The Man in the Mirrors

“Dreams don’t always stay asleep—sometimes they follow you into the light, whispering things you’re not supposed to hear.”

I was falling.

The darkness was everywhere—above me, below me, inside me. It wasn't just the absence of light. It was something thicker than that, something that pressed against my skin like wet cloth, something that crawled into my nose and mouth and filled my lungs with black. I couldn't see my hands in front of my face. I couldn't see anything at all.

But I could feel the falling. That horrible, endless dropping sensation, my stomach somewhere up near my throat, my arms and legs flailing uselessly against nothing. The wind—if it was wind, if there was anything at all in this void—rushed past my ears with a sound like screaming, or maybe the screaming was coming from me, I couldn't tell anymore.

I'd had this dream before.

It came to me sometimes, crawling out of the dark places in my sleep like something that lived there and was waiting for me. Usually it happened when things were bad—when Mum was extra worried, when the doctors did more tests, when I heard the adults whispering words I wasn't supposed to hear. Episodes. Seizures. Unexplained. The falling dream always found me on the worst nights.

I'd never told anyone about it. Not the doctors, not Mum, not even Gloria. Some things were too big for words, too strange to explain without sounding crazy. And I already knew that people thought there was something wrong with me—something in my brain, something in my blood, something that made me different from other kids. I didn't need to give them another reason to look at me the way they sometimes did, with that mixture of worry and fear and something else I couldn't name.

So I kept the falling dream locked inside, and every time it came, I fell alone.

Time didn't work here.

I couldn't tell if I'd been falling for seconds or hours or years. The darkness stretched out forever in all directions, and I tumbled through it like a leaf in a storm, spinning and dropping and never, ever hitting bottom. Maybe there was no bottom. Maybe I would fall forever, trapped in this black nothing until I forgot I'd ever been anything else.

Pictures flashed through my head—the white walls of the hospital, the green curtain around my bed, the way the fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered. Mum's arms around me, holding me close, her heartbeat against my ear. Gloria's laugh echoing down the corridor. The smell of antiseptic and floor wax and the terrible food from the cafeteria.

But the pictures felt wrong. Distant. Like photographs of someone else's life, fading at the edges.

I squeezed my eyes shut—not that it mattered, not that there was anything to see—and tried to make myself small. Tried to curl into a ball, to protect myself from the endless nothing. But you can't protect yourself from falling. You can't fight gravity when there's no ground to stand on.

Something was below me.

I couldn't see it, couldn't hear it, but I felt it. A presence, huge and patient, waiting in the deep. It pulled at me without touching me, called to me without making a sound. The closer I fell, the stronger it got—a weight in my stomach, a pressure behind my eyes, a certainty that something was there and it wanted me to find it.

Or maybe it wanted to find me.

The darkness began to change.

At first I thought I was imagining it—my brain making things up because it couldn't stand the nothing anymore. But no. The black was thinning, turning into something else. Purple, maybe. The colour of bruises, of storm clouds, of the sky just after the sun went down. Veins of sickly green-grey threaded through it, pulsing like something alive.

I opened my eyes.

The world below me was rushing up fast now. Not a world, really—just a surface, flat and vast and dark. It looked like the hospital floor after the night cleaners had been through, that slick mirror-shine that reflected the lights and showed you your own feet walking. Except this mirror was black, and the things it reflected weren't lights.

They were faces.

I saw them swirling in the surface as I plummeted toward it—faces I knew, faces that belonged to my life, but wrong. Twisted. Like looking at photographs that someone had crumpled up and tried to smooth out again.

Mum was there. Her face floated up through the dark glass, tear-stained and stretched, her mouth open in a shape that might have been my name. Her eyes were wide—too wide—and they held something I'd seen before but never understood. Fear, yes. But something else too. Something hungry.

Dr Schofield's face drifted past hers. His blue eyes weren't calm anymore. They were sharp, suspicious, cutting through the darkness like searchlights. His mouth was a thin line, and I could see the thoughts moving behind his eyes, all the questions he was asking without saying them out loud. What's really wrong with this boy? What isn't he telling me? What is she doing to him?

Gloria. Her face was the worst. She wasn't laughing, wasn't smiling, wasn't making any of the expressions that made her Gloria. Her mouth was open in a silent scream, and her eyes were full of something that looked like horror. Like she was watching something terrible happen and couldn't do anything to stop it.

I tried to look away from them, but I couldn't. The faces were everywhere, filling the dark mirror below me, multiplying and overlapping until I couldn't tell where one ended and another began.

And then I saw him.

He was behind the others. Deeper in the mirror, like something that lived further down where the light couldn't reach.

I couldn't see his face properly—it was blurred, smeared, like someone had dragged their hand through wet paint. But his eyes. His eyes were perfectly clear.

They were dark. So dark they might have been black, but they weren't empty. They glowed with something—a light that came from inside, a cold fire that burned without heat. They locked onto mine and held on, and I couldn't look away, couldn't close my eyes, couldn't do anything but fall toward them.

I knew him.

I didn't know how I knew him, didn't know where I'd seen him before, but somewhere deep in the parts of me that remembered things my brain had forgotten, I knew this man. He was familiar the way a nightmare is familiar—the way you know you've been here before, even when you can't remember when.

His mouth moved.

I couldn't hear him over the rushing of my fall, couldn't hear anything except my own heartbeat pounding in my ears. But I knew what he was saying. The words formed themselves in my head, clear as if he'd spoken them directly into my skull:

She's hurting you.

The words didn't make sense. But they lodged in my mind like splinters, sharp and deep, impossible to pull out.

She's hurting you.

Who? Hurting me how? What did he mean?

But there was no time to ask, no time to think. The ground was rushing up to meet me, the dark mirror filling my vision, the faces swirling and dissolving and reforming, and those eyes, those terrible dark eyes, still watching, still burning—

I hit the mirror.

The sound was enormous—a crack that split the world apart, that shattered through my bones and my blood and every part of me. The dark glass exploded into a thousand pieces, a million pieces, fragments spinning around me like a tornado of broken things, each shard reflecting a face, an eye, a mouth forming words I couldn't hear.

And then—

Light. Harsh, white, fluorescent. Burning through my eyelids.

Cold. Hard. A floor against my cheek, tiles pressing into my skin.

Pain. Real pain, blooming at the back of my skull like a flower made of fire.

I wasn't falling anymore.

I was lying on the floor of my hospital room, and my head was screaming, and somewhere above me, my mother was screaming too.

"Luke! Oh God, Luke!"

Her voice cut through the fog in my brain—sharp, panicked, too loud. I could hear her scrambling out of the chair, feel her hands grabbing at me, pulling at my shoulders. The room spun when I tried to open my eyes, the fluorescent lights stabbing into my skull.

I didn't understand what had happened. One moment I'd been falling through darkness, through mirrors, through faces and eyes and words that didn't make sense. The next moment I was here, on the cold tile floor, with pain pulsing through my head and my mother's hands shaking as she touched me.

"Oh God, oh God, I'm so sorry, Luke, I'm so sorry—"

She was crying. I could hear it in her voice, that wet, thick sound that meant tears. But there was something else underneath it. Something that didn't match. An excitement, almost. A brightness in her voice that didn't fit with the words she was saying.

I tried to sit up. The room tilted sideways and I had to close my eyes again, had to press my hands against the floor to keep from sliding away into nothing.

The dream was still there. Still clinging to the edges of my mind like cobwebs, like something that didn't want to let go. I could still feel the falling. Could still see those dark, glowing eyes staring into mine.

She's hurting you.

The words echoed through my head, and I didn't know what they meant, and that not-knowing was worse than the pain in my skull.

The door burst open.

I flinched—the sound was too loud, too sudden, another spike of pain driving through my head—and then Dr Schofield was there, his white coat flapping, his face tight with something that might have been concern but looked more like suspicion.

"What happened?" His voice was sharp. Not gentle, not soothing, not the voice he usually used with kids. This was the voice he used when he was asking questions he already knew the answers to.

"I—I must have dozed off," Mum said. She was standing now, her arms wrapped around herself, her face wet with tears. "He was in my arms, in the chair, and I was just rocking him, and then... I don't know, I must have loosened my grip, and he just—he fell, I couldn't catch him, I tried but I couldn't—"

The words came out too fast. Tumbling over each other, tripping and stumbling like someone running downhill. And her eyes—her eyes kept darting around the room, landing on Dr Schofield and then sliding away, like she couldn't quite look at him straight.

"I'm so sorry," she said again. "I'm so, so sorry, Luke. It was an accident. It was just an accident."

Dr Schofield knelt beside me. His hands were cool and dry as they touched my head, his fingers pressing gently around the bump that was already forming. "Can you tell me your name?" he asked.

"Luke."

"Do you know where you are?"

"Hospital."

"Good." But he wasn't looking at me. He was looking at Mum, and his blue eyes had that sharp, cutting quality I'd seen in the dream. That suspicion. That doubt. "Mrs Smith, has Luke been having any episodes recently? Any seizures you've witnessed?"

Something changed in the room.

I couldn't see it, couldn't hear it, but I felt it—a shift in the air, a tightening of something invisible. Mum's hands clenched against her sides. Her knuckles went white.

"Well, not exactly witnessed," she said. Her voice was different now. Careful. Choosing each word like she was stepping across stones in a river. "But this morning, before breakfast—I found him on the bathroom floor. He seemed confused, disoriented. Like he'd had one of his seizures. You know how they present in him. The confusion afterward. The memory gaps."

I remembered the bathroom.

I remembered sitting on the floor with my back against the cool tiles, tracing the pattern of the grout with my finger. I'd been there because I liked the way the tiles felt, liked the quiet, liked being somewhere small and enclosed where no one was watching me.

I hadn't been confused. I hadn't been disoriented. I hadn't had a seizure.

I opened my mouth to say so. To tell Dr Schofield that I remembered everything, that there hadn't been any episode, that Mum was wrong.

But I caught her eye.

And there was something in her expression—something desperate, something pleading, something that made my mouth close again without any words coming out. I didn't understand it. I didn't know why she would say I'd had a seizure when I hadn't, why she would lie to the doctor, why she would look at me like that, like she was begging me not to contradict her.

But the man's words were still echoing in my head.

She's hurting you.

Dr Schofield helped me to my feet. The room swayed and dipped, but his hands were steady, holding me up until I could find my balance.

"Light concussion," he said. "We'll need to monitor him closely tonight. Hourly checks." His eyes moved to Mum. "And Mrs Smith—perhaps it would be better if Luke slept in his bed tonight. We wouldn't want another fall."

"Of course." Her voice was too quick, too agreeable. "Whatever you think is best, Doctor. Whatever's safest for Luke."

But I saw her hands clench again. Saw the flash of something in her eyes—anger? Fear? Something else I couldn't name?

They lifted me back onto the bed. Mum's hands were gentle but her fingers dug in just a little too hard, pressed into my arms in a way that would leave small bruises later, marks that I could never quite explain to anyone.

She was crying again, or maybe she'd never stopped. Tears running down her face, apologies spilling from her mouth. "I'm so sorry, baby. I'm so sorry. I would never hurt you. You know that, don't you? You know Mummy would never hurt you."

I nodded. Because that was what she wanted me to do. Because saying anything else would make the tightness in the room even worse, would bring more questions, more looks, more of whatever was happening that I didn't understand.

But the man's eyes were still there, behind my own eyes, burning in the dark.

She's hurting you.

Dr Schofield shone his penlight in my eyes—looking for the fairies, I thought, but the thought didn't make me smile the way it usually did. Everything felt wrong. The light was too bright. The room was too loud. The shadows in the corners were too dark, and I kept thinking I saw something moving in them, something with eyes that glowed.

"Luke." Dr Schofield's voice was gentle now, the sharp edge gone. "Can you tell me what you remember? Before you fell?"

I remembered the dream. The falling. The faces in the mirror. The man with the dark eyes, saying words that didn't make sense but felt true anyway.

But I couldn't tell him that. I couldn't tell anyone that.

"I was sleeping," I said. "And then I wasn't."

He nodded slowly, like this was exactly what he'd expected me to say. Like he knew there was more, knew I was hiding something, but wasn't going to push. Not yet.

"Rest now," he said. "I'll come check on you in an hour."

He stood up, and his eyes met Mum's, and something passed between them—a look I couldn't read, a silent conversation I wasn't part of. Then he was gone, the door closing behind him with a soft click.

Mum sat in the chair beside my bed. She reached for my hand, but I pretended not to notice, keeping my arms under the blanket.

"It was just an accident," she said again. Her voice was small now, tired. "You know that, don't you, Luke? Just an accident. I would never—" She stopped. Swallowed. "I would never hurt you."

She's hurting you.

The words wouldn't go away. They lived in my head now, burrowing deeper every time I tried to push them out.

I didn't know what they meant. I didn't know who the man was, or why he'd said them, or why they felt so much like truth when everything about them should have felt like a lie.

But I knew something was wrong.

I knew it the way I knew things sometimes—not with my brain but with something deeper, something that lived in my blood and my bones and the parts of me that didn't have names. The way the adults looked at each other when they thought I wasn't watching. The way the nurses had started asking me questions when Mum wasn't around. The way Mum held me too tight sometimes, and too loose other times, and the way she lied about things that didn't need lying about.

Something was happening. Something I wasn't supposed to see, wasn't supposed to know.

But I was going to find out.

I lay in my hospital bed with the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead and the shadows pooling in the corners, and I made a promise to myself. A secret promise, locked away where no one could see it.

I would watch. I would listen. I would pay attention to all the things they thought I was too young to understand.

Because the man in the mirrors was right about something, even if I didn't know what.

Something was hurting me.

And I needed to know what it was before it was too late.