The Mirror’s Other Side

Every night, Meera woke up to the same carving on her arm: a thin, perfect line, like an incision made by a surgeonu2019s scalpel, but it was not there when she went to sleep. She had no memory of making it. The first time she noticed, she had been in the shower, the water stinging the fresh cut, and she had stared at the red line as if it belonged to someone else. This had been happening since she was a child, but the frequency had increased since she moved into the old, sprawling house in the hill station of Nainital. The house was a relic of the British Raj, with peeling wallpaper and creaking floors, and it had an antique mirror in the master bedroom, a tall cheval glass with a tarnished silver frame.

Meerau2019s friends thought she was being dramatic. Her chatty roommate Priya would laugh and say, ‘You and your ghost stories. You always find something to scare yourself with.’ But Meera wasn’t scared of ghosts. She was scared of the man in her sleep. He was tall, with hollow cheeks and a long black coat, and he would stand at the foot of her bed, watching her. In her dreams, he never spoke, but he would raise his hand and trace a line on her arm, and when she woke up, the cut would be there. She knew he was not a phantom of her imagination because she could feel the cold of his fingers on her skin.

One night, after a particularly vivid dream, she woke up gasping, her heart pounding. She stumbled to the bathroom, her bare feet cold on the wooden floor. She ran the tap, cupped her hands, and splashed water on her face. The water was freezing, and it shocked her into alertness. She looked up into the mirror above the sink, and for a split second, she saw a reflection that was not her own. It was a man with a gentle face, a beard, and a crown of thorns. He was looking at her with such sorrow that her knees buckled. She grabbed the edge of the sink, her breath caught. When she blinked, her own reflection stared back, pale and wide-eyed, with water dripping from her chin.

She did not tell Priya. She could not. That face was not a ghost; it was a face she had seen in paintings in churches, a face that had been used to comfort and to judge. But why would it appear to her? She started to lose sleep. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the man in the coat, and behind him, the face of Christ, waiting. She began to avoid the mirror in her bedroom, covering it with a sheet, but she could feel it like a presence in the room.

One evening, Priya was out, and Meera was alone in the house. The wind howled outside, and the rain lash at the windows. She decided to take a bath to calm her nerves. She filled the tub with hot water, added some lavender oil, and sank into it, closing her eyes. She must have dozed off, because when she opened her eyes, the room was dark. The tiny bathroom light had gone out. And the man was there. He was standing at the foot of the tub, his black coat dripping with a wetness that was not rain. He reached down, and his fingers touched her shoulder, ice cold. She tried to scream, but no sound came. He pulled at the edge of the towel, tugging it, and she felt a sharp pain on her arm, as if a razor had sliced the skin.

The next thing she knew, she was lying on the bathroom floor, shivering, the tub empty. Her arm had a fresh cut, oozing blood. She crawled to the sink and pulled herself up, and there, in the mirror, the man with the crown of thorns was looking back at her, but this time, his eyes were not sorrowful. They were angry, and he was shaking his head as if she had failed a test. ‘Who are you?’ she screamed, and her own voice echoed back. The image faded, and she was left staring at her own terrified face.

Meera finally called her mother, who lived in a different city. Her mother had never liked talking about Meerau2019s childhood, but now, in a trembling voice, Meera demanded the truth. Her mother broke down and told her a story. When Meera was two years old, she had been seriously ill, with a fever that would not break. The doctors had given up. In desperation, her mother had gone to a traveling missionary. The missionary had taken Meera in his arms, prayed over her, and then, in the dead of night, he had disappeared, taking Meera with him. For three days, her parents searched, and then, one morning, they woke up to find baby Meera lying on their doorstep, wrapped in a white cloth, with a small cross carved into the inner wooden frame of her cradle. She was healed, but she was never the same. She would wake up screaming, talking about a man in black.

Meera hung up the phone, her mind reeling. The man in black, the cut marks, the face in the mirror u2014 it all connected. She walked back to her bedroom and pulled the sheet off the mirror. She stood before it, her reflection wavering. She remembered the missionaryu2019s face from the mirror, and she realized that the man in black was not a ghost, not a demon, but a guardian of some sort, a custodian of a covenant she had been bound into as a child. She reached out and touched her reflection. In the mirror, her reflection reached out too, but in the reflection, her hand passed through the glass, into the other side. For a moment, she felt a cold grip, and then the mirror shattered, sending silvered shards across the floor. She saw, in the broken pieces, a thousand reflections of the man in black, each one taking a step back.

When the police came later, they found Meera on the floor, unconscious, surrounded by broken glass. The mirror had seemingly exploded from the inside. In the hospital, the doctors found dozens of fine scars on her arms and legs, but they could not explain how they got there. Meera woke up three days later, and she smiled. She told Priya, ‘Heu2019s gone. I set him free.’ Priya thought she was delusional, but Meera knew the truth. In her dream, the man in black had bowed his head and faded, and the man with the thorns had nodded, as if a long-forgotten debt had been paid. She would never see the cuts again. But sometimes, when she looked into a mirror, she could swear she saw a shadow move in the corner of her eye, and she would smile, because she knew that on the other side of the glass, there was a world watching her, and she was not alone.”