The stairs groaned beneath her boots as Evelyn climbed, each step echoing through the house like a heartbeat. The lantern cast trembling shadows across the walls, turning the peeling wallpaper into shapes that seemed to writhe and crawl.
Halfway up, she paused. The whisper was gone. The silence was heavier now, thick enough to choke. She gripped the railing with her free hand, its wood slick with dampness, and forced herself to continue.
The upper hallway stretched long and narrow, lined with closed doors. Dust lay thick upon the floor, unbroken—as though no one had walked here in decades. Yet Evelyn had the sickening impression that if she turned quickly enough, she would catch someone just vanishing into one of the rooms.
She chose the first door on her right.
It opened with a reluctant creak, the lantern's glow pushing into a bedroom. The air was stale, sweet with the stench of mildew. Curtains hung limp, rotting against cracked windows. A bed sagged in the corner, its mattress torn open like a gutted carcass.
But it was the mirror that drew her.
It stood against the far wall, tall and ornate, its gilded frame dulled with dust. The glass was clouded, but intact. Something about it made her skin crawl.
She lifted the lantern higher and stepped closer. Her reflection swam into view—pale face, wide eyes, lips pressed thin in fear. For a moment, she almost laughed at herself. All this terror, and it was just her own face staring back.
Then the reflection moved.
Not much. Just a shift, a twitch. Enough.
Evelyn froze. She hadn't moved. But the figure in the glass had.
Her reflection tilted its head slowly, the corners of its mouth pulling upward into a smile. Too wide. Too deliberate.
Her own lips remained still.
A sharp breath tore from her lungs. The lantern trembled in her hand.
Behind the smiling reflection, shapes began to form. Dark, indistinct at first—shadows gathering like smoke. Then clearer. Figures. Tall, thin, wrong. They loomed over the reflected version of her, their faces blurred, their limbs bending at grotesque angles.
Evelyn spun around, light swinging wildly across the room. Empty. The bed, the curtains, the cracked wallpaper. Nothing else.
But when she turned back to the mirror, the figures remained.
Closer now.
Her reflection leaned nearer to the glass, lips moving. At first, no sound came. Then, as Evelyn strained to hear, the whisper returned—no longer from the walls, but from the glass itself.
A voice identical to hers, but warped, as if spoken underwater:"You're already inside."
The lantern's flame sputtered, then died.
Darkness swallowed the room whole.
Evelyn's pulse thundered in her ears. She shook the lantern, desperate, but no light returned. The mirror loomed in the blackness, and though she could not see it, she could feel it watching her.
A breath brushed her neck.
She whirled, swinging the dead lantern like a weapon. Nothing. Only the suffocating dark. But she was no longer certain she was alone. The room pressed against her skin, heavy and alive.
From somewhere in the darkness, the sound came again. A soft creak. Footsteps.
Not hers.
Closer.
Closer.
She stumbled backward, searching for the door, fingers grazing rotting wallpaper. The whisper rose all around her now, overlapping voices spilling from every corner, every crack. Her name, over and over, until it no longer sounded human.
Then, faintly—like a match struck in a cave—the lantern flickered back to life.
The mirror glowed in the weak light.
Her reflection was gone.
Something else stood there instead.
Not Evelyn. Not human. A figure with hollow eyes and a mouth stretched wide, its sharp teeth gleaming in the lantern's sickly glow.
And it was smiling.