forehead, and after trying three times to make it stay up, he gave up, deciding to let it lie. He was about to turn away from the mirror when he saw a flicker of movement.
He froze, willing it to go away, but knowing it wouldn’t.
Instead, as his eyes remained fixed on the glass, an image slowly began to take shape over his shoulder.
A face.
The face of an old man, with red, rheumy eyes peering at him out of deeply sunken sockets.
Instinctively, Michael closed his eyes against the image, but when he opened them again, the face was still there.
Now he could see the old man’s hands reaching out toward him, as if to grasp him.
His breath caught in his throat, and he felt his heart begin to pound, but suddenly the door flew open and his six-year-old sister Jenny glared at him, her fists firmly planted on her hips.
“Mom says you’re not supposed to stay in here more than ten minutes,” she said.
Michael’s eyes shifted from the mirror to his sister, but for a moment he didn’t trust himself to speak, afraid his voice would betray the fear inside him. “If you have to go, there’s a bathroom downstairs,” he finally countered.
“But I want to use this one,” Jenny complained. “It’s not just yours. It’s both of ours, and I have just as much right to—”
“Fine,” Michael said. “There’s the toilet. Go ahead and use it while I finish combing my hair. I don’t care.”
Jenny’s eyes widened with outrage. “I’m going to tell Mom what you said!”
Michael moved to the door, lifted his sister up and put her down in the hall, then closed the door in her face, locking it. As he went back to the sink, Jenny began pounding on the door, wailing indignantly.
Michael, ignoring the pounding and the shouts, gazed into the mirror once again.
The strange image was gone. All that he saw now was his own reflection.
But where had the image come from? Had it really been there at all?
He wasn’t sure.
But it wasn’t the first time he’d seen it.
Indeed, he couldn’t really remember when he’d first seen it. For a long time, it had happened so rarely that often he’d forgotten all about it. But now it seemed to be happening more frequently.
Sometimes he’d barely catch a glimpse of the face; it would be no more than a flicker in the mirror.
Other times he’d see it in his dreams, and wake up frightened.
Recently, he’d begun seeing the face more clearly, and more often.
For a while he’d tried to convince himself the house was haunted. Once, he’d even talked to his mother about it. She’d listened to him, but in the end she’d laughed it off.
“As far as I know, new houses don’t get haunted. First you have to have someone die—preferably get murdered. And unless you’ve killed someone and not told me about it, that hasn’t happened here.”
He’d argued with her a little, but not much, because the more he’d talked about it, the more stupid the whole thing had sounded. And yet, the face seemed to be coming to him more and more lately.
He studied the mirror for a few seconds, now consciously willing the image to reappear, as if to convince himself that the specter existed only in his own imagination. But except for his own face, the mirror reflected only white, shiny tile.
Leaving the bathroom to Jenny, he hurried down the stairs and out into the heat of the morning. But as he started toward the garage and his motorcycle, he glanced back at the house.
What was the truth of the face he’d seen in the mirror?
Was it in the house, or was it in his own mind?
As he mounted his bike and rode away, he decided that he didn’t really want to know the answer to his own question, for one answer was as frightening as the other.
3
Kelly Anderson sat silently in the backseat of the Chrysler, staring unseeingly out the window. Though the scenery had slowly changed from the red earth and pine trees of Georgia to the marshy flatland of Florida, Kelly had been unaware of it. Her thoughts had been turned inward, remembering the two weeks she’d spent in the hospital.
She hadn’t needed to be there—her wounds had healed quickly, and even the stitches in her stomach had been removed after only a week. What they’d really been trying to do was to figure out if she was crazy. She’d convinced them she wasn’t, although she herself wasn’t