Chapter 6: The Bleeding Mirrors

Chapter 6: The Bleeding Mirrors

Rohan fled Kunal’s apartment with the sound of scratching still echoing in his ears, a phantom itch in his own mind. He stumbled down the stairs, bursting back into the cold night, the image of the coiled black hair in the toilet bowl burned into his retinas. He felt like a battlefield medic running from one dying soldier to the next, watching his friends fall to a silent, invisible enemy.

Aman, lost to his own corrupted apartment. Sneha, a screaming statue in a sunlit room. Kunal, being hollowed out from the inside, his body a conduit for the entity's filth. The attacks were a crescendo of personalized terror, each one more intimate and violating than the last. That left Zoya. And Pranav, who was still a ghost in their dead group chat.

Rohan’s hands shook as he scrolled through his contacts, his thumb hovering over Zoya’s name. As an artist, her entire life was built on perception, on seeing the world in ways others didn't. What would a reality-bending entity do to a mind like that? The thought filled him with a unique and terrible dread.

Before he could press the call button, his phone shrieked to life in his hand. Zoya’s name flashed on the screen. He answered instantly, a desperate hope warring with bone-deep fear.

"Zoya? Are you okay?"

The sound that answered him was pure, undiluted hysteria. A high, keening scream that was all raw terror and no breath. It was a sound that scraped nerve endings.

"Zoya! What is it? Talk to me!" he yelled over her screaming.

"It's wearing my face, Rohan!" she shrieked, her voice breaking. "It's in the mirror and it's wearing my face! It's smiling at me!"

The scream cut off into a sound of shattering glass, followed by a wet, percussive crash. Then another. And another. A symphony of destruction played out over the line, punctuated by Zoya’s ragged, sobbing breaths.

"Zoya!"

"It's not me... it's not me..." she whimpered, the sound growing distant. "Make it stop smiling..."

The line went dead.

Rohan didn't think. He ran to his car, peeling away from the curb with a squeal of tires, the phone dropping to the passenger seat. His mind raced, connecting the terrifying dots. The sunken eyes he’d seen behind his own reflection in Aman's bathroom. Now Zoya was seeing it too. The entity wasn't just a shadow or a presence. It was a mimic. A thief of faces.

He broke every speed limit, his journey across the sleeping city a frantic, blurry race against a horror he couldn't begin to define. He arrived at her apartment building, a trendy converted warehouse with large industrial windows, and sprinted up the three flights of stairs.

The door to her loft was ajar, swinging gently in a draft. A single lamp was on inside, casting long, distorted shadows. "Zoya?" he called out, his voice trembling.

There was no answer.

He pushed the door open and stepped inside. The scene was one of violent, focused chaos. Zoya’s apartment, usually a space of creative clutter—canvases leaning against walls, charcoal sketches pinned up, pots of brushes on every surface—had been systematically destroyed. But the destruction wasn't random. It was specific.

Every mirror was smashed.

The large, antique mirror in the entryway was a spiderweb of cracks, its frame splintered. The mirrored doors of her wardrobe were shattered, shards littering the floor like jagged teeth. In the bathroom, the medicine cabinet mirror was punched inward, leaving a gaping hole. Even small decorative mirrors had been hurled against the concrete walls, their frames bent and broken. Zoya had waged a war against her own reflection, and lost.

The air was thick with a familiar, sickening smell. Rust and decay, the scent of a stagnant pond, underpinned by the foul, greasy odor of wet hair. It was the entity's signature perfume.

Rohan crunched across the sea of broken glass, his eyes scanning the loft for any sign of her. Canvases had been knocked over, furniture upended, but there was no Zoya. He felt a chilling certainty that she was gone, just like Aman. The entity had come for her, and it had taken her.

His gaze was drawn to the largest wall in the loft, a wide expanse of exposed brick where a massive, floor-to-ceiling mirror had once hung. The heavy oak frame now lay on the floor in pieces. But the wall behind it… the wall was wet.

Dark, viscous streaks ran down the brickwork, like thick, black tears. They oozed from the mortar, glistening in the lamplight. It looked like someone had thrown buckets of tar against the wall. Rohan stepped closer, his heart pounding a slow, heavy drumbeat of dread. This was more than a stain. This was a manifestation.

He reached out a hesitant, trembling finger, touching the edge of one of the black streaks. It was thick and oily, like the brackish water from his sink, but colder, with the consistency of slow-bleeding sap. It clung to his skin, smelling powerfully of old iron and rot. The walls were weeping the entity's essence. Where the mirrors, the gateways to its mockery, once stood, it had left its physical trace, bleeding its filth into the very structure of the building.

He wiped the black substance on his jeans in disgust, a wave of nausea rolling through him. He saw it all now, the horrifying, escalating pattern. It had left its presence in Aman's apartment. It had left its offspring with Sneha. It had put a piece of itself inside Kunal. And here, it was bleeding itself into Zoya’s reality, turning her sanctuary into a wound.

He backed away from the weeping wall, his foot catching on a piece of the shattered mirror frame. He stumbled, catching his balance, and his eyes fell to the floor. Among the thousands of glittering shards, one large, dagger-shaped piece lay with its reflective side up.

For a moment, he saw himself. Just his own face, pale and haggard, his eyes wide with fear and exhaustion. A familiar, terrified face. It was a momentary anchor in the madness.

Then, the reflection changed.

The fear in its eyes didn't vanish. It sharpened. It became something else. Something cold and calculating. The mouth, his mouth, which had been set in a grim line of horror, began to twitch at the corners. Slowly, impossibly, it pulled itself into a smile.

It was not a smile of happiness or relief. It was a slow, predatory smile of immense satisfaction, a look of pure, malevolent triumph. It was a predator’s smile, directed at its chosen prey. The reflection’s eyes, still his eyes, held his gaze, and in their depths, he saw an ancient, hungry intelligence that had seen civilizations rise and fall.

Rohan stared, paralyzed, his breath caught in his throat. He was looking at his own face, twisted into the mask of the monster that had hunted his friends. The thing that had peered from the mist on the mirror in Apartment 5B, the thing that had stood silently with them in the parking lot, was now looking back at him from a shard of broken glass, wearing his own skin.

He wanted to scream, to smash the shard, to erase that horrific, triumphant smile. But he couldn't move. He could only watch as his own reflection held him captive, its grin widening, promising a world of personalized pain.

The hunt for his friends was over.

And a new one was about to begin.