The door slammed shut.
Harper lunged toward it, heart hammering in her ears, fingers scrabbling against the old metal handle. Locked. Of course. She rattled it harder.
"Open, open, open—" she hissed through clenched teeth.
Silence answered.
No. Not silence.
Breathing.
Behind her.
She turned slowly, pulse thundering, flashlight beam cutting through the dark like a sword. But there was no one. Just the hum again, vibrating low in the floorboards. A steady thrum, like a distant engine—or a heartbeat.
Her heartbeat?
She didn't know anymore.
She took a shaky step backward—and the mirror shifted.
Not moved.
Changed.
Her reflection… it wasn't matching her anymore.
It stood still as she stepped to the side.
It stared as she turned her head.
Its mouth moved, slowly, deliberately.
"You left," the reflection whispered. No sound. Just lips. "We weren't supposed to leave."
Harper's breath caught. She blinked hard, shook her head. "This isn't real. I'm not losing it. This is just… some prank. Some weird breakdown. None of this is—"
"You are real," the reflection said again. Louder this time. Audible. Her own voice. But it wasn't an echo.
It was separate.
Then, something flickered behind the glass.
For a split second, she saw herself—but not. Her eyes were darker, her expression blank. Cold. And the reflection held something Harper didn't.
A book.
Black, with torn edges and a silver symbol etched on the front.
The same symbol Harper had found in the margins of her textbooks. The one she couldn't trace. The one that showed up in her dreams.
She stepped closer.
The reflection leaned in too. Face to face. Only the glass between them.
And then—
A knock.
Hard. From the other side.
Harper stumbled back with a gasp.
Three more knocks. Slow. Deliberate.
The mirror shimmered.
Cracked.
One long fracture ran down its center, splitting her reflection in half.
And the lights went out.
Pitch black swallowed the room.
Harper froze, her hands shaking as she fumbled for the flashlight. Found it. Clicked it on—
And screamed.
Someone stood in the corner.
A girl.
Thin, hair tangled, face pale as chalk.
Not Harper.
But wearing her uniform.
Wearing her hoodie.
Eyes wide, lips stitched in a line of black ink.
The girl raised a trembling hand—and pointed to the bed.
Harper turned.
The mattress was no longer empty.
A notebook lay there.
Her name scrawled on the cover.
She stepped toward it like she was sleepwalking. Fingers trembling, she opened it to the first page.
"Day 1 — I don't think I exist anymore. But I remember everything."
Her own handwriting.
But she'd never written it.
Had she?
She flipped through more pages. Dates. Names. Sketches of people she didn't recognize. Maps of the school. And over and over, scrawled in the margins:
"Room 13A remembers."
Another knock.
She turned back to the mirror.
Now it was just her reflection again.
And this time, it looked terrified.
"Leave," it mouthed.
The flashlight flickered once—twice—and then the door creaked open behind her.
Wide open.
The girl in the corner was gone.
The bed was empty.
The notebook was still in her hands.
She didn't wait.
She bolted out the door, breath ragged, feet pounding down the hall of the West Wing like something was chasing her.
The hallway twisted. Grew darker. Lights above buzzed and died.
She didn't care.
She ran.
Didn't stop until she burst out into the cold night air and collapsed against the courtyard wall, panting like she'd just escaped a nightmare.
Because maybe she had.
She looked down at the notebook in her hands.
It was still there.
Still warm.
Still real.
And the last page now had a fresh line written in her handwriting:
"If you read this, it's already too late."
And the next very moment
The notebook wouldn't stop burning.
Not literally—but Harper could feel it in her hands as she walked the path back to her dorm. Like it was pulsing. Like it was alive. Every few seconds she'd open it again, skim that final line, as if it might vanish:
If you read this, it's already too late.
She didn't remember writing it.
But her handwriting didn't lie.
Neither did the date written in the corner.
The day before she'd gone missing.
Except no one even remembered she had.
The campus was quiet now. Moonlight poured over the lawn, silvering the tops of hedges and the stone gargoyles perched along Bellridge Academy's archways. It should've felt peaceful.
It didn't.
Every shadow looked like it could open its eyes.
Harper reached her dorm, shoved the notebook under her mattress, and didn't sleep.
Not really.
By the time morning broke, she'd made a decision: someone had to know. Someone had to listen. She couldn't keep doing this alone.
But who?
Not the headmistress. She looked straight through Harper yesterday like she was air.
Not her old friends. They still laughed in the dining hall like she'd never existed. Like she wasn't sitting three tables down.
There was only one person left.
Jamie Ellis.
The new kid in the photography club. Always quiet. Always watching. He wasn't here last semester. Which meant he didn't have "before memories" of Harper to lose.
And maybe… maybe he'd believe her
She found him at lunch, sitting alone in the courtyard behind the art block, camera beside his tray.
"Hey," she said, nerves tight in her throat.
He looked up. Blinked.
And didn't say, "Who are you?"
"Uh, hey," he replied, squinting. "You were at the club orientation, right?"
She nodded quickly. "Yeah. I'm Harper."
"Right. Jamie."
They shook hands like they were meeting for the first time.
But Harper noticed it immediately—he looked at her like he recognized her. Not from memory. But from curiosity.
"You always eat out here?" she asked.
"Mostly. The cafeteria's too loud. People like to yell when they're pretending everything's fine."
Harper blinked. "That's… weirdly accurate."
He smiled a little. "You're not pretending, are you?"
That made her pause.
"I don't think so," she whispered. "But that's the problem. No one remembers me, Jamie. Not my friends. Not the staff. Not the records."
He stopped chewing. "What?"
"I was gone for a week. Just a week. I came back—and it's like I never existed."
Jamie set down his fork slowly. "You're serious?"
Harper pulled out her phone. Showed him a picture—one of the few that had survived. A group selfie from last semester, blurry and sunlit, everyone smiling.
Everyone but her.
She wasn't in it.
Just a gap between two friends where she should have been.
Jamie stared at the screen. "Is this edited?"
"No. That's the point. I was there. But I'm gone. Like I've been erased."
She hesitated.
Then reached into her bag—and slid the notebook across the table.
He flipped it open. Eyes scanning the pages.
His eyebrows pulled together. "This is your handwriting?"
She nodded.
He paused at the map she'd drawn. A rough sketch of the school's layout. West Hall. A hallway that should have continued.
Room 13A.
His thumb hovered over it. "There's no Room 13A. I checked when I was photographing the architecture."
"That's the thing," Harper said, leaning in. "I lived in Room 13A. Before I vanished. I remember the walls, the smell of chalk, the—"
"The humming?"
Her heart stuttered. "You've heard it?"
He looked shaken now. "Two nights ago. I was in the East Wing, trying to get a night shot. I heard this weird, low humming. Like it was coming from behind the walls."
He flipped another page in the notebook.
Stopped.
The blood drained from his face.
Harper frowned. "What?"
He turned the book toward her.
A list of names. Scrawled in her handwriting.
But she didn't remember writing any of them.
And the first name—
Jamie Ellis.
Harper stared. "I… I swear I didn't know your name until today."
Jamie's voice was a whisper. "Then how the hell is it written here?"
Harper's head spun.
Was she losing it?
Or was this bigger than her?
There were other names too. People she'd never met.
Eva Marrow. Luke Hemlin. Zoe Byrne. All written in the same shaky scrawl. All marked with dates.
Next to Jamie's name was October 4th.
Today.
"Maybe," he said slowly, "this notebook isn't just a journal. Maybe it's a record. A warning."
She looked up at him. "Jamie, if your name is here… and mine is too…"
"Then we're both on a list we didn't make," he said grimly.
Harper clutched the notebook.
Room 13A hadn't just taken her.
It had plans