Chapter 15
The darkness was intimidating, even if it was just a short distance to the bathroom that the women had just vacated. Why couldn’t Tristan come with me? I took the few seconds it cost me to glare back at him.
He stood near the place the bus had just vacated, his dark form almost lost in the inky shadows. Worry that I didn’t understand lined his face, taking away some of the attractiveness that came so effortlessly to him.
I paused, wondering if I should go back to him, when a cold gust of air passed close to my face. I sucked in my breath, jumping back from the unknown source of frigid wind. I could take a guess though. And I wasn’t walking through that.
I turned again to the bathroom door; it wasn’t far now.
The old door creaked loudly when I pushed it open and peered around the thick, peeling wood. There was no one in there. Did I expect there to be?
I tugged lightly on my bottom lip and took the necessary step to put me into the room. My chest felt tight, even more so when the door banged closed behind me. I took a deep breath, focusing on the single stall the dingy bathroom offered.
Just a few steps, right? I could do that. I fumbled awkwardly behind me for the handle, hoping for the small metal locking mechanism but came up empty. The door didn’t lock.
No biggie, I shrugged. Tristan was just outside; what could happen?
Not giving my overworked mind time to answer, I shoved my body away from the door and hurried over to the stall. The half door swung open too easily, slamming into the wall behind it before I could stop the motion with my shaking hands. I flinched away from the sound, automatically glancing around the empty bathroom.
“Calm down,” I whispered, “you’re fine.”
My cheeks puffed out with the breath I held tightly in my lungs, then deflated as I exhaled. Toby would have come into the bathroom with me. The stray thought took me by surprise. Why was I thinking about him again?
The toilet sat low to the ground and had too many rust colored rings inside the bowl to be considered white anymore. Flecks of brown dotted the seat from where the paint had chipped away. Or worse.
Shuddering, I backed away from the sight and turned instead to an equally rusty sink. Maybe it would at least have running water so I could wash my face. The bus ride had been long and I could feel the effects of too many hours leaned against a window. I wasn’t very hopeful as I twisted the small silver handle, but was happily proven wrong when a thin stream of clear water fell from the faucet.
Cupping my hands under the ice cold water, I let them fill up until I had enough to splash over myself. It was too cold to be refreshing, instead leaving me shivering worse than before. “Ohh,” I let out a small groan as my eyes slipped closed briefly.
The unease I had felt outside followed me into the bathroom, leaving a feeling of breathless panic behind. But I wasn’t caving in to it - not yet anyways. Leaning my weight onto the sink with my hands, I peeked under my arms to scan the small room. Still empty.
It wasn’t like I had to go that bad anyways, I told myself, it can wait.
I pushed myself straight again; a little too roughly but regained my balance before I hit the floor. Lucky for me too, the floor was even more disgusting than the toilet. And that was saying a lot.
A tiny shudder ran down my spine as I turned away from the cracked mirror above the dingy sink. Time to leave the bathroom from my nightmares. I froze mid-step, before I could even take one step.
The bathroom had gone cold. Not the normal middle of the night cold but a bone chilling cold that left my breath hanging in front of my face in a small white puff ball.
“Is…is someone here?” I croaked out stupidly. Of course someone was here.
In answer, the lights above me flickered off then back on before I could faint away from fear.
“T…Toby?” I tried again. It would be like him to try and scare me for running off on him in the middle of the night.
The lights flickered again, staying off for even longer this time. My head jerked to the sound of the bathroom stall banging open on its own and then swinging back closed with just as much force.
Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look - I silently chanted to my racing mind.
Even if it was Toby, I decided in a second, we could talk outside. I bolted to the faded door of the bathroom and twisted the cold metal under my shaking fingers.
Nothing.
The doorknob didn’t move at all. It wasn’t possible for it to be locked though, I reminded my hammering heart. The lock didn’t work when I came in. Still, I fumbled over the locking mechanism, twisting it uselessly both ways. The knob was still stuck.
I banged on the door several times with my open palm. Someone would be out there. They would open the door up and let me out. I wasn’t stuck. I was just panicking.
“Tristan!”
“He won’t hear you,” a woman spoke from behind me.
My hands stilled instantly. My chest was rising and falling too fast, but there wasn’t much I could do about that now. I was lucky it was moving at all. My mouth fell open in a scream that made no noise.
I was alone in the bathroom, I made sure of that before. Who was talking then? I knew. I nodded heavily, accepting the inevitable. I already knew I wasn’t alone. I never was.
“Tristan can’t hear you,” the female voice called out again, just in case I didn’t hear the first time.
Summoning up all the courage that I didn’t even possess, I inched my body around until I was once again facing the empty bathroom. Still empty. I sucked in a loud breath through my shaking lips.
“W…who’s here?” I whispered.
A light flared to life, an unnatural white light that I had seen before - but not often. The mirror was blazing so bright I had to momentarily shield my eyes. By the time I pulled my arm from my face, a single shining face was staring back out at me.
“Ren,” the woman acknowledged me without a smile, but also without any other expression.
“Who are you?” I forced out through my tight throat.
“It doesn’t matter,” she snapped, only now showing a tiny shimmer of anger.
“What do you want?” I tried another question, maybe more important than the first.
“I want you to stay alive,” she said softly. The lights lining the ceiling flickered dead again, but the glow from the mirror woman kept me from being bathed in total blackness.
“Good plan,” I muttered past closed lips.
“Why are you with Tristan?” the woman flared, briefly flashing too bright for me to look at her. “You need to leave him.”
Leave him? My eyebrows furrowed together at her suggestion. Why would I leave him? Then I would be all alone and at the mercy of the ghost people. Ghost people like her. “I can’t,” I said out loud.
“Yes you can,” she fired back.
“I won’t!” I set my lips in an almost defiant line, too scared to be completely convincing.
“He will kill you if you don’t.”
“He said he wouldn’t.”
“He lies,” she hissed.
Probably, I secretly agreed. But I had made my choice - Tristan - now I had to follow it through. Didn’t I? Yes, I did. Where else would I go? I didn’t even know where I was.
I fidgeted with the door behind me, trying again to get it to open. It still wouldn’t budge. I didn’t know the ghost people could lock doors. What else didn’t I know about them? Did I even want to know?
No!
I turned around, yanking as hard as my feeble strength would let me on the door. Using my fist this time, I pounded on the door again. “Tristan!” I screamed. “Tristan help me!”
A fresh gust of cold air swept over me. “He can’t hear you,” the woman screamed out over my own cries for help. “He wouldn’t help you if he could!”
“You don’t know anything about him,” I whirled around to bravely face the woman. Brave wasn’t anywhere near what I was feeling, but it
was clear that she wasn’t letting me out until she had her say or until I did what she wanted.
“You have to get away from him,” she pleaded.
“Even if I want to, I can’t run from him.” I didn’t want to though.
“Far away from him,” she doggedly continued as if I hadn’t said anything.
“Just leave me alone!”
Both Tristan and Toby said the ghost people couldn’t hurt me. This mirror woman might be able to lock me into a forgotten gas station bathroom but she couldn’t hurt me. Right?
“If that’s what you want,” the woman replied icily.
Was that it? Was that really all it took for them to go away? I had lived all this time afraid of them and that was all it took?
“It is,” I jerked my chin forward.
The light in the mirror disappeared, plunging me into the darkness that it had kept at bay. I twisted the door handle; still locked. The lights flickered back to life, casting an eerie yellow - orange light down on me.
Suddenly, a grey hand shot out of the already cracked glass in the mirror, followed closely by a second hand. The mirror ghost’s head appeared next, snarling out at me. Using those worse than dead hands, she pulled her entire body out of the mirror and climbed down from the sink.
My mouth fell open.
In the next second she was mere inches in front of my face, her lips pulled back into a grotesque snarl. I jerked my head back but there was nowhere to go. The wood of the door didn’t cave as well as my head did. Just before everything went black, the woman was standing over me - just watching.