Chapter 5: The Collector of Reflections

Chapter 5: The Collector of Reflections

The drive home was a blur of righteous fury. The memory of the crooked figure on the road, a brand of searing light behind his eyes, had burned away the fog of his grief. He wasn't a victim of fate; he was the target of a predator. The whispers from the dark corners of the car, the sibilant hisses that seemed to emanate from the reflective trim on the dashboard, no longer sounded like random, mocking noises. They sounded hungry.

Back inside the house, the atmosphere had shifted. The oppressive silence was gone, replaced by a low, predatory hum. It felt as if his discovery at the crash site had tripped a wire. The entity was no longer just watching him; it was closing in. He walked past the wreckage of the bedroom mirror, the thousands of glass shards glittering like fallen stars on the floor. He saw them not as a symbol of destruction, but as the discarded shell of a creature that had revealed itself.

He went to his office, a room that had been his sanctuary of logic and order. Blueprints were still rolled up in tubes, pencils lay sharpened and ready, and the clean lines of his architectural models stood on the shelves. It felt like a room belonging to a different man, from a different lifetime. He sat down at his desk and flipped open his laptop, the familiar glow of the screen a small comfort in the encroaching darkness.

His fingers flew across the keyboard, his search terms a frantic litany of his new reality.

The Crooked Man’s Mile.

The first results were mundane. Tourist websites and county records, detailing the road’s history as a winding, accident-prone stretch of old highway. There were mentions of the historical marker, calling the "Crooked Man" a quaint piece of local folklore, a boogeyman invented to explain away treacherous turns and poor lighting. It was a lie, a comfortable blanket thrown over a centuries-old nightmare.

He dug deeper, adding the symbol to his search. Crooked spiral symbol Route 9.

This led him down a rabbit hole of obscure forums and digitized local archives. He found a scanned newspaper article from 1938, the headline stark: ANOTHER TRAGEDY ON THE CROOKED MILE. LONE DRIVER LOST. The article described a man found dead in his car, having crashed into the very same oak tree. The cause was listed as a heart attack, but a witness quoted at the end mentioned the driver had been screaming about a “shadowy man made of smoke and broken branches” in the road moments before he collapsed. The official report dismissed it as delirium.

He found another article from 1956. A family of four, vanished. Their car was found abandoned on the shoulder, doors wide open, the engine cold. There was no sign of a struggle. The last person to see them, a gas station attendant miles back, said the mother had seemed unnerved, repeatedly checking her reflection in the car’s wing mirror as if trying to wipe something off the glass.

Each story was a different tragedy, but they were all beads threaded on the same dark string. They all happened on that road. They were all tinged with a note of psychological distress, a hint of madness that preceded the event. They all reeked of the same predatory presence that had stalked Elena.

The final click was the one that changed everything. It led him to a post on a small, outdated paranormal investigation forum. The thread was titled "Local Legends: The Collector of Reflections." The post, written a decade ago by a user named "TownHistorian," was a chilling synthesis of all the folklore he had just read, laid bare with terrifying clarity.

Liam leaned closer to the screen, his breath fogging the air.

“Most people think the Crooked Man is just a story,” the post began. “They’re wrong. It’s not a ghost. It’s a parasite, an ancient thing tied to that specific stretch of road—The Crooked Mile. It’s drawn to intense emotion, specifically the potent cocktail of grief, guilt, and fear that often accompanies long journeys or moments of crisis.”

Liam’s blood turned to ice. He thought of his own suffocating guilt, the gnawing grief that had been his constant companion. He had been a walking feast.

“It doesn’t just haunt,” the post continued. “It hunts. Its method is unique. It uses reflections as doorways. Not just mirrors, but any reflective surface: a car window, a puddle of water, a darkened phone screen, even the shine on a polished spoon. It uses these surfaces to watch its chosen prey, to study them, to feed on their growing paranoia and fear. This is the first stage. Victims report seeing a ‘distorted man’ or a ‘smudge’ in their peripheral vision, always in a reflection.”

Elena’s journal. A smudge on the glass that moves. The words were a physical blow. She had perfectly described the first stage of the hunt.

He scrolled down, his hand shaking. The next paragraph made the air leave his lungs in a ragged gasp.

“The second stage is the theft. When the victim’s negative emotions have reached a peak, the entity—which some of the older tales call ‘The Reflected One’—makes its move. It doesn’t steal a soul in the traditional sense. It steals the victim’s image. It reaches through the reflective doorway and erases them, severing their connection to their own physical self. This is the ultimate form of psychological warfare. How can you fight for a body you can no longer see as your own? It leaves them hollow, un-anchored from reality.”

Liam slammed the laptop shut. He shoved his chair back, stumbling to his feet and pacing the small office like a caged animal. His missing reflection. It wasn’t just a bizarre side effect of the haunting. It was a deliberate act. A key step in a horrifying process. The entity had hollowed him out, preparing his body for a new tenant.

He felt a sudden, visceral wave of nausea. The whispers in the house seemed to intensify, coiling around him. He could almost make out a word now, his own name, spoken in a dry, rasping imitation of his own voice. It was practicing.

He forced himself back to the desk, his hands trembling as he opened the laptop again. He had to know the end. He had to know the final stage.

“Once the reflection is stolen, the final stage begins: possession. The entity prepares to cross over, to inhabit the hollowed-out vessel. It spends this time mimicking its victim, learning their movements from its world of glass, as seen in the terrifying ‘lag effect’ reported in rare cases where a reflection is briefly seen in a broken shard. It is preparing to wear the victim’s body like a suit. Once the possession is complete, the original person is gone forever, a prisoner in their own flesh, while the Crooked Man is free to walk in our world… until it gets bored and abandons the body, usually by staging another ‘accident’ back on its mile.”

The color drained from his face. It wasn't trying to kill him. It was trying to become him. The shattered mirror, the lagging mimicry—it had all been a rehearsal.

His desperate eyes scanned the final lines of the post, searching for a weapon, for hope, for anything.

“There is no known way to reverse the process once the reflection is stolen. But old legends speak of a way to stop the possession before it’s complete. A severance ritual. The Collector of Reflections is powerful, but its weakness is that it is bound to the world of reflections. The ritual claims you must lure it into a single, consecrated mirror, face it directly, and shatter the connection—and the mirror—trapping its essence within the broken shards. It's a battle of wills, fought on the threshold between worlds. But be warned: to do this, you have to look at it. You have to confront it in the glass.”

Liam stared at the words, the glow of the screen illuminating his pale, determined face. A ritual. A confrontation. He had to find a mirror, a specific kind of mirror, and stand before the very thing that had stolen his life. He had to look into the smudged, featureless face of the monster that was trying to wear his skin and fight it for ownership of his own soul.

The fear was immense, a towering wave that threatened to drown him. But beneath it, the cold fire of his rage burned hotter than ever. This thing had taken his wife and his child. It had taken his past and his future. He would be damned if he let it take his present, too.