The Silent Room

My name is Maya, and I am sixteen. The house I live in is a brick split-level built in the seventies, with a carport and a small lawn that my dad obsesses over. It’s not haunted, not in the way you see in movies. There are no creaking doors or ghostly apparitions. It’s more like a wrongness, a sickness in the walls. The smell is the first thing. It hits me the second I step through the front door, a sweet, rotten stench that clings to the back of my throat. My parents swear they don’t smell it, not unless I’m home. They’ll be in the kitchen, and I walk in from school, and my mom will look up and say, ‘There it is again, that smell.’ It’s like I bring it with me, like I’m the source.

But it’s not just the smell. When I come home, the house gets darker, even in the middle of the day. The light seems to drain from the rooms, and the air gets heavy. I can feel it pressing on my skin. My parents think I’m being dramatic, but I’ve seen the shadows seem to lengthen in my peripheral vision, and the quiet is too deep, like the walls are swallowing sound.

My room is at the end of the upstairs hall, and it has this built-in mirror, a huge, full-length thing that’s bolted to the wall with brass screws. It faces my bed, and I hate it. I’ve hated it since we moved in, three years ago. I would cover it with a sheet, but my mom would always take it off, saying it was ‘unhealthy’ to be afraid of a mirror. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that something lived behind the glass.

About a year ago, the sleep started to go. I’d lie in bed, trying to fall asleep, but I’d hear sounds—not loud, but there: a faint scratching, like fingernails on glass, and a low hum that seemed to vibrate in my bones. I’d get up, check the closet, look under the bed, but nothing. And the whole time, I’d feel like something was watching me, something just out of sight, waiting for me to turn away from the mirror.

I tried everything: I drank chamomile tea, I did breathing exercises, I even listened to white noise. But nothing helped. I’d finally drift off around 4 AM, and then I’d wake up two hours later, drenched in sweat, with the sense that I had been screaming, except I didn’t hear anything. My eyes would always snap to the mirror, and I’d swear I saw a shape, a silhouette that was not my own, standing in the dim light, watching me.

My parents thought I was anxious about exams, or maybe it was my first boyfriend, who had just broken up with me. They took me to a doctor, who gave me sleeping pills, but they just made me groggy, not rested. So, my mom, being the ‘open-minded’ one, brought in a medium, a woman named Gloria with silver hair and kind eyes. She walked through the house, her hands hovering over doorways and corners. When she got to my room, she stopped and turned to me, her face pale. She said, ‘The mirror is not a mirror. It’s a door. And something on the other side is trying to get in.’ She told me that it was drawn to me, to my fear, and that I needed to get rid of the mirror, but it was built into the wall, and we’d have to tear down half the room to remove it.

I didn’t want to do that, so Gloria gave me a ritual. She said to block the mirror at night with a black cloth and to draw a protective symbol on it with charcoal. She said to speak a specific phrase, something in an ancient language, but I can’t remember it now. She also gave me a small pouch of herbs and told me to sleep with it under my pillow. For the first few nights, it seemed to work. I slept longer, and I didn’t feel that oppressive presence. But then, the dreams started.

In the dreams, I’m standing in front of the mirror, but I can’t see my reflection. Instead, I see a different room, a room that’s the exact reverse of my own. The walls are a dark, stained wood, the floor is bare concrete, and there’s a single chair in the middle. And sitting in that chair is a figure—a woman with long, black hair and pale skin. She doesn’t move, but her eyes are open, and they are the purest black I’ve ever seen, like voids. And in the dream, I know she is waiting for me to step through.

Last night, I was so tired that I forgot to put the cloth over the mirror. I fell asleep facing it, and I had the dream again. But this time, the woman in the chair was standing, and she was closer to the glass, her hand pressed against it. She was whispering, ‘Let me in. I know you see me. You want this.’ And in the dream, I felt my own hand rise, as if in agreement, before I forced it down.

I woke up screaming, and the smell was intense, like something had just died right there in my room. My parents came running, and they were terrified. My mom said, ‘Oh my God, Maya, you’ve got to do something.’ And for the first time, I saw that they believed me. They saw the black scratches on the inside of the mirror that weren’t there before, like something had been clawing at it from the other side.

Today, I went online to find help. And I found a forum for people who have had experiences with mirrors. And one post said that this kind of thing is common in houses built on the site of old burial grounds. I looked up the history of my house. It was built in 1974, on a plot of land that was once part of a farm. And before that? It was a field where they buried people who died in the flu epidemic of 1918. No formal graves, just a mass pit, unmarked.

I’m writing this now, from my parents’ bedroom, where I’ve been sleeping for the past week. But tonight, I have to go back to my room, because they’re having the wall cut open tomorrow, and I need to get a few things from my dresser. I’ll be quick, I’ll have my dad with me. But as I sit here, I can feel the house shift, that familiar darkness creeping in. And in my room, I know the mirror is still there, and I know the woman is waiting. She’s patient. And she knows I’ll come back.

I just hope I make it out before she does.