Mirror, rorriM
(Autumn 1995)
18: Cornered
The flow on the floor was neither gas nor liquid, but somewhere in between. Black and shiny, its surface began to gleam with hints of red and white as it rippled and bubbled. The center of the weird puddle swelled and surged, a face half-formed, one bloodshot eye bulging to the size of a baseball, a mouth gaping with a blackened tongue protruding between rows of jagged teeth.
As it roiled, the pool moved, gliding fully beneath the door and into the hall. Wanda had retreated to the communal kitchen, and Alex backed down the hall as the eerie form of Bloody Mary coalesced from the surging pool, rose dripping, head lowered, baleful orange eyes glowing from under lowered brows. She tried to take a step, but the leg had not solidified, and it collapsed, making her fall through the pool up to her waist. With a snarl, she began to rise again.
Alex heard running footsteps and looked back over her shoulder. Wanda was running toward him, fists clenched. "Get back—" Alex yelled.
Wanda passed him, and he hooked an arm around her waist. "She's too fast!"
With a grunt, Wanda swung her arm and threw something invisible.
Whatever it was struck Bloody Mary in the face and upper chest—and holes bloomed on her skin, dribbling greenish-black liquid, thick as syrup, each cavity spreading and deepening, riddling her face until it looked like ancient, spoiled, moldy Swiss cheese. Screaming, she collapsed to the floor, liquefying again.
"What did you—" Alex began.
Wanda snapped, "Salt!"
The bubbling pool fizzed and sizzled, boiling up and collapsing again and again—and when it couldn't take shape, it oozed forward. "It didn't kill her," Alex said. "Is there another way downstairs?"
"Fire stairs, end of the hall, but we'd set off an alarm!"
Before the turgid, seething mess on the floor could take human shape again, they rushed to Selene's room. Wanda pounded on the door. "Let us in! It's us!"
Gazing back down the hall, to where the black glob was finally growing to human size again, Alex yelled, "Got any more salt?"
Wanda fumbled in her jacket pocket and produced six packets. She tore three of them open, he ripped the other three, and they scattered the salt in the hall outside the door, he saving one packet until the door opened and Wanda pushed in. "What?" Becca asked.
After sprinkling the last bit of salt along the threshold, Alex followed Wanda in, then closed and bolted the door. "She's out there," he said. "She somehow got into the dorm." He pressed his cheek against the door to peer through the peephole. He saw a fish-eye distorted version of the hallway—but not enough to see Bloody Mary, who had still been trying to reform herself down the hall, near the central stairway.
"Let's call somebody!" Selene said, her voice jagging on the ragged edge of hysteria. "Security!"
To Alex's surprise, Wanda snatched the phone out of Selene's hand. "No! First, nobody would believe us. And if someone came, they might killed. At the very best, they'd think we were pranking Security and we'd all get kicked out of school! Whose bright idea was it to summon Bloody Mary to begin with?"
"Don't say her name!" Selene begged. "If you keep saying it, she'll come!"
"She's already here," Wanda said. "Alex, any ideas?"
"Well, we can't stay inside here forever," he said. "Maybe we should risk running to the end of the hall and risk running down the fire stairs."
"If she can't come in, let's stay here!" Selene said.
"Maybe we can kill it," Becca said.
"How do you kill a ghost?" Wanda asked.
"Mirror demon," Alex corrected, still glued to the door, eye to the peephole lens.
"What?" Becca asked.
"My uncle. I called him. He said it might be a mirror demon."
"Your uncle is an expert at demons?" Wanda asked.
"He's studied paranormal beliefs and stuff," Alex said defensively. "He has like three or four PhD's."
"Is he a teacher here?" Selene asked hopefully.
"No, he's the curator of a science museum in Oregon now," Alex said. "She's lurking. I can see her—she's on her feet again, but she's not coming close to the door. The salt, I guess."
"How do you kill it?" Becca asked him.
"He said if she touches the person who called her to the mirror, they'll both die," Alex said. "That wouldn't work."
Selene sat on the floor as if she'd been struck on the head. "What? What?" She started to cry, her hand covering her mouth and chin.
"We won't be doing that!" Wanda said. "For that matter, she might go for me—she tried to drag me out of the mirror when we changed places. Does it work if—"
"If you're both on the same side of the mirror, I think it does," Alex said. "And maybe if she touches anybody at all. I don't know. There's probably some lore about it, but I've never read it."
"The mirror!" Wanda said, pointing. A framed mirror hung over one of the desks. Its surface flickered, darkening and lightening again. "I think she's trying to come through!"
Alex yanked the mirror off the wall and put it face-down on the floor. "I think this is too small for that," he said. It was only about a foot square. "But she might come through it as liquid and then shape up again."
"That's my makeup mirror," Selene said.
"Wanda, is she in the hall?"
Wanda checked the peephole. "Don't see her, but can't see too far away from the door."
"Get me a towel," Alex said. "Dark one if you have one."
Selene found a burgundy towel, and he wrapped the mirror in it. "Crack the door and look out," he told Wanda. "If she's not outside, let's run for the stairs."
"It's clear," Wanda reported.
"Let's go—Wanda, you first, then Selene and Becca, and I'll bring up the rear. If she shows up, don't let her touch you!"
They hustled, but before they'd come halfway to the stairs an ear-splitting shriek split the air. They stopped.
Though no one else was on the floor, they heard scrabbling, scratchy sounds coming from half a dozen closed dorm rooms. Then streams of darkness flowed out, behind and in front of them, coalescing, surging to form disjointed body parts—a horrible face and head, eyes glaring as it oozed forward, and across the hall, an arm reaching up from the floor, clawed hand stretching out.
Only one door didn't have a puddle seeping under it, and Wanda hit it with her shoulder. "In here!"
Alex followed the girls in.
"Seriously?" he asked. "This is like the third time I've been in a girls' room today!"
"Oh, shit," Wanda said. One wall was full of mirrors.
Which started to flicker.
Bloody Mary's mind was less like a human's and more like—well, like a swarm of bees. The bits of her had a certain autonomy. Head and arms might be disconnected, but they could all move, and like a swarm returning to its hive, they could rejoin. The salt had burned her, enraged her, but had not weakened her.
"Soap, soap!" Alex said, laying the wrapped mirror down on a sink. He dashed into the shower and found a sliver of white soap in one of the dishes. Huh. The toilets are all in their own enclosures, but the girls shower together. When he had time later, he'd probably picture that scene in his mind—hey, he was a guy who'd never even got past first base with a girl, but he had his ambitions—but at the moment he felt only a vague twitch of annoyance. They toilets and urinals in the guys' dorm were all exposed to view. Which was a problem if you were shy about even peeing in front of other guys—
He went to the mirror closest to the door and soaped a cross on it. He was, technically Jewish—but he'd never even had a bar mitzvah, he'd never learned Hebrew, and his family had yet to visit a temple, but he'd seen his share of vampire movies, so he had a good idea about the proportions, long vertical bar, shorter crossbar about a quarter down from the top.
There were six mirrors, and he soaped five of them, leaving the one farthest from the door unmarked.
"What are you doing?" Wanda asked.
"Trying something that might work," he said. "Look, everybody get into a stall, all right? I'm going to try to lure her in."
"Are you crazy?" Becca asked.
"I'm going to try to send her back into the mirror," Alex said. "And then seal it."
The bathroom door creaked.
"Hurry!" Alex said in a harsh whisper.
Two of the girls did. "Stand on the toilets!" Alex said. "Don't let your feet show!" To Wanda, he said, "You'd better go, too!"
"I'm staying," she said firmly.
"OK, she's pushing on the door. Here's what I want us to do." He hastily filled Wanda in on the plan.
"You sure about this?"
"Not sure about anything. Got any salt left?"
She felt in her pocket. "One."
"Have it handy in case this doesn't work!"
Wanda retreated into the last stall.
Alex stared down the row of sinks. The door was slowly, slowly opening, an inch at a time. He saw something that looked at first like an enormous black spider—no, not a spider's legs, but long, bony fingers with too many joints in them.
The fluorescent lights began to flicker, as though on the verge of dying. Oh, great. She's gonna come at me in the dark!
The creature shrieked again, the sound echoing in the shower enclosure, to the right as you came in the door. Then she stood swaying, misshapen—the salt?—and looking more inhuman than ever, arms too skinny and long, insect-like, neck too bony and the head too much like an elongated egg slashed with a spit-glistening mouth. The holes were gone, filled in mostly, though they still showed as pits in the dark gray flesh.
And the eyes, the eyes—human eyes didn't glare, didn't glow, like that.
The lights glimmered.
Stay on, stay on, don't go out, stay on, please.
Bloody Mary took a step forward, her skeletal feet more like huge bird talons than anything human. Her hands clenched and unclenched as she walked, loose-jointed, as though she were held together by pins loose in their sockets. He heard her hiss.
The overhead lights dimmed to a constant flicker. Alex backed away from her, flattening his back against the wall, the mirror and sink to his right, the toilet stalls to his left.
Feeling idiotic, he held up a bar of soap. "I'm not afraid to use this!" he said.
She gurgled in her throat. Was she laughing at him?
Alex wasn't much of a ball player, but he threw the small bar of soap at her. She dodged it easily and then lunged forward—
"Now!" Alex shouted.
Wanda kicked the stall door open and stepped out. Bloody Mary's head whipped around toward her.
"Hey, look at this, bitch!" Wanda said. She held up the makeup mirror from Selene's room.
Bloody Mary threw up her arms, wrists crossed as though shielding her eyes, and turned away—
Toward the large mirror on the wall.
"Bloody Mary! Bloody Mary! Bloody Mary!" Wanda yelled, her voice echoing.
As if drawn by a magnet, hissing, drooling, Bloody Mary turned back toward the mirror that Wanda held. She had to look. She had to.
And she saw . . . .
The mirror behind her, on the wall, reflected in the one the girl held—and the one the girl held reflected in the one behind her, vanishing into infinity.
"No!" she shrieked, throwing herself toward Wanda—
"It's working!" Alex said. He sidestepped and helped Wanda hold onto the mirror.
"Girls, run!" Wanda shouted. "Down to the lobby! Wait for us there!"
Stalls banged open, and the two girls pounded out the door.
"Hold on," Alex said, one hand hanging onto the mirror, the other arm around Wanda's waist.
Like a swarm of bees. Like a black swarm of bees the shape of a woman. Like a swarm caught between two powerful vacuums—
Bloody Mary came to pieces, one stream of fragments pouring into the wall mirror, another into the mirror Alex and Wanda held—
Skin, hair, flesh, bones, crumbling to pieces, the pieces streaming away to the sound of a ferocious, frightened scream—
Then silence and the lights came up full and Alex realized he had not even noticed how dim they had become—
He heard a sharp snap.
The mirror he and Wanda held had cracked from side to side. It corroded instantly.
And as though in response, the one on the wall turned black and splotched, as if it could barely contain the loathsomeness it had swallowed—
"Damn," Wanda whispered. "I think you did it."
"We did it," he corrected, starting to shiver.
"You scared now?" she asked.
"Um—nah, Mary Poppins. 'S just that I nevah 'ad me arm aroun' a loverly lady before an' in a ladies' room, an' all that, eh wot?"
"Oh, shut up," she said.
But a moment later, she kissed him. On the lips.
In the next few days—
Selene agreed to keep up with her counseling sessions. "I'm going to need them," she admitted. For one thing, in the future, she'd occasionally need to look in a mirror, which at the moment she couldn't stand to do.
Becca, like Prospero in The Tempest, decided she'd had it with rough magic and planned to break her staff and bury her magic books fathoms deep, metaphorically, or at least not to fool around with summoning visions and demons ever again.
And Alex and Wanda—well.
"You're still too young for me," she told him the next afternoon as they sat in the last warm sunshine of autumn on a bench in front of the library. Even so, they could sense a kind of chill behind the warmth. Autumn was ripening toward winter. November would come before they knew it, with chilly nights and mornings and cold rains and worries about term papers and final exams—
"Just two years difference," Alex said. "We make a pretty good team, and I didn't get my one dance."
"Give it up," she said, but not harshly. "Anyhow, thanks for your help. I guess I have to dance with you at least once for that."
"Not if you don't want to," he said. "I didn't do it to make you feel guilty or, you know, obligated. I did it because I never met a girl like you."
She grinned. "A mean bitch?"
Looking into her eyes, he said, "No, somebody who's brave and who takes care of other people before she worries about herself."
She couldn't hold his gaze and looked away, flustered. "Stop it."
"Just telling it like it is," he said. He sighed. "OK. If you insist, but crazy as it sounds, I enjoyed helping you out. I really like you."
After some moments of silence, she spoke again: "There'll be a Thanksgiving dance, you know."
Alex's heart thumped. "Would you?"
"I think," she said, "I'd like that. We'll go on a date. But no promises, OK? Nothing about anything more than going to that one dance."
"Could we just agree to leave it open?" he asked.
She looked at him, smiling, for several long moments. "I think," she said softly, "I think that yeah, I can live with that. Yes. We'll leave it open. For now."
"For now," he said, though already he was hoping for more.
And Bloody Mary? Well, all they knew for sure was that she never came back to any mirror in the dorm. The maintenance people couldn't understand how just one mirror in that one bathroom became so corroded so soon. They'd replace it . . . of course, the expense meant replacing the carpet in the conference room on the first floor would have to wait.
Anyway, Bloody Mary seemed to be gone. Maybe when the mirrors tore her apart, they annihilated her. Maybe she still lurks in the dark mirror realm. Who knows?
Just . . . don't fool around OK? Don't look into a mirror and call Bloody Mary's name. And if she calls you—
Don't answer.
The End