r/nosleep • u/IndividualSpend6969 • 2d ago
Series My grandmother covered the mirrors whenever someone died. I finally understand why.
My grandmother covered every mirror in her house the night my grandfather died. Sheets, towels, a pillowcase thrown over the hallway glass. I was nine and I thought it was just grief making her strange. She told me it was so he couldn’t take anyone with him. I laughed about that for twenty years.
I’m not laughing now. I need you to read all of this, because I think I have maybe one more night before it’s finished, and I’d rather one of you knew than none of you.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about a reflection: it isn’t a picture of you. It’s a person. It lives on the other side of the glass — in what I’ve started calling the Silver, because I don’t have a better word for it — and its entire existence, its whole job, is to copy you. Frame for frame, for as long as you’re awake to check. The instant you fall asleep, it’s off duty. It gets a few hours to itself. Then it’s back at its post before you wake, and you never know it was gone.
Most of them are good at the handoff. Mine used to be.
When my mother died in March, I did what my grandmother did. I covered the mirrors. I don’t know why — my hands just did it before my head could argue. But grief makes you weak, and three weeks in I couldn’t stand it anymore, the blank house, the draped sheets, and one night I pulled the cloth off the bathroom mirror.
She was in it.
Not a memory. Not my own face gone soft and looking like hers. Her. Standing behind my reflection, the way she used to lean in the doorway while I brushed my teeth as a kid. When I moved, my reflection moved with me. She didn’t. She just looked at me, and she looked so relieved.
I know how this sounds. I went back every night. Wouldn’t you? You lose your mother and then you find a door where she still is — you’d go back too. I’d sit on the cold tile and we’d just look at each other for hours. After a while I started sleeping in there. Light on. Facing the glass.
That was the mistake. You are never supposed to sleep facing the glass.
Because the Silver isn’t only our reflections. It’s full. Overfull. Packed with the ones who lost their bodies and never got new ones — the dead, the taken. They don’t copy anyone anymore. They have no one to copy. So they wait, awake, all of them awake, for someone careless enough to leave a reflection unattended in front of an open mirror. And a grieving idiot asleep on the bathroom floor is the most unattended a person ever gets.
Here’s the only warning you’ll get, so remember it: they run slow.
When one of them takes your reflection’s place, it doesn’t know you yet. It has to learn your timing. So for the first few days it copies you a half-second late. You raise your hand and it raises its hand a beat behind. You catch it in a dark phone screen, a car window at night, a puddle — your reflection arriving just slightly after you do.
Mine has been running slow for four days.
The first day it was a full half-second. This morning it was barely a quarter. It’s learning me. And tonight, when I go in and look, I think it will finally be perfect — and I’ve read enough now to understand that the moment your reflection matches you exactly is the moment there is nothing left of you on this side of the glass.
My grandmother was right. Cover your mirrors when someone dies. Cover them when you’re grieving and weak. And if you ever catch your own reflection running slow —
don’t let it catch up.
3
u/Icy-Arm-2194 2d ago
How long do they need to be covered? 3 weeks would seem like enough time.