Your parents left a while ago and your father reminded you to perimeter the house to ensure that his most precious, irreplaceable signed football wouldn’t be stolen. Yeah, thanks. Your child will be fine too you remembered thinking.
It’s eerily quiet, though, and every time you pass the basement door and shut it, it’s open again with its enclosing darkness wrapping around the hallway. That sound? Your dog’s whining at nothing and you want to comfort his attempt for attention, but his whining only makes you breathe heavier and your heart beat in your throat. The cold chips at your skin only to be followed with a short, visible "hmpf" every time your lungs chose to breathe for you.
You go down to the basement to get something you can’t remember- well, your mind just can’t seem to suddenly process anything- how old was.. there’s something else here. At the end of the hall, you are paralyzed while its deep encrypted eyes bore past your dilated orbs.
A step. Another. One more and it disappeared. Your mouth configured into a wried, gaping mess splittering incoherent babble onto the listening walls. Jolting, your fingertips, shoulder blades, neck, and knees all tried to rid of the tiniest tingle that a whiff of air passed through you. Forgotten, the basement muttered, groaned, prodded at your anxiousness as you almost flew past the door, up the stairs, and slammed the door.
I’ve seen this; it’s a spirit or ghost or a being far worse. A voice swallowed the thoughts you had and whispered them, not in your head, but in your ear; the inhumane, icy, monotone rumble of words hit your neck and intensified the fire in your limbs and nerves. A speck of light hit your back- you felt its heat, but still stood stationary and stuck in a quicksand of adrenaline. Like the rays of sun shining when the clouds move away, your curtains silently make way for daylight. Odd, since it was just dusk a while ago.
A date. You couldn’t even get a date to help you avoid being the outlier in your friend group who, happily, all had extra company. Conversation was pointless for they seemed to just ignore you and not notice your input, or look at each other but not at you- as if you weren’t supposed to be there. It’s my introversion; they just want to have fun. At one point you only had the crunch of dried, patched dirt & distant screaming with goofy tunes drowning out the obnoxity when you strained your ears to focus on them. To be honest, carnivals creeped you out.
Anything would do, though, to distract from the memories of the night prior to your hangout since the same tingling, watchful feeling would creep through your body whenever you thought you heard a deep whisper. The pumpkins that kids messily carved mocked and judged you more than the vsco girls did. The lights illuminating the rides nearly blinded your eyesight, and the people chewing, laughing, running, talking, hitting, playing, and screaming in terror or delight filled your nervous void. There are people here. It’s open and others see me. My friends will worry if I’m suddenly gone, but I left earlier and no one bothered to see where I was going.
The Hall of Mirrors beamed into your interest as the brightest out of all the attractions. To get out of your gloom, you were lured into the empty feature. Gray fog digested your feet and led you to the mazy hall.
Chlinkkkkkk echoed against the mirrors and seemed to awaken a far worse being- the far worse being. A person stood in the mirror in front of you- no body, legs, arms, head- just eyes: devilish eyes that evoked fear from the pores of your mind as surrounding darkness filled the absence of its body.
Then it was gone. And you were alone. With mirrors. That silently screamed and made your head pound for you couldn’t find anything in them- not even your own reflection. Turn, gasp; turn, pound at the mirror; turn, stare into its empty image with another mirror inside it and fog drifting down, but nothing else. You were gone, and this devilish being took you to the other side- a hellish place without iced coffee, constant couples’ pda, C.O.D. or 2k, Instagram or Twitter, and Mr. Johnson’s sense of humor, which are all necessities that you absolutely lived for.
Leah Hudson is a sophomore at GHS who has had a compulsion to writing since she learned the alphabet. She is always graded on essays for a little too much description, so a free-roaming story was enticing. She likes to make pieces of work that invoke thought and feeling whether it's in drawings, poetry, music, or stories.
