The Warped Glass

My Gran, Edna, kept a rundown inn called The Gander’s Rest, a crooked three-story building that leaned into the wind like a drunkard. It sat at the edge of a village that had long since forgotten how to be cheerful, but to my friend Priya and me, it was a wonderland of forgotten corners. We were twelve that summer, and the inn’s basement game room was our kingdom.

The basement was a cramped, damp space with a pool table whose felt had faded to the color of old moss, a dartboard with more holes than cork, and two arcade machines that blinked in a half-hearted rhythm. There was also a pair of full-length mirrors propped against the far wall, their silver backing cracked and bubbled. In one, you appeared stretched like taffy; in the other, squashed and squat. We called them the Whip and the Squish, and we spent hours contorting ourselves before them, our laughter echoing off the low ceiling.

That Sunday, the air outside was thick and yellow, promising a storm. Priya and I pedaled our bikes to the village store, a cluttered shop that smelled of dust and licorice, and loaded our baskets with pickled onion crisps, chocolate bars, and two magazines—one with a grim reaper on the cover, the other a glossy teen rag we read for the quizzes. By the time we returned, the first raindrops were dotting the pavement like dark coins.

We descended into the game room, eager to escape the gloomy afternoon. The electric lights buzzed, casting a sickly glow. We played pool with warped cues, the balls clicking unevenly. Then we turned to the mirrors, as we always did. I stood before the Squish, watching my face balloon into a blob. Priya laughed, her voice too high, too bright. But when she stepped aside, I noticed something odd—the mirror behind her, the Whip, had a smear of something dark across its surface, like a handprint that hadn’t been wiped clean.

We ignored it and moved to the arcade machines, but the games seemed laggy, the on-screen characters moving with a sluggishness that felt unnatural. Outside, thunder grumbled. Priya suggested we go upstairs to the room I claimed as mine—a small bedroom with a bunk bed and a window overlooking the inn’s overgrown garden. She had brought her sleeping bag, as always, and we planned to stay up late reading our magazines by flashlight.

That night, after Gran had gone to bed, we huddled under the covers of the bottom bunk, the flashlight beam trembling as we flipped pages. The horror magazine had a story about a mirror that stole reflections, and I joked that we should test it on the ones downstairs. Priya laughed nervously. Then we heard a sound from the game room—a soft, rhythmic tapping, like a nail on glass.

The tapping came from the direction of the mirrors. We froze, the flashlight sagging. I whispered that it was probably a rat, but neither of us moved. The tapping grew impatient—three sharp raps, then a pause, then two more. I felt a cold draft slide across the floor, and the window rattled. Then a voice, low and muffled, as if coming through a thick wall, said, ‘Let me out.’

We scrambled out of bed, but the door was jammed. It wasn’t locked; it wouldn’t budge. The tapping became a frantic scratching, and the mirrors in our room—there was a small one on the dresser—began to fog over, despite the cold. In the fog, I saw a shape: tall, thin, its head nearly touching the top of the frame. It was the shape I made when I stood in the Whip.

Priya screamed and yanked the sleeping bag over her head. I pressed my back against the door, praying it would give. The room grew colder, and the shape in the mirror started to move—not my reflection, but something else, something that had been trapped behind the warped glass for a long, long time. It pressed its hand against the inside of the mirror, and I saw the dark smear from the basement was now on my dresser mirror, like a black mold spreading.

The scratching stopped. The voice returned, clearer now, almost eager. ‘You looked. You saw me. Now I see you.’ The mirror cracked, a spiderweb splitting across its face, and from the shards, a long, pale arm reached out, fingers like twigs, reaching for my face.

We ran—or tried to. The door finally swung open, and we burst into the hallway, but the corridor seemed longer than before, the walls leaning inward. Behind us, the arm from the mirror grasped the doorframe, and a head emerged—not human, but a twisted, elastic version of a face, its mouth stretched wide in a silent grin. It was the reflection of my own fear, given shape.

We descended the stairs, our feet barely touching the steps, and burst into the game room. The mirrors stood there, their surfaces now dark, like pools of oil. The thing from the mirrors was in the room with us, its body bending and flexing like the Whip had shown us, its proportions shifting with every movement. It said nothing, but its eyes—if they could be called eyes—locked onto Priya, who was still clutching the horror magazine.

We grabbed a pool cue and shattered both mirrors, but the pieces scattered on the floor and each shard reflected a fragment of us—of our fear, our laughter, our secrets. The thing that had come out didn’t vanish; it just fragmented, its form breaking into a dozen smaller copies that crawled into the shadows, skittering under the pool table, into the dartboard’s holes, and up the walls like liquid.

We fled the inn that night, leaving Gran a note that we’d gone to Priya’s house. We never spoke of it again, but I could never look into a mirror without seeing a faint warping at the edges, as if something had permanently bent the world’s glass. And sometimes, in the dead of night, I hear a tapping from my own bathroom mirror—three sharp raps, a pause, then two more, and a muffled voice that asks, ‘Let me out.’ I never answer. I never look too long. Because I know that somewhere, in the basement of the Gander’s Rest, a new mirror has appeared in place of the broken ones, and it’s waiting for someone else to see the shape in its depths.