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The Dead Are Quite Fond of Pink
by Terrie Leigh Relf
He would have been pleased with the screams, Hitchcock, that is, but the lighting was all wrong, barely nothing was wrought in that chiaroscuro so dreadfully popular with the dead.
There was a slight, dust-scented mist in the bathroom that closely resembled a dank mildew, but she, that would be Claire, remembers taking an extra sniff at the towel before continuing to dry off in front of the mirror.The hands reflected weren’t hers.
Neither were the awkwardly scrawled words, “Help me!” A few of the letters backwards, as if whoever was writing had begun from inside the bathroom, then slipped behind the mirror to finish.
Claire tugged at the towel, tried to cover her ample bosom. A chill had begun to pervade the room, despite the fact that the area heater was turned all the way up. She leaned closer, reached out a tentative hand to trace the words without touching the mirror. Could the dead have lost their powers and resorted to regular means of communication.She thought this odd, but considered the possibility that they may have tried to contact her by other means. Pink, she remembered. “I’ve heard the dead are quite fond of pink,” she said aloud, in case they were listening and this epiphany was just the thing they were waiting for.
Now where did that memory come from? One color should be as good—or as bad—to the next where the dead were concerned, shouldn’t it? I mean after all, she thought, it wasn’t like she had some Picasso or Van Gogh haunting her house.
Or did she?
So Claire went through her lingerie drawer, then her sweater drawer, and finally, a bag of old things she’d been meaning to take to a local charity store. It was amazing how many pink scarves she actually had: some with sparkles, others with beads, one of woven cotton with purple metallic thread. And there was more! Garish pink with metallic fringe. Pale pink silk with hand-painted lilac flowers. Hot pink with red lips. Magenta with fuchsia swirls. An icy pink shawl of gauze.
She draped them all over each and every mirror in her house, praying that whoever was haunting her would just reach through the mirror to snatch the scarves, and wouldn’t see this as an invitation to move about her house. She was especially concerned that they wouldn’t get into bed with her when she was asleep. That could be so unnerving!
She sat down on the edge of her bed, loosened her towel, then started to massage her body with lavender oil. She closed her eyes, inhaled the soothing scent..
Her mind more clear, her breathing less erratic, Claire began to explore her memories. When had her home become a bread and breakfast to the dead? She didn’t remember inviting them to visit, and yet they visited her often, these guests who paid with sighs and laughter, ran up and down her hall when she was trying to work.
“Help you?” she said in a whisper. “How could I possibly help you?”
Then again, she thought, since they’d tried so hard to actually communicate with her, wasn’t it the right thing to do?
But what if they had dark desires? She shuddered, ran across the room to snatch a thick bathrobe off the door hook, struggled into it as fast as she could, tied it tightly around her waist.
Then again, they could be benign. Maybe they were just lonely--or worse, trapped inside her house.
She sighed, slipped into one of her many pairs of fuzzy slippers, shuffled into the kitchen to make a pot of Earl Grey tea. The tea made, with the requisite chocolate-covered biscuits on a china plate, she sat down at the breakfast bar, poured in some milk.
It curdled.
That’s strange, she mused. She took a sniff at the container, screwed up her nose, dumped the foul contents into the kitchen sink, squirted some lemon soap, then turned on the hot water to rinse the quart jug. The expiration date read March 25. It was still February. February 14, to be exact. Damn, I should have just taken it back to the market.
Claire opened the cupboard door to get another cup. The house spiders had been busy lately. She rinsed out the cup, and then rewashed it. It looked like a rat or mouse had been in her cupboards, too.
“So much for tea,” she sighed, and then took a bite out of one of the biscuits. The mirrors were all covered, and she couldn’t think of anything else to do. She certainly wasn’t going to go to bed. She shuddered again, remembering the last time she’d been awakened by one of her nocturnal visitors without their body on.
She cocked her head toward the living room. Was that footsteps? No, just her imagination. Claire continued to sip her tea in silence, one part of her mind poised for signs that she wasn’t alone in the house.
“Help me.”
Well, she mused, perhaps there was only one ghost in the house. Otherwise, it would have read, “help us”, wouldn’t it have? There was a crack in that bathroom mirror. The landlady had promised to replace it, but how many years had she lived here and it still hadn’t been taken care of?
Hmmm…what was it about cracked and splintered mirrors?
She took one last sip of tea, clambered off the stool, padded into the bathroom. The mirror was still covered with a frothy pink chiffon scarf. She lifted up a corner of the nearly transparent fabric, but no one else was there. The crack was an eyesore. Maybe it bothered whoever lived on the other side of the mirror.
“Help me.”
Claire turned her head toward the whispered voice.
“Help me.” The words wafted through her mind. She couldn’t deny she’d heard them now.
“HelpMeHelpMeHelpMe!”
“How?” she yelled out. “What can I do?”
She took the mirror off the bathroom wall, leaned it face forward against the sink.
“No, that’s not it.”
“All right. All right!” she mumbled, more than slightly irritated, as she lifted, then carried the mirror out the back door to the alley, where she leaned it face forward against a garbage can. There was a full moon tonight, or nearly so. She made a mental note to check her lunar calendar. There was something about mirrors and full moons, but she couldn’t quite remember what.
Within moments, patterns began to swirl beneath the mirror’s surface. Claire peered close, then closer, noticing that neither the moon, nor her face, was reflected there.
A hand emerged. Then an arm, a shoulder, part of a torso, the jut of what appeared to be a handsome chin.
“I’m stuck.” It sounded like whomever spoke had a mouth filled with water. Bubbles rose in the surface of the mirror.
“I don’t know how to unstuck you,” she replied, taking his hand, tugging a bit with little result.
“Just whatever you do, don’t smash the mirror,” came his garbled reply.
Claire tapped a finger against her lower lip, pouted in thought. “Why don’t you try crawling out underneath the crack then.” The man in the mirror seemed to consider this, and within moments, she saw a tousled head of hair, the curve of a muscular back, the crack of his tight buttocks.
What a hunk, she thought. Maybe he’s not really a ghost or a demon or anything. Maybe he’s just trapped inside the mirror, put there by some evil witch who used to live in my cottage.
Claire gasped as an unseen force seemed to pull him back inside the mirror. She leaned close, then closer, tentatively touched the mirror with a finger.
It slipped inside.
Totally weird, she thought, but continued pressing against the now liquid surface until she felt—something.
His hand?
She reached in again, felt a rather pleasant electrical current as their fingers touched. She tried to surround his hand with hers, but their fingers slipped apart. When Claire tried to pull her hand out, it was stuck.
“Now I’m stuck,” she growled out to him in frustration, but he didn’t answer.
“Now what do we do?” she fumed, not knowing which was more frustrating, being stuck with your hand in a mirror, or not being able to get a good look at the hunk trapped inside it. Here it was Valentine’s Day, and there was only a thin membrane separating her from a hot date.
Fortunately, depending upon your perspective, her hand followed as Claire slipped down to a sitting position next to the mirror. It was an awkward position, though, so she reached further into the mirror to get into a more comfortable position.
Not even the guy across the street, Max, who had been peering through the window with the hope that he’d get a better look at Claire’s heaving breasts, really knew what happened next.
Several days later, when the cops came to investigate a missing person’s report, all they could get out of Max was that on Sunday night, she was in the alley, wearing just a bathrobe and slippers, wrestling with the mirror.
“I thought about offering to help,” he told the officers, “but it didn’t seem like there was any real reason to. I just thought she was throwing out an old mirror.”
One of the officers squatted down to examine the broken shards of mirror that were scattered all over the alley. “Bad luck to break a mirror,” he sighed, wary of touching even the smallest fragment of glass. He stood, made a few notes on a pad of paper.
The cops never found any real evidence. They knocked on all the doors, spoke to all the people in the general vicinity. They even spoke to the woman who used to live in the house. A Mrs. de la Noche. They hated to bother her, as she was still grieving from her own husband’s mysterious disappearance several years back. Another cold case that had them puzzled.
Mrs. de la Noche, who had sold the cottage and moved into a more spacious home just around the corner, shook her head, sighed. “Poor thing. That cottage is haunted, I tell you. It’s why I sold it. It creaked too much. Drafts. That sort of thing.”
The cops nodded, made their notes, left. Another case unsolved.
Mrs. de la Noche continued to offer her most pleasant smile as she closed the door gently behind the officers.. Her frown appeared shortly thereafter.
“Damn! Now he’s got company--”
© Relf, 2010