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Mara Devine had always hated mirrors. Not out of vanity, but because every time she looked into one, something felt wrong—off by a fraction of a second, a fraction of a movement, a fraction of a thought. As a child, she used to tell her mother that “the girl in the mirror blinks differently.” Her mother laughed it off. Mara never did.
For years, the unease stayed buried. Until the night it returned.
It was late, her apartment quiet except for the buzzing fluorescent light in the bathroom. She leaned over the sink to spit out toothpaste, and when she lifted her head, her reflection was leaning closer to the glass than she had leaned. Its face was inches from hers. Too close. Way too close. A smile twitched across its lips—small at first, then slowly stretching wider as if it took effort, as if it wasn’t used to smiling.
She gasped and jerked backward, but the reflection only tilted its head, the smile lingering just a moment too long before mirroring her shock.
Mara snapped off the bathroom light and ran out, heart pounding. In the darkness, she could’ve sworn she heard something behind the glass—scratching, faint but real—like a fingernail dragging slowly down the back of the mirror.
The next morning she tried to shake it off, but a memory resurfaced. Her older brother, Isaac, once told her during a sleepover at age nine, “Your reflections don’t match you. They watch you, Mara.” She remembered his pale face when he said it. She remembered he refused to sleep in the same room as any mirror for years.
She called him. When he finally answered, his voice was tight and quiet.
“I don’t talk about them anymore,” he whispered.
“Isaac, what are they?”
A long pause.
“They’re collectors. Don’t give them attention. Don’t look too long.”
He hung up.
Her stomach twisted. She had stared at the bathroom mirror the night before—stared long enough to see every detail of that wrong smile.
That night, everything escalated.
Every mirror in her apartment began showing not her reflection, but a darker version of her—skin paler, hair darker, eyes hollow and too wide. It would move at the right time, but the expressions were wrong. Sometimes the face pressed against the glass as if testing it. Sometimes it grinned when she wasn’t even close to smiling.
When she walked away, she heard tapping.
Tap.
Tap-tap.
Tap.
As if it was tapping to get her attention. Or tapping to be let out.
Mara covered every mirror—bedsheets, duct tape, towels—but the tapping continued under the cloth, louder now, impatient. She lay awake until dawn, listening to breathing behind the glass. Slow. Heavy. Not hers.
She avoided mirrors the next day. No phone camera, no reflections in windows, not even metal surfaces. But on the fourth night, her duct-taped bedroom mirror fell off the wall on its own. The crash woke her instantly. When she sat up, shards of mirror glimmered across the floor—and something moved inside them.
Dozens of reflections.
All of them versions of her.
All whispering.
All smiling.
Some had mouths too wide, stretching ear to ear.
Others had no eyes, only shadowy pits that seemed to crawl deeper the longer she stared.
Their whispers layered over each other, hissing from every shard:
“Let us in…”
“She’s almost ready…”
“We’ve waited so long…”
“Hungry…”
She screamed, backing into the corner as the shards rattled like something behind them was pushing, trying to break through.
Isaac called her again that evening.
His voice trembled.
“They only take the ones who stare too long,” he said.
Mara dropped the phone.
She had already stared too long.
That night, it stepped closer.
The bathroom mirror bulged outward, stretching like warm wax. A pale handprint formed from the inside—long, distorted fingers leaving streaks across the glass. The face pressed through next: her face, but wrong. The smile too large, the eyes too deep, the skin stretched thin like a mask pulled over something else.
“Mara,” it whispered through the glass, its voice wet and distant, like someone speaking through a deep pool of water. “You left me waiting.”
Terrified, she grabbed a lamp and smashed the mirror. The glass exploded, but the reflection didn’t shatter—it simply retreated into darkness, its grin the last thing to fade.
That was when she decided to leave.
But stepping outside was worse.
Every reflective surface on the street showed the darker version of her—windows, parked cars, blackened bus shelters. They all turned toward her at the same time, smiling in perfect synchrony. Some tapped on the inside of the glass. Some clawed. One mouthed a single word:
“Home.”
Her phone buzzed. A notification lit the screen. She instinctively looked—and froze.
Her reflection in the front camera wasn’t following her movement.
It was smiling.
Wide.
Eager.
“You don’t need mirrors anymore,” it whispered.
The voice wasn’t coming from the phone.
It was coming from behind her.
The shadows thickened, stretching up the walls like something waking. Mara felt cold fingers brush the back of her neck. Glass cracked where there was no glass at all. And in the moment before the darkness swallowed her, she realized the truth:
The reflection had been learning her.
Studying her.
Becoming her.
It didn’t need the mirror anymore.
It needed her.
Her scream was the last real thing she ever made.
Her apartment is empty now, but the mirrors inside have a permanent dark smudge, like a figure standing behind the glass. Not a reflection—something waiting. And if you look too long, you might hear it whisper:
“Look closer…”
