Day 445

You were sure that you'd seen her portrait among the former Lords and Ladies somewhere.
She moved about the house like a misty haze as she drifted from room to room.
She used to live here five hundred or so years ago, or so she said, possibly even more.

Memory is the first thing to go and the dead are no exception.
She spent most of her time (that you could see, she tended to fade in and out of view) by
a large mirror in the main drawing room in the left wing.

You generally saw her during the early hours of the morning and she followed your team
of cleaners around as you dusted, swept, mopped and maintained her abode.
She liked to point out your mistakes and push vases she disliked into the floor.

The team quickly got used to her appearances, mild destructive tendencies and criticism.
She became something they looked forward to - her being a genuine ghost and all.
Nobody could quite figure out why she liked to stand beside that large mirror so often though.

Some reckoned she'd been given it as a gift when she was alive and she remembered it.
The newer ones thought she might have died there but she assured me otherwise.
She showed me exactly why she stands there and what she does.

I wish she hadn't, I was better off not knowing at all.
The mirror isn't just some ornate glass wall - it's an entrance, a gate, a hole and it's wide open.
She stops them from coming through, or at least she tries.

The trick to seeing through the mirror, actually seeing through it, is to switch off all of the newer
electrical lights, close the curtains and light the old candles.
The light from the other side shines through the gaps between their bodies.

They are always there, she says, waiting for someone to trip, something to fall, someone to notice
the cracks they have already made along the upper half.
She distracts us so we don't notice, so we don't touch it and let them go.