A Man Lives in The Mirror at My Grandma's House

The first time I saw the man in the mirror was right after my cat died. I was around ten years old, I think, when she got run over by a car. It was early in the morning and my parents had to go to work but they let me take the day off school since I was a complete wreck. I couldn't stop crying.

My little cat, Misty, was only a few years old when a careless driver speeding down our quiet residential street clipped her with their car. They didn’t even bother to stop and apologize. Maybe they didn’t even notice what they’d done, or maybe they didn’t care.

Since I couldn’t stay home by myself, my parents sent me over to spend the day with my grandma, a few blocks away.

I walked over there crying my eyes out over the death of my poor cat. All I could think of was how the night prior she had climbed up on my lap to snuggle with me, and she never did that. She had sat with me quietly petting her, warmly asleep in my lap, for nearly an hour. It was the first time she’d ever done that.

My grandma made me feel a little better when I got there. She made me Lipton chicken noodle soup and fed me ginger snaps and she let me pet her adorably geriatric black cat, Luna. But of course it wasn't the same. Because Luna was her cat.

I sat there all day watching Price is Right with Bob Barker and daytime murder mystery shows on the comfortable plaid couch in her den. The old black and white Zenith didn’t get many stations, but had just enough range in its bunny ears to entertain me for the day while I tried to forget about my cat.

During an episode of Columbo, I caught movement in the corner of the room I was sitting in.

My heart began to pound with fear and I screamed, seeing someone looking at me through the glass to my right. At first my mind couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing, but then it dawned on me - the piece of glass in the corner of the room was a mirror, not a window.

From the angle I was looking at him, it was impossible for the man to have been standing where his reflection showed him to be. There was nobody there, except in the mirror. It was like he was a reverse vampire, only visible in his reflection.

The man was wearing a brown suit and the first thing I noticed about him was that his eyes were white as freshly fallen snow. There was no iris or pupil within them.

And he was watching me with those blank white eyes. He was observing me carefully from the tilted, crooked viewpoint in the mirror where he resided.

I screamed as he watched me, and he calmly walked away, disappearing out of my view.

My grandma came in and told me it was okay, that it was just my imagination, but I knew what I saw.

I didn’t go back to her house for years after that. I was so afraid of the man in the mirror. I had nightmares about him for a long time and thought I would never get over the experience.

Eventually I did, though. When something supernatural like that happens, it’s like our mind reconstructs the memory, tries to make it more palatable and less impossible. And that’s what I did - I convinced myself it wasn’t real. That it was a false memory. A vivid hallucination. A dream. That’s what we do when we can’t cope with the reality of what actually happened.

But I know now. I know it was real. That was just wishful thinking.

Several years later I started going back to my grandma’s house. Although I had a fear of mirrors still, I managed to get by, trying simply to not look at them. Again, I had convinced myself that it was just a delusion - but being in my grandma’s house brought it all back each time. The memory was so vivid. Especially when my eye caught that mirror in her den.

I didn’t see the man in the mirror for two decades. Amazingly, I had almost managed to completely forget about him.

But then my uncle passed away.

We had coffee at my grandma’s house after the funeral and we were in the den, sitting around and talking about him. The night wore on and it got later and later and eventually people began to leave.

I stayed behind and helped my grandma clean up. She was obviously very upset over the tragic loss of her son, but seemed to be taking it surprisingly well.

“Thanks for your help, dear,” she said, taking some plates up to the kitchen.

"Of course Nan, anything I can do. Would you like me to spend the night?"

"No, no," she scoffed. "I'll be fine. You've done so much already."

There was a short flight of stone steps which led up to the dining room and then a doorway which led into the rest of the house. The den was an extension down on a lower level and I was once again left alone inside the quiet room.

Standing in front of the table, the mirror where I had seen the man was just beside me. But that had been so long ago I had almost completely forgotten about it, like I said before. It all came rushing back, though. All the memories and the appointments with counsellors and therapists and all the long talks with my parents, all of it came back to me suddenly as I looked to my left and saw a face staring back at me from that mirror once again. Those white, bloodless eyes staring at me.

This time I was too terrified to scream. All of my nightmares seemed to be coming true as he refused to turn away. He simply continued to stare at me. The thing which I told myself wasn’t real - was never real - suddenly it was literally staring me in the face.

And I couldn't handle it. A scream finally escaped my lips that had been growing in my belly since I was a child, building into a howling, terrified wail. It felt like…

It felt like I was back in that room, ten years old again, looking at that man in the mirror who made no sense. Who couldn't be there. Shouldn't be there. And yet he was. He was irrefutably, impossibly there. Staring at me with those blank white eyes, watching me.

My grandma came into the room and I looked up at her. She was asking what was wrong and I pointed at the mirror. But when I glanced down at it again the man was gone.

Her face was concerned but she didn't ask what I had seen. She seemed to already know.

"Grandma, what the hell is going on?"

This time she didn’t tell me I was imagining things, she simply nodded and walked over to the mirror. She stood in front of it and looked at me, then took my hand in hers. It felt cold as ice.

“I think it’s finally time I told you the truth,” she said. “You have to understand, I needed to be sure. The gift - it often skips a generation, sometimes three or four even. Children, they sometimes see things but that does not mean they are blessed with it. Only given a glimpse for a few short moments. But you have the gift. I am certain of that now.”

“What gift?” I asked, dumbstruck.

“Our family is special, Jayson. We have a power that only a very few people are blessed with. Watch, I’ll show you.”

She looked back towards the mirror.

“Frederick,” she called out, speaking into the glass softly. “Please come, and bring the cats.”

CATS?

The man in the mirror returned in his brown suit, with two cats in his arms. A grey one and a black one. Both of them had identical pairs of blank, white eyes.

“Misty… And is that… Luna?”

“Yes. You see now? Do you recognize the man? He recognizes you, I’m sure. He’s been watching you for a long, long time.”

“Grandpa?” I gasped the question, stepping backwards. The man looked so young - that was why I hadn’t recognized him. His face looked slightly familiar from photographs but I had never put it together. I had never met the man, not really. He had died when I was still a baby.

“What is this? Why are they in there?” I asked, still not understanding how this was possible or why it was happening.

Then a thought occurred to me suddenly.

“Uncle Gary… Is he there too?”

Another man stepped into the frame, looking very similar to the first, I realized now.

The two men stood there staring at us blankly, like zombies. They held the two cats and watched us through the glass, not smiling, not friendly. They did not say a word, they only stared.

“What’s wrong with them?”

“Nothing’s wrong with them,” my grandma snapped, speaking in a tone I had never heard from her before. My mom had always been a little scared of her, it seemed to me, and I never understood why. Maybe she knew something about this, or simply was terrified of this side of her so rarely seen by others.

“They get to be with us now - don’t you see? It’s perfect. They can spend so many more years with us this way.”

Her face looked far-off and dreamy as she spoke.

“But are they…” I stopped myself, seeing the look on her face again. I had to be careful.

“Can they talk? What’s it like there?” I asked, carefully choosing my words.

“No, dear. They can’t speak. But I’m sure if they could they’d say they are just happy to be with us. And the world on that side is much the same as the one here. It’s an exact replica of this house - I call it a mirror dimension. As long as they’re in this house, they’re here with us.”

I tried to comprehend how she could be so callous. How she could trap her loved ones here so ruthlessly. I suddenly felt terrified. What if I died next and she put ME in there? I imagined myself standing amid them, my eyes white and emotionless.

“Wow, so, when you… Pass away one day… Are you going to live in the mirror dimension too?”

She shot me that evil glare again and told me to quit asking so many questions.

“You can decide for yourself. Do you want to learn the things I can show you, or do you want to stay ordinary - like them?” she asked, pointing at my sad-faced uncle and grandfather in the mirror. The two cats lay limply in their arms - no longer alive, but not quite dead either.

The implication was clear - either I went along with what she wanted or I would end up there with them one day.

“Let me think about it,” I told her. She wasn’t happy about it, I could tell, but she said to take all the time I needed to decide.

If I decided to go through with it, she would show me everything she knew. But it would come with a cost, she told me. Certain HUMAN attributes would be lost in the process. She said the word, “human,” with some disdain. But I would grow into a far stronger being if I agreed. I would live the same length of time as an ordinary human, but I would have abilities that most people could only dream of.

“What exactly will I lose?” I asked her. But she wouldn’t say. Part of me was beginning to understand, though, as I looked at those sad faces in the mirror. I sympathized with them - felt terrible for them - but she merely saw them as decoration, window dressing suited to fit her needs - in this case, loneliness.

I went home and lay in bed for hours, thinking about the decision. It would be a lie to say I wasn’t tempted, that I wasn’t curious, but I couldn’t go through with it. Whatever had happened to my grandma to make her act so heartless - I didn’t want that to happen to me. Regardless of the benefits I would reap from the process.

The question was, how would I tell her? I was worried about what she might do if I refused her offer. My uncle had been a good man and she had trapped him in a mirror version of her home for eternity. My grandfather had been her husband for forty years and she had done the same to him. I didn’t want to think about what she would do to me if I said no.

As it turned out I wouldn’t have to. She passed away the following week, before I could give her my answer.

The whole family was mourning the loss of my uncle and this just made things ten times more devastating. Everyone in the family loved my grandma, and despite what had happened the last time I saw her, I loved her too. My mom was clearly conflicted at the funeral, as was I. With all that had happened I hadn’t had a chance to talk to her yet about the whole thing. And I was scared of what she would say, that maybe she would think I was crazy. It sure sounded crazy when I thought about what I would tell her.

“Hey mom, just so you know, grandma was a witch and she trapped grandpa and Uncle Gary in the mirror in her den. Oh, and you know my childhood cat, Misty? She’s in there too.”

Regardless, I knew I’d have to talk to her about it. I couldn’t just leave them stuck in that mirror, and I didn’t know how to get them out of it. I wondered if maybe my mom knew something more than she was saying. Maybe she wouldn’t think it was so crazy, after all.

Later that night we were at my grandma’s house again, having coffee and looking through old photos with family members who had come in from out of town for the funeral.

I kept seeing photos of people with my grandma who I didn’t recognize in one photo album, and it looked like they were close friends. Birthday parties and anniversaries and all the other events we celebrate in our lives - she had celebrated them with these people too. So why didn’t I know who they were?

After everyone else had gone home for the night, I pointed out one of these photos to my mom.

“Hey, mom, who is this lady? She keeps popping up in all these photos.”

“Oh,” she said, thinking about it. “That was one of the co-founders of a group your grandma used to be a part of. They stopped meeting years ago, but they used to be really close.”

Then it hit me. These were other people like her. A dwindling group of people with powers I would never understand. That I had chosen not to understand. Because of what it would do to me.

Their faces stared back at me from the photo, judging me, and I flipped the cover of the photo album closed.

“Hey mom, you know that mirror in grandma’s den?”

She turned her head sharply to look at me.

“Yeah…”

“Remember when I was a kid, how I saw a man in the mirror? It really freaked me out for a long time. You remember that?”

“Of course, how could I forget? What about it?”

I went down to the den and picked it up, looking at the faces in it, watching me perplexed as I carried it through the house. Five pairs of eyes looking back at me now, all mournful, all lonely and begging for freedom.

“Do you really like this mirror? Or can I do something with it?”

She looked at me with confusion, but then her face softened and relaxed.

“You know, to be honest, I’ve never liked that mirror. When I was a little girl I almost broke it and my mom - your grandma screamed at me, just screamed bloody murder. I'd never seen her so angry. She said it was one of a kind. What do you want to do exactly?”

“Come on, I’ll show you.”

I took the mirror outside and brought it to the curb. It wasn’t junk pickup day, but that didn’t matter. Some scrap collector could take it for all I cared. But I had a feeling that what really mattered was what we did next.

Laying the mirror flat on its back, I pointed it so it reflected upwards and faced the heavens and the stars, rather than the den inside my grandma's house.

I watched the reflections in the mirror as they slowly faded and disappeared. And said goodbye.

TCC