1867, Late July
Audrey decided to go ahead and do the foolish ritual and all its silly steps to prove a point to Harriet, to prove to her that the ghosts that inhabited their modern world in growing numbers were not the ghosts of their old mothers’ era. The ghosts of their mothers’ era were fakes. They were misidentifications, lies, or folklore. They were like Hercules and Cinderella, fictional. But the ghosts of Audrey and Harriet’s era, of the modern era of thaumaturgists and manesologists, were real.
Ghosts in the modern era were scientific fact, like gravity and bacteria and photosynthesis and other things Audrey read about in her brother’s school books. Ghosts had been a fact since 1861, when Dr. Edward James published the first scientific paper on ghosts, Multiple Intelligences Within the Human Body. Multiple Intelligences was like the Bible. Few read it, more read snippets from it, but all knew of it and what it proclaimed.
Modern ghosts, real ghosts, were not even called ghosts, scientifically speaking. They were called manes in all serious publications, though common publications such as Illustrated Phantom Stories (a guilty pleasure of Audrey’s, for though its content was sensationalized and lurid, it did provide a daily supply of ghost stories) called them ghosts. The average person called them ghosts, though Audrey took great pleasure in correcting anyone that used the term ghosts. “They aren’t ghosts, they’re manes.” was one of Audrey’s favorite sayings, and her mother was sick of hearing it.
Ghosts couldn’t be summoned through silly rituals that called for one to play with a candle and spin around and stare into a mirror at such-and-such an hour. To summon real ghosts, you needed scientific instruments called gaeite candles, not wax candles. These gaeite candles combined an electric battery, the latest in chemical and electrical technology, with a block of gaeite mined from the ruins of the pre-human Dyeus culture, and as everyone knew from the pamphlets the government printed and distributed back in 1865, when a block of gaeite was exposed to an electric current, it produced a silvery-white glow called olprt radiance which was part physical light, part metaphysical ectoplasm. Olprt radiance responded to disciplined thoughts, and when wielded by a a manesologists trained in the mental exercises of the Dyeus culture, miracles could be worked, including the summoning of ghosts.
That was how ghosts were summoned, not through superstition, but through science.
Really, everyone knew about ghosts these days. Even far-off Indians at the corners of the British empire knew about them. For Audrey, there was no excuse for people like her mother and Harriet to go on believing silly superstitions, not in the modern year of 1867, and it bothered her greatly when they did so, as if they had no common sense in their heads. Audrey couldn’t stand it when her mother talked about ghosts not being able to cross running water, as if they couldn’t fly wherever they pleased, or about how they couldn’t enter churches, as if Christians couldn't’ leave ghosts when they died. But Audrey really couldn’t stand it when Harriet talked about Bloody Mary, as if Bloody Mary was even a real ghost! When it came to believing in nonsense, Audrey’s mother had the excuse of her age, but what was Harriet’s excuse? She had none! She was simply a bird-brain.
So, to make a point to Harriet, to prove to her once and for all that there was no place for Bloody Mary and her silly rituals in the modern world, Audrey decided to do all the silly, foolish things that Harriet said would make Bloody Mary appear in her mirror, all just to prove a point.
It was just to prove a point--and it made what happened to Audrey all the more unjust and tragic.
When the sun went down and her parents went asleep, Audrey double-checked the list of instructions she had made.
--When it is dark, walk backwards up the stairs while holding a candle in one hand and a hand mirror in the other.
--Walk to the largest mirror in the house (which was the mirror in the bathroom).
--Place one candle near one edge of the mirror and another candle at the other edge (this, Audrey realized, meant that she had to leave a candle in the bathroom before the ritual started, otherwise she would have to somehow carry two candles and a hand mirror. She wondered if Harriet had ever thought about that peculiarity of the ritual and decided that she probably didn’t. Harriet probably never did the silly ritual herself, though she swore up and down she did, the big liar).
--Say “Bloody Mary” three times in the mirror (what was to be done about the little hand mirror, Harriet didn’t say. Audrey suspected that the ritual Harriet described was really the combination of two different versions. There were always different versions of superstitions like this. Audrey supposed that Bloody Mary wouldn’t be too terribly offended if she left the hand mirror on the counter outside the bathroom).
--Spin around three times.
--Gaze into the mirror once again.
And if these steps were followed exactly, Harriet promised that supernatural activity would occur in the bathroom mirror--though she was vague about the precise form this activity was to take. She said that when she herself summoned Bloody Mary, she saw the face of her husband-to-be: John Lloyd. But of course she would see John Lloyd. Her parents had introduced her to him a month ago and she fell head-over-heels for him. But Harriet warned that more than one’s future husband could appear in the mirror. She warned that a skull could appear, or a woman in a bloody shroud, or a warty-faced witch. Presumably, one of these images had to be the legendary Bloody Mary. Or perhaps all of them were Bloody Mary. Or maybe Bloody Mary had sisters. It didn’t matter.
Who exactly Bloody Mary was supposed to be, Harriet couldn’t say. She explained to Audrey that she heard from other people (she was always hearing things from other people) that Bloody Mary was the ghost of Queen Mary Tudor, notorious for her persecution of Protestants. Harriet told Audrey that Mary Tudor burned nearly 300 men at the stake, and while that was interesting, it didn’t explain why she wanted to visit people through mirrors in the present. Harriet also heard that Bloody Mary was the ghost of Mary Worth, an American plantation owner who took great delight in executing escaped slaves. Again, it was interesting, but Audrey couldn’t see the connection between old homicide and modern mirrors. Harriet also heard that Bloody Mary was a Hungarian Countess named Elizabeth Bathory who killed her servant girls and bathed in their blood in an effort to maintain her own youth (apparently, superstitions got stranger the older they were), but Countess Bathory being Bloody mary seemed like a stretch to Audrey, even in light of the other two proposed identities. Elizabeth Bathory wasn’t even named Mary, how did people come to believe it was her in the first place?
With little faith in the proposed identities of Bloody Mary and even less in her supposed ability to be summoned by girls with too much time on their hands, Audrey lit a candle, picked up a hand mirror, and prepared to begin the ritual.
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Audrey had no doubt that when morning came and she reported to Harriet that her mirror was uninhabited Harriet would call her a big liar. She would call her a liar whether or not she did the ritual, Audrey knew that, but Audrey didn’t want Harriet to be right in calling her a liar. She didn’t want Harriet to stare her in the eye and glean that she was too cowardly to perform the ritual from her facial features. Harriet had a way of reading people, and Audrey feared her friend smiling at her and saying “You’re lying, Audrey! I know you’re lying! I can see it in your face!”
That would be the worst possible outcome of the night, and so Audrey was resolved to carry the ritual to completion, foolish as it was.
It was not a difficult thing to walk up the stairs backwards. They were the stairs of the house Audrey had lived in since she was born/ She could have walked up them blindfolded. But when Audrey reached the top of the stairs, she found that she was faced with something she hadn’t considered--was she supposed to walk backwards down the stairs as well as up it?
Audrey felt very foolish. She thought she had considered all the oddities and inconsistencies of Bloody Mary and her rituals. How did she not foresee this?
Harriet never said anything about how one was supposed to go back down the stairs. Maybe it was assumed that whoever performed the ritual kept the largest mirror they owned upstairs? Who would keep such a large and fragile thing upstairs instead of downstairs?
Audrey looked down the stairs. For the first time that night, she felt apprehensive. In the dark, with only a little candle to provide illumination, she could see only a few steps of the stairs before they vanished into the darkness beyond her candlelight.
Audrey thought about what Harriet would say. Audrey decided that Harriet would definitely tell her she “did it wrong” if she didn’t walk backwards down the stairs. Walking forwards down the stairs would count as a botch and spoil the whole ritual, and Harriet would laugh at her, and so, Audrey turned around, and with her back to gravity, descended the stairs.
She had to admit to herself that going down the stairs was more…well, she wouldn’t say scary…more precarious than going up. She descended carefully, very carefully, feeling every step with her feet. With every step she took, she had the curious feeling that she was about to tip over and fall the rest of the way down the stairs. She felt as if a hand was gently pulling at her back and that at any moment it could start tugging.
When Audrey finally reached the ground, she smiled to herself, and imagined what would have happened if she had fallen. She wouldn’t have broken a bone, that much she was sure of. Her mother once broke a bone falling down the stairs, but she was so old, and so frail. Audrey figured that she probably would have yelled and woken up her parents, and then they would have yelled at her for waking them up in the middle of the night. Knowing her luck, the hand mirror would probably have cracked as well, and they would have yelled at her for that too. The whole house would be up and yelling and pretty soon someone would be knocking at the door asking what murder was just committed.
In her imagination, Audrey could hear her mother. ”Audrey! You’re always getting on to me about “superstition” this and “unscientific” that, and now you’re up in the middle of the night trying to talk to Bloody Mary!”
It was all so silly, wasn’t it?
Audrey felt disappointed once she was inside her bathroom. One would think that as one got closer to Bloody Mary’s appearance that things would start to get scarier, but this was nothing compared to the stairs, and the stairs were a trifle.
Audrey put her candle at one end of the mirror, retrieved a tinder box from her pockets, and lit the one she had placed before she went to the stairs.
She could barely see herself in the mirror and doubted that she would be able to see Bloody Mary, if Bloody Mary even showed up. How was anyone supposed to see anything in a mirror, in a dark room, with only candle light to see by?
It was all so silly!
Audrey gazed at her reflection, dull and murky as it was. There was her eye, there was her chin, and there was her lip. Everything was there, but all the parts were suspended in the darkness so that she could only see the parts her eyes focused on. It was like her face was sinking beneath a black puddle, or falling into a dark cloud.
“Bloody Mary,” Audrey said.
She nearly laughed. She couldn’t believe that she was really doing this. She hoped her parents wouldn’t hear her.
“Bloody Mary.” Audrey said again, and then one more time, “Bloody Mary.”
And that was that.
So disappointing! Whoever invented this silly superstition clearly never tried it themselves. If they had wanted it to be really scary they could have made it so that the person said “Bloody Mary” three times in a pitch black room. That at least would have been something, but this? This was nothing!
Audrey reached for her candle to light the way back to her bedroom, but then she remembered something--the last step.
Turn around three times.
She decided she might as well. She had done all the other silly things, so what was one more?
She turned around once.
Twice.
Three times.
And looked in the mirror.
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.