In an abandoned tenement on Wilcza Street, Ala and Karol find a mirror that should not exist. What stares back at them is not their reflection, but a living world waiting on the other side.
Ala had known for years that the tenement on Wilcza Street was wrong. It leaned into the street like a man too tired to stand upright, with blackened windows, peeled plaster, and a yard strangled by dead shrubs. The place had been empty for so long that even the pigeons seemed to avoid it. That was exactly why she and Karol came here on the last day of August, when the city felt hollow and the evening light was already beginning to thin.
They slipped in through a basement window, trying not to laugh too loudly. They were almost adults, old enough to know better and reckless enough not to care. Karol went first, using his phone as a torch. Ala followed, one hand on the damp wall, the other wrapped around her own phone, though she doubted it would help if anything in the building decided to wake up.
The air inside was cold and stale, thick with dust and the dry smell of paper long buried under years. Their steps stirred nothing but silence. Room after room opened before them, stripped of furniture, the wallpaper hanging in grey strips like shed skin. Then, at the end of a corridor that should have led nowhere, they found a room that looked as if it had once been a library.
Shelves had rotted into the walls. A cracked desk stood beneath a ceiling stained with water marks. And on the far wall, where there should have been a window, hung a mirror as tall as a door, set in a carved frame dark with age.
Ala stopped. Something about it made the skin along her arms tighten.
It should have reflected the ruined room behind them. Instead, it showed a forest.
Not a normal one. The leaves burned in shades of violet and deep green, and pale birds moved between the branches like scraps of moonlight. A road of glittering stones cut through the trees, leading toward a shape in the distance that might have been a figure, if it were not wrapped in a ribbon of light that drifted behind it like smoke.
Karol came to stand beside her, and his face changed as soon as he saw it.
"Ala," he whispered. "That isn't us."
She lifted her hand before she could talk herself out of it. Her fingertips touched the glass.
The surface yielded.
There was no cold, no resistance. Her hand sank in as if the mirror were made of deep water, and the image on the other side rippled outward in a shiver of silver light. Karol grabbed her wrist hard enough to hurt.
"Don't," he said, but his voice had already lost its certainty.
The mirror flashed once, bright as a camera burst, and the forest in the glass seemed to breathe.
Then something slammed downstairs.
A floorboard groaned. Another удар followed, closer this time, as if someone had entered the tenement and was climbing toward them with deliberate steps. Karol turned toward the corridor, then back to the mirror, and Ala felt the air in the room tighten around all of them.
The reflection changed again.
This time the figure in the forest stopped walking and turned its head straight toward them.