The Echo Glyph

I stared at the photo like it might bite me.

There she was—Ava Calder. My sister. Twenty-three in the picture, maybe younger. Same soft jawline. Same distant eyes. Standing in front of an old mirror with spiderweb cracks in the glass, one hand raised like she was reaching through it. And behind her—something blurred and wrong, like the camera had caught a shadow with intention.

Its face was nearly invisible.

But the eyes—God help me—the eyes were mine.

Not Ava’s. Not similar.

Mine.

Same corner fleck in the left iris. Same angular brow. Like it had taken something from me. Worn me like a mask.

I turned the photo over. Blank. No date. No note. No fingerprints. I scanned the envelope next. Same. Clean as bone. Whoever delivered it didn’t want to be traced, and they knew how to do it.

I dropped into my chair and stared at the photo until my coffee went cold.

The thing in the glass — was it real?

Or worse… was it remembering me?

---

By morning, I was back at the precinct.

The rain hadn’t stopped. Crescent City didn’t get normal weather. It got moods. Right now, it was wearing grief.

Langley met me near the coffee station. Young, sharp, too polite for his own good.

“You look like hell,” he said.

“I feel like it. Any movement on the Jane Doe?”

He nodded, grim. “We ran facial reconstruction and compared it with missing persons from the northeast corridor. Got a hit. Elaine Wren. Twenty-eight. Last seen two weeks ago in Ashvale.”

“Ashvale?” I frowned. “That’s across the state.”

“Yep. Car was found abandoned at the edge of the coastal preserve. Cops there wrote it off as a voluntary disappearance.”

“She didn't disappear,” I muttered. “She was brought here.”

Langley handed me a file with the ID details and some digital photos of her belongings. Hairbrush, cell phone, half a burned journal. One page remained legible. Just six words:

“The ink never stops listening.”

I felt the chill crawl back up my spine.

“Where’s the journal now?”

“Evidence lockup.”

I headed down there and pulled the file myself. The page had been sealed in a transparent bag. I read the words again. Then again. The ink never stops listening. What the hell did that mean?

I didn’t know yet. But I had someone who might.

---

Silas Verge’s studio was exactly where I remembered it: underground, beneath an old subway station sealed off since the ‘70s. You had to know the right tunnel and the right access hatch — and even then, the air down there felt like it came from a time that forgot how to breathe.

I knocked twice.

Nothing.

Then a voice behind me: “You brought it, didn’t you?”

I turned. Silas stood in the doorway, his eyes sunken, coat soaked, cigarette half-finished and forgotten between his fingers.

“I brought the girl’s name,” I said. “Elaine Wren. Do something with it.”

He waved me in. The inside was darker than memory. Paintings on the walls, all ink-based, all wrong. Spirals, glyphs, faces bent in prayer or agony. Books stacked like barricades, open on tables, bleeding foreign alphabets.

I showed him the photo. My sister. The mirror. The thing behind her.

He went quiet.

“Talk to me,” I said.

He didn’t look up. “You want the truth, or the part you’ll sleep through?”

“Give me the part with blood.”

Silas poured whiskey into two chipped glasses. He pushed one toward me.

“This is bigger than dead girls. Bigger than tattoos,” he said. “That ink — it’s called veilmark. Old stuff. Forbidden. The only people who used it were sects trying to draw things they weren’t supposed to understand.”

“Like what?”

“Not gods,” he said. “Not demons either. Concepts. Things that exist outside time and perception. Call them memories with teeth. They embed themselves in ideas, in symbols, in language. And once someone reads the mark... they’re part of it.”

I sipped the whiskey. It tasted like old fire and worse decisions.

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying this thing in the picture—it’s not copying you. It’s anchored to you.”

“Because of Ava.”

“Because of what you forgot.”

My blood ran cold.

“You think I’ve been marked.”

“I think you were marked years ago.”

He turned, dug through a stack of brittle papers, and pulled out a photocopy of a page from some ancient codex. In the center was the echo glyph. That same twisting figure-eight, only more detailed now — it wasn’t two loops. It was a Möbius strip. Endless. Self-consuming.

“This symbol doesn’t exist in isolation,” Silas said. “It’s a gate. Every person who carries it is a node in a network.”

“Network of what?”

“Dreams. Memory. History. Sacrifice. You’re part of something that stretches backward and forward.”

I stood. “So how do I unmark myself?”

He didn’t answer.

“Silas.”

His voice dropped.

“You don’t.”

---

That night, I dreamed.

I was walking through the morgue. Fluorescents buzzing. Every locker was open. Bodies inside, turning slowly, skin pale and smooth.

They were all women. All tattooed.

And each one stared at me as I passed.

They opened their mouths, and ink poured out — thick, black, and steaming — pooling around my feet, rising to my knees. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe.

Then one of them stepped out.

Elaine Wren.

Eyes open. Lips moving.

“You’re reading it wrong.”

I woke with a gasp, drenched in sweat.

My hands were clean.

My wrists weren’t.

There, under the skin — faint but visible — the same hooked glyph, curled like a parasite just under the surface.

I didn’t scream.

I grabbed my keys and drove.

---

The old printing press was a three-story ruin tucked behind an auto yard in the west district. Boarded up. Fenced off. Tagged with red paint that warned: DO NOT ENTER.

I broke the lock.

Inside, the air felt dead. Not old — dead. No sound. No breeze. Just dust and silence and something waiting.

I climbed the stairs. The upper office still had some furniture—desks, broken filing cabinets, paper molds long petrified.

And in the back, under a tarp—

A mirror.

Same one from the photo.

Cracked. Tall. Covered in dust.

I stepped in front of it.

At first, nothing.

Just me.

Then the cracks shifted.

The reflection changed.

Ava was standing behind me.

And so was something else.

I turned fast.

No one there.

The mirror kept showing them. Ava. The shape.

Ava raised her hand in the glass.

Not a wave.

A warning.

She mouthed the words:

“You opened it.”

And behind her, the ink began to rise — curling over her shoulder, sliding like oil across her skin, forming that same echo glyph in reverse.

I stumbled back

ward, heart hammering.

The mirror went dark.

Then my phone vibrated in my pocket.

A text. Unknown number.

One word.

“RUN.”

I turned—

Footsteps.

Not mine.

In the dark behind the door, something was moving.