done a thousand times before, I wanted to see what a sleepless night had done to my already perpetually haggard appearance. I half staggered, half glided over to the space beside the front door where I kept the massive antique. Then, seeing what it was that looked back at me from the mirror, the last remaining neurons who hadn’t given in to the melatonin flood yet began to frantically wake the others. On the surface, what I saw gave me nothing more than the motivation to screw my eyes shut, concentrate, and drag my consciousness back into wakefulness. If I was going to see this, than I was going to have to really see it.

It almost looked like me. Same thick black hair, same filthy clothes, same clammy skin. The façade was nearly perfect, but there was something... off about the image. Something had raised the hairs on the back of my neck when I’d merely been zoning out towards what I still took for my reflection but in the clear view of complete wakefulness, I couldn’t remember what it was. It didn’t feel like it belonged to me, the reflection, like someone else had left it there and I was invading their privacy by scrutinizing it. Motionless, only my eyes moved around the facsimile of myself, but could find nothing. That is, until I’d nearly given up the search and let my eyes settle on the eyes of the reflection. Those were a dead giveaway to the fact that this was not my image.

As before I couldn’t immediately tell what was wrong with them, only that they were what was wrong. I stared into the sickly yellow orbs, and they stared into mine. The light reflecting from them didn’t look as clear as it should have, like it was reflecting from a much rougher surface. I expected to see some dark bags after the night I’d had, but those eyes looked like they’d been maced; shrunken and rimed with red. I might’ve thought they were dead if I wasn’t completely certain, don’t ask me how, that they could see me just as easily as I could see them. I didn’t consciously blink, just like almost every other time, so I wouldn’t have noticed if it weren’t for the reaction in the mirror. They blinked separately, the eye on the left beginning a full second before the right, and it took them five seconds each to complete the action. Reflexes yanked my spine back like a dog on a leash. The image in the mirror did not leap as I leapt, but took a slow step behind it, as if it were only obliged to mimic my movements in it’s own time.

Breath choked off in my throat. Muscles tensed in preparation for something I could not foresee. My knees would have knocked together if I wasn’t frozen in uncomprehending fear. This wasn’t my reflection. I now had confirmation. I couldn’t think of anything else to do. Uncertainty held such a firm grip on my mind, I doubt I could have done anything in those first few moments if I wanted to. I couldn’t have made my muscles respond to my commands if I’d been charged by a bull. Eventually, the shaky spasms of my breathing began to return to normal. I kept watching the thing that looked like me but with dead eyes; it might have been my imagination but it looked far more smug than I knew my face looked. It wasn’t smirking or anything, but the lifeless eyes stopped me from seeing it as anything but a monster. A monster that had taken my face.

In experiment, I raised my arms quickly above my head and lowered them with a slap. Like a bird flapping it’s wings a single time. The image in the mirror didn’t move immediately, but after a moment, it raised it’s arms to the same position before letting them fall limply to it’s sides. I felt my windpipe constrict; it was making fun of me. It was doing what a mirror should do, create a perfect image of whatever it’s facing, but with just enough details perverted to push it into the uncanny. All the while, those dry, gelatinous eyes stared back into mine, the corner of it’s mouth just on the brink of smirking at me. This is what you look like it, seemed to say to me. This is how other people see you.

I screwed my eyes shut and smacked the spots just above my temples with the heels of my palms four times each, before holding my palms over my closed eyes and trying to rub away the illusion. Tears of frightened frustration seemed to be just on the brink of pouring through, but a few blessed moments of peace were all I needed to convince myself that I’d imagined everything. Obviously, after having been awake all night, my perceptions have been skewed to the surreal and I need only to realign myself with reality. I thought, once I’d opened my eyes, I’d see nothing more than my own reflection, my own reflection looking back at me. I had all but convinced myself of this, and only hesitated to remove my hands and open my eyes for about thirty seconds. In a way, I was right; I didn’t open my eyes to find the same reflection as before. What I was looking at now was much worse.

There hadn’t been any notable differences between the background in the mirror and in reality. That had changed now; the mirror now showed a room black as pitch. I looked behind me to check if I’d suddenly been transported to a void but mainly to avoid the rest of the image. There was my living room, cool blue wallpaper with a couch too small for the TV and a TV too big for the wall all bathed in the diffused light of the morning. I stopped myself just short of counting the tiles on the floor and forced my head, despite my better judgement, back toward the mirror. The thing that looked like me was, slightly reassuringly, looking less like me. The minor comfort this brought was outweighed heavily by the fact that it now appeared to have frozen solid. The thing was literally encased in ice, making the familiar aspects of my body all the more eerie. It looked ask if I’d been found frozen solid in the dead of winter; where before only the eyes of this thing had been dead, now there was no debate that the mirror was showing me a corpse.

Horror and anticipation were joined by disgust as I took in this new monstrosity. Icicles hung from the macabre sculpture’s face and elbows. It’s arms were raised as if in defense, but I could tell that if that was the case, it hadn’t been in defense of a wave of ice. If that were true, the hands would’ve pointed towards the source, and would therefore have more ice on them. But the fingers looked like it had the thinnest sheet of anywhere on the body. The thickest was encasing the thing’s feet, my feet, so I thought that whatever burst of cold that had caused this must have come up from below. It doesn’t matter now that that wasn’t really what happened to it. All that really mattered was that the ice became generally thinner as it worked it’s way up the body, with the exception of, what else, the eyes. They and most of the top third of the head was covered in a thick bulb of crystal, thankfully clouded over so I couldn’t see the eyes if I looked for them. I don’t think that was all that important either, except for theatrical purposes. The most relevant detail in the thickness of the ice was that when it all began to melt, it melted at the same rate throughout the body. That meant that it was the fingers that were freed first.

Perhaps freed was not the correct word for what was happening. Icy sweat poured freely from my skin as I watched first the layer of ice, then the fingers themselves melt away from the frozen image. Like it was standing beneath a rocket, the body melted away with the ice until there was an oily, putrescent puddle of liquefied former flesh pooled around it’s thinning legs. The body did not move as the ice fell away, it stood in place as if held up with wire. Body parts only fell away once they’d been converted to liquid. Heat seemed to be attacking it from all sides, as the center of the body’s mass, as well as the entirety of the thickly encased skull were the last parts to melt away. Once the spine became too thin to support the weight, it collapsed into the puddle with a snap and a gloop as the ice block at the top dropped into the thick puddle.

By the time the lower half of the head had melted into sludge, the thicker ice at the head’s cap began to shrink in earnest. The eyes were always visible, at least as to their location. Clouded frost covered them both in cool contrast to the translucent rime so that I could always tell where they were. I was completely entranced by the reaction of the head, couldn’t have looked away if I wasn’t convinced I was already mad. I watched the grisly remainder shrink from the size of a head, to a bowling ball, to a turtle shell, to two billiard balls, before finally the eyes were to melt away into nothing. That was what I assumed would happen, anyway. Instead, as I stood there dumbly expecting the two little ice cubes to vanish, they stopped shrinking. I couldn’t tell why at first, but after a few moments of watching them roll around, I figured it out. It wasn’t immediately obvious that they were rolling, honestly, I only realized that’s what they were doing when first the pupil of the right eye appeared and focused on me, then a few moments later, the left eye followed suit.

They sat in the puddle at an off angle from each other. It gave a strange impression, as if a face had partially melted, or as if the body that looked like mine was blaming me for what had happened to it. My limbs had turned to stone, I couldn’t tell you how I knew the eyes were still alive and looking at me; I couldn’t move to let them follow me. But I knew. If eyes alone could convey a knowing, understanding expression, then both of these eyes were pulling it off individually. Tears that had been building up in the corners of my own eyes were just beginning to trickle down. I couldn’t contract my diaphragm to breath. All I could do was stare back at them. It was like waiting for rescue from the inside of an oil tanker; I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t move, I knew that the eyes were angry at me, that they were going to come for me somehow. Then, in answer to my terrified confusion, the eyes began to multiply.

A third, identical white orb bobbed to the surface of the black puddle, like it was a deep late and not the petrified remains of a doppleganger’s corpse. Just as before, there was a few moments of spinning before a third pupil turned to regard me. I’d barely had opportunity to see what I’d seen before a fourth eye popped up from somewhere else. Then a fifth, and a sixth. Seventh, eighth and nineth arrived simultaneously. More little white balls rose to the top of the sludge and fixed their hellish gazes on me until there wasn’t a free inch of space between the thousands of them. All staring directly into my eyes, accusing, judging, with those cold, dead gazes.

That was too much. My knees crumbled to the ground, and I fell hard on my backside. At some point beyond my notice, the room around me had succumbed to the same darkness in the mirror. I would have been floating in the void if it weren’t for the cold ground beneath me. All this had to be gathered through my peripheral vision, as my gaze never left the millions of disembodied sentinels. Theirs never left mine. I didn’t know which of the eyes broke eye contact first. As I was looking into each of their depths simultaneously, separating one from another in my memory is both impossible and deeply painful to try, even in my current withered state. All that mattered is that one of them did. One eye looked away and began to spin in place, just as it had when it was searching for me. It was followed by another, then two more, then three, until they were all speeding around each other like white tires of a car suspended from a lift. The spell was broken, and I blinked my desiccated eyes, a handful of water in the face of the endless desert. It didn’t help my vision, which suffered all the more for what I was seeing. The puddle of gore had begun to shift.

With the potential momentum built by the whirring eyes that covered it’s body, I gaped in mute terror as the amorphous form of the thing that had once been me lifted and heaved of it’s own accord. As if a puddle of mud had suddenly gained sentience and lifted itself from it’s hole. For a confused moment, I expected the gelatinous mass to recoagulate into my features. Before I could react, inky tendrils of the sludge coalesced on each other and shot towards me. I shrieked, flinched in on myself. No sooner had I thought the tentacles wouldn’t be able to pass the glass that they had already done so. It didn’t even break with their force. Grips of iron made of grease wrapped all four of my limbs, more than one tendril for each. I screamed and writhed, but they pulled me closer. Madness overtook me and I bit into the half liquid limb that held mine. Putrid oil filled my mouth, as if I had sucked it straight from a truck. I spat and choked as the tentacles pulled me closer. More pseudopods reached out towards me and wrapped around my torso, forehead and neck. They all worked together to pull me closer.

I was like a trapped animal. My thoughts had devolved to the level of a pig being forced into a meat grinder. I thrashed and kicked and bit more places and choked on the oil every time. Nothing made any difference. It just kept pulling me closer. Through eyes that were no longer my own, I saw the mirror drawing closer. Last ditch effort, I heaved my feet against the wall that had long since bled to black. Only that gave the tentacles any pause in their bottomless well of strength. They had no mouths, but in that moment, I could swear I heard it growling at me. Against the assumptions of my fraying sanity, the tentacles laxed. Not their grips, only the effort to pull me closer to the mirror had stalled. For a single, glorious moment, I thought I might’ve won. Then, energy having been gathered, the tentacles tightened as one in a great yank, and pulled me bodily through the mirror.

I don’t remember if there was a crash, but I definitely wasn’t made incorporeal for my contact with the thing. My head slammed into the glass and lost consciousness instantly. The time between then and my waking was like an instant to me, though, perhaps my mind simply shut itself off to avoid further horror. The first part of my mind that did wake up was, naturally, my flight or flight response, which promptly went to war with itself. I jerked my arms and legs to show myself that they were still there. I felt at my face and throat for evidence of the black slime. Nothing felt familiar to me. My skin felt sallow, older than it had been before. I looked at my body, but I couldn’t see anything, I was still surrounded by absolute darkness. It was then that I looked around myself, seeking some further explanation, heedless of the damage it would cause me. Three hundred and forty-five degrees in all directions were featureless, starless night sky. Then I noticed the mirror.

It didn’t look like the mirror, but it couldn’t have been anything else. As if the past several minutes hadn’t occurred, there was my living room. A rectangular of morning sunlight reflected off the couch and entryway of my living room and failed to illuminate even a single molecule from where I was standing. Not that any of that mattered. I was focusing on the figure standing at the mirror, who’s appearance had frozen my expression. It was me, or, it was the other me. It matched my description so perfectly, I had no doubt in my mind that this was the ooze, the thing from before that had stolen my face. Worse, it had stolen my eyes. Piercing blue eyes looked back into my own from my world, eyes that lacked the yellow death glaze I’d seen before.

I blinked, shuddering at the raspy feeling. Tears would have welled in my eyes if I hadn’t been given the dead eyes when that thing had stolen mine. My lips trembled as my suddenly very dry chest racked with sobs. I couldn’t take it anymore, my flayed mind reverted to animalistic rage and I screamed. I charged toward the mirror and slammed my fists against the glass. They hardly made a sound. My scream didn’t even reach the thing that had stolen my life, it didn’t even react to me, other than that smirk. It might have been my imagination, but I saw the corner of that thing’s mouth curl, almost imperceptibly upwards. Now tears did flow from my shrunken eyes, but by their taste and smell, I could tell they were tears of blood. All I could produce anymore it would seem. Then, in a day wrought with unexpected madness, the most unexpected thing of all. My screaming elicited a reaction from behind me.

Stopping for breath I didn’t seem to need anymore, I was able to hear the roar. It was loud, unearthly, unlike anything I’d ever heard before. It sounded like it was the same voice coming from several throats of wildly different sizes. I snapped my neck to the side, pointlessly as it was still impenetrable darkness, towards the bellow that continued uninterrupted for several seconds. I tried to turn my body to face the noise.

My arms had frozen to the mirror. Just as might have happened to the thing that looked like me if it had been panicing, ice creeped and cracked along my body, summoned by Hell knows what. It grew up my elbows and shoulders, reaching for my eyes. All the while, the screech tore on through my mind.

Then it stopped, and I felt like it had left a stain on my memory. Barely a moment of silence passed, and the bellow began again, noticeably closer. Nearly petrified, I ground my neck back to face the mirror. The imposter wasn’t hiding it anymore, it was smiling with radiant cruelty now. That didn’t matter to me. What mattered was what the thing was now holding.

“Please,” I croaked after a few false starts. Forcing the words past a dusty windpipe, I said, “Please, don’t.” It only smiled wider. It’s fingers tightened around the handle and it’s arm began to rise. Another bellow came, this time piercing and angry, again closer.

“Please,” I begged, blood streaming from my eyes. “You can have it, you can have everything. Just please, don’t.” It was no use. The thing that had now become me stopped raising its arm and brought the hammer crashing down on the mirror. Glass shattered. The world beyond the mirror was no more. I was plunged into absolute darkness as I heard the bellow draw nearer one last time.