The Dark Somnium - The thing in the mirror is getting worse at copying me | Scary Stories from The Internet

Episode Date: September 13, 2026

This scary story was written by Grant Howard and is connected to a few others ive done by them Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The apartment was quiet at 547 in the morning. The kind of quiet that sits in a room like a held breath, broken only by the quiet drone of the refrigerator in the distant moan of traffic on the street below. Clarissa moved through it the way she always did on autopilot. Her body running the morning routine while her mind was still somewhere between sleep and waking. She patted into the bathroom in her socks, clicked the light on, and reached for her toothbrush without looking up.

She looked up eventually, and she always did. She has a habit of smiling at herself in the mirror to brighten her own day every morning. At first she thought it was a trick of the light. The figure in the mirror was her, clearly her. Same dark circles, same tangled hair, same big cheesy grin, same worn t-shirt she had been sleeping in for three nights. But something was wrong with the timing of it. When she raised the toothbrush, the reflection raised hers of her as a little bit.

a beat later. A fraction of a second, almost nothing. Clarissa blinked and leaned in closer, studying herself the way you would study a word that suddenly looked misspelled after years of writing it. She moved her hand again, slowly this time. The reflection moved slowly too, slowly and late. She stood there and watched it happen. She tilted her head left, and the mirror tilted left, one second behind her. She raised two fingers and counted in her head before the reflection raised two fingers back. The delay was growing. By the time the gap had stretched to something close to two full seconds, the toothbrush was clattering into the sink and her breathing had changed entirely. She backed out of the bathroom doorway and into the hall. Kate's door was at the end of it,

closed, a strip of darkness underneath. Clarissa crossed to it in four steps, knocking once before deciding that knocking was not sufficient and pushing it open. Kate was a lump under a comforter printed with small yellow flowers, one arm hanging off the side of the mattress, completely and perfectly asleep. Clarissa grabbed her shoulder and shook. While Kate made a sound back that was not language, Clarissa shook harder. Kate, Kate, get up.

You need to come. Something is happening. There was something in her voice that cut through. Kate had known Clarissa for 16 years and knew all the registered. registers of that voice, the tired one, the joking one, the quietly furious one she used on difficult customers. This was none of those. Kate sat up, hair across her face, and looked at her. What? What happened? The bathroom, just come, please. Kate followed Clarissa down the short hall with the stumbling gate of the recently woken, stepped into the bathroom, and looked at the mirror. Larissa was already standing in front of it, staring at her.

Her face had gone the particular blank of someone who had moved past active fear into something more like paralysis. She was not looking at anything because there was nothing to look at. Where her reflection had been, delayed, wrong, and frightening, it was now simply absence. The mirror showed the bathroom. It showed the towel rack and the toothbrush holder and the light fixture. It showed Kate, blinking, rumpled, confused. Clarissa's eyes filled without her meaning them to. She pressed her lips together and failed to stop the tears.

What is going on? Kate asked. She was looking at Clarissa with genuine worry. Clarissa told her. She told her about the delay how it had started as almost nothing, how she had watched it grow until her reflection was moving two seconds behind her, and then how it stopped appearing at all. She spoke quickly and precisely,

and with the slightly too-even tone of something. someone fighting to sound reasonable. Kate looked at the mirror, then she looked at Clarissa. Is this... Are you messing with me right now? The question landed wrong. Clarissa stared at her. What? Because it's six in the morning, and I'm... Kate gestured vaguely at the mirror. I'm standing right here, and I can see you fine. In the mirror, I can see both of us. Clarissa turned back to the mirror. She knew what she would find. The same empty glass without

her reflection. She could see Kate's reflection looking back at her with an expression caught somewhere between concern and suspicion. Something in Clarissa's chest came loose then. Not dramatically, quietly, the way things give way that have been holding for a long time. She began to sob. Have you slept? Like, properly slept? Clarissa, are you taking something? Or did someone give you something? No! word came out harder than she intended. No. Absolutely not.

I'm not. No. Okay. Kate held up both hands, palms out. Okay, I'm just asking. Clarissa heard herself agree that it was fine, that she was fine, that it was probably just her eyes, early morning, low light. She didn't know.

She heard herself walk back in real time, watched Kate's face loosen with relief at having the normal explanation offered to her. Kate squeezed her arm once and went back to her. down the hall. The bedroom door clicked shut behind her. Clarissa turned back to the mirror. She did not move to look away. She did not look down at her hands to reassure herself she was still there, still solid, still real. She only looked at the mirror. The mirror gave her nothing. Then she finished getting ready, turned off the light, and left for work. Kate laid in bed for a while after her alarm went off, staring at the ceiling with a particular stillness. The pattern

of morning light thrown across the ceiling from her shades, the water stain on the ceiling that looked like the state of Idaho. She had looked at both of these things for a hundred mornings, and today she was not seeing either of them. She was seeing Clarissa's face in the bathroom light. That blank, wet-eyed stare directed at something Kate could not see, aimed at a mirror that had looked completely ordinary to her. That was the part that kept snagging. Not that Clarissa had been upset, it was that whatever she had been looking at, at or looking for, Kate had been standing right beside her and had seen nothing wrong at all. Kate got up and made some coffee, pondering what could possibly be going on with her best friend,

before her thoughts were interrupted by her phone going off. It was Josh, her boyfriend. Hey, I just stopped that clerest station to fill up. Josh's voice had that careful neutral quality it got when he was trying not to alarm her. She seemed, I don't know, off. She looked right at me and it took her second to even recognize me. And then she kind of smiled, but it wasn't her regular smile. Kate gave Josh the full version of the morning.

He listened quietly. She needs a decent lunch at least. He said when Kate had finished. She probably went to work without eating anything. She definitely went to work without eating anything. So let's bring her something. I can meet you. Kate agreed and they settled on a time.

And after she hung up, she stood for a moment in the kitchen, feeling something that was not quite relief but was adjacent to it. The small comfort of a plan, of something to do with the worry rather than just carrying it. She went and got ready, moving through the apartment with a briskness that was partly her nature and partly intention. She did her hair and found her jacket on the hook by the door. And then she stopped at the bathroom.

She was not entirely sure what she expected. She stood in front of the mirror for a long time, studying it the way Clarissa had, looking for the thing Clarissa had seen. Her own face looked back to her, immediate and perfectly timed. Every small movement answered at once. There was nothing wrong with it. Nothing off, nothing delayed, nothing absent. I made sure of that.

It is not yet time for her to see. Kay exhaled slowly and picked up her keys. She had grocery shopping to do before lunch, and she was not going to solve anything by standing in a bathroom, staring at her own reflection. She locked the apartment door behind her and headed down the stairs into the pale morning. The door opened at 6.14 in the evening. Clarissa came through it, carrying the exhaustion of someone who had spent an entire workday pretending to be fine. She had it managed well enough on her face. The smile she gave Kate and Josh was real, or real enough, assembled from the parts of her,

that had decided, somewhere around the fourth hour of her shift, that she was going to hold herself together through sheer stubbornness. Josh was on the couch with his arm around Kate, the television throwing blue light across both of them. They looked up when she came in, and there was a beat of assessment that Clarissa felt, but did not acknowledge. There she is. How was the rest of your shift? Clarissa dropped her bag by the door and took off her shoes.

Not too bad, actually. I started feeling better after you guys came by. that food really helped. Thank you again, seriously. Kate picked the sandwiches. Then thank you, Kate. Anytime. I am tired, though.

Really tired. Clarissa headed off to the bathroom. She had been doing this all day. The small negotiation with herself every time a reflective surface came into view, the careful angling of her body away from the mirror above the sink at work. The particular study she had given the backs of her own hands

instead of looking up. She had checked once, early in her shift, stealing herself to the employee bathroom with the door locked. Nothing. The mirror had given her back the soap dispenser, the paper towel holder, and the yellowish light, but no Clarissa at all. She had stood there for a moment, then unlocked the door and went back to work. She now stood in her own bathroom with her back to the mirror for a moment. The familiar smell of her own shampoo and Kate's collection of products lined along the

edge of the tub, and the small comfort of a known place. She breathed then. She turned around. She was there. Her own face, complete and immediate, looking back at her with the same tired eyes she'd been wearing all day. She moved her hand, and the reflection moved with her, instant, synchronized, entirely normal.

Clarissa let out a breath that felt like it had been stored somewhere deep and inconvenient since she had woken up that morning. She went back out to the living room, dragging her beanbag chair from its corner and settled into it with her knitting. The television was showing something with a lot of dramatic music and quick cuts between faces. She let it wash over her without really watching it, her hands moving through the familiar rhythm, the soft click of needles, the slow growth of something blue and undefined in her lap. This was the part of the day she had been waiting for, the part where she did not have to be anything

in particular. After a while, Kate stretched and looked over at Josh. We should go out. Stellar Beller is playing at the bar tonight. The local band I like. Josh agreed immediately in the way he agreed to most things Kate suggested. Come with us. Kate said, turning to Clarissa.

You can knit when you're dead. Clarissa smiled without looking up. I'm so tired. I really can't. You too go. Kate studied her for a moment with the expression she used when she was deciding whether to push. She decided against it. She got up and found her jacket, and Josh found his. They moved through the apartment with a cheerful noise before the front door closed and Clarissa was alone.

She put on music, something low and familiar, the kind she had been listening to since she was 17. She knitted. The blue thing in her lap grew another inch. She got up eventually to make dinner and something simple, pasta with the sauce she kept in the back of the cabinet for nights like this, and she ate it standing at the counter because sitting at the table alone at night had always felt too deliberate to her. She washed the dishes, dried them, put them away, and wiped down the counter. She put on more music and went back to the beanbag chair and knitted some more, and for a stretch of time that felt genuinely peaceful, Clarissa was just a personal loan in a small apartment on a quiet evening, doing nothing.

nothing of any consequence. At half-past ten, she decided that was enough and went to shower. The bathroom light hummed. She reached into the shower and turned the water on to let it heat up, then straightened and reached for the hem of her shirt before pulling it off. She looked in the mirror. Her reflection was already looking at her. It was wearing her face with an expression she had never made, flat, still and direct, looking at her. Clarissa's hands dropped the shirt. She moved left. The reflection's body did not. The eyes did.

She moved right. Same thing. She waved both arms in short, sharp motions. The panic gestures of someone trying to startle a response from something that will not respond. The reflection stood. The face did not change. The eyes did not blink. All it did was stare at her.

Then, slowly, it began to raise its hand. Clarissa stopped moving entirely. She watched it. The hand came up with a kind of deliberate patience, steady and unhurried. As it rose, the expression on the reflected face began to change. The flatness shifted. The corners of the mouth drew back. Gradually, the reflection smiled.

It was wider than any smile she could make by the time the hand was fully raised, calm out toward her. The smile. It was built from her own mouth and her own teeth, and yet it looked like nothing she had ever. ever felt. The hand waved, sudden and violent, a sharp motion that was nothing like the slow rise that had preceded it. Then it was gone. The mirrors showed the bathroom wall, the towel rack, and the light. Clarissa screamed. It came out of her all at once. She was moving before the sound

had finished leaving her. Out of the bathroom, down the hall, across the living room, the door handle in her hand. Then the night air on her bare chest and the door swinging behind her as her feet It landed in a hurry on the concrete outside. The apartment was dark when Kate got back. All of it. Every room. The thin line under Clarissa's door as black as the rest. Kate stood in the entryway for a moment and let her eyes adjust, reading the quiet of the place.

Nothing alarming, just dark and still and smelling faintly of the pasta Clarissa had made earlier. She noticed the knitting first when she turned on the living room lamp. The blue project was not folded or set aside the wake. Clarissa usually left it. It was tangled across the beanbag in a knotted, collapsed heap, needles askew, as if it had been the subject of Clarissa's anger. Kate looked at it for a moment, then looked at the kitchen. The kitchen was something else entirely. Every pot Clarissa owned appeared to be involved, both large pans, the small sauce pan, the colander that was in the drying rack pressed back into service. Dishes stacked but not washed. The counter-crowded with the evidence

of an elaborate effort for one person at 10 o'clock on a Tuesday night. Kate stood in the kitchen doorway for a moment and tried to reconcile this. She went to Clarissa's door and knocked gently with two knuckles. From inside came a low-grown. The deeply annoyed sound of a person pulled partway out of sleep. Kate eased the door open. The room was dark and Clarissa was a shape under the blankets, fully buried. One corner of the comforter pulled up over where her head would be.

Kate kept her voice low. Hey, you okay in there? Yeah, I'm okay. Sorry about the mess. I'll clean it up tomorrow. Kate smiled a little in the dark. Don't worry about it. Get some sleep. She pulled the door closed behind her. She stood in the hall for another moment before deciding to do Clarissa a favor.

It did not take long. She worked through the stack of dishes methodically, the water running warm. her phone playing music from the windowsill providing company. It was nearly one in the morning, and the building around her was fully settled into its nighttime silence. She was just setting the last pan in the drying rack when the knock came. She turned the water off and stood still for a moment. Listened. It came again.

Three measured knocks. Kate dried her hands and went to the door. She looked through the peephole. A uniform. A badge catching the hallway light. A face she did not recognize beneath the brim of a cap, patient and official. She opened the door. The officer was young, with a careful, neutral expression of someone delivering news of uncertain weight.

He looked at her with a slight pause. Is this the residence of Clarissa Callum? Yes. What's the problem? I found a young woman in Cowley Park about 40 minutes ago. She was in some distress, partially addressed. She gave me this address. says her name is Clarissa Callum.

I offered her a ride to the hospital. She just said she wanted to go home. We've been sitting out front for a bit now while I try to determine where to bring her. That's not possible. I just checked on Clarissa. She's asleep in her room. I talked to her less than half an hour ago. The officer's expression did not change in any dramatic way, but something in it reorganized

slightly. They looked at each other across the threshold for a moment. Then Kate said. Hold on. And turned back into the apartment. She went to Clarissa's door again and pushed it open without knocking this time. She reached in and found the light switch. The bed was empty.

The blankets were pushed back in a loose pile, still holding the rough shape of someone recently inside them. But the room was otherwise still and unoccupied. The closet door was open the way Clarissa always left it. Her phone charger was plugged in on the nightstand, cable hanging loose and unattached. The window was open. Kate crossed the room to it. The screen had been pushed outward and was still attached to the top hinge, but was bent out from the bottom. Three floors down, the narrow strip of concrete that ran alongside the building sat empty and pale under the parking lot lights.

Kate stood at the window for a moment. Third floor. She looked down at the concrete and could not make it make any sense. She then stopped trying to because the officer was at her front door, and Clarissa was apparently in a police car outside, and neither of those things were going to wait for her to work it out. She bent the screen back, went to Clarissa's dresser, and pulled it open, grabbed what came to hand, a pair of leggings and a sweatshirt.

She hit the light switch on her way out, and the empty room went dark again behind her. The officer was still in the doorway. Kate came to him with a bundle of clothes in her arms, and her key is already in her other hand. Okay, I've got some clothes for her. Let's go. The door opened just past two in the morning, and Kate came through it first.

Clarissa behind her, slowly sobbing. Kate locked the door behind them and turned to look at her. You need to text someone about your shift tomorrow. Or call. Just get someone to cover it. Clarissa stood in the middle of the living room and shook. Her eyes were focused somewhere that was not in the room. Clarissa.

Kate kept her voice even. Your shift. Someone needs to cover it. Nothing. Kate made a decision and moved on. Okay, you need sleep. That's the first thing. Come on.

She put her hand on Clarissa's back and guided her down the hall. Clarissa moved where she was directed. Kate pulled back the blankets and Clarissa lay down without being asked. Still in the sweatshirt and leggings brought to her by her best friend. Kate pulled the blankets up over her and stood at the edge of the bed for a moment. You're home. You're okay. You're in your room and your...

safe and you're going to sleep. Clarissa shook. The blankets moved with her. Kate crouched down to be closer to level with her. Can you tell me how you got out the window? We're on the third floor. Can you just tell me that? Clarissa's eyes were open and wet. The shaking continued at its steady, low frequency. She did not answer. Kate sat with her for another few minutes and then stood and went to the window and pulled it firmly shut, twisting the latch closed. She stood there for a moment, with her hands still on the latch, then she turned off the lights and went to her own room. She lay on top of her covers in the dark, with her shoes still on, staring at the ceiling, and the worry sat on her chest like a physical weight, not the manageable kind she'd been

carrying since this morning, something larger and less shapeable. She turned it over for a while and arrived at the only conclusion that felt like solid ground. Tomorrow. Doctor tomorrow. She was not going to debate it with Clarissa, and she was not going to let it be optional. She closed her eyes and eventually, slept. Clarissa's alarm went off at 5.40 in the morning.

She silenced it and lay still for a moment. Her face moved through the various positions between her sleep and waking and landed. She got up, went to the living room, and found her phone where she had. apparently set it on the end table at some point in the night, and she sat on the edge of the couch, started going through her contacts. She called three people. The first did not answer.

The second did not answer. The third picked up on the fourth ring with a groggy irritation of someone woken before six, and Clarissa explained, as calmly as she could, that she needed coverage today. She heard the explanation from the other end before it was spoken. Prior engagements, already had plans, really sorry. The call ended and Clarissa sat with the phone in her lap. She cried for a moment, a contained, exhausted minute, one hand over her eyes. Then she simply stopped and started getting ready for work.

The sound reached Kate through the bedroom door, the particular quality of someone crying while trying not to, the familiar shuffle of Clarissa getting ready for work. She was up and in the hall before she had fully decided to be. She found Clarissa in the kitchen, dressed for work. work, eyes red. No. Clarissa looked at her.

I'm the manager. I can't. Call the owner. I don't want to call the owner. I understand that. Call the owner. Larissa looked at the floor. Kate crossed her arms and waited with a particular patience of someone who has already decided

how this ends and is simply allowing the other person time to arrive at the same place. It took a few minutes. There was some back and forth that covered nothing until, Clarissa picked up her phone and made the call. The owner answered on the second ring and listened. They said that they would figure it out. The coverage, it would be handled. But the voice beneath the words was holding an obvious tone of annoyance.

Clarissa thanked them and ended the call and stood very still for a moment. Nitting or nap? Clarissa blink to her. Those are your options until I can get you to a doctor's appointment this afternoon. You pick. Something in Clarissa's face loosened slightly. Not relief, exactly. Exactly. Something closer to the feeling of being caught before you hit the ground.

Then she hesitated. Can I ask you something weird? Yes. Can you cover the mirror in the bathroom? She said it, looking at the middle of Kate's brows rather than her eyes. I need to use the bathroom. I just... I can't look at it. I know that's... Done.

Kate said. She did not make it a thing. She went to the bathroom and took the spare towel from the rack and hung it from the top of the mirror's frame so it fell across the glass in a flat curtain of pale green terry cloth. She smoothed at once and then stepped back. All yours. Clarissa came in. She moved along the far wall, keeping her eyes on the floor, and then on the wall and then the ceiling. She could feel the covered mirror the way you feel a dark doorway in a room. Not seeing it, just knowing it was there.

She used the toilet with her eyes fixed on the grout lines between the floor tiles. She knew she should leave. Her hand was already moving toward the door, but something shifted deep in her chest like a tide going out, and she couldn't help but turn. Of course I wasn't going to let her leave without looking. She needs to look. The towel hung there, flat and ordinary and pale green against the mirror's frame. Clarissa looked at it. She watched in tear as her own hand reached out as if it belonged to someone with a different

agenda entirely, fingers finding the bottom edge of the tarry cloth before lifting it. The bottom of the mirror was red. A deep, wet red sat against the glass from the inside, as though the other side of whatever dimension the mirror opened into was coated in it. Clarice's hand kept lifting. The sink came into view in the reflection, and the sink was not clean. The reflected sink was streaked with handprints, palm and fingers dragged in long arcs across the porcelain, more than one pair of hands, or the same pair more than once.

Blood red, and more was dripping in from above. Her hand kept lifting. The reflection of the room revealed itself in sections. There was her reflection, standing where she stood, but it was moving. A small, violent, close movement. The reflected Clarissa was bent slightly forward. forward, and her arm was working in a short, rapid, back and forth. There was something in her hand, and there was red on the mirror from the inside, red on the

reflected sink, red on the reflected floor below in a spreading dark pool. Flores' hand lifted the towel the rest of the way. The kitchen knife, the one with the wooden handle she used for years. The reflection held it at its own throat and sawed. The expression on the reflected face was not blank the way it had been when it waved. It was not smiling. It was terrified. It was the face of someone in the grip of something they could not stop, eyes wide and desperate

and looking directly out through the glass with an expression of pure pleading. The face of someone watching themselves do something they could not stop. Kate was in the kitchen when Clarissa came out of the bathroom. She looked up from her phone. Feel a little better? Clarissa looked at her. Her face was composed, still pale, but settled in a way Kate had not seen since before any of this started.

Yeah. I think I just need to sleep. I've got a lot to catch up on. She went to her room and closed the door. A few minutes later, the sounds of movement ceased, and the apartment was quiet. Kate did not sleep like Clarissa did. She lay in her bed for an hour after Clarissa's door closed, staring at the ceiling and running through the inventory of the last two nights with methodical

anxiety. At some point, she stopped trying to sleep. and simply accepted that she was awake, got up, and made coffee. She sat at the kitchen table in the early gray light to wait for eight o'clock. She checked on Clarissa at 6.20. She turned the handle slowly and eased the door open an inch and looked. Clarissa was in bed, face visible above the blankets this time, not buried under them. Her expression in sleep was unguarded and still.

Peaceful was the word that came to Kate, and she held on to it. She checked again at 6.50. Still there, still the same quiet face. At eight, she called the doctor's office. She had used this practice twice since moving to the city with Clarissa. She remembered the receptionist's voice, efficient and pleasantly brisk. Kate explained that her roommate needed to be seen today, that it was important, that there were some concerning behaviors she did not want to get into over the phone. The receptionist found a noon slot. Kate took it and wrote the time on the back of her seat from her jacket pocket. She called Josh after, told him about the park, the police officer, the empty bed, the open window. She told him about the third

floor and the bent screen and the concrete below. Josh was quiet for longer than he usually was, and when he spoke, his voice had the quality it got when he was genuinely unsettled and trying not to show it. He asked if she needed him to come over. She said she would let him know. At 9.40, she needed the bathroom. The smell reached her before she got the door open. She stopped in the hallway and stood there for a moment, trying to identify it, and then she pushed the door open. The towel was on the floor, not folded or dropped. It had come down hard, still attached to the small strip of frame it had been tucked into, but the frame had come down with it. The products from the shelf above the toilet were strewn across the floor. The drawer under the sink had been pulled fully

out and set aside, its contents thrown across the counter, and the small accumulation of two women's bathrooms were strewn everywhere without pattern. The cabinet under the sink stood open. The cleaning supplies inside joined with a chaos surrounding it. The vomit was the worst part. When Kate's eyes found it was everywhere in that bathroom, she made a sort of involuntary sound. She turned around, walked back into the hall, and stood there with one hand over her nose, mouth breathing through her fingers until the immediate urgency of her own stomach passed. She stood in the hallway for a full minute. She thought about the sound she had heard this morning, coffee brewing, her own phone calls,

the ambient quiet of an apartment with one person sleeping and one person laying on their bed, listening to the other. She thought about the bathroom door, which she had not heard open her clothes. She thought about Clarissa going in after the towel was hung. Two minutes at most, completely silent, and coming out looking calm enough to go to sleep. She could not make it fit. She tried and could not. She went to Clarissa's door and pushed it open.

The room was silent. The bed was empty. The blankets held their shape. The impression's still there. The pillow still dented. Kate crossed to the window immediately and checked the latch. Locked. She checked the screen from the inside.

It was unbent, flushed. against the frame. Kate turned around and looked at the empty room for one moment, and then she went to the living room. Clarissa was in the kitchen. She was standing at the window above the sink with her back to the room, perfectly still, looking out at whatever the window showed at this hour, the narrow alley, the brick of the building opposite, the pale late morning sky above it. She was wearing the same clothes she had gone to sleep in. Her hair was loose. In her right hand, Hand, held down at her side was the kitchen knife with the wooden handle. Kate stopped at the edge of a living room.

She took one breath, and then she made her voice come out even. Hey, what's going on? The figure at the window did not move. Kate took a step closer. Are you feeling okay? The bathroom... She paused, choosing. Are you feeling sick?

Do you need to go to the emergency room? Nothing. The shoulders did not move. The hand holding the knife did not move. Kate took another step. The kitchen was small, and she was close enough now to see the knuckles of the hand holding the knife. The whiteness of a grip held too long and too tight. What are you doing with the knife, Clarissa?

The figure at the window was still. Kate took one more step. She was nearly close enough to touch her. She kept her voice as level as she had ever kept anything in her life. We need to go to the hospital. Right now, I'll drive. We'll go together. We'll get you sorted out.

That can't happen, Kate. I need Clarissa to stay for a little while longer. Kate ran. She did not decide to run. Her body made the decision, and she was already in the living room, already at the front door, the handle turning, the door swinging wide into the hallway outside. Her keys were on the counter. Her phone was on the kitchen table. She left both of them.

The door was left swinging open behind her as she ran. The door gently drifted in and out of its frame for a while after Kate left. The hallway outside was empty. Whatever neighbor eventually came to close it and did so without announcement. After that, the silence was total. Kate's coffee mug on the table with an inch still in it. The receipt with a noon appointment written on the back beside it. The TV off.

The beanbag chair with its tangled knitting still unresolved from last. night. Kate's phone lit up on the table. It buzzed four times against the wood, each call a few minutes after the last, and each time the screen showed the same name. Eventually, the screen went dark again, and the silence resumed. A few somber hours passed until the phone rang again. This time, instead of staying silent and merely buzzing against the wood, Kate's phone began to play a simple dark melody that floated through the space like words that bore terrible news. Then, from down the hall, a door closed. Clarissa came out of the room, crossed the hallway to the kitchen table, and picked up the phone.

Hello? What came through the other end was not a voice arranged into words. Not at first. It was the sound underneath sentences, the raw material of personal animal instincts, and then the words began to surface from it. Kate's voice, Kate calling her own phone. We... Corrette.

Lisa, please. A sob that swallowed the next few words whole. I don't want to die. Please, please, Carissa, put the knife down. I don't want. Please. I don't want to die, please. Clarissa stood in the kitchen and listened.

Her face was wet. The tears moved down in steady tracks, and her expression did not change around them. Don't worry. There's still some time back. You'll see her again soon. Clarissa ended the call. She set the phone down on the table with a strange gentleness.

She stood there for a breath or two, her wet face composed and empty. Then she turned and walked calmly to the bathroom. The evening came and began to slowly cloak the apartment in darkness. Josh opened the door and stood in the frame for a moment before entering. Kate, Clarissa, either of you. He moved through the apartment, checking each bedroom with a methodical quiet, but finding nothing. Something inside of him told him what to check next. He came back to the kitchen.

He stood at the counter and looked at the knife block. They had five slots, four knives, the largest one empty, the dark gap of it sitting in a row like a missing tooth. He looked at it for a moment. He reached out and took the second largest knife from its slot, the one with the black composite handle, and he held it at his side and turned toward the hallway. The scream came from behind the bathroom door. Larissa's voice, unmistakably, a high and desperate sound that had no specific shape to it, only urgency, only the raw signal of something gone terribly wrong.

Josh moved quickly. He covered the hall in a few steps and pushed the bathroom door open. He went in with the knife raised and his whole body prepared for something he could not have specified. There was no one. He stood in the doorway and looked at the room, the walls, the floor, the edge of the tub, and the tiles surrounding, and the small window above it. Every surface held the same dark evidence of violence.

Blood. It was on the ceiling in a fine spray. It was on the floor in broad uneven pools. It was on every wall and every fixture and every item in the room. Except the mirror. The mirror was clean, perfectly, completely clean. if the glass had been protected or preserved. It stood in its frame above the sink and reflected the ruined room behind Josh with absolute clarity. His own face looked back at him from the center

of it with a deadpan expression. He looked at himself and could not look away. The bathroom door slammed shut behind him. The sound of it crossed the apartment, moving through the hall, and reached the front door at the same moment that the door opened. Kate came through like a raging storm. She had mace in her right hand, thumb on the trigger, arm raised and ready. Her face was a specific kind of distressed, halfway between fury and anger. Her voice, when it came, was full volume and ragged at the edges. It filled the apartment completely. The cops are on their way. You hear me? They are coming. She moved into the living room. You think you can call me and say those things to me? You think that's okay? You think I'm just going to...

She stopped and reset. You're out of your mind. You are completely out of your goddamn mind. And when I find you... The banging from the bathroom cut her off. It was rhythmic, heavy. The sound of something substantial meeting a hard surface with force again and again.

The anticipation of its intervals between each impact just long enough to make the next one worse. Kate's mind moved through several things quickly. I'm coming in there. Her voice had changed. The rest of her. Bagged anger still in it, but something colder underneath now. Something that made a decision.

I'm coming in and I will mace you, Clarissa. I will absolutely mace you, so help me God. She crossed the living room, went to the bathroom door, put her hand on it, and opened. Josh was at the tub. He was kneeling in front of it while he was bringing his head down against the porcelain edge with full and deliberate commitment. Blood was already flowing down the side of the tub in thick lines. more of it was in his hair and on the hand he embraced against the floor. His face, what Kay could see of it when the motion brought it briefly up before the next

descent was completely empty of expression. His eyes were open and unfocused and somewhere far from the bathroom. Josh! Kate screamed his name. She grabbed his shoulders and pulled. He did not respond to her. His body continued its motion against her grip with a horrible strength. She cannot stop it, cannot redirect it, and cannot misdirect it.

and could not make him be somewhere else. She was still trying when the final impact came. The sound of it was different than the others. Josh's skull cracked against the ceramic with a sickening fud. Josh went still and then down, and the bathroom floor received him. Kate was left kneeling in the red room with her hands reaching towards a dead man. In the mirror above the sink, Josh's reflection stood upright. It stood with its shoulders back, and it looked at Kate with an expression.

that had nothing to do with the corpse in the floor. The smile came up slowly and completely, the full width of it alarming by itself. The hand came up, and it waved at her. A violent, gleeful motion. Kate screamed. She scrambled backwards out of the doorway on her hands, hitting the wall and getting her feet under her before pressing her back against it.

The mace still in hand, her chest heaving, her eyes not leaving the bathroom doorway. The next voice came from the other direction. I'm so sorry, Kate. Clarissa's voice, the sound of someone who has been crying for a long time. Kate turned. Clarissa stood between her and the front door, the large kitchen knife in her hand. Her face was exactly what her voice had promised, a devastated shell of what was once Kate's

best friend. Her eyes found Kate's and stayed there. Kate raised the mace and charged. The stream hit Clarissa full in the face, eyes. nose and mouth. Kate was close enough to see it land. Clarissa did not blink. The room became death silent. Kate stared at Clarissa and Clarissa stared back. The sheer beauty of the moment overtook me. So I spoke one final thing to those damned souls. It is time.

The knife plunged into Kate's chest, then again and again and again and again and again and again, The first officers on scene secured the perimeter, called it in, and then stood in the hallway outside the open door with absolute shock on their face. The apartment was a mess. Kate was just past the front door. The living room floor held her in a wide, dark spread of blood that had moved outward and begun to dry at the edges. The room around her was otherwise undisturbed. The mug on the table, the knitting on the beanbag chair. Josh was in the bathroom.

The officers who went in came out quickly. Fragments of his skull and brains littered the room. The mirror above the sink was unbroken and clean and showed the room with perfect fidelity. Clarissa was in her bedroom. She was seated on the floor in front of a large mirror propped against the closet door, the kind of full-length mirror that leans rather than hangs. She was upright, or nearly, her back against the side of the bed. Her legs extended in front of her. The kitchen knife was in her hand, her fingers still loosely around the handle.

The wound at her throat was the kind that does not leave room for a second decision. The mirror in front of her reflected her image back to her, as well as the dried trail of blood down the front of her sweatshirt. The investigators arrived an hour and 40 minutes after the first officials, two of them. They moved through the apartment with Grace. They were thorough. They were in the apartment for the better part of an hour before they ended up with the investigators always end up, standing in the kitchen, speaking quietly. The first one was older.

He stood with his arms crossed and looked at the living room from the kitchen doorway while he talked. Nothing about this sits right. I'll say that first. Nothing sits right. But if you walk in forward from what's evident, Josh comes in. He does what he did, do his girlfriend by the door. Then he goes to the bedroom. The roommate's there.

Maybe she's asleep. Maybe she's not. He does what was done to her throat, and he stages it, props the knife in her hand, positions her in front of the mirror, makes it look like she sat down and did it herself. Then he goes to the bathroom, and he does what he did to himself, which is the most extreme exhibition of steroids or whatever you want to call it that I have personally encountered. The second detective was younger, leaning against the counter with a notepad, opened more out of habit than necessity. He tapped the pen against the pad slowly. I hear you. And I don't disagree that it walks like that from the outside.

But something ain't right. I mean, look at the throat and the Thompson woman. The angle, the depth, the way it went. I've seen what people do to themselves and I've seen what people do to other people. And that one... He left it there for a moment. It seems like whoever did it wanted to decapitate her. No way she did that herself.

The first detective made a sound of agreement and that was also a sound of frustration. He moved to the kitchen table and looked at the receipt sitting next to the mug without touching it. Things are not what they seem. Things are definitely not what they seem. They stood with that for a moment. Outside in the hallway, voices moved back and forth. The procedural noise of a crime scene being properly managed.

Someone was photographing the bedroom again. else in the bathroom with an evidence kit. Did you get to check the security cameras? The older detective asked. Yeah, I did. Three individuals entered and exited this apartment over the relevant period. The boyfriend, the two residents, and that's it. He looked around the kitchen at the ordinary architecture of two people's shared life

amidst the horror. He exhaled through his nose. If this was a killer. He said, with his tone dripping and grim, sarcasm. You'd have to admire their sick sense of creativity.