Chapter 2: The Wrong Voice on the Line

Alex's finger trembled as he pressed Clara's contact, the phone slipping slightly in his sweaty palm. The mirror loomed behind him, its surface now reflecting normally—too normally, as if nothing had happened. But he could still feel those alien eyes boring into his back, could still see that impossible smile burned into his retinas.

The phone rang once. Twice.

"Come on, Clara," he whispered, backing further away from the dining room. "Pick up, pick up..."

On the third ring, the call connected.

"Mmph... Alex?" The voice was groggy, irritated. Clara's voice, but... off somehow. Like she was speaking through cotton, or from very far away. "Do you have any idea what time it is?"

"Clara, thank God." Relief flooded through him so intensely his knees nearly buckled. "Something's wrong. The mirror in the dining room—Mom forgot to cover it, and I saw—"

"What mirror?" The voice sharpened, losing its sleepy quality instantly. Too instantly. "What are you talking about?"

"The antique one, the one with the silver frame. Clara, my reflection—it wasn't moving right. It was like it was alive, like it was trying to—"

"Alex." The voice cut him off, and something in its tone made his blood freeze. It was still Clara's voice, her familiar inflections and cadence, but there was something underneath it now. Something cold and calculating that his sister had never possessed. "You need to calm down. You're having a nightmare."

"I'm not asleep!" Alex's voice cracked with desperation. "I'm standing right here, I'm awake, and something was in that mirror trying to get out!"

A long pause stretched across the line. Alex could hear something in the background—not the usual sounds of Sarah's house where Clara was supposed to be staying, but something else. A hollow, echoing quality, like she was speaking from inside a vast empty space.

When Clara spoke again, her voice had changed completely.

"Look at the mirror again, Alex."

The words hit him like ice water. Not the tone—the tone was still Clara's—but the content, the absolute wrongness of what she'd just said. His sister, who had spent years taking his fears about the family tradition seriously, who had always been the one to double-check the covered mirrors herself, was telling him to look directly at the thing that had just tried to break through into his world.

"What did you just say?" Alex's voice was barely a whisper.

"I said look at the mirror again." The voice was patient now, almost soothing, but with an undertone that made Alex's skin crawl. "You're being silly, little brother. Mirrors can't hurt you. They're just glass and silver. Look at it and you'll see there's nothing there."

Alex's hand tightened on the phone. Clara had never, ever called him 'little brother' in that patronizing tone. She teased him, sure, but never with that particular brand of condescension. And she had certainly never told him mirrors couldn't hurt him—not after growing up in the same house, following the same inexplicable tradition.

"Clara, where are you right now?" he asked carefully.

"I'm at Sarah's, of course. Working on that group project I texted you about." But even as the voice said it, the background sounds shifted again. Now Alex could swear he heard something that sounded almost like... wind? Or breathing? "Why would you ask that?"

"Because you're scaring me." Alex began moving toward the front door, keeping his voice low so his parents wouldn't hear. "You're not acting like yourself."

A laugh bubbled up from the phone's speaker—Clara's laugh, but stretched and distorted like a recording played at the wrong speed. "Oh, Alex. Sweet, paranoid Alex. Of course I'm acting like myself. Who else would I be?"

The question hung in the air like a challenge, and Alex realized with dawning horror that he couldn't answer it. Who else would she be? What else would she be?

"Look at the mirror, Alex." The voice was becoming more insistent now, less careful with its mimicry. "Look at it and tell me what you see. I want to help you, but I need to know what you think you're seeing."

"Stop." Alex's voice was sharp with panic. "Stop telling me to look at it. Clara would never—"

"LOOK AT THE MIRROR, ALEX."

The voice that roared from the phone's speaker was no longer even pretending to be human. It was Clara's vocal cords, Clara's accent, Clara's speech patterns, but the intelligence behind it was utterly alien. The sound was so loud, so wrong, that Alex nearly dropped the phone.

In the silence that followed, he could hear his own heartbeat thundering in his ears.

"Alex?" The voice was back to normal now, concerned and gentle. "Alex, are you there? I'm sorry, I don't know what happened. Bad connection, maybe? You're breaking up."

But Alex was no longer listening. He was staring at the front door, his free hand already reaching for the deadbolt, when he heard footsteps on the stairs behind him.

"Alex? What's wrong?"

He spun around, phone still pressed to his ear, and saw Clara descending the staircase. The real Clara—he knew it was her instantly, from the way she moved, the genuine concern in her dark eyes, the small scar on her chin from when she'd fallen off her bike at age ten.

But if Clara was here...

"Alex?" The voice from the phone was still talking. "Alex, answer me. What's happening?"

Clara—the real Clara standing on the stairs—went pale when she saw the phone in his hand, heard her own voice emanating from the speaker.

"Hang up," she whispered, her eyes wide with terror. "Hang up right now."

"Clara, what's—"

"HANG UP THE PHONE!" she screamed, lunging down the remaining steps.

Alex stabbed at the end call button with shaking fingers, but not before he heard one last thing from the voice that had been pretending to be his sister:

A laugh. Low, satisfied, and utterly inhuman.

The phone went silent.

Clara reached him in three quick strides, grabbing the device from his hands and powering it down completely. Her face was ghost-white, her breathing rapid and shallow.

"How long were you talking to it?" she demanded.

"It? Clara, what the hell is going on? Who was I just—"

"How long?" Her grip on his shoulders was painful, her eyes boring into his with desperate intensity.

"I don't know, maybe two minutes? Clara, you're scaring me. What was that thing?"

Clara's eyes darted to the dining room entrance, and Alex saw her notice the uncovered mirror. Her face went from pale to gray.

"Oh no. Oh no, no, no." She released him and began digging frantically through her purse, pulling out what looked like a small compact mirror with an ornate silver handle. "Did you look at it directly? Did you make eye contact with your reflection?"

"Yes, but Clara, what does that have to do with—"

"Everything." She was already moving toward the dining room, the compact held carefully in her hands. "It has to do with everything."

Alex followed her, his mind reeling. "That voice on the phone, it sounded exactly like you. How is that possible?"

"Because it was me." Clara's voice was grim as she positioned herself at the dining room entrance, angling the compact so it could see the larger mirror without her having to look directly at it. "Or rather, it was a version of me. An Echo."

"An Echo?"

"Something that got through from the other side. Something that learned to be me." She adjusted the compact's angle, and Alex heard her sharp intake of breath. "There. I can see it in your reflection. It's still there, still watching."

Alex started to turn toward the mirror, but Clara's free hand shot out to stop him.

"Don't look directly at it again. Never again, do you understand me? That's how they learn, how they copy. Every second you spend looking at it, it gets better at being you."

In the compact's small surface, Alex caught a glimpse of the large mirror's reflection—and felt his stomach lurch. His reflection was there, but it was wrong in subtle ways. The posture was too perfect, the expression too serene. And its eyes...

Its eyes were fixed not on the mirror, but on Clara.

"It's looking at you," he whispered.

"I know." Clara's voice was steady now, professional almost. "They always do. They can sense who knows about them, who poses a threat."

She adjusted the compact again, and suddenly the reflection in the larger mirror began to move erratically, its image bouncing back and forth between the two reflective surfaces in an impossible geometric loop. The thing wearing Alex's face opened its mouth in what looked like a silent scream, its perfect composure finally cracking.

The large mirror began to vibrate in its frame.

"Clara, what are you doing?"

"Trapping it in an infinite loop. They can't handle paradoxes—their minds aren't complex enough." The compact was getting hot in her hands, Alex could see steam rising from the silver handle. "This is going to hurt. Cover your ears."

Alex barely had time to press his palms against his ears before the scream hit.

It wasn't audible—not exactly. It was more like a sound that bypassed his ears entirely and went straight into his brain, a mind-splitting shriek of rage and frustration that felt like ice picks being driven into his skull. He fell to his knees, vision blurring, tasting copper in his mouth.

The large mirror exploded.

Glass shards flew across the dining room like silver rain, some pieces as large as dinner plates, others fine as dust. The antique frame cracked down the middle with a sound like breaking bones, and then everything went silent.

Clara dropped the compact, which had gone dark and lifeless, its surface now nothing more than ordinary black glass. She was breathing heavily, sweat beading on her forehead despite the cool air.

"Is it over?" Alex asked, struggling to his feet among the glittering debris.

Clara moved to him quickly, pulling him into a fierce hug that smelled like her familiar shampoo and the lingering ozone scent of whatever had just happened.

"For now," she whispered against his ear, and Alex felt a chill that had nothing to do with the October night. "But Alex... there's something you need to know. Something about why this happened tonight, on your birthday."

She pulled back to look at him, and Alex saw something in her eyes that terrified him more than the thing in the mirror had.

Guilt.

"If I wasn't here," she whispered, her voice thick with an emotion he couldn't identify, "it would've replaced you. Made a perfect copy and sent your real self somewhere else. Somewhere... empty."

"What are you talking about?"

Clara's grip on his arms tightened, and when she spoke again, her words shattered his world more completely than any exploding mirror ever could:

"Or you'll end up like your sister. Stuck in the mirror."

The words hung in the air between them, impossible and undeniable. Alex stared into Clara's dark eyes, searching for some sign that she was joking, that this was all some elaborate birthday prank.

But he found only truth there.

And something that might have been an apology.