I’m not quite sure what made me believe that mother was near to me again, probably just hopeful daydreaming. I missed my mother. It had always interested me that people seemed to assume that, since my mother had been dead for many years now, I would no longer miss her, or think of her at all. My brother Steve had always been scornful of my visits to her grave… back in the time when I’d been able to go to visit her. The cemetery had been replaced by a leisure centre now… little did the fitness fanatics who exhausted themselves daily in the gym or the swimming pool know that beneath them lay the ghosts of times long past. Being the imaginative person I was, I had always imagined mother rising from her grave and haunting the red-faced fat men who wasted their lives on bicycles with no wheels. As of everything else in my life, Steve had been scornful of this. He himself had no imagination, which was a large cause of concern in his life. He had always wanted to be a writer; but when he picked up a pen, nothing ever came of it. He called it a curse.
That day, I had been shopping in the local town centre, when, on instinct, I phoned my boyfriend Mike, and asked him to drive me home. I wasn’t really tired, or bored of shopping. It was just a strange feeling I’d been having all day that something wasn’t right. I suppose I wanted to assure myself that everything was alright—and Mike was always a great reassurance for me. He was such a steady figure, with his feet firmly on the ground. You always knew where you were with Mike, and that was partly why I loved him so much. He soon turned up where I always used to meet him when we were first dating; the flower stand outside the railway station. Some strange impulse in my brain had told me to buy him a single red rose, and so I did. Mike looked at it curiously, his brain obviously trying to remember if it was our anniversary; or Valentine’s day. But he appreciated it, and I appreciated him.
He dropped me home, chatted with me for about an hour, and then went off to have a quick drink with his friends. It was a couple of hours after this that the strange things began to happen. After I’d been to the bathroom, I decided to touch up the makeup on my face; for me, makeup was a new discovery, and applying it was always a great excitement for me. My mother had always strictly forbidden me to use it; I was only 11 when she died, and felt it best to honour her wishes for as long as possible. However, when it got to the point of me being 32 and never having applied a single splash of colour to my face, I had decided to change the habit of a lifetime… although I felt a pang of guilt every time I used the dreaded stuff. Maybe that was partly why I went back—to try to apologise to my mother for going against her word.
Looking into the mirror, I noticed, with a jolt of horror, that there was someone standing directly behind me. Turning around swiftly, I was terrified to see that there was no one there. The bathroom was as empty as it had been when I first went in. Jerkily, I turned back around to the mirror, and realised, terrified, that I could still see the figure in the mirror. “Who are you?” I murmured softly, almost too quiet to hear. “What do you want?”
I don’t know if I expected a reply or not, but I certainly didn’t get one. We stood together, the figure and I, for another ten minutes or so, both completely still. I did not try to speak again, not even when the figure seemed to swoop right through me, causing what felt like a wave of cold water to shower over me… dry cold water. I shivered, but still could not move. It was as if I was paralyzed, as images of demons and ghosts flashed through my mind, leering at me.
Quite suddenly, I found the life slowly come back to me, the second the telephone rang. Sighing with relief, I dashed over to the wall which housed it, and yanked it off. “Hello?” I asked into the receiver. There was no reply; just someone breathing. I would never have allowed myself to think it… but it sounded just like my mother’s gentle breath. And the figure in the bathroom… it had been a woman of around the same size and figure of my mother. I didn’t allow those thoughts to enter my mind; yet they must have seeped in through some unguarded door, as they were there, and now I couldn’t get rid of them.
I would have to do something…
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