In the Russian-language segment of the World Wide Web, there is a "terrible" urban legend about a mystical artifact that can distort human faces beyond recognition. This happened, according to this myth, about a decade ago somewhere in central Russia. The story begins with the disappearance of a young woman who accompanied her husband to the city through the forest, but did not return. Then, in the same village, a 62-year-old man, who went to collect wild garlic, "disappeared". No sooner had the investigation begun than two children disappeared. The guards believed they were dealing with a serial killer and requested help from the city. The villagers were asked to stay at home and not interfere with the investigation, but can you keep the angry peasants?
The next morning a local girl was looking for a lost goat near the forest and witnessed something frightening. According to the schoolgirl, she found herself at an abandoned house on the outskirts, surrounded by impenetrable thickets of bushes and thistles, and suddenly heard someone breathing in the tall grass. Either a man or a beast, and he breathes with difficulty, whistling, as if drawing air through a tube. The police authority (at that time there was still a police force in Russia) did not work on the men, and they immediately jumped off.
The alleged maniac was discovered first. He committed suicide by erecting something like a guillotine, from which a flat heavy stone fell on the block. With this load, he smashed his head. The bodies of the killer's victims were found in the cellar. Two of them were beaten with a stick, and two more, a girl and a pensioner, died of cardiac arrest. The madman lived there for about two weeks. He was emaciated and obviously did not eat anything. Among the trash in the house was his note with the words:
I beg you, forgive me, but they saw me. They were shouting so … I didn't want them to tell anyone about me. Remember, any mirror is suitable, any!
Naturally, at first, the law enforcement officers did not understand the meaning of this incomprehensible message. Even more mysterious was the fact that behind the house was a pile of glass chips, which consisted of crushed mirrors. The killer even took out a mirror from the powder box of the woman he had kidnapped and also pounded it into small crumbs. But the oddities did not end there.
Mysterious postcard
We decided to try to identify the maniac by the crushed skull. The pathologist who took on the case concluded that the bone fragments were twice as large as necessary, and attached to the report a rough reconstruction of the killer's head, which looked extremely ridiculous and ridiculous. The jaws were extended forward, forming a kind of tube; the eye sockets turned out to be tear-shaped, turned towards this implausible snout.
Promotional video:
The story received a certain resonance, and all sorts of curious people periodically began to appear at the crime scene. In an abandoned house, two students who had recorded their excursion on a dictaphone discovered an antique postcard from the 19th century dedicated to good manners. The postcard depicted a girl sitting in front of a mirror and showing her tongue to her reflection. The card said:
Well-bred children do not grimace, as they can remain so forever.
The next find of the couple was a dusty mirror, lying under the rubble and apparently not noticed by the madman. The dictaphone recording ended with the following dialogue:
Girl: Don't wipe it off with your sleeve, let me find you some rag now.
Guy: Look, the mirror seems to be crooked. Look, what my roooooooo …
This "o" sound continued to drag on, as if the young man could not close his mouth, and became louder until it was blocked by the heart-rending squeal of his girlfriend.
The girl's lifeless body was found in the same place, she died of a heart failure. The guy committed suicide by jumping into an empty well. His skull was deformed in an incredible way: the upper jaw lengthened and bent so that it reached the eyebrows, spreading the eyes and swallowing the nose, and the lower jaw fused with the collarbones. As for the girl, her face was disfigured only on one side - the one that was facing the mirror. The student's right eye socket and eye were impossibly enlarged in her grotesque expression of horror. There was no mirror in the room.
The mystical postcard, having done its job, disappeared
Four days later, the investigator in charge of this case did not go to work and sent one of his colleagues a voice mail with the following content:
Come to me urgently. I leave the front door open and I'll be in the bedroom myself. Don't be afraid of what you see there. I didn't need to look at that damn postcard. It all happened early in the morning when I woke up and went to the bathroom to shave. It didn't hurt, and it doesn't hurt at all now. Any mirror is really suitable, and it is not even necessary to look into it, it is enough just to be in its field of reflection. If you try to fix it in front of the mirror, it only gets worse. I have normal vision, although I can only see my own eyes now, a very unusual effect. Hearing is also normal. The pressure is high, and the pulse is rapid. Temperature 35.4 degrees. I apologize for the fact that scientists will not be able to examine me alive, but I cannot exist in this form. I don't write a will, but I would likeso that the daughter received an apartment from her first marriage.
When the police entered the man's bedroom, they found him lying on the floor with an oilcloth under his head. He shot himself in the right ear, pressing the pillow against the left. The way the head was, immediately reminded the investigator's colleagues of his habit of frowning. A huge vertical slit ran across the man's face, from forehead to chin, into which his mouth, nose and eyes fell. The wretch's eye sockets were opposite each other, and having shot in the ear, he knocked out both eyes.
The department was disbanded within a month, and most of the law enforcement officers involved in the investigation of these horrible events changed their line of work. The ill-fated postcard mysteriously disappeared, and its appearance has not yet been reported …
One could not believe this story, considering it a fiction, a terrible tale, a violent fantasy of the author, if not for one esoteric saying: a person cannot come up with anything just like that, because even the most unthinkable story is nothing more than a reflection of really existing events, even if it happened somewhere out there - in countless parallel worlds (read the interesting material about this under the link), but existing as real as our being. The author, as a rule, just spies on all this, say, in a dream. As for the events described, we can say with certainty only one thing - they happened quite recently somewhere in central Russia …