Jamie was walking along the boardwalk at midnight. In his left hand he held a sharpened pocket knife, gleaming in the moonlight. He walked and he walked, glancing from side to side, and then he stopped. On his left, leaning against the low wall sat a beggar.

  The beggar, old and shriveled, sat there, shivering from the bitter cold as he held out his trembling fingers, asking for a hint of gold.

  Jamie, a man of great stature, stared at the beggar, disgust and distrust evident within his eyes.

  He had had a bad day, and without a bit of delay, he decided to take out his anger on this weakened old man who sat in his way.

  He unleashed his fury, and stabbed the poor man in his heart, twisting the blade around and around as to make sure that the old man was dead. Blood poured out, and pooled at the old man's feet, staining them red. Jamie then raised the old man’s hand, now convulsing vehemently, and cut off all of his fingers, except for the forefinger. He then picked up the body, and threw it off of the boardwalk, and into the violent waters below.

  Then he sighed, and dried the knife on the old man’s coat, which lay there tattered and frayed on the side.

  Jamie walked on, giving not a glance back at what used to be the home of a homeless man, now gone.

  Later that night, Jamie returned home. He opened the door and closed it behind him, locking it and checking that it was locked, just to make sure. He then hung his coat on the hanger beside the door and walked to his quarters, undisturbed by the creaking noises he heard as walked on the old floorboards.

  When he entered his room and closed the door, he sat on his bed, a queen sized bed that used to house his late mother, before she died of old age last summer.

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  He sat on this bed and stared at the floor, at the black creases that criss-crossed on the floor, and then looked up, staring at the mirror he sat before.

  It was a large mirror, the size of two men, and it took up the entire wall parallel to his late mothers bed.

  His younger brother had bought it for his mother during her last days, when she had claimed that she needed no other, other than herself.

  He stared at it now, stared at himself, at the self that stared right back at him, the self that stared at himself.

  What he saw in the mirror was just a normal man, an average man, a man one saw anywhere, all the time, a man that could pass you by in the street and you would only notice his fleeting shadow as he passed you by.

  A man, a murderer.

  He knew, right then, that what he was staring at right now, at that very moment, was not a man.

  It was a monster, a being of pure evil and predation, a man he called himself.

  Suddenly, in the mirror, he saw a silhouette, a light line of shadow warping around and forming a picture, the picture of a man.

  Yet the man that he saw in this silhouette was not a monster- no.

  No, it was a disheveled, old, gangly, thin creature, a creature reminiscent of the same old man that Jamie had killed earlier that night.

  The silhouette shrunk, getting smaller and smaller, until it reached the size of a single black point, hovering just above his heart.

  Then, out of the black point came a blackened and scorched finger. The finger was wrinkled and shriveled, trembling uncontrollably as it oozed out of the black point in the mirror. After the finger came a hand, equally as wrinkled and shriveled, yet no other fingers stuck out of the hand, except for the single scorched one that was now raised, pointing directly at Jamie’s heart.

  The hand with the finger then fully detached itself from the mirror, yet stayed still in the air, hovering as it convulsed ever so slightly in place.

  Then it shot out, stabbing straight into Jamie's heart, twisting and turning, turning, turning, drilling a hole into Jamie’s still beating heart.

  Jamie closed his eyes, and then everything turned black.

  The next day, Jamie was found dead by his cleaner, and the news rocked the town.

  The police concluded that he had committed suicide, since he was found lying down on his bed with a pocket knife impaled into his heart, and his hands coiled around the handle, as if in an attempt to pull it back out.