Seventeen-year-old Jan finds a forgotten cracked mirror in an abandoned manor. In its surface, something moves that should not exist, and the house starts to shift around him.
Jan sat on the sagging steps of the abandoned manor house and watched dust glitter in the pale light leaking through a broken window. He had told himself, more than once, that coming here after dark was a stupid idea. That had never stopped him before. The manor was the kind of place that seemed to keep its own history locked in the walls, and Jan had spent years wanting to be the one who found it.
He had come for the locked door at the end of the corridor. The iron handle had resisted at first, cold and rigid under his palm, but the rotten wood gave way with a groan. Beyond it lay an empty hall stripped of furniture and colour, save for one thing standing in the centre: a tall mirror in a curved brass frame, its glass cracked from corner to corner.
It was too clean. No dust clung to the surface, no spiderwebs softened the edges. Jan stopped a few steps short, his breath catching as he looked into it. The glass should have given him back his own face, the dark hair, the half-smile he never quite managed to hide when he was nervous. Instead, there was only a shadow. It moved where he did not, a dark, restless blur turning slowly inside the mirror as if it were alive.
Jan lifted one hand. The shadow did not copy him. It shifted closer.
The air around the mirror changed first, cooling so sharply that gooseflesh rose along his arms. Then the room outside the glass began to waver. The windowlight bent strangely, and brief flashes of movement flickered in the corners of his vision. Whispering rose from somewhere beyond the walls, soft at first, then clearer, as though the manor itself had started speaking his name.
He stood frozen, caught between fear and the pull of whatever waited on the other side. The shadow in the glass seemed to tilt its head, almost curious. Then a second shape rose behind it: a human silhouette, thin and still, with eyes like empty holes staring straight at him.
Jan took one involuntary step back. Behind him, the door slammed shut with a sound like a gunshot.