I heard about it through a guy at work. I worked as a college intern at a medium-sized brokerage firm at the time, and one of the junior executives—Tommy—had taken me under his wing as a gopher and goof-off buddy when he wanted to take a break and blow off steam. One day we were talking about stupid games we’d played as a kid.
I’d told him about playing Mercy and Rock Duel (which was basically Mercy with thrown rocks). He told me about a game his cousins had gotten him to try one time when he was staying with them. It was called Billy the Bouncing Butcher. He said it involved mirrors and saying some chant until something “scary” happened. When I pointed out that it sounded like a rip-off of Bloody Mary, he’d just shrugged and gave a weird laugh. He told me he wasn’t sure, but he didn’t think it was like that. You weren’t supposed to see a ghost or anything. It was something worse.
When I asked him what was supposed to happen then, he looked embarrassed. That was weird. Tommy was a nice-enough guy, but he was a super Type-A, man’s man type, or at least that’s the image he wanted to present. This was the first time I’d seen him be anything other than serious or sarcastically goofy, and seeing his carefully-crafted mask slip for a minute to show uncertainty and shame…well, it got my attention.
After a moment of contemplative silence, he’d shrugged again. “To be honest, I really don’t know. I was with them when we set everything up, but as soon as they started saying the words, I got scared and ran out of the room. They were laughing at me, but I guess they were committed after all that work, because they stayed in and finished it. They weren’t laughing when they got done. I was pissed and embarrassed, but I was curious too. I asked them that night what had happened, but they wouldn’t say. Tried to joke that I didn’t get to know when I was too chicken to stay. But they seemed weird. Scared even.” He shook his head. “I went back home the next day, and I never found out if anything really happened or if it was just bullshit.”
I almost laughed and told him I had the answer—it was bullshit. But I didn’t want to hurt his feelings or piss him off, so instead I silently nodded as a new idea crept into my head. My girlfriend Carla simultaneously hated and loved creepy things. And I thought I remembered her saying once that’d she’d never played Bloody Mary as a kid because it spooked her so much. I knew it was a gamble, as she might just get pissed or refuse to play, but if I could get her to try out Tommy’s weird knock-off game, we might have fun or at least get a good laugh out of it.
So I pressed Tommy for details. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, and for a second I thought he was going to refuse or say he didn’t remember, but then he shrugged again and told me what they had done.
It takes at least eight mirrors. That’s probably one reason you don’t hear more about it, right? Who the fuck has eight mirrors? Well, my aunt did. She had a big house, and almost every room was filled with all kinds of shit. It only took us like an hour to find eight good-sized mirrors and sneak them all into one of the back rooms that had been emptied for recarpeting or something the next week. We’d gotten the mirrors in the room and shut the door without anyone seeing, but that was the easy part. The hard part was getting the mirrors set up right.
You kind of make a circle with the mirrors, but they have to be angled so that each mirror reflects at least two other mirrors and at least part of the center of the circle, because that’s where we were supposed to be. The idea is, if you get it right, you can see your reflections in the mirrors and the reflections of those reflections and so on, stretching out farther than you can see. When we were satisfied with that, we went into the middle and stood back to back, facing out toward the mirrors. Then they said we had to say this rhyme together until something changed.
Trying to get every detail, I asked him did he remember the phrase. Frowning at me, he shook his head. “Shit, Cody. That was like thirty years ago. It was something spooky-sounding to a ten-year old I guess.” His gaze had shifted away from mine, and I suddenly felt sure he was lying about not remembering. I was going to let it go, but he went on. “I don’t know. It was something like…” His eyes snapped back to mine. “Come to me. Come to me. You are invited by word and deed. Come to me. Come to me. By this offering will you be freed. Come to me. Come to me. Wards are mist and chains are rust, for there is only one of us.”
I burst out laughing. “Dude, that’s fucking awesome! You really had me going. Very creepy. My girl is going to shit her p…” But Tommy was already standing up with a frown.
“Got to go, man. I…I have a phone conference in ten. Check you later.” And then he was hustling down the hall toward his office.
I should have thought it was stranger than I did. But I was young and dumb, and I assumed Tommy was just playing it up, being dramatic, because that’s the kind of shit he did. Anything for a laugh or to look cool. And it was cool. I hadn’t been lying. Carla was going to lose her shit.
I didn’t mention it to her that night or the next. By the weekend, I’d already bought four mirrors for fifty bucks from a pawn shop downtown and borrowed three more from my sister’s store. With the one I had hanging on my closet, I had just enough. Setting them up was a giant pain in the ass—it was hard to get the angles just right. But by the time Carla came over for what she thought was dinner and a movie, everything was ready.
To my surprise, she was gung ho from the beginning. I could tell she was a bit nervous about it, but I think she thought it was really sweet that I’d gone to so much trouble to set it up, and like I’ve said, she really liked creepy stuff, even when it freaked her out a bit. I told her Tommy’s story, including the phrase I’d written down as soon as he’d left the breakroom that day. I’d written it down on a slip of paper for both of us so we wouldn’t mess it up. I told myself my attention to detail was just because it was all cool and creepy as it was, and if I changed it, I would just fuck it up.
Because it was all made up. Kids’ game bullshit. The words were just spooky nonsense. I didn’t really think anything would happen, so I wasn’t seriously worried about making sure I got it right.
Right?
We stood back to back in the circle of mirrors. Initially I was going to just have candles burning for extra creep factor, but it was too dark. Candles don’t brighten up the dark like they do in movies, and I finally decided to turn on a corner lamp to give us enough light to read our papers and see into the shadowy mirrors.
Our reflected selves stretched on forever. Despite being pressed against her back, I could see Carla’s excited expression doubled and redoubled just like I could see my own. Focusing on one of my faces, I asked her if she was ready to start. Letting out a nervous laugh, she said she was. So we began.
“Come to me. Come to me. You are invited by word and deed. Come to me. Come to me. By this offering will you be freed. Come to me. Come to me. Wards are mist and chains are rust, for there is only one of us.” We stumbled over the words this first time, the phrases a discordant jumble as we both shifted speed trying to match the other.
“Come to me. Come to me. You are invited by word and deed. Come to me. Come to me. By this offering will you be freed. Come to me. Come to me. Wards are mist and chains are rust, for there is only one of us.” We were in unison now, and I focused on the paper to make sure I didn’t make a mistake to throw us off again.
“Come to me. Come to me. You are invited by word and deed. Come to me. Come to me. By this offering will you be freed. Come to me. Come to me. Wards are mist and chains are rust, for there is only one of us.” We were in the rhythm now, and while I didn’t have the words fully memorized, I felt comfortable enough that I lifted my eyes back to one of my reflections. The one I’d focused on before. The one where I could see my face and behind that, the back of Carla’s head.
Except there were two faces staring at me now.
In that reflection, Carla’s face was turned to face the same direction. I had a moment of unreality where I assumed she must have turned around even though I could still feel her back pressed against mine. But then my gaze wandered to the other reflections, and all of them were the same as they had been. I should have stepped away then, or at the very least stopped or stumbled over the words, but somehow I didn’t. The chant kept flowing from me as if pulled from my core on an invisible string, and as I looked back at the wrong reflection, I saw that the mirror Carla was smiling at me. Smiling at me as she started to shake and shudder, bounce and twist, despite the fact I could feel Carla’s stillness behind me as we continued to chant.
And then, as the thing in the mirror’s smile widened further and its up and down motions sped to a blur, it was suddenly gone.
It was as though a spell had been broken. The reflections looked normal again, and this time when I tried to stop speaking, it worked. I turned to Carla and found her looking at me with a combination of amusement and disappointment.
“Getting bored already?”
I smiled at her, almost blurting out what I saw, or what I thought I’d saw. But that was stupid, right? It had all happened fast, and if it had been real, wouldn’t she have seen something too? I knew she loved me, but we hadn’t been dating so long that I wanted to risk making her think I was a nutjob over something that couldn’t have possibly happened in the first place. Or that I was so spineless that I actually got scared by a kids’ game.
So I just nodded and returned her smile. “Yeah, sorry. It’s kind of lame. You cool with us giving up?”
She leaned forward and kissed me. “Sure. And it wasn’t lame. It was cool.” She laughed. “And a little spooky. For a second, I thought I saw something move and it freaked me out. Weird how the mind works.”
I grinned, feeling relief. “Yeah, me too. I guess we just spooked ourselves.”
Two weeks later, Carla was dead.
She lived in a nice condo on the north side of town—one of those places with two pools and security guards at the gate. The police claimed they talked to everyone, reviewed all the security footage. They said they had no idea how someone had gotten into her locked apartment, disabled her alarm, and butchered her in her own bed.
I’m not saying they didn’t do a good investigation. Maybe they did, I don’t know. What I do know is that they questioned me three times, and each time it felt more and more like I was a suspect rather than a grieving boyfriend. Then the interviews suddenly stopped. Two weeks went by without any word. Finally I called the main detective, a woman named Everly, and asked her if they’d made any progress.
I could hear her reluctance to talk to me over the phone, and at first I figured it was because they still suspected me. But then she was apologizing. Told me she knew they’d been hard on me, but it was because they didn’t have many leads, and the one lead they did have had pointed towards me. That they’d finally managed to get my phone’s GPS records and then confirmed through my office’s security that I’d been working late with Tommy on the night Carla was killed. That was why they hadn’t been in touch any more after that last interview, though she was sorry to say there were no new leads so far. Stomach clenching, I asked her what about the lead they already had? What had made them suspect me in the first place?
She said that the alarm in Carla’s condo had been disabled with the code, and that based on their investigation, aside from Carla, I was the only other person who knew the code, at least locally. Since there were no signs of a struggle and it appeared that Carla had been murdered in her sleep, it seemed unlikely that she had disabled the alarm herself to let the killer in. That meant that someone else that knew the code had gotten into her apartment, disabled the alarm, and then crept back to her bedroom where they murdered her.
I was confused by the logic. I pointed out that maybe she never set the alarm in the first place, or she’d let someone in earlier, gone to bed, and then they had killed her. I didn’t want to think that she’d cheat on me, but what if she’d been seeing someone else and they’d decided to kill her while she slept. Maybe she was breaking it off with them because she really loved…
Det. Everly broke in, explaining that while the killer might be some jilted lover, they knew when the alarm had been turned on and turned back off. The system was in every condo, and they were all linked to a secure server that was monitored and controlled by an alarm company in Arizona. They had logs of every key press, as well as every time Carla’s system had been armed or turned off. On that night, Everly said, the alarm had been set just after ten o’clock and had been turned back off less than half an hour later. Around the same time, she added, they could put me walking to my car from the office some twenty miles away.
“Again, I’m sorry. I know you probably think we were just being assholes. But so often its someone the victim knows, and you were the only one with access—not even the condo manager has the code. So unless someone from the security company decided to drive a thousand miles to murder a random stranger, which we actually looked into, by the way, we don’t know how the alarm got turned back off.”
I could feel my palm sweating against the back of the phone. It had been over a month since I got the call that Carla had been murdered, and talking or thinking about it still sent me spiraling toward either a panic attack or a teary breakdown. But I wanted to understand, to help them understand if it could help catch her killer. “But maybe you’re wrong about her being asleep. Maybe she let them in. It could be someone she knew.”
The detective was quiet a moment before letting out a small sigh. “Maybe, yeah. We can’t say for sure. But it still seems weird to me.”
“Weird that she wasn’t asleep? I mean how can…”
“No, not that. The code. The security company, the records they sent, they show that when the alarm was disabled, there was one invalid attempt before the right code was put in. That by itself isn’t that big a deal, but it was how the code was entered that stands out to me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, when someone knows a code and they misenter it, they usually either hit one wrong button, swap two numbers, or put in something entirely different—putting in your PIN number instead of the alarm code, something like that. I’ve looked through all the alarm code entries for Carla’s apartment going back six months, which is as far as they keep that kind of thing. There were a couple of times where the wrong code was entered, but it was just one digit that was wrong. The same digit every time. I figured out what that probably was. Her alarm code was 1681, and the last four digits of her social were 1651. But other than that, the right code was always entered every time until the night she was murdered.”
I felt myself twisting tighter and tighter with tension as she spoke, some unknown dread blooming in my belly like a dark and toxic flower that was nourished by her words. “Please, just tell me. What was special about the wrong code then?”
She gave a short bark of a laugh. “Sorry, I get lost in it sometimes. No, all I meant was that the code, the wrong code that was entered before the right one, was different than the others or what I’d expect to see. Because it was the right code. In reverse. Instead of 1681, someone put in 1861. Then ten seconds later, just before the alarm would have started going, they put it in right.” Everly let out a longer sigh. “I’m sorry I don’t have better news or more to tell you. But trust me, I’m going to keep working on it until we get whoever did this to her.”
They never did. And eight years later, I had largely moved on. There was still a hole in me from where I’d lost Carla—not only as I knew her, but as I imagined our lives might be if we’d stayed together long-term. But if time doesn’t heal, it at least gives you scars. Patches of unfeeling callous that make it easier to not dwell on the pieces you’ve lost along the way. I still miss Carla, and while I occasionally date, its always half-hearted. My sister says I sabotage any chance I have of finding anyone, of really being happy. That I have to stop blaming myself for something terrible that happened that wasn’t my fault. Maybe she’s right.
But I’m not so sure.
Because yesterday, I got into an elevator at my company’s brand-new building in London. The same company where I’d worked with Tommy some four thousand miles away and at least one lifetime ago. I haven’t heard from him in years, and when I tried to find him in the company directory yesterday afternoon, he’s no longer listed. But that was after the elevator, and even if I found him, I don’t know that it would make any difference.
Because as I stepped into the new elevator for the first time, I realized that I was in a box made of mirrors—highly polished chrome framed mirrors along each wall of the elevator car as well as the closing doors themselves. Immediately my mind flashed back to the night with Carla, back pressed up against her as I stared at my doubled and re-doubled reflection stretching away toward some unknown destination. Just like that night, I could see an infinite number of selves all connected to each other and to me. All of them terrible in their similarities and slight variations of appearance and angle.
All except one.
Among them all, I could see one reflection that moved when I did not. That was occupied by not only my own staring figure, but a second one as well. A dark shape that cradled the face that wasn’t my face and whispered in my ear that was not my own.
It was Carla. Or something with her shape. The sight of her made me gasp, and I would have turned to try and find her if I wasn’t frozen to the spot. She looked the same as I remembered her…at least mostly. Her face and chest were speckled with black and maroon flecks of dirt or blood, and the hand that stroked the cheek of my other had ragged, yellow nails that scraped at his skin. He didn’t seem to notice or mind. His focus was as intent on me as I was on him. I would have said it was just reflecting my gaze, except he was nodding his head at her silent words.
She broke off to look at me as they both began to smile. I glanced at the floor number above the doors—two more to go and then I could get out of there. Looking back at them, I saw they had begun twisting and jumping, their images bouncing more and more as they…
And then they were gone.
I had just a moment to stare into the empty place my reflection should have been and then the doors slid open. Gasping for air, I stumbled to my office and locked the door, hiding in there most of the day before taking the stairs back down to my car.
I’m getting on a plane in twenty minutes to fly back home, if I make it that far. The planning and the motion of running, of trying to hide or fight, it makes me feel a bit better, or at least distracts me. I’m staying in crowds, hoping that whatever is hunting me can’t or won’t attack me in public.
But I have no illusions of winning or really getting away. I don’t understand what this is or how to fight it, if it even can be fought. So I write this down more as a warning for others, and maybe an epitaph for myself. So I’ll end with this:
Don’t play this game or anything similar. You may think it sounds like a fun dare, but its not. You may think its all a joke, but its not. I can’t make you believe me, and I understand by telling about it, I risk making it worse, but this didn’t start with me, so I have no reason to think it would stop whether I write this or not. So take this for what it is. An earnest warning from a dead man.
And if you don’t listen to it?
Well, you only have yourself to blame.
----
Credits
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