Am I Dreaming?

Am I dreaming?

I’m sitting up in my bed with my constellation-themed blanket wrapped tightly around my body. The sunlight streams in through the cracks of the window blinds, and expose the messiness of my room. There is a small stack of library books, that I need to return, in the corner of my room, right next to a pile of clothes that won’t fit in my overflowing laundry basket. The content of my backpack lays strewn across my desk and last night’s spaghetti is still on the floor next to me. What draws my attention is my large wall mirror right next to the doorway.

I’m watching a girl, who looks exactly like me, looking at herself in the mirror. She is combing her fingers through her long brown hair, and picking at a single pimple on her cheek. I see her mouth moving, but there is no sound coming out. Her hazel eyes don’t stray away even when I start waving my hand at her.

“Hello? Can you hear me?”

But she doesn’t seem to notice my voice either. I get out of my bed and cautiously walk up to the mirror. Everything about her is the same as me. From the small freckles under her left eye to the way her eyes shift around the room. For a split second, I thought we made eye contact, but she looks away as she seems to respond to someone. When she walks away, I look around her room to see that it is drastically different from mine.

Her bed is in the center of the room instead of being against the wall. There is no clothes or leftovers set on the ground. Her schoolbooks are stacked nicely on her desk and even her pencils are gathered and placed in a decorative cup. She doesn’t have posters of Three Days Grace on the walls and instead has posters of human anatomy and medical terminology. Even her bookshelf contains multitudes of nonfiction and assorted textbooks, compared to my bookshelf that is filled with science fiction and romance novels. Everything about her room tells me that she has a completely different lifestyle compared to mine, even though we look exactly the same.

Is this the life I could have been living?

And then another thought crosses my mind.

I want to see what it is like in her shoes.

But this idea is squashed as soon as I reach my hand towards the mirror and touch its surface instead of phasing through.

I figured it wouldn’t be that easy.

My mom came into my room the day after I discovered the mirror realm, but even she couldn’t see our mirrored life. Maybe it will be for the best if I didn’t tell anyone about it…I mean, who will believe me anyways? I continue observing her for a few more days and I notice a few more differences between us. There is something odd about the way she responds to a voice from the hallway. She never looks as she talks, and it is almost like she is just talking to herself. Also, her mom never enters her room and I never saw anyone past the bedroom door. Is she all alone in her house?

The hallway has a perpetual darkness, which is odd since her time seems to match with mine. She is always in her room when I leave, and when I come back, she is always at her desk drawing something. I got to see a peek at her drawing, but it was just some undecipherable symbols with geometric shapes. I tried looking it up online, but the only things that pop up deal with the occult and nothing seems to match what I saw. Every once and a while, she looks back at the mirror and I swear that we make eye contact for a few seconds before she fixes her hair, as if she didn’t see me.

Right before she goes to sleep every night, she always sits right by her bed and “prays”. This is the most jarring event because her eyes are always wide open when she does and she seems to be looking at something. I never see anything, but her hands are clasped and she always pauses between speaking, as if she is responding to someone else speaking. Just last night, as she was speaking, I thought I glimpsed something dark in the corner of the room. The shadows in her room seem to grow and breathe, as if they were alive. She slowly turned her head and looked directly at me. She got off her knees and began walking towards me. I quickly took one of my towels and covered the mirror with it. Whatever she was doing, it couldn’t reach me from the other side of the mirror.

For two weeks, I stopped looking into the mirror. It remained in my room, but I always had it covered with my towel. My mom questioned me about it, but I just shrugged it off and she stopped asking. There is no visible change but deep inside, I know that I want to see what is going on behind the mirror. My curiosity makes me inch closer and closer to uncovering it and seeing what’s happening…and I did just that. I can’t contain myself anymore as I rip off the towel and peer into the other room. There is something very wrong with what I was seeing.

The other me is not inside her room, and it is a little past midnight now. I sit on the ground and wait for something to happen. Around 2 A.M., her bedroom door opens up, and she walks in. From out of the darkness of the hallway, I see her bloodied form. She is wearing the same pajamas as me, but hers are bloodstained. I can see a large hacksaw in her right hand, and she is dragging something behind her. It is the body of a naked man, except the head is missing and his bones are protruding from his chest. She is smiling as she drags him to the center of the room, a few feet from where I sat. I watch in horror as she stands next to him and her body begins contorting.

Her arms and legs begin stretching out until her head reaches the ceiling. The shadows of the room moves around her and begins to cover her in their inky blackness until she becomes a tall shadow herself. I can no longer see her face, but her eyes remained wide open. Multiple blood-red eyes begin opening up and slowly move across her body. Pitch black tentacles come out of her form, and pick up the corpse. I can hear the popping sound in my head as the bones in his arms and legs snap when the tentacles begin reeling him in. Her shadowy form engulfs him until she was the only one left standing in the room.

I can’t stand to look at the scene anymore, and get up to grab my towel. Just as I begin to stand, all of her eyes turn to look directly at me. Inside of my head, I hear a deep, gravelly voice say, “You can’t run from me. I am a part of you.”

I don’t waste another second as I grab one of my hardcover books and repeatedly smash the mirror into pieces. Over and over, I bring the book down onto her image. I can hear her laughing at me as the shards cut my fingers. A dark, wicked sound that will be forever ingrained into my mind. I don’t stop even as my mom runs into my room and asks me if I’m okay. Only after she takes the book from my hands do I break down in her arms.

She is patient with me as we go to the hospital and get my hands bandaged up.

“She was cleaning up a broken vase,” my mom tells the nurses, “there was a lot of glass,” but we both know this isn’t true.

For weeks after, she would ask me about why I keep glancing at mirrors with a fearful expression on my face and I refuse to tell her. I don’t want her to know what I saw… I still see the creature sometimes. It is just lurking in the background of my reflection, patiently waiting for me to get closer and closer so it can pull me into the mirror. I can’t see its face, but I know it is smiling at me with a mouthful of long, sharp teeth. I still wonder what it meant when it said that it is a part of me…that is…until I got a call the other day.

“Hello?” I hear a younger man say.

“Who is this?”

“I know this is going to sound crazy, but I need to meet with you right now. I know what you are and I’m going to need your help to save us all.”

“You know what I am? What do you mean?”

“I’ll explain more to you later. I have to go now. I’ll see you soon, Beelzebub.”

“Wait!” I yell into the phone, but he has already hung up the phone.

Who was that guy and why did he call me Beelzebub? Right as I hung up the phone, I hear the doorbell ring. As I approach the door, I got a sinking feeling in my chest and I swear I could hear it laughing at me through the glass. A deep, haunting sound that has plagued my mind. I know the monster is out there but I don’t stop as I slowly bring my hand to the doorknob.

“It’s time.”