That could happen easily. One of her roommates had explained the phenomenon to Margot the previous summer. At any one time, the eyes are only taking in a small portion of an environment, so the brain would fill in the gaps from memory. It explained why switching a photo on someone’s desk could go unnoticed for days or why a friend’s haircut wouldn’t register until it was pointed out.

Besides, the sun was close to setting, and the room had been dim. Twilight did strange things to eyes.

They were good reasons. Plausible. Solid.

Margot pressed her hands over her head, a shuddering breath scraping the insides of her lungs.

She might have just believed her own excuses if it had been a glimpse from the corner of her eye. But she’d looked right at herself. Made eye contact with those blurred, grayed pupils. Watched the shrunken lips twitch above the yellowed teeth.

It had not been some accidental glance. It had been real. She’d stared at it, and it had stared back.

A delusion of some kind. Maybe a temporary mental snap. Stress can manifest itself in many ways.

But Margot doubted it could manifest like that.

She’d watched her share of horror movies. She’d seen plenty of fictional portrayals of death, both modern and campy. She had to assume, if her mind was intent on tormenting her, it would have plucked inspiration from something it had already seen.

She never in a thousand years would have imagined a corpse looking like the figure in the mirror. The skin had a strange appearance, both shrunken and wrinkled, but the wrinkles had a fullness to them that felt achingly unnatural.

And yet, the moment she saw it, she knew it was a more accurate visage of death than any of the movies had managed. It had resonated. For the first time in her life, she’d seen a corpse, and it had been her own.

Margot knew she wasn’t capable of imagining that. Not in her nightmares and not in the waking hours either.

What does that leave?

She lowered her hands and stared at the palms. The creases running across them were barely visible in the darkened hallway, but she’d seen them often enough to remember the shapes. Her life lines were short.

Superstitious. Superstitious.

But maybe it wasn’t wrong to open herself to superstitions a little more.

The master bedroom door would stay closed. That was a certainty. If anything was in there—bad air or some darkness from the memory of her parents’ deaths—she wasn’t going to invite it any farther out into the house.

Margot pulled herself up, using the wall for support. None of her theories could explain what she’d seen. It was possible there was still a rational explanation. She quietly, desperately hoped there was. But her cautious optimism about the house had been shattered.