A yawn stretched Mariam’s jaw until it cracked and Mariam winced. It had taken her longer than she’d expected but—a private pun in the comfort of her own mind—she had cracked it, too, the story. The perfect ending was there, in her head. Now it was only a matter of writing it, once she could find the time. But first, right now, Mariam was going to sleep. She was going to sleep as much as she wanted because it was Saturday tomorrow and this Saturday she wasn’t working.
With a groan, she got up from the kitchen table and stretched her stiff back. It groaned back to her but Mariam ignored it. Yes, exercise was a good idea and yes, it was up to her to start doing it but she had no time. Between her job at Gap and the writing, there was simply never time for going to a gym or even buying a StairMaster and using it, not that she could afford a StairMaster.
Her bedroom was cool and dark, the window open a crack to let the chilly October air in, It took some effort to resist simply falling into bed and staying there. But exercise was one thing and basic hygiene was another. Mariam slipped into the bathroom.
As she methodically brushed her teeth counter-clockwise, she studied herself in the mirror. She needed to start using some sort of cream. Not even thirty yet and she needed face cream. Life was unfair and frustrating. Unlike her story, which was bound to be accepted for publication in some of the big-name magazines. It was that good.
Mariam leaned over the sink to spit out the toothpaste. When she straightened up a face that was not hers flashed in the mirror. Heart suddenly kicking two gears higher, Mariam uttered a muffled yelp and spun around. The bathroom was empty.
“Hello?” Mariam said with trembling voice, her heart thumping in her throat. “Hello?”
Of course there was no one there. She lived alone. Her parents were two states away, in her native North Carolina, and anyway the woman she’d seen in the mirror hadn’t looked even remotely like her mother. But she had looked somehow familiar with the deep-set dark eyes and the steel-gray bangs.
Mariam stared into the mirror without blinking. The seconds passed, her eyes started itching and the toothpaste on her lips started drying. No woman appeared behind her. With shaking hands, Mariam turned the cold water on, rinsed her mouth, washed her face and with one last look around left the bathroom. Her heart was still beating faster than it should.
“You imagined it,” she told the bathroom. “It’s happened before, it’s happening again. Go to bed.”
With that, Mariam shut the bathroom door resolutely and returned to her bedroom.
As she walked in, the room for a moment seemed darker than it was when she’d left it, one shadow by the vanity table much thicker than the rest. Mariam’s heart did that gear-jumping trick again, flattening her back against the wall.
“There is no one in your damn bedroom, now go to bed,” she said in the empty room. Her legs, however, refused to follow her instructions. They appeared to be stuck to the floor.
“Come on,” Mariam said, keeping her eyes on the thicker shadow. There was nothing there. The light from her reading lamp was enough to make sure. It was simply a thicker shadow.
Slowly, as though stepping on hot coals barefoot, Mariam covered the four steps that separated the bedroom door from the bed. The mattress, soft and yielding, sank under the weight of her body when she sat down and settled with her back against the pillow. She was too wired to sleep yet. That face in the mirror bugged her. She’d used to have imaginary friends when she was little and she clearly remembered their faces and names. She could swear, even today, that she had seen one of them, a girl called Carly, a couple of times in the flesh.
But she wasn’t little anymore and she didn’t need imaginary friends. She had real ones. Only she couldn’t call any of them to relate the face in the mirror story because they’d dismiss her as a psycho. It was psycho, seeing imaginary faces in the mirror. Sick.
Mariam shuffled her feet under the blanket and swiped the screen of her phone. That was enough pointless thinking about faces in mirrors and Carly. It was time to sleep. Browsing news would help her. News always made Mariam sleepy. She pulled her blanket higher up and dived into the news stream.
A Tesla battery had caught fire in Australia. Mariam had no idea how batteries caught fire but she made a mental note of the story – she might be able to use it in one of her stories. Unless she forgot. Perhaps she should take her notepad from the kitchen and write the note but that shadow was still there and although Mariam knew it was nothing but a shadow she felt safer in bed.
Purdue Pharma, the makers of Oxy, were about the file for bankruptcy. That was a form of justice, Mariam supposed, late but duly dispensed.
“How long are you going to pretend I’m not here?” a deep, slightly hissy voice said from across the room.
The phone froze in Mariam’s hands and the story she was reading grew blurry as she stared at it, trying not to blink and, most of all, not to move her eyes away from the screen.
“I said,” the voice continued, “How long are you going to pretend I’m not here?”
It was hopeless. She was going to look.
A woman was perched on Mariam’s vanity, a tall, slender woman with a mass of ash-blond, straight hair and eyes so dark they looked like twin pits of eternity in the shadow.
“Well?” the woman said and crossed her arms.
“I don’t… I… Who are you?” Talking was difficult because her jaws had suddenly filled with cement and her lips and tongue had gone numb.
The woman’s lips curved into the sort of smile that said Oh, come on louder than any words could.
“I really… I don’t…” Mariam continued stuttering. She was clutching her phone so tightly her hand hurt but the chances of her managing to dial 911 before the woman attacked her looked slim to non-existent. The woman was in much better shape than Mariam, she could see that from her bed.
In quick proof of that observation the woman took what seemed like a single long stride and appeared at the foot of the bed. From there, she proceeded to lean forward and look Mariam straight in the eyes with those bottomless pits of eternity of hers.
“You have a story to finish,” she hissed. Yes, this was clearly a hiss more than a spoken sentence. And now Mariam knew who the woman was.
“But you… But… It’s a dream, isn’t it?” she finally managed, relief washing over her, relaxing her limbs until they felt heavy and boneless.
The woman shook her head and drew back.
“Write the story, Mariam.”
A blink later there were again only shadows in Mariam’s bedroom and none of them was thicker than the rest. She barked out a nervous laugh and picked up the phone she had dropped a moment ago because of that wave of relief.
“You’re very real for a dream,” she told the phone as she ran her finger along its side. “I’m getting good at this lucid dreaming thing.”
“It’s not a dream.”
Mariam jumped and dropped the phone. It clattered to the floor with a needlessly realistic, awake sound.
This woman was older than the blond one but not as old as the one in the bathroom, short and curvy, and she was sitting next to Mariam, in her bed, propped up on an elbow.
Mariam swallowed but no sound came out of her mouth.
“Do you remember me? Or has it been too long?” the woman said. “Stop staring like that. It’s not like there’s anything I can do to you. I’m harmless. Much more harmless than the other two. But even I know a couple of ways to make your life, let’s say, uncomfortable. Finish that story,” she said and vanished in front of Mariam’s wide open eyes.
It was a while before Mariam could move again and when she did, it was to look at her phone. It lay gleaming on the pale purple rug whose brand name was Frosty Grape and which Mariam had bought because she liked the sound of that name more than the rug itself.
Heart pounding, breaths coming out in short, sharp bursts like gasps, Mariam’s eyes darted around the room. It was empty, for now. Or it only looked empty and the moment she reached for the phone a hand would shoot out from under the bed and grab her. And then she would have a heart attack because there were only so many jump scares a heart could take, even when you were twenty-nine, and this would all be over.
On the other hand, she could move fast, grab the phone and call for help. Sam would come if Mariam asked her, just to stay over. Or she could call her mother. Or 911, if it came to that.
Licking her lips nervously, Mariam prepared to move fast, leaning over the frame of her bed – the bed that sported a ten-inch distance between the frame and the floor because Mariam couldn’t afford the storage model.
The room was quiet. Nothing moved, even the light wind outside had died down. It was now or never – that sort of courage wasn’t easy to maintain. Mariam reached down and grabbed the phone.
Before she could congratulate herself on the successful mission, before she could even register the grab, a hand shot out from under the bed and grabbed her wrist. It was a slight, elderly hand, impeccably manicured.
Mariam started screaming. The screams bounced off the walls of her bedroom, traveled through the closed door and the open window and echoed around the neighborhood. Now, at least, someone would come, for sure.
“Oh, stop it,” the owner of the hand said and pulled herself out from under the bed. There shouldn’t be enough space for a grown woman but this grown woman was a compact model, no more than five two and with a slight frame. She also had a bob of steel-gray hair and deep set dark eyes that now fixed on Mariam while the woman let go of her wrist and straightened up.
“What do you want?” Mariam whispered, shocking herself by still being able to speak.
“The same that Euphrosyne and Carolina want,” the woman said. “I want you to finish my story.”
“And make it snappy,” another voice said and Mariam turned to her vanity to see the young blonde back on her perch there. “You’ve got a second book all lined up for me and you haven’t even finished the first. How do you think this is going to work? It’s beyond annoying.”
“You think yours is annoying?” The third woman, Carolina, was leaning on the wall next to the window. “She hasn’t touched my manuscript in months. Months. I hardly remember what happened so far and as for what happens next…” She glared at Mariam.
“But I don’t know what happens next,” Mariam said. Her heart was doing its best to break through her rib cage and her body was shaking but truth mattered, even now. “How did you get here? Are you even here or have I finally snapped?”
“Oh, we’re here,” the oldest one said. Her name was Vera and Mariam knew her. She knew her well because she had created her. “Frustration is an amazing thing, you know.”
Mariam shook her head. Her ears were buzzing.
“But how?”
Vera smiled grimly at her creator.
“You gave me power over the elements and you forgot about me because there were other stories and you wanted to write those more than mine. I understand. After all, what’s so interesting about a fifty-plus widow who’s suddenly all-powerful? And the pandemic theme turned out to be ill-timed, right? I understand. But that’s what editing is for.”
“She loved my story at the beginning,” the dark-haired woman by the window said. “She loved it so much she wrote it as a romance first and it took her, what, a week?”
Mariam stared at her calf. She pinched a blob of flesh between her index and middle fingers and squeezed, gritting her teeth when the pain came.
“You’re not dreaming,” the blond woman said. She had the scariest look with those bottomless pits she had for eyes. She had them because Mariam had given them to her. She had created Euphrosyne like she had created Vera and Carolina, and dozens of other people. “We’ve simply had enough with the waiting so we thought we’d give you some motivation to finish what you’ve started.”
“But I have a job,” Mariam found herself saying. “I have bills to pay. I can’t just quit and start writing full-time. I don’t even know if anyone would buy the books once I finish them.”
“But unless you do finish them you can be sure nobody would buy them,” Vera said and sat on the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry we scared you.”
“I’m not,” Euphrosyne said. “Something had to be done. I can’t spend eternity hanging around waiting for you to figure out who killed that accountant and where my mother is. I want you to figure it out now, so we can all go on with our lives.”
“Yeah, we have those,” Carolina said. “You gave them to us. You owe us our endings.”
Mariam looked to Vera who despite her entrance—and her story—looked the least threatening. Vera shrugged.
“Is…” She swallowed. “Is anyone else coming after me?”
Well,” Euphrosyne said and swung her leg like a pendulum. “Peter wasn’t too happy about our story last time we talked.”
“You talked.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Not everyone’s happy with how you’re handling our story either,” Carolina said. “You might want to start soon.”
“Now, ladies,” Vera, radiating a tribe elder aura from her thin but warm smile, said. “I think we made our point. We’d better leave you alone,” she said to Mariam and tapped her on the knee. “You should get some sleep. After all,” she said as she stood up. “You’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Carolina shot her a suspicious look but said nothing. Euphrosyne gave her a little wave and a wink that made Mariam shiver.
“I’ll…” she started but the three had already vanished. “Do my best,” she said.
Mariam sat in bed for a few minutes staring in space, thinking. Her phone, which she was holding like it was life-saving equipment, showed the time as a quarter after midnight. The bed felt like a fortress—if Mariam left it, who knew what horrors could happen to her. The Peter Euphrosyne had mentioned was a vampire and he was a vampire on a rampage. There was also a cunning killer on the loose in Carolina’s story and scores of decaying zombie-type former humans in Vera’s story that could infect her with a touch. Maybe they wanted their endings, too.
If Mariam had any sense, she’d stay in bed. Yet Vera had been right – she had work to do. Maybe not as much as Vera supposed but it was still work and the sooner she did it, the better.
Looking around in case any of her three protagonists lurked in the shadow to make sure she did what she said, Mariam sneaked into the kitchen and opened her laptop.
The three unfinished novels she had written over the past three years snuggled in their own folder titled “Novels” in the bigger folder Mariam had in hopes and dreams named “My Work”. Also there was a more successful folder, “Stories”, which contained a dozen short stories of which, to Mariam’s pride, four had been published in various anthologies. It wasn’t that any of them had made her a lot of money – anthology publishers were as often as not also writers struggling to make a breakthrough. But their publication did give Mariam a warm feeling of acceptance, a sense of purpose. If there was one more person besides her who liked a story of hers, then maybe there could be hundreds or thousands who would also like it. So she had tried her hand and the long form.
Biting her lower lip, Mariam clicked once on the “Disease Story” folder. She could never come up with a good title for her manuscripts at the beginning. The title, she expected, would reveal itself by the time the book was finished. Yet the books never got finished. Her ring finger pressed the right click of her mouse and her hand moved the scroll to “Delete”.
Mariam looked around again. The kitchen was empty. She bit deeper into the flesh of her lip and clicked “Delete”. Before she had time to reconsider, she repeated the procedure with the other two folders, “Eco Thriller Story” and “Vampire Crime Story”. After the last one disappeared from her screen, a long sigh of relief rippled the air in front of her. Mariam swiped at her forehead to find with not a little surprise it was sweaty. So were her armpits.
Wrinkling her nose, Mariam glanced around for one last time and closed her laptop. However those freaks of her imagination had managed to come to life, they were not coming back. The thought that she could write a story about this experience flashed in Mariam’s mind and raised the hairs on her arms. It was a great story. It had jump scares and a pinch of comedy and she could swing it. But it was too dangerous, way too dangerous.
After she turned the light in the kitchen off, Mariam headed straight for the bathroom, took off the tank top she slept in and the sheep-patterned pajama bottoms, and stepped into the shower. The warm water poured over her with a finality Mariam welcomed gladly. She was putting an end to this story that she’d never write. It was a pity, really. Didn’t everyone in the writing world say “Write about what you want”? She giggled and soaped her armpits. Of course they didn’t. They said “Write about what you know.” And Mariam now knew about fictional people coming to life. It could even become a novel, it was that good.
The blow caught her across the eyes, which she’d closed to let the water run down her face. With a strangled cry, Mariam jerked back and opened her eyes. Only she couldn’t see anything. Her eyes stung and hurt, and burned, and there was something warm running down her cheeks but she couldn’t see a thing.
“You think you’re very clever, don’t you?” someone hissed in her ear. Euphrosyne. She was the hissy one. She was a were-snake, after all. “Guess what?”
“You’re not,” said Carolina and a punch to the stomach emptied Mariam’s lungs of air.
Choking, she flailed around for support but found nothing, not even a wall.
“Please,” she managed. “Please, I’ll finish the stories.”
“It’s too late for that,” Vera’s calm, sad voice said. “We’ll have to find someone else to finish the stories.”
“But I,” Mariam said and spit a mouthful of water that tasted of copper. “I deleted the files.”
“You think we need files?” Euphrosyne murmured. “Files and folders, and notepads?” She laughed. “The only thing we need is the right brain,” she said, took hold of Mariam’s throat and squeezed.