The rain hadn’t stopped in three days. It drummed endlessly on the windows of Blackthorn Asylum, a relentless static that crept into the minds of the staff and patients alike. Dr. Eleanor Vale often caught herself tapping her pen in time with the drops, as though the rain were trying to teach her a language she’d once known and forgotten.

Blackthorn was old. Built in 1887, it had been expanded, gutted, modernized—and still it smelled like the past. The kind of place where the walls remembered screams, and the air carried secrets in every gust of sterile wind. Eleanor had been hired to “refresh” the psychiatric protocols. The administration used words like reform, modernize, and integration. But the moment she stepped inside, she understood the truth: Blackthorn didn’t want to change. It wanted to be left alone.

She soon learned not to ask too many questions. The staff moved like ghosts. The patients rarely spoke above a whisper. Medications were overprescribed and underdocumented. Files vanished. Surveillance footage was conveniently “lost” when something strange occurred. There was an understanding among the long-time employees: you could survive Blackthorn, if you didn’t look too closely.

Eleanor wasn’t like that. She was curious.

Her curiosity nearly ended her.

It began with a file. It appeared on her desk one gray morning, as if conjured there. “Jonah Greaves – Room 6B.” The chart was decades old, the paper brittle. A few notes in jagged handwriting:

Avoid direct communication.

Do not discuss mirrors.

Lights must remain on at all times.

Patient does not respond to medication.

Oddest of all: no diagnosis. No incident reports. Just a Polaroid clipped to the top. It showed a figure, but the face was blurred—smudged as if by fire or mold. When she looked closer, the blur seemed to pulse. She blinked. It was still.

Eleanor asked the head psychiatrist, Dr. Menser, about the file. His reaction was immediate and rehearsed.

“There is no patient in 6B,” he said. “The room is unoccupied. Always has been.”

“But the file—”

He held up a hand. “Don’t dig there, Eleanor. Trust me.”

She didn’t.

That night, something woke her. A sound—wet footsteps just outside her door. She listened, heart thudding. The steps paused. Then came a soft tap tap tap on the glass window. She lived alone. Her apartment was on the third floor.

She didn’t sleep the rest of the night.

Over the following days, she noticed oddities. Room 6B wasn’t on the electronic registry. The hallway light outside it flickered more than anywhere else. Orderlies avoided it. Some even crossed themselves as they passed.

She asked Nurse Delgado, a kind older woman with decades at Blackthorn, what she knew.

Delgado’s face turned pale. “He speaks through mirrors,” she whispered. “He can wear your face like a glove.”

“Who?”

Delgado only said, “He never left. We just stopped calling him by name.”

That night, Eleanor returned to 6B.

She told herself it was to disprove the hysteria. But part of her wanted to know. Needed to.

The door was unlocked. The handle cold as bone.

Inside, the room was cleaner than it had any right to be. A made bed. A single chair. A mirror above the sink—covered in heavy black cloth, corners nailed down.

She stared at it.

Something moved beneath.

Then: a whisper, so soft it tickled the ear.

“Finally. You see me.”

Her skin turned to ice. She backed away. But the room—was it changing? The walls seemed to ripple. The light flickered once, twice—

—and the mirror cloth slipped.

In the reflection, a man sat in the chair. He had no eyes. Just dark holes, wet and yawning. His smile was wrong—wider than it should be, as if his cheeks had been cut to stretch.

He raised his hand.

So did she.

But it wasn’t her anymore.

The face in the mirror was Eleanor’s, but subtly different. The mouth twitched. The eyes moved independently. The reflection leaned forward while Eleanor stood frozen.

The lights went out.

She screamed.

When the orderlies found her the next morning, she was curled on the bed of Room 6B, eyes glassy, mouth muttering something over and over: “I’m not me I’m not me I’m not me—”

They transferred her to a secure wing. Her file was sealed.

Room 6B was boarded up, finally.

But even now, if you pass by during the night shift, you might see your reflection in a window—just slightly wrong. It may smile when you don’t.

And if it ever whispers, “Do you see me now?”—

Don’t answer.

---