Chapter 7: The Other Occupants

Eleanor locked the archives room behind them and led Liam to a corner table in the library's main reading area, away from other patrons but still within the comforting bustle of normal life. The manila folder sat between them like a loaded weapon, its contents already reshaping everything Liam thought he understood about his situation.

"Tell me about the family," he said quietly. "Not just the facts from the police reports. Who were they really?"

Eleanor settled into her chair with the careful movements of someone who'd spent decades among books and memories. "I was twenty-three then, fresh out of library school, when the Ashtons came to town. Eleonora visited our local history section regularly that summer, researching everything she could find about folk remedies and... less conventional healing methods."

She opened the folder and pulled out a newspaper clipping Liam hadn't seen before—a society page photograph from the local paper, dated June 1974. It showed a family at some community event: a tall, thin man in a suit that had seen better days, a woman whose beauty was marred by the desperate exhaustion in her eyes, and between them, a small boy who even in the grainy newsprint looked pale and fragile.

"Thomas Ashton was an insurance adjuster," Eleanor continued. "Steady work, decent pay, but nothing that could cover the kind of medical bills they were facing. He'd drive down from the cabin every day to work in town, leaving Eleonora alone with Tommy."

Like me. Alone and isolated, cut off from normal human connection.

"What was wrong with the boy?" Liam asked.

"No one knew. That was the tragedy of it—dozens of specialists, hundreds of tests, and they never found a diagnosis. Tommy was just... fading. Getting weaker every month, losing weight, sleeping more and more. The doctors called it 'failure to thrive,' which is medical terminology for 'we have no idea what's killing your child.'"

Eleanor traced the edge of the photograph with one finger, her expression distant. "Eleonora became obsessed with finding a cure. She'd spend hours in here, going through our collection of regional folklore, local histories, anything that mentioned healing traditions. She was particularly interested in stories about the indigenous peoples who'd lived around Lake Serene before the area was settled."

Researching. Looking for answers that conventional medicine couldn't provide.

"She was desperate," Liam said.

"Beyond desperate. I remember one afternoon in July, she broke down completely right here at this table. Said she'd tried everything, spent everything, and Tommy was still getting worse. She asked me if I believed in magic—not stage magic, but real magic. The kind that could work miracles."

Eleanor pulled out another document, this one handwritten in faded blue ink. "This is a letter she wrote to her sister back east. We found it in the cabin, never sent. She talks about finding 'the answer' in something called the Whitmore Collection."

Liam read the letter, Eleonora's desperation bleeding through every line:

"Dear Margaret—I know you think I've lost my mind, but I've found something that could save Tommy. The previous owner of this place was a collector of antiquities, and among his things I discovered books that speak of healing methods unknown to modern medicine. Methods that require faith and sacrifice, but promise results that doctors cannot provide. Thomas thinks I'm grasping at straws, but what choice do I have? Watch my baby die, or try something extraordinary? I've already lost too much to give up now..."

"The Whitmore Collection," Liam repeated. "That's where she found the ritual."

"Edmund Whitmore was what you might charitably call an eccentric," Eleanor said. "He'd inherited money from his family's mining interests and spent decades traveling the world, collecting artifacts and texts related to what he called 'liminal spaces'—places where the boundaries between worlds grew thin."

She pulled out a inventory list, typewritten on letterhead that read "Estate of Edmund Whitmore - 1962."

"When he died, his collection was supposed to go to a university, but somehow several boxes of the more unusual items ended up being sold with the cabin. Books on mirror magic, scrying techniques, rituals for communicating with the dead. The rental agency either didn't know what they had or didn't care."

A desperate mother with a dying child, left alone with books of dangerous magic.

"She tried the ritual to save Tommy," Liam said. "But something went wrong."

"The ritual she found was called the 'Speculum Exchange,'" Eleanor said, pulling out the torn page he'd seen before. "It promised to swap the practitioner's current life for one reflected in consecrated mirrors—essentially allowing them to trade places with a healthier version of themselves from what the text called 'the mirror realm.'"

Liam studied the Latin text and its faded English translation more carefully this time. The instructions were disturbingly specific:

"At the dark of the moon, when suffering reaches its peak and hope grows thin, position the subject before the blessed glass. Speak the words of binding thrice, offer the blood of willing sacrifice, and call upon the dwellers in the reflected world to grant passage. What is sick shall become well, what is weak shall become strong, but the exchange must be equal—life for life, soul for soul..."

"She thought she could cure Tommy by trading his sick body for a healthy reflection," Liam said.

"That was the plan. But the ritual required specific conditions—a consecrated mirror, particular timing, and what the text calls 'blood of willing sacrifice.' We found evidence that she'd been preparing for weeks, learning the pronunciation of the Latin phrases, timing everything for the new moon in August."

Eleanor pulled out the final document—a police photograph of the cabin's bedroom taken after the family's disappearance. The ornate mirror dominated the image, but now Liam could see details he'd missed before. Candles arranged around its base, strange symbols drawn on the floor in what looked like chalk or salt, and on the mirror's surface...

"Handprints," he whispered.

"Multiple sets. Adult hands pressed against the glass from inside, and smaller ones that would match a child's. As if they were trapped behind the surface, trying to push their way back out."

They succeeded in crossing over, but the mirror became a prison instead of a doorway.

"What went wrong?" Liam asked.

Eleanor was quiet for a moment, studying the photographs with the expression of someone who'd spent years trying to solve an impossible puzzle. "I think the ritual worked exactly as intended," she said finally. "Eleonora, Thomas, and Tommy crossed over into the mirror world. But what they found there wasn't the paradise they'd been promised."

She pulled out one last item—a small, leather-bound journal with "Property of E. Ashton" written on the cover in the same handwriting as the unsent letter.

"We found this wedged behind a loose floorboard. The final entries describe what she saw when she looked through the mirror in the days leading up to the ritual."

Liam opened the journal to the last pages, dated August 1974:

"The mirror shows me such wonderful things. Tommy running, playing, laughing like he hasn't in months. Thomas smiling again, the worry lines gone from his face. We look healthy there, prosperous, happy. The books say we can step through and take their place, live their better lives while they take our burdens..."

"But sometimes, when the light catches the glass just right, I see others in the background. Pale figures watching from the shadows of that reflected world. Are they the ones who made the trade before us? Are they trapped there, or are they the guardians of that better place?"

"It doesn't matter. Tommy grows weaker every day. The doctors say weeks, maybe less. If there's even a chance the ritual can save him, I have to try. Thomas still argues, but he sees it too now—our son is dying, and this might be our only hope."

The final entry was dated August 15th, 1974:

"Tonight. The moon is dark, the preparations complete. I've drawn the circles, spoken the binding words, prepared the sacrifice. When next I write in this journal, it will be from the other side, where Tommy is well and we are whole again. If we never return to this world, let whoever finds this know that we chose love over fear, hope over despair. We chose to save our child."

"They never wrote again," Eleanor said quietly. "Because they couldn't. The ritual transported them to the mirror world, but it wasn't the paradise they'd been shown. It was a prison, a gray space between realities where they could see our world but never touch it."

Until now. Until they found someone alone and desperate enough to complete the exchange.

"The figures you saw—Eleonora and Tommy—they're still trying to save each other," Liam said. "After all these years, she's still trying to cure her son, and the only way she knows how is to trade places with someone from our world."

"A mother's love," Eleanor said. "It can be the most beautiful force in the universe, or the most terrifying. In Eleonora's case, it's become both."

Liam stared at the photographs, at the evidence of a family destroyed by their own desperate love. He thought of the pale woman pressing her hands against impossible glass, of the grinning child whose smile held decades of loneliness, of the whispers that promised salvation through sacrifice.

They're not evil. They're victims. But that doesn't make them less dangerous.

"How many others have they tried to recruit?" he asked.

"Over the years? Dozens, probably. Most people who encounter them just run, like you did initially. But some..." Eleanor hesitated. "Some disappear. Hikers who never came back from the lake. Renters who checked out of the cabin and were never seen again. People who were already isolated, already vulnerable."

People like me.

"What makes them think I'm different?" Liam asked. "Why am I worth following to the city?"

Eleanor studied his face with that unsettling intensity again. "May I ask what brought you to the cabin in the first place, Mr. Thorne?"

The question hit closer to home than he'd expected. "Burnout. Professional failure. I needed to get away from everything and figure out what to do with my life."

"Alone?"

"Yes."

"Running from something?"

From failure. From isolation. From the wreckage of a career and a life that never quite came together.

"I suppose."

Eleanor nodded slowly. "Eleonora recognizes desperation, Mr. Thorne. She's been desperate for forty-nine years. She can sense when someone else has reached that same breaking point, that place where any change—even a terrible one—seems preferable to the status quo."

She chose me because I was already half-dead inside.

"But there's something else," Eleanor continued. "Something that makes you particularly valuable to her. You came back. You didn't just run away and never return—you came back looking for answers. That shows the kind of determination she needs, the strength of will required to complete the exchange ritual."

Liam felt the weight of the folder between them, the accumulated tragedy of the Ashton family and the dozens of others who'd encountered their desperate plea for salvation. Somewhere in the space between mirrors, Eleonora was still trying to save her child, still believing that the right sacrifice would make everything better.

And she'd chosen him to make that sacrifice possible.

"What happens if I don't go back?" he asked. "If I just... stay away from reflective surfaces, avoid the cabin, try to wait them out?"

Eleanor's expression was grim. "They've already established a connection, Mr. Thorne. The manifestations will only grow stronger, more invasive. Eventually, they won't need mirrors to reach you. And besides..." She gestured to the journal, to the photographs, to the evidence of five decades of trapped desperation. "Do you really think you can live the rest of your life avoiding your own reflection?"

She's right. This isn't something I can run from.

"Then what are my options?"

"Two, as I see it," Eleanor said. "You can let them complete the exchange—trade places with them and spend eternity trapped in their gray prison while they live your life. Or..."

"Or?"

"You can go back to the cabin and try to break the cycle entirely. Send them on to whatever comes after death, free them from the mirror world permanently."

Back to the source. Back to where it all began.

"How?"

Eleanor smiled grimly. "That, Mr. Thorne, is where things get complicated."