Chapter 4: The Wrong Smile

Chapter 4: The Wrong Smile

Time ceased to behave normally in the white room. Seconds stretched into elastic minutes, minutes congealed into stagnant hours. The seamless walls offered no shadows, no texture, no point of reference to anchor his perception. The only clock was the cheap digital watch on his wrist, but looking at it felt like a mistake, a confirmation of how little time had passed and how much was left. He was adrift in a sterile, silent eternity with only the thing in the mirror for company.

After the impossible, delayed blink, Leo had entered a state of hyper-vigilant denial. Exhaustion, he told himself, the word a desperate mantra. It’s a trick of the light. My eyes are tired. I’m seeing things.

He had to prove it. He had to debunk the terrifying anomaly and reclaim his sanity.

So began the tests.

He started small, with movements so minute he could barely feel them himself. A twitch of his left pinky finger. A subtle clenching of his jaw. A slow, deliberate shift of his weight from one foot to the other. Each time, the figure in the ornate golden frame was his perfect, instantaneous double. The mimicry was absolute, flawless. The flawless nature of it, however, began to feel less like a comfort and more like a carefully constructed lie. A real reflection was passive, a simple consequence of light and physics. This felt… performed.

He grew bolder. He ran a hand through his hair, his fingers snagging on the same knots as always. The reflection did the same, its expression an identical mask of weary frustration. He tried to catch it off guard, jerking his head to the side suddenly. The man in the glass was with him, not a millisecond behind. The performance was too good. It was the perfection of a predator’s camouflage, designed to lull its prey into a false sense of security.

The memory of Evelyn's strained face surfaced. Do not influence him. He was doing the exact opposite. He was actively engaging, poking and prodding, trying to force a reaction from a thing he didn't understand. But what choice did he have? The alternative was to sit and accept the impossible, to let the madness seep in without a fight.

Hours bled into one another. He paced the small room, a ten-foot line from the door to the mirror and back again, his sneakers squeaking a lonely rhythm on the polished floor. The reflection paced with him, a prisoner in its own gilded cage, its eyes locked on his.

It was the eyes that were starting to truly unravel him. When he looked at his reflection in the bathroom at home, he saw himself. Here, when he met the gaze of the man in the glass, he felt… seen. There was an intelligence there, a focused, analytical quality that had no right to exist. It wasn't the vacant look of a copy; it was the sharp, unblinking stare of a student memorizing a lesson. He was the lesson.

Then came the second undeniable crack in reality.

He was standing perfectly still, trying to control his breathing, when the reflection’s left eyebrow twitched. A quick, minute spasm.

Leo froze, his entire nervous system screaming. He hadn't done that. He was absolutely certain. He replayed the last ten seconds in his mind, cataloging his own stillness. He had not moved. He had not twitched. His own face remained a mask of tense calm. But the man in the mirror had. It was a tiny, alien movement grafted onto his own face.

He stared, his heart hammering. Had he imagined it? Was his mind, starved of stimulus, simply inventing phantoms? He was back on the knife's edge of uncertainty, the entity in the glass expertly gaslighting him from behind its silent prison. He was so tired. It was so easy to believe he was just losing his mind. The two thousand dollars felt like a pittance now, a down payment on a lifetime of psychiatric care.

He needed to break the tension. He needed to do something normal, something human, something that couldn’t be misinterpreted.

He stopped directly in front of the mirror, his toes almost touching the invisible line Evelyn had warned him about. He looked at his reflection—at the dark, sleep-deprived eyes, the pale skin, the faint tremor in his lips. He decided to smile. A smile was complex. It involved dozens of tiny muscles. It was an expression of emotion. It was his.

He forced the corners of his mouth to lift. It wasn't a real smile. It felt like pulling wet clay, a strained, pathetic grimace that didn't come close to reaching his terrified eyes. It was a transparent lie.

In the mirror, the reflection copied the expression perfectly. The same tight pull of the lips, the same deadness in the eyes. For a single, fleeting second, Leo felt a wave of relief. It was him. Just him. A tired, scared kid in a weird room.

He let the fake smile fall from his face, his expression returning to one of anxious exhaustion.

But in the mirror, the smile remained.

It lingered for a full second after his own had vanished. And in that second, it changed. The corners of its mouth, his mouth, stretched wider, just a millimeter or two more than his own had. It was no longer the strained, nervous grimace he had made. It was a knowing, confident smirk. It was the expression of a card player who had just been dealt a winning hand. It was a smile of pure, chilling hunger.

The blood drained from Leo's face.

He stumbled back, his legs weak, until the backs of his knees hit the hard edge of the chair and he collapsed into it. He couldn't tear his eyes away from the reflection, which had now smoothly dropped the smile, its face once again a perfect, neutral copy of his own terrified one.

The truth crashed down on him with the force of a physical blow.

The delayed blink hadn't been a mistake in mimicry. It was the lag of a system booting up. The eyebrow twitch wasn't a glitch; it was an experiment. And the smile… the smile was a message.

This thing wasn't just copying him. It was learning him. It was studying his movements, his expressions, his very biology. It was building a perfect model, not of what he was doing, but of who he was. Every test he ran gave it more data. Every panicked reaction fed it new emotional subroutines. He wasn't the observer here. He had never been the observer.

He was the blueprint. And the thing wearing his face was learning how to build itself.