Writing Challenge Day 4
It’s day four of my writing challenge, dearest reader! Hopefully your weekend is going great!
If you haven’t read the last three stories, you can find them here:
Today’s prompt: For the past few years, Claudette's estranged mother Lydia has become a recluse, a shut-in. When Lydia disappears suddenly, she is assumed dead, and it is up to Claudette to come and deal with her mother's earthly belongings and ready the old house for sale. But why is it that no matter where Claudette goes in the house, she feels like she's being observed—and why is it that whenever she turns around to catch the watcher, she finds that there's yet another mirror in yet another strange place?
Dedicated to TJ Price
And The Mirrors Watched
Claudette carried another heavy box out to the UHaul parked in front of her mother’s two-story Edwardian house. When she turned back, it felt like the house was watching her, blank windows reflecting a dull slate sky. The place was a mess, gutters clogged with rotting autumn leaves, paint peeling off the sides, missing roof tiles, a front yard gnarled with weeds and an out-of-control honeysuckle bush.
It would take work to get the place back in shape. Get it in a place where she could sell it and done with it.
Still Claudette smiled. The money from selling the house would let her buy her own, in the city in which she now lived. Even though it had come to her after her mother’s disappearance, it still represented a fresh start, a new beginning. A windfall.
She went back inside, each floorboard squealing its own protest at her intrusion. She walked past the many yellowing photographs of strangers—orphaned family portraits adopted from flea markets and thrift stores. Grim faced individuals, the lot of them. Sprinkled among the photographs were mirrors—small ones, large ones, some water spotted, others cracked. Everyday there seemed to be more of them. Claudette paused at the end of the hall. Actually, she could’ve sworn she’d taken a bunch of the mirrors down but there they were.
Claudette shook her head and continued to the back parlor, where she’d been packing up the large collection of strange porcelain eagles painted in bright pastels that dominated the space.
As she packed, Claudette tried to find some seed of grief. She’d been doing that all week, as she packed up the belongings that choked the house’s halls and rooms. Things her mother had bought to try and fill her life with value and meaning. Garbage, all of it.
Day turned to evening to night. Claudette gave up on packing and shoving boxes away in the UHaul when her veggie pizza arrived.
Before she went to bed though, Claudette made sure to pack all the hall mirrors away in their own box, firmly taping it shut.
#
Claudette stood in the middle of the hall and looked at the mirrors. The mirrors looked back. The mirrors she knew she had packed in a box, which was now open, tape hanging off in a sliced strip.
As she gazed at herself in the distorted mirrors, she saw someone behind her in a flash of movement. Claudette whirled.
There was no one.
Her skin crawling, Claudette pulled the mirrors down again, carrying them to the garbage bin outside. Each one was warm and seemed heavier than it should be.
#
The next day, the mirrors were back and there were more. They’d crept up the wall along the stairs, between badly painted landscapes.
She stared at the mirrors and the mirrors stared back.
Behind her, a flash of movement—caught a glimpse of flowered fabric— and she whirled around. Nothing and no one.
Still Claudette raced into the front room where she’d seen the person fleeing. Only one door in and out. The room was empty besides the raggedy furniture and knick-knacks collecting dust.
She’d know that apron anywhere. Her mother had worn it everyday.
Standing in the room, Claudette noticed all the mirrors on the walls. In them, the reflections of herself and movement behind her, fleeing, just around a corner.
Claudette spun and chased the specter of her mother through the house, up the stairs, through the bedrooms, the bathrooms, back down to the first floor and through the kitchen and dining room.
Her mother was always too far ahead, Claudette could only follow, follow, follow.
All around the house for hours, she couldn’t stop, her mother wouldn’t stop.
Daylight died out and the reflections were eaten by darkness. When Claudette turned on the lights, her mother was gone, Claudette was alone.
#
Claudette’s mother stopped leaving the house after Claudette’s father had died. Instead, her mother had buried herself in this house, this stuff. A sepulcher of possessions.
When Claudette left for college, she sought to escape what seemed like her mother’s inevitable death in that crowded, tortured, grief-haunted house. Weekly phone calls turned to monthly turned to Christmas only.
Then nothing at all.
When she’d gotten a call that her mother had disappeared and was presumed dead, it hadn’t come as any surprise. Honestly, Claudette had felt nothing at all. Not sad, not relieved. Like receiving the news of a stranger’s death.
#
The mirrors were everywhere. They sprouted overnight on all the walls like reflective fungi.
Claudette watched the mirrors and the mirrors watched back.
When her mother swept down the hall, deep within the contorted depths of the looking glass, Claudette was ready and gave chase. If she were fast enough, she was sure she could catch her mother, pull her out. Save her mother from her own prison. A prison of possessions, the chains of collectibles, the knots of knickknacks.
Up the stairs, through the bedrooms, the bathrooms, and back down again.
Through the dining room, the parlors, the kitchen.
Her mother always disappearing around the next corner, the next. Fleeing something.
Not Claudette though, no.
Something else.
Something Claudette began to feel. Something dark. Something with heavy footfalls that echoed in Claudette’s heart. Something with a hunger that made the house’s foundations shiver.
Claudette ran.
Down the stairs, through the dining room, the parlors, the kitchen.
Back up the stairs and through the bedrooms, the bathrooms.
She panted, her lungs burning. Her mother looked back, her eyes dark with terror.
Behind them both, it gave chase.
And the mirrors watched.
x PLM
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