Through a lens, darkly

One evening, Alice stepped off the train.

The platform was cracked, overgrown, and utterly still. A corkboard held a curling page with smeared print: Follow the path through the birches. Virelay finds those who look.

No address. No contact number. She had no signal anyway.

Telling herself that the creative retreat wasn’t going to be a complete scam, she stepped onto the birch-lined path, suitcase full of dusty lenses and undeveloped film, dragging like a reluctant child.

Virelay found her at the edge of dusk.

It was less a building than a suggestion: stone, ivy, and too many windows. Inside, the air was cool and powdery. She took three steps forward and felt farther from the entrance than made sense. The floor sloped ever so slightly, and the doors weren’t exactly level with their frames. It made her a little queasy.

No one asked her name. Scattered figures drifted through the halls, some barefoot, some humming. A man with clay under his nails nodded vaguely at her and meandered into a corridor made of mirrors. One of his reflections winked at her.

***

After dinner, she found the Polaroid camera.

It was nestled in the drawer of a desk she hadn’t remembered choosing. Ancient, heavy, leather-wrapped. Faintly warm. A crumbling note tucked into its case read: Use me.

A part of someone's immersive piece? Probably.

Might as well show willing.

She raised the camera, pointed it at herself. Took a selfie.

Click. Whir.

The photo slid out obediently.

At first glance, it was just her. Same hair, same clothes. But there was something off… not the background, not the lighting. It was her smile. She hadn’t been smiling when she took it, but in the photo, she was beaming, radiating joy. Her eyes sparkled with a ferocity she didn’t recognize.

Perhaps she’d smiled without realizing. A good sign.

She left the photo on her windowsill and forgot about it until the next morning. She went to unpack but her suitcase was already empty. Her sweaters had folded themselves into a drawer. The photo was lying in the next drawer with her underwear.

***

She began photographing the others.

The man with clay fingers was Rafael, who sculpted hollow faces that aged overnight. Chiwen, the anagrammist poet, waved from across the room. Zehra, who painted with wax and pollen, held up a honey-slicked spoon like a sceptre. Theo, the dancer, made shadow puppets with his feet. Clara smiled at her like a mirror fogging up. No one could remember what sort of art she did anymore.

Each Polaroid was a riddle.

Rafael, who hunched like a crow in real life, stood proud and sunlit in his photo, with clean hands and a police uniform. Chiwen lounged in a bright café, relaxed, mid-laugh. Zehra yawned widely beside a woman no one recognized, wearing a scarf she didn’t own. Theo was snorkeling. Clara stood at a corkboard covered in red string. A man in a very old-fashioned brown suit pointed over her shoulder like a teacher.

Later, Alice realized the suited man was in every photo, hers included.

Not in the center. Never quite in focus.

Once he was a silhouette behind a lace curtain.

Once a smudge in a mirror above the stairs.

Once impossibly small – a figure standing inside Chiwen’s teacup, clear as glass.

Alice started circling him with a pencil, just to see if he would stay put.

He didn’t.

***

“I give up. How are you guys doing this? And who’s the suit? How does he get into all our pictures?” Alice asked Rafael, showing him his photo.

He stared at it for a long time, then murmured, “I don’t like the teeth.”

“Sorry?”

“My teeth. In the photo. They’re not mine.”

Clara wouldn’t answer any questions. Instead, she made Alice take fifty more photos of her and pinned them all to her coat. They fluttered like moths when she moved and hissed like vipers when she didn’t. The ones that worked each showed a different Clara: laughing, still, blurred, gone. Some were blank. Others were blackened, bubbled at the corners.

Clara called those ones dead.

***

Alice walked into a studio that hadn’t been there the day before.

Theo was inside, balancing on one leg on a chair with one leg. “I’m practicing stillness,” he explained. “Badly.”

Alice leaned against the doorframe. “You’re younger than the others.”

He nodded. “Newer. I think I arrived by accident.”

“Is that allowed?”

“Everything here is allowed. Especially if it doesn’t work.”

The chair swayed gently. He didn’t flinch.

“I don’t feel haunted yet,” he said.

Alice considered this. “Maybe that’s what being new means.”

***

Zehra disappeared for a day, leaving her boots behind.

When she came back, she was taller. The bees no longer followed her; they hovered at a distance, puzzled.

That night, they all heard her humming to the hive in a language made entirely of smoke.

The honey she left on the sill turned black overnight.

“It’s the Midsummer tilt,” Chiwen explained. “Things spill. You just have to let them.”

So Alice kept taking photos. The camera, she realized, was hungry.

***

The manor began to whisper. Floorboards groaned at wrong hours. Reflections flickered.

Alice saw her just beyond the stairwell, walking away. Her hair, exactly like her own, except that Alice liked a French braid and she’d preferred Dutch. That oversized sweater they’d fought over when they were fifteen, now chewed raw at the cuffs. That duck-footed saunter that had driven Mum nuts.

“Evelyn?” Alice breathed, too softly to stir dust.

No answer. But the figure turned, just slightly. Enough to see the profile Alice saw every day in her own mirror. Then she continued walking away.

Alice stumbled after her on wooden feet, camera bouncing on one hip, round the last corner until she stepped into a perfectly empty room.

No, not empty.

A scarf – Evelyn’s, surely Evelyn’s - lay in a heap on the floor.

Alice picked it up, held it to her face, inhaled the peppermint shampoo they’d both loved as kids.

“Please,” she said.

And took another selfie, because it was the only thing to do.

The Polaroid whirred, gentle as breath.

This Alice was in a kitchen that smelled of good coffee, morning sunshine and homemade cookies. She was sitting at the table, head thrown back, roaring with laughter. Behind her, Evelyn was stirring a bubbling pot, telling a joke. She had always been able to tell their pictures apart.

There were… children. Blurred, in motion. One of them held out a sticky paper flower. The other was crayoning the wall with a sneaky grin. Someone else who was mostly off-frame had laid a gentle hand on her arm.

Her Evelyn had never made it out of youth. And she couldn’t even begin to guess who that hand belonged to, or how those children would smell when she hugged them.

It wasn’t fair.

***

She stopped sleeping.

Her clothes changed overnight – subtly, but wrong. A red sweater she hadn’t packed. Earrings she never wore.

In the mirror, her hair parted on the opposite side.

She asked Chiwen, “Do you ever wake up as someone else?”

Chiwen patted her knee with a hand that had grown an extra thumb. “I wrote you a poem. It’s called Alices.

“Lacie still forgets to lock the window.

Ileca keeps the key and never uses it.

Ciela sleeps on the roof when the moon is full.

Claie leaves crumbs where no one will follow.

I passed them in the corridor,

One walked like you and she never looked back.”

***

Alice found the registry on the fifth day. Tucked in a locked drawer, pried open with a screwdriver and fury.

The residency lists went back years. Decades. There were repeats. Chiwen was listed in 2023 and 2018. Theo only once, just last year. Zehra had eleven entries, Rafael nineteen. She gave up counting Clara’s after the twenty-fifth one, which was somehow dated 1924.

A brittle scrap of newspaper was taped to one page.

Alice’s eyes widened as she recognized the man in the brown suit. For once, he was front and center in a picture. He was smiling, boyish, normal. One hand rested chummily on an ancient, leather-wrapped camera.

The text read: 1823 – 1851.

Visionary conceptualist.

Imaginor. Capit. Mutas.

Someone had helpfully scrawled underneath: I imagine. It captures. You change.

***

It was Theo’s idea.

“If we break it,” he said, “maybe it will stop capturing.”

They took it to the music room. The piano had teeth instead of keys. The wallpaper changed daily. Today it was bees.

The camera was heavier than it should have been. Not resistant. Just expectant.

Alice handed it to him. “But what if it comes back?”

Theo had no answer. He turned and hurled it out the window. The throw was clean, a dancer’s arc.

They didn’t see it land. Or hear it land. Only the hush of a room growling in the voice of bees.

Theo let out a shaky breath.

“I think we were too loud,” he said.

***

Later that evening, they gathered for dinner.

The long table was lit by candles that smelled of honey and static. Mismatched chairs scraped gently. Soup steamed politely from bowls that seemed to flicker at the edges.

Alice sat beside Rafael, who was whistling a tune she almost remembered. Chiwen was folding napkins into Möbius strips. Zehra had a daisy tucked behind one ear, though the garden hadn’t grown daisies in weeks. Clara stirred her soup with a pencil.

Theo’s seat was empty.

“Where is he?” Alice demanded.

They all looked at the chair, then at one another, as if it had just been installed.

“Who?” said Chiwen.

“Theo!”

Chiwen blinked. “Was that his name?”

Zehra hummed, a slow, looping thing. “He tried to change the tempo.”

Rafael said, “They don’t always leave shoes.”

Clara whispered, “But they like you. You take such good photos.”

Chiwen smiled sadly at Alice. “You’ll need a warm coat, Ecila. I shall miss you.”

Rafael poured her tea with no cup.

Zehra pressed something sticky into her palm – a sugar-dusted bee, folded from waxed paper, faintly buzzing.

For dessert, Clara gave her one of her dead Polaroids. She pinned it to Alice’s sleeve, like a blessing.

***

The camera came back.

Of course it did.

Alice tried to burn it.

It refused.

Not in any dramatic, magical way; it simply wouldn’t catch. The fire bent around it. The leather didn’t smoke. The air smelled faintly of ozone.

She tried smashing it. It broke her hammer and squatted, grinning.

Mirrors, she thought wildly.

Mirrors kill vampires, ghosts. Doppelgängers!

Don’t they?

She found the corridor of mirrors again.

It led to nowhere and forever.

She raised the camera.

And clicked.

Just as it flashed, she met the eyes of the other Alice, the one in the looking glass. How sharp they were. How dark her coat. How broad her smile.

***

One morning, the train exhaled onto the platform.

A man stepped off.

He was clutching a satchel with spindly ashen fingers. The kind of man who might once have played piano and now apologized for the noise.

He looked around. Sunlight pooled along the edges of the birch-lined path. He stepped onto it.

At the top of the hill, Virelay’s doors swung open.

A woman stood there.

Black coat. Camera in one hand. No shadow.

She strode out into the sunshine.

He hesitated. “Sorry, are you the residency coordinator?”

“Welcome to Virelay,” said Alice.

***