Seventeen-year-old Zosia moves into her great-grandmother's flat and finds an old mirror that starts speaking. Whatever is trapped behind the glass seems to know her name.
Zosia had spent years mocking people who swore by omens, bad luck, and things that went bump in the night. But moving into her great-grandmother's flat in a townhouse at the centre of the city made even her rational mind feel crowded out. The building had a way of pressing in on her: stair rails polished smooth by generations of hands, narrow corridors that held on to every sound, floorboards that sighed as if they were trying to remember the past.
The one thing she couldn't stop noticing was the mirror in the corner of the old sitting room. It was taller than she was, set in a dark wooden frame carved with twisting leaves and worn, watchful faces. On her first day, as she carried in a box of books, she caught her reflection in it and swore the glass trembled, just for a second, like ripples moving under skin. She blinked, and it was still only a mirror. Or so she told herself.
The first few days blurred together: midterm revision, half-heard instructions from her parents on the phone, instant coffee gone cold beside her notebooks. At night, when the lamps were on and the rest of the flat had gone dim, the mirror seemed different. The shadows inside it lingered a little too long. The room behind her reflection looked deeper than it should have. Once, while she was brushing her hair, she thought she saw movement at the edge of the glass, as if someone had passed just out of sight.
On the evening it happened, she was alone and trying to force her way through chemistry notes she barely understood. A soft rustle came from behind her. Zosia glanced up, expecting a window left open, a curtain shifting, anything ordinary. The room was still. Then, from the mirror, in a voice so low she might have imagined it, someone said, "Zosia."
She turned so fast her chair scraped the floor. No one stood behind her. Only the mirror did.
Her own face stared back at her, except it wasn't quite hers. The eyes in the glass were too dark, too deep, as if they were looking out from somewhere far below the surface. Then the mouth in the reflection moved on its own and whispered, "Don't be afraid. I just want to talk."
Zosia couldn't breathe. The air in the room seemed to tighten, drawing her toward the glass. Her reflection tilted its head a fraction too slowly, and the carved frame gave a faint, dry creak, as if something inside it had shifted awake.
"Zosia," the mirror said again, but this time the voice was angry, urgent, almost warning. "You really shouldn't have woken me up."
The lamplight flickered. The room seemed to shrink around the mirror's blackening surface, and for one sharp instant, something pale and blurred pressed up from the other side of the glass, as if it were trying to find a way out.