Trembling With Fear 01/16/2022

Personal Reflections On Bloody Mary by Jennifer Lee Rossman

It was around midnight that the girls decided to abandon the sleep part of the sleepover in favor of communing with the spirit world.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking this is another one of those stories about why little girls shouldn’t play with Ouija boards, complete with demon possessions and speaking in tongues and maybe a little levitation for good measure, because wow, floating children, that’s nice and spooky.

It isn’t one of those stories.

Starts the same way though, with one girl trying to convince the others to play this scary game her older brother told her about, and everyone else saying there’s no such thing as ghosts. Of course, they could say that with all the confidence in the world, but none of them volunteered to go first.

There’s just something… off about mirrors in the dark. You can see yourself, but you can’t really see yourself, and it triggers all of those leftover instincts and the reflexes we don’t need but can’t bear to get rid of so we shove them into the junk drawer cortex of our brain. So the girls said they weren’t afraid of ghosts, and they thought they were telling the truth but the thing is, it didn’t matter. Our brains are primed to look for danger even when we know it isn’t there.

And so they sent the first girl in, and they waited and they giggled through the terror they pretended they didn’t feel, and she screamed and ran out of the bathroom talking about the horrible demon she saw in the mirror. And somehow, not only did this fail to deter the others, it made them even more excited for their turn.

***

I should mention the dog.

Cute little mongrel, his pedigree a mystery but most likely a mix of terrier and something resembling a domesticated chupacabra. He’s not really important to the story, per se, but I should mention him.

While the girls took turns whispering “Bloody Mary” in the bathroom mirror and getting scared out of their wits by optical illusions and obsolete instincts, the dog had found a makeup compact. You know, one of those clamshell shaped deals you can fit in your purse, with powder on one side and a mirror on the other.

Well, the dog found one, barking and growling at his reflection. Thought it was another dog, not because he was a particularly unintelligent pup—he was, but that’s beside the point—but because for whatever reason, evolution did not see fit to grant good old Canis lupus the ability to recognize themselves in a mirror.

The girls joked that he was playing Bloody Mary, too. Maybe he was, in his own way, because despite appearing angry and sometimes even a little scared of the terrier/chupacabra in the mirror, he got upset if they tried to take it away.

He was having fun, experiencing the adrenaline rush of the fight or flight response without actually being in danger.

***

So one by one, the girls went into the dark bathroom with its kitschy dolphin decor and they thrilled themselves with imaginary dangers like a dog growling at his reflection. And with every subsequent girl, the delighted shrieks of terror grew louder, their brains already on a fight or flight hair trigger after listening to their friends’ testimonies about what horrors awaited them.

Then came the last girl, and you’re probably thinking to yourself, this will be the girl who gets grabbed by the demon in the mirror, the demon all her friends somehow escaped without ever knowing it was real. And that would be a good ending. Nice and scary, maybe a final description of bloody handprints that can’t be washed off because they are inside the mirror.

But that’s not what happens in this story.

The last girl put on a brave face that fooled no one, least of all herself, and went into the shadowy bathroom. Closing the door behind her plunged the room into a darkness so complete that she had to double check whether her eyes were even open. They were, but it made no difference at the moment.

She waited for her vision to adjust, knowing she was alone and safe but at the same time unable to convince her amygdala of that. The sound of her breathing, coming just a little more rapid now, echoed off the tiles, played tricks on her mind. If she wasn’t alone, how would she know? How close could something get before she noticed?

When the edges of the bathroom fixtures finally dared reveal themselves, she made her way to the sink and the mirror looming above it. She could see her reflection, barely, but she could see it, and she stared into her own eyes while taking a shaky breath.

“Bloody Mary,” she whispered quickly, and waited, fingers curling around the cool porcelain of the sink.

“Bloody Mary,” she said again after a moment, watching herself in the mirror and summoning the courage to utter the name for the third, final time, because it’s always three times, isn’t it.

“Bloody Mary,” she said finally, feeling foolish for being so afraid.

And that’s when it happened, when her mirror self changed, became the terrible thing that had sent her friends running from the room in terror.

Her skin grew gray and blotchy, even in the monotone darkness, she could tell. Her lips curled up in a snarl, every tooth a serrated fang, and empty sockets crying bloody tears replaced her eyes.

She didn’t scream like the others. Oh, she tried to, opened her mouth and everything, but so did the monster in the mirror, and the scream died before it ever reached her vocal cords.

Seeing a ghost in a dark mirror, that’s an unnerving experience no matter who you are, no matter whether you believe in spirits from beyond the veil or just shrug it off as a quirk of the human brain. But this was different, this girl was different, and so her fear, naturally, was different than her friends’.

Her friends were dogs growling at a reflection they couldn’t understand, enjoying the manufactured danger in their minds while knowing all along that they were safe and there was no such thing as Bloody Mary.

The last girl to chant before the mirror had no such assurance. She was not a growling dog, because, as we’ve learned, dogs do not recognize themselves in the mirror.

She did.

She looked at her reflection, at the hideous face of Bloody Mary, and she recognized herself, and she could run and scream like her friends but it wouldn’t matter. The bloody handprints weren’t on the other side of the mirror, they were inside her.