CHAPTER 1
1751 Words
The Mirror Apartment
I always thought secrets were only dangerous when someone decided to tell them. Turns out, some secrets are dangerous simply because they exist — whether you know them or not.
My name is Vivian Chika, and for the last six months, I’ve been living in Apartment 6B at Highgate Towers, a glossy, glass-walled building in the heart of Lagos. The kind of place people take pictures of for i********: but never imagine anyone actually living in.
It was too expensive for me, a twenty-six-year-old journalist who just quit her job, but my boyfriend Jason insisted he’d handle the rent. “You deserve to wake up to a view like this,” he said, kissing the back of my neck as we looked out over the city lights that first night.
Jason was one of those people who could walk into a room and make everyone trust him. He had that quiet charm — confident, not cocky — and he always seemed to know exactly what to say. We met when I was covering a story about tech startups. He was one of the panelists, a cybersecurity expert who joked that his job was “keeping bad secrets buried.”
Looking back now, maybe that wasn’t a joke.
---
The first time something felt off in the apartment was on a rainy Tuesday night in August. Jason was working late again, or so he said. I was watching Netflix, trying to ignore the faint, rhythmic clicking sound coming from the ceiling.
It wasn’t the rain. It was sharper — like metal tapping against metal.
I turned down the volume, waited, then called out softly, “Hello?”
Silence.
Then, faintly, the sound again: click-click-click, right above the bedroom.
I told myself it was just the building expanding in the humidity, but I didn’t sleep much that night.
By morning, Jason was home — shirt rumpled, smelling faintly of cologne and smoke. He smiled, kissed me on the forehead, and said, “Rough night? You look like you fought a ghost.”
I laughed it off, but I noticed he didn’t ask why I looked that way.
---
Over the next few weeks, I started noticing other things.
My laptop webcam light would flicker randomly, even when I wasn’t using it. My phone battery would drain overnight, even on airplane mode. One night, I woke up to see the TV screen faintly glowing — not showing anything, just that eerie dark-blue light like someone had tried to switch it on remotely.
I told Jason about it.
He shrugged. “You’re a journalist, Viv. You’ve read too many conspiracy articles.”
“Maybe,” I said. But inside, something in me clenched.
---
By September, I’d started freelancing again, mostly investigative work. One day, a message popped into my inbox from a sender with no name, just an email address:
watchyourwindow@protonmail.com
The subject line said: “He’s not who you think he is.”
My chest tightened. I clicked it open.
The email only contained a short sentence:
> Check the mirror in your living room.
And an attachment — a single photo of me, sitting on our couch, taken from across the room.
I dropped my phone. My hands were shaking so hard that it took me three tries to lock the screen.
I didn’t tell Jason that night. I wanted to — but something told me to wait. Instead, I texted my friend Tola, a tech-savvy photographer who owed me a few favors.
“Can you check something for me?” I typed. “My apartment. Feels like someone’s been watching.”
Tola showed up the next day with her laptop and a signal scanner. She laughed as she set it up, joking about “Viv’s haunted high-rise,” but her laughter stopped the moment the device started beeping near the mirror on the wall.
“Babe,” she said quietly, pressing her ear against the frame, “this isn’t a regular mirror.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a two-way glass, Viv. There’s something behind it.”
I felt my stomach drop. “Like… a camera?”
She nodded. “Or a whole room.”
---
We tried to remove it, but the mirror wouldn’t budge. It was bolted into the wall. Tola scanned again — there were wireless frequencies being transmitted every few minutes, encrypted ones.
“Who installed this?” she asked.
I told her the apartment came fully furnished.
“Fully furnished by who?” she pressed.
Jason.
He’d handled everything — the lease, the payment, even the furniture delivery while I was out of town for work.
Tola told me to leave the apartment immediately. I didn’t. Instead, I waited for Jason to get home that night, heart pounding.
When he walked through the door, I said, as casually as I could, “Do you know anything about the mirror in the living room?”
He froze for just a second — just long enough.
Then he smiled, that easy, disarming smile. “You mean the designer mirror? Of course. The landlord had it custom-made. Why?”
“No reason,” I lied. “Just looks… strange.”
He kissed me on the forehead again. “You watch too many thrillers, Viv.”
But his eyes didn’t meet mine.
---
That night, I didn’t sleep. I sat up with my phone, pretending to scroll through social media while recording audio. Around 2:14 a.m., I heard it — faint movement from behind the wall, like someone adjusting a chair. Then, footsteps.
Inside the wall.
I wanted to scream, but I stayed still. My heart was slamming in my chest so loudly I was afraid whoever was in there could hear it.
I texted Tola:
> “You were right. Someone’s there.”
Then, without thinking, I went to the kitchen, grabbed a knife, and tiptoed toward the mirror.
The sound stopped.
I whispered, “Who’s there?”
And then I heard something I’ll never forget: a man’s voice, calm, low, and disturbingly familiar.
> “Go back to bed, Vivian.”
It was Jason’s voice.
---
By morning, he was gone. His phone went straight to voicemail. I called his office — they said he hadn’t worked there for months. His LinkedIn had been deleted. Every trace of him online was suddenly gone.
I packed a bag and left the apartment. I didn’t even lock the door.
For days, I stayed with Tola, barely sleeping, jumping at every noise. She tried to calm me down, saying she’d report it to the police. But when officers checked the apartment, they said there was no sign of tampering, no secret room, no surveillance equipment. Even the mirror was just… a mirror.
Tola looked at me with worried eyes. “Viv, maybe—”
“Don’t say it,” I cut her off. “It was real.”
She sighed. “Okay.”
But that night, she handed me a cup of tea and said softly, “You should see someone. Talk to a therapist.”
I wanted to scream at her. Instead, I nodded and cried myself to sleep.
---
Two weeks passed. I started to convince myself maybe I had imagined it — stress, overwork, whatever. Until the second email came.
This one had a video.
It was dark and grainy, but I recognized my own bedroom — our bedroom. The video showed me sleeping, curled up on my side. Then, the camera panned slightly, showing Jason standing over me, holding something metallic in his hand. He leaned down and whispered something to my ear.
The clip cut off there.
Attached to the email was one sentence:
> He’s still watching.
I threw up.
---
I changed my number, moved out of Lagos to my cousin’s flat in Abuja, and tried to start over. But paranoia followed me like a shadow. I stopped answering calls from unknown numbers, taped over my laptop camera, and barely went out.
One evening, while sorting through old boxes, I found a USB stick labeled “Viv’s Copy.” The handwriting was Jason’s.
Against every instinct, I plugged it into my laptop.
There were dozens of folders — labeled with dates, each containing footage from inside our apartment. Every angle. Every room. Every day.
Footage of me cooking, brushing my hair, crying when I thought I was alone.
And in several clips, Jason appeared on the other side of the mirror — watching, recording, whispering things like, “She’s almost ready.”
Almost ready for what?
---
I went to the police again, this time with the USB. They took it seriously. They traced the encryption — it led back to a shell company Jason had registered years ago. Apparently, he’d been running an illegal surveillance ring, selling private footage of people he “helped” move into luxury apartments.
My apartment was one of many.
But when they raided his last known location, they found it abandoned. Only one thing was left behind — a wall mirror, leaning against the center of the room.
Behind the mirror, they found a single photograph.
It was of me, standing in front of my cousin’s flat — taken less than 24 hours earlier.
- Writer
