The Rectangle of Cobalt

I woke with a start, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. The remnants of a night terror clung to me—a vague, oppressive sense of wrongness, and the echo of my own voice reciting verses from the Book of Job, not Psalms, but the feeling was the same: a desperate plea for protection against an unseen evil. I lay on my left side, facing the wall, and for a moment, the only sound was my ragged breath.

Slowly, I turned onto my right side, and that’s when I saw it. My bedroom in the old farmhouse was modest, with two sliding closet doors of mirrored glass at the foot of my bed. It was the right door that caught my eye. A perfect rectangle of blue light, about six feet tall and three feet wide, filled it entirely, from floor to near the ceiling. The light was a brilliant, electric cobalt, so vivid it seemed to hum. Its edges were sharper than any blade, impossibly crisp, as if the light had been cut and pasted onto the mirror.

No light spilled beyond its boundaries; the rest of the room remained in the dim, pre-dawn gloom. I blinked, expecting it to vanish, but it persisted. My rational mind scrambled for explanations: a passing car’s headlights reflecting off something, a prank, a malfunctioning appliance. But there was no source. The window to my right was dark, and no streetlight existed on this rural road. The mirror was perfectly flat, and the light was clearly coming from within it, not reflecting off it.

I was frozen, my eyes locked on that impossible rectangle. It seemed to pulse with a faint, rhythmic glow, like a heartbeat. The air in the room grew cold, and the smell of ozone crept in, sharp and metallic. I tried to move, but my limbs were heavy, as if weighted down by an unseen force. The light grew brighter, and I felt the unmistakable sensation of being watched—not by something in the room, but by something inside the light itself.

My mind raced through the fragments of my dream. I had been standing in a vast, dark cathedral, and a voice had commanded me to recite the verses. I had stumbled over the words, my throat dry, and the voice had grown impatient, its tones deepening into something monstrous. The dream had shifted then, and I was running down a corridor of mirrors, each one reflecting a version of me that was slightly wrong—one too tall, one with hollow eyes, one with a mouth that opened too wide. At the end of the corridor, there was a door of blue light, and something behind it was clawing to get out.

I snapped back to the present, and the rectangle was still there, now seeming to lean toward me. I could see my own reflection in the mirror beside it, distorted and pale, but the light itself was opaque, hiding whatever lay beyond. Desperate, I reached for the Bible on my nightstand, the old leather-bound one my grandmother had given me. My fingers closed around it, and I held it up as a shield, my lips moving in a silent prayer.

The light flickered, and I swear I heard a sound—a low, guttural chuckle that seemed to come from inside my head. The rectangle began to shrink, its edges wavering, and then it vanished as abruptly as it had appeared. The room was dark again, save for the faint gray of dawn seeping through the curtains. I lay there, trembling, clutching the Bible, staring at the empty mirror. I didn’t sleep again that night.

In the weeks that followed, I tried to convince myself it was a waking dream, a hallucination born of stress and fatigue. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that something had been left behind, a residue of that blue light that now clung to the corners of my vision. I started seeing it in reflections—a flash of cobalt in a shop window, a shimmer on a puddle at night. And always, that same sense of being watched.

Then, one evening, I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom mirror, and the blue rectangle appeared again, not on the mirror, but behind me, hovering in the glass. I spun around, but there was nothing there. When I turned back, it was gone. But my reflection was different. My eyes were wide with fear, but in the glass, they were calm, and my mouth was curved into a faint, knowing smile.

I moved out of that house a month later, but it didn’t help. The rectangle found me in my new apartment, and in the rearview mirror of my car, and in the polished surface of my phone screen. I’ve stopped looking at reflective surfaces altogether. I keep all the mirrors covered, and I’ve learned to navigate the world without seeing my own face. But I know the rectangle is always there, just beyond the glass, waiting. And every night, I recite the verses from Job, hoping that one day, it will tire of me and find another reflection to haunt.