Chapter 4: An Unnatural Symmetry

Chapter 4: An Unnatural Symmetry

The night was a long, sleepless ordeal spent huddled on his sofa, staring at the bolted front door as if it were the gate to hell. Julian didn’t dare return to the bedroom, didn’t dare pass the living room window where the fedora had materialized in the glass. The reflection had become a hostile frontier, a permeable membrane between his world and… its. The song from the radio, You Are Not Alone, was no longer a melody but a statement of fact, an insidious whisper that coiled in the silent corners of his apartment.

When the grey, watery light of dawn finally seeped through the blinds, it brought no relief, only the necessity of movement. He stumbled into the bathroom, driven by a desperate need to see his own face, to reclaim it from the phantoms of the night. He felt a profound, aching need to look in the mirror and see Julian Thorne, the aloof artist, the curated Victorian vampire, the man who was in complete control of his own image.

He braced his hands on the cool porcelain of the sink, took a deep, shuddering breath, and lifted his head.

The man in the mirror was a wreck. His skin was pasty, his dark hair lank and greasy. But it was the eyes that held him captive. The impersonator's question, thrown like a dart in the theatre lobby, had found its mark and festered. What's wrong with your eyes?

He leaned closer, his breath fogging the glass. At first, it was subtle. The slight asymmetry he’d noticed before seemed more pronounced in the harsh bathroom light. His left eye did seem a fraction wider, the lid sitting just a millimeter higher than the right. Had it always been like that? He frantically searched his memory, trying to conjure a clear image of his face from a week ago, a month ago. He couldn't.

He stared, transfixed, trying to impose his will upon the reflection, to force it back into its familiar, perfect alignment. But the longer he looked, the worse it became. It was like watching a subtle, horrifying animation. The skin around his left eye seemed to tighten, pulling the socket into a more rounded, startled shape. The right eye, in contrast, appeared to narrow, sinking deeper into his skull, hooded and suspicious. The muscles beneath his skin felt like they were twitching, shifting, rearranging his features into a new, grotesque configuration. His face was becoming a collage of two different expressions, a living portrait of his own fracturing sanity.

He flinched back, scrubbing at his face with trembling hands, as if he could physically wipe the distortion away. The face was his. The skin, the bone, it was all his. But the symmetry, the fundamental architecture of his identity, was being corrupted from within.

He had to get out. The apartment, once his sanctuary, had become a torture chamber with a mirror for a rack. He threw on clothes, not caring about his aesthetic for the first time in years, and fled into the city. He thought the noise, the crowds, the sheer, unyielding reality of a Wednesday morning would be an anchor.

It was the opposite.

He tried to order a coffee, but when the young barista met his gaze with a cheerful smile, Julian recoiled. Her friendly eyes felt like surgical instruments, dissecting the monstrous flaw in his face. He imagined her seeing it, the unnatural imbalance, the mismatched windows to his soul. He fumbled with his wallet, dropped a handful of coins, and muttered an apology, keeping his head down as he backed out of the cafe, his coffee forgotten.

The city was a sea of eyes. People on the sidewalk, faces in bus windows, drivers waiting at traffic lights—every glance felt like an indictment. He pulled his hair forward, trying to shadow his face, walking with his gaze fixed on the cracks in the pavement. The world had become a gallery, and he was the sole, misshapen exhibit.

He found himself on a park bench, the city’s roar a dull hum around him. He was utterly, terrifyingly alone. Leo thought he was a freak. The theater held a monster. His own home was a house of mirrors. He needed a lifeline, a voice from the world he used to know. With shaking fingers, he pulled out his phone and dialed the only person he could think of who might understand.

“Clara?” he said, when she answered. Clara was a fellow art student, sharp and cynical, someone who appreciated aesthetics as much as he did.

“Julian? You sound awful. Did you pull an all-nighter with a bottle of absinthe again?” Her voice was a welcome sliver of normalcy.

“No. Something’s happening, Clara. Something bad.” He tried to keep his voice steady, to edit the story into something sane and believable. But the terror wouldn't be edited. It came pouring out in a torrent of disjointed fear. “There’s this man, at the theater… an impersonator. He glitched out of the security footage. He sang to me over the intercom, Clara, a song about my eyes. And now… now my face…” His voice broke. “It’s wrong. My eyes are changing.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Julian could hear the faint sound of traffic, the entire world continuing to spin on its axis while his had tilted off it completely.

“Julian,” Clara said finally, her voice soft and cautious, the voice one uses for a frightened animal or a madman. “You’ve been under a lot of stress. This job, art school… maybe you’re not sleeping enough. You sound… you sound really paranoid.”

“It’s not paranoia! It’s real!” he hissed, his desperation curdling into anger. “I saw him in my window last night! He was in my apartment!”

“Okay, Julian, okay,” she said, her tone placating, condescending. “Listen, why don’t you try and get some sleep? And maybe… maybe you should talk to one of the counselors at school. They’re really good.”

The line went dead in his heart long before he hung up. She didn't believe him. To her, he wasn't a man being hunted by a supernatural entity; he was a case study, a bundle of symptoms. The last anchor to his old reality had just been cut.

Defeated, he shuffled back to his apartment. The city ignored him, his isolation now absolute. He walked through the door and the silence inside was a physical weight. There was nowhere left to run.

He found himself back in the bathroom, drawn by a morbid, fatalistic curiosity. He had to look again. He had to know. He stood before the mirror, his reflection a pale, haunted stranger. The asymmetry was still there, a permanent feature of his new landscape. He leaned in, his face inches from the glass, and stared deep into the mismatched eyes of his reflection. He searched for a flicker of the old Julian, for a trace of the person he used to be.

He stared and stared, losing track of time, his own breath fogging the cool surface.

And then, it happened.

His reflected face remained perfectly still. His own muscles were slack with despair. But the lips in the mirror began to move. They pulled back from the teeth, slowly, deliberately. They stretched past the point of a normal human smile, widening and widening into a horrifying, bone-white crescent that split the face in two.

It was the impersonator’s smile. Unnaturally wide. Impossibly white. A silent, triumphant grin of pure predatory hunger, plastered onto his own face.

Julian fell backward, a strangled, animal sound of pure horror tearing from his throat. He scrabbled at the floor tiles, trying to get away, his eyes locked on the mirror. The monstrous smile held for a second longer, a silent, mocking “Hee-hee,” before the reflection’s features snapped back, mirroring his own mask of abject terror.

The face in the mirror was his again. But it was too late. He had seen it. The entity wasn't just following him anymore. It wasn't just in the shadows or the static.

It was in him.