The Reflection Room

Caleb Morran didn’t remember killing his mother.

But the house did.

And it had been waiting.

—

They say a mirror is just glass with a memory.

What they don’t say is some mirrors remember everything.

Every scream.

Every lie.

Every murder.

—

He returned to the Morran estate not for peace, but because he ran out of places to hide from the noises in his head. The last patient he treated had torn her fingernails out and whispered to her own reflection until her tongue fell off.

Her final words:

“They’re coming through.”

Caleb assumed she was schizophrenic.

But now, back in that damned house, he understood:

She saw them too.

—

The mirrors were not mirrors.

They were wombs.

They grew things.

Things that looked like people.

Things that looked like him.

He found the first one sitting on the edge of his bed—shaved head, pale eyes, naked except for a necklace made from teeth.

His teeth.

“Father,” it whispered.

“Father, why did you leave us behind the glass?”

—

Flashback.

When he was a boy, his mother locked him in the Reflection Room as punishment.

But the room didn’t stay locked.

The mirrors opened.

The reflections stepped out.

Some were headless.

Some had too many eyes.

One wore his mother’s face stitched onto its own.

They told him to hurt her.

And he did.

—

The memories bled into the walls.

He found thirteen journals hidden under the floorboards. All in his mother’s handwriting.

Each one ending with the same phrase:

“Kill the glass. Before the glass kills the world.”

—

He tried.

He smashed every mirror.

But the fragments kept multiplying.

Each shard a portal.

Each shard a witness.

Each shard a womb.

Soon the house was filled with Calebs.

Some laughed.

Some cried.

Some skinned themselves alive just to feel different from him.

The real Caleb locked himself in the attic with one candle and no mirrors.

But the candle flickered with each breath he didn’t take.

—

And then, the original mirror appeared again.

He hadn’t seen it in years.

The Venetian mirror.

The one his mother said was older than sin.

Forged in a monastery where monks flayed themselves alive to trap demons inside the glass.

It spoke now—not in sound, but in vibration.

“WE DO NOT REFLECT.

WE REPLICATE.

YOU ARE OUR BLUEPRINT.

YOUR MIND IS OUR KINGDOM.

YOUR FLESH IS OUR ENTRYWAY.”

—

Caleb screamed and stabbed out his eyes.

Darkness.

Silence.

Peace.

—

But in the black, he saw light.

The light of mirrors behind his eyes.

The mirrors inside his skull.

The reflections inside his blood.

—

Epilogue

They found the house abandoned.

No sign of Caleb.

Just hundreds of mirrors—each one showing a different version of him. Some still bleeding. Some pregnant. One gnawing on a baby that looked like it had three heads.

And all of them saying the same thing, in perfect unison:

“Come closer.

Look.

Look what you are beneath your skin.

Look how many of you are waiting to be born.”

—

You don’t see your reflection.

It sees you.

And it wants out.

Author’s Note

The Reflection Room was born from a question that wouldn’t leave me alone:

What if mirrors don’t just show us our reflection—what if they show us what we refuse to see?

Not just guilt. Not just trauma. But the possibility that what looks back isn’t you at all.

This story scratches at something deeper than horror. It’s about identity as infection. About how pain, when ignored, replicates. The monster here isn’t the mirror—it’s what we allow to fester in silence, the versions of ourselves we lock away and pretend never existed.

As someone fascinated by the blurred line between perception and reality, I wanted to push beyond jump scares and gore. I wanted to trap you in a psychological prism—each reflection more disturbing than the last, until even you don’t know which version of yourself came out alive.

If you find yourself uneasy after reading, questioning the face in your mirror, then I’ve done my job.

Don’t look too long.

And whatever you do—

Don’t let it smile first.

—Jason Benskin