The Witches Mirror

Lena balanced on the attic’s rotten floorboards, peering across the gloom as someone’s phone flashlight swept beams over dust-snarled rafters. Her friends moved in jittery fits—Dana’s ghost-fairy makeup already smudging, Eli hunched so his hoodie’s devil horns shielded his eyes, Owen and Maya filming everything for tonight’s TikTok story.

Eli pried up the covering tarp, and the old mirror gaped at them from one moss-blackened wall. Four feet tall, oval, ringed in scorched silver leaves. Behind its surface wasn't glass-deep but pitch-slick and viscous, like motor oil suspended in the air. It didn't reflect light so much as swallow it.

“So this is it,” Dana said, echo trailing. “The witch’s mirror.”

Owen, would-be director, lifted his phone. “Urban legend time. The last tenant here killed his own reflection. Direct from Reddit.” He grinned—too hard, Lena thought. “Rules are, mirror dare, Halloween only. Stare and say the rhyme, see your real self, blah blah. Who’s first?”

“No one actually died,” Maya said, voice low. “You can Google it—”

“And what, miss viral fame?” Eli cut in, smirking. “Come on. Lena first. She’s least likely to lose it.”

Lena’s laugh came out strained. She faced her blurred shape in the glass, brushing strands of candy-pink hair from her eyes. The attic was silent except for the shakes and pings of phones somewhere in the house below. Outside, distant fireworks mapped orange shapes on the dusk.

“Okay,” she said, swallowing the taste of her own nerves. “Let’s do it.”

Dana read from her phone: “On Halloween night, stand before glass, let the mask slip—see who you are last.” The words felt too thin, hanging in the air after she finished.

Lena met her own gaze. The reflection was laggy, maybe—her chin twitching a microsecond late. When she blinked, her reflection didn't. Instead, the double simply widened its eyes further, tracking her with a sudden, unnerving fixation that made her stomach clench. The image caught up with a shimmer, as if water moved between them.

Still, nothing happened. Eli made a fart noise. “Next.”

Maya stepped up, rolling her eyes, and whispered the rhyme slow and sarcastic. Her reflection’s mouth didn’t match. It moved behind her, grinning wide and closed-lipped, while real Maya’s mouth stayed set in a line.

Dana and Owen went. The air thickened. Sweat wormed its way down Lena’s scalp, though the attic was freezing. Phones flicked over to video, but the mirror imagery jittered and popped, feedback flaring with every syllable.

Eli stepped up last. “No witches here, just losers talking to glass.” He touched the mirror, rapping twice.

A brittle CRACK split the attic. Lena’s ears rang. A sound like glass grinding bone filled the world with a heavy, shuddering cold that felt less like air and more like pressure. The mirror’s darkness rippled outward, swallowing the streaks of phone-light.

The attic’s air pressed hard against her skin—Lena pressed her palm to her breastbone, feeling her own rapid heartbeat struggle—and then, a sudden, agonizing stutter in her chest, as if her heart itself was briefly falling out of rhythm with her reflection's. Her reflection’s hand didn’t match her, and neither did its smile.

“That’s new,” Owen whispered, uncertain now.

Dana’s reflection looked wrong. Its dress was all gnarled lace, flickering with black mold; ropes of hair writhed, dripping wet. Its eyes bulged, glassy and lidless.

Eli’s reflection pressed its face against the inside of the glass, nose flattening, lips splitting until skin peeled and muscle flexed open—teeth gnashed at nothing. Maya’s reflected arms were too long, ending in candle-fingers that dripped waxy orange onto her shoulders.

Lena reached for Dana, but Dana jerked back, arms shaking as gooseflesh ate its way up her neck.

“Move!” Maya barked, shoving at the attic door, but the knob spun uselessly.

Figures in glass began moving independently. Maya’s doubled, flickered, then her real skin oozed and stretched. One eyelid sagged as if half-melted; she shrieked, gripping her face, pulling ribbons of flesh away in her hands—mirror-Maya smiling behind her, waxing candles down her back.

Owen screamed—a full, breaking sound—while his reflection snapped its teeth and chewed. The glass filled with dark liquid; his real mouth frothed pink, gums drawing back as if something tugged his face bone-tight from inside.

Lena staggered into a corner, throat burning with bile. The attic stank of rot and burnt sugar. In the dizzy edges of the reflected world, the attic expanded—cobwebs became hair, floorboards gleamed with gristle and tendon.

She watched herself in the mirror. The Lena inside the glass looked hungry. Color ran from her real arms in pulsing lines—veins bulged, some colored pumpkin-orange, threading rapidly toward her heart. Blotches of mirror frost bloomed across her skin, chill burning deep; the reflection pressed a hand to the inside of the frame, grinning as her own real hand fizzed, the nails separating one by one.

“Stop filming,” Lena gasped, but all their eyes were stuck on the glass, streaming out silent terror for an audience no one would ever see.

Eli’s scream guttered. His reflection punched through its throat from inside—a waterfall of glass and viscera tumbling out, pooling black-red and sticky beneath his shoes. He fell in spasms, writhing like a moth impaled alive.

Dana shrieked as her shadow in the mirror arched up, her spine curving back. Her mouth widened, jaw unhinged to a point—like sackcloth splitting at a stitch. Her real tongue bifurcated, drops of red beading down the half-silvered glass.

Lena tried to run but her legs wouldn’t obey. She felt her kneecaps slide, bones untethering, flesh remapping itself to match the monstrous Lena in the glass—a carving smile growing out of her own cheeks, stretched wide.

Maya howled, wax melting and hardening over her skin so her joints could only creak, her limbs locking into bizarre angles as her reflection beckoned her inward.

A voice behind the glass surged up—witch-old, rope-burned: “Masks off.”

Shadows lashed out, and with a wet yank Lena felt herself ripped—a film of skin and self sliding through the cold. One world blinked out. The new world burned star-bright with candlelight, sharp and wrong. She slammed face-first into glass, breath fogging up a surface from the inside.

She stared out: her friends—her body, their bodies—turning away, faces glossy, their eyes too deep and hollow. The Lena on the outside grinned at the mirror—now an ordinary girl, now someone else—wiping Halloween blood from her lips.

The attic door opened at last, the night air blowing in. Behind the empty glass, Lena screamed until Halloween’s bells drowned her out. She clawed at the frigid surface, her hands slipping again and again, leaving only streaks of red that refused to pool or drip, just flat, oily crimson smears on the cold and the silver.