Mirror's Guilt

Detective Clara Vale glides through the crime scene, latex gloves snapping against her wrists with a sharp, clinical precision. Another victim lies before her: male, mid-thirties, eyes wide open, a vintage pocket mirror pressed delicately to his lips. It’s the fifth such scene this month.

“Same M.O.,” mutters her partner, Ruiz, flipping through his notepad. “Mirror again. It’s obsessive. Even for a serial killer.”

Clara doesn’t respond. Her heart pounds louder than his voice. Her bathroom cabinet at home contains eleven of those same mirrors—identical in style and wear—purchased during one of her sleepless nights, in a fog of detachment she attributed to insomnia. Or something worse.

She snaps photos of the victim’s manicured hands, something different this time—previous victims had callused fingers, broken nails. A single silver hair clings to the man's collar. Her stomach flips.

No. It couldn’t be hers. That’s insane.

You’re hunting a copycat, she tells herself, not becoming one.

At home, she lays the eleven mirrors in a perfect arc across the hardwood floor, crouching before them like a priestess at an altar. She studies the way moonlight dances across the glass. Midnight tolls.

The mirrors ripple.

She stumbles backward, breath hitching, as her reflections step out of the glass, one by one. A circle of phantom Claras surrounds her, each holding a different weapon—knife, rope, syringe, hammer, even her old piano wire from high school. Their eyes burn with purpose. With rage.

"Stop!" she screams, clutching her temples. Her vision blurs. When she opens her eyes again, the reflections are gone. Only the mirrors remain, silent and clean.

At 3:07 a.m., Ruiz calls. “Security footage came in. You need to see it.”

The video feed is grainy but clear enough. The victim, alive, carefully positions the mirror before him. He looks calm. Resigned. He smiles.

A hooded figure enters, face obscured. The victim embraces them like an old friend. Familiar hands stroke the man’s hair. And then—

A glint. A ring.

Her ring.

Then the blade. The throat. The blood.

Ruiz’s voice crackles through the phone, cold and careful. “Clara… the lab matched the hair. It’s yours.”

She drives aimlessly until the highway turns to dust roads and the dust roads into gravel. She ends up at the house she hasn’t seen in decades—her childhood home. The walls inside are still lined with faded family photos, half-peeled wallpaper, and dust-coated memories.

A cracked mirror in the hallway draws her gaze. Her reflection doesn’t mimic her movements. The face is hers but not. The same green eyes, the same scar under the chin—but colder, crueler.

“You’re not real,” Clara whispers.

The reflection grins. “I’m Clara Vale. You’re the echo.”

Something detonates in her mind.

She remembers the lake. Age twelve. Holding her twin sister’s head under water. Her sister had kicked and screamed, but Clara held on, until the water stilled. She climbed out, put on her twin’s dry clothes, took her name. Became her.

The mirrors were never just mirrors. They were gates. Wounds in reality. Ways to silence the guilt. Or let it through.

The killer wasn’t a copycat.

She was.

The real Clara—the one she drowned—never left. She came through the mirrors, one full moon at a time, to punish. To make the imposter pay. Each victim was someone who had loved the original twin. Clara’s murders were never random. They were acts of vengeance. From beyond.

She hears tires screech. Ruiz’s cruiser skids into the driveway, headlights slicing through the night. She’s already holding his service revolver, stolen before she fled.

The reflection in the mirror smirks.

“You finally see.”

The gunshot rings out, splintering the silence—and the mirror.