Audrey blinked. Was she dizzy? She didn’t feel dizzy, but the mirror looked strange. In the mirror, she could see the glare of the candlelight, she could see the bathroom, but she couldn’t see her face.

Where was her face?

Audrey closed her eyes. It must be a trick of the light, she thought.

She opened them.

And still, she couldn’t see her face.

She laughed. She must have pulled some sort of magic trick on herself. What stage magicians did on purpose to fool their audiences she did on accident to herself. Didn’t people say they always used mirrors for their tricks? That was what this was, some sort of Pepper’s ghost trick.

She moved to try to see if she could change what was in the mirror. She stepped back, she stepped forward, but still, she would not appear in the mirror, but everything else did.

She had no reflection, no reflection at all.

But that was only how it seemed, she told herself, it was impossible for something, for anything, to not have a reflection. Somehow, the light was being curved or refracted or meddled with in some way so as to make it seem that she didn’t have a reflection.

And then she realized that she could see in the mirror the bathtub and cabinet–and those things were behind her.

How was that possible? How could some optical trick make the mirror show what was behind her..as if she wasn’t there?

She grabbed one of the candles. No more silly games in the dark. This had gone on long enough. The game was over.

She held her candle close to the mirror.

And she saw that the candle floated in mid-air without a hand to hold it.

Audrey gasped. She dropped the candle. It clattered to the marble floor and snuffed itself out with sloshing, liquid wax.

Half the bathroom plunged into darkness. Audrey felt strange, and told herself to calm down. She was safe, she told herself, whatever was happening, she was safe But her heart continued to beat faster and faster. She started to sweat.

This was fear–but also something more.

Her mouth dried in an instant. She felt her stomach start to churn.

She felt very, very cold, very, very suddenly. Her teeth chattered together. She touched her forehead and felt that she was ablaze.

She had a fever, a horrible, flu-like fever, in seconds, and she could not explain it. But worse than the fever was the fear. Something had been done to her, something she couldn’t understand, by a thing she didn’t believe in.

Until now.

Audrey began to cry. Tears clouded her vision, but when she brushed them away she found that her vision still blurred without them.

Her head felt light and her limbs heavy. Her legs buckled and she fell to the bathroom floor, barely catching herself on her hands, but then they too gave way under the weight of her body and she slumped to the floor, cheek pressed against the cold marble.

Through half-closed, unfocused eyes, Audrey could just barely make out the candlelight reflecting in the mirror.

The candlelight formed a suggestion of a face. Whose face it was, Audrey did not know, but it certainly wasn’t her own.

Audrey screamed, and the softness of her scream terrified her. It wasn’t loud enough to reach her parents, sound asleep. It was barely loud enough to escape her throat. And then, in the span of a terrified heartbeat, her screams no longer had the strength to leave her mouth.