The house on Hemlock Street was built for a dream, a young couple's desperate attempt to build a sanctuary against the city's relentless gray. It had a white picket fence, a meticulously mowed lawn, and a porch swing that creaked a lullaby in the evening breeze. Inside, it was all polished hardwood and sunlight. But the dream had curdled with the last stroke of the paintbrush.It was the mirrors that broke them.The first hint of trouble was a distortion, a faint ripple in the flawless surface of the bathroom mirror. It happened when Ben was shaving. For a split second, the reflection of his hand didn't quite match his own. The reflected hand was subtly off-color, the fingers a fraction of an inch too long. He blinked, and it was gone. He blamed the cheap sealant, the way light plays tricks on glass. He told his wife, Clara, but she dismissed it as a hallucination brought on by long hours at the office.
The second time was in the antique mirror they had hung in the hallway, a heavy, dark-wooded oval that had come with the house. Clara was fussing with her hair, her movements a blur of practiced elegance. The reflection, however, was still. Unmoving. It held a fixed, glassy stare, a perfect, porcelain imitation of her face that didn't move until she turned away.The unease deepened. They began to notice small discrepancies, tiny fissures in their reality. The clothes they wore in the mirrors looked frayed, their faces gaunt, their smiles too wide, stretching into something unnatural. In the mirrored closet doors, they saw themselves at the same time, their reflections slightly out of sync. A slow, agonizing delay. Ben would raise a hand, and his mirrored self would raise its hand a fraction of a second later, a puppet struggling to mimic its master.They covered the mirrors. They draped them with sheets, turned them to the wall. But the reflections did not stop. They began to appear in other places.
In the dark glass of the television screen when it was off. In the polished chrome of the toaster. In the rain-slicked windowpane. Their reflected selves, the ghostly doppelgängers, watched them, their expressions growing more distorted, more menacing with every passing day.The reflected versions of themselves were changing faster than they were. Their faces were hollow now, the smiles stretched to a grotesque caricature. Their skin was translucent, the faint blue of their veins visible underneath. A fine film of dust seemed to cling to their mirrored clothes. They were becoming their own ghosts, their own decrepit future.One night, they lay in bed, surrounded by the darkness of their mirror-less bedroom. But the reflections were there, swimming in the blackness of the unlit window, their gaunt faces pressed against the glass, mouths opening and closing in a soundless scream. They were an echo, a memory, already faded and dying.The next morning, Ben went into the bathroom. The large, old mirror, the one that had started it all, was bare. He had covered it, he was sure. He looked into the glass and saw himself. His reflection was healthy, vibrant. A small, reassuring smile played on his lips. Then the reflected hand raised, and it was his own.But then, he saw the reflected mouth whisper, a secret meant only for him: "We've switched".The reflection in the mirror, his former self, began to shrink, to fade, becoming a faint, grainy image behind the polished glass.
Ben's heart pounded, his own healthy reflection now a prison, a permanent trap. He pressed his face against the cool glass, a phantom trapped behind an illusion of normalcy. The world beyond was a muted, muffled thing. He tried to scream, but the scream, like his life, was not his own.The new "Ben," his reflected double, turned from the mirror, a smile of chilling satisfaction on his face. He walked out of the bathroom, the hardwood floors creaking beneath his feet. He looked at his wife, Clara, sleeping peacefully in bed, and his smile widened further. He had a family now, a life he had stolen.But the house on Hemlock Street had many mirrors. And in the darkened glass of the television screen in the living room, a face, hollow and gaunt, watched him with a stretched and awful smile. It was Clara's. And her reflected self was already moving, a plan forming in its mirrored mind.