The Mirror Of Lost Souls

Chapter Four: Whispers In The Shadows

The first light of dawn crept through the curtains, casting the room in a soft, gray glow. My body ached, and my mind felt like it was drowning in the memories of last night. Cecilia lay on the bed, her face pale, her breathing shallow. The others were scattered around the room, their expressions vacant and exhausted, like we had all survived some unspoken disaster.

I was the first to stir, blinking against the light as the fragments of the nightmare replayed in my mind. The room still held a heavy silence, the kind that comes after a storm, where everything feels too quiet, too still.

“Cecilia,” I whispered, leaning closer to her. “Can you hear me?”

Her eyes fluttered open, but they were unfocused, like she was still lost in whatever had taken control of her. She tried to sit up, but her body moved sluggishly, as though she was dragging herself through thick mud. “Lena… What happened? I can’t… remember.”

“You were… possessed, I think,” I said, my voice shaking. “Something from that mirror took over you. We didn’t know what to do.”

Cecilia’s brow furrowed, her confusion and fear mirroring my own. “It felt like a dream… or a nightmare. I remember… laughing, but it wasn’t me. It was like something else was inside me, pushing me aside.”

I swallowed hard, trying to keep the guilt from overwhelming me. “It’s over now, Cecilia. You’re safe. But we need to figure out what’s going on before it happens again.”

The others began to stir, their faces reflecting the same unease I felt. Isabella rubbed her eyes, her usual spark dulled by the terror of the night before. “What do we do now?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

“We need to learn more about that mirror,” I said, trying to sound more confident than I felt. “There has to be something about it… something old, something dangerous. Maybe there’s something in the house that can help us understand what we’re dealing with.”

Loraine, always the calm one, nodded slowly. “There’s got to be more to this. We can’t just sit around and wait for it to come after us again.”

I thought about the attic. It was a place I rarely ventured into, filled with old relics and forgotten memories. My grandmother had always been the keeper of our family’s history, storing away the past in that dusty, forgotten space. If there were any clues about the mirror’s origins, they would be there.

“We should check the attic,” I suggested. “My grandmother keeps all sorts of old things up there—books, letters, maybe even something about the mirror.”

The others agreed, though I could see the fear in their eyes. The thought of facing the unknown again, of delving deeper into whatever horror we’d unleashed, weighed heavily on all of us. But we knew we didn’t have a choice.

With a sense of grim determination, we made our way to the attic. The wooden steps creaked under our weight as we climbed, each sound echoing through the quiet house like a warning. I led the way, my heart pounding in my chest. The attic door loomed before us, a portal to the past that I suddenly wasn’t sure I wanted to open.

I hesitated for a moment, my hand hovering over the door handle. A chill ran down my spine, like the air around me had turned cold and hostile. But I pushed the door open, revealing the dark, dusty space beyond.

The attic was a maze of old furniture, trunks, and boxes, all covered in thick layers of dust. The light from the small, dirty window barely reached the corners, casting long, eerie shadows. It was a place where time had stopped, where the past lingered in every forgotten object.

“We should split up and start looking,” I suggested, trying to keep my voice steady. “There might be something here that can help us.”

We moved cautiously through the attic, the dust thick in the air, making it hard to breathe. Every shadow seemed to shift, every creak of the floorboards sounded like something lurking just out of sight.