Chapter Text
Sybil started at the house that was to be her new home. It was in a neighborhood filled with identical-looking houses, each one a carbon copy of the last and separated only by their differing paint jobs. She glanced back in the direction they’d come, taking in each of the two-storied houses with their perfectly manicured lawns, before once again looking at her own new house. It was off-white and had an immaculate front lawn brimming with an abundance of vegetation. The most striking was the beautiful rose bush out front. Despite the chilly fall weather, all the roses were in full bloom. The deep emerald green of the leaves was hidden in a mass of heavy blossoms; every rose was such a beautiful and vibrant shade of red that they shined like rubies. The whole display tied the impressively trimmed and green lawn together with the rest of the house. All it needed was a white picket fence and it’d be a suburbian wet dream. It was a beautiful home.
Naturally, she hated it.
Objectively, she could agree that it was a nice house, but everything about it felt wrong to her. Sybil was never one for green lawns or nice houses. She’d grown up in New Orleans, the Big Easy. Perfect lawns and big backyards were never something she’d craved. Her family had lived in an old two-bedroom apartment on the edge of the city. The closest thing they had to a lawn were the Jatropha plants that her dad hung from their terrace, along with a few of their neighbors, to ward off evil spirits.
Really, her hatred of the house was her dad’s fault. A Hattian immigrant, her father had fallen in love with her mom almost as soon as he came to America. Shortly after that, they’d had her. Growing up, her family hadn’t had much. Her parents could barely afford the ancient, run-down apartment they’d raised her in. But to Sybil, none of that mattered. Her home was one filled with love and laughter. It was one where her dad told ghost stories when the TV didn’t work. One where her neighbors would look after her if her parents worked late and if they worked too late, her dad would take her on the job with him. He worked as a tour guide, giving voodoo ghost tours to tourists looking for a bit of excitement in their lives. Watching him perform, Sybil thought he was magic, one of the shamans that he talked about. He’d raised her to have an appreciation for the supernatural and the strange. Now, she had a distaste for the bland and ordinary. And that was the biggest issue Sybil had with the new house. It seemed like a betrayal of their home, of their family. Though, it wasn’t much of a family anymore.
“Sybil,” her mom shouted from outside the moving van. The call went ignored as Sybil instead opted to turn the volume on her headphones up to a punishing level.
It wasn’t that she hated her mom. In fact, if she was being perfectly honest, she couldn’t even say that she was angry at her mom. But she was angry. She was angry that she had to move halfway across the country. She was angry that she had to leave her home in New Orleans. But most of all, she was angry that she had to leave behind the man who helped raise her. The divorce wasn’t her mom’s fault, and it wasn’t her dad’s fault either. Still, she was angry, and that anger pounded in the back of her heart whenever she was reminded of all that she lost. This house, no matter how beautiful, was a permanent reminder that she’d never get her family back.
The cool air flooded her ears as her headphones were suddenly ripped up and away from her. “Ow!” she responded as a few of her locs got snatched back with them.
“Great,” her mom said, voice frosty. “Now that you can hear me, start helping us get moved into our new home.”
“House,” she corrected, her voice too low for her mother to hear. Even still, Sybil got out of the car.
That had been the longest conversation the two of them had had during the entire 2-day drive to Colorado. Her parent’s relationship hadn’t been the only thing severed by their divorce. One of the worst parts of the whole thing had been dividing items that had always been ‘ours’ into ‘yours.’ Unlike most divorce horror stories, her parents had been very civil about the whole thing. They didn’t lawyer up and make each other’s lives hell. They’d simply talked about what they were and weren’t going to keep, who was going where, and everything else that came with divorce territory. When the time came to discuss custody, they both sat Sybil down in a room and asked her who she wanted to live with. At the time, Sybil thought the question had been odd. She’d thought they would split custody and keep living together, or at the very least kept living in the same apartment complex. Her mom hadn’t told her that she was planning on moving halfway across the country to Colorado, so Sybil thought she was choosing who she’d like to stay with more, not forever. At that moment, the answer was obvious: her dad.
Both of her parents had jobs with hours that went well into the night. Her dad gave ghost tours and her mom was a night nurse. But only her dad’s job gave him the freedom to pick up a little Sybil from daycare and watch after her during work. He’d told her that as long as she was quiet and didn’t cause a ruckus, he’d allow her to tag along during his tour with the other paying customers. She’d been on so many tours that she could travel his whole route blindfolded. It’s how she’d fallen in love with the city. It’s also how she fell in love with horror, gore, and all things paranormal. Her dad and she shared that love. They were incredibly close, so of course, she chose him.
That day hadn’t gone well for her mom, who got so emotional that she ran out of the room in tears. A week after that, her mom had picked her up from her dad’s new apartment and told her that her father had given up his custody rights. She’d also told her that they were moving to Colorado. The two hadn’t really talked much since. She tried texting or calling to get her dad’s side of the story, but he had yet to answer a single call or return a text. It had been at that moment that Sybil realized she wasn’t getting her family back, no matter how much she wanted it. Since the whole thing started, Sybil’s relationship with her parents had been strained and she hadn’t really been talking to either one. They appeared to be comfortable doing the same.
It would seem relatively hard for her and her mom to avoid each other, considering they lived together. But Sybil had found a way. Take now for example. She looked at the boxes that are spilling out of their U-Haul—the ones her mom just asked her to help move. Her mom had arranged them in order, so the clusters of boxes indicated where they’re all going to go in the house. Currently, her mom was moving the kitchen boxes inside with a vengeance. Thus, Sybil’s best bet at avoiding her was to start moving boxes into the attic. It would be far away enough away from the kitchen that there wouldn’t really be a need for conversation while they both went about their business.
Unfortunately, the attic boxes were stuffed all the way in the back of the U-Haul. Sybil was grateful for her dad’s genetics, blessing her with long legs as she stepped over the massive piles of boxes scattered around. The first thing she picked up was a long-leaning box in the back that was almost as tall as she was, moving it into the house and up the stairs with the haste of a snail.
When she got to the top of the stairs, she was surprised to note that there was no attic. Sybil looked around in confusion, wondering where it could be because the house was definitely supposed to have an attic.
Setting the box against the wall, she started looking for a door or a hidden group of stairs—something. The first thing she checked was to make sure that none of the rooms that lined the hallway concealed a stairway that led to the attic. After that failed, she found a stepping stool and started to feel around the ceiling with her hands, trying to feel for of a hidden door or something.
As she pushed her weight against the ceiling, something gave. Looking up, she was able to make out a thinly cut square where her hands were. Putting more pressure on it, a tiny gap opened up between the ceiling and the square that showed a room inside. This had to be the way to the attic. Again, Sybil put more pressure on the door, trying to feel for a latch or switch or something, but it didn’t give. Deciding to add even more pressure, she slammed her hands up against the door. This time it budged, but not enough for her to get through with that box.
More than a little annoyed, she decided to ram her shoulder up against the entryway to try and force the stubborn thing open. Of course, as soon as she’s thrown all her weight up into it, it springs open and a ladder came shooting out from underneath it. Fortunately, she was able to duck with enough time to avoid getting hit. Unfortunately, the box propped up against the wall with a ‘fragile’ label did not. The ladder slammed into its full force, causing a very unsettling cracking noise to echo around the empty house.
Great, just what she needed—another reason for her mom to hate her.
Sybil went over to the box and carefully pulled the ladder off of the now-crushed box. Shifting the box out of the ladder’s way with her foot, she put it back on the floor before giving the box an experimental shake. The sound emanating from the box was like broken glass, which was definitely not a good sign. Sighing heavily, she picked it up and moved into the attic.
Once she was up the stairs, she took tenderly took the contents out of the box and unwrapped it slowly. Mentally, she was prepared for the worst, expecting to find some priceless family heirloom completely and utterly destroyed. Instead, she opened the box to find a strange, full-length, and completely intact mirror. The surface was a deep, glossy black and it reflected the room around it in distorted versions of the real thing.
Everything except her. Her image was just as clear as it would have been in a normal mirror.
The mirror frame was made out of thousands of strings of gold, weaved together to form a large braid that looped around the body. Between the tiny threads were thirteen diamonds, cut in the shape of stars. They sparkled in-between the dips and curves of the golden frame. The design was beautiful without a doubt, but that’s not the thing that drew her to it. That was attributed to the way the mirror reminded her of her father. He’d always had strange, mystic-looking furniture in the house, and whenever her mom hated it—when it had crossed the thin line between unique and strange—he’d swear up and down that it was for the ghost tours. Then he’d take Sybil to his set-up and ask her where she thought it belonged. Of course, listening to the whimsey of a six-year-old didn’t make for the best design plans, but she’d always thought their odd placements made it seem more authentic as if ghosts had actually moved it. They’d spend the whole day moving furniture, and after he’d take her to her favorite store on 6th street to get the beignets she loved. Her mom loved them too. They’d bring them home, and spend the night covered in powdered sugar and laughing while watching one of her mom’s favorite old-timey movies.
As much as she treasured those memories, she couldn’t think of a time in recent years that that kind of laughter had rung throughout their home. Absently, she wondered when the laughter had stopped. What would it have taken to get it back?
Reaching for the mirror, Sybil traced the gemstones while still partially trapped in the memory of her family, wishing beyond all hope that she could hear that laughter again.
“Ow!” She pulled back her finger to find that the edge of the diamond had pricked her.
A single drop of blood slid gracefully down her finger and landed on top of the diamond she’d been tracing, staining it a deep red. Cradling her hand, she watched almost entranced as the blood seemed to seep into the gemstone.
And it doesn’t stop there.
Slowly, the color spread to every stone in the mirror. Once the final stone was colored a deep red, they seem to glow. It was subtle at first, but it quickly grew brighter and brighter. At the same time, the gold braid of the frame started to churn, seemingly feeding into each other. Same as the diamonds, it started slowly at first but quickly began picking up speed.
In her lifetime, Sybil had watched many horror movies. Whenever she had, she marveled at the characters’ stupidity and assured herself that if she ever found herself in that situation, she wouldn’t make such careless mistakes. She’d never go off alone, never trip running from the killer, and she’d most certainly get the hell out of dodge as soon as the creepy magic shit started happening. However, none of those rules applied as she stared, transfixed on a mirror that is seemingly feeding off of her blood.
As the gemstones glowed brighter and brighter and the threads wove faster and faster, something in Sybil finally snapped back to reality. She stood up, planning on running as far and as fast away as possible. And it was at that moment that she regretted wearing her black, six-inch platforms, because she tripped and fell, effectively ruining her own escape.
“Fuck my li-” Her sentence was cut off as the gems reached peak brightness, shining one final, overwhelming red beam with blinding intensity. When the light finally dimmed down enough to see, there was nothing left where Sybil should have been.