Before walking down the dark alleyway Hale looked left and right to be sure no one was watching. No one was around, but that was to be expected, it was currently a quarter past 1 and everyone was asleep. Seeing this, Hale headed down the alley until he got to a side door to a Chinese restaurant that had its front door around the corner. He had followed the pattern of disappearances that he had noticed now he was going to get to the bottom of it.
He had made it to the spot. It should be in this alley. Yet, Hale looked around and saw nothing eye-catching. He didn't know what he was looking for but he was sure that he'd know if he saw it. He always had a good intuition when it came to secrets. But he saw nothing. Maybe he had been mistaken, maybe he got the pattern wrong or maybe there was no pattern, Hale had started to doubt himself but he decided to stick around for a while anyway.
After a few hours nothing happened. No one ever even walked past the opening of the alley. He was feeling utterly defeated. In the end, he turned and walked back home. Maybe he'd go back and double-check his work. He might have missed something.
Hale Koval walked to his apartment's door and unlocked it. Inside sat his kitchen and living room. It all looked very normal. But, if you were to round the corner into his bedroom you'd be shocked at the piles of maps, police reports, and printed-off sheets of news articles. This was not normal for anyone other than Hale. He had always been a bit of a conspiracy theorist but he trusted his instincts. And most of the mainstream conspiracies he thought were a joke. Yes, we definitely went to the moon. But there was always a nagging feeling, one that irked his very soul. A feeling that he was missing something very big, and it was right in front of his eyes. And that made him so angry. One who sat above everyone, the light of his thoughts illuminating a room, yet stumped by a gut feeling. Some may have thought of him as narcissistic, but could it be that he was truly smarter than everyone else around him?
Hale threw himself onto his couch and released a long sigh. He had let his internal monologue run rampant again. It was never anything so serious as him being some genius or anything like that. He just happened to notice more patterns than normal people. Although, tonight had been a huge disaster so maybe he wasn't as smart as he thought he was. And now he had wasted his Sunday, so back to school on Monday. He was two years into his computer science degree.
After a night's rest, Hale fixed his wavy black hair that he pulled back and let fall haphazardly in slicked-back style. His face was maybe slightly above average and he had slightly tan skin that had a hint of ethnic ambiguity to it but still had blue eyes that made for quite the contrast. He could call himself almost any race and could get away with it, although even he didn't know. His dad was white and he had died the year before from lung cancer; the years of chain smoking had finally caught up to him. Hale never blamed him, he had raised Hale alone. Realizing that he was standing in the middle of his living room lost in thought he shook his head, threw on his backpack, and left.
Classes came and went and the day passed. Hale didn't have many friends but it didn't bother him much. He was mostly a homebody anyways. His classes ended and he went back home. But a piece of news suddenly presented itself as he was mindlessly scrolling on his phone. The disappearance four nights ago was a kidnapping. Something about the girl's estranged father, Hale completely lost interest in what actually happened. But this changed everything. Hale had assumed that that disappearance was a part of the others but if that wasn't true then it would change the timeline. Hale stood up and bolted to his room. Using the new pattern that doesn't include the disappearance of four days ago then Hale figured the next one should be... that night. And at the university no less.
He made ramen and finished eating it in 10 minutes total and then threw on his black cloak. Was he acting childish? Yes. And he knew that. He was an adult yet he was running around looking for disappearing people. He knew if people knew they'd think he was crazy, but so what? He didn't have any friends and he no longer had any family. He essentially had no connection to the world. Honestly, running around at night looking for patterns in random events was mostly an excuse for him to walk around at night. Boston was loud and bright but at night he could find silence. Seeing the concrete jungle empty gave him a hit of serotonin that he couldn't describe.
He walked his 35-minute walk to the campus. Of course, he didn't go to any of the good Massachusetts universities like Harvard. He just went to a public school in Boston. UMass Boston. He was smart and soaked up knowledge like a sponge but finding what could inspire him to work was hard. Grades were less about what you knew and more about how much energy you put in and that was always Hale's downfall.
He walked onto the campus, but it was a pretty big place. Since his goal was to walk around at night anyways he took his time. At this point, it was dark out and the streetlamps illuminated the streets. He looped the campus and nothing seemed to stick out to him so he started walking around with little rhyme or reason. He walked until he came next to a small area under construction across from the building that was for the material sciences. This area was not for students but was just some unloading dock-type area, it was on the back side of a row of restaurants that were on campus. The construction equipment hinted to them redoing the asphalt of the area but Hale paid little attention as he hopped the small orange temporary fence they had put up. He found it odd that there were a few large vans parked on the street nearby but he didn't think much of it in the end.
He slowly sauntered through the construction. He wasn't exactly sure what he was looking for but he had this scratch in his brain that he was getting very close. The space wasn't exactly large, after five minutes of walking he had seen all there was. Until a sudden ear-piercing scratching sound came from just a few yards away from him. It was a sound that made his skin crawl and he was having conflicting feelings. His brain told him to turn around and run but his heart begged him to stay. He was so terribly close to knowing, he had to know.
He rounded the construction vehicle very slowly and as he got to the other side he realized where the sound originated. A perfect mirror lay on the ground. Hale swore that he had not seen that the first time. He was now especially on edge since this still doesn't explain the sound, unless it came from the mirror but that doesn't make any sense. Hale stood silently there for nearly ten minutes but to him, it felt like seconds. A realization finally snapped him out of his stupor. He realized that the reflection in the mirror was not correct. It was some other place, dimly lit but still brighter than night, with about six people wandering around inside. What truly chilled him to the bone however is that he recognized these people, because he had studied their disappearances.
He wanted to turn around now but he suddenly found himself in this space among the others. Hale took a look around and now found that this place seemed to look like some sort of small warehouse. High ceilings, no windows. The six people turned to him and stared at him, pity in their eyes. Hale tried to speak out but he found that his vocal cords would shake but no sound would be created. True fear started setting in and Hale's mind was moving at 100 miles per hour. He started to walk and found that he had no problem doing that. He reached out his hand and fear turned to unbridled horror as his pupils dilated, he looked at his outstretched hand which was now semi-transparent, he could now barely make out what was on the other side of his hand.
Was this a dream? Sadly not. Hale started to breathe heavily, to the point of nearly hyperventilating. Minutes passed as Hale lost all sense of reason until survival instincts started to kick in and he began to accept this absolutely absurd situation. His pupils became pinpricks as his mind was stretched thin as he thought of every possible solution.
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He looked down at his hands again to find that his left hand had started changing. Ethereal tendrils began to run up his left hand from seemingly nowhere, and where they went his hand began to turn to normal, no longer being transparent. However, he had a premonition that this was very much not a good thing.
He took a deep breath and stopped to think as he watched these wiggling tendrils wrap around his hand slowly. He began to talk to himself out loud, even if no sound came out it helped focus his train of thought regardless.
"This is an irrational situation and so I must think irrationally. A mirror appeared out of nowhere. Then when I stood close I was suddenly in the mirror with the other people in the reflection. It's dead silent in here and I'm ethereal but slowly becoming... real?" Hale remunerated on what he said for a few seconds.
"Wait. Mirrors can't reflect sound and so there's no sound. Mirrors deal with light and now I'm ethereal but turning solid, turning into a true reflection. It doesn't make any sense but it still seems to follow its own rules." As Hale got towards the end of his thoughts he felt an immense pressure in his head. It was worse than any headache or migraine, it was like his mind was being ripped apart, but he grit his teeth and finished his thought.
"It's following the rules of a mirror. It isn't just a mirror. It's THE mirror. It's the concept itself." It sounded insane and stupid but his gut told him this was correct. As he spoke the end of his sentence the headache peaked, blood began to leak from his nose and his eyes became bloodshot from the pure pressure his mind was under. Not from this situation, but maybe by touching on an idea he shouldn't be able to understand.
And then, cracking sounds echoed through his mind. And then shattering, it felt like it came from his soul, reminiscent of a window pane breaking. His eyes began to burn like they were on fire. Then, out of every shadow in the room; the shadows in the corner of the room, the shadows made from the six people meandering around, within these shadows an eye opened and stared directly at Hale, then another opened, then ten, and in moments a hundred had opened all over the place in all sorts of different shadows all of them staring directly at Hale. A shiver went down his spine as all these eyes bored holes in him, each had a unique iris of strange colors and patterns, many having upwards of three or four different colors in repeating patterns within the irises. Contrary to what one might expect, these eyes did not put off Hale. He felt a strange connection to these eyes like he was looking at himself.
This had been such a strange 30 minutes that Hale couldn't properly cope or even think of what all this meant but he was sure that the headache, his eyes burning, the eyes in the shadows; those were a whole separate issue. But even with all this going on Hale never forgot that he might be in mortal danger.
Hale refocused his burning eyes on his hand and he seemed to notice the real world. It was like looking through the glass on a bright day where you can see what's behind it and a reflection at the same time. If Hale could see himself it'd be a strange sight as his pupils were constantly changing colors and different patterns were appearing and disappearing inside it, plus they were still bloodshot from before.
Hale pushed his focus to the max and the two worlds he could see eventually became just one as he once again stood in the construction area. The world in the mirror dissipated and he saw the mirror from before, acting like liquid mercury, as it devoured his left hand, tendrils of mercury-like mirror ate at his skin. Now released from whatever illusion he had been in he quickly pulled his hand away. The skin on his left hand looked as if he dipped his hand in acid, it was truly shocking, but even more so was that there was no pain. Hale stepped back and nearly fell over as he put as much space between him and the wriggling mass of mirror.
"We've learned enough." Said a soothing feminine voice from behind Hale that made his heart skip a beat. When did people get here? He hadn't even noticed, but as soon as the voice was done speaking two other people came into his peripherals. One of the three stepped up right in front of the mirror. He put his hand out and space seemed to shatter as the light was refracted in strange geometric ways that encased the mirror and seemed to confuse it since it shuttered for a few moments until it simply turned back into a solid normal mirror that you could find anywhere else.
Hale stared at the man in a daze but quickly got ahold of himself. He squinted his eyes and looked more closely at this person. A middle-aged man with salt and pepper hair, dressed in some sort of civilian combat clothes. As he focused he seemed to feel an aura of geometry and light. It was a feeling that was hard to describe, but these assumptions seemed to come straight from his subconscious like a gut feeling; that mixed with the demonstration of his power put one word into Hale's mind. Kaleidoscope.
Hale was suddenly jerked away by a strong hand and a knife was put to his neck.
"Stop. Look at his eyes." The feminine voice from before said as she walked around and finally appeared in Hale's vision. She had jet-black hair in a wolf cut, and her irises were orange-tinted and had odd repeating patterns in them. She had a flawless face and was no older than 23, nearly looking like a model. Hale was slightly above average but she was way out of his league. She had an aura of detachment from the material, and she naturally exuded danger which was only exacerbated by her slightly longer and sharper than normal canines.
What she was pointing out was Hale's eyes, which had gone from his normal blue to now settling down to be glowing violet with thin black lines that drew strange patterns in his irises. If you looked very closely it almost looked like writing, but also incomprehensible in a way that confused anyone that noticed it. Her smile widened as she looked into Hale's eyes. She could feel the incomprehensibility within them, the hiddenness. This action made Hale very uncomfortable since, of course, he had no idea about any of this but there was a knife to his throat a moment ago so he couldn't let his guard down no matter how heavenly she looked, or devilish.
"Did you hear the shattering?" She said softly.
"The glass shattering?" Hale said after a moment. He wanted to ask a million questions and run away at the same time but he got the feeling that questions would not be answered and he was very much not free to leave these people.
"Exactly. What did you see exactly around the time of that happening?" She asked as she guided him to sit down on some bags of cement nearby. She had seemingly totally lost interest in the liquid mirror from just a minute ago.
"I was in some sort of warehouse and there were victims of the mirror inside."
"No, no. I care little for the effects of the mirror. I want to know what happened exactly when the glass shattered." She said as she pushed Hale down onto the bags of concrete. She was very strong, which surprised him since she looked rather thin.
Hale thought about his options for a moment. He looked into this mysterious lady's orange eyes that were beaming with excitement and thought 'Well, it seems this information is keeping me alive. I guess I have very little choice in the matter.'
"I heard the shattering and then I got a headache so bad I thought I was going to pass out and then all sorts of eyes opened up in all the shadows around the room... At least, that's what it looked like." Hale spoke the truth. He didn't want to be killed by these people. One must remember that less than an hour ago Hale had been a normal person, a little eccentric, but still normal. This was all different and he had no idea how to handle such a situation.
Her eyes seemed to beam and glow as she heard that and her soft smile grew, only showing more of her pronounced canines. She looked like she wanted to tempt every man into death with her actions, but even feeling the danger Hale was not deterred but rather drawn by her look.
Then she began to hum a bit and tap her plump red lips repetitively as she had a thoughtful face and after 30 seconds she got to the end of her train of thought and turned to Hale. "The headache indicates knowledge, the shadows are darkness, but the eyes I'm not sure of. It could be a concept."
Hale didn't know what she meant but he wasn't stupid. He knew she was somehow categorizing whatever happened to him by the phenomena that he had seen. Hale was feeling less and less certain that his decision to not hide anything was a good idea as her words seemed to align with his subconscious and for a moment it felt like she could see straight through him.
"If that were true it would make his concept quite potent. It would put him on the same level as you, ma'am." The middle-aged man with a knife chimed in as he slid the knife back into its holster on his waist.
"Ok, then it's decided." She said as she seductively grabbed Hale by the back of his neck and pulled him toward herself, sending a shiver down his spine. She then whispered in his ear. "You're coming with me."