The Third Reflection

The first time Lori heard the footsteps above her apartment, she assumed it was just someone moving in. Cardboard boxes dragged across hardwood, a few thumps, muffled voices. She didn’t think twice about it — until she remembered something strange.

There was no third floor.

The building was old, brick and creaky, barely holding together on two levels. She lived on the top floor. Above her should be the roof, nothing else.

She asked her landlord, Mr. Krasniansky, about it the next day.

“There’s nobody up there,” he said, sipping coffee through yellowed teeth. “It’s just beams and dust. Maybe raccoons.”

But Lori had lived in the building for over a year. She knew the sound of raccoons. These were not raccoons. These were footsteps. Human footsteps.

Night after night, they returned.

They paced.

They stopped.

They scraped.

Then came the knocking.

Always at 3:03 a.m., two slow knocks from the ceiling, right above her bed. Like someone knew exactly where she slept.

She tried ignoring it. Told herself it was dreams. Told herself she was under stress from work. Told herself a lot of things.

Until one night, she knocked back.

Two quick taps with the broom handle.

Nothing.

The next night- the same two knocks at 3:03.

This time, she didn’t knock back.

But the ceiling did.

Three knocks.

Harder. Closer.

“I don’t understand,” Lori whispered out loud, heart hammering.

She recorded the sound on her phone, played it back in the morning. It was there — faint, but real. She sent it to her friend, Amy, a freelance journalist who loved strange things.

“You’ve got a story,” Amy said. “You should investigate.”

Lori wasn’t a journalist. She worked IT support. But something about those knocks started pulling at her.

She started researching.

Old building permits. Library archives. Neighborhood rumors.

The building was constructed in 1928. Used to be four floors. A fire in the 1950s destroyed the top two. Only the bottom two were ever rebuilt.

So technically, there had been a third floor once.

But it shouldn’t exist anymore.

She climbed the fire escape to the roof one afternoon. Just tar, vents, and sky. She knocked on the roof where her bedroom would be below. No echo. Nothing unusual.

But that night, the knocks came back.

And then- a voice.

Barely audible.

“Help…”

Lori sat bolt upright, blood freezing. She held her breath.

“Help…”

It came again. Faint. Desperate.

She grabbed her phone, started recording. “Who’s there?”

The voice didn’t answer.

She played the audio back the next morning — only static.

No knocks. No voice.

She emailed the clip to Amy anyway.

“Girl,” Amy wrote back, “are you okay? That recording is blank.”

Lori stopped sleeping. She started drawing maps of the building. Where her room sat. Where the old third floor would have been. She became obsessed.

Her neighbors noticed. A woman on the first floor said she’d heard “something, once, a long time ago.” But nothing like Lori described.

Lori started digging into the fire. Four people had died. The fourth-floor tenants. But there was someone else unaccounted for — room 3B.

A woman named Irene Morrow.

No records of her death. No forwarding address.

No nothing.

Lori found a blurry photo of her in an old newspaper. A woman in her twenties, dark hair, blank stare. She clipped the photo, taped it to her mirror.

That night, the knocking came again. But not just in the ceiling.

Now the walls.

Her closet door creaked open by itself.

Her lights flickered.

The bathroom mirror cracked down the center.

She called Amy in tears.

“You need to get out of there,” Amy said. “This isn’t a story. This is something else.”

“I don’t understand,” Lori said again, the phrase becoming her mantra.

She packed a bag and stayed at Amy's for a few days. No dreams. No knocks.

But when she came back, the air inside her apartment felt different. Thicker. Charged.

The photo of Irene was gone.

In its place- a single line scratched into the glass.

COME UP

Lori stared at it for a long time. She checked the roof again. Still just tar and vents.

But then she noticed something she hadn’t before- a small latch in the far corner. Rusted over, half-hidden by debris. She pried it open.

Beneath it- a staircase.

Narrow. Winding. Old.

It shouldn’t have been there. It defied everything about the building’s structure.

But she went down.

Not up — down.

The staircase spiraled in darkness far longer than any floor should allow. When she finally reached the bottom, she found herself standing in a hallway.

Peeling wallpaper. Faint yellow light from exposed bulbs. Carpet wet underfoot.

Apartment doors lined the hallway. Room 3A. 3B. 3C.

The third floor.

Whole. Intact.

Time didn’t feel right down there.

She reached for 3B. The door creaked open.

The apartment was fully furnished. 1950s décor. Dust-covered furniture. A rotary phone on the side table.

In the center of the room- a figure.

A woman.

Back turned, hair long and black.

“Irene?” Lori said.

The figure turned.

It wasn’t a ghost. It wasn’t a monster.

It was a woman.

Real. Thin. Pale.

But something about her eyes was… off. Like they belonged to someone who hadn’t seen the sky in decades.

“I heard you,” Lori said. “The knocking. The voice.”

The woman blinked slowly.

“I knocked,” she said. “For years. No one came.”

“How are you alive?”

“I’m not,” the woman said, smiling faintly. “Not anymore.”

“I don’t understand,” Lori whispered.

“You’re not supposed to,” Irene said. “No one does. Not until it’s too late.”

Then the lights went out.

When Lori came to, she was back in her apartment. On the floor. Her clock read 3:03 a.m.

There were no knocks.

No stairs.

No hatch.

But the photo of Irene was back on the mirror — only this time, it was a photo of Lori.

And under it- the same words.

COME UP

Lori stared at the photo of herself taped to the mirror.

Same expression as Irene's had been. Blank. Drained. Like something had hollowed her out from the inside.

She yanked it down, hands trembling.

This had to be a prank. Some elaborate, psychological joke. But who would do that? And why?

She tore her apartment apart looking for the hatch. Checked the roof again. Nothing. The spot where the latch had been was just sealed tar now. No cracks. No seams.

She emailed Amy everything — the picture, what she remembered of the hallway, of Irene.

Amy responded in all caps- “YOU NEED TO GET OUT. NOW.”

Lori tried. She packed up and left the building by noon. Booked a week at a cheap hotel. Every inch of her wanted distance from that place.

But the knocks followed.

The first night in the hotel- 3:03 a.m. — a knock on the headboard.

Second night- a knock on the closet door.

Third night- the bathroom mirror in the hotel cracked straight down the center.

The next morning, she found another photo slipped under the door.

Her again. But this time, her eyes were blacked out with thick ink. Under it, a single word-

SOON.

Amy begged her to come stay.

Lori agreed. But when she showed up at Amy's apartment, something was wrong.

The lights were off. Door ajar.

She stepped in.

“Amy?”

Silence.

She found her in the living room, sitting stiff on the couch. Eyes wide. Pale. Trembling.

On the coffee table- Lori's photo. Same one. Ink-black eyes.

“I saw her,” Amy whispered. “The woman. In my dreams. She was screaming inside my mirror.”

Lori felt cold spread from her spine outward.

“We need to burn that building down,” Amy said.

Lori didn’t respond. Because in that moment, something shifted inside her.

The fear she’d been holding onto — white-hot, crackling — suddenly snapped. Flipped.

She wasn’t scared anymore.

She was angry.

That night, she returned to the building.

Everything in her screamed to turn around. But something darker pulled her forward.

She walked up the stairs.

Past her apartment.

To the roof.

She stood exactly where the hatch had been.

Waited.

At 3:03 a.m., she heard it.

The knock.

Not from above.

From beneath her feet.

She stomped once.

The roof split open.

Just like before — the staircase.

Winding. Dark.

But this time, Lori didn’t hesitate.

She descended.

The third floor waited for her.

Same hallway.

Same doors.

Same silence.

But now the mirrors were different.

Every door had one mounted on its front — long, thin rectangles of warped glass that shimmered like oil. They weren’t reflecting her properly. Not quite. Her head tilted one way, the mirror-Lori tilted the other. One blinked when she didn’t. One smiled.

She stepped into 3B.

Irene was there. Sitting at the vanity, brushing her hair.

She turned.

“You came back.”

“I want answers,” Lori said. “What is this place?”

Irene set the brush down. “It’s a memory.”

“A memory of what?”

“Of us,” Irene said. “Everyone who was lost. Everyone who is lost.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You do,” Irene said gently. “You just don’t want to.”

Behind her, the vanity mirror shimmered.

Not a reflection.

A window.

Lori saw herself. In her apartment. Asleep in bed.

Then — the knocks.

Then — her eyes fluttering open.

Then — Irene standing over her, mouth wide, eyes hollow.

Then — Lori screaming.

The mirror cracked, spiderwebbing outward from Irene’s face, as if it couldn’t bear the image it held.

The image shattered.

“This is a loop,” Lori said, stepping back. “It keeps happening.”

Irene nodded. “It always happens.”

“What are you?”

Irene smiled.

“I was you. Once.”

Lori turned to run — but the hallway stretched, twisting. The walls pulsed. The doors multiplied.

And the mirrors…

They watched. Every single door now bore one — and each pane held a different Lori.

Some screaming. Some staring. Some reaching, hands pressed flat against the glass as though begging to be let out.

One Lori met her eyes — and whispered her name from the other side. Not aloud, but in her bones.

“Stay.”

Lori stumbled back.

A mirror to her left exploded outward, shards slicing the air like thrown knives. No blood. No pain. But every splinter showed a piece of her face — her eye, her mouth, her fear — multiplied and trapped.

The real Irene leaned in, her breath cold against Lori’s neck.

“Welcome home.”