In the quiet town of Ash Hollow, where the streets wound like veins through a forest of skeletal trees, lived a woman named Clara. She was a solitary soul, her days spent tending to a small antique shop filled with dusty relics no one seemed to want. Her nights were quieter still, spent in a creaky old house at the edge of town, where the wind whispered secrets through the cracks in the walls. Clara didn’t mind the solitude—until the man appeared.
It started on a Tuesday, a night so still that the air felt heavy, pressing against her skin. Clara stood before her bathroom mirror, brushing her hair before bed, when she noticed it—a flicker, a shadow that didn’t belong. She froze, her brush hovering mid-stroke, as her eyes darted to the reflection behind her. There he was: a man standing just beyond the edge of the light, his face half-hidden in the gloom. What caught her breath wasn’t his presence, but his smile. It stretched across his face, far wider than any human mouth should allow, a grin that pulled his cheeks taut and revealed too many teeth, gleaming like wet bone.
She spun around, heart hammering, but the room was empty. The air was cold, though, colder than it should have been, and the faint scent of damp earth lingered. Trembling, she turned back to the mirror. He was gone. Clara chalked it up to exhaustion, a trick of the mind. She went to bed, but sleep came fitfully, haunted by the image of that unnatural grin.
The next night, he was there again. This time, he stood closer, just behind her shoulder, his head tilted slightly as if studying her. The smile hadn’t changed—too wide, too sharp, too wrong. His eyes were dark hollows, glinting faintly like coins at the bottom of a well. Clara dropped her toothbrush and stumbled back, crashing into the sink. She didn’t dare look away from the mirror, but when she blinked, he vanished. The room was silent, save for the drip of the faucet, a slow, rhythmic pulse.
By the third night, Clara dreaded the mirror. She covered it with a sheet, refusing to face it, but curiosity—or something darker—gnawed at her. Around midnight, she crept to the bathroom, her hands shaking as she pulled the sheet aside. He was waiting. This time, he pressed his face close to the glass, his smile stretching so wide it seemed to split his head in two. His teeth were jagged now, uneven, and his lips were cracked and bleeding, as if the grin had torn them apart. His hands—long, bony fingers with nails like claws—pressed against the inside of the mirror, smearing it with streaks of something dark and wet.
Clara screamed and fled, locking herself in her bedroom. She didn’t sleep that night, nor the next. She avoided every reflective surface—mirrors, windows, even the polished silverware—but she could feel him watching. The air grew thick with that earthy smell, and sometimes, in the corner of her eye, she’d catch a flash of that grin.
On the fifth night, desperation drove her to the antique shop. She rummaged through old books, searching for answers, until she found a crumbling journal tucked behind a broken clock. It belonged to a man named Elias Crowe, who’d lived in her house a century ago. The pages were frantic, ink-stained scrawls about a “smiling fiend” that haunted his mirrors. Elias wrote of a deal gone wrong, a pact with something he called “the Grinner,” a being that fed on fear and grew stronger with every glance. The last entry was a single line: “It’s in the glass now. It’s me.”
Clara’s stomach churned. She returned home, armed with a hammer, determined to smash every mirror. But as she raised it to strike the bathroom glass, the man appeared—not behind her, but in her reflection. Her own face stared back, but her mouth stretched into that grotesque, too-wide smile, her teeth sharpening, her eyes sinking into black pits. The hammer slipped from her hands as she stumbled back, clawing at her face. Her skin felt normal, but the mirror showed the truth—or the lie.
She ran outside, gasping in the cold night air, but the windows of her house reflected the same image: Clara, smiling too wide, her humanity peeling away. She fled to town, pounding on doors, begging for help, but the townsfolk recoiled. They didn’t see the man—they saw her, grinning that awful grin, her face a mask of terror and glee.
Days turned to weeks, and Clara disappeared from Ash Hollow. The house stood empty, its mirrors intact, gleaming in the dark. Locals whispered that on quiet nights, if you looked into the glass, you might see her—or him—smiling back, waiting for you to look just a little too long.