Chapter 2: The Echo in the Glass

Chapter 2: The Echo in the Glass

Alex didn't sleep. He spent the hours until dawn huddled in his desk chair, the glow of his monitors a pathetic shield against the suffocating darkness of his apartment. His gaze kept snapping back to the hallway, to the impossible dark-wood door that stood sentinel on a wall that should have been bare. It hadn't moved again, not that he could tell, but its presence was a physical weight, warping the very air around it.

His rational mind, his only reliable tool in life, was scrabbling for purchase on the sheer cliff face of his terror. A hypnagogic hallucination, it supplied weakly. An incredibly vivid waking dream brought on by stress and sleep deprivation. It was plausible. It was sane.

But when the first, weak light of morning bled through his blinds, casting the apartment in shades of grey, the door was still there. It was solid, its grain defined, its tarnished brass plate catching the light with a dull, malevolent sheen.

Desire for normalcy was a desperate, clawing thing in his chest. He needed to disprove it. He stood on shaky legs, a coffee mug clutched in his hand like a talisman, and approached it. The floorboards didn't creak any differently. The air didn't change temperature. It was just a door. A door that shouldn't exist. He reached out a trembling hand, the ceramic of his mug cold against his palm, and pressed his fingertips to the wood.

It was real. Cool, solid, and unyielding. There was no seam, no crack in the plaster around it to suggest it had been installed. It was simply… there, as if it had pushed its way out from inside the wall. He ran his hand over the blank number plate. It was smooth, cold, and utterly featureless. He tried to find a knob, a lock, any kind of mechanism. There was none. It was a seamless, silent slab of wrongness planted in the heart of his home.

He stumbled back, the coffee sloshing over the rim of his mug, the hot liquid barely registering on his skin. This wasn't a dream.

The day became a frantic, disjointed blur. He tried to work, forcing himself to focus on the vectors and color palettes of a corporate branding project. He needed the anchor of routine, the comfort of logic and order. But his sanctuary was tainted. Every reflective surface had become an enemy.

It started with his main monitor. As he dragged a design element across the screen, he caught a flicker of movement in the black bezel surrounding the display. He froze, his mouse hovering. For a split second, reflected in the glossy plastic, he didn't see the beige wall of his living room. He saw a flash of sickly, bile-yellow linoleum and the corner of a dark-wood door. He blinked, and it was gone, replaced by the mundane reality of his apartment.

His heart hammered. He pushed his chair back, breathing hard. A trick of the light. Your mind is projecting the image because you're obsessed.

He went to the kitchen to refill his coffee, his nerves screaming. He glanced at the microwave, its dark glass door a perfect black mirror. He saw his own reflection—gaunt, wild-eyed, his dark hair a mess. And behind him, over his shoulder, the infinite corridor stretched out, the buzzing lights flickering in the tiny, distorted reflection. He cried out, a strangled gasp, and spun around.

There was nothing there but his hallway, his couch, his life. And the silent, waiting door.

He avoided his own reflection for the rest of the afternoon, a madman in his own home. The bathroom mirror was a portal he refused to look into. He washed his hands staring at the porcelain of the sink. He caught a glimpse of himself in the living room window and saw the impossibly tall, faceless figure standing behind his reflection before he threw himself away from the glass, his breath catching in a sob. The echoes of that place were bleeding into his world, painting over the edges of his reality.

Logic. He had to get back to logic. There had to be an explanation. He turned his fear into fuel, channeling his panic into furious action. He opened a new browser window, pushing aside his design work, and began to dig. He searched the city archives for the original blueprints of his building, The Crestwood Apartments. He found them—a dusty, scanned PDF from 1928. He pored over every line, his designer's eye tracing the layout of the fourth floor. There was no anomaly. Apartment 4A, his apartment, was exactly as it should be. A single entrance. No phantom doors. No hidden rooms.

He widened his search. News articles, historical societies, local blogs. He searched for mentions of The Crestwood. Suicides? Disappearances? Strange occurrences? Nothing. The building had a boring, unremarkable history. It was just another pre-war brick building, a place where people lived and died in utterly mundane ways. His research was a dead end, a brick wall as solid and unhelpful as the one the phantom door had grown out of. The world of facts and data offered no solace, no explanation. It only confirmed his isolation. No one else had seen it. It was happening only to him.

By late afternoon, the apartment felt like a cage. The walls were closing in, the silence thick with unspoken threats. He had to get out. He had to see other people, hear the sounds of traffic, feel the sun on his skin. He needed to prove the world outside was still working, even if his own had broken.

He grabbed his keys and wallet, his hands shaking so badly it took him three tries to get the key ring off its hook. He approached his front door with the caution of a soldier entering a minefield, refusing to look at the other, wrong door just a few feet away. He pulled his own door open, bracing himself for the impossible hallway.

But it was just the normal, shabby corridor. The faded floral wallpaper was a welcome sight, a beautiful, boring anchor to reality. He could hear the faint sound of a television from 4C. Normalcy.

He stepped out, pulling the door shut behind him, the click of the lock a small, satisfying sound. He was just turning to head for the stairs when the door to 4B opened.

An old woman emerged, her body stooped and frail, her silver hair pulled into a tight, neat bun. He recognized her as Elara Vance, the quiet widow who had lived there as long as anyone could remember. He’d only ever exchanged brief, polite nods with her. Now, she stood there, clutching a small grocery tote, her cardigan buttoned up to her chin despite the warmth of the building.

"Oh," she said, her voice soft and thin, like dry leaves skittering across pavement. "Good afternoon."

"Afternoon, Mrs. Vance," Alex mumbled, fumbling with his keys. They slipped from his trembling fingers, clattering onto the worn carpet. He bent to retrieve them, his face flushing with embarrassment.

When he straightened up, he found she hadn't moved. She was looking at him, and for the first time, he met her gaze directly. Her eyes were not the cloudy, distant eyes of the very old. They were a piercing, intelligent grey, and they held a depth of sorrow and knowing that startled him. They weren't looking at him so much as into him. Her gaze flickered for a moment, from his exhausted face to the wood of his apartment door, then back again.

A small, sad smile touched her lips. It didn't reach her eyes.

"It's a noisy old building, isn't it?" she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

Alex blinked. "I... I guess so. I don't hear much."

"No," she agreed, her gaze unwavering. "Not at first. You learn to, though. You hear all sorts of things, especially late at night." She paused, and the weight of her stare was immense. "The trick is learning not to listen. The walls are thin, but some sounds... they come from much farther away."

A cold dread, familiar and sharp, trickled down Alex's spine. Her words were too specific, too resonant with the suffocating silence he'd woken up to. She wasn't talking about noisy neighbors.

He didn't know what to say. He just stood there, his keys digging into his palm.

Elara adjusted her grip on her tote bag. "You look like you haven't slept in days, young man," she observed quietly. "Be careful. This building... it preys on the tired. It's when you're not paying attention that you notice the doors that aren't quite right."

His blood turned to ice.

She gave a final, curt nod, a gesture of dismissal that was also somehow a warning. Then she turned and shuffled slowly toward the elevator, leaving Alex frozen in the hallway, the echo of her words ringing in his ears louder than any scream.

He wasn't going crazy. And he wasn't alone. And that, he realized with a fresh, surging wave of terror, was infinitely worse.