Forest Under the Bed 4: replace yourself with a mirror version, he said, it’s a great idea, he said (Patreon)

“No,” said Faustia.

“Excellent,” the ghost said.

“I just said no.”

“You just caught a monster barehanded. You’re already one of us.”

“Who’s ‘us’? Who are you?”

“I’m... Casp… ian? Yes, Caspian,” the ghost repeated. And even though she still couldn’t see him with the lights on, he sounded very pleased with himself, in the way her parents’ friends did when they quoted old movies and expected her to do more than stare. “Caspian, monster hunter and knight thereof. You’ll start as a squire, of course, but through diligent work—”

She climbed up onto her bed. Stood, balancing on the squishy shiftiness of her mattress, and stretched her cage-bar fingers up to the overhead light. The monster pressed back into the shadows of her palms with another barely-there squeak.

“...What are you doing?” the ghost asked.

“I don’t need to go meet any monster hunters,” Faustia said, “if the monster is dead.”

“You can’t—”

Squeak.

“Well,” the ghost corrected himself, “clearly you are capable,” and his voice did not make that a good thing, “but why do you think a light will kill it?”

“…Because it’s a shadow?”

“Precisely. Shadows aren’t killed by light, they simply go away for a time. It needs to be properly sealed. As you would learn to do, as a monster hunter.”

“You’re just trying to trick me into going to the monster hunter headquarters, aren’t you.”

“Is it working?”

She lowered her arms. They’d been getting tired anyway, and all the tentacle-flailing had felt weird against her hands. “What do I need to do?”

What she needed to do was this: first, secure the prisoner for transport. This would have been easier with two hands, or a ghost that consistently helped; stripping a pillow one-handed wasn’t easy. She grabbed the case with her teeth, and the pillow inside with her right hand, and pulled. The monster wiggled in the tightness of her left-handed squeeze.

“Please don’t put it in a pillow case,” he said.

“...Won’t it work?”

“It’s the dignity of the matter. Why not a water bottle? There’s one right on your table, all you need to do is take off the lid.”

“My water goes in there,” she said, past the cloth in her teeth. And it was her dad’s favorite that she’d stolen from him fair and square, which made it her favorite now.

“Or the guitar,” he said. “You could shove it inside and strum if it starts reaching past the strings. That’s a perfectly good plan.”

“That’s stupid,” she said, as the pillow finally, finally popped free. “Whoever would do that is stupid.”

The ghost took in a long inhale. Let out a long exhale.

“Do you even need to breathe?” she asked, as she shoved the monster deep inside the case, and quickly tied a knot. The fabric wiggled and bulged, until the monster finally settled down to something the size of an unhappy dodgeball, one of the foam ones from gym class. It had about the same weight and general squishiness, too. She tested this. For science.

“If ghosts only did what needed doing,” the ghost answered, when he was done using his next breath to sigh very loudly, “none of us would still be here.”

“What next?” she asked.

Next, she had to climb down.

“…Through the creepy hole?”

Of course through the creepy hole.

She got off her bed, and sat down on the floor. And tried to put herself under the shadows there, but it was a lot harder now than when she’d been grabbing for the monster, even though it was a lot better lit and nothing was trying to grab her.

“How long will this take?” she asked. Because her mom would be back late, but not that late. Not so late that she wouldn’t try squeaking open the door to Faustia’s room. And if there was an empty bed where there should have been a daughter, like there was an empty side-of-the-bed where there should have been a husband…

Faustia couldn’t not be there.

“Time runs differently where we’re going. It won’t be as long as it seems.”

“How long?” she repeated.

“A day at the most. From an outside perspective.”

She stopped toeing the darkness, and started to get back up.

“Wait,” the ghost said. “We can leave a replacement.”

“What.”

And a moment later, from across her room, something tap-thawked against her standing mirror, like it had tried to tap-tap but overestimated its own strength. The mirror was the sort that stood in a stand, and could swing a little. So it swung, a lot, instead of just falling over.

“...Apologies,” the ghost said. “But as I said: a replacement.”

It swung back. Faustia stared into her own reflection, and it stared back.

“All she needs to do is sleep in your bed,” the ghost said. “Possibly eat some breakfast. Your… parental figure—”

“My mother.”

“Yes, that. Your reflection knows everything you do, has all the same mannerisms. Your mother will never notice a thing.”

He was asking her to replace herself with a perfect, creepy, inhuman double that no one would notice.

“This sounds like the start of a horror movie,” Faustia said, still staring into the mirror, in case the her in there got any ideas.

The ghost scoffed. “It’s just a reflection. Hunters have used them as stand-ins since time immoral.”

“Do you mean ‘immemorial’?” Which meant practically forever, which was not what the other word meant.

“Yes,” the ghost agreed, somewhat annoyed at the interruption. Or the correction. “That. As I was saying, your reflections can only step out with your permission, and it can be recalled with a thought.”

Which made this the sort of horror movie where she would never see it coming.

“…And any untimely end you should happen to meet will be mirrored by it,” the ghost added, probably because of the look on her face, which she was perfectly well aware of, because she was staring right at it. “Because it is your reflection. It is perfectly safe.”

“...How do I do this?”

She did it like this: by stretching out her hand, and holding the monster’s…

Sigh, sighed the ghost. “Hold its pillowcase.”

…because monsters were natural crossers of worlds. That was why the hole under her bed was still open, too: because she’d kept hold of it this whole time, and now it was her prisoner, and sacking it apparently counted as keeping hold.

Her fingertips slipped towards and through the mirror’s surface, just as her reflection’s fingertips met hers coming out, and they clasped each other’s hands. When Faustia pulled, there was a brief moment of resistance, as her reflection pulled back, and what if she got pulled in instead of the other way around—

But then her reflection popped free, on rather wobbly legs.

“Oh,” her reflection said, in a voice like the one Faustia always cringed at hearing when her friends made her talk in videos. It was a voice that she knew was hers, but it didn’t sound like her, not to her own ears. “This explains a lot.”

“What?” Faustia asked.

But her reflection was looking around, and didn’t seem to hear her. It walked back and forth, from its mirror to the far wall and back and again, watching its legs the whole time. And where their reflections should have been in the mirror, one for each of them, there were… cutouts, girl-shaped silhouettes filled in with a miniature view of the room they were standing in.

“Why are you doing that?” Faustia asked, as her reflection went back and forth again. She had to repeat herself twice.

“You can go backwards and forwards,” her reflection said, facing her again. “Not just side to side. And you don’t get smaller or larger when you do.”

“…Charming as this is,” the ghost interrupted, “we’ve a monster to deliver. Tell her she needs to spend the night in your bed.”

The reflection gave no response to his words. It was just staring at her, smiling brightly in a way that Faustia definitely wasn’t, and Faustia wondered if she was the only one who could give it orders, since it was hers.

“You need to spend the night in my bed,” she told it. “Just in bed. Don’t do anything evil-mirror-version-of-me-y.”

“Why would I be evil?” her reflection said, crossing its arms.

Faustia was crossing hers too, but she’d started first. “Because you’re my reflection, so you’re my opposite.”

“Maybe you’re the evil one,” her reflection said.

“As charming,” the ghost repeated, more loudly. “But if you want to be back as soon as possible, we must leave as soon as possible. You’d better bring her pillowcase, too. I do not claim to know what a monster’s reflection can do, but I imagine sealing them is much the same.”

Her reflection had stepped out carrying her own pillowcase. Faustia held out her hand for it, and after a moment of staring, her reflection handed it over.

“Bed,” Faustia said. With a huff that Faustia herself would definitely not have done, her reflection got into bed, and pulled up the covers. It closed its eyes and lay perfectly still.

“And stay there,” Faustia said, to no response. Or possibly a perfectly-pretending-to-sleep response.

“Well. In you go,” the ghost said.

So Faustia got on the floor again. She turned onto her stomach, and took a deep breath, and slid under until her legs fell down into open air. Then she stretched out her feet—she’d put on sneakers before going into the mystery hole under her bed, she wasn’t stupid—until she felt something solid. Something that held her weight.

Faustia climbed down.

Her reflection gave it a few minutes. Then she sat up, and looked at the mirror. In her reflection was a forest, with trees whose leaves were the color of fresh blood and whose trunks had dried to rough-barked scabs.

She untucked the covers, and crawled over to the edge of the bed, where she could just reach their father’s guitar if she really really stretched. Faustia had left her phone on the bedside table, but her reflection had never really seen the point of phones (most people didn’t hold them where their reflections could watch the screens with them), so she didn’t try to turn it on. She didn’t have any tutorials, didn’t know that there were tutorials, but that was okay. She was very good at mirroring what she’d seen. She sat back against the pillow, and started to strum.

She did not leave the bed, as requested.