A Relic from Another Realm: The Cursed Mirror Box

Uncle Abdelhak and the Suspicious Trip

My name is Nabil, I am 28 years old, and I live in Casablanca with my family. My uncle Abdelhak was a mysterious man in every sense of the word. He traveled frequently to places no one knew anything about, disappearing for weeks only to return laden with strange objects: small statues, engraved stones, and books in languages we couldn't understand. My mother always told my father: "This brother of yours is playing with fire; one day he will bring disaster upon us." My father would just laugh and say: "Abdelhak is just an antique enthusiast, nothing more."

But in the winter of 2023, my uncle returned from a trip to eastern Turkey and he was completely different. His face was pale, his eyes sunken as if he hadn't slept in days. He brought with him a black wooden box, decorated with intricate silver engravings. The box was about the size of a jewelry box, but it was unnaturally heavy. When he placed it on the table, I felt something strange, as if the air in the room had suddenly become heavier.

Opening the Box

I asked him: "What is this, Uncle?" He looked at me with a gaze I didn't understand at the time, as if he was apologizing in advance for something. He said: "This is a very ancient relic I found with a merchant in a village near Lake Van. He told me it's a remnant of the Urartu civilization, over three thousand years old." He opened the box slowly. Inside lay a small circular mirror, no more than fifteen centimeters in diameter, surrounded by a bronze frame engraved with strange symbols resembling open eyes. The surface of the mirror was not like ordinary mirrors; it was dark, as if you were looking into a pool of black water.

As I stepped closer to look into it, my uncle grabbed my hand violently and said: "No! Do not look directly into it. This is no ordinary mirror." His voice was trembling in a way I had never known. My uncle was a brave man who feared nothing, or so I thought. He closed the box, placed it in his room's closet, and locked it with a key. He told me: "No one must ever open this box. Never. I am looking for a safe way to dispose of it."

Voices in the Night

That night, the strange occurrences began. I was sleeping in my room when I heard a faint, repetitive knocking sound. Knock... knock... knock. It was coming from my uncle's room upstairs. I tiptoed up and stood outside his door. The knocking was coming from inside the closet. Not random knocking, but rhythmic, as if something inside was knocking to get out. I pressed my ear against the closet door and heard something that froze the blood in my veins: the sound of whispers, many of them, overlapping, as if dozens of people were speaking simultaneously in a language I couldn't understand.

I fled to my room and locked the door. I didn't sleep that night. In the morning, I told my uncle what I had heard. He didn't seem surprised. He said with a terrifying calmness: "Nabil, what is in this box is not of our world. The merchant who sold it to me warned me. He said that the makers of this mirror used it to communicate with entities from another dimension. Entities that are neither Jinn nor demons, but something much older."

The Wrong Reflections

A week later, my little sister Meriem started acting strangely. She would stand in front of any mirror in the house and stare into it for long minutes. When we asked her what she was doing, she would say: "I am talking to the boy in the mirror." My mother thought she was playing, like children do with imaginary friends. But I started noticing something horrifying: when Meriem stood in front of the bathroom mirror, her reflection moved slightly differently than she did. Not by a large margin, but enough to notice if you looked closely. She would smile, but the reflection's smile would be wider, in a way that didn't look human.

One night, I woke up to Meriem's screams. I ran to her room and found her sitting on the bed crying and pointing at the small mirror on her wall. She said: "The boy came out of the mirror! He was standing right here! He has black eyes with no white!" I hugged her and tried to calm her down. I looked at the mirror but saw nothing. However, I noticed that there was condensation on the mirror's surface, as if someone had been breathing on it from the other side.

My Uncle Tries to Get Rid of It

My uncle Abdelhak's condition worsened day by day. He stopped eating properly and spent hours in his room reading old books and talking on the phone with people in different languages. One day, I heard him screaming on the phone: "I told you it's not a normal mirror! It's a door! And the door has been opened, and I don't know how to close it!" One evening, I found him trying to burn the box in the backyard. But the wood wouldn't catch fire. He poured gasoline on it and lit it; the fire burned around the box but didn't touch it, as if an invisible field was protecting it.

He tried to smash the mirror with a hammer. When he struck it, the hammer bounced back with immense force and broke his hand. We took him to the hospital, crying and repeating: "It cannot be destroyed. It cannot. It's protecting itself." The doctor put a cast on his hand and looked at us with concern, thinking my uncle had lost his mind.

The Final Night of Revelation

On the final night before my uncle disappeared, something happened that I will never forget as long as I live. I woke up at 3:00 AM to the sound of my uncle calling my name in a very calm voice. I found him sitting in the living room in total darkness. The box was open in front of him, and the black mirror was placed on the table. He said: "Sit down, Nabil. You must understand." I sat across from him and saw that his face was wet with tears.

He said: "This mirror is not for communicating with entities. It's a window. A real window overlooking another place. And the problem is that whoever is on the other side can see us too. And since I first opened the box in Turkey, they understood I am here. They understood my family is here. And they are getting closer. Not just through the mirror, but through every reflective surface. Every mirror, every window, every turned-off phone screen."

I looked at the black mirror on the table. At first, I saw nothing but blackness. But slowly, as if my eyes were adjusting to another kind of darkness, I began to see something. Shapes. Many of them. Moving behind the surface of the mirror like fish in dark water. And when I focused more, I saw a face. A completely white face with black eyes—no whites, no irises, just like two holes in a skull. The face was smiling. And it was looking directly at me.

I screamed and knocked the mirror over. But it didn't break. My uncle picked it up, put it back in the box, and closed it. He looked at me and said: "Now you have seen them too. And they have seen you." The next morning, my uncle Abdelhak disappeared. He didn't take his clothes, his phone, or his wallet. Only the box disappeared with him. We never found him. We reported it to the police, they searched everywhere, but he vanished as if he had never existed.

It has been over two years now. Meriem recovered and returned to normal after we covered every mirror in the house for months. But I never recovered. Because every time I look into a mirror, any mirror, anywhere, I see that white face smiling from over my shoulder. And when I turn around, no one is there. But it is there. In the mirror. Waiting.