While redecorating her Krakow flat, Lena drags down an old attic mirror and discovers that something in its reflection does not belong to her world.
Lena had finally run out of excuses. After years in her small Krakow flat, she decided it was time to strip the place bare and start again. She shoved the bookcase against the wall, dragged the sofa beneath the window, and climbed into the attic for anything that might still be useful. The air up there was thick with dust and old summers: cardboard boxes softened at the corners, student chairs with scratched legs, a stack of linen that had gone grey with age.
Behind one of the boxes, half hidden as if someone had meant to come back for it, stood a mirror.
It was plain at first glance. Dark wood frame, dull glass, the kind of thing a person bought because it looked dignified in a hallway and never thought about again. Lena brushed a sleeve over the surface and felt a faint resistance, as if the dust had settled there longer than it should have. A thin crack ran straight through the centre of the glass.
She should have left it alone. Instead, she decided it deserved a second life. A little polishing, a better place in the flat, and it might even look elegant.
When she carried it downstairs and set it in the living room, the room seemed to tighten around it. Lena wiped the glass clean. The crack caught the light, bright as a thread of ice. Then, for the briefest instant, the reflection shifted.
It was not her flat.
She saw a different room, washed in pale light, with a tall window she had never stood before. On the windowsill grew flowers she could not name, long-stemmed and strangely still, as if they were listening. Lena blinked, and her own face snapped back into place.
She gave a short, nervous laugh. Dust in the attic, tired eyes, too much coffee. That had to be it.
But the mirror did not feel ordinary anymore.
Over the next few days she kept finding reasons to glance at it. In the morning it was harmless. In the evening it looked deeper, darker, as though the room behind her reflection had gained weight. Each time she moved, the crack seemed to catch on something she could not see.
On Thursday night she came home late, tired enough to be careless. The flat was silent. She made tea, carried the mug into the living room, and sat opposite the mirror as if she meant to prove something to herself.
The glass went still.
Then it clouded over, turned black, and a door appeared in the middle of it where no door had any right to be. Light leaked from the edges in a thin, cold line. Lena leaned forward before she could stop herself, and from behind the glass came a whisper so quiet she almost thought she had imagined it.
Something on the other side had just noticed her.