The sheriff's warning echoed long after he vanished into the fog.
Mara didn't sleep.
Not even an hour of rest. Her body felt heavy with exhaustion, but her mind was too sharp, too alert. She had crossed a threshold the moment she stepped into Durn Hill, and now she couldn't shake the feeling that something was watching her—following her.
The motel room was suffocating, silent except for the low hum of the refrigerator and the occasional creak of the building settling into the night. The walls felt like they were closing in. No matter how many times she read the case file, the words on the page blurred together. Samantha Leigh. No known enemies. No history of running away. Quiet, observant, sometimes distant. Her teachers described her as a shy girl, withdrawn but intelligent. A few friends mentioned that lately, she had been drawing "strange things."
Strange things.
The phrase lingered in her mind.
Mara read it again and again, but there was nothing else. No context. Just a short, cryptic mention. She flipped to the next page, scanning the details: Samantha had last been seen leaving a diner at 10:41 p.m., three nights ago, walking home alone. No CCTV footage. No witnesses. Her phone was found, screen cracked and battery dead, at the edge of the forest. It was all wrong, too wrong, and the more she stared at the words, the less they made sense.
Every detail about the case was unraveling the longer she stayed here.
She gripped the edge of the desk, feeling the weight of the silence pressing in around her. The clock on the wall ticked slowly, dragging its hands like a clockmaker with a vendetta. Time itself felt sluggish in Durn Hill, as if the town had become a place outside of it.
And then, at exactly 3:12 a.m., something else shifted.
A soft tapping sound.
It was faint at first, like a distant insect's wings brushing against glass. But then it grew louder. Tap. Tap. Tap.
Mara's breath caught in her throat, and her eyes darted toward the source. It wasn't the door. It wasn't even the window. The tapping was coming from the mirror.
She froze, heart pounding in her chest, unsure whether her mind was playing tricks on her. The fog had clouded her thoughts, but she couldn't deny the sound. It was real.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Slowly, cautiously, she stood up from the desk, her limbs stiff with tension. She knew she should leave the room. She knew she should go downstairs and check the motel's exit. But something—some primal urge—made her move toward the mirror instead.
Her feet felt like lead as she walked across the room, closer and closer to the glass. Her reflection was the same as always: her tired eyes, the dark circles beneath them, the sharp lines of her face. But the closer she got, the more the glass seemed to shimmer—distort—like something was trying to reach through it.
She reached out a hand, pressing it lightly against the mirror. The tapping stopped.
For a moment, nothing. The mirror seemed to hold its breath. Then—
A movement.
Her reflection didn't move like her.
Mara's reflection raised a hand—slow, deliberate—and drew a single red line down its cheek, like a tear of blood.
A warning.
Mara recoiled, gasping. She stumbled backward, eyes wide with horror as her reflection's eyes widened too, but the rest of its face remained eerily still. Then the lamp beside the bed exploded with a deafening crash, sending shards of glass flying across the room. Darkness swallowed the light, and Mara's heart hammered in her chest.
She didn't move.
Her body was frozen, as if the room itself had become a trap. The dim light of the streetlamp outside filtered weakly through the window, casting long, unnatural shadows over the room. The mirror—the mirror—was the only thing that felt alive now. Its glass seemed to pulse with some deep, alien rhythm, as if it was no longer just a reflection but a door, a portal to something else. Something waiting.
But the tapping had stopped. The mirror was just a mirror again—still and silent.
Mara didn't sleep after that. Not for a second.
She paced the room for hours, trying to force her mind to make sense of what she had seen. The strange reflection. The eerie warning. There had to be an explanation. She couldn't let herself lose control—not yet.
By the time morning crept in, the fog had thinned but never lifted. It clung to the edges of the town, suffocating the streets and the woods beyond. Everything felt… heavy. Stagnant.
Mara drove to the sheriff's station, the engine of her car rattling against the quiet town, as if the vehicle itself were out of place. She parked in front of the station, a squat stone building with ivy creeping up one side. The word "JUSTICE" was etched across the facade, but half of the letters were chipped off, as though the town had forgotten what it was supposed to stand for.
Inside, Sheriff Grady was waiting for her. He sat behind a desk cluttered with files, his face as impassive as always. Two cups of black coffee sat on the edge of the desk, one of them untouched. The sharp scent of bitterness filled the air, but Mara couldn't bring herself to touch it.
"You look like hell," Grady said flatly, his eyes flicking up from the paperwork.
Mara sat down across from him, rubbing her temples. The weight of the night lingered on her skin. "Something's wrong with the case file," she said, her voice hoarse. "The dates don't match. Details shift. It doesn't make sense."
"I told you," Grady said, leaning back in his chair. He didn't look surprised, just resigned. "This place… it changes things."
Mara narrowed her eyes, trying to ignore the creeping suspicion that gnawed at her insides. "You expect me to write that in my report?"
He didn't answer right away. Instead, he slid a manila envelope across the desk toward her.
Mara opened it without a word. Inside was a stack of drawings—sketches that had the faint smell of old paper. Not the kind of paper that belonged to a high school notebook. This was aged, brittle, as if it had been sitting in some forgotten drawer for years.
The first page was covered in pine trees. Thick, dark lines that became more chaotic the closer they got to the center, as if the artist had been trying to hold something back. The trees looked like they were suffocating each other.
The second page showed the sheriff's station, drawn from an impossible angle—like the artist had been watching from above, from some place outside of time and space. The lines were sharp, jagged, as though the building had been torn apart and reconstructed in her mind.
Mara flipped the page, her stomach sinking.
The third page made her blood freeze.
It was a drawing of her. Sitting on the motel bed. Staring into the mirror. Every detail was drawn with exquisite precision—her posture, the tension in her shoulders, the uncertainty in her eyes. But there was something in the image that made her feel like she was looking at a version of herself from an alternate universe. The reflection wasn't her own. There was something wrong in the way the lines were drawn—something that shouldn't be there. A shadow in the corner of the mirror, just out of focus.
Her breath caught in her throat as she flipped through the next pages. Forests. More mirrors. People with empty eyes. And again—her. In the woods. In the sheriff's station. In the fog.
But the last page was different.
It was blank, except for a single sentence written in tight, panicked handwriting:
"She watches through the glass."
Mara's hand trembled as she turned the page over, but there was nothing more. She stared at the words, trying to force some meaning into them. It wasn't just an observation. It was a warning. A plea.
She looked up from the page, her eyes narrowing on Grady. "Who's she?"
"We don't know," Grady replied, his voice lower now. "Maybe the girl. Maybe… something else."
Mara closed the sketchbook with a heavy sigh. Her eyes flicked to the mirror across the room, and her stomach churned. She couldn't stop thinking about what she had seen in that motel room, about the strange warning. About how it had been waiting for her.
"She's not just missing," Mara said, her voice tight with conviction. "She was expecting me."
Grady didn't answer. He just sat there, staring at the mirror across the room, his face unreadable.
And the mirror…
It stared back.