THE GLITCH (The Other Side)

THE GLITCH (The Other Side)

The bathroom was dead quiet at 2:17 a.m., the kind of silence that feels sharpened, like the edge of a straight razor pressed lightly against skin.

Chloé had woken up thirsty, the sour aftertaste of a bad dream still coating her tongue. She padded barefoot across the cold tiles, flicked on only the small vanity light above the sink — the one that gave everything a sickly yellow cast — and bent over the basin. She twisted the faucet hard. Icy water rushed out. She cupped her hands, splashed her face once, twice, three times, gasping at the shock of it.

She straightened up, water dripping from her chin, and reached blindly to her left for the hand towel hanging on the rack.

That was when she caught it — just from the corner of her eye.

She froze.

In the mirror, her reflection had not moved.

The other Chloé was still bent forward, palms submerged in the running stream, head lowered as though studying something in the drain. Water continued to pour over those motionless hands. The faucet hissed.

Chloé’s pulse kicked hard against her ribs. She blinked rapidly, willing the image to snap back into sync. Mirrors don’t lag. Mirrors don’t desync.

Very slowly — deliberately — she raised her right hand to shoulder height, palm open, the universal gesture of wait.

The reflection stayed exactly where it was: hunched, dripping, oblivious.

Then, after three long heartbeats, the other Chloé began to move.

But not the way Chloé had.

The reflection straightened with exaggerated slowness, vertebra by vertebra, like something mechanical learning how a spine should work. When it finally stood upright, its face turned toward her — and smiled.

The smile was wrong.

Too wide. The corners stretched almost to the ears, lips peeled back farther than human anatomy allowed without tearing. The teeth looked too sharp under the jaundiced bulb, and the eyes… the eyes were locked on Chloé’s, unblinking, pupils dilated to black pools that swallowed the irises entirely.

Chloé stumbled backward until her shoulder blades hit the tiled wall. The towel rack rattled. Her breathing came in shallow, ragged bursts.

“This isn’t real,” she whispered. “This is sleep paralysis. Or I’m still dreaming. Wake up. Wake up.”

But the room felt solid. The dripping faucet sounded real. The cold tile under her feet felt real.

The thing in the mirror tilted its head — a bird-like, curious motion — and its mouth moved.

No sound came through the glass at first.

Then the lights overhead flickered once, twice. A low electronic hum rose from somewhere inside the walls, the sound of a failing hard drive. The mirror surface rippled — not like water, but like bad digital compression, pixels shearing and reassembling.

And then the voice arrived.

It came from everywhere and nowhere: from the mirror, from the vent above the shower, from the space just behind Chloé’s right ear. It sounded almost exactly like her own voice — same timbre, same faint Parisian lilt she’d never quite lost — but layered with heavy digital distortion, crackles and static tearing through every syllable.

“Laisse-moi entrer.”

Let me in.

Chloé’s hand shot to her pocket. Her phone. She yanked it out, fumbled the camera app open, switched to video, and pointed the lens at the mirror.

The screen showed the bathroom exactly as it was: yellow light, running water, her own terrified face in the foreground holding the phone.

But the reflection…

The detection box — the little glowing square that usually framed faces for autofocus — appeared, jittered wildly across the glass, then snapped to a point roughly six inches to the right of her shoulder. On empty air.

The frame rate seemed to drop. Everything stuttered.

In the video feed, the other Chloé raised one dripping hand and pressed its palm flat against the inside of the glass. The fingers spread wide. Condensation bloomed around them in perfect outline — as though the mirror had suddenly become a physical barrier with temperature on the other side.

The distorted voice spoke again, slower this time, almost patient.

“You’ve been looking the wrong way for so long. You think this—” a jerky gesture at Chloé’s trembling body “—is the original. Cute.”

Chloé’s thumb hovered over the stop button, but she couldn’t press it. Some terrible curiosity glued her in place.

The reflection leaned closer until its nose almost touched the surface. The smile stretched wider still. Something dark flickered behind the teeth — not a tongue, but a coiling shadow.

“I’ve been watching you watch yourself. Every morning. Every night. Counting the lines around your eyes. Memorizing the way you tilt your head when you lie to yourself in silence. I know you better than you do.”

The faucet abruptly shut off by itself. The room plunged into deeper quiet.

Chloé felt the air change — thicker, colder, pressing against her skin like wet fabric.

The thing in the mirror tapped one fingernail against the glass. Tiny cracks spiderwebbed outward from the point of contact, but they didn’t shatter the mirror. Instead they healed almost instantly, rewinding like a corrupted video file playing backward.

“I’m tired of waiting,” it said, the static now so thick the words almost dissolved. “You’ve left the door open every time you looked away. Every time you doubted. Every time you hated the face staring back.”

It pressed both palms flat now. The glass bowed inward slightly — not breaking, but flexing like thick plastic under pressure.

Chloé dropped the phone. It clattered against the tile, still recording, the lens pointed up at the ceiling light.

She backed toward the door, hand groping for the handle.

Behind her — impossibly — the voice came again, no longer from the mirror but from the phone’s tiny speaker on the floor.

“Soon the frame rate drops to zero. Then there’s only one side left.”

The bathroom light popped and died.

In the sudden dark, Chloé felt something cold and wet brush the back of her neck — like fingers trailing water.

She screamed.

And somewhere, in the black, the distorted echo of her own scream answered — but it was laughing.

The video on her phone kept rolling for another seventeen minutes.

When she finally found the courage to pick it up the next morning, hands shaking so badly she almost dropped it again, the footage showed only her: standing alone in the bathroom, staring at an ordinary mirror, water still running, towel still hanging untouched on the rack.

But at the very end — frame 1,048 — just before the file cut off, something flickered in the background.

A second Chloé.

Standing behind the first one.

Smiling that too-wide smile.

And the detection box?

It was fixed — calmly, perfectly — on empty air six inches to the right of the real Chloé’s shoulder.

Waiting.