Chapter 6: The Face in the Mirror

Chapter 6: The Face in the Mirror

The beam of the flashlight cut a tunnel through the night, and at its end stood a blasphemy. Liam’s defiant roar died in his throat, strangled by a horror that defied sanity. The thing standing before him was not some beast of folklore, no bear or madman. The thing standing before him was Liam Hayes.

It was his face, but a version seen through a nightmare lens, a reflection warped by decay. The skin was the pallid gray-green of something that had been submerged for a very long time, bloated and tight over his own cheekbones, his own jawline. His dark hair was lank and matted with black mud and rotting vegetation. Its eyes—one was a milky, cataracted white, utterly dead, while the other was a black, empty socket. Its limbs, his limbs, were long and wrong, bent at impossible angles as if they had been snapped and reset by a careless god. It wore the tattered remnants of his own clothes—the flannel shirt and jeans he’d worn on the drive up. Water dripped from the cuffs, pooling on the ground in dark, spreading stains.

This was the source of the footprints. This was the thing that had risen from the lake. It was a corpse dredged from the blackest depths, a putrefied effigy of himself.

In that frozen moment of revelation, everything clicked into place with sickening clarity. His father’s terrified whisper from seventeen years ago: a kid. Had his father seen a version of himself as a child, risen from these same cursed waters? The unnatural stillness at the treeline, the impossible speed of its vanishing act—it was all the work of this... this doppelgänger. The voice, his own voice but drowned and dead, echoed in his memory: I see you. Of course it saw him. It was looking through his own stolen eyes.

The creature’s head tilted, a slow, jerky movement accompanied by the faint, wet crackle of vertebrae. Its one good eye, the dead white one, fixed on him. A low, gurgling hiss escaped its slack-jawed mouth, the sound of air bubbling through waterlogged lungs. It wasn't a sound of aggression; it was a sound of recognition.

Then it charged.

For a thing so broken, its speed was a physical violation of the laws of nature. It didn't run; it flowed across the clearing in a horrifying, shambling sprint, its broken limbs flailing with terrifying purpose. One moment it was twenty feet away, the next it was on him.

Liam’s mind was a blank slate of panic. He stumbled backward, tripping over the very log he had been sitting on moments before. He fell hard, the impact jarring his teeth. He scrambled away on his back, kicking frantically, but the creature was already there, looming over him.

A hand, his hand, but with fingers that were too long and streaked with mud, shot down and clamped around his throat. The grip was like icy iron. There was no heat to it, no life, only an immense, crushing pressure. He was lifted effortlessly from the ground, his feet dangling uselessly. The stench that rolled off it was overpowering—the smell of stale lake water, of deep-bottom mud and slow decay.

He clawed at the wrist, his fingers sinking into cold, yielding flesh that felt like dense, water-soaked sponge. It did nothing. The creature’s dead face was inches from his own, the single milky eye staring into him, a void of sentience without soul. The empty socket on the other side was a pit of absolute blackness.

His lungs burned. Black spots danced in his vision. The knife. He still had the knife. His right hand, flailing uselessly, held the key. The same knife this thing had stolen from him, had used to carve his name into the bark of the old oak. It was his only chance.

With a final, desperate surge of adrenaline, he swung his arm up. He didn't aim, didn't think. He just thrust the blade forward with all the force his oxygen-starved body could muster.

The tip of the blade met soft, yielding resistance. It plunged deep into the doppelgänger’s one good eye.

There was no scream of pain. No roar of fury. The only sound was a soft, wet squish and a sudden hiss as the pressure in the putrefied eyeball was released. The iron grip on his throat loosened, and Liam fell in a heap to the ground, gasping, choking, sucking in greedy lungfuls of blessed, non-death-scented air.

He looked up, expecting to see the monster writhing in agony. It had recoiled, stumbling back a step. The handle of his camping knife protruded grotesquely from its eye socket, a grisly trophy of his desperate defense. He had done it. He had wounded it.

But the creature didn't fall. It didn't even seem to care. It stood there for a moment, head cocked as if considering a minor inconvenience. Then, with a slow, deliberate motion, it raised its unnaturally long-fingered hand to its face. It didn't try to pull the knife out. It simply wrapped its fingers around its own eyeball, with the knife still embedded in it, and tore the entire orb from its socket.

Liam watched, frozen in a new dimension of horror, as the thing held the ruined eye in its palm for a second before dropping it to the ground with a wet slap. Then, its fingers, slick with a thick, black ichor that was not blood, gripped the handle of the knife.

With a sickening, sucking pop, it pulled the blade free from the now-empty socket. It held the knife, his knife, in front of its face, examining the blade as if it were a curious artifact. Then its head snapped up, and both of its empty, black sockets fixed on him.

He hadn't hurt it. He hadn't even angered it. He had simply disarmed himself again. The brief, triumphant flare of hope he’d felt was extinguished, replaced by the cold, absolute certainty of his own death. This thing was not a creature of flesh and blood. It couldn’t be killed because it wasn’t alive in the first place.

The doppelgänger took a step toward him, raising the knife.

That was the only catalyst he needed. The instinct for self-preservation, the deepest and most powerful drive he possessed, finally screamed louder than his terror.

RUN.

While the creature was still seemingly mesmerized by the weapon, Liam scrambled to his feet. He didn't look back to see if it was following. He didn't check for other threats. He turned his back on the nightmare at the campsite, on the tattered remains of his tent, on the ghost of his father, and he fled. He ran, his legs pumping, his lungs screaming, his mind a singular, white-hot point of focus: the gravel path. The car. Escape. He crashed through the treeline, the darkness absolute, his only guide the memory of the way out, fleeing for a life he was no longer sure was his own.