The Mirror in the Costume Shop 👻 | Horror Story

I tried on three costumes. The mirror showed me a fourth — a white sheet. The kind they pull over a body.

The Shop That Only Opens in October

Marlow's Costumes sits at the far end of our street, squeezed between a shuttered bookshop and a laundromat that never seems to close. For eleven months of the year, the shop is dark — brown paper taped inside the windows, dust on the sills, a small hand-painted sign hanging in the door that reads only: OCTOBER. Nobody I know has ever seen it open in any other month, and old Mr. Marlow would not have it any other way. "Halloween is a season," he likes to say, "not a day."

I went in on the last Friday of October, the night before my friend Sana's party, hunting for anything that was not a witch's hat. The shop is far deeper than it looks from the street: rack after rack of costumes stretching back into the gloom, the air thick with mothballs and old velvet, and a little brass bell over the door that keeps ringing a second too long after it has shut behind you. Down the back corridor there are three dressing rooms. The first two have curtains. The third has a door — and the air turns colder the closer you get to it, the way the air goes cold at the top of cellar stairs. The last dressing room at the back is always cold. Everyone in our town knows it. Nobody talks about why.

Three Costumes

Costume one, a pirate, behaved itself. I stood in the first room, turned left and right in front of an ordinary spotted mirror, and saw only myself: tired eyes, a plastic sword, a hat that would not sit straight. Costume two, a vampire, was still normal — black cape, chalky face paint, my own reflection grinning back with plastic fangs. If anything strange lived in Marlow's Costumes, it was keeping quiet.

But the old clerk kept watching. Every time I stepped out of a room, Mr. Marlow was somewhere down the corridor, pretending to fold capes, his eyes sliding toward the third door and then away. When I reached for the third room's handle with the last costume over my arm, he finally spoke. "That mirror's picky," he said. "It only works for some."

I laughed, because at sixteen you laugh at warnings. I wish I had asked him what "works" meant.

The Fourth Costume

Costume three was a clown — white face, a red grin painted ear to ear, the kind of costume that is already a little bit horrible before anything supernatural gets involved. I locked the door of the third room and turned to the mirror, an old full-length glass in a dark wooden frame, taller than me, older than the shop.

The mirror didn't show the clown.

It showed me standing exactly where I stood — but not dressed as a clown. I was wrapped head to toe in a white sheet, the way the dead are wrapped, with nothing of me visible at all: no face, no hands, only the long outline of a body that might have been mine. The fluorescent light hummed. The room was so cold my breath came out in a little cloud — and inside the glass, the sheet rose, just slightly, around where the chest would be. Then it settled. Then it rose again.

Like it was breathing.

I lifted one hand, stupidly, toward the glass, and my fingertips met a cold so deep it felt less like a surface and more like the surface of black water — as if, if I pushed, my hand would go through. I snatched it back. That was when Mr. Marlow banged on the door, hard enough to rattle the frame. "Whatever it showed you," he called, "don't buy it. Buying it is agreeing."

I got out of that costume and out of that shop faster than I have ever moved in my life. I bought nothing. I told myself, all the way home, that I had followed the only rule that mattered.

She's Ready

I almost convinced myself it was a trick — some projector, some Halloween gimmick, the old man's idea of theatre. Then, that night, I dreamed. I was walking down a long white hallway under lights that hummed the same hum as the third dressing room, and halfway along it stood a gurney, and on the gurney was a shape under a white sheet. A nurse stood beside it, and when she turned around she had my mother's face, and she spoke in my mother's voice, gently, the way she speaks to me through my bedroom door in the morning. "She's ready," the nurse said.

I woke at three in the morning with my heart slamming, and I did not sleep again. But morning has a way of making cowards of us all — by breakfast, the dream had shrunk to a story I could almost laugh about. Almost. I told no one. That was my mistake. Because the mirror had already done its work in me, and the next evening it reached for the person I would do anything to protect.

It Showed Him Too

My little brother is ten, and on the last evening of October he still needed a costume for the school parade. Marlow's was the only shop in town with anything left, so my mother sent the two of us — with a warning to be quick, and no idea what she was sending us back into. I had a plan: in and out, first two rooms only, and my brother where I could see him every second.

I was at the till, paying for his skeleton pyjamas, when I heard him laughing — that high, delighted laugh — from the back corridor. He had found the door with no curtain. The forbidden one. By the time I ran, he was already inside the third room, the clown costume's mask dangling from one hand, grinning at the great dark mirror.

And in the mirror, under the fluorescent light, my little brother was wearing a white sheet too. Head to toe. And very slowly, like the surface of deep water breathing, it rose — and settled — and rose.

"The Mirror in the Costume Shop" is an original narrated horror story from The Haunted Reel — Halloween calendar day 6. Because the mirror doesn't show you how you die. It shows you what you'll be wearing when it comes to collect.