The night felt calm. But Lucas no longer trusted calm—not after what the mirror had shown—or hidden.
In the early hours, his apartment lay wrapped in subtle shadows. The distant sounds of cars were muffled by a silence that didn't feel natural. The clock read 3:33—three perfect repeats, a mirrored number mocking his recent obsession with reflections.
He wasn't fully asleep. Nor fully awake. He hovered in that liminal state—eyes open, mind drifting.
Lucas rose and walked to the bedroom door. No reason—just a feeling.
That's when he heard it: a low sound—a scrape. Not from outside the door, but beneath it. As if fingers were slowly clawing the wood.
He crouched. Waited. Nothing. Then came a whisper—too soft to make out, yet chillingly real. Not human—not fully. As if spoken from lungs filled with water or from deep inside a tunnel.
He froze. The whisper ceased. But at the door, he saw something new: a small piece of paper, carefully folded, slid under the crack.
His hand shook as he retrieved it. Unfolded. One tremulous line in black ink:
"You also left the door slightly open."
He didn't understand—yet something inside him did, as if he'd heard its meaning somewhere before, in a time he didn't live awake.
He opened his notebook and wrote, almost mechanically:
"A door left ajar is not vulnerable—but invites what knows where to look."
He breathed deeply. The bedroom door had been ajar—but he swore he'd shut it firmly.
He rose slowly, opened the door, walked the corridor toward the living room.
Nothing. But something felt wrong. Pictures hung slightly askew. A book out of place. A mug shifted from the drainer to the sink.
"You're not sleeping," he murmured. Maybe that was the problem. Vigilance was no longer a barrier to what used to only appear in dreams.
He approached the hallway mirror beside his record shelf. The reflection followed normally. But in the lower-left corner—where glass blur hides imperfections—a dark blot caught his eye, almost symbol-shaped, like a droplet that dried too quickly.
He touched it—the glass gave way—not like water, but as if revealing a layer beneath the surface. As if the mirror were a curtain and he'd just pulled aside the fold.
For a moment, he saw himself from behind in the reflection. And someone—or something—passed behind his image in the mirror—yet not in his room.
He turned. Nothing. He looked back. The reflection was only him, alone. The dark droplet on the glass had vanished—or passed through.
Lucas knew what would happen next—not because he could predict the future, but because the present was already distorted too far to be linear.
He gathered his coat, phone, and badge. Something—somewhere in São Paulo—would happen that very dawn. And he felt—without evidence—that a death was imminent. Maybe someone was being dragged to the other side of a mirror—or worse, something from behind the glass was trying to cross.
That night was colder than usual. He walked nearly deserted streets, following an instinct he couldn't name. No call. No crime confirmed. But the sense was clear and sharp, like a razor cutting invisible veils: someone had been touched—not by human hands, but by that which whispers when doors stand too slightly open.
He entered the closed metro station—not through the main entrance (locked this hour), but a service access whose padlock was strangely open. Inspection lanterns flashed intermittently. The smell of ancient concrete and rust filled the air.
The very place where they'd found the body in the first case: Santa Inês Station. But now: no corpse, no workers, no patrol. Only a distant sound—muffled sobs—fragile, but constant.
Lucas proceeded to the disused platform. There he saw a teenager—maybe seventeen—sitting cross-legged, eyes completely open, staring at a column. He wasn't crying. He didn't move. But his mouth kept repeating:
"I'm not me… I'm not me… I'm not me…"
Lucas approached carefully.
"Hey," he said softly, kneeling beside him. "It's okay. What's your name?"
"He said my soul is like an empty room," the boy murmured, dragging his words. "Said it was easy to inhabit a body with so much echo…"
Lucas froze. Those words weren't the boy's—they were borrowed.
"Who said that?"
The boy turned slowly, his eyes dilated into tiny pinpoints, as if light no longer reached him.
"The voice behind the mirror. She called me by the name no one knows."
Lucas scanned the station—no sign of presence. Then he saw on the floor beside the boy a small shard of broken mirror. And in it—no reflection. No ceiling. No lights. Not Lucas. Not the boy. As if the surface were an opaque window to a place refusing to be seen.
Later, outside the station, Lucas escorted the boy to a hospital, withholding many details. The official diagnosis would read "dissociative state" or "psychotic episode of unknown origin." But Lucas knew better. The Order he investigated—The Vigil of the Pale Flame—referenced such fragments internally as relics that act like cracks at the threshold of the mind, allowing contact with entities not of this side of reality.
He needed to return to the Order's headquarters. To consult the Records of Incomplete Doors.
Because if the boy had been touched without ritual, invocation, or invitation…
Then someone was forcing entry from outside in. And the mirror… was just the beginning.
The Vigil's regional headquarters in São Paulo wasn't in any officially recognized building. It existed inside a seemingly abandoned three-story house in Liberdade. Windows shuttered for decades. But pass the lobby, tap the fourth floorboard of the hallway, and recite the reversed number from the back door inscription—and the air thickened, the light gained amber texture.
Lucas entered without announcing himself—Grade observers no longer needed permission.
He moved past the lower library to the oldest niche, where dark leather volumes held uncatalogued secrets. The Archivist was there—no name, only a function: old, bent, colorless eyes like forgotten parchment.
"You came early," said the Archivist without turning.
"I never really left," Lucas replied. The old man only nodded. He understood: once someone reaches Fourth Grade of the Observer, they sense when they are—or aren't—truly themselves.
Lucas scanned the shelves until he found a volume bearing the oblique cross seal on a black cover:
"Records of Incomplete Doors and Their Associated Echoes"
Opening it, he read:
"Incomplete doors are not opened from outside or inside—they are forgotten slightly ajar by minds that visit without knowing. These doors become vulnerable to the initial Echoes—formless entities that first observe, then test, and finally inhabit."
He flipped to a handwritten entry in shaky script:
"Case 217‑CSeventeen-year-old with severe dissociation. Repetition of phrases alien to personal biography. Object found: mirrored fragment with total absence of reflection."
And then… in red ink along the bottom margin, nearly faded:
"They come first as voices. Then, learn to smile."
Lucas closed the book. The Archivist drew near:
"This case is repeating," Lucas said.
"No," the old man replied.
"No?"
The Archivist fixed him with an intense stare. His voice slipped forth like a spell:
"It's continuing."
Back out on the street, Lucas looked up. Clouds covered the sky—but there was something worse in the air than a storm: an formless omen appearing in building glass reflections, rearview mirrors, darkened storefronts. It was as if reflections had begun keeping their own will. And someone, somewhere, was going to die because of it—before dawn.
The clock read 5:44 AM. He'd walked over an hour—with no clear direction. The city stirred awake, but he felt something remained dormant inside the glass around him. In each storefront he passed, he watched his reflection, searching for misalignments, signs. But reflections now knew how to behave. And that was far more dangerous.
He paused in front of a closed barbershop with dual mirrors in its façade, creating an infinite corridor of repeating images. That's when he felt it: a pulse—not in his body, but in the space ahead. The glass fogged, even with no moisture. His reflection blinked—before he did.
He backed away, hand on sidearm—training taking over. But no physical assailant: only… him. Or almost him.
The mirrored image's lips moved. Lucas's did not. The reflection was speaking. No sound issued—but the mouth formed words, clear:
"You see. But don't listen.You record. But don't understand.You arrived late."
Lucas exhaled. No point breaking glass or shouting—it was a channel of manifestation.
He pulled a piece of charcoal he'd kept from Room 217. On the pavement beside the mirror, he wrote hastily:
"Who is behind this?"
The reflection smiled. But not with Lucas's lips. With another mouth—wider, thicker—as if sewn over his own.
And through the mirrored surface, it answered:
"You."Or, at least, the part of you that left the door ajar."
Lucas collapsed to his knees. Pain returned—not just mental. His body trembled—as if part of him were being pulled backward, into the image. He heard a snapping sound. Something broke—not the world—but his perception. The lines of connection lit up:
Past deaths. The symbols. The wandering reflections. Room 217. The boy at the station. All of it part of the same cycle.
And at its center… a door still open—inside him.
Later, back home, Lucas couldn't sleep. He dared not. He knew next time he drifted, the reflection would come with questions—and he might not know the answers. But something had changed that dawn.
On his desk, beside the charcoal and old note, lay a stone—small, black, veined with gold. Bearing the Spiral symbol around four vertical bars—identical to the one on the bathroom mirror weeks ago.
Lucas touched it—and knew instantly, as the cold mineral met his skin:
"You have reached the Fifth Grade."
But with that advancement came a whisper—not from the mirror, but from within his mind:
"Now that you can see them… they can also see you completely."