The day was cold and unfriendly as I walked up to my new apartment home, nervous. The bleak hallway was cold and gray. The dim lights and their shadows unwelcome. And as the numbers on the off-white doors slowly counted down to my number “865”, I felt cold droplets of sweat run down my chest and neck. Because of my perspiration, the woolen flannel that I was wearing started to make my skin itch and tingle. Also because of the way my shoes sank into the thick carpet, along side the itching, the uncomfortable surroundings began to get to me. Every shadow seemed to hide a demon and every door hid a separated corridor of Hell just waiting for me step inside. And the harsh, snowy wind outside didn’t help. I laughed softly and breathed a sigh of relief as the door to my apartment came into view. I had read before the stories of ghosts and murderers and all sorts of atrocities that had been found in rented rooms and old homes. As I fumbled for my key one of them came to mind: Racheal had just moved into the ancient house on Magdalene Avenue and was pleased with the buy. The birds sang outside and the sky was clear and blue. And as she watched a sparrow alight on the branch of a huge willow tree outside her home her spirits lifted. At first she had been afraid that the house would have been trashed on the inside, for the furniture was still within being forgotten by the owner. But as she could see the house was securely in place with none of the windows broken. Then a bit later she realized that the home wasn’t paid for yet and money was bound to be a problem. But she could worry about that later. All she needed to do was open the door. Very carefully she walked out of her car and into the canopy over the doorway. None of the sunlight filtered out to her and this made her even more scared, but there were no bogeymen to be afraid of. Quietly she opened the door. Stale air rushed itself at her as if in a greeting. Racheal coughed and waved the dust away with a carefully manicured hand, walking a bit fasted to see what was inside. What she saw made her gasp in surprise.... “Stop it!” I told myself sternly as stepped inside my room. Inside I fumbled for a light switch and tripped over something. In the nearly pitch black room I crawled over to what must of been a light and flipped it on. When the dim light evaded the apartment room I looked around at it, confused at why such a miserable place was built. The sheets were black and the walls a greyish yellow. The wooden framed painting of a white swan did go perfectly with the ivory curtains, but their fashion I did not appreciate. For the last tenant had left the blinds open, and what they reviled was the most disgusting sight I could of ever seen. It was.... On the floor were literally thousands of magazines. Some were News Articles and some were Porno, but all littered the ground. Racheal walked dumbfounded on the mess, her mouth wide in shock. The mass wasn’t very stable and her high heeled shoes kept digging into the cracks and the rotting underneath. The air was the smell of garbage. Forcing herself to look up at the ceiling she made her way to the next room, where the stacked piles of magazines thankfully thinned out to reveal a wooden floor. The area of the room was large but only with one piece of furniture (a large round table with a hole in the center) and wallpaper showing women, some dressed like queens, some in rags and some bare naked, all with there faces turned so that you couldn’t see them. Racheal walked onward through the kitchen, bathroom, and living room, each bare with the same wallpaper. A few magazines were on the floors but not as many as the main entrance. As she continued exploring all the rooms but what she guessed as the master bedroom, Racheal found them to be the same. Only the last room remained. A dead cat!!! There was a dead, white persian hanging by a nail in it’s shoulder outside my window, on a red brick wall that was apparently the scenery. Immediately I went to the window and tried to open it but it was painted shut. With a last look at the poor animal I grimaced and searched the room for a phone. Careful not to trip over the rug I surveyed the room, searched each drawer, and even looked under the bed to find my troubles were in vain. I knew that I couldn’t go to sleep with the thing outside and couldn’t bare to go down the hall again, so what could I do? After careful thought I decided to see if the window was really painted shut or just stuck. I paced up to it once again and with every bit of strength I could muster I braced the window edge and pulled upward. There was a cracking noise and the glass shifted a quarter of an inch to 3 let loose the thick smell of smog in my room. I smiled happily and set to working on the window. The next time I tried I managed to pull it up four inches and after that eight more. After about two minutes the window was completely open and with a groan I placed the cat inside for a burial at the garbage can in the morning. Only later as I changed into my bedclothes did I notice a shadow where there shouldn’t be one. And to my horror I saw it come closer and closer.... Racheal stood there breathing hard in front of the gigantic door in a absolute silence save her beating heart. “Come now, girl” she said to herself in a pacifying way “You can’t just leave the last room untouched now after all you’ve seen.” But doubt still gnawed restlessly in the back of her head as she pulled open the door and walked in. The floor of the room was covered in magazines(all exotic) and the wallpaper was different. The women were all facing toward her. But that wasn’t all, for there was a dark figure in the room with her. And it was holding a knife. A sharp gasp escaped her lips as the person turned around. It was her! The figure had the exact same face and the exact same body and the exact same everything. Racheal turned and ran. The woman came after her calling unheard things in unknown languages. Racheal turned quickly and ran into the dining room downstairs and screamed in horror, for she now saw what she had failed to see before. The women painted on the wall paper had her face! The heads now turned out to the room and the cloth lips were moving in a single word Racheal managed to make out. “Stay”. It was a cat. Not the one that had been hanging on the computer but an orange tawny one with brown stripes. “Meow?” It mewed piteously as it made it’s way across the dismal floor. My heart melted. “Oh, you sweet thing,” I cried as I picked it up and held it to my chest. I carried it over to the bathroom and opened up one of my bags. Inside was a half of a ham sandwich that I had gotten about two hours ago. I took it out of it’s insulated wrapper and set it in front of the cat and watched to see what it would do. It sniffed the meat. Then put it’s face up to the air, nose quivering. I watched 4 silently, amused smile fading, as the animal crept up to the shoe box where the dead, impaled cat lay. A low growl escaped it’s throat and in a rage it leaped up to me and bit my cheek hard. I threw the cat back and it disappeared into the crack in the doorway as I fell to the floor, unconscious. Racheal screamed and hit her knee on the edge of the table. She let out a low moan which added to the sounds of the figure as she entered the room baring the knife. Before the woman plunged the dagger into her heart, Racheal asked in a whisper, “What is this place?” The woman smiled and leaned to whisper something in her ear. When Racheal heard what it was she screamed a final time and died even before the knife came down. Of fright. It was 2 weeks later when the manager came in wanting rent when he saw the body of Hilayem Minca sprawled on the floor. The burly man looked at it for a second and groaned. “Not another one” He muttered as he tore up the bill. Those stupid cats had been infesting the building for weeks with their disease. He had thought that he had rid himself of the last one but maybe one escaped. He picked of the half eaten carcass of what once was Hilayem Minca and tossed it into the freezer with several others and dusted his hands. That’s one more attendant gone without paying at The Hotel Marquise, sometimes vacant, sometimes full, but always has some body in it. As Racheal gave her last breath the man sitting outside laughed. He always loved the look on the faces of his victims. For hunting and trapping is a fair sport with much amusement and the man in the purple tunic loved amusement. “The house of Mirrors is my best creation” he giggled as he waved his hand to vanish to outdoor illusion. The people who go in never know where they really are. But when they find out in that special little torture house the expressions are great, but the blood is even greater. With this the man in the purple tunic skipped merrily down the fiery plains of Hell and hummed a happy song. Today was a good day.