Shelly emerged from the bathroom and glanced over at Sam on the bed. He looked up from his magazine, smiled warmly at her, and she turned away. He was getting maudlin as he grew older and it was something that had begun to irritate her. He cried now in movies—formulaic, simplistic, emotionally manipulative movies that were transparent in their sentimentality even to her—and it was annoying to hear his light occasional sniffles next to her, to see his finger wipe wetness from the corners of his eyes. He had not cried when David died, nor when his own parents had passed on, yet he was now shedding tears for not particularly well-drawn fictional characters artificially embroiled in embarrassingly contrived plots.

She wondered sometimes why she had married him.

Shaking her head, Shelly walked over to the dresser, picked up her brush and—

There was another face in the mirror.

She blinked, closed her eyes. Looked away, looked back. But the face was still there, an ancient hag with impossibly wrinkled parchment skin, dark eyes narrowed into an evil slit, a hard cruel smile on a nearly lipless mouth.

Mary Worth.

Shelly backed up, all of the saliva in her mouth suddenly gone, but she could not look away. She could see a reversed image of the bedroom in the mirror, Sam sitting up, leaning against the headboard, reading his magazine. In the foreground was the face, just on the other side of the mirrored dresser, staring back at her with malevolent intensity. She’d thought at first that it was unattached to a body, but the longer she looked the more she saw, and she could now make out hunched shoulders beneath a black robe, although she could not say whether the body had been there all along or had materialized before her eyes.

Mary Worth.

It was exactly the face she had expected to see all those years ago, when she and her sisters and her friends had had sleepovers and had played those nighttime party games indulged in by every schoolgirl in America. “Mary Worth” had been their favorite, and they had dutifully taken turns standing before the mirror with their eyes closed repeating “Mary Worth, Mary Worth, Mary Worth…” The story was that if you said her name a hundred times, she would appear. None of them had ever been brave enough to make it to a hundred, chickening out and running squealing back to their beds and sleeping bags somewhere around forty or forty-five, and she knew that she herself had always purposely kept it under fifty, no matter what she told her sisters and her friends, because that, too, seemed a magical number and she’d been afraid that Mary Worth might have been partially present by that point and she did not want to see her at all.