The Mirror Room

The invitation came in a heavy cream envelope, handwritten, no return address.



The estate of Marianne Ellory has named you sole inheritor. Keys enclosed. Please return home.



The word home landed like a stone in her chest.



Claire hadn’t been back to the Ellory house in over twenty years. Not since the night her mother vanished. Not since the voices started murmuring from behind the wallpaper. They called it “hallucination” back then. Night terrors. Trauma response. Doctors had theories.



But none of them had seen the house.



She’d told herself it had been torn down years ago.



It hadn’t.



The house still stood at the edge of the woods like a carcass. Victorian. Three stories. Its white paint was now the color of old bones. Thorned ivy crept up the walls like veins. The windows glared black and blank.



Even the air around it felt colder.



Claire gripped the rusted gate and pushed. It let out a metallic shriek that seemed to echo far longer than it should have. She paused on the front step, key in hand, half-expecting someone—or something—to answer the sound.



Nothing did.



Inside, the air was thick with mildew and memory.



Each room was like a museum of someone else’s life. Furniture covered in sheets. A tea set mid-pour on a dust-caked table. Her childhood drawings still taped to the hallway wall—crayon figures with hollow eyes and jagged smiles. All dated 2004.



The year the mirrors went black.



The year she stopped speaking.



Upstairs, the temperature dropped with every step. Claire felt the cold in her teeth.



She paused outside the study—her mother’s room, the one that had always been locked. A room of whispered phone calls and sleepless nights. Of incense and scribbled journals.



She turned the key.



The study smelled like dried lavender and scorched paper. Books lined the walls—titles in Latin and Greek. A desk sat beneath the window, its drawers slightly open. Candles melted to the nub surrounded a mirror above the fireplace, long cracked from corner to corner.



And behind that mirror—a door.



A door that hadn’t been there before.



The wallpaper cut around it too cleanly. Too recently.



Claire stepped closer. Her fingers brushed the frame. Cold. Too cold.



A brass key on the desk glinted in a shaft of dying sunlight. It fit the lock.



The door opened with a slow, guttural groan.



Beyond it, a spiral staircase wound down into darkness.



The air grew colder as she descended. Her breath fogged. The only sound was the creak of each step and the rhythmic pounding of her heart.



At the bottom: a round room.



Wall to wall, it was encased in mirrors—tall, warped, floor to ceiling. Every surface reflected her from a hundred angles.



In the center: a child’s wooden chair.



Claire froze.



It was her chair. She recognized the etchings on the legs—little sunbursts she’d carved with a kitchen knife when she was eight. Her fingers remembered the movements even now.



She took a step inside. The mirrors groaned.



And the reflection staring back… wasn’t quite right.



She was older in the glass. Eyes sunken. Skin pale. Dressed in the yellow cotton dress her mother used to insist she wear on “cleansing” days. But worse than the clothing was the expression.



It didn’t blink.



Didn’t move when she did.



And then it smiled.



Claire spun around. The staircase was gone. Just mirror.



Panic surged. Her breath quickened.



Then—voices.



Faint at first, like whispers bleeding through a wall. Dozens of voices. All versions of her.



“Claire… Claire, remember?”



“They kept the bad parts down here.”



“You left us.”



“Say your name.”



She pressed her palms over her ears. It didn’t help.



The voices weren’t outside anymore.



They were inside.



One of the mirrors began to shimmer, revealing a memory.



She was eight. Her mother held her wrists in front of the mirror, whispering something in a language Claire didn’t understand.



Then pain. Then… silence.



“She split us,” one voice hissed.



“Stored the trauma. Locked it away.”



Each mirror now showed a different version of Claire. A frightened child. A silent teenager. A weeping adult. All slightly off. All watching.



One stepped forward—out of the glass.



The girl from the chair. Barefoot. Same yellow dress.



But her eyes were wrong.



Not just empty—wrong. Like someone else was inside.



She opened her mouth and spoke with her mother’s voice.



“It’s time to be whole again.”



Claire stepped back. “You’re not me.”



The girl tilted her head.



“You gave us to the mirror. You made us invisible. Forgotten. You thought you could be normal again if we stayed locked here.”



The other reflections nodded in eerie unison.



“But we remember. You don’t get to forget.”



The mirrors pulsed. The walls groaned. Her chest felt tight.



She dropped to her knees.



This room—it wasn’t new. She had been here. Many times. Therapy sessions with her mother, who said this would “pull the poison out.” Said it was “safer this way.”



Each memory, each feeling, she couldn’t handle—they buried it here.



A psychic oubliette.



A mirror mausoleum.



Claire stood slowly, shoulders trembling.



“No more,” she whispered.



“I’m done hiding.”



She turned to the central mirror, the one with the largest crack.



“I am Claire Ellory. I am all of me. And I remember.”



The room screamed.



The mirrors fractured. Light poured from the cracks. The chair split in half. The voices shrieked, then began to merge—into one voice. Her voice.



And then—



Silence.



When she opened her eyes, she was back in the study.



The mirror above the fireplace was whole again.



The door behind it—gone.



She looked up.



And for the first time in years, her reflection looked real.