Dib was six years old, more than old enough by now. If he didn't do it before midnight this Halloween, he might not ever get another chance.
Standing on a happy piggy stepstool, he stared himself down in the mirror, biting his lower lip to keep it from trembling. Locked in his own gaze, he reached to the side with one arm, and turned off the bathroom light.
A second of pitch-black, then his eyes adjusted, so his reflection faintly reappeared. He could make out his glasses, but not the eyes behind them. It almost looked like a different person standing on the other side.
No. He couldn't let his imagination get the best of him. He had to do it now, or—
"Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary."
There really had been another person in the mirror. Gaz stood right next to him in her skeleton footie-pajamas.
Dib glared at his little sister's reflection. "Hey! I wasn't ready!"
Their reflections twisted around themselves in black and red as an unearthly scream rattled the toothbrushes. Heart hammering in his chest, Dib lifted the cardboard box he'd had under his other arm and held it above his head, open end pointed toward the glass.
The ghastly soul-stealing woman of legend shot through the mirror and hit the inside of the box with a fwump. Dib closed the flaps and jumped to the floor, holding the struggling box closed as he grabbed a roll of duct tape sitting next to the toilet.
Gaz snorted. "Like that'll work."
Dib put his full first-grader weight on the box as he peeled tape off the roll and slapped it down in haphazard strips. "It's holy duct tape! I got it blessed by a priest and everything!"
"You mean that smelly drunk guy behind the gas station?"
After Dib covered the top of the box almost entirely in tape, the ghost stopped knocking around her prison like a cracked-out cat in a carrier.
Dib beamed, showing the gap where his top front baby teeth had fallen out recently. "I can't wait to bring this to Show and Tell tomorrow!"
Five-year-old Gaz looked down impassively at the growling box full of death. "So where ya gonna keep it?"
"Under my b—" Scratching came from inside the box, and Dib reconsidered sleeping directly above it. "In the basement. I'll just hide it behind Dad's failed experiments. He'll never look there."
The next morning, Dib got ready for school, and went downstairs. The failed experiments were reduced to piles of broken glass and twisted metal, with a shredded cardboard box behind them.
Dib fled the basement, and refused to go down there for three years.