The Witness in the Glass

Her reflection smiled before Iris did.

She crossed the threshold anyway.

The preparation room smelled of disinfectant, cold metal, and the faint medicinal sweetness that clung to every room where a body had been made presentable. The overhead lamp swung above the embalming table. Its light moved across the stainless steel in slow, bright arcs.

Edwin lay on the table beneath it.

His wrists were strapped to the side rails with black embalming bands. A length of clear tubing ran from a steel stand to the crook of his arm. The needle had not yet pierced his skin. Beside his shoulder, someone had placed a Polaroid camera.

Not the old SX-70 in Iris’s hand. This one was blackened and unfamiliar, its plastic shell smooth as burned bone.

“Your father has made a decision,” said the voice behind the observation glass.

It was Iris’s voice, but flattened. The rhythm was correct. The feeling had been removed.

Edwin jerked against the straps. “Don’t listen to it.”

“I wasn’t planning to.” Iris kept her eyes on the table. “You’re welcome to explain why you’re here.”

His gaze moved toward the camera beside him. “I came to end it.”

“That has been your stated intention for a year.”

“I thought if I completed the record willingly, it would stop looking for you.”

The words settled between them with the weight of something old and deliberately concealed.

Iris walked to the table. The tubing held clear fluid. She recognized the setup—not an embalming mixture, but a paralytic agent used in rare circumstances to prevent a body from moving during a difficult restoration. It would not kill Edwin quickly. It would make him unable to resist whatever came next.

“You prepared a death,” she said.

“I prepared a witness.”

“Same distinction as before?”

His face tightened. “The role began with me. It recognizes me. If I let it finish my death, it may stop assigning you as the replacement.”

“No.” Iris reached for the tubing. “It will have a completed death and a witness who recorded it. You’re offering it exactly what it wants.”

Edwin turned his head toward her. “You don’t understand what happens if it keeps adapting.”

“I understand that every time you call betrayal a strategy, someone else pays for it.”

The observation glass reflected the room behind her. The table. The lamp. Edwin’s frightened face.

And Iris standing at the foot of the table with a second Iris directly behind her.

The double wore her black work shirt and her gray trousers. Its hair hung wetly against its cheeks. Where its face should have been, the reflection held only a pale, unfinished oval.

Tomás appeared in the doorway behind the double, camera-less and pale. Ruth stood beside him with her gun raised.

“Don’t look at it through the glass,” Tomás said.

Too late.

The double lifted the black camera from the table. It did not cross the room. It simply appeared in the reflection with the camera already in its hands.

Edwin strained against the restraints. “Iris, remove the method.”

She yanked the tubing free from the stand. The fluid bag swung once, then burst against the floor. Clear liquid spread beneath the table.

The black camera clicked.

A photograph slid from its front and landed on Edwin’s chest.

Iris snatched it away before he could see it. The image developed rapidly. It showed Edwin lying on the table with his eyes closed. Iris stood beside him, one hand resting on his shoulder. The double stood where the camera should have been, faceless and still.

At the bottom, instead of a date, the picture carried a single word.

WITNESS.

The reflection raised its empty face toward Iris.

“Take it,” it said.

The words came from every reflective surface in the room: the observation glass, the chrome sink, the polished steel cabinet doors. Even the wet puddle on the floor seemed to whisper.

“Take the picture.”

Iris looked at the photograph in her hand. The image was not a prediction of Edwin’s death. It was an instruction. The camera had already made her role clear. She was to stand close, see the death, and establish that it had occurred.

The photograph in her pocket tapped once.

Then again.

Ruth stepped into the room. “Tell me what to shoot.”

“The camera,” Iris said.

Ruth aimed at the black device in the reflection.

“No,” Tomás said sharply. “Not the reflection. The record.”

The double turned its blank face toward him. For the first time, its posture changed. One shoulder dipped. Its head tilted, copying the way Tomás held himself when he examined a crime scene.

Tomás saw it happen and went still.

The role had stopped imitating Iris alone.

Iris understood. It did not need to copy a person perfectly. It needed only to wear whatever shape would make the record believable.

She seized the black camera’s real-world counterpart from the table. The plastic was cold. The shutter resisted her thumb.

Edwin stared at her. “What are you doing?”

“Choosing the subject.”

She turned the camera toward the observation glass.

The double raised its own camera in the reflection.

For one breath, they aimed at each other.

Iris pressed the shutter.

The flash was white and absolute. Every reflective surface went dark. The observation glass became an ordinary pane. The cabinet doors showed only the room. The puddle held the dull reflection of the lamp.

The double had vanished.

Something struck the camera in Iris’s hand from within. The casing bucked. She dropped it onto the floor.

The new photograph emerged face down.

Nobody moved to pick it up.

Edwin’s breathing came fast beneath the table lamp. Ruth kept her gun trained on the camera. Tomás watched the dark glass, his expression fixed and professional except for the tremor in his left hand.

Iris unfastened Edwin’s restraints.

“You didn’t complete the method,” Tomás said.

“No.”

“Then what did you photograph?”

Iris turned the picture over.

It showed the preparation room from the ceiling. Edwin lay on the table, free of the restraints. Ruth stood at the door. Tomás stood behind Iris.

Iris herself was not in the frame.

The black camera lay on the floor beneath the table.

Above it, written in the photograph’s lower margin, was a date.

OCTOBER 16.

Edwin read it over her shoulder. His face collapsed into something close to relief, which made Iris angrier than fear would have.

“It moved the record forward,” he whispered.

“No,” Iris said. She looked at the empty space where her reflection had been. “It moved the witness.”

A sound came from the observation glass.

Three deliberate knocks.

Ruth flinched but did not lower her gun.

The glass remained empty. Then a smear appeared on its far side, as if a fingertip were dragging through grease. A line formed. Then another.

Iris watched the words emerge backward, written for the person on this side to read.

YOU SAW HIM.

A second line followed beneath it.

NOW SEE YOURSELF.

Tomás stepped closer. “Iris.”

She did not answer.

The camera on the floor clicked again.

This time, no photograph emerged. Instead, the black plastic split open along its side, revealing a narrow compartment that had not been there before. Inside lay a brass key stamped with the number 17.

Edwin made a small, involuntary sound.

Iris looked from the key to him. “You know where that goes.”

“I thought it was gone.”

“You thought a great many useful things.”

Beyond the preparation room, somewhere in the dark corridor, a door began to unlock.

Ruth moved beside Iris. “We’re not opening another door tonight.”

“The camera disagrees,” Tomás said.

Iris picked up the key. It was warm, as though someone had been holding it.

In the observation glass, her reflection returned. It stood alone now, but it no longer smiled. It held one hand against the other side of the pane.

Its scarred index finger pointed toward the corridor.

Iris closed her fist around the key.

“Then we find out what the first door was meant to keep out,” she said.