The film had stopped. The projector was silent. The apartment should have been empty.
But Saira knew it wasn’t.
She sat frozen in place, the whisper still burning in her ears. The darkness pressed against her skin, thick and suffocating, like something unseen was watching her from the corners of the room.
She forced herself to move. Slow, careful, deliberate.
The first thing she did was unplug the projector. The film reel stilled, the mechanical hum fading into silence.
But the screen—
The screen remained on.
A pale glow, faint, flickering.
She swallowed hard. That wasn’t possible.
A breath left her lips, uneven, shallow. She turned toward the light.
The film was still playing.
No. Not Sitara.
Something else.
A single frame, frozen on the screen.
A dressing room door.
And beneath it—
A shadow.
Something standing just on the other side.
Saira’s fingers curled into fists at her sides. It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real.
Then—
The doorknob on the screen began to turn.
A high-pitched whine filled the room, a sick, garbled distortion in the film’s audio track. The light from the screen flickered violently, shadows stretching across her walls.
The door in the film creaked open.
And for a single, unbearable second, she thought she saw—
The light cut out.
The screen went black.
Total, suffocating silence.
She sat there, pulse hammering, waiting for something, anything—
A sound. A movement. A whisper.
Nothing.
Just her own breath, shallow and shaking.
She stood, legs unsteady beneath her. She was done. She would leave the apartment, go anywhere else, never come back.
She turned toward the hallway.
And stopped.
The mirror.
It was wrong.
It should have reflected the faint outline of her living room, the furniture, the window.
But there was nothing there.
The mirror was reflecting a different room.
A dressing room.
The same one from the film.
Saira’s stomach tightened painfully. She took a slow step closer. The edges of the mirror quivered, like the surface of water about to break.
And then—
A figure moved inside it.
A woman.
Sitting at the vanity.
Her back to the glass.
Her hair fell in long, dark tangles over her shoulders, her hands resting limp in her lap.
Her head tilted slightly, as if she had just heard something.
Saira tried to step back, but her body refused to move.
The woman in the mirror began to turn.
Not all at once. Piece by piece.
A slow tilt of her chin.
The curve of her cheek.
The faintest glimpse of an eye, black and too deep, like the space between frames of a film reel.
And then, Saira saw her face.
It was her own.
Pale. Expressionless.
Watching.
The apartment light flickered.
The mirror shattered.
And for a brief, impossible moment, she felt the glass give way beneath her hands—
As if the world inside the mirror had tried to pull her in.
She stumbled back, gasping, her breath a sharp, broken sound in the silence.
The mirror was whole again.
No cracks. No woman.
Just her own, shaking reflection.
But something was different.
Her reflection was smiling.
She was not.
Saira did not sleep that night.
She spent hours pacing her apartment, fingers curled into the fabric of her sleeves, the weight of the film canister heavy on her desk, waiting.
She thought of Amit’s words.
“The last scenes were filmed… but Vikram wasn’t the one directing them.”
She thought of the whisper.
Help me.
She thought of the shadow beneath the door.
Something had finished the film.
She had to know who.
What.
She needed the production notes. The script. Anything that could explain what was happening.
And she knew exactly where to find them.
Indra Studios.
The studio was dead.
She had never been inside at night. It was different in the dark—the silence had a weight now, like it was pressing down on her.
The halls stretched longer than they should have, shadows pooling in the corners where the light did not reach.
She moved carefully, every sound magnified. The scrape of her shoes against the floor. The rustle of her coat. The distant creak of old wood, shifting under time.
She found Vikram Dasgupta’s office at the end of the corridor.
It was untouched. The desk coated in dust. The bookshelves sagging under the weight of forgotten scripts, bound and yellowed.
She searched quickly, fingers trailing over titles, names, anything that—
A locked drawer.
She exhaled sharply, testing it. It didn’t budge.
Her gaze flickered across the room. On the windowsill, half-buried in dust, lay a rusted paperweight.
She didn’t hesitate.
The drawer broke open on the third hit.
Inside—
Papers. Notes. A half-filled notebook, the handwriting frantic, uneven.
She grabbed everything, stuffing them into her bag.
Then, at the very bottom—
A single reel of film.
Unmarked.
The last footage ever shot.
A deep, sick feeling curled in her stomach.
She shouldn’t.
She knew she shouldn’t.
She took it anyway.
Back home, she threaded the reel into the projector.
The film began.
The camera was unsteady, not like the polished cinematography of Sitara. This footage had been shot in secret.
A woman sat in a dressing room.
Maya Kapoor.
She was trembling.
The vanity mirror in front of her reflected only an empty chair.
Maya opened her mouth, whispering something.
No audio.
Saira leaned closer.
The camera angle shifted abruptly.
A hallway. Dimly lit.
A dressing room door.
The camera moved toward it, slowly, like someone was walking forward.
Something passed in front of the frame.
A glimpse of Maya’s reflection.
But her body was still seated.
The reflection had moved.
The film glitched violently.
A single frame of static.
Then—
A still shot of the dressing room mirror.
The vanity chair was now empty.
The reflection was still there.
Maya was still inside it.
And then—
The camera turned.
The final shot was of the film crew.
Standing. Frozen. Every single one of them staring directly into the camera.
Except their faces were wrong.
Blurred.
Distorted.
Not human.
The film cut to black.
Saira sat motionless.
A chill crawled down her spine, slow and unbearable.
She rewound the footage.
Paused on the last frame.
Her breath caught in her throat.
One of the crew members looked exactly like her.
Her exact face.
Standing among them.
Staring out of the screen.
As if she had been there all along.
As if she had always been part of the film.
And then, from somewhere inside her apartment—
A whisper.
“Your scene isn’t over yet.”
