Lurking in Mirrors

That shadow in the mirror is just you.

For as long as you could remember, you have been afraid of your reflection. When you were younger it started off as something simple since you could not understand that if you were standing in one place, how could you be in another place? You didn’t fully understand that it wasn’t supposed to be literally and physically you, just a duplicate of you, you weren’t literally in the glass. But as you got older, you began to become more and more disturbed by anything that held your reflection as your understanding of the world continued to expand.

When you were five years old, you decided to communicate with the person in the glass. So you stood on a step stool in your bathroom so you could see above the sink and look at the mirror, while the mirror looked back at you. You move your head this way and that in an attempt to establish some sort of coherence and recognition with your mirror self. You refuse that the person in the mirror actually looks like you, but since you cannot see your own face from your own two eyes in any other way, you have no other way to see what you really look like. The person in the mirror mimics each of your movements spot on, and while you were turning your head this way and that, you notice a bit of fluff in your hair. With your left hand you reach up to grab it, unwillingly using the position of it in the mirror to guide your shaky hand. But using that mirrored surface as a guiding tool disoriented your spatial awareness, since when you wanted to go in the direction the mirror-person was going, you ended up going the opposite way, and your muscles froze up in confusion.

Eventually, however, you did get the bit of fluff out from your hair, but you still didn’t like that the mirror seemed to subconsciously control your movements. At dinner that night, you told your parents about how the mirror-person moved in the opposite direction, and that it made you feel uncomfortable, but they shrugged it off and tried to explain to you how mirrors show a reflection were all the sides are flipped, so it would look normal if you were on the other side of the mirror.

But you don’t believe them. You know there was something wrong in the mirrors.

As you age, you grow increasingly paranoid with each passing day and each passing thought. When you walk past the mirrors in the locker room of your gym, you could swear that something was following you, but when you confront the mirrors, all you find is yourself staring back at you, with no extra shadows that shouldn’t be there. After that, you felt like a person with a guilty conscience hurrying past a police officer every time you rush past the mirrors. But this doesn’t stop you from turning on a dime as fast as you can, hoping you are swift enough to catch whatever was lurking in the glass.

There was no weird creature in the mirrors. It was just you. You were alone in the reflection, and you were alone in the locker room, but you could have sworn you saw your reflection move just a few seconds too late.

Not fast enough, you say to yourself, determined to catch whatever has been haunting you for your entire life.

Ever since making the attempt to catch your mirror self, you start noticing that your shadow has slowly begun to thin and fade. Anyone else would have just dismissed it, and blamed it on the light, but you are too paranoid and far too perceptive of that. It also doesn’t help that you are the only person whose shadow has begun to leave them.

A week later, you notice that it was gone entirely, and no amount of light cast would create a new one. You begin to think you’re sleep deprived, and you start drinking more coffee than you used to, and you start sleeping for longer periods of time at night and taking naps during the day, hoping you were just hallucinating from a lack of sleep, but nothing helps you. No one pointed out that your shadow was gone, either, and that made you all the more worried about yourself. You’ve been told logical explanations of your fears before, but nothing could explain this. Not while keeping within the parameters of the normal, at least.

It had been slightly more than a week since your shadow disappeared, when you saw it again. You are alone in the gym locker room, and your shadow is once again lingering by your feet, and it is swaying like old tree limbs in the wind, something that any normal shadow should not be doing since the overhead lights are as stationary as you are. Then, suddenly, your shadow detached and slithered away like a snake, going along the grimy tile floor like it was just water.

You want answers, so you begin to follow your shadow, tension building up in your chest as you follow your renegade shadow around corner after corner, as it seems to deliberately lure you somewhere. Around one turn, your shadow moves too fast for your eyes to keep track of it, and you start to worry that you won’t be able to catch up to it again. Thankfully, when you round the corner, you find that your rogue shadow had stopped, and that it had brought you face to face with yourself in the mirror. You watch as your shadow glides into the mirror and back into its proper position in the reflection, but you look back behind yourself and see no shadow there. You look back into the mirror, determination overcoming your lifelong fear and keeping the tension inside of you from erupting.

You whisper to your mirror-self, saying “I know you’re there.”

You take a step towards the reflective panel of glass above the old white porcelain of the sink.

Your copy moves closer to you in unison, though something seems wrong with it, like it’s on a slightly different pace than you are. When you’re both at the mirror, you tentatively raise your hand and poke the glass, feeling the coolness of it in your skin. Your other self does the same, although they seem to be delayed, like they were unsure of what was going to happen next but had no other choice. The two identical fingers seem to almost touch, even though they are separated by the thin layer of glass, like a barrier between nearly identical worlds.

In your final moments in what you perceive as the real world, the world that you take for granted and call your world, you stop thinking of mirrors as simple and creepy reflective surfaces, and you start to think of them as windows into another world.

While you are having your existential thoughts, your other self moves on their own accord, acting swiftly and grabbing your wrist with cold fingers. Your fingers on another person’s body. You are yanked violently forwards, and when you expect to violently hit the glass, you instead pass through it and stumble into another world. As you land face first on a cold floor of tile, you watch from a low base angle as the thing that society has forced you to refer to as “your reflection,” jumps through their mirror and into your world, leaving your shadow behind with you in this world. You get up and run to the mirror as your shadow reconnects with you, and you begin to slam yourself against the glass, hoping to fall back into your reality.

But you never find the exit that you so desperately want. You are stuck in the mirror forever.

In what used to be your world, your copy stands looking at you right in the eyes, yet they have no shadow behind them. At least you have your shadow back, but it does nothing to comfort you. Unwinding all of your tension, you pound your fists on your end of the mirror, and you scream your terror out, too, but you make no sound at all.

The copy of you that was now taking your place leaned close to the mirror, and you are forced to replicate this movement, even though you don’t want to. Your senses scream in unholy agony as you move against your will, being forced to move by something totally outside of your understanding.

Your impersonator leans closer still to the mirror and its mouth opens up in a mirthless grin before it speaks directly to you, and you can feel your mouth being forced to mime the chilling words: “don’t worry, no one can hear you in there.”