Her skin had shrunken and puckered. Swollen wrinkles spread over the cheeks and forehead. The eyelids had peeled back. Her eyes were swollen round orbs, barely fitting inside the sockets, bulging and bloated and swallowed in a sick gray tinge. Her lips were shrunken away from the teeth, exposing grimacing yellow bone and gray, pulpy gums.

She appeared dead.

Margot flinched back, her eyes pressed closed. The staccato rhythm of her heart beat through the wind’s low howl. Her skin burned with sharp fear, too hot and too cold at the same second.

She opened her eyes. The reflection was how it should be. Her face was her own again. Pinched and wild eyed and the cheeks drained of blood, but familiar.

Margot half threw herself off the bed. She staggered as she hit the floor. Her legs were shaking, and she clutched at the doorframe when she reached it.

Don’t look back. Don’t—

She looked. She couldn’t stop herself.

The bed’s mattress held two depressions where two bodies had lain over the years. Margot’s own brief moment in the center was already erased, the mattress forgetting her as soon as she was gone.

Past that, the white curtains rolled in huge billows. In that second, they almost seemed to be like white hands, reaching out, stretching toward her.

In the far corner stood the mirror. It captured Margot in the doorway, normal and whole. At least, as close as she could be when she leaned on the house for support to stay upright.

The phantom reflection—not quite in focus, not quite clear—stared back at her. Margot kept her eyes fixed on it, unwilling to turn away, as she reached for the doorknob. She leaned back, watching, waiting for some trick of the light or shimmer in the glass to give her an explanation for what she’d seen. She kept watching until, at last, the latch clicked, and the only open door in the house was once again sealed.

8

Margot followed the hallway for a dozen shaking steps, intent on putting some distance between herself and the master bedroom, then leaned her back against the wood-paneled wall.

She slid down the surface in increments until her legs poked out at odd angles and her hands could lay loose in her lap. Then she waited.

For what?

For her heart to slow. For her mind to shake free from the sharp panic. For some kind of rationality to give her relief from the image in the mirror.

I saw myself as a corpse.

She ran her tongue across her teeth. Her eyes were half-closed, leaving the opposite wall in a vague, fuzzy blur.

There were plenty of excuses she could conjure to explain the vision. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast. The day had been stressful. She was in a new environment, surrounded by new sights, and her brain had malfunctioned for a second.