🪞 Part 5: The Mouth of the Mirror
The mirror in the hallway had stopped reflecting Claire.
It no longer followed her movements.
No longer showed her daughter.
No longer acknowledged her presence.
When Nina walked past it, it worked. When strangers came by, it sparkled like any other glass.
But when Claire stood before it, the surface turned black.
Not broken. Not cracked.
Just… hollow.
Like the world inside it had shut its eyes.
Or was waiting for Claire to open hers.
---
Elara had stopped using Claire’s name.
She used to call her “Mama.”
Now, she just pointed. Stared. Smiled.
She was only two, but her eyes were too old now. Too still.
Sometimes Claire heard her humming in her crib.
It wasn’t a lullaby Claire ever taught her.
It was the same tune Liora used to hum — soft, looping, hypnotic.
Claire didn’t know how she remembered it.
But she did.
And when she heard it at night, she felt her hands go cold, like the blood beneath her skin had turned to thread.
---
Nina brought over new research.
Ancient myths about mirrors as mouths — not just portals, but eaters. Devices that fed on memory, on identity, on lineage.
“I think you’ve been feeding it since you were a child,” Nina said quietly. “Not intentionally. But every time you forgot something that mattered… it took it.”
Claire stared at the dark mirror.
“You think it’s… full of me?”
“I think it’s waiting for the rest.”
---
They set up cameras.
Motion sensors.
Placed the same bell Elara had touched beneath the frame.
At 3:33 a.m., the camera caught something.
A hand.
Pale. Thin. Crawling out from the surface of the mirror like it was rising from a swamp.
The hand reached for the bell — but didn’t take it.
Instead, it pointed.
Down the hallway.
To Elara’s room.
Claire watched the footage again and again.
And then deleted it.
---
The next morning, Elara said her first full sentence in weeks.
“Liora wants to come back.”
Claire froze.
“She told me in the window.”
“In the window?”
“No,” Elara said softly, “the mirror-window.”
Claire turned to Nina.
“I think I need to go in.”
Nina looked like she was about to protest.
But instead, she nodded.
---
In the basement, behind the shattered mirror that once reflected Claire’s hollow face, they discovered a door.
Not wood.
Not stone.
Just space.
A void shaped like an archway, pulsing faintly — invisible unless viewed in the right light.
Claire held the journal, the bell, and Elara’s blanket.
She stepped through.
And the world shifted.
---
The Veil wasn’t a place.
It was memory itself.
Claire walked through moments.
Her first birthday. Her mother braiding her hair. The night she lost her first tooth. The night she found Liora.
She saw herself as a child, dancing in front of a mirror — and the mirror dancing slightly differently.
She saw her mother crying behind a closed door, whispering the word “Liora” as if it was a wound.
She saw her grandmother sitting at a desk, writing the same spiral again and again on parchment, whispering, “She’s not done with us yet.”
---
At the center of the Veil was a lake made of glass.
Underneath it floated faces.
Liora’s.
Her mother’s.
Claire’s — but hollow-eyed, mouth open, screaming.
A voice echoed around her, older than language, softer than breath:
“To save your daughter, you must bury the mother you’ve become.”
Claire knelt.
Took the bell.
And dropped it into the lake.
It didn’t sink.
It rang — a single, perfect note.
And the spirals around her began to break.
---
Above her, the mirror shattered in the real world.
Nina screamed.
Elara woke up — gasping, wide-eyed — and said:
“She’s gone.”
Claire collapsed.
---
She awoke two days later.
Different.
Lighter.
But not healed.
Some mirrors still wouldn’t reflect her.
But Elara smiled now.
Said “Mama” again.
Drew spirals with crayons — not as warnings, but as flowers.
Claire stood in front of the hallway mirror.
And it looked back.
Finally.
“Before She Called My Name”
Claire had never told anyone about the night her mother disappeared for twelve hours when she was six.
It wasn’t because she didn’t want to.
It was because, for years, she truly didn’t remember.
But now, standing in the middle of the Veil’s echo-chamber — where reflections bled into truth — that night unfolded around her like a theater production playing only for her soul.
She stood in the old house’s hallway, but the wallpaper was red. The mirror shimmered. And a younger version of her — a little Claire in yellow pajamas — stood before it with both palms pressed to the glass.
From the other side, a woman mimicked her movements.
Not her mother.
Not her grandmother.
Her.
But older. Hair undone. Eyes hollow.
And yet... she smiled.
The little Claire turned and whispered to someone invisible.
“Liora… I think that’s the real me.”
Then the mirror cracked — silently, slowly — and a black fog spilled out.
The world bent inward.
And Claire, watching from her older, present form, felt herself being pulled.
Memories she didn’t know she had pressed against her skull like whispers under her skin:
Her mother kneeling before the fireplace, drawing symbols in chalk.
Her grandmother lighting candles and mouthing words that weren't English.
A voice — always the same voice — whispering: “You will forget, but I will remain.”
Then came a moment that didn’t belong.
A new memory.
A room Claire had never seen. A crib. Elara’s crib.
But older.
And in that crib, Elara cried.
Not like a baby.
Like a girl who remembered something no child should ever know.
The mirror above her shattered into dust — not from force, but from recognition.
Elara wasn’t just remembering Claire’s pain.
She was holding it.
And feeding it back to the reflection.
Claire awoke in the Veil with blood trickling from her nose.
The lake of glass beneath her shimmered.
Her reflection stared back with eyes that weren’t hers.
Liora’s eyes.
But gentler now.
Less demanding.
Claire touched the surface.
“You’re not my enemy,” she said. “You’re my consequence.”
The reflection smiled sadly.
Then whispered:
“Break the pattern.”
Back in the real world, Nina was holding Elara tightly, chanting the protective lullaby they had discovered in the cursed book’s last page.
The room buzzed with static. The mirrors had fogged. The air smelled like burning ink.
Then — silence.
The air cleared.
And Claire stepped out of the basement — pale, exhausted… but whole.
Elara saw her.
Smiled.
And said the words Claire never expected to hear:
“Mama, she says thank you.”
Claire’s voice trembled. “Who?”
“Elara’s friend.”
She held out a crayon drawing.
Spirals… and a girl in a veil.
Underneath it, in toddler handwriting:
> “Liora goned. I stay. Mama safe.”
That night, Claire wrote in her journal for the first time in months.
She didn’t write about the Veil.
Or the mirrors.
Or even Liora.
She wrote Elara’s name.
Over and over again.
Until it filled the page.
And when she held up the paper to the hallway mirror, her own reflection smiled.
