Belief In The Occult

Seventeen

Humans have always had a morbid fascination with mirrors...

Three teenagers stood alone in a unisex subway station bathroom. The door had been wedged shut with a broken board through the handle so no midnight strangers wandered in, the lights turned off and dollar store tea candles set down on the rim of one of the sinks. Kodiak lurked in the shadows of the reflections and listened.

"I swear it happened quicker than this last time..." the curly-haired girl murmured, squinting into the mirror. Another girl and a boy were in the bathroom as well, waiting behind her.

The second girl spoke up, "It's probably just a ghost in that one house haunting the mirror or something Maddie. This is pointless. There's no way a demon's gonna jump out and scare us. They've got better shit to do than that."

The air got colder, just subtly. The boy began to feel his heart rate spike.

"Well excuse me Sasha-Vance-My-Dad-Is-A-Monster-Hunter," Maddie said, turning away from the mirror to glare at her friend in the dim light of the candles, "I'm just trying to have some fun. None of those other games worked, and everybody else in class is too scared to try this one. We can rub it in Mike's face when we get it done."

The boy, who's name was Craig, stared with wide eyes past Maddie's shoulder. "Mads." He whispered urgently, but got ignored. It kind of looked like there was an extra reflection, but it was mostly transparent.

Maddie turned back to the mirror, locking eyes with her own reflection, "What are you afraid of?"

An ice cold hand landed on her shoulder.

She whipped around, already shrieking, but the hand reacted lightning quick, the arm attached to it using inhuman strength to grab her by the face and slam the back of her head against the old rust-spotted mirror, shattering it with a deafening sound.

Sasha let out a shout of anger and charged, a collection of holy rings on one hand and a small iron knife in the other. Her Monster-Hunter dad prepared his daughter well.

But she was met with nothing but a cloud of quickly dissipating smoke. The lights above started to flicker, and she slowly turned around to face Craig, who was terribly quiet. His eyes were pitch black, and his nose was bleeding profusely. He was boredly inspecting one hand, as if he had never seen it before. He looked up at Sasha.

"Human bodies are warmer than I'd thought they'd be." He said plaintively.

"Get out of my friend." she demanded shakily, pointing the knife.

"Okay."

It pounced, a second form materializing and launching out of Craig's body, who slumped to the floor, dead from internal hemorrhages. The entity managed to dodge the knife completely and landed feet first on Sasha's stomach, knocking her to the floor and wrapping icy cold fingers around her neck as the lights flickered on a strobe.

Grabbing onto the entity's wrists and fighting, she saw flashes of it between the stark blinks of light and dark from the fluorescents.

Blink.

A young face, he could be an upperclassman at her school. Another one of Mike's friends. Some kid she hated for associating with someone she hated even more.

Blink.

Eyes so black they didn't even reflect light. Were they even eyes, or merely pitch dark holes in his head? It wouldn't be impossible for a demon.

Blink.

He was spattered lightly with Maddie's blood, soaked in Craig's.

One more flash of light and dark, and he was nearly nose-to-nose with her, expression totally blank. "Aren't you afraid of mirrors? You should be"

She couldn't answer. His grip on her throat was too tight. Sasha then finally remembered her rings stamped with crosses and blessings, and shoved a hand directly into his face, shuddering in terror as two of her fingers slipped into his eye socket, revealing that it actually was a void in his skull.

She heard the entity let out a gut-wrenching scream so full of agony that it made tears immediately spring to her own eyes, then the pressure against her neck and pinning her down was gone, and the lights stopped flashing.

Breathing harshly between sobs, she sat up and looked around. Her friends were still slumped on the ground. Every one of the mirrors in the bathroom had shattered into tiny bits at the entity's scream of pain, but he was gone.

Still crying, she picked herself up.