🗝️🪜🖼️🚪🔒🌺
I finally managed to stumble, clothes ripped and worn, out of the Lim’s dreaded abode.
Home free.
Or so I thought.
Then, light that pierced my eyes. A golden hue.
I edged closer. A brass key, dressed in details so intricate that craftsmen would fight to claim ownership.
A mark, L14, etched conspicuously on its side.
I had absolutely no desire to know what door it would open , and unveil.
Fitful rest that night. A dream, once again, of the staircase that defied normalcy.
Inverted. Perverse. Purposeful.
Portraits of women, each more beautiful than the last, still lined the corridors.
One had faded, her well chiseled face almost nonexistent.
Her hand, outstretched. Trembling.
For the key.
Then, her mouth opened, in a rounded gasp.
“It made me disappear.”
The key refused to leave my side, no matter where I threw it.
In the trash. Under a pillow. Buried in the soil.
It reappeared.
I had to return to the Lims’.
The bougainvillaea still strangled the walls.
They hid more than stone.
The gothic balconies screamed silently.
One difference.
A brass lock. On each door.
I climbed the inverted staircase. Paused at every locked door.
Behind each, a whisper.
Not wails.
Names.
Going softer with each step I took.
I stopped at the girl’s portrait.
Her mouth rounded again.
“Saying one’s name once meant freedom. No one hears them now. When the last disappears..”
Her voice trailed off.
A lock sprung open.
🗝️🪜🖼️🚪🔒🌺
Original story by Michelle Liew Tsui-Lin. AI tags are coincidental.
Mirrors of the Mind by Michelle Liew is a collection of psychological and supernatural short stories that explore the quiet unease beneath ordinary moments. These are not tales of spectacle, but of subtle fracture — where memory distorts, silence speaks, and the self is not always singular. In these stories, what is unseen often carries the greatest weight, and what lingers is not what is shown, but what is felt.
