CRICKETS AND OTHER THINGS threw their voices into the dark, filling the empty spaces with trills and whispers that traveled on the wind. It was a warm night. Or maybe my nerves were more in charge of telling my brain what was temperate or not than reality. I stood on Aunt Cindy's front porch, sweating bullets in my shirtsleeves, my stomach in knots.
I shouldn't be here.
I'd crossed midnight a few pedaled miles back, and the nighttime seemed darker here. The porch light was off. I nudged the welcome mat with my foot, my sneakers inches away from the front door, which hung open ominously, triggering my flight response.
My bike watched me from its discard in the driveway, three weathered wood treads and a gravel path away. I could make it there quickly if I needed to: one long leap down, four strides, a pause to grab the rubber handles, and then I'd be off.
"What's inside?" I asked the young man hovering at my side. His purple shirt bled color at the fringes, barely discernable in the darkness.
He didn't speak, he pointed. The familiar tone of his pearly arm drew my eye as he stretched it toward the front door, curling his fist and letting loose one rigid finger.
Go. See.
It was a thought. Not mine. It filled my head with weight. I toed the mat again, hoping to trick whatever hid inside the quiet house into a premature reveal—no such luck.
I couldn't be here. It wasn't possible.
Thursday, I'd contemplated my options, widdling the hours to nubs in the field outback, keeping within earshot of the decrepit barn. I said things out loud. Things I knew it would hear, and I wondered, half-heartedly, if Dad might be listening, his spirit squirreled away in the rafters, forever dammed to ignore me.
In the full sun, I sat, brown grass matted around me. Small insects weeble-wobbled their way up and down the frail stems.
I said, "What if it wasn't real?"
After the adrenaline rush died and my thoughts gathered in line, after I'd sketched the face emblazoned behind my eyelids, I started asking questions...
What if I made it all up?
Was Ma even there? Had I manifested her out of a strange grief I couldn't suppress?
I'd read about such things in a rotted-out book I'd found in Ma's dresser. The cover was cracked leather, so old on its own that I doubted the heat from the fire had made much difference in its brittle skin. The bookplate on the first page had angels and skulls and flourishes you couldn't find in modern books. Experimental Spiritism: A Guide for Mediums, Invocators, and Malediction. That was the title. 1891 was the publisher's date.
Inside, the thick pages were spotted by mildew, yellowed. I'd read every paragraph secretly, half hidden under my blankets, my red plastic flashlight a guide.
Egregore. Giving life to an entity through thought.
By definition, it only worked if a group of people wished and willed the same thing, but I wondered...what if Amy was guilty of the same wants as me, even if she didn't know it, even if she openly denied it?
Subconsciously, we both wanted Ma back. My gut held onto that like a lifeline.
Now and again, I'd come back to the yard. Amy set out food for me on the porch stairs: a tuna sandwich and potato chips. A glass of water. She stayed away, letting me wander, and watched, occasionally peeking out the kitchen window to confirm I was alive and maintaining a reasonable distance from the barn (she hated the barn). When the clock tipped to 5:00 PM, and I stopped seeing the rustle of the kitchen curtains, I knew she had left for her night shift.
At dusk, I went inside.
Standing alone in the hallway, the dry stillness of the achy house wrapped me in spider cotton. Soon, I heard them come. Footsteps—clunks and thuds as bold as knocks on the front door—walked over my head. Beckoning. They knew my intentions. Intentions I'd voiced in the field, not in the house, and I wondered not for the first time:
Maybe I was the haunted one?
A mirror hung in the entry to my left, hooked to the wall that supported the stairs undercarriage. Faded wallpaper disguised the liminal space, bouncing brown stripes between the treads and the hardwood floor, rising each trip. The mirror was covered coyly by a floral bedsheet, and underneath it, a table sat. A bowl for keys waited patiently on top, its ceramic pit dusty, clutching obscure items: old rubber bands, a paper clip, something sticky. Melted candy? I picked a specific key from the clutter and unhooked the oval-shaped mirror from the wall, leaving its light-colored imprint behind.
"I'm coming up," I said. The knocks stopped.
On the second floor, I made my way to the room at the end of the poorly lit hall, passing my bedroom, then Amy's, acutely aware of the darkness swelling the open doorways, leaning into the frames like inmates on cage bars. I quickened my steps, feeling more the bait than the hunter, and stopped at Ma's bedroom.
The ancient shaker moldings on the door were thick with old paint, their features nearly lost in the semi-light. I positioned the little key in the lock below the enamel knob and pushed.
It refused me—refused how a door did when held shut from the other side, moving a short jolt and stopping hard.
I pushed again with the same result. After a few tries, I said, "Let me in, please," and stumbled forward as the door swung open at my request, one-quarter of the uneven bottom scrapping a U across the floor.
Someone giggled.
"Funny," I tugged the overhead lightbulb on. It flared, and for a second, I saw a figure perched on the edge of the sagging mattress.
Two long braids. Coreless black eyes.
I'd never been able to verify Kat (the only name she'd given me) was ever a part of the Shippy family tree, although she visited me more than any of my relatives. The closest I could reckon, she was a dead neighbor from up the street. A 1901 microfilm obituary at the library claimed her as Katrina Osbourne, a girl murdered at twelve years old, her body dumped in a nearby well. Sometimes, she left wet footprints in the bathroom. Kat favored warnings. She liked to find me when something important was about to go cattywampus.
(Her word, not mine).
Why she existed in our house—the hell if I knew. A lot of spirits who didn't belong here still were. All questions led to the mirror fused on Ma's bedroom wall. As Amy said, I was 100% certain the mirror was the epicenter of many, many, many bad things. And on that night, in the nearly two decades we'd shared a roof, I had the mind to ask it some of those questions.
Peels of black paint, all that remained from yesterday's ritual erasure, flattened like wood shavings underfoot. The oval mirror from the entry remained tucked, sheet and all, under my wing as I dragged a small Bentwood rocker to the center of the room. Positioning it at the foot of the bed, I made sure its reflection was square in the middle and placed the second mirror atop an old dresser shoved slovenly against the opposite wall. The dresser stood chest-height on clawed feet, its bowed drawer front jammed open in various ways, more from heat damage than age. Varnish bled dark brown on my skin whenever I dragged a finger against the wood, tacitly sticky.
I propped the oval mirror and let the sheet drop. For a second, I saw myself rung out like a threadbare rag, and then the Shadowman flickered into partial existence. Suddenly torn between the two mirrored surfaces now present in the room, he was behind me, then before, then behind again. Adjusting the smaller mirror to catch the rocker and my subsequent reflection in both, I set the loop.
Got you.
My calmness was foreign, almost confident. I'd never wanted or tried to see the Shadowman before, to examine him the way he did me in every puddle or swatch of chrome. Whatever occurred in the supermarket had flipped a switch deep inside. I'd...changed. An aggregate numbness, different from a supernatural touch, overwhelmed my body piece by piece, deadening my fear and replacing it with determination. Floating, I sank into the rocker between both mirrors and closed my eyes, ready to begin.
Quietly, I counted, my lips moving the numbers backward, enacting my plan.
"Three...two...one..."
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