Surde.jpg

Ever looked through a mirror that's polished so well that it looks like there's another room? Or seen another room that seems so similar that it could be a very clean mirror? There's a reason for that. My friends and I learned that the hard way. Here in Manhattan, there are too many people. Unless something happens on a large scale, like 9/11, nothing gets noticed. So unless the Daily News decides to have a good story, nothing much gets noticed. It all started when my friend Jorge got an email, and a very suspicious one at that. It contained the attached image, "surde.jpg". It had no return address, so he called me and some others. From a failed Latin class, I recalled that "surde" meant "deaf." I told this to him, and he was more freaked out than ever. He immediately called me and all his friends over for help. When we arrived, someone suggested that he should print it out. This would be the biggest mistake of anybody's life. I started joking about those chain letters that said you would die if you didn't forward them to people. Maybe somebody had just forwarded it and forgotten the text! Nothing to worry about, right? Jorge and everybody else laughed, but staring at the picture, I became uneasy. I told everybody that I had to go the bathroom. There, I threw up and almost fainted. I got back up and walked back to the living room. We were still trying to figure out what the picture meant. I mean, you don't just leave something odd like this alone. That would be stupid. What we did next would be even stupider than leaving it alone, though. We decided to zoom WAY into it to see if it was a secret message or something. I think we zoomed in 1600%. We just stared at the colored dots for awhile, and Jorge said they were moving. None of us saw anything, though. So we looked at the printed version. Its expression seemed different than the one on Jorge's computer. More ominous, more vicious, just more threatening overall. We decided it was the print version we should inspect. So Jorge got a magnifying glass. This time we all saw the dots moving. Perhaps, my girlfriend suggested, it reacted to the magnifying glass and began to move when exposed to it. We decided to test more materials on it. We noticed that the effect was stronger when it was reflected. We tried all sorts of mirrors on it. Most of them were dirty, but the cleaner the mirror was, the more it seemed to move. And it seemed to move even more in the reflection. One of Jorge's friends, Jason, pulled out a gun as a joke, and screamed. We all laughed. And the picture seemed to grin. We immediately stopped laughing. Jason assured us that it was a fake, but he was a bit of a compulsive liar. We told him to get rid of that thing immediately. So he ran into the next room, and began to devise a way to get rid of it. Meanwhile, we tried out every mirror we could find. One of us remembered that Jorge had a huge mirror as one of his room's walls. It was always polished perfectly clean. Jorge was a bit of an egotist. So we were about to walk in when Jorge fell down on the floor and began to scream, holding his head. He was pointing at the picture. Barry, one of my friends who I had taken along, suggested that we shouldn't be playing with such things. Perhaps we should just stop. Jorge got up immediately. We asked him if he was alright. But he apparently had no recollection of his little spasm. That decided it. We weren't going to mess with such things. If only we had gone along with that. If only. Jorge was now more interested than ever. He kept going on and on about how we had to try it on his mirror and blah blah blah. We told him that it was too dangerous. We couldn't. It was absolutely out of the question. But it was a Friday night, so we all hung out and drank a little, had a casual party. Jason forgot about getting rid of the gun. We relaxed. Then once we were all a little drunk, one of us suggested trying the image on the mirror again. Having lost our common sense, we said yes. Jason went back into the living room to try to destroy the gun. And we went into Jorge's room. Dear God, if you exist, please let me forget. We held it up to the mirror and waited awhile, just staring. Maybe ten minutes, maybe twenty, I don't know. Then Jorge's brother, Mark, decided to get out to use the bathroom, and noted that the picture had gotten bigger than the paper in the reflection. He pissed his pants and we all laughed. But then Jorge looked, and lo and behold, it was true. The paper in the reflection was, in fact, blank. In fact, the creature had entirely vanished from the reflection. Jorge started yelling about how it was all our fault and he shouldn't have invited us. Then I looked to my right. The creature was there, sitting next to me. I ran out of the room. Disturbed, hoping I was just drunk, ran to Jason and asked him how the fuck he could destroy a gun anyway. He drunkenly said, "I dunno," and threw it out of the window. I started yelling at him about how he could get arrested for that. He said he would go down and get it, but I told him that would make him look more suspicious. He called himself stupid and everything, but his self pity act didn't sell me. He walked out, and I stayed in the living room, sulking. I finally walked back in to confirm that I was just drunk. Sure enough, the creature was in the paper again in the mirror, and everything was fine. We all started joking again. Then I unexpectedly passed out. I woke up. Everyone was gone, and there was somebody knocking. The police asked me where everybody was. They had found a gun, and mathematically deduced that it was tossed from this apartment's window. So now I'm on bail, goddamnit, and I think I'll just kill myself. Better than having this story that nobody will believe. Help me, /x/. I just got this shit picture in the email again and I think I've just accidentally posted it online. I can't live like this. I've gotta find a way out. Death is ideal. There's no noise, no sight, nothing... I love that idea. I can't hear anything anymore, either. My sight's gotten bad and all my senses are leaving me. Death... the only way out.