I spent the entire day lying on our family couch, sipping coffee, and surfing through magazines I found in our basement. Some were recent ones that got discarded there for storage, so I just skimmed through them and put them aside. But one magazine made me stop in my tracks and take a closer look. It was an old news-magazine of 1932, exactly 45 years ago. The front cover was enough to shrivel my soul, because it was the cover of that fateful day when the mirrors were believed to be shattered for the first time. I don’t even understand how such an ancient magazine intermingled among our stash like that. It was almost creepily ominous. Anyway, turning its dog-eared leaves I began to read through. It had the same style of effect, but had four, instead of three standing mirrors left. Interestingly the fourth mirror was said to be completely undamaged or tinted, it was the other three that had cracked surfaces but not enough to be broken, though sufficient to be utterly useless. At that time too, the cause wasn’t determined, save for an only account of its possibilities given by a gypsy. I moved the page closer to my eyes and realized in definite terror…it was the same gypsy woman I saw today, looking as coy and malignant as ever. The account she gave of the incident was that of a ‘greater and more imperceptible feat no mortal had the capacity to comprehend.’ I searched frantically for more information on the cause as the page was partially faded, but could not make out any more words.
I could not understand exactly what everything was indicated towards, so sitting and pondering on it for a while, I finally decided I’d ask mom face-to-face before she’d tell Annie…tonight. I got up and started to clear away the magazines. I didn’t want to involve anyone else before learning of it myself. So I began to keep my mind busy by trying my hand at baking a cake. By then it was already 6:56 p.m. I had gone and picked up Annie from school, at around 4. She appeared cheerful and didn’t seem to care about what happened in the morning or anything that we talked about in the car. All she did was run upstairs to her room, crank up the volume to her songs and stay there till, the present time. Delilah and Roxanne came back around 7:30 from their job as art gallery supervisors, and Joe got back home around the same time, overjoyed at getting her much prized sports scholarship to ‘Alistan’s Sports League University’. To celebrate, everyone began to dig into the cake I had, luckily, made.
Mom and dad were still not back. I was the only one who seemed to worry excessively for their reaching home in time. But, after much wait, everyone retired to their rooms. The slow pace confused me, I thought what with everything happening, mom and dad would get home sooner and talk to Annie. I thought maybe something would happen still, but mom and dad still didn’t appear, and by then it was around 11:45 p.m. I went back to my room and tried miserably to hit the hay too. Feeling the strangeness of inactivity right at the climax of such weird events, I couldn’t sleep. I put on my night cape and went down the stairs to fetch myself the last slice of cake in the fridge. It was 12:33 a.m. and all was dark, save for the moonlight permeating through the windows downstairs. But all was not quiet. I heard a splattering, squishy sound, repeatedly dashing against something…and a low screechy foul laughter. The idea of mom and dad returning home struck me. But that calm notion soon commutated into a more horrific sound, with a loud outcry that pricked me. Hurrying down the stairs, I ran to where the sound derived from. It was the kitchen. And there my eyes beheld the thing that seemed to stop time for my breathing, my heart, and me. It was my parents, dead.
They were gruesomely murdered on the kitchen floor. Gaping for oxygen and forcing the movement out of my immobile legs…I saw her there. That gypsy. She was slouching, and had pupil like daggers in her yellow sclera, with a face that was as if hung out, loose on her skull. She held the knife in her decaying hand that dripped with crimson blood. It was splattered all over her sickly, right arm. She looked at me and let out a cackling that pierced right through me, and slowly amalgamated into a wild bloodcurdling laughter, whilst staring right into my soul.
‘We’re coming for you…’ She let out after a baleful caesura, looking at my aghast face and snickering. She then slouched again and crawled out our kitchen window, like a giant lizard. Losing balance, I hit the wall; and the rest is a blur.
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