[Noname215]

An attempt at a ghost story:


It was just another rainy day in the town of Brerwood, Colorado. Brerwood was another one of those small towns where everybody knew everybody, from the well-dressed individual walking from the bank, to the shaggy hobo sitting on the bench outside the town pharmacy, asking random customers for any spare pocket change. This was just another town where small businesses boomed, places like the local diners, the libraries, the movie theaters, and even the little antique shop on the corner of Browning and Harley. It was a town where barbeques happened every day in the local park, and where students still brought apples to their teachers. But that one cold day in August, the rain had been pouring for hours. And that day, that antique shop on Browning and Harley was almost totaly empty, with only the little statues and vases to keep the old woman who stood behind the counter company. Except for the one customer who had just walked through the door, soaking wet.
This one custromer, Simon Duvall, the young man who works in the local pharmacy, was calmly browsing through the inventory of his local antique shop. He had forgotten to buy a birthday present for his wife Beatrice, who would turn 29 the next day, and he had snuck out to get her one. Beatrice was the kind of woman who liked fancy knick-knacks, like old toys or old-style looking small furniture. Simon knew he had found the perfect gift when he happened upon an old mirror.
The glass of the mirror was flawless, looking as if it hadn’t been touched for decades. There was a neat little carving on the border, portraying songbirds flying side-by-side. Simon took the mirror with him to the register, and placed it up on the counter, ready to let the old woman behind it name her price.
The old woman looked upon the mirror, feeling it’s wooden frame. She said to Simon that it had belonged to a woman who, in 1928, was sentenced to death for the murder of twenty other women. The murderess was a young woman who happened to be one of the ugliest people in the town, with a face and body of a scarecrow. The woman was often compared to her older sister, a beautiful woman with ravishing skin and hair as black as her sister’s hatred for her. Her jealousy and desire for beauty drove her to insanity, and one night she entered her sister’s bedroom and severed her head with an axe. She then went on a murderous rampage, killing any woman above the age of 20 who was beautiful and desired, something she could never have. She was found dead the next morning in her bedroom. Her wrists had deep self-inflicted lacerations in them, and all of her blood was staining the wooden floor.
The mirror itself was sold off at an auction, the buyer being a beautiful young woman named Martha Adams. Martha was murdered a day after the purchase of the mirror, found dead at the foor of it with her head cut clean off. Ever since then, people have believed the mirror to be cursed.
Simon was a skeptic when it came to ghosts, so he laid 200 dollars down onto the counter and walked out with the mirror under his arm.

When Simon walked back into the house, he found Beatrice sitting on the couch and watching daytime TV. He poked her on the shoulder to see what he had brought her, and when she saw the mirror, she got up from the chair and wrapped her arms around him.
Beatrice found herself unable to sleep later that night. She checked the clock beside her bed, seeing the big red 12:38 AM plastered against it. She pulled herself of the comforter, making sure not to wake up the sleeping Simon, and walked out of the bedroom and into the hallway.
The house that the two lived in was like any suburban residence that people see in small town neighborhoods. This particular house was painted a pretty shade of white and red, the foundations made up of solid brick. Simon just bought it for the look of it.
She opened the door to the bathroom at the end of the hall and did her business. She found herself stopping on the way out to look at her new mirror. She rubbed her hand against the wooden songbirds, smiling for no apparent reason. She then looked into the framed glass of the mirror. She found herself somewhat hypnotized by her reflection and somehow unable to look away, even from the bony, rotting hand reaching out of the glass.
Simon awoke the next morning to find the Beatrice wasn’t next to him. He thought to himself that she might have just gotten up to go to the bathroom or to make an early breakfast. He yawned, sat up, stretched, and walked out of the bedroom. He then noticed an appalling smell floating around in the hallways, like ten years worth of dead fish had been sitting in their house.
He began walking down the hallway, his head feeling light and his stomach feeling more nauseous by the second. He slipped just outside the bathroom. He found himself horrified by the large pool of liquid he found himself lying atop of.
It was warm. It was sticky. It was dark red.
Blood.
Simon felt confused and scared as he came to his feet, his underpants and t-shirt coated with blood. He could then see that is was flowing out from underneath the bathroom door. He slowly opened the door, the hinges creaking loudly, and saw Beatrice lying on the floor. Her skin was as pale as snow on a December morning, her throat almost completely ripped open. Large amounts of blood stained the walls and the floor, some spots illuminating either a bright red or a disgusting brown. Stringy bits of flesh hung from what was her throat, and her eyes seemed ready to sink back into their sockets. Her head rested on top of the bathroom rug, now soaked to a jet black.
Simon could feel his stomach about to release everything inside it and also a warm spot as he wet himself. He heaved out into the hallway, creating a smell that only worsened the smell of Beatrice’s corpse. He then sank down to the floor, kneeling in his vomit puddle. He was crying, sweating, and trying to scream, although something wouldn’t allow him to. In a fit of anger, he then stood up, walked back into the bathroom, raised the mirror over his head, and smashed it against the side of the sink.
Shards flew everywhere, including into Simon’s arm. Blood began to trickle from the several wounds. He didn’t care, though. He didn’t even notice. He just walked over Beatrice and sat in the bathtub, where he got into a fetal position and began to giggle like a lunatic.
The neighbors began to complain of an unpleasant smell emerging from the house next door. The police were eventually called, and they walked into the house to find the blood-splattered bathroom, corpse and all, and Simon crouching in the bathtub and crying. The police pulled him away, but when they went back to the house later to collect crime scene evidence, the mirror was gone, not even a tiny piece of glass nor a sliver of wood left behind. Not only that, Beatrice’s corpse had been decapitated and the face butchered into a hideous distortion. Simon had been left back at the police station, so they had no clue how this had happened.
Simon was convicted to an insane asylum in Illinois, where he later committed suicide by hanging himself with his bedsheets. His house was branded as haunted when people claimed to hear the sound of smashing glass when they walk by it. It was eventually condemned after five years, and was torn down.
Five years later, in the town of Santa Carla in midwest California, a young woman named Rebecca strolled out of an antique shop carrying a large mirror she had bought for her grandmother. It was a beautiful mirror. With flawless glass. And songbirds carved into the frame.