I awake in the night with no idea as to what has brought me out of what is normally a coma-like six or seven hours once the lights snap off. I'm a good sleeper. My wife jokes that it's one of my very few skills. Oh, and I snore. She never forgets to mention how loud I am and how hard it is for her to get down if I happen to fall asleep first. She snores too... like a dock worker... but I don't usually mention that fact. Women hate to be told they do something as 'male' as snoring.
The glowing digital readout of my bedside iPhone Dock slash alarm clock reads 3:47 am and I lay there staring at it, fully awake. There is a sound I realize, perhaps the very sound that has roused me but it is not loud. It is a watery sound. Like water being swirled in a glass tumbler.
At first, I can not tell from where the sound is coming. If one of the kids was in the bathroom running the water the sound would be much louder and of a different quality. This is not a sound I can place. There is nothing resembling it in my memory.
I lay there listening to the swirling wet sound and finally I decide it is coming from behind me on my wife side of the room.
Begrudgingly I turn over, leaving the comfortable warm trench my body has formed in the pillow top matttress.
The room is dark, but the readouts from our matching alarm clocks create a bluish-green glow by which I can make out the familiar surroundings.
There is the lump of my wife next to me and tonight she is not snoring, Her breathing is soft and regular. The double closet that she hates, a major downgrade from the large walk-in one we had before we moved, yawns open on one side. There is the bulky outline of the over-full hamper and to its left is the full-length mirror.
It is a cheap mirror, the kind that college students hang in there dorms. The surface is imperfect, warping the reflection, but not terribly.
There is movement in the mirror and at first, I think it is my own reflection but then I raise my arm and the thing in the mirror does not.
I look harder, squinting in the darkness and then turn my head in a panic sure that there is something behind me. A murderer or thief in my room... in my house while my wife and children sleep. I am ready to fight or at least I tell myself that is what I will do with the huge amount of adrenaline that has flooded my system and set my hands shaking and my heart pounding.
There is nothing there.
I turn slowly back to the mirror and there is a figure. I can see it without any doubt. I glance back across the room, but there is nothing there to cast the reflection I am sure I am seeing.
It moves again and I am transfixed as I watch it slowly, ever so slowly, separate itself from the glass. It is a man and he is half in the mirror and half in my room. I am holding my breath and my heart is pounding so hard that I can feel it through my entire body.. The man... dark and tall and wearing a fedora, steps out of the mirror and stops. He is looking at me. I can feel his eyes even if I cannot see them. He waits, for what I don't know. For me to move, perhaps. Or for me to go back to sleep as if I have not seen him.
I stay completely still and time passes. A lot of time passes. Minutes surely perhaps half an hour. I don't know because I will not turn my head to look at the readout on the clock.
Finally, the man moves, he walks to the bedroom door and opens it. There is that creaky squeak that I keep telling my wife I will take care of, but the WD40 is in the garage and I never remember to bring it upstairs.
She stirs next to me as he closes the door behind him and the latch clicks. I should run after him, he is out in the hallway and could go into my daughters or sons room... he could go downstairs where my eldest has made her 'cave' in the basement.
I don't move.
In the morning I awake and I know it happened. I know the man came out of the mirror. I check on the kids and they are fine.
I come back to the bedroom and I touch the mirror and its warped funhouse reflection.
The glass is hard and cool.
Life is never the same, but only I know it.
