A/N: Thanks to Spottedcat83 for another amazing beta job!
Mary, Bloody Mary…
Romilda Vane hadn’t always been superstitious. In fact, up until her tenth year, she had always scoffed at legends, thinking them silly and nothing more than tales.
Before, that is. She is changed now. It is a very… interesting story, how her paranoia began. Frightening, even.
Mary, Bloody Mary…
It was a cold and foggy October night, hardly uncommon in the flat farmland the Vane family lived on. They weren’t farmers themselves, but enjoyed the countryside and the charming old house that they had gotten for such a reasonable price earlier, during the summer. It was a large house, with plenty of room for the family and Mrs. Vane’s aging father who had come to live with them. During the autumn and winter months such as this, however, the house was drafty. A large fire burning in the hearth had coaxed Romilda from her room; she was usually not one to engage in “family time”.
“Isn’t this nice?” Mrs. Vane mused. “All of us together around the fire?”
Romilda rolled her eyes as she curled up tighter in her blanket. Her mother could be so annoying sometimes. Even though she was only ten, already knew her mother was old-fashioned. It didn’t take much to figure that out.
Mrs. Vane’s father, Archibald, looked askance at his granddaughter. He didn’t approve of her spoiled antics.
The family sat in silence for several moments, trying to soak up the warmth of the fire before they went to their own bedrooms.
“Granddad,” Romilda said, breaking the awkward silence. “Tell us a story.” Force laced Romilda’s voice so the request sounded much more like a command than anything. Archibald considered not replying, but he decided to seize the opportunity instead. Maybe he could out some sense into the kid yet.
“All right, Millie.” Archibald settled back in his chair and regarded Romilda steadily. “I have a story for you. Are you sure you want to hear it, though? It’s a spooky one.”
“You know nothing scares me, Granddad,” she assured him, her voice confident. Archibald raised an eyebrow at her.
“You’re sure of that now, are you?” His weathered voice cracked slightly as he spoke.
“Yes. You haven’t told a frightening story since I was three.”
“Now Dad,” said Mrs. Vane, her voice gentle yet cautioning, as if she spoke to a child, “Nothing too scary, now.”
But Archibald paid her no heed,
“If the girl wants a story,” he said, “then I am going to give her a story.” Romilda looked pleased, which made her mother quirk her eyebrows together.
“Go ahead, Granddad. Get on with the story,” Romilda urged.
Archibald took a long sip of his tea before he began. As he did so, the old house creaked and sighed from the wind, which seemed to grow stronger as the night grew darker.
“There once was a girl named Mary,” began the old man. “Now this Mary, Mary Worth, to be exact, was a beautiful girl. So beautiful, in fact, she could charm almost anyone into giving her what she wanted. As you may guess, she had no trouble attracting boys. They flocked to her, really, and she didn’t try to stop them. She was a flirt, Mary Worth was, and she could bat her eyelashes and flip her hair better than any other girl in town. But there was one boy she favored above all the others, and he paid no attention to her.
“Weeks went by, and the boy continued to ignore Mary. It was driving her insane. She spent hours upon hours in front of the mirror, thinking that the reason she couldn’t woo said boy was because she wasn’t pretty enough for him; that for some reason, he thought she was ugly.
“Day after day passed, and no one could get young Mary to leave her mirror. All of her previous beaus came by and pleaded with her to come out and talk to them, but she would not. She was sick with love for the boy who never did notice her. Her father and mother asked over and over again what was troubling her, but she would not answer.
“Finally, a friend of Mary’s came to visit with her. Alice Mae was her name, if I recall correctly. Alice Mae was the one who coaxed Mary to talk again. No one is quite sure how she did it, but little by little, Mary started to come back. One day, she even ventured out of doors. Ah, but what a mistake that would prove to be. She--”
But Romilda interrupted the story.
“Granddad,” said Romilda, “This story is hardly scary.”
“Patience, Millie. Just listen.” With that, Archibald began his story again. “As I was saying, it might have been better if Mary had stayed indoors, because what happened when she left her home with Alice Mae would drive her deeper into her insanity.
“They walked along towards the village looking lighthearted; it seemed that Mary had returned to her old self. She was laughing and sparkling, and all of the boys were back on her like flies”except, of course, the one she wanted to see. Although see him, she did. He was walking in the opposite direction of Alice Mae and Mary, but for some reason, he looked over to them. To Mary’s joy, he seemed to be gazing at her. She smiled at him and looked demurely away, but he continued to stare. It took her a moment to realize that he was walking towards her, but when she did, her heart fluttered. She could see his brown eyes looking at her, and she felt more beautiful than she ever had before. Suddenly, Alice Mae stepped in front of her. A hot anger arose in Mary. What was her friend doing?
“Alice Mae reached her arms out for an embrace, and the boy met her. Mary stopped cold. He had been coming over to see Alice Mae! It took only a moment for the hug to become more intimate, and soon, Alice Mae and the boy were kissing. Mary made some sort of strangled noise, which brought them away from each other, both looking slightly sheepish.
“How rude of me!” exclaimed Alice Mae. “Mary, this is my fiancé, Daniel. Daniel, this is my friend Mary. I don’t think that you two have ever met.” Alice Mae glowed with happiness as Daniel smiled slightly at Mary.
“Engaged?” Mary managed to squeak.
“Yes,” sighed Alice Mae. “I can’t believe I forgot to tell you! But, oh, isn’t it just grand! Daniel is so wonderful!” With that, they resumed their kiss. Mary felt the word spin around, and an overwhelming dizziness come over her. But I love him! she managed to think. Love him… And with that, she fainted.
Mary, Bloody Mary…
“Mary awoke sometime later, warm in her bedroom. She was groggy and her head pounded severely. It took a moment before the realization of what had happened came over her again, but when it did, despair washed over her. Her love was gone, stolen by her best friend. Her love was engaged. She started to cry. She was senseless with grief.
“Finally, it seemed as if she had simply ran out of tears to shed. She sat up and walked over to the one place where she could see her problem: her mirror. He obviously chose Alice because she was prettier, she thought.
“She started to brush her hair with maniacal force, ripping her chestnut hair out from the root. She started to sob again, salty tears distorting her vision. She saw her reflection as warped and blurred. This is how he sees me! she thought, almost incoherently as she continued to tear at her hair. Ugly! I am so ugly; I am not fit to be loved…
“Soon, nothing was left of Mary’s thick hair except for patches; her scalp was red and throbbing from the brush’s needles. She sobbed harder when she saw herself, and brought her slender fingers up to her face. Her nails rested on her cheekbones for a moment before she began to tear at her skin. She screamed and dug rakes of cuts along her face, wailing hysterically as she did so. So ugly! she thought. How can I be so ugly?
“Her cries must have alerted her parents, because they came rushing to her room. When her mother saw what she was doing, she gasped and nearly fainted. Her father, on the other hand, rushed to his daughter’s side and gently tried to calm her. He softly pulled her hands from her face, whispering to her as he did so. She fell into him from sheer exhaustion, her body going limp like a doll’s. He picked her up and placed her gently in her bed.
“It’s all right, Mary,” he murmured. “Everything will be better in the morning.”
Mary, Bloody Mary…
“You still haven’t scared me yet, Granddad,” Romilda insisted. Now that her parents had gone to bed, there was no one to stop her from being particularly rude to her grandfather.
“Ah, that would be because I haven’t finished yet.” He looked into his granddaughter’s eyes and indeed, saw no fear. “Do you like the story so far, Millie?”
“Eh,” she said with a shrug. “It’s alright. Definitely not scary, though.”
“Well, we’ll see about that.”
Mary, Bloody Mary…
“Mary awoke the next morning with a splitting headache and a throbbing face. The pain she felt brought her harshly back to reality, reminding her of what she had done the night before. She grazed her face with the tips of her fingers and felt the scabs that rose up like mountains from her cheeks. She started to cry again, but silently now. The salt stung the wounds terribly, but she didn’t stop.
“Mary felt empty. How could she love this boy so much and never even met him; never so much as talked to him? She didn’t know, but now that he was gone, she felt like she had nothing. He had robbed her of her beauty. She laid there for the rest of the day, watching the sun travel through the sky until it disappeared and was replaced by the moon.
“Mary sat up from her bed and went back to the mirror. Her reflection caused her to recoil when she saw it. Her hair was gone, her face mutilated. Even her eyes seemed different. Dead, she thought. That’s what they are.
“She kept looking at her reflection and imagined Alice Mae with Daniel. She imagined Daniel’s big brown eyes and how he would never truly look at her. She imagined what it would be like if he did. It would be different from the other boys because he would see her as something other than a pretty face; he would love her for who she was… as he loved Alice.
“The despair uncoiled within her again. She felt the emptiness of the fact that the one thing she had going for herself wasn’t good enough for the one she loved.
“She tried directing her anger at Alice Mae, but it didn’t work. It wasn’t Alice Mae’s fault that she wasn’t pretty enough to be loved. But, oh, how she wished it were.
“She looked at her injured face, appalled. There was no hope for her now, no hope that she would ever be adored. Her reflection looked back at her mockingly. Look at what you have become, it seemed to say.
“Suddenly, Mary became angry-- angry for doing this to herself, angry with Daniel for never loving her. She screamed with rage. Nothing was fair, nothing was right. She looked at her reflection again. She shrieked in agony at what she saw. All of her beauty was gone. She was a hag. Her reflection jeered.
“This self-hatred was like nothing she had ever felt before. It was overwhelming; she was drowning in it. The mirror reflected the moonlight streaming in from her window and Mary felt like some sort of creature of the night, something unfit for the sun.
“Mary only had to strike her mirror once to shatter it. She slammed the center of it with her knuckles, causing it to spider web outwards and break into a thousand shining pieces on the wood of her floor. In the back of her mind she wished for her mother or father to come into her room and stop her, to save her from herself. But no one did.
“The mirror fragments glinted and sparkled in the moonlight. The shards were sharp and pointed like knives. Mary picked the largest one from the floor and looked at its pointed tip. She brought it up and rested it against the alabaster of her skin. With one fluid motion, she sliced her wrist. She shrieked in agony, falling to the floor with pain. Blood flowed from the cut, red and flowering. Soon, the pain started to numb as Mary floated farther from life. Soon, her eyes clouded over with black and the world faded away, never again to be seen by the eyes of Mary Worth.”
Mary, Bloody Mary…
Romilda stared at her grandfather, dissatisfied. This story was definitely not up to her standards of scary.
“Grandad,” she sighed. “That tale was an utter letdown.”
Archibald quirked an eyebrow at his granddaughter.
“Well,” he exhaled, “that was the best I could some up with.” There was a hint of reminiscence in his voice that disconcerted Romilda a bit. However, she chose to ignore it and sat up from her place on the couch and headed up and into her room, leaving Archibald in the dark, alone and scheming.
Mary, Bloody Mary…
A lone candle lit the counter surface in front Romilda as she washed her face in the bathroom sink. The wind continued to howl and moan, but she took no notice of it as she continued to scrub away the streaks of dirt from her face. She wondered vaguely how they had gotten there; she hadn’t realized they were there before. Even with vehement rubbing, however, the stripes still stood out strongly. How odd, Romilda thought.
The wind’s groans increased in intensity, and suddenly, the small bathroom window flew open. Romilda was startled; the freezing wind seemed to turn her wet face to ice. Bath tissues flew about and the wind’s scream seemed magnified as the air swirled around the tiny bathroom.
Romilda fought her way to the window and managed to latch it shut. She leaned against the wall and breathed heavily. Her eyes, gone wild now, reflected back at her from the mirror on the opposite wall. The candle hadn’t blown out; it continued to cast long, eerie shadows against the wall. Romlda tried to catch her breath, but it seemed like it had been permanently sucked from her.
The dirt streaks on her cheeks were almost black now. She needed to get out of that room. She made her way to the door and tried the knob, but it was jammed. She pulled with her entire strength, but held fast. She whimpered. What was going on?
Suddenly, the candle flame began to flicker and she expected the room to go dark. Instead, the mirror began to darken, as if opening up to a world of shadows that lay behind it. Romilda’s fear was feral; her mind raced but no coherent thought emerged. Her body twitched but wouldn’t move. She was paralyzed, staring down into the abyss of shadows that had become her bathroom mirror.
An inhuman sound suddenly filled the air, a screech-like scream that seared through the eardrum and brought Romilda to her knees. Romilda knew that she should try to cover her ears, but her hands would not move. She felt hot tears running down her face as she tried to escape whatever this was that bound her. The screech intensified steadily, until a clear shape formed in the shadows.
The shape was no more than a shadow itself, but it seemed to be a hole in the abyss, a deeper, darker part from which the scream radiated. Romilda was sobbing now. She heard someone banging on the door and calling her name, and though the sound barely reached Romilda through the scream, she knew it was her mother, hysterical, crying for her, pleading for her.
The shape swirled and darkened for a few more moments before it took the form of a face. A young woman’s face, it was, with raked cuts down her cheeks and straggles of hair emerging from her bleeding scalp. Her lips were cracked and bleeding, her mouth toothless and gummy.
Her eyes were holes of black”a blacker black than even the deepest shadows of the mirror. They held such an immense pain that Romilda thought she would explode from being forced to look into them; seeing the horror of this thing that was once a girl flooded her mind with shots of terror and doom.
Romilda cried out with something far more than fear. There was nothing to describe what she saw.
With a long, bony hand, the shadow-girl reached from her mirror and stroked Romilda’s dirt-striped cheeks. The girl’s touch was cold and draining; Romilda thought that death could be nothing worse than this.
Then the girl made a tearing cut down Romilda’s cheek with one fingernail. The shadow-girl rasped and seemed to be trying to speak as she did so, but it a rattle of something from beyond the tomb and nothing anyone of this world could understand.
The rasping continued as the shadow mauled Romilda’s face, tearing at her eyes and lips and anything else it could touch with its stone-cold hands. The candle flickered and threatened to sputter out. The door to the bathroom shook as people outside the door tried to force their way in. Romilda cried again and tried, tried to do something.
“Please,” she croaked to the thing. “Please, Mary, please stop.” How she new it was Mary Worth, she wasn’t quite sure. Maybe it was the tiniest bit of loveliness that still lined its face that gave it away, maybe it was because it could not leave the mirror to attack her further.
The shadow gave a soft, almost human, rasp.
“Not Daniel,” it hissed. It seemed almost confused. The candle flickered once more, and then snuffed out. Romilda felt the consuming horror of being in the complete darkness with something so inhuman. She let go of the tiny strand of consciousness she was holding onto and slipped into a black that was almost worst than where she already was.
~*~*~*~
Mary, Bloody Mary…
~*~*~*~
“Romilda…” a voice whispered in her ear. It was a soft sound, punctuated by little hiccups of cries.
Archibald looked down at his granddaughter. What had he done to her? Why did he have to tell that story? He always knew what would happen, her having Daniel’s blood. It had happened.
He sighed. With proper help, she would heal up fine. Hopefully. He shook with a silent sob.
Romilda’s cheeks were raked with canyons of red from the demon’s fingernails, her hair pulled out and hanging in limp strands. Her once long eyelashes were ruined, ripped out at the root. They jutted from her eyelids like legs of squashed insect. Her still childishly round face was mauled; it seemed to take away her innocence.
Archibald sobbed again.
He stared at the great-granddaughter of Alice Mae and Daniel Watkins. Archibald shuddered for a reason he couldn’t pinpoint. It was a cumulative shake, mostly for his injured granddaughter, but maybe it held just a tiny bit of pity for the thing once called Mary Worth.
How he had never experienced the thing’s wrath escaped him; he should have been the one attacked first! He was their son!
Yet, the attack was on his precious granddaughter. Yes, he saw her now as precious” not a brat, not an annoyance, but precious. How terrible things can change your perception.
Romilda’s chest rose and fell shallowly. Healers bustled in and out of the small hospital room of Saint Mungo’s, looking at the girl every now and then and checking on how she was improving. A thick black cloth had been draped over the standard-issue mirror. He wasn’t taking any chances.
Romilda stayed fast asleep as Archibald continued to look at her. He had to get going soon. Guilt was really the only thing that kept him as long as he had been there, but he repressed that thought. He gazed at the cloth covering the mirror. He hoped to Merlin that it would keep Romilda safe. He stood up from the chair and heard his old bones creak with the strain of him walking to the door.
“Sleep well, Millie,” he whispered as he left.
Mary, Bloody Mary…
Some time after the old man left and the moon had risen to the center of the sky, a sweeping wind whirled around the hospital room. The windows were locked and the door was closed; there was no explanation for it. The wind picked up speed, but the girl continued to sleep. The black curtain on the mirror swayed and flapped until it fell off and crumpled on the floor. The wind then stopped suddenly and a dark shadow flashed across the looking glass. A rasping noise filled the room, and the girl let out a whimper in her sleep.
The mirror flashed again with an unearthly shadow as the rasp began to fade away. With one final swoop of wind, the room returned to as it was, the spirit Mary Worth forever resting behind her looking glass.
Mary, Bloody Mary.