Chapter 5: The Mark in the Mirror

Chapter 5: The Mark in the Mirror

Rohan’s disappearance was a stone dropped into the placid pond of our town, and the ripples of fear spread quickly. The official story, the one the adults whispered over their morning chai, was that he’d run away. A troubled boy, they said, always a bit impulsive. But the teenagers, the ones who had grown up hearing the same ghost stories we had, knew better. They wouldn't meet my eyes in the street. Vikram’s lie about a drunken hallucination had shattered, and in its place was a terror so profound it had become a wall of silence. Rohan was gone, and the wet footprints leading from his window were a secret everyone now knew but no one dared to speak aloud.

His absence had a strange effect on the craving inside me. The ravenous, screaming beast in my stomach had quieted. It was still there, a coiled serpent in my gut, but its desperate cries had been replaced by a low, triumphant thrum. A satisfied hum. My mother’s words echoed in my head: To give in is to feed it. Rohan had eaten. He had fed the connection. And in doing so, he hadn't sated the beast; he had simply made it stronger, and now its focus was returning to me with a horrifying, renewed intensity.

I tried to call Vikram again, possessed by a desperate need for the illusion of our old alliance. “He’s gone,” I said, the moment he picked up. “Vikram, they’re saying he ran away, but we saw the footprints. I saw them. They were wet.”

“So what do you want me to do, Arjun?” Vikram’s voice was ice. The confident leader was gone, replaced by a cold, pragmatic survivor. “Go to the police and tell them a water monster took him? They’ll lock me up.”

“We have to do something! We were all there!”

“No,” he said, his voice dropping to a low, accusatory hiss. “You were there. Sameer and I were on the side. Rohan threw the bottle. But you… you were sitting on that stone, closer to the water. It was looking at you, Arjun. It was always looking at you.”

The line went dead, but his words hung in the air, sharp and venomous. He was cutting me loose. He was painting a target on my back to save himself.

Sameer was even worse. He answered the phone in a choked whisper, and I could hear the frantic clicking of his mother’s prayer beads in the background. “Don’t call me,” he breathed. “My pandit said there’s a dark energy around you. A mark. He said to stay away. I’m sorry, Arjun. I can’t.”

A mark. The word chilled me to the bone. I was contagious. A leper. My friends, the only pillars I had left in this nightmare, had crumbled to dust, leaving me completely and utterly alone.

That night, the haunting escalated. It broke through the perimeter of my mind and invaded the physical world, violating the sanctity of my mother’s wards. It started in the bathroom. I was washing my face, trying to scrub away the grime of fear that felt permanently slicked to my skin. The water from the tap felt unusually cold, almost icy, and it carried a faint, coppery smell of stagnant river water. I stared at my reflection, at the gaunt stranger looking back. Dark circles bruised the skin under my eyes. My cheeks were hollowed out, my skin stretched taut over my skull. I looked like Dev’s description. I looked hollow.

I was about to turn away when something flickered in the mirror. A distortion, like a heat haze rising off the porcelain sink. I blinked, leaning closer. My reflection blinked back. Everything seemed normal. I must be losing my mind. I raised my hands to splash more water on my face, and that’s when I saw it.

In the mirror, the hands moving towards my face were not my own.

They were longer, thinner, the color of drowned flesh. A translucent, greenish film seemed to cling to them, and the skin between the fingers was not separate but connected by a thin, shimmering membrane.

They were webbed.

I recoiled with a strangled cry, stumbling back against the wall, my heart trying to beat its way out of my chest. I looked down at my real hands. They were normal, shaking violently, but normal. I risked a glance back at the mirror. The reflection was me again, my own hands held up in a defensive posture. But for a split second, I had seen it. A glimpse of the thing’s influence, an overlay of its own watery form onto mine. The mark Sameer’s pandit had spoken of. It wasn't just an aura of dark energy; it was a physical claim.

A gurgling sound drew my attention to the sink. It started as a low, watery burble from the drain, the sound of a clog being cleared. But it deepened, resolving into something else. A sibilant hiss, the sound of whispers trapped in a water pipe. I leaned over the drain, my fear warring with a desperate need to understand. The whispers were indistinct at first, a chorus of wet, murmuring sounds. Then, a single, clear word bubbled up from the darkness below, carried on a puff of air that smelled of mud and decay.

“Arrr-juuun…”

I scrambled out of the bathroom, slamming the door shut, my breath coming in ragged sobs. I collapsed onto my bed, pulling the covers up to my chin like a child hiding from a monster in the closet. But there was no hiding. The sanctuary of my own bedroom was the next to fall.

The smell came first. It wasn't the phantom scent of the river I sometimes caught on myself; this was real, thick, and suffocating. The cloying stench of river rot, of drowned leaves, and something ancient and foul, seeped into my room, originating from nowhere and everywhere at once. It was the smell of the creature’s presence. It was here. Inside.

My mother’s wards had been breached. The silver nail, the sacred smoke—they were little more than wishful thinking against a predator that had already sunk its hooks so deep into its chosen prey.

Vikram’s words came back to me. It was always looking at you.

It all clicked into place with horrifying clarity. This wasn’t random. I wasn't just one of four boys who had trespassed on its territory. Rohan was a target of opportunity, a foolish appetizer who had willingly opened his door. But I was the one it had singled out from the very beginning, sitting on that stone by the water's edge. I was the one it had followed. I was the one it was whispering to.

I wasn’t just noticed. I wasn’t just haunted.

I was chosen. Marked as the main course. And as I lay there, trembling in the dark, smelling the inexorable approach of my own watery grave, I stared at my hands, half-expecting to see the webbing sprout from my flesh. The mark was not just on my soul. It was inside my very skin, waiting to emerge.