Chapter 4 Hallucinating

That night, Marcus couldn't sleep. He lay awake, listening to Elise's breathing down the hall. His thoughts twisted, fractured. Was any of this real? He tried to remember the first day of his job - who interviewed him? What was the office layout? He remembered Elise, but everything else came in pieces.

He got up again, drawn to the mirror like a moth to a flame.

This time, he didn't see himself at all.

He saw Elise.

She stood in the hallway in the mirror's reflection, staring at him with an expression he'd never seen on her face - blank, almost fearful. And behind her, the house was dark, crumbling. The walls were smeared with what looked like handprints. Her mouth moved, but no sound came.

Marcus spun around.

The hallway was empty.

His skin crawled. Something was terribly wrong.

But when he looked back at the mirror, it was just his reflection again-this time wearing an expression of heartbreak.

The months passed like a storm behind fogged glass.

Marcus stopped going to work. He stopped answering Elise's messages. She moved out eventually-quietly, without confrontation-after finding him staring at the mirror one night, mumbling to someone who wasn't there. He hadn't noticed her leave. He barely noticed the days anymore.

The house, once filled with light and laughter, now drowned in silence. Curtains stayed shut. Dishes piled up. The mirror remained exactly where it always was, a silent sentinel in the shadows.

Marcus no longer feared it.

He spoke to it.

Sometimes it answered.

"Why? Why did you do that to me?"

The voice came not with sound but with presence-an echo in his chest, a whisper in his bones. The man in the mirror no longer mimicked his movements. It had become something else entirely-something other. It grinned when Marcus wept. It watched as he tore pages from books, screamed into empty rooms, scratched at the walls.

He tried to destroy it once. Smashed a chair into the glass. It didn't break.