The Man Inside the Statue

The mirror showed a reflection that wasn’t my own. At first I thought it was little more than a trick of the brain. A side effect of another weekend night filled with too much drinking and too little sleep. But the longer I stared at it, the more sure I became. It may have looked like me with its bedraggled dark hair, 5 o’clock shadow, and pointed ears, but something was wrong.

“You’re being ridiculous.” I thought to myself, “This is exactly what Dr. Roth was talking about during our last session. Every time you go out partying, your derealization flares up the next day. Just relax.”

Taking my own advice, I gathered up all the air I could into my lungs and let it go in a peaceful exhale, or at least my best imitation of peace. With closed eyes, I turned on my faucet. Pin prick needles of cold danced on my skin as I splashed the icy water against my face. Little by little the tension in my chest loosened, my heart rate slowed, and a blanket of calm fell over me.

I was being ridiculous. This was exactly like the morning after my best friend David’s bachelor party. A night full of saki bombs and a morning without my medication left me feeling like the world around me was a lucid dream that I’d become trapped in. But conveniently, the second I took my meds I was back in the real world, and just in time for the wedding. All I had to do now was take my medication and the dread that gripped my heart would fade away just like it did then.

I opened the medicine cabinet and washed down my prescription with a gulp of water. Like a dying plant in the desert, even the tiniest bit of hydration brought me back to life with a little bit left to spare. So, my nerves steeled and my mind relatively quiet, I looked up once more. Sure enough, there I stood staring back at myself. Me. No imposter, no dastardly doppelgänger. Just a rough-looking Scott Baker, who clearly needed to find a better way to spend his weekends. I let out a sigh of relief as I smiled at myself from the mirror.

“Welcome back, buddy.” The sentiment was forced to say the least but Dr. Roth also recommended I try to be more positive with myself, and who am I to argue with a therapist? I strolled downstairs to my kitchen to make myself some tea. Normally I’d rush to the grocery store down my block to slam two energy drinks before getting to work but an unexplainable, health-minded energy was surging through my veins and implored me to change my routine. Some might call it my own subconscious recognition of hitting rock bottom, I however considered it as turning over a new leaf.

Even though it might sound like it, I wasn’t a bum by any means. I had a job working remotely as an accountant for a mid-level law firm. The details and minutiae of it would put any sensible person to sleep, though the money I got certainly kept me wide awake. Despite that, I knew myself. I was 26 with no hobbies other than drinking on the weekends with my friends and watching Netflix. That lifestyle was fun when I was younger but now it felt wrong, like I was wearing a shoe that I’d long since grown out of.

Thankfully, the beeping microwave drew me out of my own head before a thought-train of self pity could start. I grabbed the hot mug and popped two tea bags in. Sitting down at the kitchen counter, I pulled out my phone to check my email.

But my phone wouldn’t turn on. I tapped the screen once, twice, even held down the power button on the side. Nothing.

It was strange. In the last five years, I had never once woken up with a dead phone. Worrying about missed calls or texts was enough to make charging it a subconscious pre-sleep ritual. I decided not to worry about it. Given the liquor-soaked antics of last night, anything could have happened. With a sigh, I walked back up to my room to get my phone plugged in.

I was only halfway up the stairs when I heard it. The steady, unmistakable hiss of running water coming from my bathroom. I rolled my eyes and nearly slapped my palm against my forehead.

Hurrying up the rest of the stairs, I passed through my bedroom and tossed my phone on the bed as I went. I could plug it in after. Right now I needed to save my water bill before it got any higher. I turned on the bathroom lights and reached out to the faucet knob.

I froze when I saw it.

The wall beneath my medicine cabinet was no longer the same cream-colored plaster that it was before. Now it was perfectly reflective just like the mirror above it, like it had spread. I tried blinking it away. I even tried slapping myself once blinking failed to do the job. It was impossible. Mirrors don’t spread. They just don’t. But there it was. No matter what I did. The newly mirrored portion of my wall stared back at me as if to say, “There’s no point, Scott. We both know that you see me.”

It wasn’t real. That was the only explanation. Clearly, I was so overly stressed out that I was hallucinating. But stressed about what? My mind may have been prone to altering my perception, sure. But full on hallucinations? Not even on my worst day had I seen something that wasn’t there. My heartbeat pounded in my throat, which had gone sandpaper dry, and beads of sweat were already lining my forehead.

I needed more medication. That had to be the answer. If I took another pill, or two given the circumstances, I’d be okay. I just needed to-

Before I could finish my thought, the mirror spread again. It happened in an instant. There was a deep, growling hum and then a noise like glass beginning to break, and suddenly my faucet and sink were reflecting my own horrified face back at me. The water stopped flowing and the only sound in the room was my own shaky breathing.

“That’s enough.” was the only thing I could think of as I yanked open my medicine cabinet and popped two pills into my mouth. I reached out to turn the tap on with my index finger, the same way I always did, hoping the water would come back on.

The pain hit me instantly. Right as my skin touched the mirrored knob, searing agony arced all the way up to my shoulder. I recoiled from the sink screaming in pain right as the rest of the wall behind the mirror became reflective. I screamed again, this time in panic, and stumbled back into my room.

My entire arm throbbed like it was broken. The pills I’d taken fell out of my mouth and clattered against the hardwood floor as I winced and tried to will the pain away. What the hell had that mirror done to me? I looked at my hand to answer my question.

The moment I saw it, I wished I hadn’t asked.

It had spread to me. The mirror was on the pad of my right index finger. I watched my eyes go wide before I looked away to grab my phone. I rushed to put it on the charger but before I could plug it in, the mirror spread from my finger to my phone screen. In an instant my phone, the charger, my nightstand, and half of my finger had been consumed.

“No! No! No!” I cried. The lights in the bathroom and in my bedroom began flickering sporadically as the growling hum grew louder. I turned over my shoulder and saw, to my horror, that my entire bathroom was covered in reflective chrome. Worse than that, it was spreading. Jagged, metallic tendrils snaked out of the bathroom and crept across the ceiling, walls and floor of my room. Then, with a speed incomprehensible to my eyes, the thin strips widened until they covered everything beside them.

I bolted back downstairs and made a beeline for my front door. Real or not, I refused to stick around and find out how it would feel if the mirror touched more of me. I reached out to the doorknob, refusing to acknowledge that my pointer finger, now completely coated in chrome, wouldn’t move with the rest of my fingers. As my grip tightened on the knob I heard it again, that awful baritone hum.

I didn’t see it move this time, it was blindingly fast. All I felt was the same shock of pain on my palm as the door, and the wall around it, and the doorknob in my hand were devoured and turned into a sickening funhouse reflection.

The numbing grip of shock forced me backwards onto the floor. I clutched my right hand by the wrist and frantically scooted away from the door. It felt like my whole hand had just been dunked into liquid nitrogen. I didn’t have to look at it to know, but I did it all the same.

Sure enough, the mirror had taken all the skin on my palm. None of my fingers would move no matter how hard I tried and, based on how stiff my wrist felt, it wouldn’t be long until the rest of my hand was immobile too.

Before I could block it out, a horrifying thought assaulted my mind. This mirror, whatever it was, spreads like wildfire. It spread throughout my bathroom, my bedroom, now even downstairs in only a matter of minutes. That same infectious mirror was on my hand. Based on how quickly it took my finger, how long would it be before it reached my elbow? My shoulder?

In that moment, I thought back to when I was younger, maybe 12 or 13 years old. My father and I would watch horror movies together late at night on the weekends. He worked late and we didn’t connect over much else besides movies. Before long it became our special ritual. We watched every horror flick under the sun, but our favorite were zombie movies. They were really my favorite, and I always suspected that he secretly never liked them, but he pretended all the same.

There was always one trope in those movies that kept popping up no matter which one you watched. The side character you grow to love gets bitten on the arm, or leg, or hand, and is forced to make an impossible choice. Act fast and lose a limb, or freeze up and turn into a shambling corpse.

“Act fast and lose a limb. Freeze up and turn.” That thought played on a loop as I watched the mirror creep down to my wrist. At the rate it was moving, it wouldn’t be long before I’d be losing more than just my hand.

The part of my mind that I considered rational told me that this entire situation was insane. It said, “Hey, you’re losing your mind. None of this is real. Don’t cut your hand off because of a delusion.”

But then a different part of my brain spoke louder. This piece of my mind was animalistic and instinctual. “You feel that pain in your hand. You feel it. You touched the mirror on the sink. You can’t touch or feel a delusion.”

My blood ran cold. Even as the mirror continued to eat up more and more of my living room, I sat there motionless. Maybe it was all in my head. Maybe my mind had suddenly cracked up for no reason. But I knew what I felt. More than that, I knew what would happen if I did nothing. There wasn’t any room for doubt or skepticism.

Adrenaline shot through my veins and kicked my body into gear. I was up on my feet and in the kitchen in a heartbeat. My mind was screaming at me to stop, to reconsider, to try and find another way. But there wasn’t another way. Even if there was, I didn’t have enough time to find it. Half of my arm below the elbow was chrome now. Careful not to touch anything with my right side, I frantically searched through my drawers until I found the perfect tool.

A year ago, David went through a ridiculous phase where he became obsessed with smoking the, “perfect cut of meat,” as he put it. He bought a ridiculously expensive charcoal grill, 100 dollar slabs of beef, even artisanal spices and salts. So, being the thoughtful friend that I was, I got him the perfect gift for his birthday: a stainless-steel butcher’s knife that was forged by hand in Japan. Needless to say, David loved it. However his girlfriend, now wife, Angela despised David’s hobby and eventually coaxed him into selling all of his equipment in order to pay for their wedding. David, unable to part with the knife and equally unwilling to sell it, gave it to me to hold onto for him.

As I stared at the glimmering, Damascus-patterned butcher knife in my left hand, I had never been more thankful for David’s ridiculous hobbies and the contempt Angela held for them.

I set my arm down on the cutting board that sat on the kitchen island. I could hear the sharp, crackling sounds of the mirror over my shoulder and knew I was running out of time. I swore and gripped the handle of the knife so tight that I thought my knuckles might pop out of the skin.

I positioned my arm on the board and raised the knife above my head, but my body refused to send the blade down. “What am I thinking? I can’t do this. I can’t do this!” I thought. Hyperventilating, my eyes darted around every possible direction in a desperate attempt to find an escape. Of course, there was none.

Then I thought about David, about my mom and dad. If I stood there in my kitchen as I was, I’d never see them again. There would be no chance to tell David how lucky I felt to have him as a friend. I wouldn’t get to tell my mom how much I loved her, how much I wished I could have visited her more. My dad would never know how grateful I was that he pretended to like dumb zombie movies so that his son wouldn’t be alone on the weekends.

I never told any of them how I felt. I never took the chance when I had it, but I was going to. I vowed to myself then and there that I would survive to tell them.

Just like that, the cleaver fell with the ease and speed of an executioner’s guillotine. The metal moved through the muscle and bones in my forearm like they were made from clay. It was so smooth, I almost didn’t feel a thing. Almost.

There I was thinking that the icy-cold pain from the mirror was unbearable. This was like someone had jabbed a molten iron rod up my arm and was twisting it around and around with sadistic fervor. I screamed so loud that my throat went hoarse as a geyser of blood sprayed out onto the island from my stump arm. The chrome that covered my severed limb quickly spread to the rest of the island countertop and turned the blood from crimson to silver.

I did my best to fight through the shock and keep myself lucid. Every part of me wanted to faint then and there. But if I did it would mean a very painful, and reflective, demise. I left the knife behind and shambled out of the kitchen to avoid the spread.

Stumbling back into the living room, I looked down at what was left of my arm. My stomach did backflips as my radius and ulna looked back at me from the exposed musculature that encased them. Spots swam around my vision and I felt myself begin to sway back and forth against my will. Nausea brought me to my knees as I gulped down air like a man who had nearly drowned.

I heard my next thought in David’s voice. “Scott, it worked!” he said enthusiastically. “You saw your arm!” I was so disoriented by the pain that the thought almost didn’t make any sense. But it was true. If it hadn’t worked, all I would have seen was my own face staring back at me from a silvery stump, not muscle and bone.

A smile crept across my face and short, breathy laughs escaped through my nostrils. “I did it.” I said to myself. “I did it!”

I wasn’t allowed any time to enjoy my victory though. The growl of the mirrors brought me back unwillingly into my hellish reality.

The living room was almost entirely gone. Every single area except the few square feet of floor where I was kneeling had been chromatically assimilated. I saw my own pale, terrified face staring back at me from the couch, the ceiling, even the fireplace. I looked around for any possible means of escape but the longer I looked, the more dismayed I became.

I was surrounded on all sides. Any feasible way out was completely coated in infectious metal. The lights above me flickered mockingly before they were shut off, covered by the spread. All the while blood kept seeping from my arm in steady spurts.

It was for nothing. All the effort of lopping off my arm, and what had it brought me? Another minute of horror? Maybe two? I felt tears of indignation well up in my eyes. It seemed I was already going to break the promise that I made in the kitchen.

I cried out for help. I begged for anyone to hear me. I thought that if I screamed loud enough maybe my neighbors would hear and come running or call the police. Nobody heard me, though. I went hoarse again before any potential rescuer could hear me. I noticed it right as my voice went out for good. The entire time I sat there sobbing and screaming, the mirrors didn’t move an inch.

The only part of my house that was still a house was the 10-foot radius of floor that surrounded me. Despite that, it had been that way for almost two or three minutes. The spread had eaten half of my house in that time, so why was it stopping now?

My eyes went wide and the gears in my head started to turn. I was so preoccupied with trying to escape and survive that I never considered what exactly this cancerous reflection actually was. In the back of my head, I originally assumed it was an elemental force like fire. Something that spread aggressively if given the chance and was to be avoided at all costs if one valued their safety. And while it certainly moved like a force of nature, there were certain attributes it held that suggested it was something more.

The way that it moved made no sense. Fire, for example, grows exponentially. If given the right amount of oxygen and materials, it will burn hotter and brighter until it can no longer sustain itself. It's unable to stop dead in its tracks and start back up again. The mirror on the other hand was sitting completely still while I sat sobbing on the floor, like a tiger waiting for injured prey to stop thrashing around.

To that point, fire also doesn’t growl. It makes noises, sure. But this was different. The guttural, baritone humming sound that the mirror made every time it spread was something I had been too terrified to really think about, and doing so only made me more uneasy. It seemed like a noise of exerted effort, the same way someone might grunt when they moved something heavy.

Unless it was related to accounting, I wasn’t much of an expert on anything else. But my intuition had been right at every single turn today and I was not about to discount it now. Sitting there on my floor, my gut told me two things, both of them completely insane. First: this mirror was alive and completely sentient. Second: there was no evidence that it would stop once it got me.

If the mirror truly was alive, and I had to assume it was, there was no sign that this monstrosity had a vendetta against me. It was doing what any type of mold or virus was programmed to do. Grow. Bigger and bigger, no matter what. Meaning that once it had taken me and all of my house, the next logical step would be to go outside.

I had reached an official world record for number of heart-drops in a single day. If that thing got outside my house there would be no stopping it from eating up whatever it wanted to. All my neighbors, David and Angela, my parents, the whole world. They would all end up like me.

Another growl shook the shimmering foundations of my home. It was a hungry, impatient sound that only confirmed my theories. I had to stop it. But how could I? The moment I touched it, my doom would be spelled out.

Suddenly, I thought back to earlier this morning just before I touched my faucet. I had effortlessly opened and closed my actual mirror without any issue. That had to be it. The bathroom mirror was the entity’s brain or heart, and if I could touch it there was a high chance that I could break it. There was no guarantee that breaking it would stop anything, though I didn’t really care. I still had to try.

I looked towards the staircase across the room. I gauged that it was somewhere around 15 feet away. Factoring in that and the distance up the stairs and into my room, I guessed it would take me less than a minute to sprint up there. That also depended on how much of me the entity would take, and how fast.

I quickly took off one of my socks and tossed it onto the shimmering floor in front of me. The fabric landed quietly against the surface and I counted silently in my head until it had gone completely silver. 10 seconds.

Nodding to myself, I stripped down until I was completely naked. I counted the articles of clothing I had to use: a t-shirt, pants, underwear, and one sock. All in total, 40 seconds. I shut my eyes and clenched my teeth. 40 seconds would get me up the stairs. After that, the longest and most painful 20 seconds of my life, maybe the last 20 seconds of my life, would start.

The entity growled again and the reflective perimeter around me grew even smaller. It was now or never.

My sock went first. I delicately hopped onto it, desperately trying to balance all of my weight on the balls of my feet as I threw my underwear down next. The whole time I was frantically counting up in my head.

Seven... Eight... Nine...

I hopped onto my underwear just as the reflections consumed the sock. Facing the stairs now, I laid my pants across the shining steps and lunged up them.

Five... Six... Seven...

I was standing on my shirt at the top of the stairs before I even finished the count. A brief feeling of triumph made my heart swell as I stared down the hallway to my bedroom. I was doing it, I could do it.

Six... Seven...

Freezing pain stabbed the soles of my feet. I grunted and looked down to see that my shirt was gone. The house rattled and laughed at me. I swore loudly.

It tricked me. It made me think that the spread was consistent when in reality it could take whatever it wanted whenever it felt like it. I wasted no time in wallowing. It already had me, so I had to work fast.

I sprinted down the hallway, my naked reflection moving in tandem both beside, below, and above me. Every step I took felt like I was splashing around in lava. By the time I reached my bedroom my legs below the knee felt impossibly heavy. I didn’t take the time to look at what the spread had done to me, I already knew. Gritting my teeth, I threw one foot forward after the other and ignored the searing pain shooting up my thighs and back.

My eyes flared with rage when I saw it through the bathroom doorway. The mirror sat on the wall with seemingly innocent inanimacy. It would have probably fooled every single person on the planet, but not me.

I could feel it pulsating with life from where I was limping. The steady, maddening thra-thrum-thra-thrum of an organism’s heart, or whatever this thing possessed, was undeniable. I knew it saw me approaching through the doorway as it let out an ear-rupturing screech.

A crazed smile distorted my face as I stomped into the bathroom. My movement was dictated by my hips now. My legs were all but immobilized.

“Didn’t think I’d make it, huh?” I rasped to the mirror through the pain enveloping me. I tightened my hand into a fist and braced myself against the sink with my other arm. I positioned my feet facing the true mirror, waited until my stump arm was fused to the sink, and then ran my fist along the wall. I watched, grimacing, as the reflections spread up to my wrist, changing my hand into a makeshift club.

I reared my arm back and then, yanking myself forward by the stump, I let a haymaker punch loose against the mirror. The thing cried out in pain as a spiderweb crack formed in the spot where I struck it. I felt the spread reaching my back and neck. I needed to go faster.

“David. Angela. Mom. Dad.” I repeated each of their names like a mantra as I viciously hammered away at the screaming entity. Over and over and over again.

The fractures covered the entire surface now. In the nearly-shattered mirror I could see the skin on my neck quickly vanishing. All that was left were my face and my arm.

I said it one last time. “David. Angela. Mom. Dad.” Closing my eyes, I pictured each one of them. They were standing in front of me under a warm and shining sun, all smiling. They didn’t say a word. They didn’t need to. Their eyes said enough.

“We’re proud of you, Scott.”

With an almighty bellow, I rammed my fist forward with every ounce of strength I had left.

The creature howled as my shimmering hand smashed through it and sent shards of glinting metal down to the floor. My reflex was to pull my hand back, but it refused to move. I looked at it and, in the reflection, saw the metallic spread continuing to creep across my face.

The thing was dead, I had no doubts about that, but it seemed like whatever it had done to me wouldn’t stop. I felt the cold reach my eyebrows just before my vision went dark. I laughed while I still had a mouth to laugh with. In my mind, I was still talking to the creature that met its match at my hands.

“How’s it feel to get your ass kicked by an accountant?” Those weren’t the last words that I dreamt I would have. But then again, it was cooler than what most people got to say.

***

I wasn’t expecting to remain conscious after I was consumed. It was strange. I couldn’t see or hear in the traditional sense. But whenever something interacted with a surface that was assimilated, I could hear, feel, see, and smell it better than I ever could when I was normal.

It took David about a week to come check on me. When he found what was left, he called everyone we knew to come and see it. Everyone assumed that I turned my house into an interactive art exhibit and fled off somewhere without telling anyone. In time my house, and I, were monetized by the state and turned into an art exhibition. It was funny in a morbid sort of way. I was more popular as a statue than I had ever been when I was alive. I was practically a celebrity. Thousands of people from all over came to see the mysterious, miraculous Mirror House.

But one night, when the exhibition was closed, I felt someone walk inside. He was a man, around six feet tall, reeked of aftershave, and wore a gun holstered on his hip. He met me in the bathroom and stared at me for a long time.

“Hello, Scott. I know you’re in there.” He said after a while. “On behalf of myself and my colleagues, I’d like to thank you for your sacrifice. The thing you managed to kill, there are a lot more like it. If you hadn’t acted when you did, there’s no telling what kind of havoc would have been wrought. Trust that our organization knows you’re here, and we’re working tirelessly on a cure for your... condition.”

He left without another word, disappearing past my range of awareness. I wait for him now, day after day, endlessly hoping he’ll come back. It’s been nearly five years since that night but I know that someday he’ll return. Someday, I’ll finally feel something other than the cold.