Part 1

Part 2

The unlit, half-demolished rooms and walls of semi-transparent plastic made the construction site feel like some kind of insane plague hospital. My heart was in my chest as I felt my way through the dark. What if I got caught? I doubted my family could take another tragedy…

The mall was no less creepy than the construction site had been. The main lights had been powered down, and the only illumination came from emergency signs and a few gated storefronts that must’ve kept their lights on all night. The eyeless stares of backlit mannequins seemed to follow me while I hurried through the mall. I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone or something was following me. Every time I stopped moving, the echoes of my footsteps seemed to continue on just a little bit longer than they should have.

I crouched in a shadowy hallway in front of Maia’s favorite store…and waited. There was no sound but the dripping of the powered-down fountains and the rumble of machines kicking on beneath the mall. I kept expecting to turn and find some horrible thing squatting in the darkness beside me…

I was considering giving up and going home when lights suddenly came on in the store in front of me. In happier times, the posh teen clothing retailer had been Maia’s favorite place to shop; now, with its staticky pop songs playing to an audience of mannequins and vacant cash registers, it seemed far more sinister than I remembered.

The gate was unlocked when I approached, but I winced at the noise it made when I lifted it.

At the time, I didn’t consider how strange it was that someone had somehow entered the store without passing through it.

By the time I did, it was too late. A dark figure was approaching from the dressing room corridor, humming along to the music. Maia.

I dived into a circular clothing rack, grabbing the hangers to stop their rattling. It was like being a kid again, playing hide and seek with my older sister–

Only this time the game felt deadly serious.

Maia held up jeans and sweaters, checking each look before discarding anything she didn’t want into a growing mountain of clothes beside her. She tried a variety of perfumes and painted her nails Hot Pink with a smile–a maniac, hungry smile that didn’t look right on my sister’s face.

I slipped my phone out of my pocket.

I’d come this far for proof, and no matter how frightened I was, I wasn’t going to leave without it. The next time Maia struck a pose in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirror, I was ready. From my hiding spot in the clothing rack, I looked down to take the photo–

But Maia didn’t appear on the screen. I glanced up at the girl in front of me and back down at my phone–

Footsteps came running toward us. I gasped and peered out the other side of the rack.

“Freeze! Security!” a pale, scared-looking guy in a cheap-looking uniform skidded to a halt in front of the store. “Hey! Put your hands up and turn around! NOW!”

The smile never left Maia’s face as she lifted her arms and turned toward the mall cop. The way she twisted her body hardly seemed human, but the guard was too nervous to notice. He was busy trying to get his radio to work. No matter what channel he used to ask for backup, the radio only played the same staticky pop music as the store’s speakers…

“You’re trespassing on private property. I’m gonna have to take you in.”

Then Maia was on him. The hot pink polish of her nails sparkled as she squeezed the guard’s head between her hands. His eyes went wide; he didn’t have the time or the strength to resist as Maia pushed him backward…toward the mirror.

With one hand she touched the silvery surface, and with the other…she pushed him through it. The reflection of the store wavered, and for a second I was looking into a maze of gloomy corridors that swallowed the guard like quicksand. The moment his fingers disappeared into the mirror, the gray hallways disappeared and I was once again looking at my sister’s reflection. Maia dusted off her hands and went back to trying on clothes. Each time she came close to the rack where I hid I shut my eyes tight, terrified that she’d find me and push me through the mirror, too–but the tightly-packed dresses hid me well. By the time Maia finished, the store looked like a hurricane had hit it. With three vials of nail polish, two bottles of perfume and an armload of clothing, my sister approached the mirror…and stepped inside. I caught just a flash of the gloomy corridors and the panicking guard before the reflection wavered and returned to normal. I was alone with the eerie music, the ransacked store, and an angry voice on the mall cop’s radio that was asking him to report in. I got out of there as fast as I could run.

I spent the misty, 2 A.M. drive home trying to explain what I’d seen, but when I parked on the street in front of my parents’ apartment, my thoughts were just as troubled and confused as they’d been when I’d left the mall. I checked nervously for signs of movement from Maia’s window before I snuck inside and dragged myself to bed.

I woke to a knocking on my door. Sunlight streamed through the window.

“Breakfast, sleepyhead!” my father was saying. “By the way, that was a really sweet thing you did for Maia last night!”

“W-what do you mean?” I felt my blood run cold.

“You did a great job painting your sister’s nails–you even remembered how much she loves hot pink!”

The next morning, the missing mall security guard was all over the news. I bit my lip, wondering if anyone had seen me sneaking into the shopping center after hours. What if the cops dusted for fingerprints? Would they find mine–or Maia’s? There was only one way to find out for sure what was happening to my sister, but I was terrified of doing it.

I’d actually preferred to go to a sketchy dance club and break into a mall, rather than do the one simple thing that I’d been dreading all along: spending the night in my sister’s room.

Once I’d committed to it, though, I felt an odd sense of calm. One way or another, I was about to learn the truth about what was happening to Maia.

When my father’s snores finally began to echo down the hallway, I tiptoed to my sister’s room.

“Maia?” I whispered. No movement, no response. I could see a dark shape in my sister’s bed. She must be asleep, I thought, or pretending to be.

As I crossed the room to the table lamp that was Maia’s only source of light, another possibility occurred to me: What if that wasn’t really my sister under the blankets?

I reached out for the light, expecting a horrible hand to shoot out of the darkness and grab my hand–

But none came. When I clicked on the tiny lamp, I saw only my sister’s sleeping face. Without opening her eyes, Maia sighed and turned away from the light. What now? I had no idea.

There was nothing to do but listen to the barely-there, hypnotic sound of my sister’s breathing–

And try to stay awake.

Every time I checked my phone, I was amazed by how little time had passed. I zoned out looking at my sister’s possessions, preserved in the silent room like butterflies pinned behind glass. Finally, my eyes settled on the fancy oval mirror on the wall in front of Maia’s bed.

There had been a mirror in the dance club–and in the store in the mall.

What if–

I froze. Was it possible that someone…or something…was watching me from within that gloomy reflection? I sighed, patted my sister’s hand, and pretended to stretch. I turned out the lamp, then opened and closed my sister’s door–but I didn’t leave the room.

Instead, I pressed myself against the wall where the mirror hung, hiding myself from the view of anything inside. The darkness seemed thick enough to cut with a knife as I waited for something–anything–to happen.

After what felt like hours, the surface of the mirror began to swirl and emit a dull, silverish glow. My sister stirred and, with a tremendous effort, pushed herself into a sitting position. In the weird light of the mirror, Maia looked like a ghost. Her eyes burned with fear and excitement, but of course, I couldn’t see what she was looking at. Then, to my horror, a hand reached out of the mirror, and a dark shape pulled itself through.

Maia reached weakly over and turned on her table lamp, and I was treated to a full view of the thing that had just climbed out of my sister’s bedroom wall.

It was like a walking reflection of Maia, and when it sat down on the bed beside her and took her hand, it made no impression on the sheets.

Until that moment, the darkness had hidden me from my sister’s view. Now, however, Maia was looking at me with a mixture of confusion and terror on her face.

I pressed a finger to my lips, silently begging her not to alert the thing to my presence. As the thing touched her hand, my sister seemed to draw some strength from it, and I saw I sight I’d never dreamed I’d see again:

Maia opened her mouth and began to speak.

“I love the outfit!” my sister rasped. “I had a great time!” Maia paused; I had to hold down a scream as the thing from the mirror leaned hungrily toward her, like it was drinking in her words. “I just…I don’t think I wanna go out again.” The thing twisted its head and made an angry sound like glass shattering.

I noticed its other hand creeping up Maia’s chest, toward her neck…

“What happened to that man, the guard from the mall? What did you do to him? This isn’t fun anymo…” I realized that where the thing was touching Maia, its skin was merging with her own, blending until I could no longer tell where my sister’s body ended and the thing from the mirror began. It was slipping her on like a suit made of skin. “Stop!” Maia choked. “I don’t want to do this anymore! Please…stop…!”

I fumbled for something to defend myself with; my fingers wrapped around Maia’s old lacrosse stick. Against a monster, it wouldn’t do much…but against a mirror…

I swung it into the fancy antique on my sister’s wall. As the glass cracked, the thing’s head whipped around backwards toward me. Its body followed, crackling horribly as it turned.

The reflection in the mirror no longer resembled Maia’s room at all; on the other side of the fractured surface I could see only those ghastly gray hallways, those decrepit silver rooms…

And the half-eaten remains of a mall security guard.

I felt cold, glass-like fingers on the back of my neck, pushing me toward the horrible vision in the mirror. I smashed at the fractures with the lacrosse stick ones, twice, again–

It wasn’t enough.

With a final scream I grabbed the mirror’s ornamental frame, hurling it onto the floor–

And the antique looking-glass finally shattered.

The feeling of those cold fingers on my skin disappeared.

Maia stood behind me, blinking like she’d just woken up from a bad dream.

As I looked down at the shattered remains of the mirror, I realized that my sister’s sickness had begun right around the time she’d hung it up in her room.

That thing must’ve slipped out of her mirror each night, draining her energy until she could barely move. Then it approached her as a savior, offering Maia her energy back in return for letting it inside of her…

My sister hadn’t been talking to herself; she’d been talking to it.

The door flew open.

“WHAT is going on in here?!” My father bellowed. “I TOLD you–”

He stopped mid-sentence when he saw my sister on her feet behind me, one hand resting on my shoulder.

It had taken over six years for my mother’s prediction to come true, but in the end she was right: we finally had our Maia back.

X