The Hollow Glass

Mara had always been a collector of nights. While others slept in blank darkness, she wandered through landscapes that felt more real than the waking world—cities of rust and bone, forests where the trees whispered her name, oceans that churned without waves. Each morning, she woke with the taste of those places on her tongue, and she filled notebooks with sketches and symbols, convinced they held a meaning she couldn’t quite grasp.

Her bedroom walls were lined with dog-eared dream dictionaries, their pages soft from obsessive thumbing. But no entry explained the persistent presence that followed her through sleep: a figure that stood at the edge of every dreamscape, always at the limit of her vision. He was tall, young, with hair the color of wet slate and eyes that held the pale blue of winter sky. He never spoke, never approached, but his gaze was a constant weight, as if he was waiting for her to acknowledge him.

One night, Mara found herself in a vast field of black sunflowers, their petals drinking the light of a crescent moon. The young man stood closer than ever before, his lips parted as if to speak. A sound rose in her throat—a name she almost remembered—but then a sharp crack split the air, and she was yanked awake by the shattering of glass.

She sat up, heart pounding. The window was a gaping maw, shards glittering on the garden path below. The night air poured in, cold and sharp. Her family had been standing there not five minutes earlier, laughing at a stray cat. Now the ground was a minefield of glass, and her mother’s voice called from downstairs, trembling, ‘What was that?’

Mara didn’t answer. She stared at the broken pane, and in the fractured reflection, she saw not her own face but his—the young man, his blue eyes burning with urgency. And for the first time, she understood: he wasn’t a guardian angel. He was a warning.

The dreams grew more insistent after that. He began to speak, but his words were like static, or the sound of a radio caught between frequencies. He would point, always at a specific direction in the dream, and Mara would wake with a sense of wrongness, as if she had been shown a glimpse of something terrible and forbidden. She started to fear the night, yet she couldn’t stay awake forever. Eventually, sleep would claim her, and she would be pulled back into that other world.

One evening, as dusk bled into dark, Mara found herself standing before a mirror in a hallway she didn’t recognize. The glass was wavy, ancient, and in it, she saw the young man clearly for the first time. He was crying, and his tears were black. Behind him, in the reflection, a shape moved—a shadow that had no source, a darkness that seemed to drink the light.

‘You have to stop,’ he whispered, his voice finally clear, but it sounded like rust and dust. ‘You’re showing them the way.’

Mara woke with a scream. The room was empty, but the air was heavy, as if something had just passed through. She fumbled for the lamp, and when light flooded the room, she saw her notebook on the bedside table, flipped open to a page she didn’t remember writing. In shaky handwriting, it read: ‘They come through the glass. They come through the dreams. You are the door.’

She wanted to burn the notebook, to never sleep again, but exhaustion was a tide that would not be denied. That night, she forced herself to stay awake until her eyes burned, but at 3 a.m., her body betrayed her. In the dream, she was in her own garden, the stars pinpricked in a velvet sky. The young man was there, and now she could see the hollow in his chest, a cavity where his heart should be. ‘It’s too late,’ he said, and behind him, the glass from her shattered window rose from the ground, levitating, forming a jagged archway.

Through that archway, shapes began to crawl—things with too many joints, eyes that were too large, mouths that opened sideways. They moved with a jerky, unnatural grace, and they were drawn to her like moths to flame. She tried to run, but the ground had become sticky, like tar. The young man grabbed her arm, and his touch was cold, unforgiving.

‘This is what they want,’ he said. ‘They want to be remembered. And you, with your dreaming mind, you’ve given them a way.’

Mara woke with a jolt, but this time, the room was not empty. In the corner, a shadow shifted, taking on a form that was almost human. She saw the glint of eyes, and then a voice, not imagined but real, scraped through the air: ‘We see you.’

She did not sleep that night, or the next. She tried to stay awake for a week, but the world became a blur, and hallucination and reality began to bleed together. One afternoon, she looked in the bathroom mirror and saw not her own reflection, but a procession of faces pressed against the glass from the other side—faces that smiled with too many teeth. They were all wearing her face.

In a final, desperate act, Mara took a black marker and wrote across every mirror in the house: ‘I do not remember.’ But that night, sleep claimed her anyway. In the dream, she stood in a great hall of mirrors, each one reflecting a different world, and in each world, she was being chased. The young man appeared before her, and now she could see the wound in his side, the way his form flickered like a broken projector.

‘You have to let me go,’ he said. ‘I’m not here to help you. I’m here to guard the door, but you’ve already left it open.’

Mara looked down and saw that her hands were covered in a dark, viscous liquid. She realized then that she was not the victim of these dreams—she was the vehicle. Every night, she carried them across the threshold of consciousness, and now they had learned to follow her into the waking world.

She woke to the sound of breaking glass. Every window in the house shattered simultaneously, and the shards did not fall—they hung in the air, suspended, forming a whirlwind of razor edges. From the center of the storm, shadows poured out, coalescing into figures that were almost familiar. Her family’s screams were cut short as the shadows enveloped them, and Mara saw their faces contort, becoming hollow, empty.

She stood in the living room, now a maelstrom of glass and darkness, and the young man appeared beside her, his form solid for the first time. ‘There is one way,’ he said, his voice barely a whisper. ‘You have to dream the door shut. You have to dream of a world without them.’

‘How?’ Mara cried, but he was already fading, his form dissolving like smoke. ‘Find the name. The name I could never tell you. It’s the key.’

Mara closed her eyes. The chaos around her was deafening, but she reached inward, into the fabric of her unconscious. She saw the name, carved into her memory like a scar—Elias. In that moment, she understood. Elias was not a guardian; he was a prisoner, a soul trapped between worlds, and he had been using her dreams to call for help. But the things that followed him were not benign. They were the ones who had imprisoned him, and they sought to use her as a gateway to escape.

With the name on her lips, she spoke it aloud, and the world went white. When she opened her eyes, she was in a place of emptiness, a void without light or sound. Elias stood before her, finally whole, and he smiled. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and then he vanished.

Mara woke in her bed, the room intact, the morning sun streaming through the window. There was no broken glass, no shadow, no sign of the night’s horror. She stumbled to the mirror and saw her own face, pale but whole. For a moment, she felt relief—but then she noticed something in her reflection. Behind her, in the glass, a shape lingered, just out of focus. And in the garden, she saw a crow, watching her with eyes that were too human.

She hasn’t slept since. But the dreams have found a different way. They come to her in daylight now, through the shimmer of heat on the pavement, through the flicker of a faulty light bulb. And sometimes, when she passes a window, she sees Elias’s face, pressed against the glass, his eyes wide with a warning that she will never fully understand.