Chapter 62 - The Antique Mirror

The antique shop was filled with the scent of dust and forgotten things. Its proprietor, a man as thin and brittle as the porcelain he sold, watched her with faded eyes as she browsed. Nothing in the store called to her, not the chipped ceramics nor the tarnished silver, until she found it: a small, oval hand mirror with an ornate, silver-filigree handle. The glass was cloudy with age, but something about it seemed to shimmer, to pull her gaze inward. She felt an odd, cold sensation tracing her spine as she held it. The shopkeeper barely registered her purchase, just took her money with a long, bony hand.Back in her cramped apartment, she polished the mirror, but the cloudy patina wouldn't budge. Giving up, she set it on her bedside table, its ornate handle catching the lamplight in a peculiar way. That night, as she slept, she dreamed of a face she didn't recognize. Not her own, but a woman's. Her features were blurred, as if seen through a dirty window, and her eyes were empty, black voids. The dream lingered long after she awoke, leaving a knot of unease in her stomach.She started noticing things. A flickering in the corner of her eye as she passed the mirror, a fleeting movement in the clouded reflection that wasn't her own. One night, a noise jolted her awake—a soft scraping sound, like fingernails on glass. She sat up, heart pounding, and saw the mirror on the bedside table. In its cloudy depths, the blurred woman's face was clearer than before, and her eyes weren't empty anymore. They were watching her.A week later, she was brushing her hair, the mirror propped up on the counter, when she saw it. Her own reflection smiled back at her, but the smile was wider, stretching impossibly wide. Its eyes, her eyes, were black and hungry. She screamed and dropped the brush, and the mirror flashed, the vision gone in an instant. Her reflection in the mirror was normal again, but she knew. It wasn't her looking back.Panic set in. She couldn't sleep, couldn't eat. She spent hours watching the mirror, trying to catch it, trying to prove to herself that she wasn't losing her mind. One night, she finally succumbed to exhaustion, the mirror still in her line of sight.She woke with a gasp. The mirror was on the floor, cracked. Her own face, or what was left of it, stared up at her from the broken pieces. The crack cut across her neck, and her reflection was smiling. The real terror, however, was not what she saw in the glass. It was the feeling of a cold, glass-smooth hand reaching up from her own reflection to touch her cheek. As it did, her own touch became cold, and the image in the mirror became clearer. The woman's face in the mirror wasn't blurred anymore. She was smiling, and in her terror, she didn't realize that her face was fading from the reflection, and hers was taking its place.