The Red Room’s Reflection

It was the summer I turned thirteen, and my cousin Lila and I were inseparable. That August, our families descended upon my Great-Uncle Harold’s estate in the hills of Vermont, a creaking Victorian relic that had been in the family for generations. We’d visited every summer, and normally we’d get the cheerful yellow room down the hall from the bathroom, with its patchwork quilt and the window overlooking the apple orchard. But this year, Uncle Harold, with his milky eyes and shaky hands, assigned us to the room at the end of the corridor—a room we’d always avoided because it felt wrong.

The walls were painted a deep, oxblood red, so dark it seemed to swallow the light from the singular brass lamp on the nightstand. The room was crammed with Lila’s mother’s craft show inventory: cardboard boxes overflowing with macramé owls, painted shells, and burlap wreaths, stacked haphazardly against the walls. The air was thick with dust and the faint, sickeningly sweet smell of dried flowers. And directly across from the twin bed I was to sleep in, there was a monstrous antique mirror, tall as a door, in a gilded frame whose gold had tarnished into a bruised green. I’d always hated mirrors in any room I slept in—a childish phobia I’d never fully shaken, and this one was the worst. It reflected the red room endlessly, making it feel twice as oppressive.

I tried to hide my discomfort, but Lila knew me too well. She touched my arm and whispered, ‘We can ask Uncle Harold for a different room. He’ll understand.’ But I shook my head, embarrassed. ‘It’s just a room, Lil. I’m fine.’ We unpacked our bags, tossing them onto the boxes, and the bed springs groaned in protest. That night, we lay in the twin beds—Lila by the window, me under the mirror’s gaze—and I kept the lamp on, pretending to read until my eyes burned. The red walls seemed to pulse in the dim light. Every time I moved, the mirror’s silver-backed surface caught the movement, and I saw my own pale face staring back, gaunt and unfamiliar. I must have drifted off eventually, because I remember the dream: I was standing in front of the mirror, but my reflection was a fraction of a second behind. I saw it first—my mirrored self smiled before I did.

I woke with a gasp. The lamp had gone out, and the room was in near-total darkness, save for a sliver of moonlight from the window. Lila’s breathing was soft and steady. But something in the mirror caught my eye: a faint, phosphorescent glow, like wet paint that hadn’t dried. I squinted, and the shape resolved—it wasn’t my reflection. It was a woman, her face pressed against the glass from the other side, her features smeared like a charcoal drawing left in the rain. Her lips moved, but I couldn’t hear a sound. She pointed a long finger toward the corner of the room, where a stack of cardboard boxes cast a deep shadow. I turned to look, and when I turned back, the woman was gone, but the mirror now showed not my room, but a different space—a hallway I didn’t recognize, lit by a single swinging bulb, with wallpaper the color of a bruise. And at the end of that hallway, a door that was slightly ajar, leaking liquid blackness.

I didn’t sleep the rest of the night. I lay rigid, my back to the mirror, my heart hammering against my ribs. When dawn finally came, the mirror looked benign, just a dusty antique. I didn’t tell Lila about the dream or the woman; I chalked it up to sleep paralysis, or the claustrophobic red. But over the next few days, the room began to change. The boxes seemed to shift positions overnight, though no one had entered. The red paint looked darker at the edges, as if it were creeping toward the ceiling. And every night, the mirror would draw me, regardless of my will. I’d find myself standing before it, my reflection shimmering, my own face contorting into expressions I never made. It was as if the mirror were showing me a version of myself from a parallel life—a life where I had never left this room, where I had grown old staring into that red mausoleum.

Lila started to complain of nightmares. She said she dreamed of a staircase that went down forever, and a child’s hand reaching out from a grate. She grew pale, and circles appeared under her eyes. I wanted to tell her about the mirror, but I was afraid she’d laugh, or worse, that she’d look into it and see the woman too. And I couldn’t stop wondering: why this room? Why me? I began to snoop through the boxes, looking for anything of the room’s history. Under a pile of moth-eaten scarves, I found a photograph, faded and crinkled. It showed two young girls in dresses from the 1950s, standing in front of the very mirror. One girl was smiling; the other was not, her face half-turned away. On the back was written, in a child’s scrawl: ‘Me and Edith, before the room took her.’ I felt a chill crawl up my spine. Edith. The name meant nothing, but the warning was primal.

That afternoon, the adults went into town for supplies, leaving Lila and me alone. We stood in the red room, staring at the mirror. I told her everything: the woman, the hallway, the photograph. ‘We have to leave,’ I said. ‘We have to tell Uncle Harold.’ But Lila just stared at the glass, her own reflection calm and clear. ‘I see her too, now,’ she whispered. ‘She’s not in the mirror.’ I followed her gaze. The woman was standing behind us, in the reflection, but when I spun around, there was no one there. I looked back at the mirror—she was still there, a smile spreading across her grimy face. Then the mirror’s surface rippled like water, and the reflection of the room began to change. The boxes became furniture draped in white sheets. The wallpaper was peeling, and the floorboards were warped. And in the center of the reflected room, a woman hung from a ceiling beam, her body swaying gently, her face bloated and blue.

I wrenched Lila away, dragging her out of the room, down the stairs, into the daylight. We were trembling, wrapped in each other’s arms. But even as we stood in the yard, I felt the urge to go back, to look at it one more time. The mirror had its hooks in me. That night, I couldn’t sleep in the yellow room, because my mind was still in the red room, my reflection still there, waiting. I tried to tell my parents, but they dismissed it as nightmares, or the heat. ‘The room’s just old,’ my father said, but his eyes flickered with something like unease.

The next morning, Lila refused to eat. She sat at the kitchen table, staring at her own reflection in a butter knife, muttering, ‘She wants us to stay. She wants to switch places.’ I knew then that the mirror’s power was growing, and that I had to destroy it. That night, I snuck up to the red room, carrying a hammer from the tool shed. The mirror loomed before me, its glass dark and oily. I raised the hammer, but my arm wouldn’t move. My reflection in the glass raised the hammer in perfect sync, but its face was not mine—it was the woman’s, her wasted features stretched over my skull. ‘You’ll break me,’ she said, and though her lips didn’t move, I heard it in my head, ‘and you’ll be trapped forever in the reflection. There will be no you left.’ I dropped the hammer and ran.

The next day, I found Lila in the red room, sitting cross-legged in front of the mirror, her hair unkempt, her eyes hollow. She wasn’t looking at herself; she was looking at the woman, who was now visible to the naked eye, standing just behind Lila’s shoulder in the reflection, her hands resting on Lila’s shoulders. ‘She’s so lonely,’ Lila said, dreamlike. ‘She didn’t mean to hurt anyone. The room just kept her.’ I pulled Lila to her feet, but she fought me, her fingers scratching at the air. In the reflection, I saw the woman’s face contort into rage, and then, with a shriek like tearing metal, the mirror cracked. A fissure ran down its center, and the reflection split—I saw Lila’s twin, and mine, on the other side, reaching toward the crack, their mouths open in silent pleas. The room grew cold, and the red walls seemed to bleed.

I dragged Lila out of the room, and this time, I knew we had to act. I rushed downstairs, grabbed my pocketknife, and returned to the red room. Lila was slumped against the wall, sobbing. I approached the mirror, and with every step, my resolve hardened. The woman in the reflection was raging now, her form pulsing like a bad signal. But I couldn’t let her win. I lifted the knife, not to break the glass, but to cut my palm. I pressed my bleeding hand against the mirror, and as the blood smeared across the silver, the woman’s reflection began to distort, as if she were being sucked into a void. She screamed—a sound that seemed to come from inside my skull—and then she was gone, leaving only my own reflection, which looked old, tired, but alive.

I bandaged my hand and we spent the rest of the day in the garden, silent. The adults noticed our haunted looks but said nothing. That night, we slept in the yellow room, the door between us and the red corridor wide open, but I couldn’t shake the sensation that something was still watching. In the morning, before we left, I went to the red room one last time. The mirror was intact, but the glass was now black as obsidian, and my reflection appeared only as a vague silhouette. I closed the door and never mentioned it again. Years passed; Lila and I grew apart, but we never married, never had children, and we both developed a deep aversion to any reflective surface thicker than a windowpane. And sometimes, just before sleep, I’d hear a faint knocking, as if from inside a wall, and I’d see a red glow at the edge of my vision, and I’d know that the red room still had its hooks in me—and that somewhere, in a mirrored place, a woman was still waiting for someone to take her place.