The Ghost in the Mirror
When I was little my
mother and grandmother owned and ran a little antique shop in my home town, I
grew up around all kinds of old and neat things. Most children can be
destructive but I had a sense of reverence for these things, it was inspiring
to me. The older an object was the more
interest I tended to pay it. There was this one piece however that always
made me uncomfortable. I am not sure if
it is a vanity or a dresser all I do know is, it is a Victorian era piece and
is very old. My mother still owns it even
now it is one of the few pieces we kept when we closed down the shop. Now that I am older it is not as scary to me
as it was as a child. The dresser itself
is not the object I feared it was the image I had associated with it.
The dresser has a
mirror in the center and that is framed by two pedestal like drawers on either
side, all of this sets on top of a piece like a chest of drawers, the whole
thing has kind of a black tone to it, so in dimly lit rooms with the intricate
carvings around the mirror it takes on an ominous appearance. One can only imagine what it must have looked
like via candle light coming from the candelabras connected to the right and
left sides of the mirror. As I mentioned
the piece itself no longer bothers me.
The dresser was clearly meant for a high class woman to use this much I
did know as a child. I avoided it like
the plague at the antique shop but my nightmare did not start until my mother
and grandmother decided to close down the shop.
The dresser was moved to my mother’s bedroom not really a problem
right? With the layout of our house it was, all of
the bedrooms are on a hallway located to one side of the house. Her bedroom was the master bedroom at the end
of the hall. The hallway went right into
her room. It went right to that dresser! You enter the hallway at one end and look
down it; you would be looking right at that dresser. My bathroom was the last door on the left
right before her bedroom, the dresser frightened me as a child, especially in
the dark. I can remember many dead
sprints to the bathroom where I was trying to avoid the hands from underneath
my bed and the thing in the mirror. It
was a constant source of nightmares to me.
At night something
would come out of the mirror and visit me in my dreams. She had to be about fifteen or sixteen had
long flowing beautiful hair, pale skin and a necklace with a blue stone around
her neck. The dress she wore was typical
of the Victorian era, tight around the torso and billowed out with that bird
cage effect they used, it had lost any sense of color, it was stark white and flowed
with the wind, the only problem was we were indoors. I encountered her repeatedly in my dreams
until my late twenties. I will never
forget the first time I saw her come out of the mirror; I was four or five
years old at the time. I ran for my life
and found mom, I actually woke up screaming in bed but you all know how dreams
go.
The dreams continued
like this for years; with each age I reached I was farther down the hall as she
appeared. The first time I was at the
hall entrance the second by the hall closet.
Somewhere in here I became a teenager and as you know teenagers are
cocky, particularly teenage boys. In
this dream I was at the doorway to my mother’s bedroom, I had decided I was not
going to be afraid of her anymore. In a
brash act of teenage foolishness I called her out, with several choice expletives. At first she just appeared in the mirror and
stared at me, I guess she did not understand me until I hurled a few Victorian insults
at her, “come out of that mirror you GONG-FARMER, you DIRTY PUZZLE” it was that
one that got her, in our language I had called her a whore. There were electric lights in all of these
dreams they just did not play a huge role until this one. As I got older in the dreams I was always a
little farther down the hall. This fact
is important to know. When she burst
forth from the mirror she was angry the electric lights did not just go off
they exploded. There were sparks flying
everywhere, it was then I saw it a detail I had missed my whole life she had no
eyes, where they should have been were nothing more than black empty voids,
combined with that pale face and dress, she was terrifying. She flew right at me, with her arms reached out;
before she could grab me I had turned and started to run. As I beat a path down the hall heading for my
room on the other end, I began to quickly regress in age, first came thirteen
then ten, a few seconds later I was seven.
With each step the hallway stretched and my room seemed farther
away. She was right on my heels the
second my hand touched the door knob of my room, I was now Four or five the age
I had been when I first saw her, I flung the door open and slammed it behind me,
leaped across the room into my bed and buried myself under my covers. Awake now and hyperventilating I sat up a
teenager once again, dripping in a cold sweat.
The image of her eyes or lack thereof locked in my mind’s eye. The ghost in the mirror had won that
one.
Though none of the
dreams were as nightmarish as this I continued to encounter her even as an
adult, in those places were dreams, memories and reality blur together. I will never forget her, the woman of my
nightmares; my ghost in the mirror.
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