The Girl in the Mirror

"The demon lurks beneath the ground,
His singing makes a charming sound,
But what to do with the maiden fair,
For all that she will do is stare."

The girl in the mirror was singing. This itself was not particularly unusual, for the girl in the mirror often sang. She would sing lullabies and nursery rhymes, innocent rhymes written to entertain young children, and certainly not made to sound like instruments of some dark entity. It is a truth, however, one that may be ignored or not to one's own fancy, that children like blood. They enjoy stories full of fire and knives and swords and magic, full of sinister plots and wicked fairies, blood and death and princes with strange fetishes for those who are neither conscious or, in some cases, alive. Rhymes enjoyed by children are often full of violence, of blinded folk and decapitation, of things that, when considered carefully, appear rather more sinister than grown-ups would like to imagine them to be. And so it was that the girl would sing, sing songs that, though having themselves an air of innocence due to their inherent connection to children, sounded as dark and sinister as their lyrics would suggest.

Listening to the girl sing, the woman wondered again where the songs came from. She had certainly never heard them before, not in this world, but the girl seemed to know them from memory, and they rolled off her lips with the sort of familiarity that comes when you have listened to something a great many times since your youth, when the lyrics were ingrained into your young mind. The rhymes spoke of blood and stars and demons, of darkness and monsters. This would not have been so bad, the woman thought, for she knew of monsters and demons and knew they were not real. Even when the girl spoke of terrible things that the woman would do, even then the woman was not particularly frightened, for she knew she would never do them, indeed could never do them, so strongly was she governed by her moral code.

What frightened the woman was when the girl came to her, covered in blood. The girl would have a knife with her, and she would look at it for hours, watching as the shining metal caught the light. The woman would close her eyes and look away, and the girl wouldn't notice. Sometimes she would sing, but more often she would sit, silent except for the occasional mutter about blood, the occasional murmur about screaming. Sometimes the girl wasn't alone. She would get angry sometimes, frustrated by the woman's refusal to do as the girl said she should. Those times she would bring someone with her, do her work there, in front of the woman. The woman would look away, closing her eyes and her ears, trying not to hear the screaming. She would yell, then, yell at the girl to stop. But the girl in the mirror never listened, and the girl in the mirror never stopped.

The girl wasn't afraid of anything. She made monsters cry out in pain, made demons beg for mercy. Everyone and everything cowered before her, and she was afraid of nothing. But she didn't like the woman in the mirror. The woman in the mirror didn't understand, and she didn't cower. She would tell the girl things, tell her to stop. The girl didn't want to stop. She liked it when they screamed, it sounded high and clear and beautiful, and it made her tingle with pleasure. The woman was wrong, the girl wasn't evil. She was doing what she had to. She had to hurt them, she had to know, she had to, she had to. She would wish for the woman to go away, but she never did. She was always there, in the mirror, always talking and smiling and saying...saying awful things. She would tell the girl it would be over soon, that she would win and the girl would go away. It was too bad, really. She would have made a nice friend. The girl didn't have many friends. People said they liked her, but they didn't. The girl knew this, knew they were lying. She didn't like liars. "Lying is wrong," she would say, and then she'd make them scream. After all, they had to know. They had to understand that lying was wrong. The woman lied, she said she wasn't afraid when it was quite clear that she was. But the girl could never make her understand. She tried, she did. She couldn't hurt the woman in the mirror, so she showed her, showed her what happened to liars.

The girl didn't like the woman in the mirror, but she would sit there all the same. She would watch the woman, talk to the woman, tell the woman what she'd done. She would listen to the woman's whimpering, listen to her little gasps of shock and horror. She would sit there, listening, looking at her knife, watching the light, her shirt soaked with blood. This was what the girl in the mirror was doing now, watching her knife as she sang under her breath.

"The demon lurks beneath the ground,
His singing makes a charming sound,
But what to do with the maiden fair,
For all that she will do is stare."

The girl didn't like demons. Demons lied, lying was bad. That's why she had to hurt them. And they would yell, their screams like a song, sweet and loud. Her dad used to sing the song to her, and she'd listened. She always listened. She listened when he sang, and she listened when he lied. She even listened when he died. She lay down the knife, looking into the mirror. The woman in the mirror was avoiding her gaze, but the girl didn't care. The girl in the mirror stared.