Chapter 10: Return to the Lake

The mountain road to Lake Serene felt longer in darkness, each curve revealing nothing but more asphalt disappearing into the void beyond his headlights. Liam's hands gripped the steering wheel with white-knuckled intensity as he practiced the Latin incantation for the dozenth time, the unfamiliar syllables feeling like stones in his mouth.

"Spiritus vinctus, liberare te impero. Quod mortuum est mortuum maneat. Quod vivum est vivum maneat."

Bound spirits, I command you to be free. Let the dead remain dead. Let the living remain living.

The phonetic notations Eleanor had provided made pronunciation possible, but each repetition felt like he was speaking words that didn't want to be spoken by living tongues. The mirror shard in the passenger seat seemed to pulse with each recitation, its fractured surface catching the dashboard lights and throwing them back in patterns that hurt to perceive directly.

11:31 PM.

Twenty-nine minutes to midnight. Twenty-nine minutes to perform a ritual he barely understood, in a place where supernatural entities had been building their power for half a century. The rational part of his mind catalogued all the ways this could go catastrophically wrong, but that voice had grown quieter over the past few days. Rational thinking was a luxury he could no longer afford.

The turnoff to the lake appeared in his headlights like a mouth opening in the forest. The gravel road beyond was rougher than he remembered, forcing him to slow to a crawl as his car bucked and lurched through potholes that seemed deeper in the dark. Tree branches scraped against his windows with sounds like fingernails on glass, and more than once he thought he saw movement in the spaces between the trunks—pale figures keeping pace with his car, always visible in his peripheral vision but gone when he looked directly.

They know I'm coming. They've been expecting this.

The cabin materialized out of the darkness like a photograph developing in slow motion. First the outline of the roof against the star-studded sky, then the bulk of the walls, finally the details that made his stomach clench with recognition. The same wooden steps where he'd sat three days ago, believing his biggest problem was professional burnout. The same windows, now dark but somehow watchful. The same door that had seemed so welcoming when he'd first arrived seeking solitude.

Now it looked like the entrance to a tomb.

11:47 PM.

Liam sat in his car for a moment, engine ticking in the sudden silence, staring at the structure that had become the center of his personal nightmare. Every instinct screamed at him to start the engine and drive away, to flee to another state and hope the Ashtons' influence couldn't follow him that far.

But Eleanor's words echoed in his mind: Seven people who were alone, desperate, vulnerable enough to accept their offer.

How many others would die if he ran? How many would face the same impossible choice between surrender and madness?

The cabin's windows reflected his headlights back at him, but the reflections seemed wrong somehow—too bright, too focused, as if they were being watched from within by eyes that gathered light more efficiently than glass should allow. When he turned off the engine, the reflections didn't fade. They intensified.

The mirror world is bleeding through.

He grabbed the satchel and stepped out of the car, immediately hit by cold that had nothing to do with the mountain air. This was the same supernatural chill he'd experienced in his apartment, but concentrated here at the source of the Ashtons' power. His breath misted in clouds that lingered longer than they should, hanging in the air like small ghosts before dissipating.

The cabin's front door stood slightly ajar.

I locked it when I left. I know I locked it.

But the deadbolt hung loose, and through the gap he could see faint light moving inside—not electric illumination, but the cold radiance of reflected moonlight bouncing off surfaces that shouldn't exist.

11:52 PM.

Eight minutes to midnight. Eight minutes to cross the threshold and begin a ritual that would either end his nightmare or trap him in it forever.

The door swung open at his touch, revealing an interior that was familiar yet fundamentally wrong. The furniture sat in the right places, the layout remained unchanged, but the air itself seemed thicker, more viscous, as if he were walking through water instead of atmosphere. Every surface that could hold a reflection—the windows, the chrome fixtures, even the polished wood of the dining table—showed not the cabin's interior but glimpses of someplace else.

The mirror world.

Through the reflected surfaces, he could see the gray landscape Eleanor had described: rolling hills under a pearl-colored sky, figures moving slowly through mist that never quite resolved into recognizable forms. But now he could see more detail than before—structures in the distance that might have been buildings, paths that led to destinations shrouded in perpetual twilight.

It's not empty. There's a whole world there, with its own geography, its own rules.

The bedroom door stood open, spilling that same cold radiance into the hallway. Each step toward it felt like walking uphill, as if gravity itself were trying to prevent him from reaching his destination. The wooden floorboards creaked under his feet, but the sounds seemed to come from multiple directions, as if echoes were arriving before the original noises.

11:56 PM.

Four minutes.

The bedroom had been transformed. The antique mirror dominated the space as before, but now its surface rippled like disturbed water, showing depths that extended far beyond the physical boundaries of the glass. Candles that hadn't been there moments before burned around its base—not wax candles, but flames that seemed to emerge directly from the wooden floor. The symbols Eleonora had drawn for her original ritual were visible again, scratched into the floorboards in lines that glowed with their own phosphorescent light.

The original ritual site is reasserting itself.

But it was what he saw in the mirror's depths that made his hands shake as he opened Eleanor's satchel.

The Ashtons stood on the other side of the glass, but they were no longer the desperate specters he'd encountered before. Here, in their place of power, they looked almost solid, almost real. Eleonora's hollow eyes burned with fifty years of accumulated hope and desperation. Tommy's grin had returned, but now it carried a weight of anticipation that was somehow more unsettling than his previous sadness.

And behind them, barely visible in the mirror world's gray mist, dozens of other figures waited. The seven people Eleanor had mentioned, plus others—all the souls the Ashtons had collected over the decades, all waiting for their chance at freedom.

Not just three spirits. An entire population of the trapped and desperate.

11:58 PM.

Liam pulled out the mirror shard, its surface immediately beginning to resonate with the larger mirror's power. The fragment grew warm in his hand, then hot, then so cold it burned. Around him, the candle flames flickered in patterns that suggested language, and he could hear whispers rising from every reflective surface in the room.

"Turn back..."

"Join us willingly..."

"The ritual will fail..."

"You don't understand what you're attempting..."

But underneath the chorus of trapped voices, he heard something else: Eleonora's voice, speaking directly to him with desperate clarity.

"Please. I just want to save my son. I just want him to have a chance to live."

The raw pain in her words almost broke his resolve. This wasn't a monster he was facing—it was a mother who had spent fifty years trying to undo the consequences of a choice made from love.

But love without limits becomes its own kind of evil.

11:59 PM.

Thirty seconds to midnight. Thirty seconds to begin a ritual that would either free dozens of trapped souls or add his own to their number.

In the great mirror, the Ashtons pressed forward, their faces nearly touching the glass from within. Eleonora's mouth moved in what might have been a prayer or a curse, while Tommy's grin stretched wider, revealing teeth that gleamed like stars in the mirror world's eternal twilight.

"Spiritus vinctus, liberare te impero," Liam began, his voice barely audible above the whispers that filled the room.

The mirror shard flared with light that had no color, and the temperature in the room plummeted. Ice began forming on the windows, and his breath came out in clouds so thick they obscured his vision.

"Quod mortuum est mortuum maneat."

The symbols on the floor blazed brighter, and cracks appeared in the mirror's surface—not physical breaks, but fractures in reality itself that showed glimpses of spaces that shouldn't exist.

"Quod vivum est vivum maneat."

The clock on the bedside table chimed midnight.

And the mirror exploded outward, not with glass but with a tide of gray mist that carried the desperate voices of five decades' worth of trapped souls.

The ritual had begun.

But as Liam stepped forward to complete it, he realized with horror that he wasn't alone in the room anymore. The Ashtons stood behind him now, no longer trapped behind glass but present in his world, their forms more solid and threatening than they'd ever been.

The barrier isn't just cracking. It's collapsing entirely.

And in the swirling chaos of mist and whispers and impossible geometries, Liam understood that he had perhaps thirty seconds to complete the Severance before the mirror world consumed his reality entirely.

Time to find out if a failed graphic designer had what it took to save both worlds from fifty years of accumulated desperation.

The real battle was just beginning.