Reflections

The car hummed beneath him, a mechanical heartbeat counting down the miles. Martin Ellery watched the world stream past his window—a blur of autumn trees and small towns that would soon exist only in memory. The handcuffs bit into his wrists, cold metal against skin that would know no other touch for decades to come. Life without parole. The words still echoed in the hollow chamber of his chest.

“Beautiful country,” said the marshal sitting beside him, a man whose name Martin hadn’t bothered to remember. “Shame you won’t be seeing it again.”

Martin didn’t respond. His eyes traced the contours of distant mountains, purple shadows against the dimming sky. The car slowed as they passed through yet another forgotten town—weathered storefronts with peeling paint, a gas station with a single pump, an old woman walking a dog that paused to watch them pass.

“You know, I’ve been doing this job twenty-three years,” the marshal continued, undeterred by Martin’s silence. “Transported all kinds of men to all kinds of places. But you—you’re different.”

A faint smile ghosted across Martin’s lips. “Different how?”

“Most men, they rage. They weep. They bargain. You just… accept.”

Martin turned his gaze from the window, studying the marshal’s weathered face. “Would raging change anything? Would tears erase what happened?”

The marshal shrugged. “Guess not. But it’s human.”

“Perhaps I’m not feeling particularly human today.”

They passed a cemetery, headstones tilted like broken teeth in the fading light. Martin counted them—one, two, three—until they blurred together in a granite stream. Everything passing, passing, passing. Soon the car would deliver him to concrete and steel, to a life measured in identical days.

“The judge,” Martin said suddenly, “he called me a monster during sentencing. Said I showed no remorse.”

“And did you?” The marshal’s eyes remained fixed on the road ahead.

“Remorse implies I had a choice.”

The car slowed again, this time for a railroad crossing. No train approached, but the lights flashed red against the twilight—warning, warning. Martin felt something shift inside him, like sand settling after an earthquake.

“Everyone has choices,” the marshal said.

Martin shook his head. “No. Some of us are simply caught in currents beyond our control. We become what we must become.” He leaned his forehead against the cool glass of the window. “Have you ever looked at your reflection and wondered who was looking back?”

The marshal’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Can’t say that I have.”

“I saw someone else in the mirror that night. Someone with my face, but not my eyes. Not my hands. Yet I watched those hands move as if they were mine.” Martin felt tears gathering, unexpected and unwelcome. “The blood looked black in the moonlight. Did you know that? Almost beautiful.”

The marshal’s silence stretched between them, a third passenger in the car.

“They found the knife in my kitchen drawer,” Martin continued, voice barely above a whisper. “My fingerprints. My DNA under her fingernails. Everything pointing to me. And yet…”

“And yet what?”

“And yet I remember standing outside myself, watching it all unfold like a play I couldn’t stop.”

The marshal sighed. “That’s what they all say, Mr. Ellery. One way or another.”

Martin closed his eyes. “Yes, I suppose they do.”

As the car crested a hill, the prison came into view—a sprawling complex of razor wire and floodlights cutting through the gathering dusk. Martin felt his heart stutter, a clock unwinding. This was it. The end of everything he had known. The beginning of nothing at all.

“We’re almost there,” the marshal said unnecessarily.

Martin nodded, his gaze returning to the window, trying to memorize each tree, each cloud, each fragment of the world that would soon be beyond his reach. And as he watched, for just a moment, he thought he saw his reflection smile back at him with unfamiliar eyes.

***

Eleven months later, Dr. Amelia Reeves adjusted her glasses as she reviewed the file on her desk. Patient interview #137. Subject: Martin Ellery. She clicked her pen and checked the time—2:17 AM. The facility was quiet at this hour, save for the occasional footsteps of orderlies in the corridor outside her office at River Heights Facility for the Criminally Insane.

The tape recorder hummed softly as she pressed play, Martin’s voice filling the small room, a voice she had come to know intimately over these long months of therapy sessions.

“I’m not who they think I am. I’m not who you think I am.”

Amelia closed her eyes, remembering the man who sat across from her three times a week. Hollow-cheeked, eyes like bruised wells, fingers that never stopped moving—tracing invisible patterns on the table between them. The same man who, rather than entering the prison that day, had been redirected here after a psychiatric evaluation revealed what the court deemed “persistent dissociative delusions.”

“Sometimes I feel like I’m wearing a mask made of my own skin.”

She paused the recording and made a note. Possible schizotypal manifestations. Her pen hovered over the page. There was something else about Martin Ellery, something that defied clinical categorization.

Outside, rain began to fall, pattering against the window like skeletal fingers. Amelia glanced at the small mirror hanging on the wall opposite her desk. For a moment—just a moment—her reflection seemed wrong somehow. The angle of her head, perhaps. The set of her mouth.

She turned back to the file. The crime scene photos were stark, clinical. A woman, thirty-two years old, found in her kitchen with seventeen stab wounds. Martin Ellery discovered in a nearby park, clothes soaked with her blood, the knife in his hand. And yet his eyes in the mugshot were bewildered, lost.

Amelia pressed play again.

“I see him sometimes, you know. In reflections. In windows. In the polished metal of the water fountain. He’s wearing my face, but it doesn’t fit him properly. It stretches when he smiles.”

She felt a chill creep up her spine despite the warmth of the office. The conviction had been swift, the sentence harsh. But instead of prison walls, Martin now faced white rooms and medication schedules.

Eleven months of the same story, unchanging.

“He whispers to me when I’m almost asleep. Says he’s been waiting for so long. Says there are others like him, wearing other faces, walking among you. Says soon he won’t need me anymore.”

Amelia reached for the glass of water on her desk, her hand trembling slightly. She had treated psychopaths before, dealt with manipulators and storytellers of the highest caliber. But Martin Ellery believed his delusion with a conviction that bordered on the contagious.

The recording continued, Martin’s voice dropping to a whisper.

“It happens when you look too long at your reflection. When you start to wonder who’s really looking back. That’s when they can slip through. That’s when they can try on your life like a new suit.”

Amelia stood abruptly, walking to the window. The rain had intensified, streaming down the glass in rivulets that distorted the world outside. She pressed her fingers against the cool surface, feeling suddenly, inexplicably trapped.

Behind her, Martin’s voice continued.

“Doctor, I need to warn you. I’ve seen him watching you. In your reflection. When you check your appearance in your compact mirror. When you glance at the window during our sessions. He’s interested in you now.”

She turned from the window, heart quickening. This was absurd. She was allowing a patient’s delusion to affect her own perception. Unprofessional. Dangerous.

Amelia returned to her desk, switching off the recorder. She needed sleep. In the morning, she would recommend a change in Martin’s medication. Perhaps bring in a colleague for consultation.

As she gathered her notes, her gaze fell on Martin’s file photo once more. Something about his eyes—the depth of them, the emptiness. For the first time, she wondered what those eyes had seen on the night of the murder.

She rose, collecting her coat and keys. As she reached for the light switch, her eyes caught her reflection in the small mirror once more.

Her hand froze mid-air.

Her reflection smiled at her—a smile she wasn’t forming, a subtle curve of lips that didn’t belong to her. And then, almost imperceptibly, her reflected hand moved independently, reaching up to tap against the glass from the inside.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Behind her, the door to her office clicked locked. And in the sudden silence, she heard Martin Ellery’s voice—not from the recorder, but from her own lips in the mirror.

“There are doors that swing both ways, Doctor. Reflections work in both directions. And now, while you’re in here with me…”

The lights flickered once, twice, then darkness.

“…I’m out there with them.”