The Mirror’s Yield

My cousin Delia and I were six, the summer our mothers worked the late shift at the cannery. We stayed with our great-aunt Morgana in her crumbling farmhouse outside of Harrow, a town that had long since whispered its last secret. Aunt Morgana was a woman of moss and mothballs, and she wore her superstition like a second skin. She’d say, ‘The house has a memory, children. It remembers every pain that’s ever bled into its walls.’ We thought she was just a lonely old woman with a fondness for ghost stories. Our mothers thought she was an eccentric, harmless relic.

The afternoon was thick with the drone of cicadas, and the air inside smelled of dust and dried lavender. Delia had gone upstairs to Aunt Morgana’s room, the only one with a full-length mirror, a heavy oak-framed thing that seemed to swallow the light. I sat on a wooden stool near the foot of the stairs, tracing patterns in the worn carpet, when a violent chill ran through my body, and the world tilted.

For a heartbeat, I was no longer in the dim hallway. I was in that mirrored room, seeing through Delia’s eyes. The reflection was wrong. It wasn’t her. It was a woman with skin like cracked porcelain, her hair a wild silver storm that floated as if underwater. She wore a black shift that hung off her bones like a shroud, and her eyes—my mother’s eyes—were black as pitch, with no whites, and they were fixed on Delia with a hunger that curdled my blood.

Then Delia screamed. The sound was raw, tearing through the silence, and it snapped me back to myself. She stumbled down the stairs, her face a mask of terror, tears streaking her cheeks. She reached the bottom and grabbed my shoulders, shaking me. ‘Did you see her? In the mirror! She looked like Mom, but—’

I cut her off, my voice calm in a way that scared us both. ‘I know. An old woman, grey hair, like a witch. I saw her too.’ Delia’s mouth fell open, and she stepped back, her fear turning to something like awe. ‘But you weren’t there,’ she whispered.

That night, I lay in the narrow bed in the guest room, Delia sniffling in the bed beside me. Aunt Morgana had given us chamomile tea and told us not to mind the mirror. ‘It shows you what you’re not ready to see,’ she said, and I didn’t understand then. I fell asleep with the image burned behind my lids: the hollow cheeks, the needle teeth that grin revealed, the way her reflection seemed to breathe even after Delia had turned away.

She came to me that night. Not in the mirror, but in the space between waking and dreaming. The room was winter-cold, and there she stood at the foot of my bed, dripping wet as if she’d just climbed from a lake. She didn’t speak, but her mouth moved, and I heard a sound like dry leaves skittering across a tombstone. ‘You saw me twice, child,’ she seemed to say, though her lips never formed the words. ‘Now you’ll see me every time you close your eyes.’

And she was right. For years, she was my constant companion in nightmare. Every dream had her at its center, her long fingers reaching for me, her mouth opening too wide, revealing a void. She’d whisper the names of people I loved, and I’d see them decay in her palm. I grew up in fits and starts, always looking over my shoulder, always checking mirrors twice. My mother dismissed it as night terrors, but Aunt Morgana, from whom I heard through my mother, sent me a charm made of dried juniper and a single black feather. ‘Wear it,’ she wrote, ‘and it’ll keep her at bay.’ I did, but she still found me in dreams, just watching, patient as a stone.

It wasn’t until I was thirty-two, when Aunt Morgana died and left me the farmhouse, that I finally confronted her. The house was even more decrepit, the walls weeping with moisture, and the mirror in her room was covered with a dusty cloth. I pulled the cloth away, and there she was, unchanged, her black eyes staring out at me. But this time, I didn’t run.

I took a deep breath and spoke to her. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why did you haunt me?’ The reflection rippled, and she smiled—a slow, terrible smile that showed all her needle teeth. And then she spoke, her voice a chorus of whispers that echoed in my skull. ‘Because you are the only one who ever saw me clearly. The others, they screamed and forgot. You carried me with you. You made me real.’

I felt a strange pity. She was a memory, a remnant of something unspoken, a grief that had curdled into obsession. I reached out and touched the glass, and she did the same, our fingertips meeting. A jolt ran through me, and suddenly I saw her life: a young woman, mourning a lost child, cursed to be forgotten, turning bitter and vengeful, leaving a stain of loneliness on the house. I realized then that she wasn’t evil, just abandoned.

I lowered my hand and said, ‘I see you now. And I’m not afraid anymore.’ The reflection flickered, and for the first time, her eyes softened. She began to fade, like mist burning off at dawn, until all that was left was my own reflection, tired but at peace.

Since then, she has not come to me in dreams. But sometimes, when I look into a mirror for too long, I think I see a flicker at the edge of my vision—a grey-haired woman smiling gently, nodding as if to say, ‘You’re ready now.’ And I smile back.