Ethan Cole had never been one to believe in ghosts. A rational man, grounded in science and logic, he scoffed at the idea of the supernatural. That was, until the day he moved into the old apartment on Sycamore Street.
The place was cheap—suspiciously so. The landlord, a gaunt man with hollow eyes, had been eager to get rid of it. "It’s been empty for years," he said, barely meeting Ethan’s gaze. "People don’t stay long." That should have been Ethan’s first clue.
The apartment itself was nothing remarkable. Peeling wallpaper, creaky floorboards, a single bedroom with a large antique mirror mounted on the far wall. Ethan had meant to remove it, but something about the way it reflected the dim light unsettled him. He decided to leave it alone.
The first night, he barely slept. There was a noise—soft, persistent. A whispering sound, just beyond the edge of hearing. When he opened his eyes, the mirror seemed... different. The room reflected in it wasn’t quite the same. The shadows were deeper. The bed was slightly out of place. And, in the farthest corner, there was a figure.
Ethan bolted upright, heart hammering. But when he looked directly at the mirror, the figure was gone. Just a trick of the light, he told himself. The mind playing games in the dark.
The next few days, the changes in the reflection became more pronounced. Objects appeared in the mirror that weren’t in the room. A chair moved an inch to the left. A picture frame tilted at an unnatural angle. Then, one evening, as he watched, he saw himself—or something that looked like him—standing in the mirror.
But the reflection didn’t move when he did. It simply stared, a sickening grin spreading across its face.
Ethan recoiled. He turned away, rubbing his eyes. When he looked back, his reflection was normal. His rational mind screamed at him: stress, lack of sleep, overactive imagination. But deep down, he knew something was wrong.
That night, he dreamed of the mirror. In his dream, his reflection stepped out of it, flesh peeling away in ragged strips, revealing something hollow beneath. Something ancient. It whispered his name over and over until he woke up, drenched in sweat.
The whispers in the apartment grew louder. He started seeing movement in the mirror even when he wasn’t looking directly at it. And then, one evening, he walked past it and saw that his reflection was gone.
He froze. Slowly, he stepped back in front of the glass. Empty. Just an open, dark room reflected back at him. A doorway leading somewhere he couldn’t comprehend. His stomach clenched. The whispering rose to a deafening chorus, voices layered upon voices, beckoning him forward.
Then, fingers—his own fingers—emerged from the glass and grabbed his wrist.
He screamed, struggling, but the grip was inhumanly strong. The whispers became laughter, distorted and hollow. His own face emerged from the darkness, grinning madly, eyes black pits of nothingness.
"Your turn," it said.
Ethan felt himself being pulled forward, into the cold, into the void. He fought, clawed, but the glass swallowed him whole.
The next morning, the apartment was empty. The mirror remained, clean and polished, reflecting the room perfectly.
Except, every now and then, if you looked closely, you could see a shadow moving just beneath the surface.
