Something’s wrong.
A dull pain in my hip throbbed – the sharp edge of a rock was jabbing into me, but it was the thought that woke me up. Opening my eyes, I pushed myself into a seated position. Gravel crunched and cracked beneath me. The second I put weight on my right hand a jarring ache shot through my palm like electricity. Upon turning it over, I saw a large scrape on the pad of my hand, swollen and beginning to bruise.
“Ow,” I muttered, swiping the loose grit from the wound as I turned my attention back to the sky. I squinted in disbelief. “That can’t be right.”
A wash of thick, rich violet spread over me like a dome. The hue was cut through with jagged branches that reached all around where I was sitting, like desperate fingers scraping at the clouds. Two moons shone over me, one a perfect reflection of the other. I blinked over and over, rubbing my eyes, praying it was just a moment of double vision or a waking hallucination. The latter was no stranger to me. Upon reopening them, however, the strange hue remained, and the copy of the moon still hung in the sky. Uneasiness welled up in my chest as I got to my feet, bare and cracked at the soles.
A soft rumbling filtered out from the trees behind me, accompanying it was a chorus of deep hums and the shrieking of distressed birds.
I whirled around and stared in the direction it came from. Branches twisted in the wind, gesturing to the path beneath them. I paused, my veins filled with hesitancy, when a voice caught my ear, beckoning me onto the path.
That sounded like… my name. It was distinct amidst the clamor. There was a familiarity in the voice, but I refused to place it. Pulling branches away from my face, I started forward.
It had to be a trick, I thought. An illusion.
The uproar in the trees continued to get louder the further I trekked. Dirt and large pieces of gravel littered the path, but my gaze was directed forward, paying no heed to the ground under my feet nor the trees that caged me. My mind was too tightly wound around the voice calling my name to register that anything was out of the ordinary.
That all ended in a flash.
Catching movement from the corner of my eye, I gasped, stumbling backward. My reaction was mimicked for what seemed like an eternity, copied-and-pasted through the trees. It wasn’t until a gleam caught my eye that I realized what I was looking at.
There, strung up on the trunks that lined the path, were dozens of ornate mirrors. Each one was strung up by a thin wire, clinging to nails that were jutting out from the bark.
For a while, it was all I could do to sit there and stare. The reflection seemed… off somehow. I got to my feet and approached the nearest one.
Holding out a hand to touch the glass, I studied the image until I heard footsteps behind me, crunching through gravel and coming up on me fast. I whirled around to see who – or what – they belonged to but saw nothing. As they passed, I followed the noise with my eyes, but only caught a glimpse of them. No… What I caught was their reflection in the mirrors on the trees.
“What the hell?” I murmured.
Their hood bobbed up and down, bright orange like wildfire, as they ran down the road, disappearing in stretches, appearing only in the mirrors. They flickered through the glass like candlelight until they were almost out of view.
I recognized that jacket.
Feet pounding after the figure, I ran until I made it to the end of that path. Throwing myself out into the clearing, I froze. The nausea kicked in as I felt the color drain from my face.
After fifteen years, I was standing in the driveway to my childhood home. Eight years in therapy, and there I was, shaking at the sight of it. I spun on my heels to leave, but the path had been replaced with the trunk of a large oak tree.
Hanging from the bark was a large round mirror painted over with a single sentence: You can’t run this time.
My heart sank to my knees, taking my stomach along with it.
“Right,” I muttered. “This dream.” I moved my hand to pinch myself but stopped short.
What if I didn’t-
A scream broke through the clearing. I looked up at the house, two stories tall, paint peeling from the siding. The wailing continued. After the initial shock, I put my hands over my ears and slammed my eyes shut.
“I don’t want to go in there,” I whispered. “Please don’t make me go back in there.”
Taking a deep breath, I tapped my toes against the ground and counted, trying to calm myself back down. When I made it to twenty, I opened my eyes, this time fully prepared to wake myself up.
My reflection stared back at me – two inches from the tip of my nose.
I stumbled backward, tripping over my own feet, and crashed to the ground. It felt like… hardwood. It was dark. Shadows pooled in every corner like puddles of tar. I scrambled to get to my feet, backing into the railing of the staircase.
No.
My eyes wandered over everything as my heart pounded. I was inside the house, but it was wrong. Mirrors were strung up everywhere. Just above the first step another message was scrawled out over the glass.
Go upstairs. It was accompanied by a glaring red arrow.
Numbly, I obeyed.
The stairs groaned under my feet. When I got to the second floor and rounded the corner to the hallway, the stench of sweetened copper clawed at my nostrils. I clapped my hands over my nose and mouth, fighting back my gag reflex. Casting a glance at the mirrors on the wall, more writing appeared: Keep going. Cringing and swallowing desperate cries, I continued down the hall.
My brother’s bedroom door was open. His light was on. Knowing what I would find if I continued, I looked back at the staircase, pleading for release. All I found was yet another demanding sentence – dripping down the glass in that same awful red.
NO TAKE-BACKS. KEEP GOING.
I bit my lip, drawing in a shaky breath before I surrendered. My eyes were cast down at the floor as I staggered into the room. I didn’t want to look up, the numbness settled deep in my body, I knew what he had done.
Piles of dirty clothes and suggestive magazines were strewn everywhere. The sheets were off the bed and wrinkled to all hell, but other than that, everything looked ordinary. It wasn’t until I looked up and caught the reflection of the room that I doubled over to vomit.
I saw myself in the doorway at twelve years old, wearing the specific hand-me-down hoodie; orange like wildfire. Dark hair tangled from the toss of the wind, face sickly pale. With a slow turn of my head, I followed their gaze.
My mother and father lay face down on that dirty sheet, soaking it through with blood as my brother stood over them, still clutching my grandfather’s shotgun.
On the other side of the glass, my brother looked over his shoulder at me, meeting my eyes as if he could see me through to my side of the mirror. He raised a finger to his lips.
Shhhh.