Bloody Mary -- a Manifestation

Bloody Mary – a Manifestation

The Bateman Home, 9:00 PM

Cindy, thirteen years old and wearing pink pajamas, stares into the bathroom mirror. Downstairs, her friends wait impatiently in a basement lit only by flickering candles.

Let them wait, she thinks. I’m the séance medium, and I need time to get ready. She puts on her witchy look – face angled down, long hair mussed and wild, and that penetrating stare. The ritual is simple – eyes shut, then five repetitions (with a generous pause between, for effect), then eyes open. She chooses her voice – of a girl with no inkling of whom or what she might summon. Cindy closes her eyes and begins.

One…

The room goes silent. A faucet drips.

Two…

The girls’ laughter sounds out, muffled from below.

Three…

The vanity lights blink off, then on.

Four…

A draft – cool, no cold – fills the room with a rank, musty smell.

Five…

Eyes open.

In the hallway, a chaos of light and shadow plays beneath the door. There’s a strangled cry and a brief clatter of metal, then silence.

Soon after, her dad, wearing headphones, appears from the living room. At the bathroom door, he removes them and knocks.

“Cindy, honey, you done in there yet?”

No answer. Shifting his weight impatiently from foot to foot, he repeats himself and waits. Then he opens the door.

9:30 PM

Outside, heavy snow is falling – large, wet flakes driven horizontally in a gusty, whistling wind. The snow, already a half foot deep, glows in alternating bursts of blue/red police lights. A cruiser sits in the driveway, its engine idling, one officer behind the wheel and talking on the radio. Two other cruisers, their lights also flashing, sit against the curb. Several curious neighbors watch from their windows, while a lone, elderly woman next door, bundled against the storm, stands on her porch.

Inside the house, three officers stand about the living room. All of them face Cindy’s father as he sits stiffly on the sofa. He’s holding both hands out in front of himself, his bloody fingers splayed, as an officer takes photos. He blinks with each pop of the flash. On the hardwood floor, halfway between the sofa and the hallway, lies a bloody, wide-bladed knife, droplets of blood scattered about it.

“So, the last time you saw your daughter was just before nine o’clock this evening, correct?”

“Yeah, that’s right.” His voice is trembling, faltering, his face wet with tears. “She came upstairs – she and her friends were having a sleepover – and hurried into the bathroom. A few minutes later, I had to use the toilet, but she didn’t answer my knocks, so I went in…”

“And you say this is not your knife, correct, Mr. Bateman? And that you never saw it before?”

“Right, never seen it.”

At last, the officer with the camera steps back and nods to his chief.

“Why did you pick up the knife and bring it out here?” The chief’s expression is grave, his eyes locked onto Bateman’s.

In the bathroom, detectives take photos, careful not to step into the scene. A foot-long slash of blood crosses the left half of the mirror, droplets trailing down to the sink and floor. Bloody fingerprints, along with more spatters of blood, cover the sink. A mirrored reflection of the word “MARY” is painted in blood, as though with someone’s fingertip, on the right half of the mirror. A clearly defined hand print, no smearing, lies beneath it.

Downstairs in the basement, a young female officer helps four frightened, sobbing girls into their coats. Candles, flames extinguished but still smoldering, stand on the bare basement floor at the center of a circle of pillows.

The Haverton Police Station, 10:30 PM

Inside a cramped, blank-walled room, Hank Bateman sits across a table from Haverton’s chief of police and beside another man – younger, bleary-eyed and sipping coffee from a styrofoam cup. Both men are jotting notes while Hank frets, elbows on table, forehead propped in his hands. A harsh, fluorescent light buzzes on the ceiling. Hank purposely avoids the large wall mirror, three feet in front of him, since he knows he’s being watched from the other side.

“So, Cindy went into the bathroom, a room with no windows,” the younger man says. “You went in a few minutes later and found her missing, blood everywhere, and the knife, which you then carried into the living room and dropped to the floor. You say all doors and windows were locked, and that her friends were downstairs. No else was home. Oh, and you’d have seen it if any of the other girls came upstairs and approached the bathroom.” The man pauses, takes a sip of coffee, and glares at their suspect. “Mister Bateman, you need to be straight with us.”

“I didn’t do anything to her, I swear to God! We’re wasting our time!”

“Okay, Mister Bateman – you look yourself in the eye and say that again. And this time, make it the truth.” The detective points sternly to the mirror, his eyes boring into Hank’s.

The ceiling light flashes off, then on, and begins buzzing at a lower pitch, then higher, its brightness flickering several times. Hank struggles to unlock his gaze from the detective’s. When he does, his face goes pale, his eyes wide. He leaps up and pounds the table with both fists while the others recoil in shock.

In the mirror stands a pale, ghostly woman with long, dark matted hair. She wears a torn, stained dress – fabric ripped and blotched in blood, and she restrains Cindy in a neck lock, her other hand holding a large, glinting knife blade at his daughter’s throat. Cindy appears barely conscious, cuts and bruises on her face, neck, and arms. The blade reflects brightly and dimples a crease against his daughter’s throat. A mirrored reflection of dripping, bloody letters spells “SHE IS MINE” on the glass.

Hank lunges toward her.

"You bitch! You bitch, let her go!” The men leap forward as the door flies open with a bang. Two more officers rush in, and they struggle to subdue and cuff him.

All they see in the mirror is themselves and Hank Bateman.

2:45 AM

The police chief sits at his desk – an old government surplus unit – built like a tank, its gray metal drawers dented and scuffed. The lighting is dim – a single goose neck lamp casts a pool of light across his desk. Beyond his office window, heavy snow is still falling, and his cruiser, parked just outside, is blanketed in at least eight inches of the stuff. He tears open several packets of sugar and pours them into his coffee, one after another, until his phone rings. It sounds deafening this late at night. He presses the speaker button and answers.

“Chief, I got a match back on that mirror print at the Bateman house! The print on the right side? It’s not Hank Bateman’s, of course – too small. Nor does it match what I’m assuming are Cindy’s prints. But we got an AFIS hit, from three of the fingers on that hand!”

“What?” the Chief says, his brow furrowing. “On AFIS?”

“Yeah. Sounds crazy, but they match someone from the old print archives – those cards we had scanned into the new system, like ten years ago. It’s a 99% match for a Mary Stefanik. I looked up her case file. Back in ’58, she fatally stabbed her teenage daughter in the bathroom, then fled the scene. Presumed guilty and missing ever since. Stefanik’s neighbors and the local press nicknamed her Bloody Mary.”

“Missing since 1958? How the hell old is she?”

“Ninety-six.”

Downstairs, in a cell with nicked, scuffed walls and a fluorescent ceiling light, Hank Bateman sits on a bed. He wears a jail-issue orange jumpsuit and white socks on his feet. A stainless-steel sink and toilet jut from one wall, and a heavy white door with a rectangular access panel, now closed, faces him. His expression is blank.

“Cindy, baby,” he whispers, tears filling his eyes again. “Where are you? Come back to me. I’ll do anything to get you back!”

A second later, the fluorescent light buzzes noisily, then fluctuates in brightness several times. It blinks off entirely, plunging him into darkness, then comes back on, still buzzing. Hank jolts to awareness, his eyes shifting as the air suddenly feels cold, goose flesh rising on his arms. He stands and looks into the shatter-proof mirror above the sink.

The mirrored words “WANT HER BACK?” drip with blood on the mirror. Behind them stands the same dark-haired woman, still holding Cindy in a choke hold, the huge butcher knife raised upright like a sword in her other hand, dripping blood to the floor – like the floor of his own jail cell – but reflected into some crazy alternate version of reality. Hank approaches the mirror.

“Cindy, baby – can you hear me?”

His daughter appears dazed, semi-conscious, as though under the spell of the woman holding her. The woman’s eyes are like black pits, and hot embers burn at their centers. A sickle grin spreads across her face. Then she seems to float toward the mirror, bringing Cindy with her.

Hank halts, inches from the sink, and points one finger at Cindy while tapping the other against his own chest. Then he swaps the positions of both fingers.

The woman watches. Hank repeats his gesture, this time with more emphasis. He taps his own chest and points into the mirror. Then he stabs an index finger at his daughter and swings it out and away from her, into his cell.

She grins darkly, revealing rows of sharpened, rotting teeth, and nods slowly. A rotting stench assails Hank’s nostrils as she floats ever closer, now larger than life and filling the mirror. He leans forward, brings his face a few inches from the mirror, and shuts his eyes.

4:30 AM

The chief hears it first, as he exits a restroom near the stairs. It sounds like a muffled female voice – shouts and crying – no, wailing, from the basement. He rushes downstairs and follows the din to its source – Cell 4. Bateman’s cell. He flips open the door’s observation window, and the crazed wails pour out and into the hallway. Panicked, he swipes his key card, yanks open the door, and hurries inside.

A few steps in, he sees something is terribly wrong. There, on the bed, the clean cotton sheet now smudged with blood, lies a teenage girl. Long, clotted lacerations line her face and arms, and a narrow, shallow slash across her throat seeps blood.

Hank Bateman is gone.