It was a long time ago, about 14-15 years ago. I was in the hospital with some kind of cold nonsense, I was 18 years old. One evening, a girl in serious condition with peritonitis was brought in, operated on and placed in the postoperative ward. We, walkers and curious from idleness, went to visit her. Her name was Ira, she was about 28-30 years old. Despite the successful operation, she looked somehow bad: pale, silent, reluctant to make contact. Well, okay, people can be different...
When she got better, she started talking to a girl from our department.: They were about the same age, so they became friends — they went to the cafeteria together, for walks. Sometimes they invited me with them, although we had no common interests: I was a teenager for them, but in order not to stay with boring women in the ward, I walked with them like a tail. The second girl was from western Ukraine — her name was Mariana, she worked as an assistant prosecutor. But this is by the way, so that it is clear that we are not talking about "downtrodden" rural workers.
Ira once told me that she lives with her husband and little son in a communal apartment, and her neighbor was an old woman who was as mean as hell, and she was just living with a young family. I won't go into the details of communal life, but it was all a real nightmare. When Ira's son was born, they began to think about expanding their housing. This grandmother died here, and Ira got her room. There was no limit to her happiness. That's where it all started. One morning, washing in the bathroom, raising her face to the mirror, Ira screamed in horror — an old woman with disheveled gray hair, a wrinkled face and a toothless mouth looked at her from the mirror.
I will not describe the horror of what is happening, but after finishing the story, Ira said: "Girls, I've already forgotten what I look like—in any mirror it's not me, but a scary old woman. I haven't looked in a mirror for about a month now, I don't tell my family — I don't want to scare them, and they might take me for a madwoman, but that's how I want to live!" Well, we had a little fun and went our separate ways.
A couple of days passed, Mariana looked into my room and said, "Olya, can we sit here with you? A relative from the village came to see me, but it's noisy in our ward, you can't really talk." And she came in with a woman in her forties. We sat down on the bed, and then Mariana said to me, "Come on, let's go out." I replied that I was reading a book and would not go anywhere. She then said, "Well, whatever you want, but then don't be surprised at anything and don't leave the ward." I thought let them talk, we're not bothering each other.
After a few minutes, I realized that something was wrong. Ira was sitting with her head bowed, and this woman was whispering some spells and yawning, tears began to flow from her eyes. I stopped reading and sat like a mouse, afraid to move. The woman was probably removing the damage. But what happened next shocked me. They went to the washbasin, turned on the water, the woman took Ira by the hair and began to wash her, pulling her hair and slapping her cheeks, saying: "Old witch, leave her alone, go to the realm of the dead, you have no place among the living!". From time to time, she lifted the crying Ira to the mirror by her hair and said: "Who do you see?" Ira was crying and saying, "The old woman." Then the woman would bend her over to the water again, wash her, beat her, and lift her by the hair to the mirror. I don't remember how long this nightmare lasted: I was just neither alive nor dead from fear. But when Ira lost consciousness, this woman shouted at me, "Come help me, what are you looking at?!"
We put her on the bed. After a couple of minutes, coming to her senses, Ira went to the mirror and cried: "Oh, there I am! I see my hair, you know, not gray locks and a toothless mouth!" I was so shocked that I would not have been surprised if I had discovered the graying hair on my head. When everyone left, I no longer stayed in this room for a minute and asked for another place that night. I was discharged the next day. I do not know anything more about the fate of this girl.
Over time, the story has been forgotten, but sometimes I think about it and think how much more there is in the world of the unidentified and unexplained. And very scary.
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