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The morning after her husband’s funeral, Lauren Mason discovered that the door of her apartment was stuck. Slowly, experimentally, she fiddled with it, jiggling the knob back and forth and playing with the three locks as she wondered whether she had forgotten to undo one. Finally, she decided that it didn’t matter. She hadn’t really wanted to go anywhere anyway.
The next day, or was it night? It was growing harder to tell she woke from her uncomfortable perch on the living room couch and idly scrolled through her phone. She read through the first four messages of sympathy, texts and emails expressing in formulaic patterns how sorry they were for her loss, how good a friend John had been, that if there was anything she ever needed, all she had to do was reach out. After that, she started deleting them unread. The bare handful of voicemails, too. She didn’t want to hear them, and besides, their very presence was insulting somehow. Little snippets of dialogue only a minute or so in length. An absurd voice in the back of her head screamed in rage and anger and grief... Lauren had never viewed herself as a social butterfly, but to see that so few of the “friends” she thought she had had even cared enough to call turned her blood to acid and made hot tears run down her cheeks as she pulled her knees into her chest. That little voice whispered to her again, even as she covered her ears. If it had been you gone and John left behind, they would have cared... you were always just a burden on them anyway...
She woke up lying on her back, staring at the ceiling, not remembering how she had wound up there. She simply breathed in and out for a while, enjoying the feelings of perfect nothingness that surrounded her in that hazy, dreamlike state of semiconsciousness, refusing to let memory or rational thought torment her.
And then, she heard his voice. Soft, almost a whisper, but utterly unmistakable.
“Lauren, wake up.”
Her breath caught in her throat, her lungs working in vain as though an invisible weight was crushing her. Gasping and choking, she stumbled to her feet, eyes flashing back and forth and not seeing anything. She knew it was impossible, knew she was surely dreaming or else finally losing her mind, but she couldn’t help herself. “John? Are you there?”
Again, the voice, fainter now, so quiet she thought she might have imagined it. “You have to get out.”
“John? John??” She was crying now, hardly recognizing her own voice as it echoed around her.
There was no response. Just the silence, and the darkness. But as she stood there, she could feel the hairs on her arms standing up, a cold touch of air like a breath on her neck. Suddenly, she was running, sprinting for the apartment’s old door, clawing at the doorknob.
It didn’t turn. She simply stared for a moment, trying again in vain. Swallowing back her panic, she double and triple-checked the locks, making sure that they were all open. And yet the brass knob remained defiantly motionless, as though her home was nothing more than a lifeless diorama in a museum. Lauren was gasping now, her chest heaving as her mind raced to make some sense of the impossibility before her. At that same moment, she could hear something behind hear. Something that sounded very like footsteps.
She was vaguely aware of herself screaming, slamming against the door with her shoulder over and over again as she tried to force it. The footsteps were drawing nearer and nearer as she flailed against the wood, sweat and blood staining the door as she pounded her knuckles into raw hamburger. Whatever it was, it was right behind her now, close enough that she could hear thick, inhuman panting. She screamed again, and at that moment, her foot slipped out from under her, and she careened face-first into the stubbornly unyielding door. Lauren’s limp body slumped wetly to the ground, unconscious.
––––––––
When she woke, she gradually became aware of two things. The first was that everything hurt- her poor, ruined hands and her head most of all.
The second was that John was with her.
She could feel the heat of his body on hers, his strong arms wrapped around her, the soft rise and fall of his chest mirroring hers. She was dreaming, some detached part of her decided. She had to be. But it was such a nice dream... did she really want to wake up?
As soon as the thought crossed her addled mind, something changed.
Suddenly, he was gone, the imaginary? weight of his body moving off her, just like he had every morning when he was still alive. He always gets up first... Her head was throbbing in a way that she hadn’t felt since she was throwing back straight vodka in her college days back when you had friends, but she staggered up all the same, throwing out her arms like a blind woman as she searched for him.
“Lauren. There’s only one way out.” With those words, his voice even more distant than before, he was gone. It was as though a light had been turned out- she had always been able to sense him instantly, and now she could feel his absence even more harshly. She wanted to start sobbing again, wanted to break down and curl into a ball, but instead she gritted her teeth. She didn’t understand it, didn’t understand any of it, but John was talking to her. Guiding her somehow. And she trusted him. Swallowing back her fears and tears, she turned within herself, searching for that calm, rational part of her that had always served her so well back when she was still a soldier before you met him. All right. She needed to get out. John had said there was only one way, and it clearly wasn’t the door. Windows? It took her only a moment to reach the first one, tugging at the closed shade. Somehow, she wasn’t even surprised when it failed to move even a centimeter. She tried again. No dice. She tried to wiggle her fingers around the edge of the cloth, only to find it seemingly sealed to the wall. Why did you buy blackout curtains, you idiot... The others were all the same, as sterile and immobile and unresponsive as that goddamn door.
She hadn’t expected them to work. She knew what he meant, where to find the one hope left to her. The very thought of it terrified her, and yet she gritted her teeth and walked to the closed door of the master bedroom. The door that she had not opened since that day, and that some small or not so small part of her had hoped to never open again. She reached out, as though in a dream.
The doorknob turned, and the door slowly slid open.
In an instant, she saw everything. She saw the pictures scattered across the floor where she had flung them, the disheveled bedspread left untouched, the mementos and keepsakes of her all-too-short life with John. But most of all, she saw the light.
Was that his voice calling her forward, or had she only imagined it? Her unsteady legs marched of their own accord, towards the light peeking out from behind the bathroom door. It felt as though she were walking down a wind tunnel, every step weighted down by quicksand as she struggled, stumbled, shambled forward. It was only a few meters, but it felt like miles, as though the shadows themselves were dragging her back. She screamed wordlessly, hurling herself forward at the door- only to find it give with no resistance at all, a splatter of red instantly spreading across the clean white of her bathroom tiles as her face cracked against them. She staggered upward, using the sink as a handhold to pull herself upward, slipping and sliding as her bare feet stumbled on the scattered, loose pills.
She looked into the mirror, and she saw John looking back at her.
He smiled, holding out his hand. He was reaching towards the glass, reaching out to her. Lauren raised her arm, feeling as though she were trapped underwater, not understanding, but accepting all the same.
“It’s not real.”
It was his voice, though his lips had not moved. Lauren froze, staring at the mirror as John cocked his head to one side, his brow furrowing. Again, he held out his hand. This time, his fingers twitched, beckoning her forward.
“It’s not me.”
John not-John? furrowed his brow, shaking his head as though he were trying to drive off a fly. His hand was pressed against the mirror now, desperation visible in his eyes, his mouth moving wordlessly. As she watched, tears began to roll down his cheeks. That, at least, was a true reflection.
“Go, Lauren. Go, and don’t look back.”
She was rooted in place, her eyes locked on the memory-reflection-ghost of her husband. But as she watched, the shadows behind him began to shift. Her eyes widened as she saw the darkness there coalesce into a shape, a wet, oily, ever-more-human thing that was insubstantial, and yet growing more solid with every step. The blackness that was its face began to melt away like wax, and with an awful thrill, she realized that she recognized it. But then, that shouldn’t have surprised her. Not unless she had forgotten what mirrors were for.
It was her, a bloodless, pale, inhuman parody of her, and yet unquestionably her. The Not-Lauren’s flesh was desiccated, rotted, sloughing off into the darkness of the shadows, but she was smiling. Smiling, waving, beckoning, a look of utter tranquility on what remained of her face. The thing that looked like John stopped struggling as she drew closer, that same unearthly peace washing over him as his movements slowed.
“Go, Lauren. There’s nothing left for you here.”
She was whispering, shaking, but she knew he would hear. “I can’t leave you.”
For an instant, she was warm, a soft embrace wrapping around her, an invisible breeze playing with the lock of her hair just as he always had. “I’ll always be with you.”
Something broke inside her, a rubber band that had been inexorably tensed since that awful day, a spring of her soul wrapped in on itself that was now suddenly, violently uncoiling. She looked back at the mirror, to see the things there on the other side flailing wordlessly, clawing at the invisible space that separated them. By all rights, she should have been afraid, afraid of the shifting and twisting nightmares that were imploring her to join them, but all she felt was an indescribable, all-consuming relief, a ray of the light crawling into her heart in a way that she hadn’t felt since before. She looked back at the horrors, gazing on them with a dispassionate eye, John’s words ringing in her ears. It’s not real.
She turned on her heel, walking through the darkness of her apartment without fear. She reached the front door, knowing before she touched the brass knob that it would yield. And she stepped out into the hallway, letting the door close behind her with a satisfying click as she left it behind and walked away into the waking world.
CONTRIBUTORS
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John Garland Wells is a writer, poet, and performer based out of Asheville, NC. His debut poetry novella Maxie Collins Dreams in Wretched Colors was released in 2021 (Breaking Rules Publishing). His horror short fiction can be found in Nightscript 8 and the Creeping Corruption anthology (Madness Heart Press).
Stephanie Athena Valente is a copywriter. She is the author of Internet Girlfriend (Clash Books, 2022), Hotel Ghost, Waiting for the End of the World, and Little Fang (Bottlecap Press 2015-2019). Her work has appeared in Hobart, Witch Craft Magazine, and Maudlin House. She lives in New York. More secrets can be found at @stephanie.athena and stephanievalente.com.
Sarah Das Gupta is an 81-year-old writer from near Cambridge, UK. She has lived in the UK, India, and Africa. Her interests include horse racing, the countryside, medieval history, and ghosts. She has had work published in Paddle, Dipity, Cosmic Daffodils, Dorothy Parker's Ashes, Waywords, 'The Chamber, Grave Light Anthology, and others.
David Fox is a writer who currently resides in New York City. He studied Labor Relations at Cornell University.
Robert Runté is Senior Editor with EssentialEdits.ca and has edited over 35 traditionally published books. A former professor, he has won three Aurora Awards for his literary criticism. He currently reviews for the Ottawa Review of Books. His own fiction has been published in over forty-five venues and six of his short stories have been reprinted in ‘best of' collections, such as Canadian Shorts II and the first MetaStellar print anthology.
Sabina Malik is an author of speculative fiction. Originally born in the States and raised in Canada, she leads a nomadic life, writing stories in airports, buses, and hotel rooms around the world. Her most recent fiction credits include Sci-Fi Shorts and Flash Fiction Magazine. You can find her on Instagram @lazyfiction and linktr.ee/lazyfiction.
Arthur Allen Midwinter is a semi-retired antiquarian bookseller who, while a generalist, has always favored the gothic, strange, and publications from remote valleys where the fog never lifts. He resides in central Ohio, plays a lot of tennis, and is active in the Aldus Society, an organization devoted to books and the book arts.
L.N. Hunter's comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside works in anthologies such as Soulmate Syndrome and Hidden Villains: Arise as well as Short Edition’s Short Circuit and the Horrifying Tales of Wonder podcast. There have also been papers in the IEEE 'Transactions on Neural Networks, which are probably somewhat less relevant and definitely less fun. When not writing, L.N. unwinds in a disorganised home in rural Cambridgeshire, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
Ryan Klopp is a recent graduate of the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. His debut novella Souljar of Fortune was published in 2019 by Alban Lake. Some of his other credits include Lovecraftiana, Eerie River, The Fifth Di..., Dread Space, Aphelion, and The Night’s End Podcast. In addition to writing, he loves camping, playing board games, and watching old movies.
Wayne Kyle Spitzer is an American writer, illustrator, and filmmaker. He is the author of countless books, stories and other works, including a film (Shadows in the Garden), a screenplay (Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows), and a memoir (X-Ray Rider). His work has appeared in MetaStellar—Speculative fiction and beyond, subTerrain Magazine: Strong Words for a Polite Nation and Columbia: The Magazine of Northwest History, among others. He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Eastern Washington University, a B.A. from Gonzaga University, and an A.A.S. from Spokane Falls Community College. His recent fiction includes The Man/Woman War cycle of stories as well as the Dinosaur Apocalypse Saga. He lives with his sweetheart Ngoc Trinh Ho in the Spokane Valley.