This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Dopabeane on 2024-12-21 22:17:38+00:00.

On February 10, 1998, emergency services responded to a domestic violence call in Fargo, North Dakota. They arrived on scene to discover a semi-conscious woman who bore signs of severe injuries and mutilation consistent with torture.

The bedroom in which she was discovered contained bloodstained ligatures, bedding, clothing, and a variety of weapons including a baseball bat, a hatchet, a kitchen knife, a machete, and dumbbell plates, all of which bore signs of use.

In the center of the room was a large shattered mirror. Broken glass covered the room. One shard approximately eight inches in length and three inches in width was lodged in the victim’s stomach.

The victim, who was clearly delirious, told officers that her boyfriend did this to her. “But it’s not his fault. He was crazy, and the mirror made him crazier.”

Despite extensive search efforts, no other individual was discovered on scene, including the victim’s boyfriend. It should be noted that this man was never located, and to date is considered missing.

EMS transported the victim to the hospital, where emergency surgery commenced.

No matter what treatment was rendered, the wound inflicted by the large mirror shard would not heal.

After significant medical intervention, it stopped bleeding but did not knit, effectively leaving the victim with a small cavern in her abdomen.

Approximately two weeks into her hospital stay, one of the nurses providing treatment went into hysterics and refused to go back into her room. When asked, the nurse explained that while performing wound care, she “looked inside the patient’s wound and saw a room.”

According to the nurse, the patient herself was somehow inside this room inside the wound, smiling back at her.

The patient was not capable of providing any additional information. At this time, she was still extremely mentally unstable owing to her ordeal, and medically fragile.

Shortly after this, the patient was taken for further study with the goal of closing her wound once and for all.

The details of this study are disturbing and fundamentally irrelevant.

Suffice to say, the medical professionals studying her wound also observed this bizarre “room” described by the nurse. Following a distinctly unfortunate incident relating to this room, hospital staff facilitated her transfer to the custody of AHH-NASCU.

The inmate, Ms. Pauley, has been with the agency ever since. She is currently a T-Class agent assigned to the agency director.

Ms. Pauley’s ability is simply astonishing. In simplest terms, she is the keeper of an open-ended pocket dimension. This dimension takes the form of a living room paneled in mirrors. Ms. Pauley says the space is identical to the living room of her childhood home except for the mirror walls.

The entrance to this pocket reality is the wound cut into Ms. Pauley’s abdomen by the mirror shard. Ms. Pauley and Administration both agree that the spectacular properties of this wound derive directly from the properties of the broken mirror that inflicted the injury. After taking her into custody, Agency personnel attempted to find additional shards of the mirror but were unsuccessful.

Notably, the pocket-dimension includes a front door that, when opened, leads to other locations. Previously, Ms. Pauley claimed to have no idea where the door led. However, following the recent escape of Inmate 70 (Ward 2, “The Man Who Never Smiles”) the agency learned that Ms. Pauley not only knows where the door leads to, but can control where it goes.

Given Inmate 70’s unique abilities, Ms. Pauley was not disciplined for his containment breach. However, on 12/14/24, when she was caught trying to help Inmate 22 (Ward 1, “Lifeblood”) breach containment.

It should be noted that Inmate 22 reported Ms. Pauley of her own volition, although she displayed extreme emotional distress at the idea that Ms. Pauley would “get in trouble.”

After this incident, Ms. Pauley was fitted with a device that removes her ability to control whether to open or close her pocket-dimension. When the device is active, her body is intact, the wound appears to be healed, and no going in or out. The agency director currently monitors this device himself.

Ms. Pauley is a 51-year-old adult female. She is 5’9” tall, with brown hair and blue eyes. She suffers from major depressive disorder and anxiety. Despite extensive therapy and full compliance with her treatment plans, she experiences significant distress whenever she looks into a mirror.

Ms. Pauley has historically been extremely cooperative with Agency directives, but due to recent events she was reclassified to uncooperative status.

At the director’s discretion, she still maintains T-Class status, albeit in a highly restricted capacity.

Interview Subject: Polly Pocket

Classification String: Uncooperative / Destructible / Gaian / Constant/ Low / Apeili

Interviewers: Rachele B. & Christophe W.

Interview Date: 12/21/2024

My boyfriend used to talk to mirrors.

He told me that talking to his reflection was a coping mechanism he developed as a kid. I had a few of my own weird coping mechanisms, so I understood. I didn’t like it — mirrors have always made me uneasy — but I understood.

Besides, talking to the mirror wasn’t the only bizarre thing he did, and certainly not the scariest. Not by a long shot.

Crazy is a bad word, especially for people like me. I hate using it, even now.

But looking back, Philip was crazy.

But at the time, his particular kind of crazy felt familiar. He felt comfortable. He felt like home. Everyone wants to find home, me included.

So what are you supposed to do when crazy feels like home?

No one else has ever felt like home to me. Only him.

And he wasn’t a monster. Far from it. He was sweet and thoughtful, and stable enough to get custody of his baby sister, Alice, who adored him. They had the same eyes, this spectacular pale green.

Most importantly, Philip was sure about me from the very beginning. He showed it, every day. He once told me that he knew we were meant to be from our very first conversation. Like he’d known me his entire life. Or that we’d known each other in a thousand prior lives.

I didn’t believe in any of that, of course. But I believed the way he treated me.

And he treated me extremely well.

Above all, he was so considerate. It’d take days to tell you everything he did for me. But just as an example, I once told him no one had ever read me a bedtime story. From that point on, every night before we went to sleep, he’d tell me a story. Sometimes fairy tales, sometimes urban legends, usually stories he made up himself. Falling asleep next to him while he whispered a story in my ear is one of my favorite memories, even now.

I asked him once where he got his story ideas. “From the mirror,” he teased. “I talk to it, and it talks back.”

In a lot of ways, he was wonderful.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Our lows transcendently awful. But the highs were correspondingly spectacular. And even on the worst days, we never went to sleep angry. That was a first for me. Even if we’d been fighting, even if we’d been screaming, even if we were angry and even if I was scared, that all melted away as soon as we got into bed and he started telling a story.

That’s why it was so easy to stay with him.

As for the things that made it hard to stay — well, that’s where my own weird childhood coping mechanism came into play.

When I was a little girl, I used to imagine a little pocket behind my heart. A hidden, dark, secure, and above all safe place where I put all my bad feelings.

That pocket is where I shoved all my fears and doubts about Philip, and it’s where I hid all the instincts that screamed at me to leave him.

There were a lot of those. Too many. But the heart-pocket was magic, so whenever I had too many bad feelings for the pocket to hold, it grew to accommodate them.

Once, after this particularly insane fight, I could practically feel it expanding. I felt it stretching from my heart to my hips, gently displacing my organs and grazing along my bones. I was sure I’d be able to press down on my stomach and feel it hiding, firm and heavy and full of all the darkness that threatened my light.

I hated our fights. I hated how they made me feel. I hated how they made him feel. I hated that they were never about anything important. I hated that Alice had to hear them.

Most of all, I hated how he talked to the mirror after every one of those fights.

Because no matter what he said about coping mechanisms, he only ever got worse after he talked to mirrors.

There was one day, maybe a week after the new year, where we basically started fighting the minute we woke up.

Nothing I did helped. No matter what I did, everything just kept getting worse and worse, snowballing into something uncontrollable. I could feel it in my gut and in the depths of my heart-pocket:

We were headed for disaster.

And that night, he didn’t get into bed with me. He stayed in the bathroom, talking to his mirror.

What I heard him say was terrifying.

He kept repeating Every life, we kill each other.

And he kept saying he needed to sever “the soul tie.” How pain is the only way. That’s what he kept saying: Pain is the only way. The greater the pain, the cleaner the cut. You have to do it. It’s the only way to end this forever. It’s the only way to save each other.

I tried to shove all the fear into my heart-pocket, but…

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