PLAYHOUSE Chapter 4/10

He got to the front door. Both keys — smiley-face in the main lock, long one in the deadbolt. He turned them together and they gave and he shoved the door open and walked out into the cold and just stood there on the steps for a second breathing.

Then he sat in his car. Locked the doors. Didn't start it.

His hands were okay. His heart rate was coming down. His head was doing this thing it does after something bad almost happens, where it keeps going over the thing again and again like it's trying to find a different outcome. Silas in the shaft. The filing cabinet gap. The dark and the sound right above him.

He let his head do it. It finished eventually.

Then he looked at the building.

He'd seen something in the management office mirror. Right before Silas. A shape in the glass that wasn't him, that disappeared when he turned around. He'd told himself: tired, bad light, his own reflection doing something weird. Buildings do that. Mirrors do that.

He pulled out his notebook and went back through his notes from the orientation tape.

*Four Companion figures. Mabel — receives and reflects behavioral distress. Silas — receives and reflects physical fear. The Twin — receives and reflects self-image and emotional recognition. The Child — receives and reflects all primary attachment needs.*

The Twin. Reflective. Designed to help children see themselves.

He'd seen something in a mirror.

He sat on the road for a long time.

Then he drove back in.

Security room first. Monitors: Mabel on the upper floor, moving that slow circuit she never varied from. Silas on camera six — the shaft, resting at the top, just a dark shape hanging in there like a coat on a hook. He watched it for a while. It didn't move. He made himself stop looking at it.

He left the front door unlocked this time. Front door, he'd confirmed, opened from outside without a key. If something went wrong he had a way out. He needed a way out.

He went to the management office.

Stood in front of the mirror.

His own face looked back at him. Grime on his forehead where he'd wiped his hand. Headlamp. The dark circles under his eyes that had been there for eighteen months. He looked tired in a way that didn't get fixed by sleeping. He'd been aware of that before this building, actually.

He waited.

Nothing happened for about thirty seconds. He was starting to feel stupid when it stepped into the frame.

Not suddenly. That was the part that got him. It didn't appear. It moved into view in the reflection the way someone would step into a doorway — slowly, from the side, one shoulder first and then all of it. It was him. Same jacket, same headlamp. Except.

The arms were too long. Not a little too long. Wrong-length. Like whoever had made it had gotten the proportions slightly off and the result was that the arms hung about three inches past where arms were supposed to end, fingers almost at knee level.

And the head was tilted. Not a normal tilt. More like a question mark shape, the neck going one way and the head correcting the other way, the whole thing at an angle that made his own neck feel wrong just looking at it.

And it was making eye contact with him in the mirror. Not looking at its own reflection. Looking at him. Specifically at him. Through the glass.

He held the eye contact because he couldn't figure out what else to do. His heart was doing something fast and uneven and he was very aware of the doorway behind him — the real doorway, not the reflected one — and what might actually be standing in it.

The Twin raised one hand. Pointed. Not at him, to the right — down the hall from the management office, about fifteen feet, a door he'd walked past twice and not registered.

He looked at it in his peripheral vision without turning his body. Plain wood door. No label.

When he looked back at the mirror, the Twin was still pointing. The arm too long, the finger extending at the wrong angle, patient in a way that felt ancient.

He walked sideways out of the mirror's sightline before he turned. He needed to know what was behind him before he moved. He turned.

The doorway was empty.

He stood there anyway. Looked at the actual air where the Twin had been reflected as standing. Nothing there. Just the hallway.

His legs walked him to the door before he'd fully decided to go.

Unlocked. He pushed it open.

Small storage room. Corkboard taking up most of one wall, covered in layered papers — memos, schedules, notes from different handwriting, different eras of pen. In the center, pinned to everything else, a hand-drawn floor plan. Way more detailed than his printed map. Different pencils, different inks, clearly added to by different people over different years. Someone had been studying this building.

One note circled in red at the east wing elevator: DO NOT USE ELEVATOR ALONE. SILAS MONITORS THE SHAFT. USE ONLY AS DISTRACTION — SEND IT WITHOUT RIDING.

He read it twice. Three times.

He photographed the map in sections. He was almost through when his lens caught something at the bottom corner of the corkboard, half-hidden under a drooped schedule — a photograph. Color faded. Same room, same corkboard, a man sitting in a folding chair with his back to the camera.

And in the corner of the photo — a small wall mirror he hadn't noticed in the actual room until right now — the Twin.

Same too-long arms. Same tilted head. Standing right behind the man. The man wasn't looking at it. The man didn't know it was there. It was looking at the camera.

He turned the photo over.

1993.

He looked back at the mirror in the corner of the storage room. Just his reflection. Nothing else.

It had been in here with that man in 1993. It had been in here for years before that. It had probably been in here when they closed. Waiting in mirrors for someone to come back.

He went back to the security room. Monitors: Silas still in the shaft. Mabel moving her circuit. And on camera two, the waiting room — a small shape in one of the little chairs, feet not quite reaching the floor.

The Child. Sitting there facing the door, like it had an appointment.

He watched it for a moment on the monitor. Then he grabbed his notebook and went to meet it. He didn't know why. Maybe because it was the only one in the building that hadn't tried to trap him in something or watch him through a reflective surface from directly behind his head.

Low bar. But he was working with what he had.