Story 1194: A Door in Every Mirror

It began in silence—not absence of sound, but a sudden awareness of it. Evelyn Blackmoor noticed it first as she stared into the cracked mirror inside her temporary refuge. Her reflection didn’t match her movements. It blinked too slowly, tilted its head slightly askew. The reflection smiled, but Evelyn had not.

A doorframe appeared in the reflection behind her. There was no door behind her in the room.

She turned.

Nothing.

Back to the mirror—the door was still there, open now, leading to a place of darkness stitched with stars.

Across Dreadmoor, it was happening to others. Children saw people in the mirrors who weren’t them. Shopkeepers glimpsed warped versions of their stores reflected in dusty windows—shelves filled with flesh instead of bread. Madame Grin, polishing a cloudy hand-mirror behind her bar, dropped it with a scream as her reflection whispered her true name, a name she hadn’t spoken since before she was alive.

Every mirror had become a threshold.