The Warped Reflection

The house at 14 Thornapple Lane had always been a strange one, but I’d grown up with its quirks. My parents bought it when I was a baby from the elderly Marrow siblings, who moved to a cottage down the lane after their brother passed. Built in the 1930s, it still had a crumbling Anderson shelter in the back garden, half-buried under brambles. I’d moved away for university, but three years later, I was back, sleeping in my old room, which overlooked the overgrown yard.

One night, insomnia had me wandering. I ended up in the upstairs bathroom, a room that had once been a bedroom. For years after we moved in, it was too unsafe to use—plaster crumbling, floorboards rotted—and it wasn’t until I was a teenager that my parents converted it. They put in a large window above the sink, which reflected the hallway behind you when you stood at the basin. It was a practical choice, but I always hated that reflection. It seemed too dark, too hollow.

That night, I stood at the sink, toothbrush in hand, the water running. The house was silent except for the hum of the pipes. I glanced at my reflection, the usual tired face, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw something else in the window. A shape, darker than the night, standing in the hallway behind me. I froze, but when I looked directly, there was nothing. Just the shadowy corridor. I sighed, chalking it up to a trick of the light.

But then I saw it again, this time more defined. A figure, tall and gaunt, with elongated limbs and a head tilted at an unnatural angle. It stood perfectly still, watching me through the glass. I spun around, but the hallway was empty. The bathroom door, which I’d left ajar, swayed slightly as if someone had brushed past. My heart pounded. I turned back to the mirror, and there it was again, now closer, its face obscured by darkness.

I stumbled backward, my toothpaste dripping onto the floor. I tried to rationalize: a smudge on the window, a reflection from outside. But the window faced the blackness of the garden, and there was nothing to cast such a form. I forced myself to look again, and the figure raised a hand, slowly, and pressed its palm against the glass. In the reflection, my own hand twitched in response.

Terror gripped me. I bolted from the bathroom, slamming the door behind me, and locked it. In my bedroom, I sat shaking, listening for any sound. The house was still, but I could swear I heard a faint tapping, rhythmic, like knuckles on glass. I didn’t sleep that night.

The next morning, I told my mother about what I’d seen. She frowned, then said, ‘Oh, that’s just the old mirror. It’s been warped by the damp.’ But she didn’t meet my eyes. I asked if the prior owners had anything to do with that room. She hesitated, then confessed that the old woman, the one who died, had actually passed away in that room. They’d found her collapsed by the window, which at the time was just a small, boarded-up hole. After the funeral, the brothers had sealed the room shut, and no one had gone in for years until we converted it.

I should have been satisfied with that explanation, but I wasn’t. The figure I saw was not shaped like a frail elderly woman. It was something else, something that seemed to have grown in the years the room was abandoned.

Over the next week, I tried to avoid the bathroom, using the one downstairs, but at night, the house seemed to steer me back. I’d find myself standing outside the door, my hand on the knob. One night, I gave in and opened it. The bathroom was normal, the sink gleaming, the window dark. I stepped to the basin and looked at my reflection. For a moment, it was just me: tired, pale. But then my reflection’s eyes seemed to darken, and the corners of its mouth lifted into a smile that was not my own.

I tried to look away, but it reached out, its hand blurring as it passed through the glass. I felt a cold touch on my shoulder, and my reflection opened its mouth, but no sound came out, only a breath of foul air. In the glass, I saw the room behind me begin to warp, the walls twisting, the door becoming a yawning void.

I staggered back, but the reflection moved with me, now separate, stepping out of the mirror. It was tall, gaunt, with skin like old paper, and its eyes were empty sockets. It spoke in a voice that scraped against my ears: ‘You’ve been gone a long time, but you’ve finally come back to me.’

I screamed, and the thing lunged. I threw my hands up, and the bathroom light shattered. Darkness, and then silence.

When I came to, I was on the floor, the morning light streaming through the window. The mirror was cracked, a spiderweb of lines radiating from the center. My reflection, intact, stared back at me with wide eyes. I scrambled away and spent the rest of the day in my room, my mind a jumble.

That evening, my mother asked if I was feeling well. I confessed that I’d seen something in the mirror, something that seemed to come out of it. She paled and whispered, ‘So it’s true.’ She told me that when the old woman died, her husband had mourned her so deeply that he’d taken his own life in that same room, hanging himself from the beam that used to cross the ceiling. His grief had twisted him, and his spirit had festered there ever since.

I moved out the next week, leaving Thornapple Lane behind. But even now, in my new apartment, I avoid mirrors at night. I’ve changed the locks, but sometimes when I pass a reflective surface, I see a flicker of something at the edge of my vision. And last night, as I brushed my teeth, I could have sworn my reflection was a split second behind, always slightly out of sync, always staring a little too long.

I caught myself smiling in the mirror, a smile I didn’t will, and I knew: whatever haunted that bathroom had followed me, and it was patient. It would wait until I was weak, until I was alone, and then it would step through the glass again. And this time, it would bring me with it.