Chapter 5: Shards and Whispers

Destroying the bathroom mirror had been a mistake.

Liam understood this with crystalline clarity as he sat in his kitchen at two in the morning, every light in the apartment blazing, surrounded by reflective surfaces he'd never noticed before. The stainless steel refrigerator. The glossy black screen of his phone. The chrome faucet that curved like a question mark over his sink. Even the dark windows had become mirrors now that night had fallen, showing him his own haggard face duplicated endlessly in glass that should have revealed the city beyond.

She doesn't need antique frames or haunted cabins. Any reflection will do.

The realization had come to him slowly, like water seeping through cracks. Every time he caught his reflection—in his phone screen, in the toaster's chrome surface, in the puddle of spilled coffee he'd left on his counter—there was something wrong with what he saw. Sometimes it was subtle: his reflection's eyes staying open a fraction too long when he blinked. Sometimes it was blatant: the pale woman's face appearing over his shoulder in surfaces where no one else should exist.

You can't eliminate every mirror in the city. You can't stop living in a world made of glass and metal.

He'd tried covering the obvious ones at first. Thrown towels over the chrome appliances, taped newspaper over the windows, even considered smashing his phone. But that only made him more aware of the surfaces he couldn't cover—the reflection in his coffee mug, the gleam of his doorknob, the polished brass of his light switches.

The modern world was built on reflections.

His phone buzzed against the counter, the vibration unnaturally loud in the apartment's oppressive silence. For a moment, hope flared in his chest—maybe service had returned, maybe he could call someone, maybe—

But the screen showed no messages, no missed calls. Just the familiar background image of a design project he'd never completed, overlaid with the faint ghost of his own face staring back at him.

Except his reflection's mouth was moving.

Let... us... out...

Liam jerked his hand away from the phone so violently that it skittered across the counter, spinning to face him like an accusation. In its dark screen, barely visible but undeniably present, two figures stood behind his reflected image.

The pale woman, closer than ever before, her skeletal hands resting on his reflection's shoulders.

And the grinning child, small face pressed against the glass from within, that terrible smile stretched impossibly wide.

This isn't a haunting. This is an invasion.

The thought came with uncomfortable clarity. Whatever these entities were, they weren't simply appearing in reflections—they were colonizing them, spreading through every reflective surface like some spiritual infection. His apartment was no longer his sanctuary; it was their beachhead into his world.

A sound drifted through the apartment that made his blood freeze: whispers.

Not from any particular direction, but from everywhere at once—the walls, the floors, the very air around him seemed to carry fragments of conversation just below the threshold of comprehension. Syllables that might have been words, intonations that suggested meaning without delivering it.

Can you hear them? part of his mind asked with detached curiosity. Or are you finally going completely insane?

But the whispers were real. He could feel them more than hear them, vibrations that bypassed his ears and resonated directly in his bones. And gradually, impossibly, they began to resolve into something approaching language.

"...so long trapped..."

"...he can see us..."

"...the way out..."

"...swap places..."

The fragments came from different voices—the pale woman's desperate rasp, the child's sing-song lilt, and others he didn't recognize. How many were there? How many souls had been caught in whatever web he'd stumbled into?

Liam pressed his palms against his ears, but the whispers weren't coming through normal sound. They were emanating from his phone, his appliances, every reflective surface in the apartment speaking in voices that shouldn't exist.

"...he's listening..."

"...closer now..."

"...almost ready..."

The temperature in the apartment began to drop. Not gradually, like a failing heater, but in waves that corresponded to the whispers. Each phantom voice brought a pocket of arctic air that made his breath mist and frost form on the windows.

But it was what he saw in that frost that made him stumble backward against his kitchen counter.

Letters. Forming slowly in the ice crystals that spread across his windows like living things. Backwards script that he had to read in reflection, words appearing one by one in the growing cold:

LET US OUT

SWAP WITH US

SO COLD HERE

SO HUNGRY

PLEASE

The last word stretched across his living room window in letters three feet tall, the frost growing so thick it obscured the city lights beyond. But in that white opacity, shapes began to move—vague figures pressing against the glass from an impossible outside, their forms distorted by the ice but unmistakably present.

His phone screen flickered to life without being touched, displaying a message that wasn't from any app he recognized:

WE KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE

WE KNOW YOUR NAME

LIAM THORNE

GRAPHIC DESIGNER

AGE 28

APARTMENT 4B

ALONE

ALWAYS ALONE

The words scrolled across the screen faster than human fingers could type, accompanied by images that made his stomach lurch. Photos of his apartment from impossible angles—from inside his walls, from beneath his floorboards, from spaces that didn't exist. Pictures of himself sleeping, working, eating, taken from the perspectives of his mirrors and screens and chrome fixtures.

They've been watching. This whole time, they've been watching.

But the worst image was the last one: a photo of himself as he sat right now, hunched over his kitchen counter in the blazing light of his apartment. But in the photo, he wasn't alone. Pale figures crowded around him, dozens of them, their faces pressed close to his as if whispering secrets in his ear.

The phone screen went dark, but the whispers continued, growing louder and more insistent:

"...trade places..."

"...you live our life..."

"...we live yours..."

"...fair exchange..."

"...so much better on this side..."

Something touched his neck.

Not a hand—the sensation was too cold, too insubstantial for flesh. But definitely a touch, a presence that shouldn't exist making contact with his world. Fingers that felt like icicles traced along his spine, and when he spun around to confront whatever had touched him, he saw nothing but empty air.

But every reflective surface in the apartment showed the same impossible sight: the pale woman standing directly behind him, her skeletal hand resting on his shoulder, her hollow eyes staring directly into his.

She's not just in the reflections anymore. She's starting to cross over.

The realization came with a terror so profound it felt like drowning. Whatever barrier existed between their world and his, it was breaking down. The whispers weren't just communication—they were preparation. A countdown to something he couldn't let happen.

But how do you fight an enemy that exists in reflection? How do you battle something that lives in the spaces between light and glass?

Run, his survival instincts screamed. Get out of here. Go somewhere with no mirrors, no windows, no reflective surfaces.

But even as the thought formed, he knew it was hopeless. The modern world was built on reflection. Streets full of car windows and storefront glass. Buildings sheathed in mirrored facades. Puddles on sidewalks that could hold a face.

There was nowhere to run.

And in the growing chorus of whispers that filled his apartment, he heard something that made his knees buckle:

His own voice.

Faint but unmistakable, joining the ghostly conversation:

"...let me out..."

"...so tired of being alone..."

"...want to swap..."

"...please..."

He wasn't just being haunted. He was being recruited.

Somewhere in the maze of reflections that surrounded him, a version of himself was already pleading to trade places with the living world. The process—whatever it was—had already begun.

In his phone's dark screen, his reflection smiled back at him with hollow eyes and whispered a single word that froze his blood:

"Soon."