Five Stories for the Dark Months Read online

Five Stories for the Dark Months

  Katherine Traylor

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  Copyright 2013 Katherine Traylor

  Cover image is "Window," by Lucrecia Beatrice

  "Under Glass," "Warmth in Winter," and "Over the River" can also be read online at the author's blog, Among the Goblins. "Sans Merci" and "Boon" have never been published before in any format.

  License Notes

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  Table of Contents

  1. Under Glass: A girl discovers the danger of being rude to a mirror.

  2. Warmth in Winter: A young border guard and a foreign spy must avoid pursuit while traveling through a forest full of hungry ghosts.

  3. Sans Merci: During a stolen coffee break, a young father meets a beautiful stranger who is much more than she seems.

  4. Over the River: A young woman wanders to the riverbank on Halloween and is invited to a strange party.

  5. Boon: A very dark Thumbelina retelling, inspired by zombies and Norse mythology.

  6. About the Author

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  Under Glass

  October 2011

  Table of Contents

  “But you said I could go!”

  “I said you could go if you kept your grades up, young lady, and I told you what would happen if you didn’t.”

  “But Aunt Laurie—”

  Adie’s mother folded the report card and set it down on the pristine kitchen counter. She clearly would rather have thrown it on the floor. “I will call Aunt Laurie myself and tell her why you’re not coming,” she said. “Or you can explain to her why shopping with your friends was so much more important to you than your visit next month.”

  “That’s not—”

  “Don’t you raise your voice to me, young lady, or you’ll regret it.” Her mother pointed out the door. “Now go upstairs and do your homework. Dinner’s in an hour.”

  Adie glared. “I’m not hungry.” Her stomach rumbled as she spoke. The air was heavy with the aromas of baking bread and homemade tomato sauce, and she hadn’t eaten anything since lunch. But some things were more important than her mother’s spaghetti, and New York was one of them.

  Adie’s mother looked heavenward, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “All right. Then go upstairs and go to bed. I don’t want to see you until morning.” With that she turned back to the cutting board and began dicing celery with harsh, uneven strokes. Adie knew that the conversation was over.

  She grabbed her backpack and stormed from the kitchen, down the hallway and up the towering stairs. She made sure to stomp hard on each beige-carpeted step. All right, she would go to bed—and then she’d get up early tomorrow, eat breakfast and leave the house before either of her parents woke up. Right now she wasn’t sure if she wanted to see them ever again.

  The trip to New York was a long-delayed birthday present from her Aunt Laurie, who had been one of Adie’s dearest companions until she’d moved away last fall. The thought of calling to tell her aunt that the trip was off was enough to make her gut clench. Tears blurred her vision as she opened her bedroom door. She threw her backpack on the floor, then went back down the potpourri-scented hallway to the bathroom to brush her teeth. She would go to bed. Right now she’d rather be dead than face the knowledge that her own stupidity had lost her New York.

  In the bathroom, Adie squeezed a healthy glob of toothpaste onto her toothbrush and shoved it into her mouth. She winced as it rammed the backs of her gums and bruised the inside of her cheek. As she brushed (tops... bottoms... insides... outsides... twice all over...) she watched the reflection of her face in the mirror.

  The girl in the mirror was an unfashionable sixteen. She had frizzy hair and an awkward nose, and her shirt was stained from a spill at lunch.. Her cheeks were wet with tears; her eyes were red and swollen. This was the kind of face you had when you were hopeless. When you weren’t going anywhere. When you would spend Christmas break alone with your own stupid parents... and when, worst of all, you weren’t going to New York because you had been stupid.

  She spat her toothpaste into the sink, then spat again to clear the dregs from her mouth. Now the girl in the mirror had little dribbles of toothpaste foam all over her lips and chin. Her nose had begun to run,too. She looked ridiculous.

  Adie wrapped her arms around herself and stared at the girl in abject misery. So. Stupid. Why had she ever even thought that she would make it to New York? She was probably doomed to stay here forever and rot, like an unharvested pumpkin in the world’s worst field.

  A little more toothpaste ran down the chin of the girl in the mirror. Despite her foolish appearance, there was a glint in her eyes that Adie didn’t much like. The girl looked mocking. Mean, even. Adie could understand why people wouldn’t want to be around a girl like that. She wouldn’t want to be around herself, either. She just made everyone angry. It was probably for the best that she wasn’t going—Aunt Laurie would probably have regretted inviting her even if she had gone.

  She glared at the girl, and the girl glared back. “Fuck you,” Adie whispered. She wiped the toothpaste from her mouth with an angry fist.

  The girl in the mirror watched dumbly, as if she hadn’t understood what she’d said.

  On a whim, Adie licked her fingertip and wrote—in big, neat block letters—on the surface of the mirror: FUCK YOU.

  Then, to make it even clearer, she wrote it backwards.

  When she looked back down at her reflection, her stomach dropped: The girl was not looking at her.

  She was looking, instead, at the message Adie had written, and her lips were moving as she read the words. When she finished, her eyes went wide. Slowly, she looked back down at Adie.

  It was not a nice look.

  More than an hour later, as Adie lay trembling in bed with the blankets over her head, someone came into her room. She thought that it was probably her mother, because she could smell her mother’s neat floral perfume over the faint tang of her own unwashed laundry. Well-pressed chinos swished efficiently to the center of the room, then stopped.

  The person who was probably her mother stood quietly for a very long time. Adie lay in the warm darkness beneath her blankets and wished that she could be sure.

  “Still mad?” her mother said finally. The sound of her voice was blessedly familiar.

  Adie shrugged. She hadn’t actually thought that much about the argument since she’d seen what must have been a hallucination in the bathroom mirror. She still shuddered just thinking of the malice in her reflection’s eyes.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” her mother continued in her calm, reasonable way.

  Adie snorted. Tell her mother she was hallucinating? Sure, that would smooth things over.

  Her mother sighed. It was a soft, gusty sigh, quite restrained: the sigh of someone who has too many troubles to welcome another one. It also had that extra little trill of exasperation that had always been applied exclusively to Adie. This, more than anything, convinced her that it was safe to come out.

  She pulled the covers from her face and sat up. The air was a cool shock against her skin after more than an hour between the blankets. Her mother, who had already started to leave, stopped in midstride. She looked surprised, and no wonder: Adie rarely left a sulk until at least a day after she’d started it.

  “I’m still mad,” she said quickly, lest her mother wrongly assume that all was forgiven. “But... I’ll come downstairs.”

  “All right,” said her mother, looking bemused. “Go wash your hands and come set the table.”

  Adie approached the bathroom as if it were a dragon’s cave. Her heart was pounding. The bathroom light was out, and since the room had no windows
it was as dark as a real cave would have been. She snaked her arm around the doorframe and felt for the switch. For one harrowing second she was sure that something was going to bite her hand off—but then she found the switch, and light flooded the bathroom.

  There was something wrong with the mirror. At first she couldn’t make sense of what she saw. It was a strange crosshatching over the surface of the glass, so thick in places that it almost looked frosted. It covered the whole surface of the mirror, from top to bottom and left to right.

  After a moment, Adie realized that the marks were scratches, gouged into the surface of the glass as if with a screw or a nail. They grew larger and wilder the further down they went, until at the bottom they became a nest of angry gouges that took up half the mirror.

  She reached out automatically to touch the glass. The scratches were quite deep, almost rough to the touch. It would have taken someone a lot of work—and a lot of anger—to produce them so quickly. Gradually, her mind found patterns in the chaos—and then it all clicked into place. From top to bottom, side to side, the scratches spelled out the same two words over and over again, until they culminated in a ragged scrawl across the bottom:

  FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU

  Something moved behind the glass, drawing Adie’s eyes to her reflection. The girl behind the mirror was almost hidden behind the destruction she had wrought, but it was clear that she was pleased with herself. She smirked at Adie and mouthed two words. Though Adie couldn’t hear them, she understood them quite clearly.

  “I just don’t see how you did it,” her mother said the next Saturday. “You were only up there for an hour—some of those scratches were a quarter of an inch deep!” She was leaning against the kitchen counter, overseeing Adie’s punishment breakfast of cold cereal and milk. For Adie’s parents there were pancakes and coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice. The smells in the kitchen were an exquisite torture to Adie, who usually looked forward to Saturday breakfast all week.

  She watched wistfully as her mother sliced fresh cantaloupe and poured real maple syrup into a jug for the table. “I didn’t do it,” she muttered for the thousandth time.

  “Then who did, Adie?” her mother snapped. She had clearly lost patience with Adie’s protestations of innocence. “Only you and I were in the house, and I promise you that I didn’t carve ‘Fuck you’ all over your mirror. Are you suggesting that some criminal broke in and did it?” She looked as if she wanted to throw something.

  Adie rather wanted to throw something, too. She shrugged, looking down at her plate. What could she say?

  The new mirror for her bathroom was delivered within a week of the old one’s demise. Under her mother’s direction, Adie had cleaned and polished the room to a sparkling sheen, and the air was heavy with the remnants of chemical vapors. The mirror itself was larger and more elaborate than the other one had been. It had a beveled edge where the other had been plain, and a border of frosted-glass roses that Adie longed to run her fingertips over. She stole glances at the glass as her father installed it, and watched as her mother polished it to brilliant clarity. There was nothing unusual in their reflections. She began to hope.

  After dinner that night, she crept towards the bathroom with butterflies in her stomach. Once again she reached through the doorway first to turn on the light. New mirror or not, there was no way she would ever set foot in that room again without the light. Across the flawless counter, she laid out her supplies: toothbrush, toothpaste, dental floss, mouthwash. Then she looked up.

  For one long, still moment, she stared at her reflection, and the reflection stared back at her. Neither of them moved. Around them, the house was quiet. Downstairs she could hear the news, and over it her parents’ quiet voices. Nothing was out of the ordinary.

  Adie slowly let out the breath that she must have been holding for ages. In the mirror, the other girl let out a breath, too. The two of them smiled at each other and reached for their toothbrushes.

  But as Adie squeezed toothpaste onto her brush, her reflection’s smile continued to grow. In a moment it had become a savage grin, baring sharp white teeth much larger than her own.

  She shrieked and leaped backwards, hitting the wall hard. A towel rack jabbed her painfully in the back. The thing in the mirror let out a shriek, as well, and then began to laugh. Adie could only just hear it over the thunder of footsteps on the stairs: her parents, coming to see what was happening. She wanted to tell them to hurry, please, help her—but the thing in the mirror had wrapped its fist around its toothbrush and was advancing towards the glass. Adie threw her arms across her face just as the mirror shattered.

  When her parents reached the bathroom door, they found her crouched amid a sea of broken glass, hiding her eyes and weeping hysterically. Of the thing in the mirror there was now no sign, only a little flicker in one of the shards of glass, which might have been a trick of the light.

  This time the mirror was not replaced. Instead, her parents began to talk about “finding special care” and “seeing a therapist” when they thought that Adie couldn’t hear them. She barely heard them, anyway. She had discovered, to her horror, that reflections were everywhere. She caught glimpses of herself in windows, pot lids, the blades of table knives. Though she kept her eyes lowered as much as possible, she kept seeing twitches where nothing was moving, flashes of teeth out of the corners of her eyes.

  One night, on her way to bed, she paused in her bedroom doorway. Across from the door, next to the closet, there was a full-length mirror that her mother had bought for her at a flea market years before. It was very pretty, with a carved wooden frame the color of oxidized copper. Adie had always loved it, but since her first encounter with the thing in the mirror she had left it carefully covered. Now the sheet that she’d covered it with lay pooled on the floor, and the mirror stared back at her unguarded.

  Her reflection gave her pause, for she looked almost at death’s door. She had grown pale and drawn from many nights without much sleep, and the skin under her eyes was so dark it looked almost blue. Her hair was an unkempt mess, and her clothes were slightly out of place: she never checked her appearance anymore if she could avoid it. It was no wonder her parents had taken to whispering about her when they thought she wasn’t listening. The changes in her appearance would have startled anyone.

  Just as she remembered that she should probably look away, the girl behind the mirror took a step forward.

  Adie was out the door and halfway down the hall before she’d really registered what had happened. She had just enough presence of mind to tiptoe back and yank the door shut behind her. She thought she felt something tug against it when it was nearly shut, and had to hold back a scream as she wrestled it into place. When it was finally closed, she grabbed a few blankets from the linen closet down the hall, minced back across her doorstep, and pounded down the stairs as fast as her legs would carry her.

  Her parents were in the kitchen, talking in hushed voices again. They fell silent when they heard her go into the living room. “What are you doing, Adie?” her mother called, in that sweet, careful voice she’d taken to using lately.

  Adie spread one blanket across the old tweed couch cushions. “I’m sleeping down here tonight.” She had given up explaining herself, since they never believed her explanations anyway.

  There was a flurry of whispers. “Um... okay, honey,” her father said. She heard him close his newspaper. “Good night.”

  She stacked most of the throw pillows at one end of the couch, then spread the other blankets on top of them. As she slid between the covers of her makeshift bed, she heard chairs scrape in the kitchen. A moment later, the kitchen light went out, leaving the downstairs infinitely vast and dark. “Good night, sweetie,” her mother called.

  “Night, Mom. Night, Dad.”

  In the darkness, her hearing grew sharper. She listened to her parents footsteps as they climbed the stairs and started down the hallway. They were still whispering, as if they
thought she didn’t know what they were talking about. One of them stepped on the creaking board outside Adie’s bathroom. There was a soft click—someone turning off the hallway light—and the darkness deepened. A moment later, Adie heard her parents’ door squeak open and shut.

  Now the living room became an alien wasteland, alive with strange black shadows that seemed to move whenever she tried to look at them. Shivering, she pulled a blanket all the way over her head. Like everything in the linen closet, it smelled vaguely of mothballs, although her family had never used them.

  She tried to reassure herself that she was safe. For one thing, her parents were probably still awake. They always sat up talking and reading for a while after they’d changed into their pajamas. In her mind she saw the clean white light of their reading lamps, heard the placid murmur of their voices. It made her feel a little better to know that they’d hear if anything strange started to happen.

  Then she remembered the menacing stare of the thing behind the mirror. It had traveled from the bathroom to her room so easily. What was to stop it from traveling to her parents’ room, as well? Her reassurance twisted into anguish in her gut, but she did not dare climb up the stairs to warn them.

  The house grew very quiet, and into the silence there came a dream. Adie was walking. She had in her arms a long, thin parcel: the mirror from her room, safely covered once again.

  Something was pounding against the glass beneath the sheet. Adie knew that if she didn’t lock the mirror away, the thing inside it would get out. Then it would get her, and maybe after it killed her it would take on her face and kill her parents, too. Her bedroom closet was the nearest safe place to put it.

  As Adie tried to shoulder open the sliding door, fingers rose from beneath the sheet. They clawed at her arms, leaving welts that stung like cat scratches. She forced back a scream as she wrestled the mirror into the closet. “You are nothing,” hissed a voice from beneath the glass. “You are food.” Sharp teeth bit into her neck just as Adie hurled the mirror into the corner. She heard the glass crack, and saw the sheet start to fall. Leaping backwards, she dragged the door shut.

  For a moment, there was silence.

  Then something began to scrabble against the door.

  Adie screamed herself awake. For a moment she lay paralyzed in the darkness, soaked in sweat. The stifling air was full of harsh, desperate breathing, as if an animal’s lungs had been ripped from its body and left to die on their own.

  Gradually the breathing slowed, and Adie realized it was her own. The last black shreds of the nightmare fell away. She remembered that she was still curled up in the darkness beneath a nubbly, scratchy old blanket that smelled vaguely of mothballs, on a couch that under ordinary circumstances she’d have gotten in trouble for sleeping on. This was the living room, not her bedroom at all, and the mirror she’d dreamed about was nowhere nearby.

  Her mouth was as dry as if it had been wiped out with cotton balls. Adie swallowed, but couldn’t get rid of the sour taste that lingered in the corners. She took one last, deep breath and pulled the blanket off her face.

  Cool air rushed over her skin, drying her sweat and giving her goosebumps. She peered into the dark, trying to assure herself that nothing was amiss. The night was dark and still, and the neighborhood was silent. Even the crickets had stopped chirping. It had to be late—maybe three or four in the morning. Adie turned over uneasily. She meant to go back to sleep, but quickly discovered that she desperately had to pee.

  She thought, for a split second, of waiting until morning. The house was vast and black and frightening, but in her nest of blankets she felt relatively safe. The pressure on her bladder, however, became too powerful to ignore, so at last she relinquished her safety and staggered to her feet. Clumsy with sleep, she toddled toward the bathroom. The hardwood floors were chilly, and she wished that she’d thought to bring socks. In the kitchen she heard the hum and groan of the refrigerator, and was startled by the the rattle of ice falling into the dispenser.

  It wasn’t until she had almost reached the bathroom that she remembered: Her own bathroom had no mirror anymore, but this one certainly did.

  Frost crept up Adie’s spine as she stared through the pitch-dark doorway. She almost retreated right then and there, but she knew that she’d never be able to make it until morning. A brief notion of going back upstairs was quashed by the memory of her nightmare, and of what she’d seen in her room. Downstairs it was.

  Anyway, if the thing was in her bedroom now, then maybe it hadn’t come downstairs yet.

  Somewhat cheered by this thought, Adie reached through the doorway and turned on the bathroom light. Its cheerful yellow glow spilled into the hallway, shrinking and clarifying everything it touched. Now Adie could see that the bathroom was, in fact, just a bathroom. There was the striped wallpaper that her parents had picked out together. There were the gleaming brass fixtures her mother polished with frightening regularity, and the white tile floor that her father had laid one sweaty afternoon when Adie was nine. An unlit purple candle among the hand towels filled the room with the scent of lavender and roses.

  Just to be on the safe side, Adie kept her eyes lowered and stepped quickly past the mirror. Nothing flickered in the corners of her vision, and nothing hissed or muttered when she raised the toilet lid and sat down on the icy seat. She concluded her business without incident and got up to wash her hands.

  Morbid curiosity compelled her to look up this time. She raised her eyes fearfully to look at her reflection—but there seemed to be nothing to fear. She saw only herself—the same old Adie, frizzy hair and awkward nose and all. When she smiled, her own shy smile came back to her. She lifted her arms, and her reflection’s arms went up, as well. She even did a little dance, and the mirror mirrored it without a trace of mockery.

  The thing must somehow have been confined to the upstairs—or maybe she’d even defeated it when she’d trapped it in her dream. Tomorrow she would ask her dad to take the mirror out of her room. Maybe a priest could even come and bless the house. She’d ask her mother about it.

  Happy that the end was in sight, Adie grinned at her reflection.

  Her reflection grinned back, and turned off the light.