The Static Hymn

Marnie and I had shared an apartment in the old Westerly building for three years. It was a crumbling pre-war walk-up, the kind where the radiators clanked like ghostly chains and the wallpaper peeled in damp, floral patterns. But Marnie, ever since that night on my rooftop when she swore she heard a voice calling her name, had become obsessed with the unseen. She filled our shelves with dog-eared tomes on séance techniques and folklore, and her laptop was littered with forums dedicated to ‘the other side.’ I tried to laugh it off, but her fascination had taken on a desperate edge.

One evening, as a cold draft slithered through the cracked window frame, she called me from her bedroom. Her voice was thin, electric with excitement. She described, in breathless detail, a ritual she’d found on an obscure blog—a ‘summoning’ that didn’t require a board, just a mirror, a black candle, and a specific sequence of syllables she kept mispronouncing. She asked me to stand in for her as a second participant, to amplify the ‘signal.’ I told her she was spiraling, that she needed to see a therapist, not a ghost hunter. She laughed, a brittle sound, and said she’d just try on her own. I hung up, shaking my head.

I spent the next day trying to scrub the image of her hunched over a mirror from my mind. But when she called the following afternoon, her voice was wrong. It was hollow, with a slight delay, as if she were speaking through a tunnel. She complained of a headache, a pressure behind her eyes that wouldn’t lift. She admitted the ritual hadn’t gone as planned; she felt watched, and there was a persistent hum in the apartment, like a refrigerator but lower, more organic. I yelled at her, called her a reckless idiot, told her she was hallucinating from sleep deprivation. The more I shouted, the more her responses lagged, and then the call cut off.

I tried calling back. She didn’t answer. Panic twisted my gut. I grabbed my coat and ran the six blocks to our building, taking the stairs two at a time. The door to her flat was unlocked. The air inside was cold and heavy, and a single black candle had melted into a shapeless pool on the floor in front of the full-length mirror in her room. The mirror’s surface was fogged, like after a hot shower, but the room was dry. Marnie sat cross-legged before it, her back to me, motionless.

‘Marnie?’ My voice cracked. She didn’t turn. I stepped closer, and the room’s hum grew louder, vibrating in my teeth. I saw her reflection in the fogged glass—but only hers. The reflection seemed to bleed through the condensation, her image sharper than her actual form. Her lips were moving, but I couldn’t hear her voice. Instead, a low, dissonant chord filled my head, a harmony that was wrong, like a choir singing off-key. She lifted a hand slowly, and in the mirror, her reflected hand reached out, and its fingers pressed against the glass from the inside. The fog parted where her fingers touched, leaving a clear, wet streak.

I stumbled backward, and my heel caught on a loose floorboard. As I fell, I saw her reflection turn its head—not Marnie’s head, but a shadowed silhouette with eyes like burnt holes in paper. It smiled with a mouth that was too wide. The hum became a hymn, a cacophony of voices singing in a language I didn’t know, all of them slightly out of sync. Then the mirror’s surface rippled, like water, and the shadowed figure stepped out, merging seamlessly with Marnie’s seated body. She convulsed once, then went still.

I scrambled to my feet, reaching for her, but the floor between us turned to ice. A voice, layered, static-laced, echoed from her lips: ‘You left me alone to listen. So now, I stay.’ The room went dark. When I managed to flick the light switch, the mirror was clear, and Marnie was gone. The only trace was a single black hair, impossibly long, coiled on the floor like a question mark. The hum was gone too. But as I stood there, the house phone rang. I answered, and the line was filled with a distorted recording—my own voice, screaming a name I didn’t recognize, and Marnie’s laughter beneath it, like a radio tuned to a dead frequency.

I haven’t been back to that apartment. I changed my number, moved to a different town. But sometimes, in the silence of my new place, I hear that hymn again, faintly, from a neighbor’s wall or a crack in the baseboard. And there’s always a mirror in every room, and I can’t stop looking, afraid that one day the glass will fog, and I’ll see the silhouette with burnt-out eyes, waiting to step through and finish the song.