The Veil-Taker at the Umbral House: Part Five

A Serial Horror by Avaline Rose Quinn — Part Five

That evening, she hung a sheet over the mirror. It moved as if the glass took a breath beneath it.

She sat in the hall with the diary and waited as one waits for a tide.

At 2:17, the knocks came—three, measured as always—and when she reached for the cloth, a drawn-out scrape came instead, the sound of a fingernail along the underside of a lid. The candle bowed low. She did not pull the sheet away. She felt the weight of eyes through linen.

The diary fell open of its own accord. The spine gave a little prayer, and a new line wrote itself in a hand she recognized at once.

Lenora Finch, do not look too long.

“Who are you?” she asked, because she already knew.

The sheet slipped. The mirror revealed the hall, but reversed, deep, correct in its wrongness. Lenora’s reflection stood with its hand poised, unsurprised to find the sheet gone—not because it had expected her to lift it, but because it had been the hand that did.

This is the part where one screams. She did not. There is a small territory between fear and reverence and she stood in it, barefoot.

“What do you want?” she said again, and when the words shot back at her from the glass, she heard the answer inside them: want—the place in the body hollowed out to fit something else. Want, as in lack.

The reflection’s lips moved. The sound arrived a heartbeat late, like a visitor who knocked once and then remembered their hat.

“I want you to remember,” it said.

“Remember what?”

“That I am the girl who looked too long,” it said, almost tenderly, “and you are the one who looked away.”

Return tomorrow—at 2:17 AM EST sharp—for Part Six of The Veil-Taker at the Umbral House.

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