Underneath the Mirror

The mirror showed a reflection that wasn't my own. At first, I thought it was my roommate screwing with me. Boy was I wrong.

The first time I noticed anything strange, it was 3AM and I had just gotten home from my shift at the bar. I don’t drink, mind you, so it wasn’t a drunken confusion. Nonetheless I wrote it off to needing sleep, and hopped into bed and went to sleep.

The next day when I woke up, I shuffled into the bathroom to pee, and I noticed it again. This time there was no question - something was off. I wasn’t even in the same room. What I had seen last night was in my bedroom, in the mirror on the back of my door.

I blinked and rubbed my eyes, but when I looked back, the same image stared back at me. It was me, but it wasn't. The figure in the mirror had a sinister glint in its eyes, and its lips twisted into a sinister leer.

I shook my head and tried to ignore the eerie feeling that crept over me. It had to be my roommate. There were no wires or anything hanging out anywhere, but hell, she was a genius with that kind of stuff, so she could hide it easily. Besides, I’d been going through some pretty heavy stuff at the time, so maybe it was my mind playing tricks on me.

“Maybe I just need some rest,” I said to myself, and resolved to chat with my boss that night about taking a few extra days off. I went about the rest of my day, and almost forgot about what I had seen.

However as the days passed, I noticed strange things happening around the house. Objects in my room moved on their own. I heard whispers in the dead of night. Random things around the house were getting broken. I confronted my roommate, but she blamed it on my imagination.

Deep down, I knew something was wrong.

One evening, while I was standing in front of the mirror, I saw the reflection's lips move. This was the first time the reflection didn’t completely follow my own movements. I felt a chill run down my spine as I realized that the reflection was trying to communicate with me. I’ve never been a great lip reader, and yet somehow this felt like a sinister message.

The next day, I investigated the mirror's origins. I discovered that it was an antique that had been owned by several generations of our landlord’s family. He told me that he was told as a child that the mirror was cursed, but always shrugged it off.

“You know how old people are when you’re a kid and they don’t want you touching their stuff. They tell you all kinds of scary nonsense to keep your hands off,” he told me. Yeah, I guess, I thought.

Later that night, as I stood in front of the mirror, the reflection spoke again, and this time an eerie, disembodied voice filled the room. It spoke of an alternate reality beyond the mirror's surface, a dark place where the very things of nightmares waited for just the right opportunity to cross over.

I looked deeper into the mirror, and I saw. The glass wall that stopped this alternate reality from bleeding into my world seemed too thin. Shadows moved behind the glass, and I saw ghostly apparitions out of the corner of my eye. I knew destroying the mirror was the only option to stop these creatures, but how would I explain that to my landlord?

As I watched the reflection in the mirror, it started to change too. It looked like me, but malevolent. I pulled away from the mirror and began to walk away, its eyes following me. I went to bed but its twisted smile haunted me in my dreams.

As the alternate reality bled more into my world in the coming days, I knew it was time for drastic measures. I enlisted the help of a paranormal investigator, and together, we searched for a way to break the curse of the mirror. Once we gathered everything we needed, we planned an evening to try the spell.

As we chanted the words, the energy in the room shifted. It felt angry, dark, and heavy, almost as if there was some fog of evil hanging in the air. As we finished chanting, the mirror shattered, and I saw my own reflection staring back at me from a second layer of glass that had been underneath the first. The energy in the room shifted, becoming lighter and feeling less dark and evil.

The alternate reality vanished, and the malevolent reflection was gone. But the memory of the haunted mirror stayed with me, and after a few months, I moved. I couldn’t bear to live in that house any longer, even knowing that whatever had been haunting that mirror was gone.