09 May Numbers to Nowhere

“What do you have there, Cassie?” I asked my daughter as she played with something in the living room.

“Oh, it’s just a marker I got from my friend.” She smiled at me as she responded, and I didn’t think anything of it. My daughter is a very sociable seven-year-old with a lot of neighborhood friends.

I was about to walk away to continue cooking dinner when I saw a strange marking on Cassie’s birthday gift.

“Cassie, please don’t draw on your present. That mirror was an antique your mother and I bought for you.”

“I’m sorry, Daddy. My friend told me to write it. I’m not sure what it is, but I think it’s pretty.” She smiled again, disarming my frustration, but I was still confused by what I was looking at. Did one of her friends speak a different language? I looked again at the odd mark on the fancy hand mirror.

My wife and I had bought the mirror for Cassie’s seventh birthday at an estate sale. It was a very old antique beauty mirror, with real silver and sapphires studded in it. We were surprised it was so cheap, considering the valuable materials, but we weren’t complaining.

The marking she left on the hand mirror’s edge, written just at the corner where the glass met the metal, was some odd little rune or sigil. The mark looked like five Y’s stacked together. It didn’t resemble any language I recognized, and I didn’t know how she would have known to draw something like that on her own.

Puzzled, I decided to ask her.

“Hey, honey, what friend told you to draw this marking?”

She paused briefly, and her smile shifted into one of unease that concerned me.

“Well,” she started, “you probably won’t believe me, but it was the mirror man. He told me it’s a number from his world.”

It made more sense now: it was just some imaginary friend, and the marking was made up. Cassie was very talented at drawing for only being seven, so I didn’t put it past her to come up with an intricate design like that.

“Oh, did he now?” I asked, offering my own disarming smile and a brief chuckle.

She did not smile back. Instead, she looked a little sad.

“I knew you wouldn’t believe me. He said you wouldn’t.”

I seemed to have upset her, so I decided to play along—at least in a way that didn’t seem condescending or like I was poking fun at her “friend.”

“Okay, honey. I’m sorry. Did the mirror man say what the number was for?”

She smiled again and said, “Yes. He said it had to do with his visit, and that the numbers and the mirror would let him visit soon.”

“Okay. Well, tell the mirror man that we can play, but no drawing on the mirror we got you for your birthday. It’s very old and very valuable.”

She loved the mirror and used it all the time, despite my initial protests to keep it safe in her room since she could lose it or it could be stolen. She talked to it and played with it, first pretending to reenact “mirror, mirror on the wall,” but recently it seemed her new mirror game was talking to the mirror man and writing whatever came to her mind.

I loved her stories and her creativity, but the look she gave me when I doubted her seemed genuine, and it troubled me.

* * * * * *

The next day, I got home from work early and decided to surprise Cassie with pizza. I had just come in the door and was bringing it into the kitchen when I heard her talking in the living room again.

“Okay, Gallas, but I don’t want to get in trouble. Dad will be mad if I leave those marks on the mirror and on the other ones.”

There was an odd pause, and for a fleeting moment, I wondered if she was actually talking with someone. Who was Gallas? Was that what she had named the mirror man?

There was no response that I could hear, and Cassie soon came into the kitchen, greeting me warmly and acting as though nothing unusual had happened. I thought it was odd, but chalked it up to her imagination again.

Later that night, I was awakened by a noise from downstairs. I almost went back to sleep, but when I heard it again, I resolved to check it out. For a brief moment, I was concerned it might be an intruder, but then I focused on the sound and heard the light patter of Cassie’s footsteps and relaxed.

No intruder, but she shouldn’t have been up.

I was being run ragged with my wife away for the week at a conference, and I had wanted to talk to her more about Cassie’s behavior, but she was too busy to discuss it at any length.

When I got downstairs, I found Cassie in the living room with her marker. She was drawing on the mirror on the wall. I was a little frustrated that she had ignored my earlier request, and I went into the room to talk to her.

She gasped, clearly startled that I was there, almost as if I had broken her out of a trance.

“Oh, Dad, I’m sorry. I really had to, though. I want to see my friend, and he says I have to draw these on all the mirrors or I won’t be able to see him.”

Once again, I was surprised to see the honest concern in her eyes, and I couldn’t tell if it was just because she had been caught or if she truly thought what she was doing was important.

“I don’t want to stifle your creativity, honey, but you really can’t be drawing on all the mirrors like that. And you really can’t be disobeying me or Mommy when we say not to do something. I don’t know if that marker is permanent, or if we’ll even be able to clean those off.” I tried to tell her as amicably as possible, but I could tell she was upset by my tone, feeling guilty and sad.

I took her back upstairs and tucked her into bed. On my way back to my room, I stopped to use the bathroom, and when I turned on the light, I let out a frustrated groan. She had left a marking on the mirror up here as well—this time a large Y with three smaller ones above it.

I remembered the marking from the day before and thought the character looked similar. Whatever it was, it wasn’t random; it had some design or purpose. It even looked like it could be a number, since the previous character had five Y’s and this one had four.

I thought perhaps my daughter, despite being so young, might have somehow learned bits of another language, but how? We didn’t exactly have the resources on hand here to teach her that.

* * * * * *

The next day, while I was at work, I got a call from Cassie’s school. I found out she had gotten into a fight. I was surprised and concerned—that definitely wasn’t like her.

I had to pick her up, and the principal told me that a classmate had tried to take her mirror to look at it, and Cassie had gotten very upset and punched them in the face to get it back.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. That wasn’t like Cassie at all.

I tried talking to her in the car on the way home, but she was sullen and brooding about the event. After reminding her that we don’t respond to people taking our things with violence, she interrupted with a frustrated outburst.

“Gallas is my friend! I didn’t want to lose him!”

That name again—Gallas.

I figured it must be her made-up name for the mirror man. This was getting old now. It was affecting her school life, and with violent outbursts like that, she could get expelled.

I tried talking to her again, but she shut down and barely acknowledged I was speaking. I didn’t know what to do. I wished her mother had been home, because whatever I was doing clearly wasn’t working.

After an uncomfortable, silent dinner, I was putting Cassie to bed and started getting ready to sleep myself when I heard something that sounded like creaking on the stairs.

Not again.

I went downstairs, and sure enough, Cassie was there, holding her mirror in one hand and the marker in the other, writing on the living room mirror again. I was over it at that point.

I stormed into the room, startling her. “Not again! No more of this! You’re cleaning these up tomorrow, but first you’re going to bed, and you’re giving me the mirror!”

She looked like she was about to cry and spoke. “No, I can’t. Not yet. Gallas will be angry.”

I was getting so tired of this game that I shouted again and took the mirror from her, sending her upstairs. She let go of it without fighting, pausing briefly to look at me and then at the mirror.

She ran upstairs, a faint sob making me feel terrible about what I had done, despite my initial feeling of vindication in catching her breaking the rules again.

I looked down at the mirror. Sure enough, there was another marking—this time it looked like three very slender Y’s. The numbers seemed to be counting down from whatever they had started at.

I was puzzled by whatever language they were in, and how Cassie would know how to write in it. While considering these things, my eyes were drawn to the center of the mirror, and I felt an odd sense of vertigo and unease.

I started to entertain suspicions that there was more to this mirror than we knew, and I wished I had learned more about the people whose estate sale we had bought it from.

Next, I decided to look up Gallas. I didn’t find anything initially, but when I searched the term in relation to Sumerian mythology, what I found was deeply disturbing.

The name Gallas—or Gallu—referred to great demons or devils from ancient Mesopotamian religion that stole victims away to the underworld to be tormented, regardless of guilt or innocence.

I started thinking about the Sumerian numerals counting down and how Cassie had said the mirror man, or Gallas, would arrive when the countdown finished. There was no way this could be real. It had to be a joke. Cassie couldn’t have made up ancient Sumerian numbers and the literal name of a caste of demonic kidnappers.

I was getting legitimately freaked out at that point. I was so distracted by my research that I lost track of time, and realized I had likely missed Cassie’s next trance-like sleepwalking episode.

I rushed to check the bathroom mirror to confirm—and there it was. Two large, slender Y’s, marking the number two. Every other mirror in the house bore the same symbol.

I didn’t know what to do. I started looking for Cassie to put her back to bed.

Yet to my absolute shock and horror, Cassie was gone.

I tore the house apart searching for her, pleading for her to come out from wherever she was hiding. But it was no use.

I called the police and gave them her description, explaining the situation in case she had run away, leaving out the more paranoid and supernatural concerns. I hoped that if she had run off, they could help find her quickly.

I almost fell asleep on the couch downstairs, exhausted from calling every number I could think of and searching the neighborhood for hours. I spent the entire day searching for her, inside and out.

Then, at about midnight, I heard the front door open slowly—and slam shut.

My heart leaped. It must be her, I thought. I wheeled around and shouted, “Cassie, you’re back! I was so worried.”

Yet there was no reply. All I could hear was the squeaking of writing.

Then I realized—she was writing a single character on every mirror. The number one.

That was last night. I don’t know what to do now. My wife’s flight was delayed. It’s still just us.

Cassie is asleep in her room. I took the mirror again, and it sits on the nightstand near my desk where I’m writing this. I have an inescapable feeling of dread for some reason.

I keep telling myself this must just be a game. A cry for help. But I don’t know what to do.

My eyes feel heavy suddenly. I think I need to lie down.

Somehow, I woke up holding the mirror. The numbers—they were all there.

Cassie is asleep. Somehow, she slept through it. But something happened. I was holding the mirror and the marker. I saw the numbers and brand-new, strange signs on the mirrors that hadn’t been there before. Worst of all, it looked like my handwriting.

As I struggled to make sense of it, I felt the pressure of some unseen force.

I took another look at the mirror’s oddly shifting reflection, and the surface gave way to something else. A face made of pure darkness, with deep red eyes, stared back at me.

Suddenly, the mirror cracked under the strain of the force, then shattered completely. I jumped in surprise, and as I recovered, I heard a cacophony of breaking glass throughout the house. The pressure released in a violent rush, and a fetid, rotting smell filled the air.

In the distance, I heard an unnatural voice, echoing faintly.

The mirror man is real. And whatever he is, I think I let him out.

I need to get Cassie—and get out of here now—before her “friend” finds us first.