I woke to silence that was too thick to be natural. The kind of silence that presses against your chest and fills your lungs with its weight. My hand instinctively went to the diary, still open on the desk from last night's knock. I had meant to write nothing, meant to hide from the echo of that sound—but curiosity, my unholy inheritance, would not allow it.
Tonight, it was not the door that called me. It was the mirror.
The hallway mirror, tall and unassuming, had hung there since I could remember, reflecting only what was in front of it. But tonight, as I passed, I noticed its surface quivering—not a ripple of glass, but of something behind it. Something alive.
I paused. My reflection should have met my gaze, but it did not. My eyes blinked; the reflection hesitated. My hands brushed the banister; the reflection's lingered just slightly longer than mine. I felt the hairs rise along the back of my neck. The mirror was breathing.
Yes. Breathing. A faint swell and fall, almost imperceptible at first, like fog rolling gently over a lake at dawn. Then more deliberate. Shadows twisted in its corners, coiling, stretching, reaching. I could not look away.
I whispered, almost instinctively, "Who's there?"
The glass fogged over. Not from my breath—but from something else. Something cold. A condensation curling from the edges, thickening into shapes that writhed like smoke in water. Words appeared, curling across the surface like fingers of ink:
"Not I. Not you. But we remember."
My chest tightened. They remember.
I thought of my parents. Their warning echoing faintly, always half-formed in my memory. "Curiosity is a dangerous inheritance, Marisol. Ours more than most." Words meant to prepare me, to protect me—but protection had ended the moment they vanished.
I moved closer, drawn despite every instinct screaming otherwise. My reflection remained slightly delayed, almost mocking, and the shadows in the glass deepened, pooling into indistinct shapes: faces pressed at the edges, fingers curling, eyes glinting faintly like stars in a void. I could not tell if they were real or conjured from my imagination. Perhaps that was the point.
I pressed my fingertips to the cold surface. The glass was colder than ice, yet alive. It pulsed beneath my touch as though something behind it shared my heartbeat. I gasped. The mist recoiled, curling around my fingers like it wanted to escape—but the pull was stronger. It drew me in.
The diary jumped open, and ink bled across the page of its own accord:
"Do you see? They are waiting. Watching. Breathing."
I stumbled back, heart hammering. The candle flickered violently, shadows tearing across the walls in strange, angular shapes. One corner of the hallway grew darker, stretching unnaturally, as though it was no longer confined by the limits of the house. I blinked. The shadow moved when I did.
I laughed then—quietly, almost hysterically. Brave? Foolish? Perhaps both. The air tasted metallic, heavy with the scent of old wood and something fouler beneath it, something I could not name.
I whispered my parents' names again. "Mother? Father?"
The mirror answered—not with words this time, but with a subtle movement behind the glass. A hand, pale, translucent, pressed lightly against the inside. It was mine. And not mine. It mimicked my motions, tracing my outline. My stomach churned with both dread and wonder.
I remembered the night they disappeared. How they had spoken of thresholds, doors, mirrors, of places where curiosity could become a trap. I had been a youngling then, but even then I had felt it—the way the house itself responded to them, to their presence. Perhaps that presence never left. Perhaps it waited, patient, for me to arrive.
I wanted to step back, close the diary, and pretend the mirror was merely glass. But I could not. Curiosity coursed through my veins like wildfire.
The shadow moved faster now. Not the reflection—something behind it. Something older. The mirror exhaled a sound—soft, wet, almost like a sigh, vibrating through my bones. My fingers tingled, my scalp prickling, as if every nerve had become a listening device.
I stepped closer again, compelled despite the terror coiling in my chest. The words on the glass shifted as I watched:
"Do you see what lingers when the living forget? Do you remember what they could not?"
I felt tears prick my eyes—not from fear, exactly, but from recognition. I remembered the warnings. The voices of my parents, now ghosts in memory if not in flesh. The house had waited for me. The diary had waited for me. And now, the mirror waited too.
I could have fled. I could have closed the diary, torn the pages from the book, smashed the glass. But some things are not meant to be broken. They are meant to observe, to test, to tempt. And I am nothing if not obedient to curiosity.
The mist thickened, swirling, forming shapes I could not name—faces that were familiar and wrong all at once. The shadows pooled at the edges, inching closer to the floor as if they could spill into reality. I felt their gaze pressing into my skin, cold, hungry, insistent.
I pressed my palm once more against the glass. The cold was absolute. My reflection hesitated, lips parting without sound. And then the diary bled again:
"Some mirrors remember more than the living. Some see what hides in the blood. Some breathe, and if you breathe back, you may not leave unchanged."
I stumbled back, gasping for air. The candle sputtered, throwing wild light across the walls, across the mirror. And for a brief, terrifying moment, I thought I saw my parents—not alive, but behind the glass—smiling faintly, eyes hollow, lips trembling in silent warning.
I wrote this quickly, as the mist coils, as the shadows wait. My hand shakes even now. My heartbeat is too loud. I know I will return. I must.
For some mirrors do not merely reflect.
They remember.
They breathe.
And they wait.
(The pen hovers. The ink trembles. The page seems to thrum beneath my fingers, alive, aware. I should end this entry here… but the mirror has not finished its tale, and neither have I.)