The Haunted

Except it was not exactly a drawing. It didn’t look like someone had used a finger to depict a face on the glass, but rather as though a face had been pressed against the moisture on the mirror. For every feature was visible, down to a dimple on the narrow chin.

She wiped the face away with her hand, but the bathroom was still steamy, and the mirror fogged up again almost instantly.

The face reappeared.

Only it was different this time. Something about it had changed, and it took her a moment to realize what it was.

The face was smiling.

And its eyes were looking … lower.

She held the towel more tightly against her, wanting to run, wanting to scream, not knowing what to do. This wasn’t really happening. Her imagination was working overtime, seeing things that weren’t actually there. She was just scaring herself, her mind playing tricks on her the way it did after she saw a scary movie or TV show.

She thought of that thing—

monster

—she’d seen at night when her friends had stayed over. She’d told no one, not even Zoe or her mom, and she still wasn’t a hundred percent sure that she’d really seen what she thought she’d seen. It had been late; she’d been tired; it might have been a dream. … There was a whole host of possibilities.

But that list of possibilities was getting shorter by the second.

Because the steam in the bathroom wasn’t dissipating the way it should, wasn’t going away. Instead, it was getting thicker and … moving. A long, slender section that resembled an arm moved toward her. She backed against the counter and saw the steam behind the arm thicken and coalesce into something that looked almost like a man’s body.

Almost.

For there was something off about the form, a subtle mistake in proportion that resulted in a too-small head on a too-big body and an arm that resembled an anaconda. She remembered the tentacle that had slipped under Zoe’s sheet. This reminded her of that, though the steam figure was smaller and more humanoid than that thing in the night had been.

The arm reached for her, its misty white fingers undulating and wavy, like strands of seaweed in a strong current.

Megan dashed to her left and yanked open the door, although she was wrapped in only a towel, ready to scream for her parents, ready even to accept the humiliation if James came up and saw her. But the instant the door opened, all of the steam in the bathroom shot out into the hall, pushing past her with a whoosh she could both hear and feel, as though a giant fan had turned on and propelled all of the air out of the room. The steam disappeared, evaporating in the dry atmosphere of the hallway. She turned in a circle, searching for the figure she had seen, but it was gone, and when she poked her head into the bathroom, she saw that the mirror was clear, no face.

Feeling braver, no longer needing to call for her parents, she walked back into the bathroom (though she kept the door open, just in case) and breathed on the mirror. She expected the condensation of her breath to reveal the outline of the face once again, but there were no lines on the glass at all. It was as if none of it had ever happened.

Still, she felt uneasy, and she grabbed her hairbrush and clothes and went into her bedroom, where she closed the door, quickly got dressed, then opened the door again, combing her hair as she hurried downstairs.

She wasn’t sure what she should tell her parents, or whether she should tell them anything, but that problem was solved for her when she found that her mom had already left for work, James was in the garage playing in his stupid clubhouse, and her dad was on the phone, deep in conversation with some computer guy. Megan went into the living room to watch TV, and by the time her dad got off the phone and announced that he was going upstairs to work in his office, the entire experience in the bathroom seemed much less threatening and barely worth mentioning. She had a hard time believing it had happened herself.

But when ten o’clock rolled around and she decided to text Zoe and Kate about their plans for the day, the nervousness returned. Her parents had given her cell phone back a few days ago, but Megan was warier of using it than she had been before and now did so only when other people were around. With her mom at work, she went back upstairs where her dad was. She’d do the actual texting in her room, but he’d be in his office, close enough to save her if she needed help.

She didn’t need help this time, but her muscles were tense when she first turned on the phone and waited to see whether there were any mysterious messages waiting for her. Luckily, there weren’t, and she let out an honest-to-God sigh of relief as she typed out her texts.