Author's Note: This short story is being written for submission in the RoyalRoad Community Magazine. I've never written horror before, so when the idea popped into my head upon reading the prompt I knew I had to go for it, even just as an experiment.
Content Warning: Eating Disorders, Body Image Issues and Disturbing Content
Chapter 1
“Mary dear, I need to speak with your parents for a moment.” Dr Jacobs smiled a little as he opened the door to his office, then poked his head out and signalled something to the woman behind the reception desk. “Anne can fetch you a nice warm drink if you like, this shouldn’t take long.”
Sure enough, Mary had barely taken two tentative steps out into the waiting room before a steaming cup was pressed into her hands. Instant cocoa. The smell tickled her nose, sickly sweet and lacking any real depth. She sipped it anyway, and some of the tension left her shoulders as the warmth trickled down into her core. She took a seat on one of the chairs, a hard plastic thing with a back that creaked and wedged up against the wall behind when she sat against it.
Five minutes turned into ten, and the receptionist came by again, this time with a small plate of cookies— the kind that an old person might give you if you dropped by unannounced, with jam and dusted sugar on top.
She’d just started nibbling at one when she felt a prickling on the back of her neck. She glanced up, and the receptionist’s gaze flicked back to the computer screen at the front desk, fingers clacking at the keyboard.
So that’s how it was.
The room was sterile and boring, without even so much as a single piece of artwork to break up the drab teal paint and medical diagrams on the walls, so without anything better to do she busied herself on her phone, checked her socials and did some window shopping.
By the fifteenth minute, boredom crept in, and she was just about to stand up and shake off some of the nervous energy when the door opened again.
Her parents were the first to exit, and she cringed when they looked at her, with eyes full of sap like they were gazing down at an injured bird, or a butterfly with a broken wing.
“I’ve pencilled you in for a follow-up in a week” Dr Jacobs was saying, as Mary’s parents gravitated over towards her. She stood up and wished that she had the strength to brush her father’s well-meaning hand from her shoulder when it inevitably fell there and squeezed gently.
“Thank you so much doctor” her mother replied. “Is it okay if I call you between now and then?”
“Of course. If… things deteriorate… they can do so quite quickly. If you have any concerns at all you could also…”
Mary slipped her earbuds in, tuning out the rest of the conversation until she could finally mumble a quiet ‘thank you’ and rush out the front door.
The car ride was quiet. She kept her earbuds in but turned the music off— if her parents were going to talk between themselves, she wanted to hear— but when her father opened his mouth he was met with a quick “not now dear”, and he wisely let it drop.
It was dinner by the time things came to a head. Josie was out again— she’d found true love in the arms of her sixth boyfriend in as many months and was messaging the family group chat with pictures of expensive, slimy-looking entrées and lobster rolls. Without her sister to blunt the force of her parents’ scrutiny, Mary had hoped to pile some food on her plate and disappear off to her room citing exam preparation, but that hope had been short-lived. She’d come downstairs to a table that was set with an empty seat at the head and a steaming plate heaped high with stuffed potatoes. On either side her parents sat with expectant looks.
“Why don’t you lead us in Grace, Mary” her mother suggested. Checkmate. She sat down and mumbled her way through a quick blessing.
They watched her take her first bite, and the second, only turning to their own meals when she was halfway through her serving. She opted for speed, wolfing her dinner down greedily— she had been hungry— then dropping her fork to the plate with a clatter and rising to her feet. Her father caught her sleeve.
“Mary… we need to talk.”
“But I have…”
“Please sit dear,” her mother leaned forward, wringing her hands. A dark globule of dread pooled in Mary’s stomach as she slowly slid back down into the seat of the chair, eyes firmly fixed on the scraps and bones still on her plate. A faint ringing filled her ears, growing as both of her parents stared her down.
“Mary, the doctor today…” her father began, then tailed off. His lips twitched with a frown, and then he rallied. “Your mother and I are concerned about your health.”
“I’m healthy.”
“Sweetheart, the doctor says that if nothing changes, you’re going to end up really sick” her mother chimed in gently and leaned forward to lay her hand on Mary’s. Mary shivered at the touch, white terror prying at the seams of her control.
Please no, just leave it, mom, let it go.
“It’s… you know you’re beautiful, don’t you sweetheart? Your father and I are both so proud of the gorgeous woman you’re becoming, so…”
Stop, please just stop.
“What your mother is trying to say is that we’ve noticed that you’ve been a little out of sorts lately” her father added with a pointed look at his wife. “You’re spending a lot of time up in your room and we’ve noticed that you don’t seem to have been eati…”
“I’ve been eating enough” she interrupted, more sharply than she’d meant to and the dread turned to shame as her parents flinched. “I… really, there’s nothing wrong.”
“Nothing wrong? Sweetie, you’re as thin as a twi…” her father caught the elbow to the ribs with a slight wince and glared balefully at her mother before sighing. “Okay. But we are worried about you, and the doctor put a few things into perspective today and…”
The ringing was louder now, filling her ears with static, as if an angry beehive were rallying itself between her ears. She nodded along until an abrupt silence and two expectant stares broke through the swarm.
“Sweetheart, we asked if you understand where we’re coming from” her father prompted. Mary took a deep breath.
“I… understand. And I’m sorry to make you worry” she ventured, butt hovering above the seat of her chair as she tentatively began to stand. This time, they didn’t stop her. “I’ll be fine. Really. Please don’t worry about me. Please.”
“Just so long as you understand we’re here for you no matter what.” her mother’s well-meaning concern slipped like poison through the cracks in Mary’s demeanour, and suddenly there was mist in the air. She rubbed her eyes.
“I know, but really mom, I’m fine.”
“Okay sweetie, you’d best go and get some study done. I need to have a talk with your father.”
She couldn’t flee upstairs fast enough, pausing only to drop her dishes in the sink. She took the stairs two at a time and almost ran, heat spreading in her cheeks down the corridor until a peculiar sensation like something had hooked her by the scruff of the neck gripped her. She stopped, hand hovering over the door handle of her room.
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She stopped there for a long moment. There was silence downstairs.
She opened the door. Then, with a long shaking exhale, she closed it again, loud enough that the sound would carry. A second passed, then another, and a hum of conversation started floating up through the corridor from downstairs.
Up on her toes, she crept back down the corridor past the picture frames; the first a candid Christmas photo of a post-lunch family nap, the next a photo of the four of them, smiling, taken on the beach in Brighton, May of the previous year. She’d been wearing a new swimsuit from that same Christmas, and bitter globules of bile fought to clear a beachhead in the back of her throat.
She swallowed it down. Focus. The conversation was almost audible now. She tip-toed closer, stopping at the entrance to the hallway by the stairs.
“…ven’t noticed it if she IS purging. And she ate her full portion tonight as well.” Her mother.
“I’m wondering if it could be a fitness compulsion or something. I don’t want to search her room…” Mary’s breath hitched in her throat, and she barely managed to contain a coughing fit as terror washed over her in a wave “…but if she’s taking some kind of non-prescription medication or crazy dieting supplement then I don’t see us having a choice” her father finished.
“I haven’t noticed her working out more than usual” her mother said. “And you know what will happen if we search her room and don’t find anything. I want to trust her.”
“Of course,” her father answered evenly. “I want to trust her too. But she’s clearly sick Carol. You heard what the doctor said. If it continues, she’s in real danger. I don’t know if we can afford to do nothing about this.”
“She needs a therapist,” her mother said, and with that statement came a fresh wave of terror. “But you know how hard kids are to pin down, especially when it comes to body image stuff. I should know, I was her age once. Kids are cruel and fragile all at the same time.”
“I’m just so worried” her father’s voice came low and strained. Mary had never heard him sound like that. She felt a new feeling, shame, adding to the swirling paint-dip cauldron in her gut.
“Ray…”
She couldn’t take any more. Keeping just enough presence to roll from heel to toe with each step so as not to make a noise that would give her away, she fled again, back to her room, this time easing the door open and closed with a soft click as she spilled inside and onto the shagpile rug by her bed, head in her hands.
She was only alone for a moment.
“You ate too much again tonight.”
She didn’t need to look to know what was happening, but she did anyway, staring frozen into the polished depth of glass that sat close by.
The mirror had been a gift. Purchased by her uncle Patrick for her thirteenth birthday from an estate sale out in the boonies, it leaned up against the wall at the foot of the bed, an enormous dark mahogany wooden monstrosity, resplendent in age and adorned with fanciful bronze imagery. Two grinning masks were embossed in the top corners, with spears that ran the vertical length of each side such that the heads of the spears were obscured behind the masks, each bifurcating into a set of unshod feet at the haft.
Leaves, flowers, and strange symbols adorned the full frame, running in ribbons along the top, bottom, and sides of the wooden skirting. After purchasing the mirror ‘for a steal’ Pat had sent off photos to the professor at the local university, an expert on symbology who declared them ‘utter gibberish’. Still, the mirror had been an impressive gift, one that Mary had fallen completely in love with.
That was until she appeared.
The thing in the mirror stood crooked, one bony shoulder hanging as if dislocated from its socket, the other tucked up by its right ear. Its head was cocked, whistling air through needle teeth, air that filled like bellows the massive protruding abdomen and belly with huge lurching breaths that rattled the glass in its frame.
It was almost humanlike, with shrewish beady black eyes set in a pudgy, play-doh face above two narrow slit nostrils that leaked some unmentionable fluid down and over gaping purple lips. It was without hair, instead long, whiplike coils of beads— like the chain-pulls of a set of blinds— draped across its face in pastel colouration.
“You always eat too much. It makes you ugly.”
The tears were coming now, thick and boiling down her cheeks as Mary bit down, hard on the insides of her mouth to stop the shriek that threatened to spill from her throat, that always threatened to send her parents running in to see her, to see the thing she’d been hiding for almost a year now.
The first time Shuggah had appeared in the mirror, she had crawled, bubbling her way up from where the base of the glass met the frame like boiling toffee, black and sludge-like before setting into the slovenly form that now stood, slanted, one leg shorter than the other in the center of the mirror, occupying almost entirely the width and breadth of the six-foot pane.
“You don’t want to be ugly, Mary. I don’t want you to be ugly.”
“I’m sorry” Mary sniffled.
“I’ll make you beautiful Mary. You want to be beautiful” Shuggah trilled, pressing her face against the other side of the mirror, fat rolls flattening out into pancake-batter puddles, and she pushed against the glass.
“Wait, stop” Mary cringed away, but there was no stopping it. Flesh-coloured droplets welled up on the surface of the mirror, dripping down the slippery face of glass to pool on the carpet. The puddle grew and grew, more and more of the gelatinous ooze pooling, until the four-foot gap between bed and mirror was fully occupied by a writhing mass of pinkish lard. It drew itself up, and on its extremities sprouted sausage-like fingers, and choadish toes that wriggled and writhed. Black pits formed at the top as eyes were carved in, and Mary couldn’t hold it anymore, breaking her gaze on the creature and falling back, trembling, to bury her head in the soft fabric of the rug, closing her eyes.
Still the noises seeped through Mary’s eardrums, an awful slurping and belching flatulence of escaping air and bubbling muck. The air in the room grew heavy, a blanket of moist wetness and the sickly-sweet scent of red cordial that accompanied Shuggah’s entrance.
When it was done there was a second of pause. Then came the plodding steps, growing closer, the floor vibrating with each slap of flesh on hardwood, like the sound of meat hitting the butchers table. Then, a pudgy digit curled beneath Mary’s chin and yanked her up with a stifled sob.
“I’ll make you pretty Mary” Shoggoth crooned, pressing her face close to Mary’s, and her breath was a rank odour, heavy with the sweetness of decay. She grinned widely, rows of hypodermic teeth opening, salivation running down her many chins in lumpy streams, clogged with the detritus of past meals.
As the darkness came closing in on the edges of her vision, the blackest thing in the room was still those eyes. When the darkness became absolute, and all sensation left her she could still see them in the nothingness, a void that sucked hungrily the light, the joy, everything good in the world. They were gaping pits, and she teetered on the edge.
Then, with a desperate whimper, Mary fell.