The Hollow Reflection

The day we moved into the old farmhouse on the outskirts of Maplewood, the sky was the color of a bruise. I remember thinking the place had a strange silence to it, a quiet that pressed against the ears. My wife Clara and I had been so excited to escape the city, but as we carried boxes up the creaking stairs, I felt a knot tighten in my stomach.

That first night, Clara took a bath in the master bathroom while I showered in the one downstairs. The water was barely warm when I heard her gasp. I shut off the tap and listened, but only the sound of dripping echoed through the pipes. When I found her, she was sitting in the tub, white as a sheet, her eyes fixed on the mirror above the sink.

“There was a face,” she whispered. “An old man, with hollow eyes. He was staring at me.”

I checked the bathroom, but of course there was no one. I told her it was steam, a trick of the light, but her hands were shaking too much to believe me. That night, we slept with the lights on.

A few weeks passed, and I managed to convince myself it was nothing. But then our son, Leo, who was almost three, started talking to his reflection in the hallway mirror. He called it ‘Mr. Hollow.’ He would giggle and wave at it, and sometimes he would sit on the floor and have long, one-sided conversations, his little voice telling secrets to the glass.

At first, it was almost cute. But then he started waking up in the middle of the night, crying that the man in the mirror was standing by his crib. Clara and I took turns checking, but there was never anything there. The pediatrician said it was a phase, an imaginary friend, but the dread in Clara’s eyes told me she felt something else.

I found the letters in the attic a month later. They were hidden inside an old wooden chest, tied with a faded ribbon, written by a woman named Margaret who had lived here in the 1950s. She wrote about her husband who had died in the war, and how she used to talk to his reflection in the mirror, because she couldn’t bear to let him go. She described how the man in the mirror began to answer her, night after night, until she felt her own reflection growing faint.

The last letter stopped mid-sentence: “He thinks I’m his… but I’m not… I must stop… to the cellar… must break…”

Clara was pale when I showed her the letters. That night, we decided to move out the next day. But Leo, standing by the mirror, said, ‘Daddy, why is the man in the mirror smiling? He never smiled before.’

Joining the letters, I found a photograph of Margaret, standing next to a man I recognized from the reflection in the bathroom that first night. It was him. The hollow eyes. I looked into the mirror, but my own reflection seemed to waver, and for a split second, I saw a stranger’s face looking back at me.

The cellar door was locked. I broke it open with an axe, and in the damp darkness, I found the other side of the mirror, covered in scrawled writing. It was a list of names—Margaret, us, the family that lived here before us. And at the top, the name ‘Hollow.’

I realized we were not the first. And I knew, with a sickening certainty, that the man in the mirror was not just a ghost. He was something that fed on reflection, that needed a host, that would not let us leave until our eyes had gone dull.

As I turned from the cellar, I caught a glimpse of myself in a shard of glass lying on the floor. My reflection was a second too slow. It smiled at me. And I knew that when I went back upstairs to my family, they would see a stranger in me, walking around in their father’s clothes.