The Vanity

Zola was worried about Elise. She had been her friend much longer than she had been her supervisor. So when Elise began falling asleep at work, started looking terribly pale, and even clocked in late a few times, it worried Zola at two different levels.

Elise explained in private to her friend. She told Zola she knew it was going to sound crazy, but that ever since she had bought an antique vanity for her bedroom, she’d been losing sleep. She’d been having terrible insomnia. And she’d been having the worst nightmares.

She had a recurrent dream in which her reflection in the vanity mirror was watching her as she slept. Elise described how the woman would rise up out of the bed and stand in the mirror and just watch her sleep. This would often cause Elise to bolt awake, flip on the lights, and examine her own reflection in the mirror. Of course, the reflection was normal. Because she was awake and rational.

It was in the second month of this nonsense, when Elise had fumbled an important communication with the parent company, had emailed not only the wrong data but information her supervisors did not want shared with the higher-ups, that the situation became critical. Zola had to warn Elise that she was now on very thin ice with the company. She had strongly urged Elise at that time to see a therapist and get the issue under control. It was no longer a minor issue.

Zola wondered privately how much of this obsession had to do with Elise’s recent break-up. She knew some people handle having to suddenly live alone better than others. She explained to Elise that she had to find a solution, do whatever she needed to do. She had even joked that she might want to get a camera and record the room when she was asleep, just to prove to herself that the vanity mirror did not harbor any ghosts, no matter how many centuries the pretty antique had been floating around the planet.

It was shocking to Zola when Elise just stopped coming into work. Zola’s calls went unreturned for a few days. Finally, she received an email from Elise which convinced her that things were much, much worse than she had suspected.

Elise was clearly suffering from mental illness. This was the only conclusion to be drawn from the email in which the young woman wrote that she had followed Zola’s advice and recorded the vanity mirror while she slept. She had used a rotating night-vision camera set on a tripod. She wrote that “the woman in the mirror” (she never used the word “reflection”) could be seen watching her on the video which she had recorded. She said the woman could be seen stepping through the mirror and standing at the foot of Elise’s bed while she slept. And, worst of all, she believed that this woman who “only slightly resembled” her (Elise’s actual words about her own reflection) then climbed into the bed with her and floated above her, “sucking the breath” from her body.

Zola felt sick to her stomach. She closed the door to her office and cried for her friend. She knew Elise would not be coming back to work. But she worried that Elise might not be coming back to sanity.

Zola left a voice mail explaining to Elise that they had arrived at the point where Elise must frame her issue in a medical context or risk immediate termination. She explained that the company would need to hear from her within twenty-four hours or termination would result with “dereliction” given as the reason.

Elise did not respond and was terminated the next day.

Several days later, Zola stopped at her friend’s apartment after work. There was no answer when she knocked. Zola realized she still had a key to the apartment, since had pet-sat for her when Elise and her then-boyfriend Craig had vacationed in the Bahamas. She felt moral qualms about trying the door, but she did it anyway. She was greatly concerned for her friend’s welfare and figured the end justified the means.

She called out as soon as the door opened, but then stepped back in shock. She had been afraid of what she might see, had several rather nightmarish visions in her head. She was so afraid she was going to see her friend’s dead body sprawled in her bed. She told herself how irrational these fears were.

But she had not expected to see Elise sitting calmly on her sofa staring at a television screen. The program was muted. She was watching the television in silence with no real expression of interest on her face. But she turned to glower at Zola. Zola thought it odd that she hadn’t turned immediately at the sound of the opening door. Because the room was so silent. Her reaction had been strangely delayed.

“Hon, are you alright?” Zola asked in maternal tones.

“What the hell?” Elise shouted angrily at the woman. “You can’t just come in here! This is my apartment!”

“Elise, this is Zola. Do you recognize me?”

“Yes. Now please leave. I didn’t invite you here.”

Zola tried to explain to Elise how important it was that she seek help, that we’ve all been in that dark place. She tried to tell her that she wanted to be there for her as a friend. But Elise chased her out of the apartment as though she were a total stranger.

Zola hated to admit it, but it was as though Elise had gone, as though someone else had taken her place. The voice was different, the way she moved, even her expressions. Everything was different. This Elise seemed much stronger but also much colder. Zola thought about the woman in the mirror Elise had described. She had a few irrational thoughts then, from which her mind began embroidering irrational fears.

The worst thing was when she realized that she had actually seen into Elise’s bedroom when she stepped into the apartment. She hadn’t quite processed it at the time, but now in mentally reviewing that glimpse into the bedroom, she realized there was something different about the room. The antique vanity set with its nightmare mirror had vanished.

She never saw Elise again. All calls and emails went unanswered and when she stopped back at the apartment a few weeks later in another “welfare visit,” she was told that the woman had moved out. Because of legal restrictions, no further information could be divulged.

The last time Zola saw Elise it was in a nightmare. She dreamt she saw Elise in the vanity mirror. She was trapped on the other side. She was through the looking glass. And another Elise, the one she had met that strange day at the apartment, was selling the furniture set to strangers, who apparently could not see her friend trapped in the mirror. Two strong young men lugged the vanity out of the apartment. After a cash exchange. In the dream, she watched as her friend was carried out of her own apartment inside the antique vanity, buried alive in a coffin others saw as furniture.

Elise was eventually reported as a missing person, but the case quickly turned cold. There was no evidence any crime had been committed. The investigating detective did admit to Zola that it was odd she hadn’t turned up seeking employment or at least accessing social services somewhere else. No income taxes were filed in subsequent years. Her ex-boyfriend had no motive to harm her and she had no enemies. A crime of opportunity seemed unlikely, since Zola had informed her apartment manager of her decision to move away. Suicide was a possibility, but it would remain unproven until a body was found.

So the years passed into decades and dust gathered on the memory of Elise as it does on an old mirror.

Zola never told people that she hunted for the vanity mirror in consignment shops and thrift stores for some time. She would stare into the mirrors of old vanities and tell herself she was crazy. Sometimes she would see flickers in the back of old dusty mirrors, or would think she did. But one can’t live very long like this, haunted by such ideas, and eventually she gave up the search.

But now and again she would find herself looking deep into a mirror, whenever she saw an antique vanity set she thought resembled the one her friend had been so excited about that day she found it in a little impromptu store, a few months’ rental on Quartermain Street, a rag and bone shop that no longer exists, in the way reflections no longer exist when one steps away from a mirror.