Tonight, she was going to open it.
A sound broke the silence—a heavy, dragging footstep from the attic above.
Eliza’s blood turned to ice. The house plans she’d found in the county archives flashed through her mind. There was no attic. The roof was a flat, decorative cap. Yet the footsteps grew louder, coming down… down… toward the locked room door.
A child. Standing behind her. A small girl in a white nightgown, her face indistinct, holding a patent leather shoe. 6 alexandra view
Eliza tried to run, but her feet were rooted. The girl in the mirror reached out a cold, small hand. And for the first time, Eliza recognized the child’s face. It was her own—from a photograph taken at age six. The year before she’d developed a sudden, inexplicable fear of mirrors.
Outside, the rain stopped. A neighbor, walking her dog, noticed that for the first time in twenty-two years, the light was on in the turret room of 6 Alexandra View. And in the window, two figures stood side by side—one tall, one small—waving.
Eliza spun around. Nothing.
Her aunt, Lydia, had vanished from this very porch. No note. No struggle. Just a dropped watering can and a single, patent leather shoe.
When she looked back at the mirror, the girl was closer. She was mouthing words. Eliza leaned in, heart hammering. The girl’s lips formed a single, desperate sentence: “He didn’t leave. He went in.”
As the footsteps arrived at the door, the last thing Eliza saw was her reflection splitting in two: one version screaming, the other smiling, holding the door open for Arthur. Tonight, she was going to open it
He whispered through the glass: “She’s waiting for you, Lizzie. We’ve kept a place warm.”
Inside, the air was thick with dust and the ghost of lavender polish. She ran a finger over the mahogany banister. Everything was preserved—a time capsule from 1985. Lydia’s knitting needles still impaled a half-finished scarf. The Radio Times on the coffee table advertised a Miss Marple adaptation.
But it was the framed photograph above the fireplace that drew Eliza in: Lydia, beaming, her arm around a man with a kind face and a military posture. Her great-uncle, Arthur. The one who had died six months before Lydia vanished. The one whose bedroom—a locked room at the end of the upstairs hall—Eliza had never been allowed to enter. The house plans she’d found in the county