The morning after, when Jaeden finally left after a hearty breakfast, Avry couldn’t shake the feeling away. Jaeden was acting normal today, no strangeness, and no eerie smile revealing she knew Avry’s darkest secrets. She deflated the mattress, rolled it up, and shoved it deep into her full closet. Her fingers fluttered into the wooden beams on the left side, feeling for the crack to pull open.

Oh, good. Not everything has changed, she thought as she slid out an envelope. She fumbled through the bills and gasped. It wasn’t the same currency. She knew for a fact she stuffed a hundred and fifty pounds in there for emergency cases. It was in American dollar bills.

“That’s not right,” she muttered. Her stomach dropped. The rest of the morning she set to cleaning her room, something she put off for the last month now a driving force of her fear. Many of her things were intact but the written language she found all over her school notebooks was indecipherable and she couldn’t understand the music she loved anymore— the rhythm was slightly off, the notes a half-pitch out of tune, and the melodic singing sounded more like wailing.
She quickly shut it off.

“Okay, okay.” She raked her hands through her hair, pacing, trying to keep her anxiety from completely overwhelming her. “I know I didn’t look. Jaeden did. Not me. Am I going crazy?”

She didn’t know what to do. Her mind raced, thoughts going a mile a minute. “The mirror,” she muttered, only half aware of speaking the one coherent thought aloud. She grabbed her knapsack and started shoving items in; a pen, a notebook, the envelope, and a few snacks. She located her keys, raced downstairs, and was out the door.

It was overcast, the clouds blotting out the sky like a blanket. She hurried toward the nearest bus stop, just narrowly catching it. It reeked of popcorn and rubber shoes and was eerily quiet for a fully packed bus. Her heart jumped in her throat when she realized the bus was driving on the right side, not the left.
She had to close her eyes and breathe to calm down.

It seemed to take forever to reach the last stop and she jumped off, briskly walking down the street like she did yesterday. When she reached the museum, she couldn’t help but let out a cry of horror.

It still stood in all its decrepit glory but there was no way inside. The windows were barred with iron cages and the door appeared to be cemented shut. She banged on it, pulled, pushed, and kicked, instantly regretting the pain that shot up her shin. The bars were too narrow for her to fit through even if she managed to break the panes of the windows.

“I need to get in,” she whimpered. She knew it had something to do with the mirror. She should’ve never let Jaeden do it, should’ve never even gone with them.
She slid to the ground outside the door, tears staining her face.
And that was how Jaeden found her.     


Photo by creatifrankestein via Pixabay.