Chapter 2: The Word on the Glass

Chapter 2: The Word on the Glass

A scream died in Alex’s throat, choked off by a fist of pure ice. He stood there, barefoot on the cold floor, staring at the warped reflection that wasn’t entirely his own. The shadow clinging to his back in the mirror was formless, a patch of absolute black that seemed to drink the moonlight, but he could feel its presence like a physical weight, a pressure between his shoulder blades. The unnatural chill that had latched onto him at the funeral flared, no longer just a feeling but a gnawing, invasive cold that seemed to emanate from his very marrow.

With a surge of adrenaline, he tore his eyes away, stumbling backward. The illusion—it had to be an illusion—vanished. He slammed his back against the opposite wall, heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs. He was alone. The hallway was empty. Just him and the mirror.

He scrambled back to his bedroom, diving under the covers as if they offered any real protection. He lay there, rigid and panting, until the first gray light of dawn crept through his blinds. Sleep was a forgotten country.

The next night, it happened again. He woke with a jolt, not to a sound or a dream, but to the cold. He was standing in the same spot, facing the same mirror. A deep, throbbing ache had settled into his joints, as if he’d run a marathon in his sleep. He forced his leaden limbs to move, crawling back to bed, his mind a maelstrom of fear and denial.

And the night after that. And the one after that.

Each morning, the exhaustion was worse. The ache in his muscles was deeper, a weary, grinding pain that clung to him all day. At work, he stared blankly at his computer screen, the vibrant graphics he was supposed to be designing blurring into a meaningless smear of color. He chugged coffee until his hands trembled, but it did nothing to dispel the profound fatigue. He felt hollowed out, a marionette whose strings were being pulled by an unseen hand in the dark.

This wasn't normal. This wasn't just stress. But what was the alternative? That he was losing his mind?

On the fifth night, he decided he couldn't take it anymore. He needed to break the cycle. He needed to sleep. A real, deep, dreamless sleep that would chain him to his bed until morning. Rummaging through his bathroom cabinet, he found a bottle of over-the-counter sleeping pills he’d bought months ago and never used. The label warned to take only one. He shook two into his palm, his hand trembling slightly, and dry-swallowed them with a grim finality.

He fell into bed, the chemical promise of oblivion a comforting weight. As his consciousness began to fray at the edges, he felt a flicker of triumph. There would be no walking tonight. No mirror. No shadows.

Sleep came, not as a gentle tide, but as a lead-lined blanket dropped from a great height, smothering him in an instant.

He was in his bed, but the darkness was different. It was absolute, suffocating. He tried to move, to lift a hand, to turn his head, but his body was a statue of lead. Only his eyes could dart around the room, wide with a terror that had no voice. Sleep paralysis. He’d read about it. A trick of the mind. A waking nightmare.

But this was no trick.

From the deepest corner of the room, a shape began to coalesce out of the shadows. It unfolded itself slowly, joint by agonizing joint, like a desiccated insect. It was a woman, or the memory of one, emaciated and ancient. Long, stringy grey hair hung in greasy clumps around a skeletal face. Her form was a wavering, semi-translucent gray, but her eyes… her eyes were solid points of burning, malevolent light. They were fixed on him.

She began to move, not walking, but flowing across the floor like smoke, silent and inexorable. The room grew colder with every inch she advanced, the air crystallizing in Alex's lungs. The chill from the funeral, the cold from the hallway—it was all a pale imitation of this. This was the cold of the grave.

The figure reached his bed and crawled onto his chest. The weight was crushing, impossible. It felt like a block of granite was pinning him to the mattress, cracking his ribs. He tried to scream, but the only sound was a faint, pathetic whimper trapped in his throat.

Two emaciated hands, gray and skeletal with long, cracked, yellowed nails, rose into his vision. They descended, clamping around his neck. The touch was not merely cold; it was draining. He could feel his life, his warmth, his very essence being drawn out of him, a feast for this spectral parasite.

A gurgling sound filled his ears, a wet, guttural whisper that seemed to come from the creature's throat and from inside his own skull simultaneously. It spoke in a language that was all harsh consonants and sibilant hisses, a dead tongue that scraped against his sanity. He didn't understand the words, but the meaning was terrifyingly clear: Mine. You are mine.

His vision tunneled. The burning eyes were all he could see. The world dissolved into a pinprick of hateful light as his lungs burned for air they couldn't have. He was dying. This was it. A silent, pathetic end in his own bed, murdered by a nightmare.

CRACK!

The sound was explosive, impossibly loud. Alex was thrown back into his body with a violent gasp, air flooding his lungs in a painful, ragged torrent. He wasn't in bed. He was on the hardwood floor of the hallway, a heap of tangled limbs.

A blinding pain radiated from his forehead, sharp and pulsating. He pushed himself up, his arms shaking, his entire body slick with a cold sweat. He looked up, his vision swimming.

The mirror.

It was shattered. A starburst of cracks radiated from a single point of impact, spiderwebbing across the entire surface. His reflection was a fractured, terrified mosaic. He must have hit his head on it. He must have sleepwalked again, fallen, and woken himself up.

He staggered to his feet, leaning against the wall, his head throbbing in time with his frantic heartbeat. It was a dream. A hyper-realistic, horrifying night terror brought on by stress and the pills. That’s all it was. It had to be.

But as he stared at his own splintered reflection, at the dozens of panicked eyes staring back at him, his gaze caught on something near the point of impact. Something that wasn't a crack in the glass.

It was a word.

It was scratched into the mirror’s silver backing, the letters jagged and uneven, as if carved by a trembling, sharp nail. The script was ancient and full of hate. It was not his handwriting.

One word.

DYBBUK