Trapped in Time

They had just moved into a new house; the wife was not so excited, something was bothering her when her husband asked what it was she was unable to tell him clearly what the reason was. The new house was just new to them, in architecture the house had been standing proudly for over a century, with a lively history of past owners. The husband and wife didn’t know these stories; they never inquired much before moving. In a hurry to get the house before someone else did they hurried around with the paper work to become the owners of a spectacular house that was the reason for envy among all their acquaintances.

The house was old, the outside was strong and could withstand time but the inside had a gloom that didn’t leave even when the wide windows were left open to allow the sunlight to wash over the rooms. The wife mentioned this in passing to her husband who told her that she was being paranoid, and basically just missing her old home.

The old house came with a few pieces of furniture that were said to have passed down from the original owners one of these items included a dressing table, that was placed in the master bedroom. To the eye it seemed like a fine piece of furniture that stood the rough usage of several owners and still shone in a certain kind of glory in the room with all the new furniture.

The wife didn’t approve of it, it didn’t go with her bedroom, while her own furniture was far more modern this dark dressing table was out of place, out of time, and gave the wife a very uneasy feeling. They tried to move it to the other room but the sheer weight of this piece gave the two a back ache. They gave up and the husband promised to get help to move it out of the room because he could see the dark table was making his wife very unhappy.

The wife didn’t mention it out loud but she did feel that every time she looked at the mirror although it was herself that she could see in the reflection who was visible, but it was someone else looking back. The eyes of the person who looked back didn’t belong to her. She spent time looking at that mirror and then giving up but the eyes that had looked back at her from her own reflection didn’t stop following her, anywhere she went in that room she could feel someone looking at her from that mirror. When she couldn’t take it anymore she decided to cover it up with a cloth; the eyes stopped following her around but the feeling that someone was there didn’t go.

She complained to her husband about the sore sight in their bedroom and wanted that dressing table moved but the husband was excuses again. He told her to wait some time while he got things in order, the wife decided to let it go as she was aware of all the things they both were managing and this was just not so important to bother him with too much.

A few days after shifting, when they could have said they were closer to settling down into a proper routine, the wife came across an album of old photographs while cleaning out the attic. The album was at least a century old; she assumed these belonged to the original family that lived here. With interest she opened the album and looked through the photographs. Happy smiling, faces looked back, the faces of happy husband and a happy wife. She couldn’t help but smile at these pictures. The same house in another time with different faces, faces that were meant to live on forever, that were at peace with what they had. She continued to smile and look thru the pictures when something caught her eye. It was the eyes, the eyes of the wife in the picture, the eyes looked familiar to her, she thought she’d seen them somewhere and suddenly the smile from her face was gone.

She spent the whole day through all her chores but was unable to place where she’d seen those eyes. When her husband returned that evening she shared the discovery of the album with him.  As husbands are, he didn’t seem to be too interested and just glanced through the pictures to make his wife happy. The wife refused to share her worry with him judging his lack of concern, but the eyes didn’t seem to leave her mind.

That night when she went to sleep she had the eyes on her mind, and that may have been the basis of the dream that she dreamt...

The woman of the pictures was going about her chores of the house, the husband was out of town on business, but the woman had her heart filled with content and warmth and she said a silent prayer of thanks.

The same night her husband who was away was delayed due to a storm and she had to go to sleep alone. She jumped at every sound that she heard and with the heavy rain and winds she heard sounds that were foreign to her all together, she finally managed to fall asleep in the middle of the night.

During her deep slumber she felt she was being watched that jerked her awake and she saw a woman dressed in black looking at her with greedy eyes. She was startled and was just about to scream when the woman in black rose her hand mumbled something and the woman on the bed felt herself standing behind a window where she started screaming. But nobody could hear her all she was able to see was the woman in black smile at her from the other side of the window, it was then she realized she was not looking through a window but she was actually looking through the mirror of her dressing table.

She banged and screamed and cried but nothing mattered, he voice was not being heard by anyone on the other side….

The wife woke up with a jerk, and looked at the dressing table that she had covered with a cloth and remembered where she’d seen those eyes of the pictures, it were the same eyes who looked back at her when she saw here reflection in the mirror on her first day in the house. She mustered strength and removed the cloth looking at her reflection in the mirror but it were the eyes she was looking at and those eyes were sad, not her own eyes had they been reflected they’d be full of fear, the reflection were the eyes of the pictures but sad, seemed like they were pleading for help.

The wife got terrified and recovered the mirror and returned to bed but was unable to sleep. When morning came and she had sent her husband away to work she returned to the room with a hammer and hit hard on the mirror breaking it to a million little pieces. The woman trapped inside rose from the pieces of glass and stood on the floor staring at the wife with the same sad eyes, she then turned around and walked towards the window of the room and vanished in the sunlight but before she vanished she turned to look at the wife one last time with a smile on her face. The same smile that she had seen in those pictures she found in the attic.

That evening the when the husband returned home the dressing table was no longer in the bedroom.