The Twin of the Last Row

I had been at the Al-Rahman Academy for nearly a year before the first anomaly occurred. It’s a modest Islamic boarding school nestled in the Pocono Mountains, a place of old stone buildings and whispering pines. The air always carries the scent of damp earth and fallen leaves, and the halls echo with the soft recitation of prayers. I thought I had left the supernatural behind when I moved from my old school in Indonesia, but it seems such things follow those who are attuned to them.

The first incident happened on a Wednesday night in late April. My roommates—Hassan and Yusuf—and I were settling in after the Isha prayer. The dormitory, a long corridor lined with wooden doors, was unusually quiet, save for the occasional creak of the old building settling. Hassan had gone downstairs to fetch some water, or so we thought. I was reading by the dim light of my desk lamp when Yusuf, who was sitting on his bed, suddenly whispered, ‘Look.’

I turned, and there, in the doorway, stood Hassan. He was wearing his usual gray pajamas, his hair tousled from the night. He walked in silently, moved to his bed, and pulled back the covers with a practiced motion. He lay down, turned his back to us, and pulled the blanket up to his shoulder. I felt a chill run down my spine, not from the draft, but from the wrongness of it. Yusuf, ever the practical joker, called out, ‘Hassan, you didn’t say anything before you came in.’ The figure on the bed didn’t respond but shifted slightly, as if settling deeper into sleep. Then, the door swung open again, and another Hassan stepped in, this one carrying a water bottle and looking slightly puzzled. ‘Why are you two staring at me?’ he asked.

In that same instant, the Hassan on the bed vanished. No shimmer, no fade—just gone, as if he had never been there. The sheets remained rumpled as evidence of his presence. My mouth went dry. Yusuf and I exchanged a look of pure terror. Hassan, oblivious, sat on the edge of his bed and asked what was wrong. We couldn’t speak. That night, I barely slept, and when I did, I dreamt of a figure in the corner of the room, watching.

The next day, I tried to rationalize it. Maybe a trick of the light, a shared hallucination. Yusuf, however, was adamant. ‘We saw him. We both saw him.’ He refused to brush it off, and he began carrying a small prayer book everywhere. I was less outwardly affected, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something had been disturbed.

The second incident was three days later, on Saturday, during our weekly cleaning session. Each student was assigned a section of the building to maintain, and I was given the old library on the second floor. It was a cavernous room filled with dusty volumes of tafsir and forgotten history. The windows were high, letting in shafts of dusty light. I was dusting the shelves in the back corner when I noticed a book out of place—a small, leather-bound journal with no title, jammed between two ancient tomes on the lowest shelf. Curiosity overcame me, and I pulled it out. The pages were yellowed and brittle, and the handwriting was neat but faint, as if written with too much pressure. It began with a date from 1956 and the words: ‘I, Ustadz Farid, have seen the Twin. It walks the halls at night, wearing the face of a student. It made Khalid disappear last week. I must warn the others.’

My blood turned cold. I read more. The journal detailed the appearance of a doppelgänger, a ‘Twin’ that mimicked students and staff, always appearing briefly before vanishing. It warned that the Twin was always watching, always waiting, and that to acknowledge it was to invite it. The final entry, dated a month later, read: ‘It has taken to wearing my face now. I see it in the mirror before me. I don’t know if I am the real or the copy. If you read this, flee.’ I closed the journal, my hands trembling. I glanced around the library, half expecting to see a version of myself staring from a dark corner, but there was only the settling dust.

I slipped the journal into my bag and didn’t tell Yusuf or Hassan, fearing that sharing would make it worse. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the Twin, especially the way it had mimicked Hassan so perfectly. The following week, I noticed minor incongruities. Items would move between my desk and the windowsill. I heard my own voice call out from the bathroom, followed by silence when I checked. I refused to acknowledge these occurrences, hoping they would stop.

Then came the night of the spring break. Most students left, but a handful of us remained, including Yusuf and Hassan. The building felt vast and empty, the silence immense. On the third night, I awoke to a strange sensation—a weight on my chest, as if something was sitting on it. I forced my eyes open and saw, in the faint moonlight, a figure looming over me. It wore my face, my exact features, but its eyes were void, black pits. It smiled, a slow, eerie smile, and whispered in a voice that was my own: ‘You know too much.’ I tried to scream, but no sound came out. The weight increased, pressing me into the mattress, suffocating me. Just as I thought I would die, the figure vanished, and I gasped for air, sweating, shaking.

The next morning, I told Yusuf and Hassan everything. They listened in silence, their faces pale. Yusuf produced the journal from his own bag—he had found a copy in the basement, he said, covered in dust, with the same warnings. Hassan was quiet, his eyes downcast. Then he looked up, and his expression was not his own. ‘The Twin knows you’ve been reading,’ he said, in a flat voice that chilled me to the core. ‘It will not stop until you join it.’ Yusuf and I stared in horror. But just as quickly, Hassan blinked, and his normal demeanor returned. ‘What did I just say?’ he asked, looking confused. I couldn’t speak. I was drowning in fear.

That night, we decided to destroy the journal. We took it to the small courtyard behind the mosque, where a fire pit sat for gatherings. We burned it, watching the pages curl and blacken. But as the flames consumed it, I heard a voice in my ear, no more than a breath: ‘You cannot destroy the truth.’ We ran inside, locking the door behind us. For hours, we sat in the common room, huddled together, recounting every strange event since the first sighting. Then, at the stroke of midnight, the power flickered and went out. In the blackness, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned, but no one was there. A match flicked, and Yusuf’s face appeared. He was looking at me with a strange calm. ‘I’ve met the Twin,’ he said. ‘It showed me what happens when we leave. It showed me our future. We will become it, one by one.’ His voice was hollow, and his eyes were glassy.

Then the power returned, and Yusuf blinked as if awakening. ‘What happened?’ he asked. Hassan and I exchanged a look of sheer dread. We both knew that the Twin was among us, wearing one of our faces, or perhaps all of us. We had become part of its game. The school was quiet, but it felt alive, watching. I don’t know how long we can survive here. The Twin wears faces, but it cannot wear our souls. I pray that when my time comes, I’ll be able to tell the difference. But deep down, I fear I won’t. And as I write this, I catch a glimpse in the window’s reflection—a figure that is me, but not me, smiling. It knows I’ve seen it. And it knows I’m afraid.