This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Responsible-Fox-7225 on 2026-08-18 07:59:08+00:00.
Liv opened her door wearing pyjama shorts and one of those enormous T-shirts she’d owned since first year. She looked at me, then down.
“You know it’s after midnight.”
“I know.”
“You drove here?”
“Yes.”
“Barefoot?”
I looked down. There was blood on the concrete between my toes.
“Oh,” I said.
Liv stared at me. “Eve.”
“I didn’t notice.”
Apparently, somewhere between getting out of the car and reaching her front door, I had stepped on a piece of broken glass. A thin shard was still caught in the ball of my foot, bright with blood, and I had toothpaste on the front of my shirt.
Liv stepped aside. “Inside.” That was the whole conversation about whether I was allowed in.
Her house was warm in a way mine never was: properly warm, where you could walk around barefoot. There was a lamp on in the living room, two mugs beside the sink, and somewhere upstairs her boyfriend, Sam, was brushing his teeth with an electric toothbrush. I could hear its faint mechanical buzz through the ceiling, and it was unbearable how normal everything was.
Liv sat me on a kitchen chair, fetched tweezers and antiseptic, and pulled the glass out of my foot while I tried not to look. Then she put the kettle on. She didn’t ask me anything until the cut was cleaned, a plaster was stuck over it and a mug of tea was sitting between my hands.
She sat opposite me. “So.”
“So.”
“You left your house barefoot, drove across town, stepped on broken glass and didn’t notice.”
“I was in a hurry.”
“I gathered.”
I wrapped both hands around the mug. She waited.
“There was someone in the hallway.”
Her eyes flicked to mine, but her expression barely changed. “Someone?”
“I saw them in the mirror.”
“Okay.”
“Twice.”
That got a pause. “What did they look like?”
“I don’t know.”
“Man? Woman?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tall?”
“I don’t know, Liv.”
“All right.”
The irritation in my voice embarrassed me, which made me more irritated. “I didn’t exactly stop to take measurements.”
“I didn’t say you should have.”
“I know.”
She looked down into her tea. Upstairs, the bathroom door opened. Sam crossed the landing; a door opened, then shut. Neither of us spoke until the house was quiet again.
Liv tapped one fingernail against her mug. “You saw them in the mirror, but when you turned around—”
“There was nothing there.”
“And then?”
“It was there again.”
“In the same place?”
I hesitated. “No.”
Her fingers stopped against the mug. “Where?”
“Closer.”
She nodded slowly, not as though she agreed with me but as though she was trying to make the information fit somewhere. “How much closer?”
“I don’t know.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because I don’t.”
I looked away. Already, the story was getting worse—not the memory, which was still horrible, but the telling of it. I could picture the shape in the glass perfectly, or at least I thought I could, yet every time I tried to turn that picture into something concrete enough to tell Liv, pieces fell away.
It had been a person, except I hadn’t seen a face. It had been standing there, except I hadn’t seen its legs. It had moved closer, except I hadn’t seen it move. What I actually had was a dark shape in a mirror at midnight, after several nights of bad sleep, in a house I had spent two weeks obsessing over.
I knew exactly what I would have said if somebody had described it to me as part of my research. Peripheral vision is unreliable in low light. The rod cells that dominate the outer retina are good at detecting movement and changes in brightness, bad at fine detail. The brain fills in what they leave out, which means something vague at the edge of your vision can seem remarkably solid until you look directly at it.
Which was, almost offensively, exactly what had happened.
I stared into my tea. “You’ve been sleeping?” Liv asked.
“Yes.”
She looked at me.
“Mostly.”
Another look.
“Badly.”
“Mhm.”
“I know what you’re doing.”
“I’m drinking tea.”
“You know what I mean.”
She smiled a little, but not enough to make it a joke. I slept on her couch.
By morning, the whole thing had become significantly more humiliating. Daylight does that to certain kinds of fear. At two in the morning, a shape in a mirror can reorganise your entire understanding of reality; at nine-thirty, after coffee and a shower and Liv complaining because I’d used her shampoo, it becomes something you would rather not have told anyone about.
Liv drove me back because she claimed she wanted coffee from a place near mine. I didn’t point out that there were at least six places closer to her house.
The sun was out by then, which somehow made my flat look worse. Every stain showed. The front steps were green around the edges, somebody had left a recycling bin tipped over by the fence, and inside, the hallway was flooded with thin grey-white light.
The first thing I noticed was how tiny it looked. At night, the hallway had seemed long enough for something to stand at the far end of it; in daylight, I could practically have touched both walls with my arms out.
Liv followed me upstairs. I stood in the bathroom, roughly where I’d been the night before, and looked into the mirror.
“There?” she asked.
I pointed. At the far end of the reflection, near where I’d seen the figure, a coat hung from one of the hooks beside the stairs: dark coat, hood bunched at the top, sleeves hanging down. From that angle, with the hallway dark enough and me not looking directly at it, I could see exactly what my brain had done.
Absolutely not. I stepped away from the mirror.
Liv looked at the coat, then at me. I could feel my face getting hot.
“Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
“I really wasn’t.”
“You have a face.”
“I always have a face.”
She bit the inside of her cheek.
I pointed at her. “I hate you.”
“I know.”
I pulled the coat off the hook and dropped it onto the floor harder than necessary.
Liv watched me. “You good?”
“Fine.”
“Cool.”
“Completely fine.”
“Great.”
She left it there.
That evening, I stayed up late on purpose. I told myself I simply wasn’t tired, which was technically true, although only because I’d consumed enough coffee during the day to make my hands shake. I worked for a while, watched half an episode of American Dad! without absorbing any of it, then cleaned my room badly.
Eventually, I opened a dating app I’d downloaded months earlier and barely used. That was where I met Hannah.
Her first photo had been taken somewhere near the water. She had dark hair blowing across half her face and was squinting at the camera as though whoever held it had said something stupid just before taking the picture. Her profile said very little: something about bad films, good coffee and a strong dislike for people who stood still on escalators.
I matched with her mostly because I was trying not to look at my bedroom door. She messaged first, and we talked until nearly two in the morning.
Nothing important, which was the nice thing about it. We argued about whether American Dad! Was a good show or not, discovered we had both once pretended to like the same terrible Wellington indie band for someone we were dating, and spent far too long trying to work out whether we’d ever been at the same university party without knowing each other.
For several hours, I forgot about the mirror, the linen cupboard, the photographs and old floorboards contracting around nails. More importantly, I forgot to listen.
By the time I put my phone down, my eyes hurt from staring at the screen. Hannah had sent one last message I was too tired to answer properly, so I left it for the morning, plugged my phone in beside the bed and rolled onto my side.
The house was quiet, and I was almost asleep when the hallway creaked: three boards, one after another. I kept my eyes closed. At the time, I still thought the house was the thing I needed to understand. I hadn’t yet realised that Hannah would become the fixed point around which everything else fell apart.