The Mirror

 The office fluorescent lights always hummed at a frequency that made my teeth ache, but the silence in the antique shop was worse. It was heavy, like wet wool. When the old woman told me the price—a pittance, really—the whispered *"Be Warned"* hadn’t come from the shadows behind her. It had come from the glass itself.

I ignored it. I wanted something beautiful to mask the rot of my repetitive life.

By Friday, the mirror was mounted in my dim living room. It was magnificent—the silver-weeping angels and leering brass devils seemed to squirm in the candlelight. But as I leaned in to inspect the craftsmanship, the glass didn’t show my living room. It showed a void.

My reflection stood within that darkness, but it wasn't me. Its skin was the color of a bruised plum, and where my tired brown eyes should have been, two pits of glowing, pressurized crimson throbbed.

As I stared into those red orbs, the headache returned, splitting my skull like an axe. My vision tunneled. I wasn't in my flat anymore; I was back in that rain-slicked alleyway from three months ago.

The two muggers were there. I felt the cold steel of their knife against my ribs, but this time, the "snap" inside me wasn't just a metaphor. I felt my tendons turn to wire. In the reflection, I watched what I had truly done—a memory my mind had bleached white to save my sanity.

I hadn't just fought back. I had fed.

In the vision, I saw my own hands—elongated and black-taloned—hook into the lead mugger's jaw. I watched with a detached horror as I unzipped his face from his skull with a wet, Velcro tear. The second man tried to scream, but I had already reached into his chest, my fingers knitting through his ribs like a loom. I didn't just kill them; I dismantled them, decorating the brick walls with their steaming, rhythmic viscera.

I jerked back, gasping, hitting my coffee table. I wasn't in a memory.

I looked down at my hands. They were stained a dark, crusty rust color. The "daydream" hadn't ended three months ago—it had just begun.

I looked toward the kitchen. The smell hit me then: the cloying, metallic stench of a slaughterhouse. Propped up against my refrigerator were the "sculptures" I had been working on in my blackout. My neighbor, the one who had complained about the noise, was no longer a person. He was a collection of wet, red parts, meticulously arranged. His head was perched atop the mirror, the angels’ brass wings skewering through his ears to keep him upright.

I ran to the front door, screaming, clawing at the locks. But the door wouldn't budge. I turned back to the mirror, and the old woman from the shop was there, standing inside the glass, stepping over the piles of my reflection's victims.

"The price was small," she croaked, her voice no longer quavering but vibrating with a hollow, metallic hunger. "But the rent is paid in local currency."

The red-eyed version of me stepped out of the frame, his boots splashing in the gore on my hardwood floor. He didn't look like a monster; he looked like the only version of me that was truly alive.

He gripped my throat, his fingers sinking deep into the soft tissue. As the world began to fade to black, I didn't see my life flash before my eyes. I saw the mirror's surface ripple. I wasn't dying; I was being pulled in to replace the reflection.

The last thing I felt was the cold glass closing over my face, while the thing with red eyes took my car keys and headed out to the 9-5 shift, whistling a tune through teeth that  were far too long.