Chapter 6: The Historian's Warning

The library parking lot was nearly empty at nine in the morning, just a few cars scattered across the rain-slicked asphalt like islands of normalcy. Liam sat in his Honda for several minutes after turning off the engine, staring at the brick building through eyes that felt full of sand. He'd managed maybe two hours of sleep, huddled in his car in a 24-hour McDonald's parking lot, afraid to return to his apartment and its gallery of haunted reflections.

This is insane. You're about to ask a librarian about ghost mirrors like it's a perfectly reasonable research request.

But what choice did he have? The internet searches he'd conducted on his phone—carefully avoiding his own reflection in the dark screen—had yielded nothing useful. Plenty of urban legends about haunted mirrors, sure, but nothing that matched what he was experiencing. Nothing about entities that could travel through reflections, that could whisper from frosted windows and touch the living world with fingers of ice.

The Millbrook Public Library was one of those Carnegie buildings from the early 1900s, all solid stone and high windows that spoke of a time when knowledge was considered sacred. Inside, it smelled like old paper and floor wax, comfortingly analog in a world that had become too digital, too reflective.

The reference desk was staffed by a woman who looked like she'd been born among the stacks—silver hair pulled back in a neat bun, reading glasses on a chain, cardigan that had seen decades of faithful service. Her nameplate read "Eleanor Hartwell, Local History."

Eleanor. Like the thing in the mirror called herself Eleonora.

The coincidence made his skin crawl, but he forced himself to approach the desk anyway. Desperation had a way of overriding superstition.

"Excuse me," he said, his voice rougher than expected. "I'm researching the history of a cabin up at Lake Serene. The property records show it was built in the sixties, but I'm trying to find information about the previous occupants."

Eleanor looked up from her computer screen, and for a moment Liam felt a chill of recognition. Not her face—she was clearly flesh and blood, with laugh lines and age spots and the warm solidity of the living—but her eyes. They held the same knowing quality he'd seen in his reflection when it whispered words he hadn't spoken.

You're being paranoid. Not everyone with gray hair is a ghost.

"Lake Serene," she repeated, setting down her glasses. "That's quite a drive from here. What brings you all the way to Millbrook for local research?"

Because the mountain town's library was closed, and you were the closest thing to a historian I could find who might know about cursed mirrors.

"I'm writing an article," he lied smoothly. "Freelance piece about abandoned properties in the region. The cabin has some interesting features—old mirrors, vintage fixtures. I thought there might be a story there."

Eleanor's expression sharpened with interest, but there was something else underneath it. Something that might have been recognition, or concern.

"What did you say your name was?"

"Liam Thorne."

She nodded slowly, as if his name confirmed something she'd been thinking. "And you've been to the cabin recently?"

The question was casual, but her tone carried weight that made his stomach clench. "Two nights ago. Why?"

Eleanor was quiet for a long moment, studying his face with the intensity of someone reading between lines. Finally, she stood up from her desk.

"Mr. Thorne, I think you'd better come with me."

She led him through the main library, past rows of books and scattered patrons, to a door marked "Archives - Staff Only." Beyond was a smaller room lined with filing cabinets and boxes of documents, lit by fluorescent bulbs that hummed like angry wasps.

"Before we begin," Eleanor said, closing the door behind them, "I need you to tell me exactly what you saw in that cabin."

She knows. Somehow, she knows.

"I'm not sure what you mean," Liam said carefully.

"The mirrors, Mr. Thorne. What did you see in the mirrors?"

The direct question hit him like a physical blow. For three days, he'd been alone with his terror, unable to share it with anyone who wouldn't immediately recommend psychiatric evaluation. Now this elderly librarian was asking about it as if supernatural mirrors were as common as overdue books.

"A woman," he said quietly. "Pale, hollow eyes. And a child, maybe eight or nine, always grinning. They appeared in reflections, but they weren't... they weren't normal reflections."

Eleanor nodded grimly. "The Ashtons. I was afraid of that."

She moved to one of the filing cabinets and withdrew a thick manila folder, setting it on the small table in the center of the room. The tab was labeled "Lake Serene - Missing Persons - 1974."

"You've heard of them?" Liam asked.

"Heard of them? Mr. Thorne, I helped search for them when they disappeared." Eleanor opened the folder, revealing newspaper clippings, police reports, and photographs that were clearly decades old. "Thomas and Eleonora Ashton. And their son, Tommy. They rented that cabin for the summer of 1974, and by September, it was as if they'd never existed."

The photographs made Liam's blood run cold. The woman in the black-and-white images was hauntingly familiar—the same gaunt face, the same hollow eyes that had stared at him from impossible reflections. But in these pictures, taken when she was still among the living, there was a desperate quality to her expression that was somehow even more unsettling than her ghostly manifestation.

"She looks..." he began.

"Exactly like what you saw," Eleanor finished. "I know. Because you're not the first person to come here asking about the Ashtons, Mr. Thorne. Every few years, someone else rents that cabin and sees things they can't explain. Usually they run, like you did. Usually they never come back."

How many others? How many people have seen what I've seen?

"What happened to them?" Liam asked, though part of him already knew the answer would be terrible.

Eleanor pulled out a police report, the paper yellowed with age. "According to the neighbors—and there weren't many, even then—Eleonora had become increasingly desperate about her son's illness. Tommy had some kind of chronic condition, something the doctors couldn't diagnose or treat. The family had spent everything they had on specialists, treatments, anything that might help."

She turned the page, revealing a handwritten witness statement. "Mrs. Patterson, who lived in the cabin next door, reported seeing strange lights from the Ashton place in the weeks before they disappeared. Said she heard chanting at all hours, saw Eleonora burning things in the backyard. Occult things, she thought."

Occult rituals. In front of the mirror.

"Eleonora was trying to cure her son," Liam said. It wasn't a question.

"That's what we suspected. The cabin had belonged to an eccentric collector before the Ashtons rented it. Man named Whitmore who had a fascination with antiques and... stranger things. When the police searched the place after the family disappeared, they found books on folk magic, ritual implements, and that mirror."

Eleanor pulled out a photograph that made Liam's breath catch. It showed the cabin's bedroom, exactly as he remembered it, with the ornate antique mirror dominating one wall. But in this image, taken by police photographers in 1974, the mirror's surface seemed wrong somehow—clouded, as if viewed through dirty water.

"The investigators noted that the mirror appeared damaged," Eleanor continued. "Not cracked, exactly, but... corrupted. Like looking into a pond that had been stirred up. And there were marks on the glass, handprints that couldn't be wiped clean."

Handprints on the inside of the glass.

"What do you think happened to them?" Liam asked, though he was beginning to suspect he already knew.

Eleanor met his eyes directly. "I think Eleonora found something in one of those occult books. Something that promised to cure her son, to give them a way out of their suffering. But magic always has a price, Mr. Thorne. Always."

She pulled out the final document in the folder—a yellowed page that looked like it had been torn from an old book. The text was in Latin, but someone had written an English translation in faded ink in the margins.

"This was found in the cabin, along with several similar pages. A ritual called the 'Exchange of Souls'—a way to trade places with your reflection, to swap your current life for the one you see in the mirror world."

Liam read the translation with growing horror:

"When the boundaries grow thin and desperation runs deep, the mirror world offers sanctuary to those bold enough to seek it. But what enters must balance what leaves, and the price of crossing over is to send another back in your place..."

"...trap places with your reflection..." The words from his apartment whispers echoed in his memory. "...fair exchange..."

"They didn't disappear," he said quietly. "They crossed over. Into the mirror world."

"That's what I believe, yes. But the ritual backfired somehow—instead of freeing them, it trapped them between worlds. They became prisoners in the reflections, able to see our world but not truly exist in it."

Eleanor closed the folder gently, as if handling something sacred or dangerous.

"Until now," she continued. "You see, Mr. Thorne, the ritual requires a willing participant from this side. Someone to take their place in the mirror world while they escape into ours. For forty-nine years, they've been searching for that someone."

Someone alone. Someone desperate. Someone who's already given up on their current life.

"And they think they've found him," Liam said.

Eleanor nodded grimly. "The question is, what are you going to do about it?"

Outside the archives room, the library continued its quiet business—patrons checking out books, children attending story time, the normal flow of small-town life. But Liam felt like he was sitting at the bottom of a well, looking up at a world he might never rejoin.

The Ashtons. Thomas and Eleonora and their son Tommy. Not monsters, just a desperate family who made a terrible choice.

But understanding their tragedy didn't make them less dangerous. If anything, it made them more so—their motivation wasn't evil, just the kind of desperate love that could justify any sacrifice.

Including his.

"There has to be a way to stop this," he said. "To break the connection or send them back or... something."

Eleanor was quiet for a long moment, studying his face with that same unsettling intensity.

"There might be," she said finally. "But it would require going back to the cabin. Back to the source of their power."

Of course it would.

"And it would be extremely dangerous," she continued. "The boundary between worlds is thinnest there. If something went wrong..."

"I could end up trapped like they are," Liam finished.

"Or worse. You could let them out completely, free to walk in our world while you take their place in the prison they've inhabited for half a century."

Liam stared at the folder on the table, at the photographs of a family whose love had become their curse. Somewhere in the space between reflections, Eleonora Ashton was still trying to save her sick child, still believing that the right sacrifice would make everything better.

And now she'd found someone alone enough, desperate enough, to make that sacrifice possible.

The question was whether he was going to let her succeed.