Chapter 5: A Crack in the Glass

Chapter 5: A Crack in the Glass

The wrong smile had shattered everything. Leo sat collapsed in the hard-backed chair, a cold sweat plastering his hoodie to his skin. The illusion of a simple reflection was gone, replaced by the horrifying certainty that he was being watched, studied, and judged by an entity wearing his own face. The two thousand dollars felt less like a salary and more like a bribe for his silence, for his sanity.

He had to change tactics. The testing, the prodding—all it had done was feed the creature information. He was a textbook it was speed-reading. Evelyn’s warning echoed in his skull, no longer a cryptic piece of advice but a desperate, vital command: Do not influence him. He had failed.

His new strategy was simple: give it nothing. He averted his eyes, forcing his gaze onto the featureless white wall to his left. He focused on the near-imperceptible seam where it met the floor, tracing it with his eyes. He regulated his breathing, forcing it into a slow, steady rhythm. He became a statue, offering the thing in the glass a static, uninteresting subject. If he didn't move, if he didn't react, maybe it would lose interest. Maybe it would revert to being a simple, passive copy.

Minutes crawled by. The oppressive silence of the room was a roaring in his ears. The temptation to look, to check, was a physical itch. He resisted, picturing Maya in her hospital bed, her breathing soft and shallow. He was doing this for her. He could be a statue for her.

Finally, he couldn't stand it any longer. He risked a sideways glance, a fleeting flick of his eyes towards the mirror.

The reflection was no longer a perfect mimic. It was standing perfectly still, just as he was, but its expression had changed. The neutral mask of exhaustion was gone. In its place was a look of faint, clinical curiosity, the kind a scientist might give a petri dish that had suddenly stopped showing results. Then, as it met his brief glance, the expression shifted again. The corners of its lips tightened, not into a smile, but into a subtle look of… annoyance.

Leo’s breath hitched. It was showing an independent emotion. It was bored. It was frustrated that its toy had stopped moving. He quickly snapped his gaze back to the wall, his heart pounding a frantic, terrified rhythm. The statue strategy wasn't working. It wasn't making the thing dormant; it was making it impatient.

He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to retreat into the darkness behind his own eyelids. He recited state capitals, multiplication tables, anything to occupy his mind and give the entity nothing to read. But the feeling of being watched intensified, a prickling sensation on his skin, as if the reflection's gaze could pass through the glass and touch him.

He felt a terrifying, magnetic pull to look again. He knew he shouldn't. He knew it was what the creature wanted. But the compulsion was overwhelming. Slowly, reluctantly, he opened his eyes and looked straight at the mirror.

The man in the glass was staring directly at him, its head tilted slightly. The look of analytical curiosity had morphed into something else entirely. The subtle smirk from before had been a playful test; this was different. This was the raw, undisguised expression of a predator that has grown tired of waiting for its meal to wander into the trap. It was an expression of chilling, possessive hunger.

Then its mouth moved.

No sound came out, but Leo could read the word on its lips as clearly as if it had been shouted. A single, silent syllable that it formed with a slow, deliberate precision.

Leo.

It knew his name. The name he had given it. It was throwing the sacrificial offering back in his face, demonstrating its power, its memory. Its lips moved again, forming the second part of his name.

Vance.

Leo felt a wave of nausea so strong he thought he was going to be sick. This was a direct violation, a tearing down of the last thin veil of separation between them. It wasn't just wearing his face; it was claiming his identity, one piece at a time. He scrambled backward in the chair, the bolted legs holding it fast, his body straining against the metal. He wanted to scream, but his throat was locked in ice.

The reflection watched his terror with keen interest, its eyes gleaming. It was enjoying this. It was feeding on his fear.

Desperate to break the connection, to see anything else, Leo’s gaze shifted from the creature’s face to the space behind it. He focused on the background—the stark, white wall of the room, perfectly replicated in the glass. He needed an anchor, something real and unchanging.

For a moment, it worked. He saw the white room in the mirror, a perfect, stable copy. Then, the air behind his reflection began to shimmer, like heat haze rising from asphalt on a summer day. The effect grew stronger, the pristine white wall rippling as if it were a reflection in disturbed water.

Leo stared, mesmerized by the new horror. The ripple intensified into a violent, digital-like glitch. And for one horrifying, world-breaking second, the white room in the mirror dissolved completely.

It was replaced by a different place.

Instead of clean white, the walls were a slick, mottled black, stained with what looked like years of water damage and creeping mold. The air seemed thick with a sickly, greenish-yellow light that emanated from no visible source. To the reflection's right, where there should have been only empty space, lay the splintered remains of a dark, wooden chair, shattered as if by a tremendous force. And on the floor, barely visible in the gloom, were strange, complex symbols scrawled in a substance that looked disturbingly like dried blood. It was a dark, decaying, violent chamber. An abattoir of a room.

The vision lasted for no more than two seconds before it snapped back, the decaying chamber vanishing and the pristine white room reasserting itself in the glass.

Leo was gasping, his lungs burning. He was hallucinating. That was the only explanation. The isolation, the fear, the exhaustion—his mind had finally broken and projected a nightmare onto the glass. It wasn't real. It couldn't be.

CRACKLE.

The sound of the intercom made him flinch so violently he almost fell out of the chair. The flat, robotic voice filled the silent room, utterly calm, utterly indifferent to his state of panic.

"Log all environmental deviations. Do not engage."

The words slammed into Leo with the force of a physical impact.

Environmental deviations.

It was a sterile, corporate term for the absolute hell he had just witnessed. It was a known phenomenon. The Foundation knew about the dark room. They had a procedure for it.

He wasn't hallucinating. He wasn't going mad. He was simply an observer, cataloging the predictable behavior of a monster. The safety net of insanity—the comforting thought that this was all just in his head—was viciously torn away. This was real. The thing in the glass was real. And the dark, rotting world it inhabited was real, too.

He stared at the mirror, at his own face looking back at him from a perfect copy of the white room. But he knew now. He knew that the white room was a facade, a thin camouflage draped over a festering reality just behind the glass. And the entity wearing his face wasn't just a mimic in a mirror. It was a prisoner—or perhaps a warden—in a dark and terrible place, and it was looking for a way out.