Some houses never let you sleep all the way through the night.
They breathe when you do, exhaling in the cracks between your dreams. They shift under their own weight, adjusting in the dark like an animal curling closer to keep you in place.
This house was one of them.
I woke to the sound of waves breaking hard against the cliffs, louder than the night before, the rhythm less like the sea and more like something pacing in the dark. The air in the room was heavy, tasting faintly of salt and old metal. My skin prickled before I even opened my eyes.
The curtains stirred just slightly, though the window was latched. The draft felt like it was coming from somewhere else from inside the walls, maybe.
I sat up, brushing the hair from my face, and saw the door.
I had locked it the night before. I remember doing it sliding the bolt and tugging twice to make sure it held. Now, it hung open by an inch, the faint chill of the hallway pressing into the room.
I told myself I'd imagined locking it. I told myself the hinges were loose and the old wood had given way. But in my chest, there was a small, stubborn certainty: someone, or something, had been in here.
I didn't go to the attic right away. I wasn't ready.
Instead, I moved through the house, hoping to find something that would anchor me to the ordinary—a sign of dust that could be explained, footprints that could be blamed on my own restless pacing the night before.
The ground floor was as empty as I'd left it, but emptier in a way I couldn't quite name. The silence didn't just feel like the absence of noise it felt like the house was listening.
In the dining room, I found the only object that looked like it belonged to someone who once lived here.
A shallow porcelain bowl sat on the sideboard. Inside it lay shards of glass small, uneven, and darkened at the edges with age. I picked one up, rolling it in my fingers. The surface was warped, cloudy, almost as if something had tried to burn the reflection out of it.
It didn't belong to the mirror upstairs. The edges were too rough, the cut too careless.
Why keep broken glass? Why keep this?
I set the shard down, and the sound it made just a small tap against the porcelain echoed in my head far longer than it should have.
The fog outside had thickened by midday, swallowing the horizon so completely that the world beyond the house could have ceased to exist and I wouldn't have known. The tide had risen, the crash of the waves growing heavier, closer.
I found myself at the base of the attic stairs without deciding to be there.
The door was open wider than before.
The air on the steps was colder than the rest of the house, and with each step upward, I could hear the faintest hum like the ringing in your ears after a loud noise, except steady, as if it were coming from the wood itself.
When I reached the attic, the light from the porthole had shifted, cutting across the floor in a pale ribbon. Dust spun in it lazily, disturbed only when I stepped inside.
The mirror stood exactly where it had the night before.
But this time, it was different.
There were five distinct fingerprints pressed into the glass from the inside. They weren't smudges too precise for that. They were the kind of prints left when someone leans close and stays there long enough for the warmth of their skin to linger.
I swallowed hard. My reflection was there, but she wasn't still this time.
When I stopped walking, she didn't.
She took one more step toward me. Her head tilted slightly, her eyes bright with something that could have been recognition… or hunger.
A slow smile crept across her face the same one as before, the one that made my stomach tighten. She mouthed something, and this time, I knew exactly what it was even without sound.
You came back.
I felt my pulse in my throat. Against my better judgment, I stepped closer, close enough that her palm rested flat on the glass, waiting.
My hand lifted. I didn't mean for it to, but it did. I let my fingers hover just above hers, the thin pane of glass all that separated us.
And for the briefest moment, I felt it warmth.
Real.
Alive.
Somewhere below, a door slammed hard enough to shake the floor. The vibration broke whatever trance I'd been in, and I pulled my hand back like I'd been burned.
I turned toward the attic stairs, heart hammering, but froze before my foot could touch the first step.
The air in the attic had shifted.
Behind me, the mirror's surface rippled once, like water after a stone is thrown.
And when I looked back, my reflection was gone.