The Signs of Horror

She walked toward the far end. Her footsteps echoed six times, though she had taken only three steps. The gallery narrowed, then widened, defying its architecture. A column appeared where there had been an arch. A lamp descended from the ceiling, swaying without a draft, and its yellowish light revealed a bronze plaque:

“The Mask of Light.”

Beneath it, words appeared on the glass as if someone were writing them from the other side.

Aries enters a room first because it fears the room will decide its place. Its mask is impulse, candor, the brilliance that convinces others that moving forward is the same as living. Beneath that clarity may hide a quieter demand: not to be stopped, not to be contradicted, not to face the moment when courage is mistaken for fear.

Inés brought her fingers close to the glass. The sentence vanished.

In its place appeared a man seated at a bare table. He looked about forty. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and behind him a door stood open.

“Who are you?” Inés asked.

The man raised his head. His eyes were not looking at her, but at the reflection of the door.

“My name is Darío,” he replied. “I’ve been waiting three nights for someone to tell me when I can leave.”

“The door is open.”

“That’s what I thought the first night.”

Darío stood. As he did, the room in the mirror stretched longer. The door was farther away now, at the end of a corridor that did not exist.

“If I go through it, I end up back in this chair,” he said. “If I stay here, I hear it opening.”

A sharp knock sounded behind him.

Darío closed his eyes.

“Don’t look at it,” he whispered.

The door opened a little farther. Beyond it was not darkness, but another copy of the same room. In it, Darío sat waiting.

“What does it want from you?” Inés asked.

“For me to be the first to enter. I’ve always confused that with being free.”

The image broke into ripples. Darío was back in the chair, though Inés had not seen him move. The door remained open. He looked toward it with exhausted resolve.

“Now it’s my turn to decide,” he said.

“Decide what?”

“Whether the door exists because I want it to, or because it fears me.”

The mirror darkened.

Inés kept walking, with the feeling that his answer had clung to her skin. The gallery split into three corridors. She chose the middle one. After a few minutes, she found the same lamp, the same plaque, and the same closed door.

She returned to the junction.

“No,” she said. “This can’t be the same place.”

A woman’s voice answered from the wall on the left.

“It can be, if you refuse to let yourself get lost.”

The mirror hanging there showed a bluish room. A woman stood beside a window covered with curtains. Her short, dark hair was precisely styled. On the table sat an untouched cup and a key.

“What’s your name?” Inés asked.

“Mara.”

“Are you trapped too?”

Mara smiled without joy.

“I chose to stay.”

“Why?”

“No one can abandon me if I’m the one who leaves first.”

The window opened by itself. A damp wind blew in, stirring the curtains. Beyond it was no garden, but a corridor identical to the one Inés stood in.

“And the key?”

Mara looked at the table.

“It opens every door I don’t want to cross.”

“Then it’s no use.”

“It’s useful for keeping up the illusion that I’m still in control.”

The cup trembled. A drop of dark liquid fell onto the tablecloth. Mara did not look away from Inés.

“There’s a difference between moving forward and obeying the impulse not to stop,” she said. “Sometimes courage is just an elegant way of not listening.”

The mirror went dark, leaving Inés’s face suspended in the glass. She saw her own mouth slightly open, as if she had been about to answer. She did not remember moving it.

She continued down the right-hand corridor. The distance folded in on itself. The floor creaked beneath her boots; the smell of wax grew stronger. Every time she found an exit, she returned to the original threshold. The gallery door waited for her, its handle motionless.

On the fourth circuit, Inés struck the frame.

“Enough!”

The sound did not fade. It multiplied. “Enough, enough, enough,” the walls repeated, until a second voice, lower, added:

“Then come in.”

Behind her, one of the mirrors had turned red. It reflected not the gallery, but a circle of extinguished embers. At its center appeared a symbol like a pair of horns, traced in light.

Aries.

Inés approached. The glass was warm. When she touched it, she felt a prick in her palm - not pain, but recognition. The surface yielded like hardened water. On the other side was a circular room, and twelve signs gleamed on its walls, each enclosed in a different mirror.

“Twelve,” she whispered.

Mara’s voice came from nowhere:

“The vault doesn’t show what you are. It shows what persists in you.”

“Who built this place?”

No one answered.

Inés stepped through the mirror. The room smelled of ash and withered flowers. The air vibrated with a deep murmur, as if an ancient machine were breathing beneath the floor. In front of her, the Aries mirror covered the entire wall. The symbol burned in its frame.

Inés stopped before the glass.

Her reflection raised its head.

She did not.

The reflected figure smiled faintly, with a fierce, unfamiliar expression, a joy without tenderness that seemed to have waited for years behind her eyes.

Inés stepped back. The reflection remained close to the glass.

“What do you want?” she asked.

The image tilted its head.

“To enter first.”

Then the other eleven surfaces began to light up, one after another, and the door through which Inés had arrived disappeared from the room. The Aries mirror held on to that smile as, somewhere in the house, a lock slowly turned.

End of chapter one. 11 more chapters and about 17,526 words in the full book.