Look at Me

Something lurks around my house at night. This I know for certain.

About a month ago, I was sent in for a psychological evaluation due to hallucinations. The doctor had to pester me in order to get a general description of what I had been seeing. At first, I didn’t want to admit to anything out of paranoia that he would scoff at me. I eventually convinced myself that he was there to help me, so I told him just about everything he needed to know.

There was a mirror near the front door to my house. Every time I passed by said mirror, I swore that I could see a faceless shadow man a few inches behind me. It sometimes just stood there and stared at me. Other times, it reached a hand out to me. I tried to ignore it, but as time went on, it became more and more prevalent in my reflection. It even rested a hand on my shoulder at one point, which really made me jump. One of my housemates was around to see this, and he was the one who convinced me to get the evaluation.

The doctor said that the shadow man was likely caused by a traumatic experience that I might have had when the mirror was present. When I told him that the mirror was passed on to me from my recently deceased father, his hypothesis was practically proven correct. That was reason enough for him to prescribe me some medication. I wasn’t sure that it was going to help me out, but I was willing to try anything.

In the two weeks that followed, I felt like the medicine was working. I saw less of the shadow man in the mirror, and even my housemates claimed that I looked calmer and happier than usual. For the first time in over five months, I felt safe.

I was happy to find that I had the house to myself one night, as my housemates all had their own errands to run. These sorts of nights usually consisted of me binge watching some show on Netflix until I fell asleep on the couch. However, given that exhaustion had recently caught up to me, I decided to go ahead and hit the hay.

After plugging in my phone, I opened iHeart radio and set it to a station that played only classical music. My body curled up underneath the covers and, within minutes, I could feel myself drifting off. That was, until I heard something.

“Look at me.”

A voice whispered above my head. I figured that one of my housemates had come back early and decided to play a prank on me, so I ignored it.

“Look at me.”

The voice sounded more frantic and it was getting harder to ignore it. Coincidentally, I could feel a sense of dread tighten my chest with every passing second.

“Look at me.”

My curiosity and paranoia had simultaneously gotten the better of me. Rather than look directly at whoever it was standing over my bed, I turned over and opened my eyes to meet my reflection in the window next to my bed.

In the window’s reflective surface, I could barely see the silhouette of a person. What looked like black smoke made up its entire body. It didn’t even have a face.

I stared at it for a time before a single blink made it disappear before my eyes. I sighed, thinking that it was just a hallucination that had somehow come back.

That was when I heard a loud shattering sound come from downstairs.

In that moment, I felt my body paralyze in fear. My mind ran around in circles, trying to find a logical explanation, until it reached the conclusion that this was a prank. I took hold of the baseball bat I keep by my bed and made my way downstairs. This had to be a sick joke set up by my housemates. If it was, I was going to make them pay for it with a good whack to the abdomen with the bat.

I couldn’t see any vehicles outside in the driveway, except for my own. It looked like I was still the only one in the house. None of the windows appeared to be broken, either. It wasn’t until I cut my foot on something that I realized what had made the shattering sound from before.

The mirror that was mounted near the front door had broken into pieces.

Two of my housemates told me later on that they found me out on the front lawn, curled up into a ball and weeping about how something had escape the mirror. When they found the broken mirror, they put two and two together and assumed that I did it out of paranoia. Suffice to say, nobody believed my story.

For a time, I didn’t even believe it.

I can’t tell you if it was all real or if it was an overactive imagination. All I can say for certain is that something lurks around my house at night, and it will never leave me alone.