BROKEN MIRROR

As soon as Sarah saw the mirror at the antique shop, she knew she had to have it.

It was a large, ornate mirror with an intricately carved frame that seemed to glow in the dimly lit shop. The glass was slightly warped, giving everything a dreamlike quality when reflected in its surface. Sarah was entranced by its beauty and immediately asked the shopkeeper how much it cost.

The shopkeeper gave her a strange look before quoting a price that Sarah thought was too good to be true. She didn't waste any time in purchasing the mirror, and the shopkeeper helped her carry it out to her car.

As soon as got the mirror home, she hung it on the wall in her bedroom. She spent hours admiring herself in it, marveling at the way the glass made her appear more beautiful than she had ever felt before. She started spending more and more time in her bedroom, gazing at herself in the mirror for hours on end.

But as the days went by, Sarah began to notice something strange about the mirror. Every time she looked into it, she could see a faint outline of someone standing behind her. At first, she thought it was just her imagination playing tricks on her, but as the days went by, the figure in the mirror became clearer and clearer.

It was a woman with long, dark hair and pale skin. She was always standing just behind Sarah's shoulder, staring at her with a cold, dead gaze. Sarah tried to ignore her, but she couldn't shake the feeling that the woman was somehow watching her every move.

One night, as Sarah was getting ready for bed, she caught a glimpse of the woman in the mirror out of the corner of her eye. She spun around, but there was no one there. When she turned back to the mirror, the woman was staring back at her with a twisted smile on her face.

Sarah tried to run out of the room, but she found that she couldn't move. It was as if she was frozen in place, her body paralyzed with fear. The woman in the mirror began to laugh, and her laughter echoed throughout the room like a thousand tiny voices.

As the days went by, Sarah became more and more afraid of the mirror. She tried to cover it with a sheet, but the sheet always seemed to slide off in the middle of the night. She even tried smashing the mirror with a hammer, but the glass was unbreakable.

One night, Sarah woke up to find the woman in the mirror standing at the foot of her bed. She was holding a broken piece of glass in her hand, and she was smiling that same twisted smile.

"I've been waiting for you," the woman said. "Now, we can be together forever."

Sarah screamed and tried to run, but the woman in the mirror stepped out of the glass and grabbed her by the wrist. Sarah felt herself being pulled into the mirror, into a world of darkness and terror.

She never returned from the mirror. Her family and friends searched for her for months, but there was no trace of her. The mirror remained in her bedroom, untouched and unbroken, but no one would ever look into it again.

Rumors began to spread about the haunted mirror in the antique shop, and people stopped going there altogether. The shopkeeper eventually closed up shop and moved away, but the mirror remained, waiting for its next victim to come along.

And so it goes, the mirror waits for the next unsuspecting victim to gaze into its glass and become trapped forever in the world beyond.